What happens when people love your brand and what it could be so much that they’re willing to, err, mess with reality in order to make it so? 

As detailed here (and in the diagram and Home Depot shopping list above) my pal Reilly Brennan of Winding Road went through a lot of trouble to create a "fake" version of the mysterious — and as of today, not on the market — Corvette Blue Devil.  If you’re not a gnarly gearhead, a little background for you: people who love the Corvette are extremely interested in what’s next.  What will Chevy do to make the next version that much better?  Or will they screw it up?  How might it allow them to go out and stomp on witless 911 and Viper owners?  Or to win Le Mans yet again?  It’s a community which is not only ripe for the spreading idea viruses, it’s one which welcomes them.  And as Reilly has shown, Corvette aficionados want stories and myths that feed the story of why they bought their own car so much that they’ll believe anything.  Because they want to.  Describing this worldview, Reilly writes:

We have visions of high American optimism coupled with the fear of a regulated, sedan-like tomorrow.  We dream of a world full of nightmarish Corvettes, those that rumble and break pavement and write "Zora" on blacktop when they leave stoplights.

In brief, Reilly and team took a stock Z06 Vette and mocked up their ersatz Blue Devil with a few hundred bucks of foam and vinyl and tape.  They paraded it around Detroit, and some competing automotive journals even took the bait and published "spy" photos of their fake in action.  Which is a fun outcome, but more significantly, rank-and-file citizens like and you and me were shouting "build it" when they saw the fake Blue Devil rumble by.  Now, if you were Chevy, once you get beyond the act of outsiders pretending to be you, you’ve got to be happy with that outcome.  Why?  Because Winding Road’s Blue Devil is simultaneously an example of and a catalyst of the kind of user-generated brand content which Chevy tried to get with its much-discussed user-generated launch campaign for its Tahoe brand.  Except, I’d argue, it represents an undeniably positive outcome from a brand point of view.

Philosophically, when it comes to creating infectious action, I see the fake Blue Devil as the same kind of expression as the user-generated Firefox cropcircle.  They share some common elements and operate on similar principles:

1. No permission asked (or required): I’m not sure how Reilly got the Z06 to modify in the first place, but I’d bet the MSRP of a Blue Devil that he didn’t detail out his aesthetic vision in detail to its owner.  Put another way, I doubt GM would have sanctioned it.  And the people at Firefox structure their marketing efforts in such a way that they don’t have to be consulted on every user-generated marketing action — a simple set of guidelines and community-based discussion forums is all it takes.
2. It’s authentic: If GM had tried this as a publicity stunt, I wouldn’t be telling you about it.  Yes it’s a fake car in a sense, but it’s a very real and authentic expression of brand love because of the folks behind it.  Who blows 50-odd hours taping foam to a Corvette?  What kind of group of people stomp out computerized patterns in a cornfield?  Total weirdos who love you, that’s who.  Weirdos = Authentic.
3. It’s audaciously unexpected: Mess with an expensive, brand-new Corvette to create infectious action?  Create a cropcircle of a software logo and then take an aerial photo (how did they do that, anyhow?).  I don’t know about you, but I found both of these to be unexpected actions.  And because of that, they’re easy to weave a yarn about, and they’re memorable.  So, as evidenced by the high amount of web traffic I get linking back to the Firefox cropcircle post on this blog, they’re memorable stories that people want to pass along, infectiously.
4. There exists a Dark side to The Force:  As experienced by Chevy with its Tahoe campaign, letting people outside of your payroll create your marketing messages can be dangerous.  People may call you nasty names and say bad things about you.  The Firefox crop circle could just as easily have been a "Firefox Sux, Buy IE" slogan.  And embedded in the fake Blue Devil mockup is a bit of a naughty streak, like something the fraternity in Animal House might have done.  It’s funny, but does leave one feeling a little dirty.  There’s a Dark Side, and one has to be mindful of it.  In the end, the actions created by endeavors designed to be infectious can be deeply negative in the extreme, or else we wouldn’t be a species still engaged in genocidal activity.  From a design point of view — designing the offering, designing the story, and designing the system to spread the story — the operating principles are the same.

Well, somehow I’ve managed to start with Corvettes and end with genocide.  I didn’t expect to get there, but this is a long post, so I’ll stop here.

