Even a year ago 48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up. Sound familiar? It’s the morning paper. The difference is 28% do this before even getting out of bed.*

48% of young Americans say Facebook is the way they find out about news.* Silly, shallow, outrageous you say? Maybe not.

My parents—who are in their 80s—religiously watch the 6:00 network news. I cannot imagine myself doing this. It seems an anachronism. I do read the New York Times online. Once upon a time I had it delivered to my door. How quaint.

So is Facebook an alternative to the New York Times? Hardly, but depending on who you have selected to supply your news feed with content, it can be pretty damn good for news.

Having lived for many years in Japan, I still have many connections there. When last year’s disaster (earthquake, tsunami, then nuclear disaster) hit Japan I wanted good information about what was happening, and conventional news media—especially tv—was not able to deliver.

Facebook came to the rescue for me.

It became my best source of news and insight on the matter, and lead me to some of the resources that inspired Radiation, Disaster & Hubris, which is one of the most read posts I’ve written. This happened because of two factors. One, I had friends who were there and reporting on their experiences through Facebook, and two, the Kyoto Journal, had just started its Facebook page and was doing a great job of sourcing useful reports. I was simultaneously getting the first hand accounts from those I knew and cared about, and who were being directly affected by the events, and I was also getting well selected material and analysis from local and global sources sorted through by Kyoto Journal editors. All this was provided to me via Facebook on my news feed.

This kind of combined reporting was incredibly satisfying in terms of what I needed and wanted to know. Facebook made it possible.

By contrast, my wife, who notably is not on Facebook, had to wade through hours of live coverage on CNN that was often lacking in insight, and tended to be repetitive and sensational. All that time and effort on her part so that she could NOT really know what was going on or what it meant.

My experience in this case is an illustration of how the role of Facebook continues to expand. If you are a public facing institution or business, it’s clear that you should consider the implications of this change. Think about how you tell, or rather how you facilitate the retelling, of your story.

Facebook is not my primary source of news, but I acknowledge it as a legitimate means of access to news and information. It has the capacity to target things I’m most interested in and in the right circumstances—like mine with last year’s disaster in Japan—serve as a very good news source indeed.

This reminded me of traveling in the Yucatan as a 22 year old and utterly forgetting my own birthday. Somehow the group I was with knew when it was even if I did not, and they actually engineered a make-shift surprise party for me. That was perhaps my most memorable birthday, though I’m not sure I would recognize any of those kind people if I bumped into them on the street today.

This year I woke up late after having worked well into the morning on a collection of projects. As I spun up my email to check on things, my mailbox was stuffed with Facebook birthday wishes. That felt a little like the surprise party in the Yucatan.

The New York Times Opinionator had a thoughtful post about birthdays and Facebook. The author ends up essentially where I am, giving Facebook its due and marking its role here as basically positive.

Facebook’s power and pervasiveness is interesting if a little scary. Why does it work so well? One if my collegues has plausibly suggested that its phenomenal success is due in part to it’s essential emptiness. What she means by this is that the container—the platform—avoids giving too much direction for the user. It does not interfere with your ability to fill in your content, but it does provide a framework that is rigid and strong enough to keep the focus on the content and not the wrapper. These birthday wishes do not unfold from some customized envelope that the sender selects. They do not typically  contain long or belabored messages. They simply appear in your email notifications and on your wall, and they all have exactly the same packaging with a short personalized message as text and an indication of who sent them. Only the essentials, nothing wasted.

Facebook allows people to easily, almost passively—and with little guidance—interact with their friends. It subtly facilitates the pleasures of social engagement and self expression in the warm context of a friendly audience. It does this with a kind of transparency—almost “invisibleness”—that makes it powerful. It’s strength is the ease with which it provides a means for people to do things they are naturally inclined to do, but might not if these acts were inconvenient or too much of a departure from their daily routine. The Facebook birthday wish is a classic example. Who could remember everyone’s birthday? But the simple prompt in the sidebar makes it nearly effortless and still not devoid of meaning or genuine good intentions.

Facebook enables a kind of minimal-effort-required human communication that is, it seems, in sync with the warp and woof of people’s lives. It is inherently superficial for its ease—and lack of real social responsibility—but it IS real. I am thankful for those birthday wishes, and all the sundry notices that populate my news feed, each alerting me to some small facet of my friends’ lives. My own life would not afford this interaction otherwise.

I talk a lot about truth and why it matters for a brand. And yet look at all these major brands. They are jokingly being shown at odds with the reality of what they actually deliver.

I think this situation shows, among other things, that a brand is NOT just a logo. But at the same time, it points out how our brand associations really are not rational.

Just last night as I was driving through central Brooklyn and my emergency reserve fuel light came on. I needed gas badly. The first station I came to was a BP.

Now, I’ve written with passion about the matter of the BP brand, criticizing it for being an inaccurate reflection of the reality of a big oil company and polluter, and not the ethical, forward thinking green company their logo suggests.

