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Fouroboros | Brain, Metaphor,
Archetype, Brand. Part I
Canadian Headhunter and I have been to-ing and fro-ing about what makes people tick, relative to brand and leadership and whatnot. Rob, at BusinessPundit, also seems to have some interest in the subject. It's a big club but, seemingly, short on firm theory to toss around.
So, with a prayer to St Christopher or whomever watches over IP, some of our company's ideas, firm or otherwise:
Number one: Life is much simpler than you suspect.
Number two: People don't know what they think.
Number three: Emotion trumps logic.
Number four: Brand is ubiquitous
People do things that often have nothing to do with common sense, and everything to do with how they regard themselves and how they think others will see them. Opposite of this is that they perceive others not how they are, but how they want them to be--for good, or for ill.
Confused? Ever heard the phrase "love is blind"? There you go. Similarly, "love at first sight" is not a myth, it is a collection of images and metaphors that click, gestalt-like, all at once. Fact is not invited, except as the cover for instinctive decisions made following intrinsic rules of fundamental human desires.
French Mathematician, Blaise Pascal said "the heart has reasons that reason doesn't know." Some credit Emerson for this instead, but whoever said it, the modern translation would be: Perception is reality. And reality reveals itself in subconsious imagery called Archetypes. These apply to places, products and companies, as well as people. They most definitely apply to America. In its positive form, the results of encountering an Archetype in action are two-fold:
1. "Ooohhh."
2. "I want some!"
This way of arranging our world view is inviolable. You fight archetype and "the frame" at your peril. (You've heard of "framing the issue"? The idea of contextual Framing comes from a 50s anthroplogist named Gregory Bateson. Around here we call the distillation and mobilization of this stuff "Managing the frame©")
Is it irrational? Of course it is. And it causes people to indeed be economic irrationalists in realizing this Statue sense. Spreadsheets and spec charts do not move them. The things we often trumpet about Standard Feature Advantage Benefit progressions are moot--because they are invariably incomplete. They do not go deep enough.
For instance, people buy SUVs "because they're safer", even though they've seen DatelineNBC and other shows explain things like higher rollover risk. Yet, against every provable, spreadsheetable, surveyed-to-death fact to the contrary, they buy them because they still "Feel" safer. ("Bigness" matters and not because "bigger is better." Think harder and you'll get to them.)
Likewise, asking people in standard terms what they want out of work, or from a particular product--what we call the old conversation--often gets you useless information: They will say what they think sounds intelligent or what they think they are supposed to say, in order to be, you guessed it, more highly regarded. Yes, more highly regarded by people they'll never see again. So they lie. And we ask more wrong questions in polls. And our focus group participants become amateur venture capitalists or marketing experts. In other words, they gild the lilly some more. Then we all run off and execute initiatives that are doomed from inception. And the cycle continues. We all do it. Boardroom to loading dock. Gen-X to Gen WWII. Bad mojo. Expensive mojo. Career-threatening mojo.
What's good mojo? Effective companies share DNA and brain patterns with their customers. Great companies and their brands are leaders of communities--internal and external. They mirror and amplify the ambitions of their respective publics. They know how to discover and employ this DNA and it's elements. Primary to all this is to understand that leaders are:
A. Purveyors of hope and answers to questions people are often unequipped to ask.
B. Guides to a future people didn't know they had. Or, had given up on.
So, actions--purchasing or not, working hard or not, sacrificing or not--are exemplars of deeper issues in play. These issues, shared understandings really, compose the language of Vision, and of Vision executed: Brand. It begins with this:
In their work with epileptics in the 1950s, neuroscientists like Paul MacLean and Roger Sperry revealed a lot about brain function, and the relationship between the cortex (left and right hemispheres), and what MacLean and others call the R-complex (our limbic, mamalian and reptilian brain.)
In the graphic, you'll notice the usual left brain/right brain breakdown, with those two hemispheres stacked on top of the older, evolutionary-wise, R-complex. Our evolved left brain is younger and therefore least "senior" if you will. It is also more loosely connected to the somewhat older "right" brain, and lastly, to the oldest mammalian and reptilian brains. Why does this matter? The left brain needs the permission of the older brains to move forward into action. That is the biological connection. The brain is a feedback system of permissions, wth the oldest, seemingly most irrational element, the R-Complex, holding the keys to action.
