Twice in the last week I’ve had an encounter with the Toyota Prius brand which left me uttering a slack-jawed "Huh?"

Encounter No. 1:  While tooting along down the highway at just over the speed limit in my own car, some dude in a Prius blows by me doing about 95 mph.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Encounter No. 2:  Trundling along through rush hour urban traffic, a person in a Prius in a BIG hurry tailgates me for one long minute, then finally whips out against oncoming traffic in a desperate attempt to get somewhere on time.

Now, the percentage of impatient leadfoots driving a Prius is probably quite low, but they’re a good reminder that, for all the time and money you spend crafting the story behind your offering, your customers are going to write at least a few additional chapters in the book of your brand.  And those are the pages that matter to the world.  Know-nothing yuppies turned BMW from a driver’s car into a social-climber’s bauble.  Porsches used to be driven by people with quick wrists (the better to catch that oversteer!), but now the story is about SUV’s for suburban wrists with, ahem, extra padding.

Who is going to write those chapters for your brand? 

In the weeks since hitting my recent big ship date commitment, several people have asked me how fatherhood has affected my view of marketing and product development and design.

Yes, I suppose it has.  Here are my two personal epiphanies, as it were:

1. I now understand why my extremely sagacious father has been telling me for years that man is fundamentally an irrational animal, because we can rationalize anything.  I’m an incredibly happy guy, but I’ve been doing a lot of rationalizing lately…
2. As a Good Marketer, I recognize the the importance of matching the right message to the right group of people with the right worldview.  I now realize that a good messaging strategy may have as much to do with what you don’t say as with what you do.

If marketing is about figuring out what people want, making what they want, and finding the best possible way to let them know that you’re making what they want, then Bodygroom by Philips is a textbook case of Good Marketing.

Think back to the Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of meaing creation.  Bodygroom the product and Bodygroom the story have each been designed with all three levels in mind to create a total offering experience that just sings if you already have the "I’ve got to shave" worldview (not that I’ve ever used it, mind you… but I believe it would work…).  The visceral-reflective  sublimiity of scissors chasing dual kiwis — well, that’s marketing genius.