My latest book review is live and in living color at 800 CEO READ Blog

I reviewed Lovemarks, by Kevin Roberts. An interesting read with some stimulating ideas, but not a stellar book.

Google is hot because they let their products do the talking for the brand.  If you think about it, the Google brand is synonymous with the Google use experience, and isn’t the result of some expensive “brand building” campaign.  No, those crazy Google people spend their dollars on product.  At Google, everyone – the engineers, the graphic designers, the cooks in their fabulous cafeteria – owns the brand.

You can see this in Gmail.  Google took free email and said “How would the Google experience work here?”  This kind of thinking led somebody at Google to place a wickedly brand-defining message in, of all places, the Trash box (see above).  This is brilliant.  Like 99.99% of all adult males, I skipped all the marketing messaging when I cranked up Gmail.  Sure, I knew going in that it had 1 Gig of memory reserved for me, but this little surprise in my Trash really drove the value proposition home for me.  Brilliant.

All experiential elements of your offering can be, should be – must be – thought through and consciously designed to define, embody, and amplify your brand’s unique song. 

Good on ya, Google!

Download BzzAgent_HBS_CaseStudy_Sum.pdf

John Moore (who is one of my book reviewing peers at 800-CEO-READ-BLOG) turned me on to this summary of an HBS case on BzzAgent. It’s a nice overview of how word of mouth marketing (aka customer evangelism) is affected by network types and the players within them.

The most interesting – and counterintuitive – assertion in this piece is that the most influential source of incremental word of mouth marketing comes from individuals with weak ties to your organization, meaning that they’ve only experienced your brand once before, as opposed to being repeat or long-term customers. The reasoning behind this is that more loyal individuals have already saturated their networks with talk about your offering, while less loyal folk offer virgin fields, so to speak, for you to plow.

This is a nice way of thinking about the dynamics of word of mouth for established brands. For nascent players or offerings, however, you’d have to alter your tactics, because very few individuals, if any, are loyal to you, and in order to cross the chasm you’ve got to establish some pockets of deep loyalty.

Bluebottle Coffee Company, an artisan microroaster, is a purveyor of Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ).  In the minutes leading up to a sip of Bluebottle espresso, my knees go giddy with anticipation, because they know I’m about to have the best damn coffee around, crafted with care by one James Freeman.  Like Woody Allen, Freeman is a clarinetist when not laboring for his art, and that art is sublime: watching him whip up a cappuccino from beans roasted not more than 24 hours ago is a deep lesson in passionate product creation.  He’s serious about brewing coffee to the hilt:

The highest achievement, I think, is just a straight shot of espresso.  Coffee itself is very sexual. Espresso is nerdy. You have to have the soul of a poet and the heart of a band nerd to get everything right.

Freeman takes things beyond sane limits because it’s the only way he knows – it’s about Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ).  Ettore Bugatti and Enzo Ferrari understood WBCTQ .  Yvon Chouinard, Steve Jobs, and Quentin Tarantino are instinctive WBCTQ’ers.  Bluebottle Coffee is using WBCTQ to create what, one day, will be a widely-renowned brand.  Doing things to the hilt is how great brands get made.

I believe in products that go beyond the ordinary to deliver memorable experiences. There’s so much clutter in the marketplace that merely competent functionality is, for the most part, a given. What matters more than ever are products which solve real problems in spectacular ways, creating deep meaning for users along the way. True product standouts come from people who take something and do it to the hilt.

Doing things to the hilt means going beyond what is “reasonable” or “expected” by the market. There’s a product development baseline out there which all know and recognize. This is the world of the Ford Taurus, Budweiser, and Taco Bell – all entities where advertising is used to create and push products, because the products largely can’t stand on their own. Why? Because each was developed to a specification of “market demands” laid out in a book, and the very act of writing guidelines down limits the potential for something wonderful happening. Some people call these specifications “critical to quality” metrics, or “CTQ” for short.