Notice words like ritualistic, paranoid and compulsive. Sounds tribal, prehistoric even. Hardly sounds like someone we'd invite to dinner does it? Never fear, they're still vital. And when filtered up through the brain they're polite company. Polite, but powerful. And if you ignore them, probably recalcitrant or obstructionist. Or worse, destructive. Not a part of the brain you want working against you. Bad enemies the R-complex--it carries us into things like, oh, I dunno, Clashes of Civilizations or Jihad.
Our left brain is sequential, process oriented. It likes resumes, track records and consistency. It's not too big on surprises. It values "Doing" things. Contrary to what many think, the left-brain factors heavily in creative thinking and artistic technique, heavy on the technique or mastery aspect of it. Left is cool, calm and calculating. It loves words and numbers. It can handle abstracts like quantum physics. It doesn't need visuals to visualize. But as we said, it's the youngest, and the brain is like a Trade Union or the average family: Seniority matters.
Next comes the right brain. Home to images and feeling, music and metaphor, the right brain is simultaneous orgestalt, German for "all at once". Unlike the sequential left brain which likes to packet things to be effective, the right brain assimilates instantly many disparate elements and says "Ahh, Beethovens 5th" or "Oooh, a farm." It's why hearing a song from say, "The Breakfast Club" throws you back to high school or wherever you were at the time, bringing with it all the attendant feelings that fit. And this is where the right brain does its best work.
Metaphor combines image cognition (any sensory image) and feeling states. Perhaps it's reduntant, but it bears explaining: Derived from Greek, meta means "over and above", pherein the root, means "to bear across". The work of Carl Jung and philosophers like Immanuel Kant rely heavily on metaphor and its alphabet, Archetype. Metaphor is the home of dreams and myths, legends and cultural icons. It too is rigidly consistent in this part--it's why Homer's Oddysey gets rewritten in the 1950s by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa as The Lost Kingdom and then, rewritten again in 1977 by American director George Lucas, this time as Star Wars. Same story, same metaphors, same archetypes. Only 2000 years between them. Smells like a pattern, eh? As such, the right brain is half-home to knowable nareatives of motivation. Speaking of smell, something as simple as the aroma of cofffee brewing in the morning is richly laden with metaphorical meaning to a 45 year-old. They may not know it, but the smell means comfort, security and stability. It means Home, in the best sense, as they remember it as a child. Folgers figured this out through Archetype study with French Cultural Psychologist named Clotaire Rapaille. They stopped talking freshness and began promoting aroma. And the numbers spiked.
Finally, the R-complex, a clustering of our earliest Reptillian and Mamallian brains. It is the most directly connected to the right brain, it's closest evolutionary sibling, age-wise. As was noted, the R-complex is home to limbic responses such a self-preservation and reproductive urges. The R-complex is the thing that jolts our sytems into motion in times of arousal--threatening or pleasurable. (Philosophical Utilitarians will recognize the "Pleasure/Pain" dyad.)
R-Cx is the proverbial on/off switch, and it doesn't debate itself or others. But it is an often myopic boss. Our cortex (Left/Right brains) keeps it in check with that one thing unique to Humans, our evolved sense of free-will, borne of reasoning. Where other animals will attack to protect, kill readily to eat, mate or when being encroached upon, our cortex brakes this impulse--sometimes--with the concepts of caution or mercy. The mamallian self-protective impulse of the R-complex has more luck at this than the cortex also. They are immediate neigbors and speak the same language, if you will. Where a reptile will attack a much larger animal while competing for a mate, the mammalian overide warns against it, essentially saying: you're no good to anybody wounded or dead. Live to fight another day. Notice there's no mention of moral right or wrong in that statement. It is purely enlightened self-interest: I won't kill you because I can't procreate or otherwise enjoy life locked up or dead, not because God told me not to.
As we said, R-Complex is self-interested and bores easily. It also has a checkbook or energy to share. Boundless energy. But only if you can tap into the patterns that unleash or engage the right-brain/R-complex chain. Do that, and you get "truth" or "authenticity". At least, you get them as understood by the brain's owner, which is what matters if you're a marketer or a leader or provider of anything that needs buy-in from others. Which brings us to the brain progression we call FAB3. The process looks like this:
Good time for a break, I've got work to do. Uhh, Chat amongst your hemispheres. More later in Part II.
