Who Dat? The Saints, Dats Who.

Fairy tales are named such because of their rarity.

If there is a better description of the New Orleans Saints' 31-17 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday then I'd love to hear it.

In their forty four years of existence, the Saints have been the epitome of a hapless franchise. It took them two decades to achieve a winning season, and over four decades to reach a Super Bowl. As if this weren't bad enough, the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, put their very existence in the Big Easy in jeopardy.

Amongst the obligatory hoopla and celebration, I felt the happiest for Drew Brees, the undersized free agent that 30 teams felt was washed up in in 2006. Hall of Fame Quarterback Steve Young's appraisal of Brees' performance after the game was quite telling. Describing his play as "pure artistry" seemed quite surreal given most pundits were about to anoint Peyton Manning as the "greatest of all time" only four hours earlier.

Of course it wouldn't be the Super Bowl without the commercials. To view them all, click here.

IBM is Thinking with its Dipstick

Until last night, I loved the latest "I'm an IBMer" campaign from IBM.

The spots feature what we believe to be real IBM employees of many nationalities and ethnicities, all united in the goal of "building a smarter planet."

But last night I noticed that in the latest addition to the campaign, one of the IBM team members looked quite familiar. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be the whip-happy Scotsman from the Castrol "Think with your dipstick, Jimmy" TV spots.

There is a disconnect here. Actors often appear in several commercials at once, and I've got no problem with that. My problem here is the nature of the IBM commercial. Although, the bearded gentleman never announces that he works for IBM, the message of the campaign is that IBM's vision for a smarter planet is contingent upon each of its team members fulfilling their individual roles.

I can see how this mistake got made -- the actor chosen looks positively professorial and was born to wear a white lab coat. The lesson we learn here is that casting managers should ensure the actors they hire don't have a recent body of work that could take away from the message they are currently communicating.

The IBM and Castrol ads are here and here.

Thanks to Matt McCoy for the side by side screenshot.

Why You Should Read Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer

Business books generally fall into one of two categories.

The first is the kind that seeks to explain the latest tech platform or fad of the moment. Think Twitter Power or Crush it. These books are often anecdotal, breezy and enjoyable reads, but often light in rigorous market research.

The second type is the dry academic tome – think Blue Ocean Strategy or Good to Great. These are rich, scientific pieces, chock-full of exhaustive research and references. These books attempt to synthesize market data into new theories and formulas that capture the imagination of serious marketers and professorial types.

MIT Research Affiliate Grant McCracken’s Chief Culture Officer is rare because it combines the best of both worlds. It’s as robust an academic commentary as you’ll find, but with the page turning ability of a John Grisham thriller.

Firstly, may I say it is impossible to read this book without wanting to meet the author in person. Every sentence reminds you of your buddy’s cool uncle that made that dinner party you tried to avoid tolerable. You know the one - the guy that straddles the border of what is appropriate to say and what isn’t. Charming enough to observe the social niceties, but a fervent enough truth seeker to push some guests beyond their comfort zone. Plenty of authors delight in informing the emperor he has no clothes, Dr. McCracken is the type that politely suggests his majesty could also lose a few pounds on the way to the tailor.

Like most business books, Dr. McCracken’s has a consistent narrative pivot the book revolves around. In Chief Culture Officer, this “hook” is the author’s argument for the creation of the CCO position in the C-suite. Dr. McCracken argues that where once we summed up cultural stereotypes as “James Dean or mainstream,” our modern society has become messier and more fragmented, calling for a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the forces shaping consumer behavior – cue the Chief Culture Officer.

What follows is a rich summation of modern culture, drawing on the author’s considerable professional experience as well an incredibly astute eye for social observation and people watching. The parts of the book I most enjoyed were the author’s description of how trends subtly shifted from the subterranean to the mainstream. His detailed examination of “preppy convergence” was superb, as was the review of the periods that shaped the Beat and Hippy movements. Chapter four is entitled “Status and Cool” - a chief distinction any budding CCO must make. The author’s deep dive into the nineteenth century Parisian genesis of coolness led him to call it “one lucky meme” for its staying power.

My only concern with the book is its name. And that is only because I don't think it adequately captures the richness of the material inside. My fear is that the title as well as the subtitle, “How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation,” means the book might appear to the casual bookstore peruser as a lightweight, touchy-feely manifesto for how to build an admired corporate culture - the kind of name that Phil Knight or Tony Hsieh might attach to their memoirs. However, since the book is starting to generate almost uniformly positive reviews, people are realizing what a worthwhile read it really is.

