This entry celebrates and challenges Bernard Chapais’ Primeval Kinship (Harvard, 2010). In this book, Chapais explores the deep structure of human kinship, following in the footsteps of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robin Fox, and other notable social scientists. But Chapais is a biologist by training, and he rigorously invokes important primate data as he builds his argument. Chapais concludes that the atom of human kinship is the brother-sister-husband bond, which expresses a tribal social structure that is uniquely human. The binding mechanism of this structure, he argues persuasively, is a combination of descent and alliance (kinship and marriage) that is rooted in our biological legacy. The tribe is therefore not a cultural creation, as Lévi-Strauss argued, but one that evolved from primeval precursors in a predictable, contingent sequence.

In short, Chapais proposes that human society evolved from a chimp-like order grounded in generalized promiscuity, to a baboon-like order grounded in generalized polygyny, to the present human order grounded in generalized monogamy. He suggests that the crucial breakthrough from polygyny to monogamy came as the result of a stone in a rival male’s hand that broke the dominance of the alpha male.

Chapais’ work is essential reading because it recaps all the key biological and anthropological literature thoroughly and gracefully. That said, I believe it treats the vital issue of reproductive strategy weakly, and therefore invites a response. In particular, I believe Chapais misses the crucial point that the branching of the primate tree from pre-gorilla, to gorilla, to chimp, and ultimately to human expressions constitutes a sequential process of adding reproductive strategies to a basic root game. A brief sketch of my argument follows in the next two paragraphs.

The root game in the primate tree is alpha dominance. Many primate species including baboons and gorillas branch off from the main trunk and play this root game. After gorillas branch off, promiscuity joins alpha dominance in the trunk line, creating a new game. Chimps and bonobos branch off and play this new game of promiscuity + alpha dominance. After chimps and bonobos branch off, monogamy and then belonging join the game in the trunk line, creating new games. Humanity branches off to play the ultimate game of belonging + monogamy + promiscuity + alpha dominance.

Each of the successive games organizes a society differently, and each specifies conflict at a different level. The root game—alpha dominance—requires players to challenge one another for dominance in a territory, and specifies the unimale-multifemale social structure, as in gorillas. In this game, the primary locus of conflict sits at the level of individuals. The second game—promiscuity + alpha dominance—pacifies relations among resident males through a combination of uncertain paternity and certain kinship, and specifies the multimale-multifemale social structure, as in chimps. In this game, the primary locus of conflict rises to the level of neighboring bands. The third game—monogamy + promiscuity + alpha dominance—binds neighboring bands into tribes through the mechanism of daughter- and sister-exchange, and specifies the multifamily social structure, as in humans. In this game, the primary locus of conflict rises to the level of tribes. The ultimate game—belonging + monogamy + promiscuity + alpha dominance—is the great hope of humanity, and also its great challenge. Belonging introduces the capacity to conform and therefore to cooperate at every level from individuals to nations and from kin to strangers, while its integral opposite—the capacity to rebel—challenges us daily, by reintroducing conflict at every level of society: individual, band, tribe and nation.  (I call belonging and rebellion integral opposites because rebellion topples old norms and creates new norms for people to belong to.)

As you might guess from this brief sketch, I have a hard time buying Chapais’ assertion that a period of retrograde polygyny intervened between periods of generalized promiscuity and generalized monogamy in the evolution of human kinship and society. Specifically, Chapais’ argument that technology forced a transition to monogamy could apply just as easily to my sequence, and mine is more parsimonious: promiscuity –> monogamy. Further, if you read Chapter 11 closely, Chapais does not prove his argument that polygyny intervened between promiscuity and monogamy—he merely asserts it. In fact, Chapais skillfully argues against an interval of polygyny in an ironic passage relating to female peacemaking and cooperative partnerships on pages 225-6.  Lastly, Chapais does not treat belonging at all—even as a survival strategy—and this is the most significant vulnerability of his work. As you read Chapais’ book, I ask that you keep these observations and my game-based model in mind.

In short, I believe that humanity’s unique game of four strategies constitutes the selective pressure that specifies the oversized brain and many other human adaptations. In addition, I believe the game motivated all of the vital breakthroughs in human culture, including hunting, language, social contracts, etc., and continues to today. More on all of this will follow in subsequent entries.