If this topic floats your boat, you may be interested in
Why is “value” important and what is it?
Courage and Conscience in Business
http://www.alchemysite.com/blog/fouroboros.html
Original content © 2004 Fouroboros, except where otherwise noted.
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Fouroboros | Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand. Part II
[Update - 11:36, 3/12/04.
Thanks to John Dumbrille for the heads up.
[Update 2 - 14:37, 3/13/04 Tweak to final graphic and some cleanup for clarity
on the self/brand dynamic]
Okay, we laid the ground work in Part I for how people make choices that often aren't "rational" or predictable in the usual sense. We talked about how leadership and brand are really synonymous. And we explained that the brain has a flow that relies on metaphorical imagery, converted into psychological benchmarks called "Archetypes." Oh yeah, one other thing: Brand is Ubiquitous.
Some of the following may get a bit dense, but hey, I'm trying to share a lot in an accellerated, compressed manner. A lot of it is counter to prevailing "wisdom" therefore we'll be short on "buzzwords" to grease the skids. And anyway, as the Talmud and sage old chinese guys like Lao Tsu have pointed out since forever, "for a thing to be easy, first it must be hard." Or something like that.
We mentioned that "brand is ubiquitous". What does that mean? Well, if you think about it, brand--or, at least, brand well executed--takes on a human character. Look at the attachment people have to their Harley or their Mini or their iMac or their Manolo Blahnik shoes. These things become appendages to our selves. More than appendages, they fit naturally, they are us. Now think of the best job or friend you ever had, or the best place you ever lived. Were they natural or effortless, and fun, and now you're sad they're gone (if they are gone)? Would you say "I lost a piece of myself" when you lost X, or moved on to Y?
A piece of yourself. Fit. Best place. Best job. Effortless. Natural. Notice those are terms or ideas that deal at once in concepts of time and space and feeling. So, taken this way, brand is dimensional and can have coordinates.
Let's talk about dimensionality. Because this is not just brand building, it's basic mathematics too. And math has Archetypes as well.
One point is called a monad - a
dot
Two points are a dyad - a
line
Three points are a triad - surface
Four points are a tetrad - volume
It looks like this:
And, taking what we know about Brand so far--time, space, feeling--it looks like this.
Time. Space. Feeling. But Brand is also meaning--we know that in personal terms, about the brands that matter to us, about our Mini or Manolos. But do we know why? Or how it fits together? Or, why some brands, companies or communities have all the necessary "tools" yet somehow just can't seem to make the leap into "Icon"? Or why some simply fall apart? Maybe it's because they lack an Archetype tied to what pioneering psychologist Carl Jung called the "Collective Unconcious." This element equates to the missing fourth point that any collective effort needs to stand and have valence in a feeling, dimensional world.
Hopefully, as you've trawled through all the above you can see that the three Brand points that are time, space, and feeling only add up to what mathematicians call "Surface", as in surface area. Flatness. Now remember that the left brain is time-based, the right is space-based, and the R-Complex (reptillian and mammalian brains) is the one known for it's emotional, tribal, instinctive responses to its world.
Left, Right and R-Complex. Those three coexist together, but beyond the on/off nature of the R-Complex, there are no guiding rules for how they should behave and thrive, together. What's more, what provides the context for the left brain to measure effective or not, good result from bad? And speaking of context, when the right brain is doing its metaphorical job of joining up feeling with sensory imagery and deciding "Good feeling" or "bad", what is its frame of refererence? Why is a rose "pretty" instead of "ugly"? Why should a Harley or an iMac make us feel "good"?
Looks like somebody needs some benchmarks. But who decides?
