What Happens When Mavericks Act, Well, Like Mavericks

The news is filled with breaks between Sarah Palin and John McCain. McCain's camp is calling Palin a "Diva." Palin's camp is blaming McCain for botching her coming out party. Both are probably right - although it probably is sexist to call her a diva - even though there were "diva" wars several years ago between celebs wanting to be known as the "only true diva," - but that's another blog entry all together.

Back to the question at heart - which is I'm not sure what the problem is. The RNC decided early on that they would brand McCain as a "Maverick." They then decided to bring in Sarah Palin as "Another Maverick." It's not a bad brand to assign. In fact, it ranks rather well in people's minds. Ms. Palin augmented Mr. McCain's maverick brand and as polls showed, gave a real shot to the campaign. The problem wasn't in the concept of the maverick brand, it was in how to keep the brand alive, without it turning into a flat, two dimensional moniker?

As it turns out, it's not an easy tightrope to walk. Just look at a brand like Sketchers. It was a great, counter-culture brand when it first launched. It was a maverick brand. However, once it became popular, the brand realized it had to give up some of its counter culture status in order to make more money. After all, how counter-culture can you be when you're sold in Kmart?

So it made a decision - stay true to its brand, or take a brand shift and make more money. Some brands stay true to themselves and never grow [just walk into any skateboarding store]. Others manage to stay true to the brand and grow to a certain extent [Clif Bars has done an amazing job at keeping a maverick brand alive, while growing well]. Still others, try to keep walking that line, only to realize to late that their market likes the idea of a maverick, but has trouble when that maverick keeps acting, well, like a maverick.

Bottom line, the concept of being a maverick is great on paper. But how do you keep a maverick in line so that they give a consistent message day in and day out? Even more important - how do you keep a maverick on message?

Once you do, they're no longer a maverick.

Again, great on paper - impossible to maintain over the long term...

The Importance Of Research

From a brand perspective, there is nothing, absolutely nothing more important than research. Research to understand your customer, research to understand your client, and research to understand the market you're going into, and of course research to truly understand the product itself as well as the experience it promises to provide. Most important though, is the need to jump in and try out the product with hands on research the way the legendary ad-men and women of the 60s and 70s did.

There are stories about how account teams would spend weeks in Betty Crocker's kitchens, baking cakes and pies and cookies to get a real understanding for what the customer's experience. From weeks to baking, they were able to understand the beauty and the foibles of a particular product. They learned the ins and outs that their customers would learn sooner or later. Because of this, not only could they get inside the customer's head and write the kind of copy that people responded to. They could speak to their clients knowledgeably about what was good and what was bad about a particular product. The result from that research? The ability to turn consumers into customers and customers into brand enthusiasts like never before. They were no longer ad-men and women, they were knowledgeable customers. That is something that goes beyond pocket books, but lies deeply in the hearts, minds and souls of any successful product or campaign.

Political parties not withstanding, for any brand, be it political, consumer, or B2B to think they can skip over the time it takes to undertake research in order to understand their own product I sheer folly. If anyone thinks about rushing their product to market without doing the proper research, well, let's just watch how the cards deal out from the news that hit on September 1st, when it should have really been about a convention...

Flip Flop - Meaningless Phrases & Meaningful Networks

“Flip Flop.”

It's a phrase that came into being in the 2008 elections to discredit John Kerry for changing his mind on issues. I have to admit to the people who created it – it was shear genius.

The fact that there is not a candidate alive – republican or democrat – who has not changed their position, or their mind, on an important subject at one point in their career, let alone their candidacy, is absurd. Yet, with the right network of media relationships, this term helped turn an election.

In the 2008 election, the term “flip flop” is still being bantered around from time to time. It seems like an effort to ill-brand a candidate, but it hasn’t stuck yet. Perhaps even the media has begun to realize it is a meaningless term - something that cannot be a defining label to any campaign because every candidate has “flip flopped” at one time or another. Or perhaps it’s because nobody has been able to energize a network like the inventors of “flip flop” were able to do in the 2004 elections.

And maybe that’s the key. Maybe what you say is not as important as how you say it or who it’s said to.

Think about that the next time you spend hours perfecting your message before you figure out how you're getting it out to the audience you want to reach...