This entry is dedicated to Dr. Irv DeVore, teacher and friend.

To follow the thread of this entry, it is helpful to know the cyclical, saecular model of history offered by William Strauss and Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning (1997). In the parlance of that model, the USA has moved in the past twenty years through an Unraveling phase into a Crisis. A great High awaits after the Crisis resolves, an Awakening will follow the High, then another Unraveling and Crisis. To date, four presidents have addressed the present Unraveling and Crisis (George I, Clinton, George II, Obama), with little positive effect from any of them.

The solution to the current Crisis is simple but elusive: the American president must belong to the office. To belong to the office, a president must know and do what is right for the country, whatever the personal cost may be. In terms developed by the social scientist Francis Fukuyama, the president must suppress his/her megalothymia and express his/her isothymia. In my estimation, Ronald Reagan was the last president who truly belonged to the office, and even he could not sustain his belonging for eight years.

Resolute, counter-cultural belonging to the office by two great presidents brought about the ends of the last two Crises. Lincoln turned the stalled Civil War into a righteous crusade for humanity, and FDR skillfully drew a reluctant, Depressed country into an essential world war. Both presidents operated against all odds and at grave personal risk; both died in office too. In contrast, our last four presidents have insisted upon expressing themselves as individuals, pursuing personal recognition, party stature, and even corporal satisfaction at the expense of the office. As a result, the current Crisis endures.

The cycles of history result from humanity’s defining game of strategy, a simple, elegant contest of belonging vs. rebellion. While numerous social scientists have noted the tension between belonging and rebellion, the most-cited among them have viewed it as a linear progression–including Tönnies (Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft), Weber (traditional to rational-legal), Durkheim (mechanical to organic), Popper (Closed to Open) Maine (status to contract), Spencer (military to industrial), Redfield (folk to urban), and of course Fukuyama. But it is not a linear progression, because purposeful belonging to the office by the American president can end a Crisis and trigger the communal High waiting beyond it.

Neither politics nor politicians can end a Crisis. Consequently, it matters not a whit whom we elect in November. All that matters is that he/she elects to belong to the office. Nobody could have predicted that LBJ would become the champion of The Great Society, but the office changed him, made him belong, made him do what is right—even though he became a one-term president as a result. Britons have recently celebrated their throne; Americans need to celebrate our office of the president, because that office has the unique power to ennoble and fortify the frail and fallible people we rotate through it.  –Jude Hammerle

The distinguishing characteristic of social media compared to commercial media is that social media are controlled by consumers. While consumers exploit all media for the same purpose–to advertise themselves–consumers’ absolute control of social media ordains that virtually every scrap of organic social content makes one or more of the four competitive statements humans make about themselves: “I dominate,” “I submit,” “I provide,” and/or “I belong.” Social media therefore constitute the most direct and unsubtle forum for human competition, and always have.

Social media predate commercial media by at least 250,000 generations (5 million years). Long before our ancestors could talk, the deep structure of their kinship specified regularities of social engagement, and these regularities grew in complexity as the new reproductive strategies of monogamy and belonging emerged and spread. As belonging took root, social regularities became norms and norms became the reference points for assertions of both conformity and rebellion. Today, every human action can be understood as a display of conformity to a norm, or one of three kinds of rebellion. Rebellions are the means by which new norms form, and today’s digital social movement is simply a rebellion threatening to replace an old norm of media consumption with a new one. The decline in American television viewership suggests that this rebellion is proceeding apace, at least for now.

Word of mouth is the most important social medium. Today’s digital technologies provide new structures and audiences for this crucial medium. Like all social media, word of mouth is controlled absolutely by consumers. It has always been this way, and smart producers have always found ways to elicit advocacy from consumers. The best way for producers to engage consumers as advocates is to help consumers compete. So, the first rule of using social media effectively is to make sure that your product, service and/or brand helps consumers to DOMINATE, SUBMIT, PROVIDE and/or BELONG. This is a fundamental rule of marketing, not just of marketing via social media, but few companies today follow this rule. (Does yours?)

