It's ten days to Christmas and we're already two days into Hanukkah, so I'm ready to call the season's retail sales:

• The worst performing stores and brands will often evidence the "best" advertising, only the results won't be their fault.
• The best sales results will come from businesses that offered low prices, and they won't get credit for any marketing success.

JOKE has been epidemic for at least the past few holiday selling seasons, as the prevailing wisdom all year long has been that companies should entertain consumers. It's why we see web sites featuring dancing elves or chocolates, and TV spots and magazine ads that are interchangeably funny or cute. Lots of campaigns focus on the personalities of eponymous model employees because JOKE sufferers believe that their customers won't buy things if marketing tries to sell to them, so 'tis the season to engage in conversations of one sort or another.

In fact, more than half of all retailers are using some sort of social media in their holiday marketing (Facebook, Twitter, web site-based activities).

Come January, we'll blame consumers for not validating the JOKE approach with their pocketbooks, just like we did last year, even as we celebrate in marketing circles our ever-improved ability to pay for the privilege to waste their time to no commercial end whatsoever. We're already noting some campaigns as if moving merchandise wasn't more than a nice-to-have afterthought.

You can come up with your own list of the likely winners and losers simply by turning the topsy-turvy JOKE perspective on its head. There's an inverse relationship between entertainment value and sales: for every nanosecond that a store or product brand wants you to spend laughing, rocking, or finding friends whose time you want to similarly waste, that's time that probably won't be spent selling anything reportable to shareholders.

The JOKE makes calling the season a no-brainer.

Any of the "new" marketing ideas that that buck this affliction mask really "old" ideas, whether bait-and-switch sales realized via door/web-buster prices on Black Friday/Cyber Monday or distributing coupons via Twitter (how did a timeworn direct mail strategy become "social" because the medium changed?). Getting a friend or URL link clicked is a new way of tracking the old analog idea of wasting time saying nothing of commercial interest to unqualified, unlikely purchasers.

Conversely, brands that have articulated clear, dependable cost/benefit value propositions all year long will sell better during the holidays than any of the brands that fully embrace the JOKE, but will do so in spite of the marketing noise and not a result of it.

It didn't have to be this way. 

More marketers could have rejected the inane, empty promises of the JOKE lobby's newfangled experts; we've known since January that the holidays would come at the end of a very tough, confusing year, and that there were a variety of things businesses could do -- and then talk about -- to sell to consumers:

• Better retail store experiences, instead of lean inventories and misleading pricing intended to obfuscate how horrible the shopping experiences could be.
• Smarter employees who didn't just talk (even from the heart) but actually possessed certifiable expertise, and were incentivized to provide credible advice.
• More meaningful promises so that products and services weren't positioned just as enhancements and upgrades, but as fixes and life-changers.
• Broader relationship offers to add ongoing, service/conversation-based attributes that extended and deepened value propositions.
• Clearer financial incentives that recognized that cash and credit card debt are only two of a myriad of possible ways to buy stuff (where are the subscription and holiday-club buying programs)?
• Novel ways to get there, so imagine spending most of the year strategizing how your business would prompt sales vs. letting the marketers and their vendors imagine was to make your brand entertaining?

Why? Such real innovation -- whether from the brands, or at the locations at which they're retailed -- would have required that marketers return to the oldest premise of them all: it's OK to sell, and being better, faster, more reliable and, yes, cheaper, is and always will be the drivers of sales (and thus brand value). 

Make it as entertaining as you want. Have fun and please your branding gurus. But never ever forget to sell.

Sadly, I suspect that our conclusions about sales this year will be no different from last year. Ad and marketing creative that prompted forwards and fond memories will be touted as the products of genius, then held up in parallel to even the slightest hint of activity in the real world to be credited with causal responsibility. Dozens of big name brand CMOs will say (or be told by their CEOs) "I want some of that, too," and get to work copying the means without ever fully understanding the ends. 

The folks who actually sold stuff during the holidays will get far less praise, as the drivers of that success will be seen as circumstantial ("consumers were looking for deals") and not worthy of emulation (or even comprehension). The most important and compelling brand attribute this year will be price, just like it was last year, only most marketers won't be able to understand or admit why. That's why I'm comfortable calling the season right now.

The only thing I can't predict is when we're going to realize that this JOKE isn't so funny anymore. 

I had the opportunity to talk with WPP's MediaCom and some of its clients in NYC earlier this week at one of its "Fast Forward" events, and it was a really interesting conversation that changed my thinking.

