Do-gooder brands pt. II or 6 kinds of advocacy and counting

In my last post, I suggested that contemporary consumer advocacy brands are less about consumer protection (like Ralph Nader) and more about positioning. Generally positioning themselves against a category leader who they view as unfair, anti-competitive and/or obfuscating.

Right after I made this claim, I realized I was at least part wrong, as the exploding category of green brands is precisely about consumer and environmental protection. A brand like Method is one of the most successful examples of a brand that was invented (by an ex-planner no less) who saw an opportunity to deliver a benefit without all the toxic chemicals used by traditional package goods companies. Seventh Generation in another that offers a wide range of household products that limit environmental impact. These brands charge a premium, not for maximum efficacy, but for combining adequate efficacy with lower risk to health, home and the environment.

The power of this claim has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream CPG companies who have made copy-cat products with dubious claims, to the point that we now need old-fashioned consumer advocates to protect us from new-fashioned bogus consumer advocate brands.

But the majority of brands claiming consumer advocacy are motivated by taking on some unfair industry or industry practice. Used car dealers probably stand—fairly or not—as the most iconic example of dishonesty in American business, so it’s not surprising that a number of service brands have sprung up to advocate for consumers as they shop for used cares. CarMax has created a retail model which attempts to take all the unpleasant haggling and doubt out of the process, while CarFax claims to provide the hidden history of the used car so the consumer can make a more informed decision.

And there is whole category of brands that became consumer advocates through technology alone, serving the consumer faster, cheaper, better than traditional retail devices. Virtually every industry that’s been impacted by the internet has brands that occupy this space, whether it’s tax preparation, travel, retail or banking. This is how all those aggregation sites work. They streamline the shopping so you have a better chance of buying what you want for the price you want.

In fact, so many brands recognize the consumer in control era that it’s maybe more interesting to note those categories where we still can’t quite get the control or information we want. The financial services industry might be a prime example but when even the pro's don’t seem to know what they are selling, it’s hard to imagine anyone can offer us much help. And then there are industries that we keep thinking will get democratized, like Real Estate, but for reasons from a strong lobby to the complexity to the sale, never quite get there..

All this suggests that consumer advocacy is almost cost of entry these days. The question becomes what kind of advocate are you.

Supplementing my previous list, with a still provisional set of categories, I’ve now get 6 versions, but I’m sure there are more. (And I'm not counting brands or brand confederations that are pure non-profits.)

1) Information/transparency advocate: like Carfax, providing the consumer with important and previously hidden info

2) Competition advocate: like LendingTree, bringing competition to a category that lacked it

3) Green advocate: Like Method, bringing a safer, less toxic version of a product to a category filled with environmentally damaging products

4) Service advocate: Like Zappos, bringing a new level service and conditions to a category that previously offered restricted terms

5) Self-service advocate: Like Etrade or the other online trading services that allow consumers the chance to do what only the pro’s could do before.

6) Social Mission advocates: Brands like Ben & Jerry's which build their social mission right into their product and confederations like RED which enlist a set of brands to raise funds for social causes

Do-gooder brands or what counts as consumer advocacy today

It seems like every brand manager I talk to these days is claiming that their brand is a consumer advocate. Whether they are selling cars or mortgages or checking accounts or shoes or health insurance or ice cream or travel packages or just about anything else, they want to align their product or service proposition with the notion of consumer advocacy. And they seem to mean it. Whenever I push the broader management team on their commitment to this principle they almost all say they are true believers. (There are notable exceptions but pesky contracts preclude me from revealing names) Most managers now claim that consumer advocacy is in their company DNA.

On the one hand, this isn’t so surprising. You only have to type some variation of “good” into The Google these days to see many people—or at least young people—believe that business can and should be an agent of positive social change. You could even say that finding or starting a career that enables them to both do good and get rich is the trick kid’s most want to pull off these days. (An evolution from my own Gen X’s equally tricky ambition to somehow get rich by being creative.)

But the very ubiquity of this claim raises some interesting question. Can every brand justifiably claim they are a consumer advocate? Technically I suppose so. But then what does consumer advocacy really mean? One thing or more than one thing?