Importantly, digital word of mouth differs from analog word of mouth by being public, not private, and therefore collectable and measurable. So, the second rule of using social media effectively is 1) to collect, 2) to measure and 3) to track over time exactly what is being said about your offerings–good and bad–in digital social forums. Note that this rule (like the first) does not help to measure the value of social media; instead, it highlights digital social media as enablers of measurement.

Turning now to the heart of the issue, I note that most social media (including word of mouth and many digital enablers of it) are accessible to all players–producers and consumers–at zero cost. So, the first step for every producer is to engage in free social media at a high level. To this end, I offer a third rule: corporate boards and overseers should compel marketing managers to increase the depth and breadth of their usage of free social media until such usage produces results/responses of a significant nature, as measured by established research and tracking systems (including social media monitoring). This process demonstrates management’s proficiency, and sets a baseline measure of causes and effects in social media. Subsequent paid social media efforts must demonstrate a return over and above this baseline.

Finally, producers should note that consumers and entrepreneurial producers with zero marketing budgets are among the most effective users of social media. Ridiculous videos of cats, children and couples in flagrante delicto routinely receive fifty or more times the attention of expensive commercial creations. People seem to know by instinct what corporations “unknow” by design: consumers are bound and determined to compete, and it behooves every producer to help them do so. –Jude Hammerle

Citation:

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-facebook-ads-dont-work-pulls-10-million-account/

There are four people with the surname Walton in the top seven of Forbes‘s 400 Richest Americans of 2008, each of whom possesses net assets greater than $23 billion.[1] They are the daughter, daughter-in-law and sons of Sam Walton, founder and spirit guide of Wal-Mart.

Mr. Walton was not the first modern entrepreneur to understand that very low prices can create very high demand. That title goes to Frank Winfield Woolworth, creator of the “five and dime” retail concept in 1879, and one of the first purveyors of general merchandise to insist that the public be allowed to handle his goods without the physical and emotional barriers of counters and salespeople. As often happens, Woolworth’s early success inspired two capable imitators: Sebastian Sperling Kresge (1897) and George Dayton (1902). By coincidence, the big-box discount stores that grew out of Woolworth’s, Kresge’s and Dayton’s original five and dimes–Woolco, Kmart and Target–all debuted in 1962, exactly the same year Walton’s first Wal-Mart opened.

Given all that, it’s surprising that there aren’t any Woolworths or Kresges or Daytons in the top seven of the Forbes 400, or anywhere else on the list for that matter.

Sam Walton understood something that precious few billionaires ever will: for billions of people, Normal is a steeply aspirational ideal. The fact that you can afford the money and hours needed to buy and read this book probably makes you many, many, many times better off than the proud people of whom I speak. The Walton fortune was built not of the nickels and dimes that made Woolworth rich, but of the Jacksons and Franklins expended in determined pursuit of millennium-era normalcy.

In our media-driven global village, daily life puts all people in contact with all other people. This raises the bar of normalcy, especially where possessions are concerned. Wal-Mart has thrived because it has made the great trophies of our day accessible to legions of people in sixteen countries–big-ticket goods like televisions, home theater, video and audio media, bicycles, gold and silver, diamonds, appliances, china, toys, sneakers, athletic gear and just about everything else worth showing off. Because we humans do like to show off…even if it’s just that we’re Normal.

The example of Wal-Mart demonstrates that the key perception a brand must manage is the consumer’s view of his/her own self. An adulterated marketer defines its position in relation to other brands: “Always Low Prices.” Statements like this make a brand smaller, because they reduce its bandwidth to a single channel. An identity-savvy marketer improves the consumer’s position in relation to other consumers. For Wal-Mart and all other Normal brands, the bull’s eye for consumer self-perception is “I’m normal too.” Wal-Mart helps its consumers belong, and they love the brand for it. Both the consumer and the brand grow larger. Because it reflects the joy of belonging(s!), Wal-Mart’s smiley face is actually a bigger idea than its price claim. As we continue our journey through the chapters, we will see that Normal and the other three consumer display identities always point the way to the biggest brand stories possible.[2]

This is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Real Reasons We Buy (a work in process).

[1] http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/16/forbes-400-billionaires-lists-400list08_cx_mn_0917richamericans_land.html

[2] For background, see: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964), Chapter 9, The Written Word.