My proposition to the group was absolute in the extreme; I asked them what these media experiences have in common?:

• Texaco sponsors Milton Berle's radio variety show
• 7-Up runs Peter Max-like TV spots of glowing angels
• FedEx inserts messages in front of programming on Hulu
• "United Breaks Guitars" runs on YouTube courtesy of a disgruntled flier
• A happy customer tweets about an item just bought on sale

I said that I saw an unbroken chain of practice based on the belief that brands are "things" that are "out there," and that marketers must build and protect them. Whether described as exposure, interruption, engagement, entertainment, or whatever, the idea is as consistent as the names and mechanisms for realizing it have changed.

It's a hundred year-old concept, yet it drives most creative and media buying decisions today much like it did in the early 1900s. And I said that I think it's wrong.

That's when the discussion started.

The immediate reaction was that I couldn't be serious. Brands matter, by definition as well as aggregated experience. While sometimes the connections are imprecise there's still no denying that awareness of brand attributes has an impact on purchasing decisions. Every mediated moment can't be a direct marketing event. To suggest it would be, well, absolute in the extreme.

This is true. I went too far in making my case, making it appear as if I were some strict behaviorist in the B.F. Skinner model, and I'm not. I know that human beings are irrational, flawed beings with vibrant internal conversations that dictate not just our opinions but the very way we perceive and understand reality. But I do believe that our ideas about brands (and everything else) don't exist independent of the inputs of our senses, and that the most accurate and true expression of those ideas are behavioral.

We do things, things get done to or around us, and our beliefs and opinions emerge therefrom.

Conversely, we marketers have spent over a century perfecting the approach that behaviors are nothing but channels or triggers to those higher states of mind and soul. While we talk about behavior these days (thanks to the prompt from digital media) we still focus on understanding brands as those ultimate mind states. 

So my suggestion wasn't that those mind states don't exist or matter, but that we have it bass-ackwards regarding how they are formed and expressed.

We can't confirm those mind states separate from behavior, but rather only suggest and allude to them (and to any connection to reality). We have to ask about them in order to perceive them, so they're only sensed indirectly. Worse, while all of us have opinions about a zillion different things, those opinions emerge, morph, and dissolve in real-time within the little black boxes of our minds. Brand "positions" and "associations" and any other measures are really just snapshots, or moments, that we draw out of that chaos. You have to ask a consumers about their perceptions of brands in order to get them to see them and pass judgments...and then extrapolate from those answers to perceive connections to subsequent purchasing decisions.

This is why I don't think there's a there "out there" (or "in" there) that we should worry about referencing unless we can define it in terms of the behavioral inputs and outputs thereinto or outcomes therefrom. Our 100 year-old approach is flawed because we think we speak to brands when we're really just talking to ourselves. 

The evidence of this flawed approach is all around us but we're too busy trying to prove it's not true: consumers are harder to reach, more difficult to convince, and nearly impossible to keep loyal, and this comes in spite of our aggregated experience and endless waves of new media campaigns. Corporate reputations are at all-time lows, and brand names are struggling to maintain premium pricing (or even staying on shelf at retailers). A century of worrying about what people think and feel instead of do has rendered the meaning of "intangible asset" to something just shy of "doesn't exist," and led the branding business off the edge of a cliff. 

Like I said, though, it was clear through the discussion over dinner that I'd pushed my POV too far. It was really helpful to have smart advertising-savvy people talk me back from the edge of that cliff. 

After all, I claim to focus on reality and by the main course I was acknowledging that brand attributes, functions, look-and-feel, display and support absolutely, definitively matter...but only when they matter (i.e. when something happens). I saw opportunity where I hadn't before.

This led to a collaboration conclusion worth riffing upon: why don't brands do things that matter more clearly, more often, and more responsibly? Marketers could stop trying to influence the "what if" and instead focus branding resources on "the here and now." If we saw behaviors as the expressions of brands, not just the channels for them, it wouldn't negate the importance of emotions and associations and all the other qualities of human experience that matter...rather, it would give us a better handle on delivering them. 

I couldn't stop thinking about the conversation after I returned to my hotel, so I came up with three ways this new approach to brands might apply to media buying/monitoring practices:

• First, stop imagining connections, and any rationale (or supporting ROI fantasy) about how some brilliant creative idea "contributes to the brand" or "makes the brand relevant to popular culture" should get flushed down the toilet. Demand more of your strategy...observable fact is far more reliable and true than implicit inspiration, so think about your plans as if you were charting weather patterns or sports scores instead of writing the narrative to a detective novel. How would things change if you were plotting causally-related consumer interactions? Again, internal states matter, but people learn and remember through actions, and consuming some aspirationally wonderful content is more like witnessing it, not internalizing it.
• Secondly, fit content to context. This is a weird idea that requires more thinking and validation, but it seems to me that the guts of what a brand communicates have to be focused on the consumer -- who, what, where, when, and why -- more so than on the brand itself. So when FedEx runs a bumper ad at the start of an SNL short on Hulu, it's telling the viewer something utterly devoid of meaning, relevance, or utility to that moment of consumption. It's a gotcha that can't be avoided, focused all about the brand and unrelated to the consumer. Ditto for any social media conversation that elevates talking over delivery of anything commercially useful; it's no great accomplishment to "friend" brands or host conversations about nothing at all, and it certainly isn't delivering any brand-relevant content where, when, and to whom it might matter. Distraction is no better than interruption. It might be worse.
• My third thought is that every communication, however you categorize it, should have a purpose...not defined by the branding message it contains or alludes to, but the ultimate deliverable of the activity. I can't get off the conclusion that every activity is direct marketing and that it should have a clear prompt beyond "think fondly about the joke in this spot" or "visit our website." If there's no there out there, then everything we spend money to do should have some discernible connection to making money for us. It won't always be clear, but shouldn't that be the first question we ask and attempt to measure instead of the last?

Asking intriguing questions means you're participating in finding smart answers.

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

Ever get the feeling that you're living and working in a fishbowl? All of the experts you rely on live in the same bowl. That means nobody knows what's going on. We're all inside looking at ourselves, like Flatlanders trying to imagine life in three dimensions. If an expert claims any more perspective that that, you should laugh and walk away quickly.  

Sure, anybody can float a theory, and most everyone has one or another; there's no litmus test for who gets to talk about brands and marketing. So you can't pick up a magazine that doesn't claim to explain what happened in 2009 (and what you're supposed to do about it next year). There are webinars every five minutes on the list of things you should do, follow, and otherwise believe. What pass for examples and case histories are stories written during the year, created in the heat of battle as folks stumbled through the tall weeds of expectations, variable skills, and imperfect perspectives on the shape, location, and substance of the fishbowl.

You probably sat through a presentation from a vendor, a trade show speech, or perhaps gave either or both yourself, always hoping to draw conclusions, and thereby give shape and reason to the chaos of what was going on.

Hello McFly? 

Here we are nearly done with 2009 and still I don't think we know what the hell is going on. Worse, the exigencies of business require that we get with the program as quickly as possible, so I worry sometimes that our need for answers sometimes keeps us from asking the right questions. 

That's why most of my Dim Bulb posts were ultimately about the same thing: what program?

Periodically during the year, I wrote about some possibility or trend that I suspected might be worth thinking about. I rarely had an answer, but I wanted to explore the possibility of different, better questions. While everyone was writing about the miracle of social media, I asked about what happens to trust and other externalities on which communications depend. Ditto for a counterpoint to the growth in crowdsourced fact, when I asked about its effect on objective truth. While most experts agreed on what was important to consider, I looked in other directions, and:

• Contemplated the broader questions raised when companies selected to stop giving profit forecasts.
• Wondered about the impact of presuming that "free" is really the new model for making money.
• Pondered if the use of dubbed movie clips could be a new form of language in social media.
• Got all confused about the purpose of mainstream media, if it only reports on itself.

Here's my advice for next year: don't trust anybody's advice, including mine. Whatever answers you are given, it's probably more important to come up with more questions. 

And then repeat.

The Bulb Asks:

• Is there an inverse ratio relationship between certitude and reliability? What's most obvious now is probably going to be something we laugh about in a few years.
• When an expert or vendor describes a trend or case, do first agree on definitions?  One person's "success" is another's "irrelevance."  Language matters.
• Did you look to the past for ideas, or only forward? No matter how new or futuristic something appears, it has probably happened before in one way, shape, or form. Conversational media is not rewriting the rules of civilization, for instance. Check out what other people did when faced with the same things we face.

McDonald's is going to change its logo in Germany, casting its iconographic golden arches against a green background to envoke its respect for the environment. I can't decide if the idea is irrelevant or insane. Or both.

Central to the decision would be the premise that fast-food customers make eating decisions based on corporate environmental policies. If comparisons between hamburgers or fries net out in a tie, McDonald's must believe that it'll win because it's doing good things for the planet.

On that point, the company has substantive actions that it can promote:

• It's testing a prototype store that uses 25% less energy 
• Another store is testing cutting-edge energy use management with U.S. government certification programs like LEED 
• It's buying solar-powered air conditioners 
• It touts the expected sustainable food chain and environmental steering committees on its corporate web site

Who cares?