Consumer advocacy has been around almost as long as lawyers, but didn’t really start to mainstream traction in America until the 60’s, supported by fiercely uncompromising advocates like Ralph Nader. As represented by his breakthrough book Unsafe at Any Speed--attacking GM's safety recrod--Nader was and is primarily fighting to protect consumers, workers and the environment from unsafe products and practices. Nader and others are still hard at work, but thanks to the democratization of everything, the role of consumer watch dog has been extended to everyone, with blogs like The Consumerist eager to post your complaints and help fight the power.

But most brands claiming to be advocates aren’t in the business of consumer protection. Beyond government agencies and blogs, consumer protection is mostly performed by non-profits.

Consumer advocacy for brands is more about positioning than protection, either against a competitor or category. And in my very cursory overview, it seems to me that these brands generally rest their claim of advocacy on 1 of 3 potential actions:

1) Introduce competition to a category with very limited or no competition

2) Offer—or seem to offer—the consumer more information about a product or service that has traditionally kept the consumer in the dark about important information.

or

3) Offer the consumer new service (often self-service or customization) for a product or service that lacked this offering in the past.

LendingTree, a brand I used to work on, is a good example for the first kind of advocacy. LendingTree isn’t a bank. It’s an aggregator of banks offering mortgages and other loans to consumers. But the brand’s original tagline, “When banks compete you win,” and early advertising both called attention to how anti-competitive the current practice of getting a mortgage was. They claimed—with considerable justification—to be one of the first brands to give the power to say no back to the consumer where it belonged.

Progressive insurance also introduces new competition to a category, but their function as advocates depends more on offering more information, placing their quote within the context of the competitors.

Their site has come under attack for not being quite as fair as they claim (MA investigation report here), but I’ll save my comments on the role of comparison engines for my next post with the hope that others will point out other versions of consumer advocacy they've encountered in the rapidly expanding world of do-gooder brands.

Service economy anxiety pt III, or good help is hard to understand

Over the past couple posts, I’ve been writing about America's collective uneasiness with our long shift to a service-based economy, citing a range of examples that seem to express what I'm calling our Service Economy Anxiety. I've written about our collective desire to nostalgically celebrate the skilled trades (through the artisanal movement and elsewhere) as well as the frequency and volume of complaints about customer service on social media platforms. But the richest and most dynamic cultural expressions are often produced by artists and writers who intuitively tap into this underlying anxiety as a source for their work.

I think I first noticed the popular expression of this anxiety in Louis CK's now famous "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy..." riff on Conan (here). His monologue focuses on how the amazing advances in technology have made us impatient with just about all kinds of service, including the technological replacements for personal service.

But once I got sensitized to the importance of customer-service content in popular culture I started to see these scenes everywhere.

Just last night, watching a TIVO’d episode (Season 3, Epi 4: Mitten, cited here) of Nurse Jackie, I saw the indomitable Edie Falco pretend to be a restaurant manager in order to confront an arrogant customer berating a waitress for failing to get his order right. The waitress/customer confrontation is pretty standard fare, almost an iconic representation of social relations of any era. (Think Five Easy Pieces to Seinfeld)

But you don't have to very work hard to see how this scene is particular to our current cultural moment: 1) Edie F isn't an irate customer but a service vigilante, stepping to address an injustice, like the Consumerist come to life. 2) Eddie's nurse’s uniform positions her as an iconic leader of the service professions 3) most most revealing of all are the dynamic of the scene. In order to make her case, she turns to the arrogant customer’s dining companion and asks him if he’s a client. When the dining companions replies that he is, Edie then asks him if he wants to do business with an asshole like this. He replies, “No...Actually, my daughter is a waitress.”

Past versions of this would have likely called out the differences between between the two rich white guys dressed like lawyers or bankers and the women serving them. But in Nurse Jackie the distinction is collapsed to make a point about shared social responsibility. Don't be assholes to service pro's; after all, they are all somebody's daughter. (And yes I'd argue the gender politics are no accident either, but that would require another post).