Brands that take themselves very seriously appeal to consumers operating in the Strong zone. The Strong consumer competes by intimidation, and surrounds himself/herself with highly aggressive brand statements that glare out at the world. The Victoria’s Secret catalog is a curious case in point, a very serious division of an otherwise fun brand.

The Victoria’s Secret catalog is a direct descendent of the infamous Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, that annual feast for the roving eye that depicts peak supermodels lounging about in their unmentionables. The poses that SISI‘s and Victoria’s celebrity bodies strike from issue to issue are identical, and are strictly prescribed by history and convention. They trace their origins back through the predecessor of the Swimsuit Issue, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, to the colorful illustrated pinups of Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez, commonly known as Alberto Vargas. His idealized cartoon images of nude and barely clad women first appeared in the pages of Esquire in the thirties, then earned fame as government-issue nose art on American World War II bombers. These pictures reminded the boys what they were fighting for, and also burned Vargas’ idealist iconography into the minds of millions of men and women across the globe. (See Fig. A, below.)

There is no precedent to the work of Vargas. The first permanent photograph of any kind was created in 1826, and the first wave of pornography that followed it–while sometimes shockingly frank–was disarmingly human. During the hundred years that elapsed between the 1820s and the 1920s, the female subjects of pornography conformed to no rule or convention. They smiled or didn’t, were beautiful or not, carried too much weight or not enough, wore something or nothing, were sweet or salacious or sometimes even silly, and most importantly, seemed to be in on the joke.[1] The mere fact that women were photographed with the intention of titillation seemed sufficient to provoke and sustain the interest of male consumers. Like it or not, there is an unmistakable innocence to early pornography. (See Fig. B, below.)

That innocence withdrew rapidly under the influence of Vargas. Beginning as an artist for the racy Ziegfeld Follies in 1920s New York, then continuing as a studio art director in 1930s Hollywood, Vargas commandeered natural sexual fun and drove it down a dark and dangerous alley. The chillingly lean Art Deco nudes shot by Ziegfeld photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston beginning around 1920 mark the first appearance of the Vargas poses, and from that moment they absolutely define the modern commercial identity of the sexual female: her smile disappears, she glares at or ignores us, her body and beauty are idealized to a state of untouchable perfection, and her innocent “Yes?” becomes a provocative “No.”  (See Fig. C, below.) By 1930, the male viewer of feminine forms is no longer an innocent bystander; he’s been challenged, and now must choose to dominate or submit to every flash of female power he sees. It is especially disturbing that this change occurs almost simultaneously with the ratification of voting rights for American women on August 26, 1920.

From the standpoint of strategy, the Victoria’s Secret catalog expertly engages the Strong identity in men and women by its abject seriousness. While it is commendable that Victoria’s has the insight and inclination to spread its appeal from the Fun and Affluent zones into Strong, the tactical choice to use objective exploitation as the face of its Strong deployment creates an opportunity for rivals. Even if its only motivation is to maintain control of its category, Victoria’s catalog must make itself a champion of its consumers–a shelter from the storm of oppressive images that swirls about them–even if they’ve been conditioned to love it. For no matter how successful the catalog may be in its present form ($1.5 billion including web sales in 2008), Victoria’s goal must be to be right in all cases, and right now its catalog is seriously wrong.

We will come back to the story of Victoria’s Secret in the next chapter to celebrate the brilliance of its very Fun stores ($4 billion in 2008).

This is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Real Reasons We Buy (a work in process).

Figure A:

A classic Alberto Vargas cartoon.

Figure B:

A French Postcard, circa 1900

Figure C:

Ziegfeld Girl Hazel Forbes, by Alfred Cheney Johnston, circa 1920

[1] Alexandre Dupouy has superbly chronicled the late first phase in three definitive collections: Yva Richard: L’âge d’or du fétischisme, Collection privée de Monsieur X, and L’album obscène, (Editions Asarte, Paris, 1994, 2000, 2002)

In March of 1996, everyone I talked with complained that the Comet Hyakutake was a disappointment, and frankly I agreed with them. If you looked right at it with the naked eye, Hyakutake was just a fuzzy, dirty little dot in the sky. Through binoculars it looked even blurrier, even more disappointing. 

