John Maeda recently had a remarkable experience in a restaurant in Minneapolis.  Here’s a photo of what happened, followed by this commentary:

When sitting down at a restaurant in Minneapolis, I noticed the waiter
replaced my white napkin with a black one. Apparently the tradition
here is that if you are wearing black trousers or a dark skirt, the
reasoning is that a white linen napkin might leave visible lint on your
clothing so they immediately swap it for a black one. Such careful
attention to detail surely develops trust.

A black napkin for black-robed laps feels just right, and is a world away from a crummy-looking nacelle on a passenger jet.  It makes an empathic (and emphatic) statement; we care about the way you’ll look when you leave our restaurant.  And by making that statement, we say everything that needs to be said about the level of care poured in to the meal itself. 

Good experiences — the drivers of good brands — are fractal, and everything matters.

I flew on a name-brand airline the other week.  Airplanes are my reading room, so I packed my usual array of reading material:  The Economist, Monocle, and Octane. 

But who needs a couple hours of reading material when something as fascinating as this is hanging just outside your window?:

Where to start.  First, there’s a bunch of mismatched paint that’s been dabbed on with a brush clearly stolen from a preschool play center.  And there’s the variety of panels — some are deeper blue, some are more oxidized, so we can be sure that a variety of airplanes have been cannibalized to get this hunk of junk in the air.  Personally, I admire that look on the Millenium Falcon, but not so much on a device I’m trusting my life to.

But wait, there’s more.  Let’s look back toward the wing:

I applaud the airline for taking the time to locate, hire, and train the one individual capable of laying down a more dribbly line of caulk than yours truly.  And look at that grease swirl at the junction of the engine nacelle and the leading edge of the wing.  How artful — you can’t get that kind of fluidity of application by accident.  There’s real technique at work here.

All joking aside, I actually don’t blame the mechanics who work on this plane.  They’re probably good people who went in to the business because they were gearheads who liked working on airplanes.  The root source of bad blue paint and the lack of time (and will) to do things right is more likely to be someone controlling a marketing budget who believes that cash spent on the rights to Gershwin tunes is more important than keeping the planes looking like the vessels of safe passage they need to be.  Where would you spend your dollars? 

I’m a believer in smoothing the transmission of the truth, so I’d spend the dollars it on matching paint, a new caulk gun, a buffing wheel, some rags, and the time and permission to do things right.  Brands are about truth, and that truth must be fractal.  Everything matters.  Or else everything comes untied.

Before the Saturn Sky was released to market, I wrote an essay for BusinessWeek talking about why, if I were to buy a sports car, the Sky would be at the top of my list.  My point was that it’s not just about the car — it’s about what the ownership experience should be and can be.  In other words, it’s about brand, where brand is about what you do rather than what you say you do.

The New York Times ran an article today titled 2 G.M. Brands, a Similar Car, but Very Different Results.  It compares and contrasts the wildly different market fortunes of the Pontiac Solstice and the Saturn Sky, which share a common platform and the majority of their mechanical bits:

Sales of the Solstice are down 19 percent this year through July,
and G.M., which apologized for not building enough Solstices initially,
now has nearly a five months’ supply in inventory, double the
carmaker’s average. Sales of Pontiac-branded cars and trucks are off 17
percent, compared with 9 percent for all eight G.M. nameplates,
according to Autodata, which tracks industry statistics.

“It was
such a radical departure from what people expected out of Pontiac that
it created a tremendous buzz when it first hit the market,” said Wes
Brown, an automotive consultant and a partner in the Los Angeles
marketing firm Iceology. “It looks pretty cool, but ultimately it’s not
able to overcome some of those barriers people have within their mind
with regard to the brand image.”

Meanwhile, demand for the
Solstice’s fraternal twin, the costlier and more angular Saturn Sky,
has shown no signs of subsiding. G.M. has about one month’s worth of
the Sky available, and many buyers still have to wait several weeks or
months for their Sky to arrive.

From a behavioral design perspective, they’re virtually identical but where they depart is in their visceral design elements — the Pontiac is swoopy mango yogurt where the Sky is crisp Prada suit — and in their reflective design elements.  The latter is touched on briefly in the article, but I think it’s at the core of the issue here:  what people buy is reflective design and, by extension, the experience of what it will feel like to participate in the brand over time.  While I’m a believer where Pontiac can go (their new G8 sedan bodes to be a BMW 5-series killer), for most folks Pontiac is a golden screaming chicken decal on the hood of a muscle car piloted by a guy with a mustache.  Saturn is a group of people who will help your daughter out when her car has broken down in the desert.  In other words, Pontiac is about (the old, wrong) product, while Saturn is about a having a nice experience.

It’s not just about product anymore.

From the masters at Apple.

Simple.  Concrete.  Sticky.

Have you seen Flight of the Conchords on HBO?  It’s a new show about a New Zealand folk duo trying to make it in The Big Apple.  I love it.  It’s like Curb Your Enthusiasm meets The Odd Couple meets Forrest Gump meets The Royal Tenenbaums.  Here’s a video blurb from the show to show you what I mean:

It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you like your humor on the quirky side, you’ll probably like it.