Nor it need hardly be mentioned—though I’ve mentioned it before—that the show Nurse Jackie is itself all about privileging the nurse’s work of attentive personal care over the work of the self-interested and generally flawed doctors--the higher-status experts, who are the professional equivalents of the assholes Nurse Jackie castigates in the restaurant.

But the freshest and funniest take on our service economy anxiety has to be this year's 6-part IFC special Portlandia. The source of most of its comedy—as my clever wife first pointed out—is the social confusion and blurred roles caused by our service economy.

Virtually every one of the first six episodes has at least one scene that represents a character perplexed by how they are supposed to behave as a provider or receiver of service. Portland's notoriously lefty social politics create the raw material for this confusion, but the confusion extends beyond political correctness to the nature of the work itself. In scene after scene, service providers and recipients stumble awkwardly back and forth across line of uncertain authority, trying to figure out who is actually in charge. Often, the service provider tries to redefine the role to something other than service: they want to be friends or educators or therapists, almost anything but old-fashioned servants.

In the opening episode, a waitress at a progressive, lefty café doesn’t just tell the diners that their chicken is local, free range and “all across the board organic” but actually produces its “papers,” which documents its pedigree. (Clip here under "Is it local?") "His name was Colin," she tells the diners, the series' creators and co-stars, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, but of course even the papers don’t satisfy Fred and Carrie who leave to “check out” the farm on which Colin was raised.

In another episode (clip here), a spot-on parody of the Ace Hotel (renamed The Deuce), the show mocks the boutique hotel chain’s notoriously crappy service with Carrie playing a hostess, trying to bond with customers angry over the lack of attention even though she’s the one who has failed to serve them.

And then there is episode 3 in which Fred and Carrie discover that their maid is in fact their favorite artist and cultural hero—indie songwriter Aimee Mann. The most slapstick representation yet of our current confusion about our roles as service purchasers and providers, Fred and Carrie fall over themselves trying to ingratiate themselves with the hired help. They might be paying but they aren't in charge. In Portlandia, capital is no match for cultural capital.

In the final episode, W+K (which seems to have some involvement in the series) pokes fun at itself by documenting Carrie’s first day on the job at the famed agency (clip Wieden and Kennedy). While there are a handful of obvious jokes about hipsters trying to signify how cool their job is--birthday parties for dogs and dodge-ball brainstorming sessions--the deeper social comedy is about our newly uneasy relationship to our co-workers.

In her first moments on the job, Carrie is invited to sign a birthday card for a woman she has never met. The show plays up the artificially intense emotion for comic effect (this is advertising’s job after all: instant affect!) but the creepiness lingers, and should be familiar to any of us who have worked in environments which strive to erase boundaries between professional and personal life. Throughout the scene as Carrie is bombarded by increasingly personal questions and requests, her puzzled expression seems to ask: Who are these people anyway? Are they my colleagues? My bosses? My friends? My family? Is this a job, a lifestyle, a cult, or what?

Versions of these anxious questions are ones the show poses over and over again.

It's easy to forget that it wasn't always like this, but you want to be reminded just how uncomfortable we are our new roles, just read a novel from the first half of the century to remember how comfortable we—or our English friends—once were feel telling servants how to behave.

The distinction between providers and receivers of service was once clearly divided along class and then professional lines. Those distinctions are now long gone. We're all serving somebody now. We have adjudicate our roles in each and every interaction as we simultaneously try to pretend that something more meaningful (an education, a relationship, a bond, enlightenment) than just plain service is happening.

It's exhausting of course but no one said customer service was easy.

Service Economy Anxiety, pt II or how we complain now

Our uneasiness about our nation’s long shift to service economy has spun off a number of cultural expressions.

A few examples I cited in the last post were related to our attempt to hold onto the myths and values of the skilled trades even as they become marginalized in the nation's economic life. It seems to me that this anxiety might also be seen in the widespread use of social media to complain about customer service.

Almost every major brand on earth now has a Facebook page dedicated to failures in customer service, or in the parlance of soc-med: how much they suck. Sears sucks as does Home Depot as does as does JC Penney. JP Morgan sucks. Fidelity sucks. Bank of America suuuuucks. McDonalds sucks. Burger King sucks. All the airlines suck of course. As do all the telecoms. And all the cable companies.