One night during Hyakutake’s brief visit I needed to bring the recycling up to the head of our driveway. It was a clear moonless night in the country, a pitch-black backwater night. As I stood on a little hill at the crest of the drive I caught a sort of glow in my right peripheral vision. I looked up, and noticed a gigantic, broad swoosh of very faint light that stretched across the entire sky. It all emanated from that one little blurred dot.

The next year, the Comet Hale-Bopp came. It too was just a tiny fleck of light, but it was brighter and sharper and had a little tail and looked every bit like a comet should look. Everyone got all excited about Hale-Bopp. Some cultists even killed themselves in the hope of hopping a ride on it, as you might remember.

The long and the short of this story is that the Comet Hyakutake passed much closer to Earth than Hale-Bopp did. So close, in fact, that you couldn’t comprehend the totality of it unless you looked away and let your peripheral vision process its reflected light. The faint glow that had stretched all the way across the night sky was the tail of Hyakutake, millions of miles long. Had I lived nearer to any city or any other great source of light I would have missed it completely. Since then I have made a point of looking away for a second or two from everything I look at, just in case there is a bigger picture to be seen in the periphery.

Some of the smartest people I know (and all of the dumbest) have told me that sex sells. For many, many years I did not believe them. Then one day, while consulting simultaneously on a beer project and a car project, I looked away for a moment. When I did, I saw that sex does sell, and how.

Sex buys, and that is how sex sells. [1]

I am certain that some people will use this book to justify the insertion of ever more nipple, bulge and ass into the already nipple-, bulge- and ass-laden media. They will shrug slyly when confronted with their prurience, and say simply that sex sells, just as the faithful say amen without ever knowing what it means. [2]

Other people will quietly begin removing the aforementioned body parts from the aforementioned media, and replacing them with far more seductive rhetoric and imagery. This book is dedicated to them.

This is the Preface to How Sex Sells: The Persuasive Power of Identity, a work in process.

[2] Amen means ‘So be it.’

On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Paul Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the “new trade theory,” a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. [1]

On November 3, 2008, one day before the most anticipated presidential election of my lifetime, the same Paul Krugman authored an op-ed article for the New York Times, in which he speculated that the representatives of the Republican party likely to remain in both Houses of Congress–the “Republican Rump”–would be even more conservative than the current composition of the party, and as a result “the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.” [2]

For what it’s worth, I saw Mr. Krugman’s piece as just more partisan gibbering, another wasted page in a tiresome tale called Democrats v. Republicans.

Democrats v. Republicans is the sad melodrama that has been forced on us by our increasing failure to compete effectively on the world stage. We have a natural compulsion to compete, and when no suitable global competitive diversion exists, we compete among ourselves.

While I’m not a Nobel Prize economist, I understand that part of the job of a lawmaker is to protect the rights of his/her State and its residents, and that these rights sometimes do conflict with the rights of other States and their residents. That said, another important part of the legislator’s job is to work with colleagues from other States when the national interest calls for it. Right now, the national interest is calling at the top of its lungs, yet we continue to dwell on the small picture, the partisan picture, because it is easier to understand.

It disturbs me that a Nobel Prize winner, especially one whose specialty is exactly the international marketplace in which the United States must immediately improve its performance, is wasting his time on this glorious day of days prattling on about the comparatively petty nonsense of politics. I think even Paul Krugman would concede that he is a better man than this, and that it will be a shame if his article of today is remembered as nothing more than a first salvo in the tyranny of a new majority.

This is not an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Persuasive Power of Identity (a work in process), but it covers the same ground: the sweeping implications of the human compulsion to compete.

[1] This brief bio is taken verbatim from the NY Times website: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/opinion/03krugman.html?hp

To primates, and to the primate part of humans, largeness is a highly threatening display of strength.