I began reading CCO by underlining some of the “money quotes” to use in this review. The problem was that their sheer abundance now means almost every page is doused in red ink! Here are some below:

On our culture in an ongoing state of flux:
“It’s not easy to decipher how our culture got from Andy Griffith to Homer Simpson, but that’s our job. And once we’ve done that we can figure out the transition from Homer Simpson to Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Guy.” Our culture is under constant reconstruction” (p.101).

On affecting the bottom line:
“There are two ways the CCO pursues profit. The first is in the workaday business of making the C-suite’s decisions better informed of the opportunities and risks that come from culture. The second is by acting like an internal entrepreneur, an innovation agent inside the corporation” (p. 107).

On culture’s influence on the Coke brand:
“Without a connection to culture, Coke is merely carbonated water and syrup. Without culture, it’s just a fizzy drink. So culture counts. Let’s be clearer still. The fundamental terms of the Coke proposition are changing. The carbonated soft drink is now contested by new ideas of what a drink should be (Snapple, Gatorade, Poland Springs, Vitamin-water, Red Bull). In the traditional case, culture matters. In the present case, it matters more.” (p.10).

On former Disney boss Michael Eisner mistaking exposure to media for understanding of culture:
“No doubt, Eisner avails himself of new media. This only tells us he drinks from a fire hose, not that he’s well informed” (p.156).

On the trouble with “Cool Hunters”
“At some point in the conversation ask him about some aspect of culture that is not fashionable, and see how he handles it. Ask him say, about swap meets, NASCAR, or gardening… Does he dis or dismiss the topic? Does he offer hipster’s answers that swap meets are great because they have so many vinyl records and vinyl is much truer than digital, blah, blah, blah)? The moment a consultant starts demonstrating this fatal confusion about culture and cool, it’s time to go” (p.160).

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. I read a lot of business books, but none casts the net so wide and delivers the goods with such ease. Thank you Dr. McCracken for raising the bar so high.

Do yourself a favor, buy this book today:

Don't Fall in Love With Your First Idea

Beautiful piece from Langara College to promote the "Rethink Scholarship."

When Malcolm Gladwell met the Baha Men...

Interview with MIT's Grant McCracken

Interview with the author of Chief Culture Officer, MIT Anthropologist Grant McCracken.

I am 60 pages into the book, but that alone was worth the purchase price. I will write a review here when I'm done. In the meantime, this video will give you a bit of a taste for it. Absolutely worth a look.

A Tiger’s Tale: Road to Redemption

It’s old news now, but Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, the squeakiest of the squeaky clean sports stars, has been outed as a serial philanderer. The Twittersphere and the tabloids have done a pretty good job of documenting Tiger’s indiscretions, the details of which need not be revisited here.

The question I’m more interested in is a little harder to answer - What damage has Tiger Woods, the man done to the Tiger Woods, the brand?

First thing’s first - Tiger will return to golf. He will better than ever. He will break Jack Nicklaus’s record for the most Major wins. This much is certain.

But far murkier is how Tiger’s tale will evolve from this point. Will his wife leave him? Is he a toxic asset that sponsors must drop? How will golf fare in his absence?

Accenture has already pulled the plug, Procter & Gamble have “benched” him by limiting his presence in Gillette ads. Tag Heuer has announced they will continue supporting Tiger after initially signalling they would sever ties with the troubled superstar.

But Tiger’s most important booster is the swoosh factory – and Nike is sticking with their man. Founder Phil Knight recently observed, “When his career is over, you'll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip.”

Tiger - The Brand
With some sponsors leaving and others holding firm, no one has a crystal ball telling us whether Tiger’s stock is buy, hold or sell. While most think his brand image will slowly rise from rock bottom, few believe it will ever climb back to the stratospheric heights it once lived.

One thing is certain, Woods’s actions have made his brand infinitely more vulnerable than the virtuous juggernaut it seemed only a couple of months ago. Perhaps his self-described “transgressions,” made us realize is human after all. As it might be expected, the immediate damage to his market value was significant. University of California, Davis economists Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango have estimated the financial fallout of Tiger's scandals to have cost his sponsors between US$5-12 billion in wealth.

While it's hardly comforting right now, his sponsors can be optimistic that the outing of his inner lothario have added a whole new dimension to Tiger's brand. In the final telling of Tiger's story, the silver lining of this moment is that practically all revered heroes in history face daunting challenges at some point, but most come out intact. Let’s face it, stories aren’t very interesting when it’s all smooth sailing.

