A friend of mine told me that his New Year’s celebration included a trip to the grocery store with his two kids (8 and 10) so that each could pick out their own once-a-year box of sugary cereal. He told me that, although each of them had a different strategy for how to ration the box to make it last as long as possible, both wound up picking Lucky Charms as their annual treat. When he finished his story, the two of us dads reminisced about the good old days when our parents gave us Lucky Charms for breakfast every morning. My friend’s kids will grow up never once considering that Lucky Charms is a meal. To them, it’s a dessert, a treat.

I know, I know, we live in Portlandia, where happy, free-running, self-actualized chickens eat only sustainable, organic feed. How seriously should any self-respecting mass marketer take one anecdote of such cultural extremism? But the funny thing is, Jim told me this story on the day I returned from a trip to the heartland, where I had met with the CMO of a major, iconic American food brand, whose products, once a staple of my healthy Midwestern upbringing, are now sold exclusively as treats—small indulgences to celebrate moments worth rewarding.

I sense an accelerating trend toward marketing products that were once offered as foods as if they are now treats. It is a way of sidestepping health concerns, based on the idea that most people don’t really want to eat better, but they do want permission to eat what they already like and feel that it’s okay to reward themselves with treats and small indulgences from time to time.

Marketing some foods as treats seems perfectly natural. M&M’s has had spectacular success with a campaign that, at least in its early years, was all about our relationship with treats. In most of the early spots, Red and Yellow want to be the center of attention, but when they succeed in attracting attention, people want to eat them, so they have to run away. From a story point of view, that’s a perfect metaphor for our relationships with treats: We are attracted to things that are bad for us.

M&M’s could capitalize on this story because their product form seems to suggest an answer to the story problem: moderation. M&M’s are such innocent-looking, bite-sized bits of chocolate that they seem to embody moderation, something the M&M’s characters can’t quite master. Unable to moderate their own desires, Red and Yellow face dire consequences and provide a hilarious negative example for the audience.

Over the past 16 years, the M&M’s characters have remained popular with audiences of all ages, while the brand has largely escaped criticism as the obesity crisis engulfed much of the food business like a tsunami. Clearly, you can tell a story about small indulgences, about food brands as occasional treats. The line between food and treat, however, is now shifting so fast that, as more and more former food brands straggle ashore onto Treat Island, there just won’t be room for all of them. How many products can you think of that were perfectly acceptable foods when you were a kid that are now considered indulgent treats? Marketers will struggle to differentiate their products when all the brands on the island are telling essentially the same story.

Of course, not every food brand is marketed as a treat. In the early part of the last decade, Cheerios—with its heart-healthy message and a side panel that literally asked, “Who are you eating them for?”—practically sold itself as medicine. General Mills successfully extended that food halo to Honey Nut Cheerios, which is understandable from a story point of view, even if nutritionists aren’t all on board. But Frosted Cheerios and Chocolate Cheerios were actually both in the running when Jim’s friend took his kids to pick out their annual treats.

Our story assessment of this trend suggests a couple of principles:

• Foods with genuine treat credentials are positioned to do well (Oreo, Krispy Kreme, M&M’s, Haagen Dazs), but the island doesn’t seem to be getting significantly bigger just because a lot of brands are crowding on. SO…
• It will be increasingly important to have a distinctive and authentic story to tell about your particular role in the drama of Treat Island. Think, for example, about the difference in story energy between Oreo and just about every other cookie.

There is a strong tipping-point dynamic to the way story evolves in the food business. A brand without a firmly grounded story can be cruising along, comfortably selling a slightly better-for-you version of a venerable food product, and wake up one day stranded on the island without the skills and resources it needs to survive.

If you know a food brand that has built a good life for itself on Treat Island, I would love to hear the story.

A friend who’s worked as an Imagineer at Disney tells me that they understand this principle very well and use it in the design of their theme parks. Disney knows that the story that its guests will take home with them is not the average of all their experiences at the park. In fact, all the “average” experiences—the ones that could have been anticipated, that live up to expectations—will quickly fade from memory. What will be left, what Disney hopes will form the backbone of the story that sticks with its guests, will be the surprises. Understanding the dynamic of story, Disney focuses its efforts on the extremes of experience. It does its best to minimize bad memories—long lines, dirty bathrooms, surly employees—and to optimize the possibility of special moments that its guests will remember and repeat to friends.

Of course, orchestrating delightful surprises and minimizing memorable catastrophes may seem easier if you are designing a theme park than if you are managing a department store or a restaurant chain—or an airline. Southwest Airlines, however, has been remarkably successful at building brand equity in an otherwise commoditized category because of its uncanny ability to imprint the meaning of its story on thousands of employees. Part of the Southwest story, right from the beginning, was about making air travel—previously an elite privilege—available to regular folk. This story was brought to life by Southwest’s famously quirky flight attendants, encouraged to customize the government-mandated safety announcement and to inject their own personality into a role that, on most other airlines, had become almost robotic. Southwest seemed to understand that it could put on a much more compelling show if it let the actors improvise a bit.