The average adult American today weighs 24 pounds more than he (and she) did in the early 1960s.[1]  Normal America is so intimidated by the increasing size of our citizenry that it has propagated an all-out war of stigmatization, defamation and discrimination against fat people.[2]

Medical reports enumerating the dangers of obesity blare out day and night. Public transportation and public buildings scrupulously accommodate every physical challenge but this one. Airlines require large people to buy two seats. Sedans that comfortably suit large people are far more expensive than ones that don’t. Doctors recommend gastric bypass surgery, despite its serious, sometimes fatal complications. Clothing choices for large people are strictly limited. Skinny actresses don fat suits to be treated poorly for ratings. If the media really want to know how it feels to be fat, why don’t they ask fat people? Because Normal society wants to see skinny actresses laughing, not fat people crying. While we tolerate and protect extremes of identity and behavior from every other facet of society, we stubbornly insist that fat people change.

Wendy Kaufman, the beautiful person turned Snapple Lady turned Fatvocate once described her size challenge to me this way: “Sometimes I’m good, and sometimes I’m fat.” While Wendy has since adopted a deservedly more forgiving attitude toward herself, for far too many people big and small, fat is still the opposite of good.

As I see it, fat is really the opposite of weak. Fat is Strong.

While displays of any rebel identity are inherently competitive, the circles of behavior that result from Strong displays are uniquely challenging. Guns beget guns. Gangs beget gangs. Armies beget armies. Wars beget wars.

One’s weight is his/her most obvious and inevitable display of identity. Since everyone sees us react to his/her size, weight is both a very public and a very personal matter. Over time I have come to believe that the increasing size of Americans is simply a natural and very predictable response to the increasing size of Americans. In other words, with our weight we’re simply doing as we often do–we’re fighting Strong with Strong.

To date, the ironic effect of the booming $40 billion a year weight loss industry has been to add an average of twenty-four pounds to each of us since 1960. Perhaps if we stop thinking that big people are doing something wrong and start believing that we/they are doing something natural, then next year’s $40 billion might actually buy us what we’re being promised. I can certainly imagine several intriguing ways to create more identity-savvy weight-loss solutions, and I believe that after just a few more chapters, you’ll be able to also.

This is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Real Reasons We Buy, a work in process.

[2] Meira Weiss in Conditional Love [1994] neatly summarizes the key literature on social stigmas, and mentions that some experts believe stigmatization is a response to a perceived threat (pp. 54-5).

Over the past fifteen years, as I clawed my way grudgingly to whatever level of maturity one calls this, two realities overtook me.

First, I grew to understand that I am part of something much bigger. Specifically, there are forces that make things work, and my instinctive judgment is not one of those forces.

Second, I began to see my heroes for what they are. My heroes have always been brands, and what they are now is much, much less than I remember them being. Even those with increasing sales have ceded large measures of their cultural significance.

Coke, Pepsi, 7Up, Dr. Pepper. AT&T, IBM. GM, Chevy, Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury. Chrysler. Mercedes Benz. Burger King. Macy’s, Sears, Kmart. Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt. Coors, Miller, Heineken. Seagram. Firestone. Schick. Hasbro and Mattel. Barbie. Toys R Us. Nabisco. Sony. Adidas and Reebok. ABC, NBC and CBS. The NBA. The Yankees. America Online. Pan Am, TWA, American, United. The Senate. The Oval Office.

This pantheon of shrinking brands is most noteworthy in light of their past opulence. These were the champion spenders! They had the resources to live large for all eternity. Good people invested those resources with the advice and consent of other good people schooled in the art and science of persuasion. But something went wrong. These hard, glittering badges we collected at no small cost are now soft and tarnished–some beyond remedy.

Implicated in the decline of these great brands are myriad narrow tactical ideas that have masqueraded for too long as strategy–ideas like hip, smart, clever, elegant, proven, human, fresh, retro, artful, stylish, glamorous, trendy, talented, proud, productive, worldly, technical, historic, quirky, American, global, definitive, flashy, cool, glitzy, surprising, educated, authentic, effective, professional, original, noble, extreme, fabulous, magical, soulful, fashionable, unique, new, and many, many others.

This book presents in words and pictures my contention that the prevailing concept of branding strategy is defective. A brand is not a single point in perceptual space, and the boundaries of that space are not a playground for subjective judgment. A brand is not a narrow idea to be hammered home with the force of $millions. A brand is different things to different people, all at once. Am I suggesting that your brand should be all things to all people? Actually, I’m insisting that it must be more things to more people, or risk joining the burgeoning ranks of the less significant. To bolster my dissent, I will propose a new approach to strategy that works much better.