I mean, I care that companies institute real good-for-business environmental and social policies, as I believe doing right by the planet and by people shouldn't be the purview of marketing or some other corporate social responsibility nonsense. Wal-Mart is writing the book on this strategy (followed by other big names, like Dow) and, in doing so, is illustrating that doing "green" is probably going to resemble doing "IT"...and offer no more competitive differentiation on the marketing front than, say, touting your computer servers over those of your competition, or declaring that your brand's sourcing code is more robust.

Even if McDonald's assumes that it can buck this trend and that hungry customers care about this stuff, claiming a position on "green" is a slippery slope:

• What about how its beef is slaughtered and handled, or what raising zillions of cows does to communities and their local environments?
• What about all the waste produced at retail outlets (sure, no-ink bags are recyclable, but does it happen consistently)?
• How much fuel is used to drive to McDonald's stores, both by customers and employees, etc.? 

Contemplating such a list gets stupid pretty fast, though at least irrelevantly so compared to the "healthy" nonsense the brand tries to claim with its "nutrition information" (i.e. eating a burger is part of a balanced diet that includes extra good stuff to compensate for what we serve you) and disingenuous sponsorship of the Olympics (yeah, gymnasts are regular patrons). The one area in which "green" might matter most should be measured in lettuce, only you need a microscope to find that evidence.

But like I said, who cares?

Environmentalism and health claims seem so far afield from selling great hamburgers in great restaurants. McDonald's has absolutely nothing to hide or be embarrassed about: it sells tasty, cheap fast food in dependably clean and convenient locations. Trying to make the case that it is improving the health of its customers or the planet isn't just a reach but risks being utterly unconnected to the drivers of consumption.

Could it make sense for individual restaurants to commit a percentage of every purchase to some local community project? Perhaps. How about letting customers accrue points for healthy lifestyles and rewarding them with celebratory McDonald's meals? Maybe. I'm still not convinced that such programs would actually influence purchase choices, but there are lots of ways to make such themes meaningful and relevant to behavior...and provide some utility to customers.

But who cares about a green logo? It stands for a faulty assumption, and risks reducing a well-known brand icon into an example of branding nonsense.

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

Great branding and marketing happened all the time in 2009, only it often occurred in some less noticed and most unlikely places.

In fact, I'm not sure we possess the right criteria or language to agree on what "great" even means. So many things have changed − from our channels to our expectations − that much of what was celebrated in the media (and promptly resold to other clients) just left me flat. I had this sneaking suspicion that we were missing something all year long. 

A shared idea of purpose. Criteria for success. 

A program.

I wrote a number of Dim Bulb essays during the year on what I thought were home runs that you'd otherwise miss; when I reviewed them for my new book, I discovered an underlying consistency across all of them. A pattern of design and execution that I believe drove all of the successes, whether large or small. The best campaigns all exhibited novel thinking in one or more of what I've concluded are the six categories, or Six C's of Success, which are: 

1. Channel. "New" shouldn't be a synonym for "digital" when it comes to media for reaching consumers. The truly inventive campaigns used new ways to communicate, like incorporating heaters in bus stops with ads, or newspapers that were written differently, not just reformatted to look like web pages. Every communications channel is "new" unless you choose to use it in old ways.
2. Creativity. I'm a sucker for a good fart joke just like the next guy, but the really creative content in 2009 wasn't focused on making people laugh as much as inventing new ways to talk about products and services. Who would have ever thought of giving life insurance as a gift, for instance? Successful campaigns redefined the mandate for creativity and put it against finding ways to engage with consumers thatwere relevant, meaningful, and had some utility beyond eliciting a chuckle. 
3. Competitiveness. Some marketers rejected the babble of talking about "enhancements" or selling imaginary benefits, and got back to talking about real differences with competing offers, sometimes going so far as to invent their own competition to crowd a market. "Why we're different/better" proved to be a far better basis for social conversations than whether folks thought an ad was good or not.
4. Content. Home run messages had meaning and relevance, not just entertainment value. One of the key winning ideas was to pull campaigns back to the old-fashioned idea of sampling, which helped make a beer message very compelling.
5. Clarity. The best ideas weren't focused exclusively on marketing communications, but the business behind it. 2009 gave us examples of clients linking marketing efforts to results (holding agencies accountable for results...gasp!), which the media interpreted as punitive. It wasn't. Could selling be emerging as the new marketing idea? It would be laughable if it weren't possible.
6. Call to Action. This was perhaps the most important quality of all. Home runs have objectively real actions attached to them, so they're memorable for what happened (and not for what people thought about them). So, for instance, an emotional attachment was less important than the offer to "try our toilet paper." Beyond all the babble about conversation for the sake of conversation, the most successful campaigns provided something after the talk.