This ability of Southwest employees to improvise in character was demonstrated dramatically to my partner Jim during a recent holiday-travel ordeal:

I was flying out of Midway with our two young girls in tow. My wife had flown back to Oregon a few days earlier, and the girls were missing their mom. Following a tip from my wife that the Southwest check-in had been particularly crowded, we arrived a full two hours early, only to be greeted by the most staggeringly long line I’ve encountered in four decades of flying. The line stretched out of the ticketing area, past the elevators to the parking garage, around the entire interior of the airport and then all the way back to the Southwest counter. It wasn’t possible to comprehend how long that line really was without travelling its entire distance, through service corridors, up and down stairs and around other airlines’ check-in counters. It was truly the mother of all lines. I have no idea what had gone wrong, but everyone’s nerves were frayed, and uniformed Chicago police officers had been called in to ensure that the situation didn’t get out of hand.

After being assured by several airport employees that flights would probably be held to accommodate the massive delays, we decided to brave the line. We waited. And waited. And waited. Three hours we waited. Sure enough, our flight was delayed—once, twice—while we stood anxiously in line. Eventually, ten minutes after the posted departure time for our flight, we made it close to the front of the line. Keep in mind, we were only at check-in. We still had to clear security.

My kids were about to melt down, and I was fuming. We’d chosen Southwest because of a history of hassle-free, even pleasant flying experiences, but this was it. Not only was I never going to fly Southwest again, I was already mentally composing a nasty letter to Southwest management as we finally stepped up to the counter. When the attendant took our tickets, I told her that I thought we’d probably missed the flight and would need to rebook. She was a heavy, grandmotherly lady, and she shook her head sadly.

“Honey,” she said, “We’ve got so many people who’ve missed their flights, the soonest we could rebook you would be day after tomorrow.” At that, my youngest daughter, five, burst into tears. But then something interesting happened. The attendant looked us over, typed something into her computer and turned to my daughter. “Hold on a second, honey.” She got on the phone, and from her hushed but heated conversation I could only make out her last words: “You hold that plane.” As she hung up, she fixed us with a steely gaze. “Tie your shoes tight, everybody. We’re gonna get you in the air.” She came out from behind the counter, slung my daughter’s car seat over one shoulder and led us on an amazing sprint through the airport, flashing her security badge at three different clearance points to speed us through the flight-crew-only checkpoints. Puffing and sweating after our crazy run, I had no idea how she made it, car seat and all, but she did. And she got us on that flight, although she had to make the flight crew re-open the sealed jetway door, something I thought they never did except in the movies. With that unexpected effort, she saved the Southwest story for me and for everybody I’ve told about my misadventure.

Jim told me this story shortly after Southwest Airlines announced it would be the subject of a reality TV series on TLC that begins filming during the holiday-travel season. That’s taking the marketing-as-show metaphor right to the edge, since TLC is certainly not investing in the production of a TV series in order to document how easy, safe and uneventful air travel has become. But I’ll bet Southwest feels pretty confident that whatever surprises arise in the making of the series, they will be dealt with in a way that supports and energizes the story of the brand.

We’ve been thinking about that metaphor a lot recently, as we watch the fortunes of retailers rise and fall in a constantly churning, Darwinian scrum. What we see, from a story point of view, is that the retailers who are successful at any point in time seem to be the ones with the clearest sense of what show they are putting on.

But it’s important not to confuse a show with a theme. For example, “western” is a theme. You can tell me a movie is a western without telling me anything at all about the story. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, on the other hand, is a show that happens to have a western theme. While applying this structure to retail is a little subjective, I think Pier 1 Imports seems to be built on a theme, while Ikea is a show because it communicates a deeper, more engaging story.

The key is that a compelling retail show, like any good story, embraces conflict in a unique and engaging way. This is important because while classically trained marketers have a discouraging tendency to try to avoid conflict, conflict is the heart of every great story. It’s what gives a great show energy and makes it feel authentic.

We haven’t done a story-framework project for Ikea, so I don’t know for sure what conflict powers its story. Still, the sense of a show is palpable, and the sure touch of the storyteller on every aspect of the experience is very satisfying for me as a member of the audience. Here are some of the intersecting story currents that seem to give the Ikea show its energy: stylish versus functional, imported versus accessible, exotic versus familiar, cheap versus valuable, creative versus controlled.

Having a clear sense of what show you’re putting on must start with understanding the story of the brand at a strategic level—the conflict that drives the story and the meaning that conflict conveys. From that point, the show is in the hands of the storytellers: the marketers, designers and merchandizers who have to scramble to mount a blockbuster every day. That’s why I’m fascinated to see what happens next at J.C.Penny, where Michael Francis has just been hired as the new president. He joins Ron Johnson, Penny’s new CEO and the man credited with the development of the retail store strategy for Apple. These are two guys with a deep, intuitive grasp of story that makes me think they might be able to put on one hell of a show.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this way of looking at the category. I would particularly like to know who you think is putting on a great show, who is settling for the theme approach, and who is simply dying on stage.

