I received this email last month the night before taking a Virgin America flight:

Dear Diego Rodriguez
            
            
Due to delays
in the modification of our new planes, the inflight entertainment and
select other in-seat services will not be available on your upcoming
Virgin America flight. This includes the Red Inflight Entertainment
system, which normally features satellite TV, movies, games, Google
Maps and a food ordering system. In addition, the plugs at every seat
for electronic gear will not be operational for the flight. Why are we
sending you this message? We want you to be prepared to have your
laptop or iPod fully charged, and ensure you have the latest magazines
or newspapers to read while onboard your flight. We’ll do our best to
provide some reading material onboard in case you forget.

We
make millions of dollars in high-tech modifications to each one of
Virgin America’s brand new planes and we appreciate your patience with
us as we finalize this modification process across our brand new fleet.
Thank you again for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you
on Virgin America.
         

The Guest Services Team

As it turned out, when I boarded the inflight entertainment system was working (they had fixed it, I suppose) so my low expectations were greatly exceeded.  I was a happy guy: happy to be on a clean airplane with an enthusiastic crew, happy to get something I didn’t think was going to happen, and happy that Virgin knew how to reach me with the right message at the right time. 

This message feels like it was written by someone who had flown on a plane at some point in their life, and understood the importance of having something to do during the flight.  Like having reading material.  It is a far cry from the disjointed jingle-driven marketing drivel spewed by most other airlines.  No tag-lines or positioning statements here; this is marketing at its best: all about making my experience the best it can be, and showing a concern for all the small elements of the flying experience which signal that the big stuff are being taken care of, too.  Great marketing is an exercise in fractal experience design.

The office of Lamborghini’s marketing chief, Manfred Fitzgerald, is covered in a nice profile in Fortune magazine.  You can see a glimpse of it here, but unfortunately the best photographs of his office are only in the print magazine. 

Configured in raw aluminum, polished steel, black stone tile, and white leather, Fitzgerald’s office does in fact look and feel like the embodiment of the current Lambo brand – which is something about German technical know-how and integrity draped in Italian mojo.  Audi-owned Lamborghini is the type of Italian car company whose marketing chief would most appropriately be named Manfred, in other words.  As is argued in the article, the aesthetic of the space informs the thinking done there which informs the greater brand of the company as embodied by its products.  Aside from the use of Eames chairs, the product of folks whose design sensibility sits in a place a world away from that of Lamborghini, it works for me. 

It also leads me to believe that imagining what one’s brand-delivery knowledge working space should look like could be a great exercise for getting to the essence of a brand.  And perhaps a more effective exercise than coming up with keywords or images borrowed from stock imagery or from other brands.  For example, the workspace of the pre-Audi Lamborghini — a chaotic, passion-filled brand — would have been an old Emilian barn with a gas-welding setup in the middle of the room, spanners on a table, sheets of aluminum in a messy pile, and a pyramid of empty lambrusco bottles over in the corner.  And some loud opera playing off of vinyl.

Let’s try some more to see if this works.  Close your eyes and imagine Apple’s place.  You can see it, right?  It’s not so different from Lamborghini’s palace, except that people are wearing jeans instead of multi-thousand Euro suits, the floors are white instead of black, and there’s a CNC machine in there carving something interesting out of a block of stainless steel.  Puma.  What would Puma be like?  I see it as an outdoor cafe in a hipster place like Miami, with multiple open-participation shoe creation stations where civilians (filtered by a hipster bouncer, natch) could help design future shoes.  Subaru’s brand development place would be a heli-vac capable modular building transported around the world on a seasonal basis, always positioned out in the boonies where there’s a good supply of muck, gravel, snow, and sheep filth.  Petter Solberg would have a permanent bunk bed there, always ready to roll, so long as he slept in his nomex coveralls.

These are the types of spaces where brand-creating folks should be sitting, not in some corporate cubicle-ville where the closest cultural wellsprings are a TGI-McFunster’s, a parking lot, and the nearest highway.  Living in the brand in order to create the brand.  Virtually or literally, it makes sense.

Here’s a cool example of creating infectious action being done by the folks at Mozilla: Download Day 2008

I found about it via Facebook.  Based on the pledge ticker at the Download website, it appears to be working quite well.

Infectious Action = Remarkable Offering + a Sticky, Compelling Message + a System Designed to Spread

It’s all about a brand that is based on a truth rooted in getting real stuff done in the world.  It’s not about selling the sizzle, it’s about selling a steak that sizzlers.  Hot!  And a juicy one at that.

What makes it all authentic is the relatively close tie between the WRX’s you see pogoing around in this video and what you or I could buy down at the corner Subaru dealer.  They’re a lot closer to the civilian models than anything you’d find in NASCAR, let alone Le Mans racing or even touring cars.  Effective marketing is about brands that are real, not fake.  Truth, not myth.

A while back I wrote about the crazies at Ducati tapping in to the power of co-creation.  By promising to use a  name submitted over the web for its new G8-based car/pickup, Pontiac is pushing that idea harder.  If you go to Tame the Name, you too can submit a name for this new product.  How cool is that?  Go ahead, submit a few. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when it comes to using the web to push the frontiers of marketing, the people at GM know what they are doing.  I love this initiative: good marketing takes guts, and Pontiac is about to enjoy a true brand renaissance.  They finally have fantastic product (but perhaps poorly timed, given $4 gas…) and it appears as though their marketing folks are working hard to shed any remnant of their screaming-chicken past.  Another decade of this kind of execution and Pontiac will be the new BMW.  I kid you not.

I’m a big believer in knowing by doing.  So in preparation for my upcoming Stanford class on Creating Infectious Engagement, which will involve a viral marketing project for Facebook, I’ve been messing about a bit over in their part of the world.

This past weekend I set up a "I’m a fan of" page on Facebook for the Stanford d.school.  Using some tools built in to Facebook, I sent notice of this fan page to four key connected mavens, and have been tracking the membership stats over the subsequent days.  Here’s what the curve looks like, tracking the total number of fans at the end of each day (or at my 10pm bedtime, to be more precise):

I’m not sure what to think about these results.  Any comments or ideas from Facebook and/or marketing gurus would be great.