Too late. It's already done. And here's an idea how: Since sweaty cavemen swapped shiny rocks and chased animals across the landscape, the one thing they couldn't catch or touch or eat or wear was located up. Literally, Up: The Stars. They were different from anything they knew. The twinkles acted strangely and followed patterns. Naturally, they figured if they didn't control them, somebody else did. Somebody who? The same person who made the animals? Probably. The same woman who made the trees? Must be. But whoever it was never showed up. So, they made him or her up in idealized form. And since the stars, the seasons, and they themselves had patterns and rythmns they followed, it made sense that that person made them too, and also, had some kind of plan for them, as well. Again, since nobody was offering them a timetable or a list, they started making one up. Just as "nature abhors a vacuum," the human brain hates not being able to put things into context. And so, symbolism was born, and the search meaning was on. People began to tell stories about things that happened to them. The stories had winners and losers, happy endings and sad endings. In this way, they contained lessons. Eventually after a lot of time, and lots of hits and misses, a guy with a long grey beard comes down from a mountain holding 2 stone tablets with 10 rules that codified much of the last 50,000 years' evolutionary lessons for social coherence. Voila! Right and wrong had an outline, qualitative up and down. And metaphor got a universal, collective starter alphabet. After 2000 more years of trial and error, today, I'd say it looks pretty much like this, give or take:
[click to enlarge]
These are the foundation for Western culture as well as being sacrosanct for 99% of the globe. They are the building blocks of law, art, war, business, history and pretty much anything else that requires people. The idea of a Collective Unconcious works as a "library of meaning" because these truths are held to be self-evident--they're not debatable--as Thomas Jefferson noted in a certain Set of Rules he was outlining in 1776. Meaning, therefore, the 4th coordinate of the Brand Framework, is derived from these agreed upon metrics of good, bad, happy, sad, nice and not. In turn, Archetypes--roles almost--such as Shadow, Light, Hero, Rebel, Warrior, Sage, Creator, Caregiver and others are built out of the attributes and lessons latent in these metrics. And yes, since these lessons and images are older than rocks, they and their Archetypal messengers are the only language able to bust though to the stubborn, twitchy, self-interested R-complex.
Now, here's where it can get a bit messy. This encyclopedia of meaning is ingested and experienced daily by the thing that created it -- us. Except, because these patterns are deep-seated in the most paleo reaches of our brain, the poor thing can't really point out what "turns it on". It only "knows it when it sees it". It can only respond. Sometimes in good ways. And other times, in stupendously short-sighted dumb ones, which we'll cover a bit below. (Think: Nixon or Clinton; Ken Lay and others.)
Back to the brain and what it's looking for.
Jung broke personality into three elements: Ego, Persona, Self. This matters because brand is ultimately not about "image" but about its character and the characteristics it's imagery invokes and evokes--it's deeper archetypal vocabulary.
As you may know, Ego is the package of hidden, baser desires we hold in ourselves. They are limbic, they derive from the oldest R-Complex brains--mammalian and reptilian. Their instincts are centered on the Four Fs tied together with compulsive, ritual, paranoid and rigid tendencies. Ego is always with us.
Persona is the face we craft to present to the World, it's our best first impression. You do this, I do this, and companies do this through their brands and other actions. The only problem is, the boss, our R-Complex, knows its ownself is not perfect and it is deeply suspicious of anybody who suggests that they are any different. Here is where companies and individuals get into trouble and lose standing, customers and employees: The R-Complex is home to the idea of "too good to be true" (Remember, it is paranoid and self-interested.) A corrollary to too good to be true, is "too perfect to be human." Take that thought, inate cynicism really, matched to the mission of the R-complex as tribal and protective of "the gene pool"--its community--and then compare it to what Companies try to create: Brands.
As presented by companies, things like brands, their strategies and the structures they dictate within companies are often anything but human. They are counterintuitive, counter to what the brain knows to be true. They are therefore, false "selves" presented by companies as authentic and truthful, yet found to feel false and inert to the R-Complex. If the brain interprets brand as "people", and it does, then many brands fall flat. They are false people, dimensionless selves. Viewed in this way, we often don't as much brand companies as we spray-paint them. Whoops.
This brings us to what Jungian psychology defines as the "Self", the final and third aspect of personality. Here lies what I would say is the core of brand, it's Character.
[Grandiose Statement Alert:]
Brand is the public interpretation of personal beliefs.