Breathe Happy: Febreze has crafted itself one of the creepiest surprises I’ve seen. Blindfolded consumers are brought into a filthy room, which they believe to be clean because the odors have been eliminated by Febreze air freshener. Sure, on the surface it conveys the message that Febreze is great at masking bad odors, but it’s hard to avoid the unsettling message that appearance is more important than reality. The product is so good at deceiving our senses that we can just shut our eyes and deny the ugly filth around us. The surprise here is a confirmation of one of our darker tendencies as humans. Every time I see these spots, I think I should go buy cleaning products, not Febreze.

Personal PC Store: Wow! Microsoft actually invades this woman’s home and turns it into a Microsoft store in order to get her to buy a new computer. Does Microsoft really mean to show me that they are so inept at relating to people that they will literally force their way into someone’s home in order to get her attention? The big surprise here is not the computers, which all feel kind of expected and even clunky, but that this woman would actually feel good about a giant corporation invading her home and building a store inside it. Surprise! I can’t help but feel a little sad for Microsoft every time I see one of these spots.

Marie Calender’s Gourmet Lasagna: In the serious ouch department, Marie Calender’s frozen foods ran right into the foodie-blogger buzz saw with an attempt to surprise diners by revealing that a supposedly gourmet meal was actually frozen lasagna. It’s not hard to see how the brand’s desire to be perceived as tasting like gourmet food inspired this idea, but it’s more difficult to understand how they thought that this might be positively received by an audience expecting natural, minimally processed ingredients and gourmet preparation. Just goes to show that the surprise sword cuts both ways.

And the hit?

Carlsberg Beer: What a great commercial! Couples enter a movie theater to find that only two seats are unoccupied and all the others are filled with a motley collection of bad-boy bikers and dangerous-looking thugs. Will they meekly flee the room or make their way through the threatening crowd to take a seat?

What’s so good about this commercial is that the surprise isn’t just about being surprising. Carlsberg isn’t trying to inject an artificial sense of excitement into the brand. Carlsberg is intentially saying something deeper about the brand using surprise as a tactic. What is Carlsberg saying? How about “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “Courage is its own reward”? Carlsberg, an older brand looking to create new engagement, uses this story to suggest that its beer is a well-deserved reward and that the beer itself deserves your reconsideration. Things aren’t always what they seem, and if you have the courage to try something that might have put you off at first glance, you could wind up feeling like a winner, a champion, a hero.

Brands love their candid-camera moments because they think the excitement of surprise transfers to the brand, energizes it with that thrilling, sexy energy. But moments of surprise have to touch something real if they’re going to build a connection with the audience. For a moment of surprise to really be effective, you want the audience to picture themselves in the same situation, imagine how they might react and feel some deeper connection with the brand as a result of that mental exercise. Carlsberg used its surprise to reward the risk takers. Carlsberg built its surprise on a moment we can relate to only too well, then rewarded the audience watching the commercial with a moment of heroism they could vicariously enjoy and, perhaps, left them wondering how they might react under similar circumstances. That’s effective storytelling. Surprise, surprise!

Breakfast cereals have long used characters to put a face on what were originally commodity products. The characters became points of distinction in a category that was pretty much staples (grains, corn, rice) coated in sugar, and they helped to justify premium pricing and to create loyalty. It seems as if the characters who worked most effectively for their cereals did so by powerfully crystallizing and taking ownership of otherwise generic insights within the category. Tony the Tiger was a beautiful representation of the energy boost kids got from eating sugared cereal and made Frosted Flakes a powerhouse. Sonny the Cuckoo bird was a great symbol of the passion people feel for chocolate and consequently a great representative for Cocoa Puffs. And Lucky the Leprechaun put a face on the ultimate magic kids wanted to capture: getting to eat dessert as a meal without getting in trouble.

It's not hard to see parallels with car-insurance characters. Given changes in government regulation that have made car-insurance coverage much more uniform over the last decade, the category has approached commodity status, driving many insurance brands to reach for characters, like Flo, to serve as points of distinction and create connection with the audience.

Allstates's Mr. Mayhem fits the breakfast-cereal character model. Mr. Mayhem crystallizes the capricious nature and trickster aspects of chance. Sometimes, it seems as if the world is just out to get you. During those moments, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself, so insurance is important as a safety net. Mr. Mayhem helps you understand why you need insurance. Any insurance company can talk about risk (in fact, State Farm is currently airing a pretty funny commercial featuring a giant robot built on this exact theme), but Mr. Mayhem puts a face on this generic aspect of the category.