Legendary mythologist Joseph Campbell believes that such adversity is a recurring theme in every great story in history. In his famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell formulated the idea of “ The Hero’s Journey” or “Monomyth” - a narrative framework that transcends time, place and culture. George Lucas famously used the monomyth as a template for writing the Star Wars saga.

A quick glance at the cycle quickly reveals how it relates to Tiger’s travails. Some of the stages, appropriately named, “the road of trials” and the “woman as temptress” have landed Tiger firmly in “the abyss”. But as Campbell writes, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

The reason for the abyss stage is simple - while not all protagonists in mythological tales are human, the audiences who read them are. In order to relate to the hero, we must be able to empathise with their experiences. It’s pretty hard to empathise with a flawless robot. To err is human after all.

From Tiger’s perspective, his short hiatus from the game has already put him on the road to redemption - at least with the fans and sponsors - no one knows how atonement will go for on the home front. But time is a powerful healer, and before long Tiger will have mended fences and be back swinging clubs and spruiking products like never before. The only thing Americans love more than a fall from grace is a comeback of Lazarus proportions – just ask Robert Downey Jnr.

Like Michael Jordan before him, Tiger Woods is one of those rare figures that transcends his sport, his race and his nationality. His marketability is based on the certainty of outcome – he will win, and he’ll look good doing it. So sure, the facade of the bulletproof boyscout has been shattered. But for Tiger, perhaps his own “hero’s journey” may not be a such a myth after all.


To read about another recent tale of redemption, see Gunther Sonnenfeld's great post on Michael Vick.

The Late, Great, Paul Rand On Design.

I'm no art critic, but I'm a big fan of the legendary designer Paul Rand.

Rand is well known for his vast body of identity work including the logos he did for IBM, UPS, Westinghouse, Enron, and NeXT. One of my personal faves was the Ford re-design he did in the sixties that the company never implemented.

Rand was one of the first designers to communicate the importance of design as a competitive advantage in business. He was also a fount of timeless wisdom, offering up many commonsense nuggets over the course of his career. One of my personal faves: "Don't try to be original. Just try to be good."

How To Be Creative

A must-see video on how to be creative, inspired by creativity's enfant terrible Hugh MacLeod.

For more commonsense, straightforward tips from Hugh, read his blog Gaping Void, or grab a copy of his book: Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity.

What Motivates Us?

Daniel Pink is a seriously sharp cat. His 2005 book, A Whole New Mind is the definitive work on the shift from the knowledge-based, left-brain, twentieth century economy to the creativity driven, right-brain dominated economy of the future.

His new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, is due out in January and I’ll be sure to snag a copy. In the meantime, this TED talk gives us a sneak preview of what we can expect.

Pink believes that three attributes - autonomy, mastery and purpose, help foster our intrinsic motivation far better than the promise of financial reward. In fact, Pink highlights how monetary incentives can actually stunt performance and creativity. In this talk he gives several examples of how employees become more effective when they believe their work carries more meaning and gives them a sense of accomplishment. In most cases, this results in tangible increases in productivity, innovation and profitability across the board.

Definitely worth a look.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Brilliant speech by world renowned creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson.

Discussing the idea of "academic inflation" (the concept of university degrees becoming less valuable), he believes that only by nurturing a child's unique talents can they be fully engaged and successful in the work they do. Robinson believes education is diverse, dynamic and distinct - three attributes that most school systems do not adequately accommodate.

Do yourself a favor, check it out when you get a spare 20 minutes.

GO DUCKS!!!!!!!

The #7 Oregon Ducks and #16 Oregon State Beavers will square off tonight in the 113th Civil War football game at Autzen Stadium in Eugene.

With a Rose Bowl birth on the line, the stakes have never been higher in the clash between these two storied programs of the Northwest.

The Ducks hold a special place in my heart. I knew very little about American football when I studied abroad at the U of O in 2003. Now I never miss a Ducks game, no matter where I am.

The Ducks should win this evening, but I'm too nervous to make a score prediction for fear of jinxing it.

Go Ducks!!!!

Update: The Ducks beat the Beavers in a thriller 37-33 and now play Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on new year's day. Oregon State Will play Brigham Young in the Maaco Las Vegas Bowl on December 22.

Great results all round for football in the state of Oregon! Watch the video below for highlights of the game.