They can also be nothing more than scrappy singles, to push the baseball analogy perhaps too far. I'm convinced that some of the best strategies in 2009 were mistaken for tactics; doing "little" things really well was perhaps one of the year's "big" ideas.

So you've got my recipe for success. Want to know which campaigns I thought were the home runs of 2009?  

Buy my book.  :)

I can all but guarantee that someone you know and care about is planning to go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. You need to intervene.

Black Friday is a contrived, customer-hostile, bait-and-switch, potentially deadly symptom of what's wrong with bricks and mortar retailing. A handful of grotesquely low prices on a smaller handful of products are advertised as "doorbusters," and we've been subjected to years' worth of propaganda intended to associate the day with shopping deals, however imaginary. With inventories somewhat leaner this year versus last, there's also the implicit suggestion that if you don't run out and buy something, you might not be able to find it later on...so go ahead and buy that marginally discounted TV when the three that were on sale are nowhere to be found.

The necessity of shopping this Friday is wholly the creation of retailers who choose to abandon any other reason to compel a visit, provide a pleasant in-store experience, or associate any value to the store brand other than perhaps the hint that there are deals to be had if and when the stores dole them out.

Yet crowds will dutifully start lining up at their favorite stores tomorrow long before the sun rises. TV journalists will broadcast from shopping malls with faux insightful comments about "consumer sentiment" and other aspects of the commercial community in which we all belong, though none of us claim membership. An unofficial legion of shoppers will tweet from the front-lines, narrating which store deal is ripe for exploitation. Next Monday's headlines will declare that the entire holiday selling season will be big or a bust.

Who are the numbnuts getting manipulated by the stores?

They're our families, friends, and neighbors. David Ogilvy once said "the consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife," only if your loved one or friend can't resist the Pavlovian command to shop on Back Friday then the "moron" label is a compliment.

The retailers are morons, too, because they keep doing it year after year, though I guess you can't fault them for repeating something that regularly proves to be somewhat effective. Every item that gets purchased by a customer is one less item gathering dust on a store shelf. Sales on Black Friday are guaranteed to be better than sales on a Friday of any other color. Registering transactions now, however they're delivered and at what ultimate cost, is a better business strategy than waiting for them to magically appear as we get closer to Christmas. Folks lining up in the dark outside Walmart aren't shopping online (unless they have their smartphones with them).

So who cares what it'll do to the retail brand next month, or next year? Without comp store sales this year, there may be no tomorrow.

I say this logic is utterly flawed. Black Friday is moronic for everyone involved because it represents a collective effort to destroy retail, and here's how:

• Retailers strip away every pretense of authenticity and credibility to their brands by so bluntly detaching pricing from product and purchasing value; doorbuster offers are no different than the promise of winning the lottery.
• Consumers subject themselves to the most crowded, competitive, unpleasant, and more than likely unsatisfying shopping experiences possible; bricks and mortar stores couldn't do a better job of promoting online shopping if they tried.

This is the market at work, friends, and the collaborative malaise known as Black Friday will continue until somebody yells stop.

Is that somebody you?

Imagine if each of us sought out a person we know is going to humiliate him or herself on Black Friday; you know, somebody who is already plotting out which stores to hit, what times, how much they want to spend, etc. Be a friend and keep them away from the stores. Go to a movie. Start an art project. Walk the dog (a lot). Do anything other than shop.

Staying home on Black Friday would tell the retailers that we want more from bricks and mortar shopping experiences:

• They should be better than trolling web sites in our underwear at home, and that means strategies other than getting the most of us in stores at the same time to battle over merchandise
• We are willing to see value in retail brands beyond price, but that we expect more creativity from retailers in hopes of delivering it
• We want respect from them, not manipulation, which would start by stopping prompts like doorbuster sales and other ruses to get shoppers out of bed at 4 am to buy toys.

They're helping ruin retail for the rest of us.

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

In case you haven't noticed it, almost every public and commercial establishment blew up this year. Your reputation and brand aren't what they used to be.

Citizens no longer believe in their governments. Investors don't trust the markets. Science, history, and even the very definition of what constitutes facts are up for debate, quite often contentiously so. Even though our planet is evermore wrapped in the knowing embrace of instantaneous communications, networked conversation, and access to literally infinite amounts of information, people seem to agree less, distrust more, and rely on a shrinking list of common beliefs.

And what we marketers talk about most often is how consumers want more conversation?

It's like we're debating over a nuanced description in a sentence that nobody is reading, let alone has any capacity to comprehend. Process over purpose. Right answer, wrong question.