The next character that I thought of, the Geico Gecko, doesn't seem to fit the cereal model as well. The Gecko pioneered characters in the category and has been around the longest (excepting MetLife's borrowing of Snoopy). While he clearly started as a mnemonic device to help people remember the Geico name, he seems to be built on a bigger idea: that car insurance should be accessible and down to earth. This attitude fits well with Geico's "15-minutes-or-less" approach to insurance. The Gecko has represented accessibility in many different ways: by being the little guy in a big world, by standing as counterpoint to his mature and grave-looking CEO, but mostly by being funny. He's been so effective at crystallizing the accessibility message and building a connection with the audience that he's virtually led the charge for bringing humor into the car insurance category.

Oddly, however, the Gecko--and all the other Geico characters, actually--seems less about an insight into insurance and more about an insight into how people feel about buying insurance. Pioneering a new way of buying insurance has given Geico a lot of traction and could also explain why the Gecko himself has been so fluid and changeable. He's been more like a chameleon than a gecko because he's not about the fundamental truths of insurance; he's about the way that buying insurance is changing. 

How people relate to buying insurance brings me back around to Flo. She has more in common with the Geico Gecko (species aside) than she does with Mr. Mayhem. She's like an ostentatiously funky sales clerk in a limbo store, selling what looks like store-brand insurance. If there is an insight that she's built on, it also appears to be about buying insurance. She's like an acknowledgement that insurance has become a commodity, so you might as well be rational and comparison shop. Get the generic; it's cheaper and smarter. Her whole shtick seems to be to quirkily dispense insurance as if it were nothing more than--well, boxes of cereal. She herself doesn't seem deeply connected to what insurance is all about. In fact, on the surface, it seems as if she could be used to sell pretty much any product in any commodity category. Flo's not selling insurance; she's selling a way of buying insurance.

Insurance is an industry that has long been built on our personal relationships with insurance agents. But that model is changing fast, and a lot of insurance is now being sold online or over the phone. Where Progressive's Flo doesn't work all that well in terms of representing a fundamental truth of the category, she shines in terms of representing someone we can relate to. Perhaps that's what all of her ostentatious quirkiness is about and why she seems to be appealing to so many people. She's not so much about representing a truth of the category as filling a hole in people's changing relationship to insurance.

The danger for Progressive with the Flo approach is, of course, success. Think about the travel industry. Once it was all about travel agents. Travelocity made its huge splash by pioneering agentless travel, thus revolutionizing the category and making Travelocity the name in travel. That is, until the whole industry followed its lead. Now agentless travel is the cost of entry, and Travelocity's once unique identity has been swallowed by the category because Travelocity didn't take its story deeper than the innovation in how people buy travel. The opportunity for Progressive is to use the connection Flo has made with the audience in order to express a deeper and more timeless message about what the brand means.

Without a firm handle on that meaning, Flo might just as well be selling breakfast cereal.

The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World, in case you've missed him, is Bob Wiltfong, an actor playing the role of a fictional legendary spokesperson who has been hired to be the new spokesperson for Nationwide Insurance. Which makes him the actual spokesperson for Nationwide Insurance. While this sounds kind of "meta," he's one of a growing group of pseudospokespersons that includes Dos Equis' The Most Interesting Man in the World and Old Spice's The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. All this self-reflexiveness reminded me of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish--and not just because I was getting hungry.

The Pepperidge Farm Goldfish brand was a pioneer in something we call deconstructionist advertising, advertising that intentionally (and usually comically) attacks some key precept of advertising--for example by breaking the fourth wall and drawing attention to the fact that the commercial is actually a commercial and that everyone knows it, including the people in the ad. Today, brands are breaking the fourth wall all over the place, but Pepperidge Farm broke the wall and new ground over a decade ago with "the jingle singers," who sang a jingle about singing a jingle about Goldfish snack crackers. Perhaps you remember their song, which noted to the accompaniment of happy-folksy pop music that Goldfish were "the wholesome snack that smiles back until you bite their heads off."

This self-reflexive, deconstructionist, playing-with-the-medium approach has become more and more popular--probably because the best examples work like gangbusters at cutting through the clutter of the crowded advertising landscape. It's easy to imagine that the deconstructionist approach works largely because it is funny or, going a little deeper, because it's so absurd that it catches the audience off guard. But we think something else is going on. For decades, a lot of advertising has been built on a broad exaggeration of the importance of products in our lives and thoughts. We've been told that the right toothpaste could land us a girlfriend, that a can of body spray could get us laid or that real happiness could be had for the price of a (fill in the blank).

This approach is as patently inauthentic to our experience of real life as it is ubiquitous, so we've developed a kind of cultural immunity to it. All of the BS has become background noise into which the vast majority of brand communications simply vanish without anyone noticing. Which is why those first deconstructionist Goldfish ads were so refreshing. It wasn't just that they were funny or unexpected but that they felt honest in a sea of exaggeration. In their own strange way, by being really honest and overt about exaggerating while trying to sell something, they recaptured a kind of authenticity that was missing from most advertising. Goldfish's nail-on-the-head deconstructionist jingle singers, for all of their apparently crass and obvious salesmanship, captured a kind of optimistic innocence that jibed really well with the personality of the Goldfish brand itself.