So what do you think went through my mind when I saw the BP logo in the lights of Coney Island Avenue?

…”Thank god!” It’s not a ‘Splunky’s Gas Emporium’”…

And so I pulled up under that delicious green, seemingly sun lit logo and filled up my tank. I did not think of oil sludge on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. I should have, but I didn’t. Instead I thought of the brand promise that the fuel I was pumping into my overpriced black station wagon was actually going to be 93 octane.

Despite everything I know and have written about the damage that this brand’s false promise has done, other powers of the same brand reached out through all of that to grab my mind with a promise that it can still deliver: quality gasoline.

Damn.

Now that I have thought about it, I won’t be going back there, but there it is, if a brand can pull me back in like this, you have to respect the power of it, and yes, it’s expression through a logo.

BP for me no longer has ANY green creds, and this makes their beautiful logo a lie, but even so it still holds some of its power—it still delivers on its core business promise to the consumer.

So who am I? You could rightly say, “Hey, if you’re going to keep driving your car, you might as well admit that you are a de facto aider and abettor to the havoc and destruction wrought by the oil industry…” Is Mobile—where I usually go—really any different?

Well, what if you could check? What if we had a eco-responsibility labeling system like nutrition labels on food?

That’s the ambition of these guys: Brandkarma

So the oil company of choice—evaluated by Brandkarma on three basic criteria: product, people and the planet—looks to be Shell.

Thanks guys!

The answer cannot be, “this, and this and, oh yes, this.” No matter how complex the reality is, a brand’s keynote expression must be immediately graspable if it is to have real power. And it still needs to be true.

Occasionally we are asked to take a project without the opportunity to do brand development work first. “Oh, our brand is fine, we just need a new website that will express it better.”

This almost always leads to trouble, because more often than not, one key reason the website is not working is because there is a more general lack of brand clarity.

Reducibility to a single word is actually an indication of brand strength.

Toyota: reliability
Mercedes: prestige
BMW: driving
Volvo: safety

Each of these companies has cultivated its U.S. brand reducible to a single word that differentiates it from its competitors. Other brand sectors are similar. Even in the museum world the strongest brands can be similarly reduced:

Metropolitan Museum of Art: masterpiece
MoMA: modernism
American Museum of Natural History: adventure
Guggenheim: parking garage (just kidding…that’s two words

If the institutional response to this kind of requirement for absolute clarity is, “yes, but we also have to feature this and this and this, and how can we get this in there, and let’s not forget this.” Then, well…we have a problem. And we certainly don’t have a brand that can be understood, let alone remembered, by someone on the outside. (I would argue the inside as well, but that’s another post.)

A root cause of this problem is, I think, that internal executive understanding of an organization is often nuanced and complex, while external understanding can almost never be.

A brand always has many elements: colors, words, photography, logos, ads…many of which may have been independently developed over time, and they may not reflect or amplify a coherent and unified message.

With no clearly understood guiding principle that can illuminate the weaknesses of one argument measured against another, all things are nearly equal in the unfocused eyes of a brand. This makes it much harder for anyone to argue for the elimination of non-essential stuff. By contrast, if the same elements are measured against clear benchmarks for style and meaning, they can be easily deposed. I write about this a little bit in the inauspiciously titled post Brand Impact on CSI Reports.

All of those particular things that the institution sees in itself may indeed be true, but for the brand consumer it’s just not possible to pull all of them together into a memorable brand.

A brand, if is to be powerful, cannot be about many different things. You must have the courage to ignore those who will always be there whispering, “But this is important too.” Capitulating to this urge is a recipe for brand mediocrity: in many such cases, it’s all there, and all true, and yet in the end, nothing sticks in the brand consumer’s mind. That’s brand disaster in it’s most basic form.

A brand that cannot articulate itself succinctly will always be a compromise.

So let me ask the question again. “Who are you?” You must decide on the one thing that you are most—the one thing that represents you best.

Decide on ONE thing.

You really only get one.

Make THAT decision, and then we can put everything else under that. Once all the brand elements align and they all point back to that ONE thing…

THEN you will indeed have a powerful brand.

Illustration: Sage Einarsen

Related blog posts: Brand Impact on CSI Reports, Non-Profit Brand Basics, Too Many Brand Messages, Brand as Defense Against Attack

The idea we came up with was to pick one of our non-profit clients, explain a bit about what they do, make a donation to them, and tell you about it. This idea has a triple benefit: this non-profit gets a little boost, you learn about them, and we get to show you some of what we did for them and maybe this gives you ideas for yourself. This year we choose www.Zafen.org

We have not done their website improvements or introductory video yet so we can’t show you that, but we did create a Facebook welcome page for them a few months back to help them build their following and to better explain what they do. Zafen.org provides zero interest loans to viable small businesses in Haiti as a means to support sustainable economic development there. The loans are qualified and administered on the ground in Haiti through Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution.