You wouldn't know it from the "best of" successes we’re going to hear about over the next month. We're supposed to emulate campaigns -- whether new or old media -- that deliver awareness, engagement, social currency, branded content, and a myriad of other made-up benefits while ignoring the ugly fact that nobody really believes or cares about the crap we're propagating (or certainly don't care as much as they once did).

We've detached our branding and marketing efforts from the reality we were once expected to influence, and there's no more graphic example of this phenomenon than in the financial sector:

• Their very structural foundations were called into question early in the year
• Cold, hard facts proved old processes and certitudes to be no longer reliable
• Individual investors lost untold amounts of money
• Financial firms responded with expensive branding that effectively told people "don't worry, be happy"
• The firms announced no changes in behavior or reporting. Consumers are still wary and mad

• Worried about global warming? Your friendly neighborhood oil company is on it with glossy commercials of its scientists busy at work solving the problem
• Bothered that agriculture businesses making oodles of profits while a large chunk of humanity starves? No worries, because they contribute to charity
• Product tampering got you spooked? The brands, whoever or whatever they are, promise to never let it happen...again

Consumers don't wake up in the morning hoping for a closer relationship with brands, or wishing that they'd get more marketing intrusions in their lives. I think that every exhortation to "talk more" or "add to the conversation" belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketers' challenge.

If the last year has shown us anything, it's that the medium is not the message.

The message is the message. 

My prediction is that consumers aren't as dumb as we think they are, and that in 2010 credibility is going to be a major brand differentiator...perhaps even more so than any emotional or associative benefit. People can connect the dots, or believe that they can, and the fact that they're rejecting most traditional forms of marketing could have something to do with the fact that what we're saying hasn’t been credible for quite some time. 

They just don't like our dots, however brilliantly rendered.

Similarly, we've had to invent ROI measures for newer forms of communicating that don't even presume or aspire to credibility, per se, and offer new metrics that aren't particularly related to the old ones (i.e. sales). 

The reality is that reputation has moved out of the hands of image makers and into reality. Reputation and brand depend on what your business does, not what it says or how creatively it says it. The marketing challenge is to find ways to narrate this process and experience, and in doing so restore the credibility in what we do. You don't need a new media campaign or better billboard ad. No channel is more legitimate than another.

The marketing opportunity is to discover the content that matters. Until we do that, corporate reputations are going to suck.

The Bulb Asks:

• Instead of brainstorming what you want your customers to believe, should you come up with reasons why (and how) they should believe your brand?
• Communicating doesn’t occur in a vacuum, so do you know how your content relates to the context in which it's consumed?
• If your 2010 branding goal was to be trusted, would that provide you the platform to promote a variety of added benefits? Conversely, if your brand isn't actively trusted, does even the smartest marketing only add insult on top of injury?

'Tis the season to diss Apple in some very creative and entertaining ways. I'm just not sure whether it's a sign of strategic marketing insight, or fishbowl-like confusion of message over meaning.

First came Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaigns, with its snippets of slice-of-life everypeople declaring their stereotypical lifestyles, and then shoppers explaining how they'd first looked at an Apple but then chose a PC because it was a better value. I'm all for comparison ads but the nonsense of contrasting PC-ness with Apple-ness is kind of silly. Here's why:

• Apple has been running those hilarious Justin Long/John Hodgman spots for a few years now, but I'd venture to say that they haven't touched Apple’s sales much
• They preach to the faithful, and mildly entertain the rest of us
• It's probably anathema for any advertising-interested person to say this, but Apple has a tradition of running corporate branding campaigns that have no connection to consumer behavior
• The "Think Different" campaign was strikingly memorable, but I'm not aware that it did anything for sales (coming on the heels of the first iMac launch, I think sales even dipped)
• Even the "1984" spot (and the sorta lame HAL9000 follow-up) were creations of great art and panache, but almost purposefully said nothing about sales
• It's all great art, but not particularly smart marketing

If sales go up, squint one eye, balance on your left leg, and ask people if they remember the ads and, voila, you have circumstantial if not casual proof of value. If sales stay flat or go down, well, consumers still probably remembered the ads, so the branding isn't at fault as much as those pesky consumers just not doing what they're supposed to do. All that matters is that they're talking about the campaigns, can recollect them if asked, or can make a VU meter on a digital dashboard register some conversational measure, like "social currency" or "tone."

If anybody thinks Apple's brand success has much if anything to do with these artifacts of communications, they're idiots...or, more specifically, they work at Microsoft or one of its ad agencies, because they chose to take the irrelevant declarations of a company that represents a fraction of a percent of the global PC business, and made it the focus of their positioning. Jeez...PCs aren't even a product, per se, but rather a category of products in which Apple is included.