The best of the new crop of deconstructionist campaigns continue to work in the same way, not because they are absurd for the sake of absurdity--that's just the latest form that commercial exaggeration is taking--but because they speak to an audience starving for authenticity. Good deconstructionist ads play with the accepted conventions of how advertising works so that they can move past the inherent inauthenticity of the medium and say something true and sometimes even deep about who a brand is or what people will get out of a relationship with it.

From my point of view, the apparent plagiarism, while amusing, is less interesting than what this episode says about how various car companies are using story as they try to define their place in the world of electric cars. The fact that the same spot can be used for all three brands suggests that no one has carved out any unique story territory yet.

It reminds me of MP3 players before the iPod. A large group of competitors were piling into the category, battling with each other over a catalogue of features that conveyed very little meaning to most consumers. By contrast, Apple entered the category with a strong story that went beyond the literal new technology. The iPod seemed like such a brilliant collision of technology and intuition that many consumers perceived it as an altogether new kind of device.

Toyota captured that kind of story energy for hybrid vehicles with the Prius. It is significant that, in both cases--iPod and Prius--the story energy was unique enough and authentic enough to reflect back on the parent brands themselves.

I don't know that there is anything wrong with Nissan and Renault spending money to tell the category story of electric cars (questions of creative integrity aside). But it does feel like the territory is wide open for someone to stake a much more engaging and compelling claim to a unique story.

I'd love to know if you see this same dynamic playing out in any other categories.

Is darkness in advertising anything more than a tactic for cutting through the clutter and amusing the audience by playing against their expectations? Can darkness actually grow the equity of a brand? For us, these are ultimately story questions. Great brand communications, like great stories, are only effective at connecting with people on an emotional level when they express some fundamental truth. With regard to Verizon, Virgin Mobile and Burger King, do the brands reveal some dark truth about themselves in order to make an authentic connection with their audience, or do they just try to obscure the truth that there is no deeper relationship by cloaking themselves in darkness?

While part of the effectiveness of the Droid commercials was clearly that their dark tone created a counter note to Apple’s domination of the category, there seemed to be more going on. The early Droid commercials captured a specific tension in our relationship with technology. We’re fascinated by and drawn to innovative technology while we’re simultaneously suspicious of it and fear it. That’s a big part of what made the Terminator movies tick. We want the power that advanced tools bring, but we recognize their potential to overwhelm, addict or even destroy us. Technology is power, and like power, it can be used for good or ill. Rather than shying away from this tension, Verizon jumped right into the thick of it and intentionally blurred the lines between man and machine. In contrast to the iPhone’s story of happy empowerment, the Droid campaign let Verizon express the attractiveness of raw power and dominance—in all of its dark glory. Because no other brand in the category was presenting its devices in this light and because of Verizon’s long-standing emphasis on power and dominance, we think that the Droid communications did more than cut through. We think the campaign actually built the brand by strengthening its emotional connection with the audience.

The Virgin Mobile stalker spots make for interesting contrast. While the most obvious point of the ads is to get across the message that Virgin Mobile is offering a “crazy” good deal, they are also expressing a tension that is front and center in the communications category at the moment: Technology is enabling ever-greater connection between people in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few short years ago, but this connection comes at the price of our privacy. We want the connection, but we are also overwhelmed by it and suspicious of what so much access might lead to. This is such a powerful meme in the category—and the world in general—that it ripples through almost every brand. Which actually robs the story of some of its potency for Virgin Mobile. It’s not that the story doesn’t express a resonant truth; it’s just that Virgin Mobile isn’t using the story to reveal anything distinct or ownable about itself. In other words, the story seems like a category story rather than a Virgin Mobile story, and consequently it seems less likely to build the brand for the long term.

I believe the Burger King campaign shared this problem. It’s not that the brand wasn’t expressing a dark truth with its ads. It was doing that in spades. It’s just that the truth was equally applicable to the entire fast-food category. What was the truth in the king ads? We have a dysfunctional love-hate relationship with fast food. The king’s first appearance in “Waking up with the King” captured it all. A guy wakes up in the morning to find he’s in bed with the king, a strange, mute, frozen-faced imitation of a person. The guy is a little put off, a little creeped out—as I imagine I might be—but he still can’t resist the fast food the king offers him. The two touch each other lovingly then feel awkward and repulsed, but—and this is important—they stay in bed together.