But I’m not here to talk about television.  I’m here to talk about marketing.  Flight of the Conchords is a great example of thoroughly executing Step 3 of my three-part recipe for Creating Infectious Action.  Here are those steps again:

1. Create something remarkable  (viz the video above)
2. Weave a sticky message around it (Tenacious Dundee)
3. Design the system to spread it

If you point your browser to the Show Your Love section of the Flight of Conchords website, you’ll see a comprehensive set of spread tools kindly provided by HBO for your maven pleasure.  There’s a full set of embedable video clips, a set of IM icons, video podcasts, background images for your fan website (see above as well), and even a set of color hex values so that your fan website is on-brand.  This is great marketing at work, because it releases control while it enables brand-appropriate behavior.  Instead of trying to fight the entire fight yourself, designing to spread means spending at least part of your energy on enabling others to do it for you.  It’s about walking around, pouring gas on a bunch of little fires, rather than endeavoring to build one big bonfire yourself. 

And, the more you consciously design a system to spread the word, the more likely it is your cool thing will fly.

John Lilly, the COO of Mozilla and a guy I’m proud to count as a friend a collaborator, has written what I think is an incredibly insightful and important statement about how the world works today.  Writing in response to a recent speech given by Steve Jobs indicating that the future of the browser market could look like the pie chart shown above, John says (in part — please read his entire post if you have a chance):

There are a couple of problems, of course. The first is that this
isn’t really how the world is. The second is that, irrespective of
Firefox, this isn’t how the world should be.

First, it isn’t really how the world is. The meteoric rise of Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Linux and Firefox,
among many other examples, shows that today’s connected world is no
longer constrained by the monopolies and duopolies and cartels of
yesterday’s distribution — of the publishers, studios, and OS vendors.
Hundreds of millions of users, in every language around the world are
now making new choices. That Apple doesn’t feel this, even within the
familiar reality-distortion-field confines of Moscone Center,
illustrates much of the problem.

Second, it isn’t how the world should be. Even if we could somehow
put that movement back in the bottle — that a world of just Starbucks
& Peets, just Wal-mart & Target, just Ford & GM — that a
world of tight control from a few companies is good, it’s the wrong
thing to do. It destroys participation, it destroys engagement, it
destroys self-determination. And, ultimately, it wrecks the quality of
the end-user experience, too. Remember (or heard about) when you had to
get your phone from AT&T? Good times.

So here’s my point, to be clear: another browser being available to
more people is good. I’m glad that Safari will be another option for
users. (Watch for the Linux port Real Soon Now.) We’ve never ever at
Mozilla said that we care about Firefox market share at the expense of
our more important goal: to keep the web open and a public resource.
The web belongs to people, not companies.

This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays their
thinking: it’s out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented,
not-the-web thinking.

John is right.  This isn’t 1957.  What’s good for GM, or Apple, or Microsoft, isn’t necessarily good for all the rest of us formerly known as the audience.  If you believe in starting with the needs and desires of real people as a way to create real value and meaning in the world, then things like engagement and choice and self-determination are not just "nice to haves", but are critical means to an end, where the end is an informed, savvy, and free (as in liberty, not price) society.  As John says, "The web belongs to people, not companies."  Markets do, too.  So do brands. 

Web thinking is freedom thinking.  And it is the driver of modern, progressive marketing.

I’ve written before about the problems that speeding hybrid owners might pose for the Prius brand.

So, in the metacool spirit of seeking generative and productive solutions, how might Toyota incent Prius owners to behave in ways that enhance the brand?  I’ve been mulling over that question for a few months now, but over the weekend I spied the license plate pictured above in a local Whole Foods (no surprise there) parking lot, and it sparked a brainstorm of sorts:

1. Per the photo above, reimburse any owner who slaps an appropriately-themed custom license plate on a Prius.
2. For those short on imagination, provide a web-based green-jingle license plate character generator over at www.prius.com
3. Parking these things at Whole Foods is preaching to the converted.  Better to try and infect new communities, so hand out shopping coupons for Wal-Mart, Safeway, etc… to owners who do the license plate thing.
4. On the other hand, ego-gratification is a big driver of community-based marketing, so do a deal with Whole Foods whereby a highly visible parking spot near the front of the store is reserved for Prius owners who’ve done the license plate thing.  Which brings me to idea Number 5.
5. Issue owners who’ve done the Prius license plate thing a nice holographic-looking window sticker which says "Prius Maven Onboard".  It’s designed to sit inside the left corner of the vertical hatchback window, and is the cue to Whole Foods parking lot attendants not to tow your Prius from the designated Prius Maven parking spot.
6. Make the green color scheme free.  Charge extra for all the other colors.  Charge much, much more for black paint, which lowers the albedo of the Earth.
7. Better yet, paint the roof of every Prius white.  The better to bounce sun rays back and reduce the air conditioning load.  Plus, white roofs are in.  Critically, tell owners why the roof on their car is white (even if they paid $2,000 extra for black paint), so that they can educate their friends about the concept of albedo.
8. Provide a $1,000 rebate to any Prius owner who agrees to have a speed-limiter placed on the car.  This device would limit the top speed to 75 mph, because drag increases with the square of velocity, and if you want to save the planet, it helps to not drive though it like hell.
9. Sell the Prius as a service.  If I’m a Prius Maven, I’m not buying a car — I’m investing in a public confirmation and signal of my worldview.  What if Toyota could make the entire Prius brand cradle-to-cradle by maintaining it and taking it back in a completely holistic way?
10. Create a Garage Lifestyle Bounty.  If you trade in your H2 for a Prius, you get acclaim on a public website, and you get a license plate frame, like "My old ride was a Hummer"

This is just a brainstorm.  But increasingly I believe that word of mouth and infectious action is like a garden.  A garden will grow on its own, certainly.  But with inputs of energy and care, it grows that much better.  The Prius has already tipped — when you think "hybrid" you think Prius.  But even companies like Toyota should think about ways to actively tend and feed the garden.