Seth Godin is Cap Rooney

I took a peek at the Ad Age Power 150 for the first time in a while this morning. It’s great to see some blogs of real quality climbing the list. Some of my personal faves are David Armano’s Logic + Emotion, Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation and Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

However, more surprising to me was the fact I couldn’t find Seth Godin’s name near the top of the list. After a bit of a scroll, I was amazed to find that Godin, for so long king of the blogosphere, had slipped to number 89. What gives?

Seth Godin is a blogging pioneer. He has been churning out his commonsense nuggets every day for the best part of a decade. He publishes a book a year, most of which become bestsellers. He is the unanimous first choice any aspiring author has to write on their bookjacket.

Why then such a big slide? After all, in the realm of blogosphere clout, Godin has few peers.

Godin’s slide is indicative of the macro blogging environment. There are plenty of great thinkers out there, and on the web there are few gatekeepers keeping great ideas locked up. As such, Seth's slide in the AdAge rankings is not so much a decline of his influence as the rise of everyone else’s.

A particularly apt analogy here comes from the Oliver Stone Film film Any Given Sunday. In a pivotal scene, Coach Tony D’Amato is telling overnight quarterback sensation Willie Beamen he will be benched when veteran Cap Rooney returns from injury. He’s having trouble persuading Beamen that Rooney’s track record of success means he is an automatic start until he hits him with an irrefutable truth, “Sure Willie, you kicked ass, but Cap Rooney’s been doing it for years.”

Seth Godin is the Cap Rooney of the blogosphere – an enduring champion, a source of inspiration to others, more importantly a leader that makes those around him better. Bloggers of all stripes become better because of him.

Obama, United Way and The NFL

Great United Way spot that aired during last night's NFL game.

Regardless of what one thinks of Obama, the man is a masterful brand manager. He could easily have sat behind a desk and encouraged the kids of America to be more active - but that would have been "off brand."

Part of the President's crossover appeal is his love of sports. Show me an American of any political persuasion that thinks being more active is a bad thing? Well done Mr. President.

The NFL's choice of personnel couldn't have been better here either. Drew Brees, Troy Polamalu and DeMarcus Ware are guys admired as much for their off-field character as much as their on field exploits.

Bravo United Way for a great and inspiring spot.

Port Adelaide Power Gets It Right

The AFL's Port Adelaide Power have revealed a new playing strip for 2010. It's about bloody time!

Port's old jumper was probably the worst playing uniform I have seen in all of professional sports. So much so, that I refuse to feature a picture of it on this blog. If you feel the need to check it out, click here. Viewer discretion is advised.

The new strip, a far more menacing ensemble, hearkens back to the famed South Australian state of origin jumper, suiting the Port club well. Joining the league in 1997, the Power made the mistake of many teams in the nineties by succumbing to the temptation of teal. It is my ardent belief that no team apart from the Miami Dolphins have forged a strong franchise brand while using teal. But let's face it, they've had the advantage of two Super Bowl wins as well as Ace Ventura.

My Aussie rules team, the Portland Power, took our name from the Port Adelaide Power. In the process of a brand overhaul ourselves, it is reassuring that our sister club is going for a sharper, more traditional football design over that hodgepodge atrocity they wore for over a decade.

To the Portland Power guys, what are your thoughts? What elements could we include on our new strip? Shall we include the Portland skyline a la the Denver Nuggets of the eighties, or shall we look to keep it more basic like Port Adelaide Power have done?

Adidas Launches the Predator X

Adidas has just released the most anticipated football boot of 2009 - the Predator X.

There has been a ton of anticipation surrounding the launch of the latest offering from the iconic Predator family. Who then, is a better figure to promote the boot than legendary retired French star Zinedine Zidane. The three-time FIFA World Player of the Year tasted both triumph and tragedy wearing Predators, holding the World cup aloft in 1998, and controversially headbutting an Italian player in the 2006 final.

I can’t wait to get a pair! Hat tip: Mark Ament at Sportsbiz.

Jameson Goes Overboard

Love this Jameson Irish Whiskey spot "Lost Barrel" by TBWA\Chiat\Day. Speaks to the authenticity, sense of humor and love of a drink the Irish are famous for.

The Jags' Brand Challenge

I often talk about Loss-Proof Brands on this blog. A Loss-Proof Brand is a sports franchise able to retain loyalty and profitability regardless of on field performance.

Often the storied franchises of pro-sports, Loss-Proof Brands able to command performance agnostic loyalty by staying true to a compelling brand narrative. Love them or hate them, these teams represent the same thing independent of on-field success or playing roster.

At the other end of the spectrum are franchise brands that are anything but loss-proof. These teams rely on the ad-hoc technique of recruiting stars and chasing championships to build their brands – not exactly an original or reliable strategy.