Following on the "feeling" aspect above, Brand is not product. Not price. Not approachability, nor attitude. Brand is not ego or persona. It is the "self" Carl Jung described. That is, it's the quieter, hopeful, original part of a person, place or thing that can't be neatly tagged yet fits naturally and effortlessly. And it grows along with its adherents and admirers. Better still, it helps them grow. In this way, brands mirror the ambition of a consumer and reveal themselves as tools for the journey of becoming the idealized self we saw in the Statue of Liberty example. Dr. George Boree describes it this way: The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally. It is an ideal of perfection.
The Human Self, being a soft idealist, needs a safe place to reside. In our brains, the most secure place is the R-Complex, the protector. Therefore, Brand must be composed of character traits that build a wireframe in dimensional space, a shelter if you will, for the consumer's journey. These can be Trust. Sex. Bravery. Whimsy. Sobriety. Generosity. Beauty. Wisdom. Faith. Compassion, etc. the list is longer, but not too much. (Simplicity, remember?) Most important, as currently interpreted Brand is not marketing. Marketing is marketing. Brand is leaving the world and the mind a better place than you found them. Brand is the epitaph: "we were glad they were here, we are sad they are gone."
The above attributes or qualities get the attention of the R-Complex, whereas others bounce off it's rigid worldview. In fact, they grab the R-Complex by the Jugular, metaphorically speaking. (Hah!) And they derive their power from the aforementioned playlist called the Collective Unconscious. If you take these and build a frame, you have not done business or built a brand. You have created a "Legacy." You have done good.
Legacy is key. It is deeply symbolic. And very magnetic. It is qualitative. It inspires action and doesn't shy away from sacrifice. It values reward, on many levels. Why is Legacy so powerful? Well, the R-Complex is on/off. To be quite honest, it's also kind of melodramatic. It interprets and experiences things in terms of life and death, pleasure and pain. Shades of grey were not an R-Complex invention. But legacy it understands. Because it speaks to perpetuation of the species, it includes making a difference. It means being remembered well. It is about "being" and becoming, not "doing" or what is. The R-Complex, simplistic as it can seem is the seat of ambition and leadership--again, think Nixon or Clinton. Creating a legacy, and letting others share in the creation and bounty is what leaders do. As it turns out, all those things are vital to organizations and the people who lead and populate them.
The challenge business-people often need to overcome is the modern confusion between managing and leading. Leaders guide and point out, they don't demand and prod. Interestingly, Western culture once had a very strict interpretation of leadership and its code of conduct. The terms honor, noblesse oblige and mercy were deeply ingrained in this.
"The captain went down with the ship." "He fell on his sword" "The buck stops here."
There is a universal symmetry to those thoughts. They are Limbic in their common sense. The R-Complex likes their clarity.
But they are also out of fashion, as the papers remind us every day. The tribal self-protective nature of the collected R-Complexes in a Board Room or an Oval Office can, in their narrow-focus attempts at self-preservation, doom their hopes of maintaining "life" or, more realistically stated, Power and Influence. For this, another wise old chinese guy had a saying: "The tighter you squeeze, the more grains of sand slip through your fingers." (For the modern version, the term "Bunker mentality" was invented along with the idea that "The cover-up is always worse than the crime".) Here, the deep institutional cognitive dissonance that reveals itself is what damages companies' and an individual's ability to be believed, trusted, and invited in by our R-Complexes. The left brain hears the words "I care", "Customer Service is job one", "We value people". The right brain backages the concrete sensory evidence, usually to the contrary. The R-Complex assesses the package, and it says..."yeah, uh-huh, sure. Bullshit! Get lost."
Brands ignorant of this process prove the aphorism "the perfect is the enemy of the good", perhaps in an unintended and ironic way. In sanding off the rough edges of authenticity, in sacrificing brand-humanity, if you will, we doom ourselves to irrelevance.
The concept of Brand Character is vital to company mission also. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne, you can't show one face to the world, and a different one to yourself without really screwing your head up. This fact has become more salient and destructive as companies spend more time telling the world how "wonderful" they are through media, marketing and so forth only to have members of the corporate family know it's not usually true. The boilerplate does not match the reality. In this way, companies make lots of promises and spend billions to introduce unwitting customers to disaffected employees who don't intrinsically know why what they do matters on a deeper level. Donald Trump reminded his budding Appretices of the danger of this a few weeks ago: don't sell a product you don't believe in.