And that’s it. That’s most people’s relationship to fast food. Fast food is like a dysfunctional, codependent lover that we know we should be strong enough to leave but that we keep going back to because the relationship is easy and comfortable and feels good in the moment. This is truth, dark truth about the appeal of fast food. But the story creates two problems for Burger King: First, the story is not unique to Burger King. That “fatal-attraction” story captures our relationship to most fast food, so the advertising seems as likely to build sales at McDonald’s as at Burger King. The second problem is even worse. Unlike the dark power that Verizon promises to unleash with the Droid, the darkness that the king exposes is clearly weakness. The king is less about revealing the attractiveness of the dark side of fast food and more about indicting those who indulge in it and those who sell it. Yes, it’s funny and engaging in a creepy way, but it seems like a cautionary tale, meant to warn us off fast food rather than enticing us to try it.

After reading some recent interviews with Alex Bogusky, one of the chief architects of the king, who subsequently left advertising for a new gig saving the world, I think it’s possible that this was what the campaign was actually intended to convey—in which case, the Burger King king campaign would have to take the award for the all-time champion of truth in darkness.

For most people, insurance is something they have to buy. By and large, people don’t spend their days wistfully thumbing through glossy catalogues of different auto policies, daydreaming about which one would look good on their car. Buying insurance is often a costly, potentially high-stakes chore. Not only is it generally unrewarding on the front end, but any serious interaction between the audience and the brand usually takes place after something has gone horribly wrong. It’s not hard to see why the audience may have developed a relationship with insurance companies that could be described as quirky, ironic, abrasive or even dysfunctional.

Many insurance marketers seem to be trying to manage this relationship by using irony and oddball humor as a way to connect. That got us wondering, are these ads just trying to humanize their brands by making people laugh—or are they actually trying to build equity by bringing honesty and authenticity to an essentially troubled relationship?

Clearly, some insurance brands are handling the new story territory and relationship issues more adeptly than others. I’d love to hear which insurance companies—and which characters—strike a chord with you and what you think is really going on with these campaigns.

Of course, a real personal relationship is a connection between two people, whereas a brand is a kind of useful fiction. Because of this, I believe it is helpful to think of your brand as if it were a fictional character. Audiences establish real emotional relationships with fictional characters all the time, that's what the suspension of disbelief is all about. Without it, no one would ever cry at the movies.

For a marketer, the question becomes, what kind of character is your brand? Especially, what is the objective it pursues and what are the conflicts it wrestles with in pursuing that objective. Understanding the brand as a character is the key to developing a relationship in which the audience identifies with the brand and feels connected to it--a relationship, to put it in story terms, in which your customers feel like they know who your brand is, what it believes and how it thinks.

I could use your help with this exploration, if you are interested. I'd love to know if this metaphor--the brand as a character--seems useful to you as you approach the idea of building the relationship between a brand and its audience. Is it meaningful to you based on your own experience? And if so, could you describe the character of a brand to which you feel some personal connection? What has the brand done or said that led you to feel connected?

A long time ago a wise anthropologist who had (like me) drifted inadvertently into the world of marketing, taught me this:

Most brands spend their time desperately trying to get their customers to love them. Really successful brands manage to demonstrate, by their behavior, that they love their customers.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Last year at the TED Conference, I did a talk on whether it is better to be loyal or to be honest. The premise, based on a wonderful book by Jane Jacobs, is that human society has developed two different, frequently conflicting, systems of ethics. One, which she calls the Guardian Syndrome, evolved to support the smooth functioning of a kingdom. The other, called the Commerce Syndrome, facilitates the workings of a marketplace. Not surprisingly, a kingdom requires a high degree of loyalty; a marketplace, honesty.

(If you are interested, here is a link to the video. It’s a six-minute course which I presented in the TED University forum.)

A brand is an interesting hybrid of commercial and guardian energy because a brand, while clearly an artifact of the marketplace, has no equity value unless it commands loyalty from it customers. This seems especially significant when you think about a brand like Ford. The Ford Motor Company is certainly a massive commercial enterprise, but because of the inherent danger connected with owning and using one of its cars or trucks, Ford necessarily assumes an important guardian role as well—a lesson that was undoubtedly burned into the brains of Toyota’s leadership this past year.

The idea that big brands, depending on the nature of their product or service, may be required to navigate by both guardian ethics and commercial ethics at the same time has huge story implications. Think about how the value of brands like Johnson & Johnson, Bank of America or BP has been undermined recently by a failure of each of these companies to uphold their guardian responsibilities. 

It has occurred to me that the vulnerability of some big food brands may also be a function of how well they embrace the conflict between their commercial interests and their guardian responsibilities. McDonald’s seems to have been wrestling with these issues somewhat successfully; Burger King less so. Pure candy brands, like M&M’s, seem to get a pass in the obesity wars because they have never pretended to be nourishing. Sugared cereals, which used to promote themselves to children as part of “a balanced breakfast,” seem more vulnerable.

My colleagues and I find ourselves thinking a lot these days about the relationship between brands and their audiences. I would love to know if this line of thinking—the conflict between guardian and commercial roles—resonates with you, and whether you can suggest other examples of brands that have embraced this conflict particularly well or poorly.