And branded twitter hashtags can sound almost biblical in their Job-like litanies devoted to the miseries inflicted by bad service. Above is a Cablevision thread but just about any brand + sucks will tell the same story.

When any form of expression becomes pervasive it's hard to hear what’s new and strange about it anymore. So if you want to refresh your experience of all this complaining, try getting a member of the boomer generation (a parent will do for many of us) to read one of the “X brand sucks” threads and watch their faces wrinkle into one of those “why do people waste time on this unpleasant nonsense” expressions.

In the most annoying and yet apt expression of the era, these old people just don’t get it. We may like to think that what they don’t get is how empowered we are now that we can complain on social media to brands who better listen or WATCH OUT because we can spread our complaints to the four corners of the earth. But the generation gap doesn’t work that way. Older generations aren’t necessarily blind to contemporary experiences. They just don’t need what we need. They got and get their satisfactions elsewhere.

What the non-net-complaining-generation don't get is that our new social rules have been defined by our new social-economic roles. We are a nation of service providers providing service to a nation of service providers. No wonder we are so judgmental, so impatient, so demanding, so intolerant of minuscule FAIL-ures. Every time our service economy fails us, we feel implicated in the exchange. How do we expect to make it, unless we all give %110 all the time, people. Pro-class members of a previous generation would have never dreamed of asking to change places with a cashier or barista; we contemporary service pros will happily do it: just to show them show how it's done.

Consumer advocates argue that we complain so often now because we can. And that’s probably true. (It's certainly and obviously true social media has become an important tool of political activism.) But it seems to me it's also true that we complain so often because we need to. It's a point of pride, a reminder of the expectations we all have to meet. It's service we were born for. It’s Bergdorf's we mourn for.

Of course not all of us are blind to the cultural contradictions of the service economy. I've recently become sensitized to the prevalence of scenes in TV shows and movies that represent customer service failures, including an entire series that seems devoted to the social tensions created by our service-to-service culture, Portlandia. But more on that next time...

Service Economy Anxiety, pt I

While economists differ on the practical implications of America’s long shift to a service economy, almost every discussion of the change carries with it the suggestion, however faint, that something essential to our national character is being lost—some native spark of boldness, ingenuity and determination. While we still want to align the American character with the pioneers, inventors and farmers who founded and built our country, the stat's show that we've become a nation of cashiers, marketers and money managers, careers that require more decorum than boldness, more social intelligence than ingenuity, more emotional endurance than determination.

Our cultural anxiety over this perceived loss has found many expressions. Our butchers, bakers and candlestick makers might be increasingly marginalized in our nation's economic life, but we're far from ready to give up on the values and myths we associate with the skilled trades. It's visible in the long rise of the artisanal movement which has transformed previously low-status jobs like butchers and bakers into forms of performance art (at least in Brooklyn) as well as inspired manifestos like Crawford's recent Shop class as Soulwork that argues for the fundamental, philosophical value of working with one's hands. Only by making, Crawford claims, can we liberate ourselves from the soul-killing labor of managing and serving.

My own research with Creative Class folks supports Crawford's claim that a life devoted to customer service can make a man feel, well, less manly. The vast majority of pro-class men I've interviewed over the years actively seek out hands on work in their off hours--from farming to carpentry--because, as they put it, it just seems more "real." Their remarks repeatedly turn to the uneasiness that their two hands aren't being put to much use. "I want to see that I've actually made something...accomplished something.." "At work there are a lot days when I'm not sure what I've done. I know I've done something, but it's hard to describe."

Another manifestation of what am I calling service economy anxiety is the way social media platforms are rapidly transforming into giant forums for complaints about service. Just about every brand on Facebook now has a page devoted to how much it sucks, but more on that next time.

Two Minds Branding

If some consumer research company happened to call me today to ask me the standard series of brand sentiment questions about say Toyota or Bank of America, I’d likely say that my feelings are more negative than they used to be. My reasons for these negative feeling are probably similar to everyone else.

I know Toyota’s legendary quality has slipped in recent years (even if a lot of those careening Prius's were caused by driver error) and of course I am well aware that B of A has had more PR disasters than Robert Downey Jr. since the financial meltdown.