It's Bad Mojo. In all caps.
So. If brand is not just a suit you put over a flabby body in order to get a date, what's the key to being "real"? Simple. View things as a transformational journey, exactly as the self does. And understand and frame your particular brand, organization and environment as tools and shelter with deeply symbolic power for the trip.
Again, we'll make with the Geometry. Just as a three-part brain needs guidelines built from a Collective Unconscious in order to function, so does a brand need to meet 4 requirements to be deemed "real" to that brain. If we're thinking dimensionally, they look like this:
Next: Part 2.5 Some examples of archetypes in brand motion... and why "Survivor", "American Idol", "The Apprentice" and "Junkyard Wars" have some of the most brand-loyal viewerships going.
Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading. Comments and any corrections are welcome.
If this topic floats your boat, you may be interested in
Why is “value” important and what is it?
Courage and Conscience in Business
http://www.alchemysite.com/blog/fouroboros.html
Original content © 2004 Fouroboros, except where otherwise noted.
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Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand. Part 2.5
Well, of all the posts in this jumble of non-billable hours, the series on my (or, rather, my company's) take on what makes people tick seems to have a life of it's own. Part III, likewise, is morphing into a book unto itself. But to those who've been patient in their emails asking, "Where the hell is part III?!", a little fix to tide you over.
Some are still hazy as to why brand matters beyond marketing, or how brands are really a misunderstood place holder for deeper meaning. Or why brand and leadership, or the lack of either, are intricately entwined. Phew.
And then, happily, some are coming along for the ride, putting the pieces together and whomping their heads, saying, "Wow, I could have had A V-8!" Or something like that. Okay. Let's try and start tying this together.
We left things in Part II, promising some examples of archetypes in brand-motion... and to explain why "Survivor", "American Idol", "The Apprentice" and "Junkyard Wars" have some of the most brand-loyal viewerships going.
R-Complex boredom.
Education author Eric Jensen, in Arts with the Brain in Mind reveals that "America is a feeling-phobic society." This goes in spades for subgroups filled with "Professional Adults" called corporations. Of course, the feelings are still there and very active. They're just non-sanctioned, unofficial "elephants" taking up space and sapping oxygen. And this reveals a paradox for most businesses interested in moving product: many have no firm idea what moves people. Nor do they have processes to share this knowledge. That's hardly surprising. Most organizations are configured to hard facts, heavy analysis, and predictable results. Bureaucracies define themselves by their aim for consistency. What is surprising is that that bland paste of "consistency" equates to figurative "death" to our R-complexes. If there is no challenge "I am dead and useless" goes the brain imprint. And people shut down. Or they move on. Or they fight. (More on this below.)
Our brains--at least the parts willing to exert for ambition and spend for affirmation of identity, these parts recoil at spadework and predictability. And they have unique ways of showing themselves, depending on the circumstance. For example, have you ever asked yourself why "Survivor" or "Junkyard Wars", "American Idol" or "The Apprentice" or even Extreme Sports blasted so powerfully onto the American scene?
R-Complex boredom. These shows or activities feed our primal need to face and identify with challenge. Notice that some are solo efforts, some are teams, but all are competitive. Each has conflict, alliance and resolution. Each has winners and losers. Each is simple in its outcome.
That's because simplicity and rigid black and white choices--the R-complex's definition of Authenticity--is what's missing from modern life. For some of us, watching a TV show is enough of a fix. But most need more.
We were built to fight, flee, feed and, well, you know the other "F". The R-Complex is home to The Four F's. Modern life deprives us of opportunities to exercise these primal, hardwired facilities. Today, we are safer, better fed, more socially-secure than ever thought possible. The closest we come to exercising our basest skills is office politics. Or family feuds. And, yes, institutions and their power are quietly strangling because of it: Digital, synthetic, polished and too good to be true characterize much of what passes for official reality today. The R-Complex says "Bullshit!" It knows what natural feels like, and this ain't it. Natural isn't perfect and perfect isn't natural. Oddly enough, perfect is a Downer. Because in the minds-eye of the American R-Complex, perfection is the end of the road--nothing left to do. Again, Death.