I tried hard not to register in any way that I had heard her comment or was the least bit interested in beginning a conversation.

“There’s so little Christmas spirit in the world today,” she continued. “It’s like people have completely forgotten what Christmas is all about.” She paused in an apparent attempt to leave me an opening to interject.

“I’m Sally, by the way,” she said after a long moment. I glanced around at the nearby seats, considering my options.

“Let me remind you all, this is a completely full flight,” the pinch-faced attendant barked, cutting off any possibility of escape.

“Hi Sally, I’m Jim,” I offered reluctantly.

“Good to meet you, Jim,” Sally said. And then, without further preamble, she launched into an impassioned tirade about the commercialization of Christmas, which, she suggested, was a relatively recent development that had begun sometime after her own golden childhood and which was now reaching an unbearable peak.

Not that my eyes glazed over, but this got me thinking of a way we commonly fool ourselves with story. It seems like, down through the ages, we humans have repeatedly told ourselves the story that commercialism, exploitation and cynical thinking are recent developments and becoming more pronounced as time goes on. You can find laments about this in ancient Greek, Latin and Egyptian, and yet we continue to perceive the issue as being about the specific things going on in the world around us rather than the things going on inside all of us, always.

An example is our belief that the commercialization of Christmas began within our own lifetimes. I hate to say it, but most of the current Christmas tradition celebrated in America seems to have been fabricated starting around 1820 as part of a successful attempt, mostly spearheaded by merchants, to refocus the boisterousness of a population at loose ends and flush with unaccustomed abundance away from rioting and looting and toward buying things.

You see, prior to modern times, January was a very interesting month. The arrival of January meant that the crops were harvested, so there was less farm work to keep people busy and they had time to party. The livestock had just been butchered because it was cold enough for the meat to keep but there was a short window of time in which it was at its peak of palatability, so there was a lot of feasting. Also, the first batches of beer were ready to be drunk, which is what vast swaths of the population were at the onset of January—ready to be drunk. They had too much time on their hands, a short-lived overabundance of food that was going to be followed by a long period of want, way too much alcohol and they were facing the prospect of a long, bitter winter. Plus, they were coming out of thousands of years of a feudal tradition in which January was the “season of Misrule” during which masters and servants reversed roles and the poor could accost the well-to-do and demand gifts of food, alcohol and money as a kind of social-pressure-relief valve. This is actually the basis of many Christmas carols, which otherwise seem kind of inexplicable. Now bring us our figgy pudding and bring it right here! We won’t go until we get some!

However, the seasonal traditions of drunken over-indulgence and ritual extortion of the wealthy that filled a functional social role in monarchies didn’t go over very well in democratic America with its burgeoning middle class and its capitalist economy. In America, drunken revelers didn’t accost noble lords and ladies who’d earned their fortunes based on inherited land and holdings, but hardworking business people who didn’t feel like they owed any particular debt to the masses. The great experiment of American democracy, coupled with the beginnings of the industrial revolution, caused great social upheaval that was profoundly affecting everything, including Christmas. The holiday frequently turned into an excuse for licentious behavior, rioting in the streets and looting of shops that generally made the season such an unsafe time to go outdoors that the celebration of Christmas was actually officially outlawed in some major cities.

And so a conscious effort was brought to bear in the early 1820’s, spearheaded by business owners, to change Christmas from a drunken carnival of public excess into an idyllic domestic celebration built on a foundation of “selfless generosity” that would require the exchanging of gifts. They hand-selected and outright fabricated “traditions” like hanging stockings to be filled with presents and exchanging Christmas cards. Commercialism isn’t the bane of our current Christmas tradition, but its foundation. Even our modern version of Santa Claus was formulated as the figurehead of this domestic/commercial movement, built from a combination of the gift-giving Saint Nicholas, the British Father Christmas and various pagan figures including Odin, Cernunnos and the Green Man. Santa’s fur-lined suit and cap are both holdovers from the wild Green Man, as are his reindeer Donder (Thunder) and Blitzen (Lightning). His red hat is probably a corrupted blend of Saint Nicholas’ bishop’s mitre, Odin’s pointy wizard cap and the Green Man’s hooded cloak.

Which is what I was thinking as I watched the white fluff ball at the tip of Sally’s Santa hat bob energetically while she emphatically shook her head. “It just seems so wrong that all these brands and stores and everybody are glomming onto our Christmas traditions, using them to sell stuff and then not even wanting to call the holiday by its proper name,” she concluded. She sighed mightily and then stared at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for me to commiserate. I briefly toyed with telling her that Christmas, as she knew it, really was about commercialism. That there really was a Santa Claus, but he wasn’t the selflessly generous and sprightly old elf from her childhood, just an odd combination of ancient Norse Gods, pagan nature spirits and misappropriated saints invoked by merchants to sell presents and Coca-Cola. That what was bothering her was that she was getting older rather than that the world was changing. That her perception that the state of the universe was devolving into corruption and commercialism was a story as old as humanity and one we all tell ourselves in order to avoid facing the harsh reality that we are sliding into old age.