In scientific terms, How Sex Sells is a hypothesis supported by observations. In the parlance of art, this is the work of an Impressionist, sketched quickly with broken strokes of unmixed color. The important colors reappear frequently, so even inveterate skimmers should get the gist of my solitary, cathartic scream.*

This post is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Persuasive Power of Identity, a work in process.

Of all the United States, Texas has the clearest brand identity. Aside from its militantly Fun capital,[1] the entire geography and demography of Texas sits deep in the heart of Strong.

Texas takes considerable pride in its proprietary history and culture. Texans proudly note that the flags of six nations have flown over Texas, because it implies that nations come and go, but Texas is forever.[2] For a time, Texas was a republic unto itself. The state flag of Texas depicts a Lone Star on a blue field with a single white and a single red stripe. Simply put, it is the flag of a United State.

Everything about Texas is Strong. Dallas is “Big D.” Texas’s signature industry is Big Oil. Texas leads the nation in executions, with 413 since 1982.[3] And in toxic waste emissions. And in prison construction.[4] The state’s official unofficial motto (official because President George Bush 43 uses it) is “Don’t mess with Texas.” The state’s unofficial unofficial motto is “Everything’s big in Texas.” The University of Texas mascot is the Longhorn. When it became Normal to stop wearing hats in 1960, Texas refused to doff its ten-gallon rebel version, and continues to refuse today.

Dan Rather is from Texas.

Dan Rather is the Alpha journalist who anchored the CBS Evening News for 24 years and one day, from March 9, 1981 through the same date in 2005, the longest service by any anchor in US television history. Rather inherited the ratings leadership from his predecessor Walter Cronkite, lost it, regained it from 1985 to 1989, lost it to Peter Jennings at ABC, and dropped to third place in 1992 when NBC’s Tom Brokaw passed him. Since then, CBS has been unable to move up from third place.

Rather made his name through characteristically tough reporting. He was tough on Nixon. He donned a mujahideen headdress in Afghanistan and was tough on the Soviets. He was so tough on George Bush 41 about the Iran-Contra affair that neither George Bush 41 nor George Bush 43 ever granted him another interview. Saddam Hussein did grant him an interview, and Dan was tough on him, too. His sign-off of choice was “Courage.” It lasted only for one week, but he did reprise it in his last broadcast, his final act of defiance.  

Rather toughened the news culture at CBS so profoundly that his successor in the Evening News anchor chair, Katie Couric, has been unable to leverage her sublimely Normal identity into a higher ranking for her broadcast. CBS seems to have forgotten that Cronkite cried when JFK died, swelled with pride at every success of the space program, and grieved with families as the Vietnam body counts he reported grew nightly. Cronkite was America’s incredibly well-informed uncle. In a word, he was Normal, and we loved him for it. Tom Brokaw was Normal, too. Katie Couric is cut from the same ideal cloth as these two greatest anchors. If she and CBS can embrace the Normal and let go of the Strong, the world is theirs for the taking.

A few weeks after the preceding paragraphs were laid down, in the New York Times dated October 11, 2008, journalist Jacques Steinberg noted the beginnings of a possible turnaround for Couric’s fortunes as anchor. Among similar developments, Steinberg pointed to a recurring segment in Couric’s election coverage called Primary Questions, in which “all of the major candidates…were asked the same 10 questions about character, including the last time they had been angry about something or whether trust in a marriage should be a barometer of trust in office.”[5] At last, it seems that Ms. Couric has turned her gift for the interview format into a quest for answers that will allow Normal people to evaluate a complex issue with supreme confidence and fluency. While she remains third in a three-person race, Ms. Couric’s position on the inside rail of the Normal viewer identity bodes well for her, especially if she has the Courage to press her advantage.

This post is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Persuasive Power of Identity, a work in process.

[2] The six flags are, in chronological order: Spain, France, Mexico, Republic of Texas, USA, Confederate, USA again.

[3] http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/annual.htm

[4] http://www.onthemedia.org/yore/transcripts/transcripts_012101_popculturetexas.html

[5] New York Times, October 11, 2008, p. C1 and following.