The Jacksonville Jaguars are a great example of this. Since entering the NFL in 1995, the Jags have achieved a good deal of success, having eleven or more wins in five different seasons. Despite this, a recent Harris Poll has the Jags as America’s least favorite NFL team amongst those who follow professional football.

But why? From a brand perspective, three key components are glaringly obvious:

No Brand Narrative: Team brands are far more than the players and coaches that take the field each week. A sports franchise is an evolving story containing heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedies. The strongest teams have a powerful narrative that ties its eras and generations together through values unique to that franchise.

To be fair, the Jags are still a young franchise, but they have not yet determined the overarching meaning for what their brand represents. If the Pittsburgh Steelers are the “blue-collar, hard-nosed spirit of the steel city;” the New York Yankees are “the brazen, big city bullies”; then what are the Jags? Like any brand, if it means different things to different people, it doesn’t mean much to anyone.

Iconography: Apart from the crisp sounding alliteration, Jaguars are in no way related to the city of Jacksonville. Without the benefit of a Steelers or Packers history to draw on, expansion teams must choose a mascot that unequivocally ties that team to its geographical home. The Houston Texans are a good example of a new team doing this well. Taking their colors from the Texas flag with a stylized longhorn as a logo, the NFL’s newest franchise has managed to outdo even the Dallas Cowboys as emblematic of the Lone Star state. Despite never having had a winning season, the Texans are currently nine places above the Jaguars in the 2009 Harris favorite team rankings.

Terrible Teal: There is no scientific explanation here, but it seems that teal and professional sports uniforms don’t mix. Teams are in the business of brokering nostalgia, so strong primary colors that hearken back to the good old days are far superior brand building colors than the murky confluence of two blended together. Plus, teal smacks of nineties trendiness – the Detroit Pistons flirted with the color for five years before seeing the light and reverting to their iconic royal blue unis.

Summary:
Every NFL team takes the field each week trying to win. But as Tony D’Amato points out in Any Given Sunday, "it’s about more than winning." Teams that realize this are able to retain loyalty even when their performances head south. In order to move up from the NFL’s least favorite team, the Jags ownership must heed this advice and figure out what they stand for, regardless of the W or L.

Focus Group Fatigue

Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation is a great read. Whether for your business or personal online presence, it underscores the importance of harnessing the web’s hyperconnectedness to build your brand. A former music journalist, Joel himself is a poster child for the book’s material, giving several examples of how he used today’s digital channels to open doors to many rewarding career opportunities.

Joel cites WIRED editor Chris Anderson’s maxim that brands are fast becoming defined by their first page of search results. With so much customer interaction and feedback taking place online, many traditional market research techniques are becoming antiquated. For example, Joel believes focus groups, so long a mainstay of qualitative research, are much less useful than they once were. He writes: “The web provides the ultimate focus group (and it’s free). It’s authentic because you’re not locking people in a room and feeding them pizza to get their opinion. They’re expressing themselves (good, bad, and neutral) without being solicited, and they’re talking online with passion. Can you really put a price on that? Can you really afford not to be listening?” (p. 63).

Critics of focus groups have long argued that their legitimacy can be compromised by several factors; groupthink, biased or unrealistic questioning, even the interrogatory nature of discussions to name a few. But what does the nature of today’s growing digital realm mean for the future of groups? Will researchers conduct more online “chat” style groups? Will brands incorporate more feedback sites like Starbucks’ hugely successful mystarbucksidea? The java giant has created a fast, cost-effective method of mining the consumer brain trust for useful insights and opinions.

What do you think? In this digital age where consumer behavior and interaction is more easily measured, is there still room for traditional focus groups? Are they headed towards oblivion, or can they still serve a purpose?

The Death of The "Big Idea."

British account planning guru Mark Earls’ speech at last month’s 4As event challenged much conventional thinking about strategic planning.

Earls took aim at the time honored notion of a strategy’s “big idea” as the central organizing principle around which a brand or campaign is built. Earls suggests that this “all or nothing” practice may reap high rewards, but is not particularly prudent, especially when the future success of a strategy is so hard to predict.

The problem with a static brand proposition is that brands are anything but static. Brands, like people, are evolving entities that live and die by the success of their actions. So this new idea of trying a ton of things and seeing what sticks may not be such a bad idea after all. As they say, success is a poor teacher, if a brand is going to fail; it makes sense for it to “fail forward, fail fast.”

Over to you, would love to hear your thoughts…