So I did.

And let me tell you, it is possible to make a four-and-a-half-hour, middle seat, Christmas Eve flight significantly more uncomfortable than it has to be just by saying the wrong thing. Even if it is true.

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about the American Christmas tradition and the origins of Santa Claus, check out The Battle for Christmas written by Stephen Nissenbaum and Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men by Phyllis Siefker, both books to which I am deeply indebted for much of the information in this post.

Purpose-Driven Marketing All the Rage at ANA

Over the past few years, as the concept of brand purpose has gained currency among high-profile marketers, I've noticed that Ad Age has seemed a bit conflicted about the whole idea. To my ear, the phrase "all the rage" contains a subtle dig, suggesting that purpose is a passing fad among starry-eyed marketing types. Of course, even if my suspicion is correct, Ad Age couldn't say that directly because those starry-eyed marketing types are its most important audience.

If there is a disconnect, I think it arises out of a chicken-or-egg debate about the purpose of commercial enterprises in general. There are those who argue that the ultimate purpose of any business (especially a publicly-owned corporation) is to make money for its owners. And there are those who point out--inconveniently--that businesses that seem to have a purpose over and above making money for their owners are often more effective at making money for their owners.

As with most of life's intractable puzzles, the only really useful way forward is to embrace the conflict. The conflict between money and purpose is a slightly narrower articulation of the conflict between the struggle to survive and the search for meaning. (See Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, about his experience surviving the concentration camps.) If your personal story is all about the struggle to make money for its own sake then life will eventually feel empty and bland. On the other hand, for most of us the search for meaning has to take place within the real world as we find it. As Jack Kornfield put it, in the title of his book about the search for spiritual fulfillment, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

To be as hard-nosed and pragmatic as possible, the purpose of purpose is threefold:

First: A clear sense of the meaning and purpose of the enterprise--a story framework--provides an organizing principle for everything a company chooses to do. That clarity of purpose will quickly reveal what is "in character" for an organization and what is not. That's why story is such a powerful tool for analyzing brands and shaping strategy.

Second: The authentic purpose behind a business is the best motivator for everyone who works there. As a senior marketer at a global food company once told me, "I would hate to think that I get up every morning for no other reason than to increase shareholder value for the owners of (fill in your favorite public corporation here)."

Third: A credible sense of purpose gives your customers an important reason to believe that you might be better at what you do than a competitor who is doing it just for the money. To its loyal fans, for example, Apple appears to be driven by an intense desire to make machines that seem to think like real people. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be driven largely by a need for power and control, which is a variation of the money story.

At the end of the day, a story is powerful if you believe it. A company that exists only to make money will inexorably drift toward commodity status. But if you and your colleagues all believe that you are making money in order to advance your efforts toward some more inspiring purpose, then you will be more effective, your customers will be pulling for you to succeed and, ironically, you will probably make more money.

And yet, from a story perspective it makes perfect sense. This isn’t really about a phone that drops calls, it is about a status shift in an iconic brand. Apple spent decades as the counter-culture underdog of the tech world. Steve Jobs was the freewheeling, self-proclaimed pirate (“It’s more fun to be the pirates than to be the navy”) who thumbed his nose at the stuffy conventions of the IBM and Microsoft establishment, building fun, cool computers that broke the rules for the benefit of the audience.

But a series of truly disruptive innovations, beginning with the iPod, has changed the role that Apple plays in the drama of the category. Apple successfully challenged the old definition of what a computer could be and thereby cemented its position as the thought leader in the tech category. In the long running battle between Apple and IBM/Microsoft, Apple won—so much so that it felt like an amusing bit of trivia when Apple’s market cap actually surpassed Microsoft’s recently.

While winning thought leadership has clearly been a good thing for Apple, it also comes with some fairly significant challenges. The chief one is how it affects the brand story. How can Apple be the underdog-pirate-challenger on which it has built its identity when it is now the king of the category? Everything Apple does and says is interpreted differently when it is the winner. Aggressive actions that would have seemed perfectly in character for a scrappy underdog fighting the oppressive big guys, take on a whole new aspect when those big guys are on the run and the world is lying at your feet. We’ve seen this happen many times—whenever a challenger wins. As far as the brand is concerned, it is just doing what it has always done, but from the audience’s perspective, it is playing a different role now and it needs to act accordingly.

That new perspective was painfully apparent at the press conference where Steve Jobs, previously seen as a charming and entertaining rouge for his in-your-face arrogance, tried to defend the new iPhone.

It will be very interesting to see what happens next in the unfolding story of Apple, but it is our suspicion that, unless they can come to terms with their change in status and circumstance, they’re going to be in for some rough sailing.