"I'm a PC" inherently declares "I'm not a Mac," which is kind of like the U.S. basing its global reputation on reminding everyone that it's a country, but not Liechtenstein. 

Then came the "iDon't" campaign for the Droid smartphone, which chose to list its features in contrast to Apple's iPhone; everything it did differently was a statement of something that iPhone couldn't do (some features were truly unique, though the iPhone has its share of those, too). It sorta felt like a Mac spot, and ended with a whacky garbled static thing like the closing scene in the horror movie Prince of Darkness.

Does a list of don'ts add up to a list of benefits? We marketers might snicker about how the ads belittled iPhone, but I say it was a bass-ackwards way to make the point, at best, and statements like "iDon't allow open development" couldn't have made much sense (or provided comfort) to most non-geek buyers. 

More to the point, did the ads do anything to drive people to stores to buy the damn gizmo? Verizon won't say, but estimates are that they sold at least 100,000 units in the U.S. during the first week. Apple sold 1.6 million units in 8 countries during the same period of its launch. Clearly, the "iDon't" campaign was another branding success.

Now there's another spot trying to humiliate iPhone by banishing it to goofy Island of Misfit Toys we Boomers remember from the claymation Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. It's there because it has lame 3G coverage compared to the Verizon map that has a lot more real estate filled-in with company red.

Touting 3G coverage reminds me of arguing over processor speeds in computers, or surfactant percentages in dishwashing liquid. In the technology world "more" is even a bit better than "new," even if nobody knows what the hell it means. So is it a meaningful difference? Are there experiential proof-points to make the case that 3G yields better experiences, irrespective of device? Does it prompt sales? 

We simply don't know these answers because the marketers decided that the only question worth asking was "how can we slam Apple?"

Some ad critics have decided that these campaigns are evidence of a new day in which Apple is somehow under fire and less secure. I wonder if it isn't evidence of the exact opposite: Apple so dominates the categories in which it chooses to compete that its competitors can't come up with anything meaningful to do about it. The best they can do is find ways to creatively declare "We're not Apple" or mock Apple's ads, which just furthers their reach.

Apple doesn't care about the ads anyway; it's the products and experience that destroy its competition, and the celebrated cool kwan of its brand trails that fact vs. preceding it. Apple's brand story isn't a promise, it's a narration of experience.

Every dollar that its competitors waste drawing contrasts with image and brand attributes is money that could have gone toward revealing meaningful and relevant differences that could have prompted their own experiences. And sales.

Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, but Apple envy won't get you anywhere.

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

All the incessant chanting of new media's Greek chorus notwithstanding, 2009 revealed two emergent facts about the promise of social media: first, it's not really "social," and second, "media" is its least important quality. Instead, the opportunities it presents arise from what goes into it, and what comes out of it. Ignoring these inputs and outputs are its downside, too.

There has been no shortage of experimentation during the year, and I've written extensively about the thriving cabal of researchers, pundits, bloggers, and consultants who conspire to sell the idea of new media to marketers who are either disillusioned with traditional media ("those pesky consumers just aren't doing what they're supposed to do!"), or simply didn’t have the budget to pay for it anymore.

I haven't attended a conference of marketers that didn't celebrate "the right way" to "do"social media. The thought of newer, even more arcane and intangible measures of benefits makes people downright giddy with enthusiasm and a sense of their own special worth...like it lets them forgo another round of educating those hapless bastards who run companies or pay client bills, and instead tell them that they need to change entire organizations before they can truly understand the merits of social media.

Yessss, feel the power! 

It occurs to me that social campaigns cost less because they are worth-less. Maybe the market pricing model works, and the Invisible Hand is telling us that it doesn't necessarily make sense to replace the already-questionable metrics developed to support a few generations of branding and marketing with new ones that seem even more vague. Yet the presumption these days is that consumers prefer conversation over content, relevance, meaning, or utility, and that this given truth requires only more efforts at tactical delivery. Survey after poll derides marketers who are lagging in this regard.

So we've seen lots of really creative, memorable campaigns that capture clicks, downloads, and headlines. The sales successes usually involve distributing a coupon or notice of a sale, which is absolutely legitimate, but absolutely not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. Return from the conversing that goes on is usually measured when campaigns are linked to other events simply because they are concurrent: people clicked on a funny video and sales were up, ergo social media drove sales.

If the metric for success is that things happened at the same time, however, we should also credit social media campaigns with making the Sun rise and ensuring that gravity functions correctly. Who knew causality was so casual? Maybe we should put world peace on the docket for the next Facebook campaign in 2010?