I realize this is a stretch for some. It's what shrinks call non-discursive: Hard to describe. Love fits in that category. So does the urge to buy a $1000 generator when the last power outage you suffered through was in 1977. Non-discursive doesn't mean nonexistent. It just means you have to switch languages--images for words, feelings for facts, metaphor for management-speak. Non-discursive means sustainable competitive advantage in a parity world. In the most crass terms, it means you're counting your money while everyone else is jealously wondering how you got so "lucky." Unfortunately, many companies are "too busy for business"--their real business: identifying these needs and levers, and moving people toward mutual benefit with them.
These factors figure into the reason that Apple scored so counterintuitively with the iMac. A computer--a machine--made the leap from hardware into true Software. It became a part of your psyche and a member of the family. As a portal to the Internet for Jane and Joe Average, it overcame the final barrier: It became organic so you could communicate with other organic things: People. If you look closely at successes and failures of products and organizations, you'll see the connection. Look at vehicles again, particularly those of Daimler-Chrysler Their designs, from the Viper to round-fendered Ram Pickups to things like the PT Cruiser, are redefining and renergizing the car industry and reigniting people's appreciation of cars after years of crappy swings and misses. These changes are coming not from focus groups and traditional market research, but from cultural anthroplogists. They're giving people a comfy mat, turning down the lights, and asking them to provide narrative descriptions of being a child in the backseat of the family car. Or, to describe the feelings associated with picking up a date in your first car. Wacky, yes? Chrysler can't staff enough shifts to make enough PT Cruisers.
Ideas, companies or products that harness this primal realization and offer tools to break free, even momentarily, are viewed as saviours. (The key to lifetime customer value.) Brands intuited this way are heroes for hire, jealously guarded by R-Complex warriors, employee and consumer and even shareholder. Brands intuited this way are far from the traditional C-Level view and disrespect of marketing as Affectation--the suit you put over a flabby body to fool someone into dating you. If anybody should drop their spreadsheets and listen up, it's the guys leading the charge into brave new worlds. Which leads to another example before we proceed: Ever wonder why California seems to be "out there" on virtually every cultural front? Simple. Because it was the end of the line. All that westward ho! explorer spirit, all that idealism chasing opportunity, all that anxious, frenetic DNA... It slammed into the Pacific Ocean and pooled up on the West Coast.
Now, what is the archetype of America in the eyes of the world?
It's an admix of seeming geographic impossibility: It's California's Hollywood, right next door to Monument Valley and across the street from the Brooklyn Bridge. America is fast and flashy, future and past, mostly fair-minded, act first, ask questions later.
America is a Hero in a hurry, in the archetypal, R-Complex lexicon. As citizens, we are most comfortable living out that idealized self-image. Others, i.e. The rest of the World, are most comfortable seeing us as this Archetype. Anyone who tries to alter that view--ourselves included--gets a very bad reception from the R-Complex. It is a non-operational identity, It is inauthentic. To some, the dissonance can be scary or angering. America is also an adolescent as countries go. Like many teens we are in the midst of deciding our next phase. Messy for kids, messy for us, but a vital tug of war to cement identity for further growth.
Here is where American politics is playing out an object lesson as you read this. Left and right have two very different perceptions of "Hero", brought violently into conflict by the events of 9-11. One Archetype is powerful, yet sage and calm, expansive almost to a fault. It is a Hero-caregiver-protector. The other is powerful too, sage as well, if not so relaxed, and decisive almost to a fault. It is a hero-warrior-protector.
It's a separate conversation from here, but the successful candidate this Fall will be the politician who balances and reconciles the seemingly competing imagery of caregiver and warrior. It's not impossible, if framed correctly. I say successful because "winning" and getting the job are not the same things. Anyone who voted for Gore in 2000 will understand that distinction. And that's a lot of people.
Back to the pretty pictures.
So, the brain gives permission in a specific order. If you can asses the patterns that unleash or engage the right-brain/R-Complex chain, you get "truth" or "authenticity"--at least, you get them as understood by the brain's owner, which is what matters if you're a marketer or a leader or provider of anything that needs buy-in from others. In marketing terms, it too is a progression.
The process looks like this:
As noted, facts are also rans in this process. That's not to say they're irrelevant. Quality data is vital to consistent production parameters and so forth. The problem comes when our left brain's voracious appetite for process meets the R-Complex's need for ritual and rigidity. For metaphorical rightness, not perfection.
