Craft Werk DreiSeems today is Craft Day. Several familiar notions seemed to be repeating in the previous posts, so here's a snip from a talk to Virginia Tech students and the Roanoke Ad Club given back in 2001.
BIG SCARY DINOSAURS, BIG SCARY COMPANIES versus you.
"It's not personal, it's business" is the bumper sticker of modern commerce. And well, it's false. Microsoft goes after Sun Microsystems hammer and tong because it’s personal. Republicans go after Democrats, and vice versa, because it's personal. Work longer hours and nobody says thanks, and you take it personally. Screw up a customer's experience and personally is the only way they take it if someone doesn’t jump fast.
The lie takes us further and further away from the forgotten true reason for commerce and distances us from the humanity and personal talents of those we need most. Employees and consumers. The true reason for Commerce? It’s not profit. That’s a by-product. The true reason is to satisfy physical human needs and to emotionally connect with other people.
“Business”, that nasty word, has replaced “trade.” Trade has been around since cavemen swapped shiny rocks for pointy sticks -- and it’s value and meaning went far beyond goods shared. But Business as a business has been around properly only since the renaissance or Gutenberg.
And ever since, people have been gradually discovering life just isn’t as satisfying anymore. Why, lots of reasons we think . And we’ll cover some here and offer some alternatives for change.
Reason 1: markets aren’t markets anymore.
People went to market to get stuff they needed and sell the stuff they made. Pretty obvious. But wait. A lot of the time people came and went without buying anything. So why go?
Because markets aren’t just about trade. They’re about meeting people, seeing stuff, learning new things, talking trash about neighbors, killing time, trying to find a date, or a friend.
As Christopher Locke wrote in “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, Markets are conversations.
People need markets. Because people need the satisfaction of crafting things and sensing the pleasure craft brings—pleasure for those who make, and the pleasure of those who receive. Remember our process from earlier: ESSENCE, SHIFT, CRAFT.
Craft is personal. The sweat of your own labor. The ability to haggle with someone over the value of your thing, or to answer their questions on how it works, and why you made it the way you did…. And that imparts soul and meaning into the calculus of the transaction. Soul and meaning equal satisfaction.
The personal nature of the process also automatically imparts a certain accountability that’s lost today: modern guarantees of customer satisfaction are meaningless in terms of “real satisfaction”.
Because you can’t talk to the guy or girl who made it anymore. Paradoxically, in this age of instant communication, you’re put on hold, tortured with bad elevator music and, 45 minutes later, you’re told essentially, I can’t help you it’s out of my realm of authority.
Businesses have changed, not markets. People are no fundamentally different today than they were thousands years ago. The only evolution is that the industries who can most profit from those marketplaces have invented modernist jargon and mumbo jumbo for justifying new and improved ways to deliver and develop more stuff. As I said earlier, it’s also a good way to keep fresh new ideas out as well.
With the jargon, structure and dress code comes distance and formality and gatekeepers to truth. It’s a monolgue, not a dialogue. And with all that comes disunity and suspicion. And yeah, it also brings a hellish struggle to market credibly, or to rally the troops, or to improve balance sheets.
THE MORAL? Bring back authenticity and humanity to the brands you’ll work with. Make them real and human.
Trade is the heartbeat of community. That’s not really meant to be a metaphor. Heartbeat implies a heart and hearts are usually attached to People. And, to coin a phrase, brands are people too. They are. A loaf of bread can’t insult you, yet if someone gets home and finds the loaf they just bought is moldy, they’re mad, they’re insulted. The supermarket is a bad guy. The baker is incompetent.
Companies get the blame in people terms because that’s how we relate to our world. Weird, huh? But yet the artificial personalities that businesses create to represent themselves, their brands, are often as obviously counterfeit to real people, consumers, as plastic is to wood. They sound too good to be true. They act as if they’re infallible. They’re polished, perfect, and predictable. Things real people know other real people can’t be.
People have genetic radar to spot fakers, but even those who slip under the radar, the ones who manage to con them for a while, always get a face full of mud, because an entire corporation of actors is too hard to sustain. Honesty, reality, humanity is the only script that doesn’t need rehearsals. True representative brand doesn’t need a take #2.
Town square, local pub and shopping center are meeting places. They facilitate life. And business is a subset of life, not the other way round. It seems life’s winners are people of character and talent and humanity.
Organizations, as well as people, can embody those traits if they care, and if they try. And companies and brands and leaders who recognize this are the ones people want to get to know. And the ones that get to stick around.
REASON 2: Resentment - from it stems all spiritual disease.
A bad experience—poor service, maybe—is an insult to the humanity of the customer, a metaphorical 'screw you' to their right to be pleased and respected. And poorly handled, 'screw you' is the way they hear it.
And they’re hearing “Screw you” a lot.
Maybe what’s happened is that the opportunities for insult have expanded with modern advances and commercial opportunities. We have contact with more people in a day than some of our great grandparents may have dealt with in a year. That has to have an impact.
500 channels, 4 gas stations at every intersection, thousands of other drivers on the road with us, chain of command at the office, messages missed, or unreturned or unattended to from a hundred different time saving technologies. All add up to billions of opportunities to be psychically bruised or to bruise others. And remember, it’s personal and it business. Especially in brand.
But maybe in this depressing litany lies salvation and opportunity because a thousand cuts can be fixed or at least soothed by one moment of compassion, often more effectively and noticeably from a person or entity previously known for having insulted us.
In a sick way, lowered expectations are your friend. Other companies batter consumers daily, so have your brand come to their rescue. Find the heroism in a brand. Find its inner Florence Nightingale.