But if this researcher happened to ask me what kind of car I owned, I’d say I just got a new lease on a 2010 Toyota Prius because I’ve had a good experience with my last one and there wasn’t a better option at the price. And if they asked me where I banked, I’d say Bank of America for the same reason. No bad experiences, a few actually positive ones and I don’t really care if John Thain--or any other big bank president--likes to have a fancy office. I'm kind of working under the assumption that they all do.

My point is that these issue--which are undoubtedly impacting how most people answer these brand sentiment questions--have had zero impact on my personal choices. This isn’t to say my feelings about the “master brand” don’t matter at all. If, for instance, some car brand offered a potentially better alternative to the Prius, I’d probably be slightly less loyal to Toyota than I would have been in the past. But not much. Certainly not as much as a declining brand sentiment score might traditionally indicate.

It seems that most of us have two minds when it comes to big brands. On the concrete, day-to-day level, brands exist as the symbolic authors of products and services that we actually use and our experience of those products pretty much defines whether we buy them again. And then there is the BRAND, the big abstraction, existing in culture, which sometimes motivates our choices, but not nearly as much as we often hope or fear, particularly with brands that deliver some functional benefit.

Our relationship to this latter abstract BRAND entity has about as much influence on our purchase decisions as our feelings about a country like France have on our desire to go to Paris in the spring. I’m no fan of the reemergence of the National Front, but that doesn’t have much to do with my desire to see the Rembrandt show at the Louvre followed by dinner at Aux Lyonnais

Not dead yet: towards the reinvention of the focus group

I’ve been hearing about the death of focus groups for about as long as I’ve been in this business, which is now over a decade, and yet they keep happening, which makes you wonder: can they really be as stupid and pointless as all their detractors claim?

Well, sure. Sometimes they are just that stupid and pointless but as more measured observers have pointed out, they have their place, so long as you understand that place and their limits as research tools. I’ve written about them before myself here, comparing them to the usefulness of using water to put out fires. There might be better ways to put out fires, but water works pretty well and there are quite a few handy fireplugs around so we might as use them.

But this is a pretty weak defense when the truth is I often get quite a bit out of qual research. Though I should add that I've generally had a different take on focus groups than most people I’ve met in the industry. In general, I’m not that interested in whether consumers “like” something or not. It’s always seemed to me that the only reactions that mattered were strong reactions, and that a strong negative was probably more useful and informative than a weak positive. This a fact that Sacha Baron Cohen understands intuitively and uses to great comic effect in Bruno. Few reactions are as powerful or revealing as disgust.

I certainly don’t think of qual as evaluative in the marketing research sense of the term. In fact, I generally don’t care what consumers think coming into the groups. My standard line in the past has been I don’t care what consumers think so much as what I can make them believe. Am I leading the consumers? Yes, I am. The question is: are they following? If I can’t get them to follow me in the room they certainly aren’t going to follow any marcom object they encounter in their daily lives.

But this was always an exaggerated claim of the kind I’m prone to. I do care what consumers say or at least how they say it. I don’t care if they “like” a particular idea or expression but I do care a lot about the particular language they use to describe their reaction. The form and content of these reactions is far more revealing than any of their claims about whether they like something or whether they will buy it. Unlike these claims--which are of dubious accuracy--the way consumers express themselves reveal how they think through consumer decisions and the cultural touchpoints they use to support their own opinions. These are almost impossible to fake, even if consumers had any motivation to make them up. Plus the lanaguage often makes for great creative source material.

It wasn’t until I started working at Amalgamated that I joined up with a group of strategists and creatives that really embraced this point of view and had developed a methodology that made use of these seemingly irrelevant details that most researchers edit out of reports or consider merely directional, when in fact they are the most meaningful and useful content in the research.

And yet, I still didn't fully understand or could really explain everything I was trying to do in focus groups until recently, when, with the help of some of my former colleagues in academia, I was led to the work of a neo-Freudian analyst named Christopher Bollas who has detailed a revolutionary way of thinking about the old idea of free association, which I’ll post about next.