Be prepared to hear much more of this next year, often times from people who are either too young to remember Y2K, aren't interested in reading the business history of tulips or the South Sea, or just presume that the Internet is this miraculous agent that everyone else loves so much because they do.

The pundits aren't going to be much help to you, either, as they're at least indirectly in the pocket of folks who want to sell this stuff. You've got to figure things out for yourself.

The good news is that social media have amazing promise. There's a ton of truly revolutionary thinking going on, but you have to look past the immediate examples of glitzy campaigns. It's impossible to understand the utility of social media campaigns unless you explore what goes into it − corporate behavior is much more important than creative marketing − and what comes out of it, in terms of participant behavior and involvement yielding actions in the real world.

That 2009 has illustrated is that it's less important to spend money on the mechanism of how these inputs and outputs are connected − the social media tools, whether Twitter, Facebook, or A Player To Be Named Later − and more crucial that businesses understand the connectivity at both "ends." Figuring out how to waste consumers' time in the meantime, however pleasantly, isn't an accomplishment whatsoever.

Think instead along two broad paths:

Second, where and why the people who might care about your actions might do something with/about them? Consumption of messages isn't an action, taking an action is an action. So inventing a creative idea for people to enjoy is at least two steps removed from what matters; instead, the real challenge is to invent ways for consumer behaviors to track with your corporate actions. Think share, test, vote, inform, dissect, visit...verbs that require a subject and object. 

So if your branding strategy is to get people talking about your branding strategy, you're probably doomed despite all of the encouragement the punditocracy might shower upon you. And those stupid operational folks who you're telling to change the position of every molecule in the company? If you stay focused on the blather of conversation for the sake of conversation, even if it's spot on your brand attributes (or whatever), it'll become apparent to them that the only thing they need to change is you.

The language of social media is behavior, and the challenge for 2010 will be for you to discover how to realize this ultimate promise.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you trying to make social fit for your company, or does you company have a clear, objective reason to use those tools?
• Do you know how broadly and frequently you're already doing it (hint: think employees, vendors, customers, and critics, not just your marketing department)?
• Could you confuse tactics like tweeted customer complaints (i.e. the tail) with the operational functions that really matter, like customer service (i.e. the dog)? 

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)

JPMorgan Chase announced earlier this week that it plans to hire 1,500 new mortgage and small business bankers by the end of 2010. I think this is a tremendous branding opportunity.

"We have invested in new systems, aggressively grown our capacity and are now looking to increase our sales force," said its head of home lending in a statement reported on CNN.

Up to now, you could have fooled me.

Ever since the economic meltdown began, the communications from Chase and its competitors have been just shy of criminal: no details, no insight, no evidence of any action other than page after page of paternalistic, insulting branding blather that amounted to little more than saying "don’t worry, we've been through tough times...just trust us."

Financial firms received billions and billions of dollars because their very stuctures and ways of doing business were suspect, if not revealed to have failed outright. The few actions we learned about -- paying one another giant bonuses, raising fees whenever possible, and resisting government exhortations to please .loan money to customers so the rest of the economy can get out of the crush of your ineptitude -- told us much more than the branded communications. Oh, and we learned from the government that the firms were actively working to stifle any efforts at improved or increased oversight.

We still don't know what has changed, if anything. I've written before that there is an ugly, nagging, gaping hole in the spot where customers used to place their trust in financial institutions. No creative slogan could restore the qualities of credibility and authenticity upon which these firms once relied. I am shocked that none of them have done anything to repair their reputations.

This is why I find the news from Chase so encouraging. Hiring staff is doing something other than hiring branding gurus to invent nonsense marketing. It might not be terribly strategic, and rather simply a staffing up for an anticipated uptick in loan applications, but if I were advising the bank, I'd find a way to make it a catalyst for communicating real change:

• How will its loan offerings be different?
• Who will they be targeting (i.e. will it be more selective)?
• Will there be different vetting processes for approving loans, whether mortgage or commercial?
• Are there lending goals for regions and/or sectors, so people can feel involved?
• What are the loan servicing changes that will help make borrowers feel more secure/less likely to default?
• Could there be real, meaningful synergies between Chase financial products, instead of treating customers as targets for cross-selling exploitation?
• If there are new or improved regulatory and reporting conventions supporting this new phase in the bank’s growth, what are they and how could they matter to borrowers?

The Bulb Asks:

• Did your last financial or operational news announcement support the ongoing narrative of your brand?
• Do you identify & communicate things your business does differently than your competition vs. what positioning differences you want your customers to know?
• How can you translate your corporate news into terms that matter more to your customers than to your branding?