And if you can’t find it, create it within the company. Because to be aware and to do or correct automatically, instinctively and without reactive resentment at being guided to do so is supremely valuable.
Why? You know that thing that makes the hair on your neck tingle after receiving an unexpected kind gesture—that’s compassion talking. And it’s a bond begging for notice. This compassion, this confidence in the face of fallibility is part of what is called 'character."
And compassion is the antidote to resentment, and it’s the lost meaning of the word “Service”. Compassion, an essential part of 'brand' character, is not perfection, It’s the recognition that a wrong unrighted or an opportunity missed alters the balance, and imbalance leads to decline. In discipline. In appeal and in market share.
Meta of brand
Excuse the metaphysics, but brand is far more spiritual than scientific. That may make some people squirm—the measurers, maybe—but think about it. Hell, to paraphrase James Burke, of Connections fame, even science is more spiritual than scientific. The guy who discovered the hydrocarbon molecule chain—he say’s it came to him in a dream. Einstein called his theories reveled “divine” truth.
The reason focus groups yield fumbling explanations and mangled syntax is that people honestly don't know why they prefer "X" over "Y". They just do. "What is 'love'?" Can't tell you, but I like it.
Guardians of brand need to know that character within brand is what appeals far more than utitlity. It’s the central theme of the fight between Mercedes and Lexus.
While we’re on the metaphysics of brand.... We're all put here to do good. Ask any minister or motivational speaker. Anything else beside the pursuit of good is a waste and will feel in your heart like a waste. Set aside moral code, and you know this just from practical work experience.
Think of the last time you were engaged on a business or academic task that you knew to be misguided, fruitless or just dumb. Were you a ray of sunshine? Showering joy on all around you? Doubtful. Wrong is infectious that way. It metastasizes and infects individuals, brands and organizations.
But the broad pursuit of consensual good generates positive energy. From good works derive good feelings and unexpected gifts. What works for people works for organizations, perhaps doubly so. Not as a means to replace higher ideals but as a conduit to them and as a pool of resources and like minds upon which to lean and learn from.
What’s consensual good in organizational terms? You and your community need to decide, but it needs the perpetual motion of realistic shared aspiration. Maybe it’s to think and solve without being prodded. To protect and serve, without being asked. To wonder and invent, while still paying the light bill.
When does that happen? We only act instinctively in positive ways when our internal code and sense of self says it’s the only option. When we are acting to preserve our own sense of how things ought to be -- what is fair, what is worth doing – then we do amazing things.
We sacrifice and offer our energy to others. We forego petty distractions because we have more important fish to fry. We become parents to our brands. We become those stonemasons who think they are building cathedrals --- not just people who cut up rock. Challenge and aspiration is why we thrive.
But organizations traditionally exist to streamline and bureaucratize problems into a bland predictable paste. It makes management easier. And they do the same to their brands if you let them. And that unsatisfying diet is why markets, employees and consumers are abandoning companies with exponential speed.
Amazingly, this realization is not happening in organizations at precisely the time when they are most under assault by self doubt and cultural change.
Profit isn't evil, it's just a by-product. Brand is the public interpretation of personal beliefs, but the only sustainable manufacture is to pursue, uncover and maintain the bonds that keep the brand alive, and growing. Your product or service is only the enabler, the excuse for connection.
Because bonds and the reassurance they provide are the only scarce commodity left in this world. Plenty of TVs to choose from. Toothpaste, insurance companies and breakfast cereals, too. Big shortage of ‘connections”.
Bonds. They are the metaphorical medicine that protects against the rough intrusions and separations that technological change has foisted on us. Bonds are the basis for atomic structure, family stability and organizational growth. They spring from proximity, community, circumstance and sometimes even by choice. But mostly bonds are accidental.
And the so the purpose of people and organizations and their brands is to place yourself in the way of good fortune and goodwill -- to create pathways for as many of those happy accidents as possible.
Reason3 – The Metaphysics of work
You might laugh, but absent family, charity or religion, in no place in modern life can people find, nor can they look for, higher ideals to share, emulate and promote than in their places and products of work. Belonging is what drives us, and nobody wants to belong where their voice is unwelcome. Brand is shared voices, merged. And healthy brands generate evangelists. And evangelists swell the ranks of churches and stamp clubs and sports stadiums and shopping malls and fortune 500 balance sheets.
Brand is the public interpretation of personal belief. Personal beliefs coalesce into community. Ad people evolve when they collaborate with the torchbearers of brand such as employees. Employees move heaven and earth when brand identity is the result of their collective values. Consumers respond when brand transcends corporate boilerplate and becomes human and personal. When it becomes a dynamic conversation.
Alchemy, our company, exists because the parents of brand – purpose, message, environment and leadership -- are really convergent crafts not divergent tools. They don’t exist independently of one another, yet are often practiced as if they do. This disconnect within organizations, this lack of bonds and shared air is the cause for dysfunction and deception, and ultimately, disappointment.
For us, it’s no accident that the output and utility of each craft is altered and elevated by the proximity of others. Or that the energy level is electric. That’s our business model. The design of architecture benefits from the influence of storytellers and motivators such as ad people. And vice versa. Strategic thinkers evolve as they rub shoulders with cultural creatives. And vice versa. MBAs eat lunch with shrinks, art meets commerce, Idealism meets pragmatism, and they actually get along.
Your work is craft. And if it's not, make it so. Your job descripion is to remain curious and to provoke. Your mission is to bring people together and ask them what they want and what they know. Your vision, enlightened by all that new knowledge, is to create answers built on optimism. Your job, wherever you may land, is to have fun, and to change your small part of the world. Go get 'em.