We just created a new team: “Tronvig Group and friends” We made a small loan to a really great project https://www.zafen.org/en/projects/817 in rural Haiti. When this project is fully funded (hopefully in the next 9 days) a $6,750 loan will go out to this business so they can provide peanut seeds to local growers helping to sustain 50 local farmers and increasing their own supply of peanuts to meet local demand for the peanut products that they produce and sell. Please read about the project and loan through our team to see if we can fulfill this loan before it closes. To quote the Zafen Facebook page about this project: “The organization has effectively transformed the area into a green space and built a road allowing easy transport into the nearest city, reducing transportation costs for farmers to go sell their goods.”

If this loan gets fully funded then next year about this same time, we will all get our loans back and be able to loan again to another small business. In this way, this money will be able to keep on helping Haiti in the years to come.

Happy holidays from everyone at the Tronvig Group.

In a recent conversation with a very senior person at a financial institution my colleague was told, “I think private wealth managers will have a hard time seeing the value of branding—they see marketing as a cost center, not a driver of sales.”

Hold it.

How did we go from branding to marketing in one sentence like that?

What is marketing? What is branding? How do they differ?

There is a spectrum of opinions here, but in my view, marketing is actively promoting a product or service. It’s a push tactic. It’s pushing out a message to get sales results: “Buy our product because it’s better than theirs.” (or because it’s cool, or because this celebrity likes it, or because you have this problem and this thing will fix it, etc.) This is oversimplification, but that’s it in a nutshell.

This is not branding.

Branding should both precede and underlie any marketing effort. Branding is not push, but pull. Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, attributes, that clarify what this particular brand is and is not. A brand will help encourage someone to buy a product and it directly supports whatever sales or marketing activities are in play, but the brand does not explicitly say “buy me.” Instead it says “This is what I am. If you like me you can buy me, support me, or recommend me to your friends.”

So marketing may contribute to a brand, but the brand is bigger than the particular marketing effort. The brand is what remains after the marketing has swept through the room. It’s what sticks in your mind associated with a product, service or organization—whether or not, at that particular moment, you bought or did not buy.

The brand is ultimately what determines if you will become a loyal customer or not. The marketing may convince you to buy a particular Toyota, and maybe it’s the first foreign car you ever owned. But it is the brand that will determine if you will only buy Toyotas for the rest of your life, and the brand is built from many things. Very important among these things is the lived experience of the brand. Did that car deliver on its brand promise of reliability? Did the maker continue to uphold the quality standards that made them what they are? Did the sales guy or the service center mechanic know what they were talking about?

Marketing can unearth or activate buyers. Branding is what makes loyal customers, advocates, even evangelists out of those who buy. This works the same way for all types of businesses and organizations. Everyone sells. How they sell may differ, but everyone is in the business of building brand loyalty for whatever it is that they sell.

Ok, back to our financial expert, marketing IS a cost center that can pay for itself or not, depending on how well the particular campaign drives sales.

Is branding a cost center? On the surface, yes, but the return is loyalty. The return is sales people whose jobs are easier and more effective, employees who stay longer and work harder, customers who become ambassadors and advocates for the organization.

Branding is as vital to the success of a business or non profit as having financial coherence, having a vision for the future, or having quality employees.

It is the essential foundation for a successful operation. So yes it’s a cost center, like good employees, financial experts and business or organizational innovators are. They are cost centers, but what is REALLY costly is not to have them or to have substandard ones.

Illustration: Sage Einarsen

Related posts: Invisible Consequences: How Branding Impacts B2B Sales, Design and Price Point, The Business of Demand Creation, Brand Truth, Life and Pecans: Why Truth Matters, Brand as Defense Against Attack

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Yesterday we had Thanksgiving dinner at our neighbors house. Dinner at a neighbors is rather common for us. We all sat down around a large table, and had a kind of potluck Thanksgiving. The kids—who have all known each other since birth—piled up their plates with whatever they wanted most (including Brussels sprouts), and our host asked each of us to express in a single word what we were thankful for.

My eight year old blurted his out first: “food” he said—perhaps influenced by his immediate environment. My middle child—the most responsible—said, “friends,” and then amended that to “family,” again perhaps a response to the environment. My oldest, who is now 14, said “death.”

This certainly got everyone’s attention, and in violation of the one word rule, she got the opportunity to elaborate: “I’m thankful that I am not dead yet,” she said. She has no terminal illness or morbid preoccupation with death, but it seems that she has begun to think about the bigger picture.

For my part, I concur with the lot of my children. I am thankful for food, friends, family and that I am still alive. To this list I would add work, which I enjoy immensely.

Happy Thanksgiving.

DiMenna Children’s History Museum Website

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DiMenna Children’s History Museum, Sloppy Copy

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