Screw CTQ. CTQ’s give us Velveeta, which is congealed boredom. Why not do things to the hilt instead? I want a rich, sublimating cheese that makes my nostrils flip out and my tongue go furry. How about replacing CTQ metrics with “Way Beyond Critical to Quality” (WBCTQ)? We need more people creating things born out of intense, total passion. Making things remarkable. Surprising. Blow-your-hair-back-and-part-it-down-the-middle-wow. Way Beyond Critical to Quality.

In today’s New York Times, Jamie Kitman tells a sorry tale of the demise of Saab.  In an earlier post I asserted that “Subaru is the new Saab”, and unfortunately that’s literally true: the new Saab 9-2 is but a badge-engineered Subaru.  Kitman agrees that the WRX is the car that Saab should have been building all along:

"Authenticity issues aside, the turbocharged, all-wheel-drive WRX is, at least, the sort of car that Saab might have built today if it had only received enough financing in the 1990’s. Like the rally-winning Saab 96’s of the 1960’s, the 9-2X wrings maximum advantage from being a light car with a small engine and loads of grip."

In contrast, Kitman describes the new Saab 9-7X (which is really a Chevy truck) as “… the very antithesis of the Saab ethos,” and he’s right.  Just because you hang a badge on it and put the ignition in the floor doesn’t mean it’s a Saab, no more than lipstick on a bulldog makes a fashion model.  In Popeye’s parlance, things are what they are, and your brand (an odious word) is the sum of the feelings your products evoke.  A Chevy with a V-8 just can’t feel like a Saab.

Kitman attributes Saab’s crash to a lack of leadership.  I would go beyond him to say that leadership was surely lacking, but management, particularly “brand management,” was in no short supply at GM and Saab.  The old Saab was run by rally junkies who wore blue and gold underwear; it was run into the ground by a bunch of pin-striped, brand-managing fun sponges whose only gold is on their wrist.

Remember Saab?  The world-conquering rally cars?  The firm whose machines were hallmarks of iconoclastic engineering that coupled functionality, rationality, with understated yet compelling design forms?  The crew who brought us ignition on the floor, turbos under the hood, and huge fifth doors which opened up to a cavernous cargo hull?

Well, that Saab is dead, victim of a relentless drive up market to the fairyland of bigger margins and “aspirational” customers.  Somewhere along the way, Saab stopped racing and stopped loving cars.  They axed the hatchback (you can just see the PowerPoint deck and the MBA voiceover “… the hatchback segment share of market is decreasing year over year…”) and they lost their soul.  Only a soulless firm would slap a Saab badge on a Chevy truck, Saab’s next big move.

On every parameter of what once made up “Saab-ness”, Subaru is, well, firing on all four horizontally-opposed cylinders.  World-conquering rally cars?  Check.  And piloted by a charismatic Nordic race driver who grew up driving Swedish cars, to boot.  Iconoclastic design sensibilities?  More than a heaping spoonful:  expensive boxer engines justified on the basis of lower CG, rounds of raucous turbos for the entire bar, and all-wheel drive on all models.  What Subaru has done is to whip up a distinctive mix of ingredients and pour it into cars that drivers love.  Then, instead of blowing their marketing budget on just the usual media mix, they’re out there mixing it up – and winning – in the World Rally Championship across every continent save Antarctica, letting the car-crazies among us know that Subaru creates exceptional driving experiences.  And as Malcolm has taught us, those Mavens are the key to word of mouth…

Your brand does not define the character of your products.  Your products (and the layers of sales, service, and support surrounding them) define your brand.  A brand is not about words and pictures, it’s about feelings.  And it’s the product (or the service or both) your company delivers that generates those feelings.

Want a strong, vibrant brand?  Make “branding” the job of your product development group and your marketing team.  Let the product crazies have the run of the house.  I’ll bet my TiVo that the Saab corporate lot is full of boring, unmodified Saabs driven by boring, by-the-number corporate zombies.  And the lot at Subaru?  Do I have to tell you?

"It passes between rooms until it has infested not only your living room, but also your 1.5 bathrooms, your cleanly appointed kitchen, and then your entire sun-drenched, open-plan loft apartment. In the most extreme cases, it will even spread to the string-light-decorated rooftop patio overlooking your recently gentrified neighborhood."

You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to learn more about this deadly epidemic.

Another incredible effort from the folks at Mini.