Any reading of the press will demonstrate that "Smart" people sure do seem good at making dumb choices. They're not unique, they're just visible.
These people will bore you to tears rationalizing how it "Seemed okay", or was "a good idea at the time." Coke, with all their marketing dollars, thought "New Coke" was a "good idea." The aftermath was smart people backfilling. Part of this is due to arrogance borne of credentials or reputation or just a deep-pocketed organization's collective belief that they're the Pros from Dover. But how is this poor choice-making so?
Well, the saying goes that "Seeing is believing." Not true. We only "see" that which we already believe. Or, which supports what we believe to be true or think ought to be true. (Remember the phrases: She was ahead of her time. "He was overnight success--after 20 years.") We only see what fits. The rest is actively or passively discounted or actively, and sometimes violently, rejected.
Taking the Lady Liberty analogy in Part I, we are collections of hopes and fears. We promote hope, exalt it and imbue it in our organizations, products and messages. Or, we wallow in fear and frustration, mostly by pretending to ignore their real impact. Either way, these feelings tend to attract like minds--you get what you measure for, goes the saying. Proximity of these minds builds bonds. The collection of these bonds form communities. Another term for community could be neighborhood, or brand, or company, or political party. Whatever you call them, they are affinity groups with an aggregate collection of ideals that reveal themselves as archetypes. You might call these metaphorical definitions. They are more powerful than organizations themselves.
Have you ever left a job, only to have clients follow you, asked or unasked? While in that job you may have spouted the company brand position fastidiously, perhaps even written it. You did everything you could to be a good soldier. Still, when you left, the client follows. What gives?
People aren't loyal to companies. They're loyal to ideals. But ideal, simply stated on paper is just an idea. As individuals, we are or are not the embodiment of ideals in motion. And we leave a trail of evidence of ideals in action. Inevitably, people (and organizations) who have this magnetic attraction are firm believers and speakers and doers of the the things that realize a product or a company is really beside the point: enabling people to achieve their Statue Sense is the goal, regardless of the product or situation. For them, work is not work. It's "Profitable Learning" and sharing what they know. Feature advantage benefit for them, climbs from factual, to emotional, to symbolic. FAB-cubed.
Closer inspection reveals that organizations, like nature, are self-organizing--Leadership be damned. The true power and levers in an organization often do not jibe with the rational org chart. This can be good, or very bad, if you don't acknowledge the self-organizing nature of people. For this reason, many brands and companies fail because they freeze their persona--their understanding of it--in Amber. After all, they think: "We've just spent 5 million bucks figuring out 'Who we are' and we're damn well gonna amortize that cost for as long as possible."
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This is spraypainting, not branding. Forcing, not aligning. Shuffling bits of rational knowns around, rather than finding the dynamic natural and profitable order. In this way, our left brain's hurry for order builds boxes that exclude many of the people who can do our organizations a world of good. Top down urge for spick and span leaves us wandering, like Diogenes, looking, not for perfection, but it's opposite: for an honest, authentic man, company or experience, warts and all. A final example:
An architect once designed a cluster of buildings. When asked by the landscape crew where to pave the sidewalks, he told them to plant grass between all the buildings, wait a year, then, after the occupants had worn the most useful paths, the architect told the landscape crew to pave the pathways that the occupants had created.Okay, I've mumbled enough. I'll add more for part 3 on how we can all realign what my outfit calls Revealed Shared Purpose and how, often, a desire for more Advertising is often a plea for a shift in work process; how a desire for a new headquarters is often a multimillion dollar "patch-job" for lack of organizational leadership, priorities or understanding. How, in marketing, managing leading or hiring, we're often economic irrationalists because we think complex problems must dictate complex answers. And how intuition has been banished from board rooms and work at precisely the time it's most needed. As Jon Strande has eloquently pointed out, How Alfred Sloan Chose Your Career and Is Costing Your Company Millions And, finally, how brand is everywhere--it is ubiquitous:
Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading. Comments are welcome.
If this topic floats your boat, you may be interested in
Why is “value” important and what is it?
Courage and Conscience in Business
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Original content © 2004 Fouroboros, except where otherwise noted.
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