I’d love to hear what you think.

That’s me and my friend Ross hanging out in IronForge.  It’s a great place to have a meeting and get some work done.  Perhaps even do something innovative.  In case you’re wondering, that’s me on the right — I’m the taller one sporting the diving helmet (which I engineered and fabricated myself, natch) and the longish gun, which was a gift.  My trusted pet attack bear, Yogi, isn’t in the photo because just a few seconds earlier he wandered off in search of some cheese to eat and fell into a pit of lava.

But I digress.

Come December 1, Ross and his company Socialtext will be holding a press conference.  What makes this one special is that it will be held in World of Warcraft in the charming village of Goldshire  at the blood-soaked Gurubashi Arena.  The whole event should be interesting, and if you’re a journalist or a blogger or someone interested in wikis and social software, you outta be there.

If none of this makes any sense to you, I’d encourage you to try out World of Warcraft and attend.  I’ll even volunteer to walk you over from the city of Stormwind to the press conference location (or have Ross summon you there).  I think all of these "games" such as World of Warcraft and Second Life are but the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding what our lives will be like in 10, 20, 30 years.  And the best way to begin to understand is to jump in and wallow around.  Learn by doing.

Find press conference details and signup instructions here on Joi Ito’s Socialtext Workspace

Say what you want, think what you want, feel what you want about the rock band Tenacious D.

But when it comes to the design of B2C websites, I don’t know that I’ve seen anything lately quite as fresh and innovative as The D’s promotional website for their new movie.  It just could be the greatest website ever created.

Instead of the usual cluster of clickable static pages, we get a story, some humor, a lot of fun, and above all, an experience.  An almost cinematic experience.  It’s the Tenacious D brand writ large, dude.  It’s like inward singing but for websites.

( update 11 October 2006:  in the grand tradition of The D, parts of this post were written tongue-in-cheek.  Humorous.  As in, it’s probably not the best website ever.  Because of this, I’m not going to be able to respond to every email and blog link I receive assailing my marketing and aesthetic tastes.  But you have to admit, it is pretty cool. )

A Firefox crop circle.  Created by a band of loyal (and unpaid) Firefox customers.

How might your brand stoke this kind of infectious action?

link via neural park

Yesterday I went to the FAA website to see the latest carry-on guidelines.  Here’s what I saw:

What does "Frequestly" mean?  And how about the use of "our" instead of "out"? 

Here’s the obvious observation of the day: typos like these aren’t really helping the FAA brand.  I actually like the word "frequestly", and would find it to be brand enhancing if I heard it from Cranium or Virgin or Mini, but when the FAA speaks, we need it to sound like James Earl Jones.  We want the FAA to show us at every opportunity that they have their act together.  Brands are fractal entities, and the meaning of the whole is to found in the execution of even the lowliest detail.  Especially if your brand is all about rigor, safety, and juggling lots of big, heavy balls without dropping even one in a million.

The cool business-and-design offering at the Stanford d.school this fall will be a class called Clicks-n-Bricks: Creating Mass Market Experiences.  While I won’t be part of the core teaching team for this one, I do plan to drop in for a class session or two (or three!).  This class is a logical evolution of where we went with Creating Infectious Action last quarter, where we found that the most compelling student projects all involved the design of experiences.  So why not teach an entire class focused on that topic?

We’re thinking big about the future of business and design at the d.school.

Check out Bob Sutton’s blog for more details about Clicks-n-Bricks and how to apply to be a part of the action (it’ s open to Stanford graduate students only).

It used to be that having a blog was a remarkable thing for a Fortune 500 company.  I know because I had to "hurdle" to get one started when I was part of the team at Intuit, and it was a big deal when General Motors came out with their Fastlane blog.  As marketing organizations have become more comfortable with easing their span of control over outbound messaging and content, blogs are now more or less part of the marketing mix.  RSS feeds are de rigueur.  Corporate blogging is about trusting the judgment and intuition of individual contributors instead of relying upon a rule-based central authority.  It’s about releasing control and rules, but embracing judgment and character.  In general I think that’s a better way to market, because it comes across as more real and authentic because it is more real and authentic, and a more open, trusting stance is a wonderful way to engage the outside world in creating contagious action around your offerings — which is the fundamental (if often forgotten) goal of marketers in the first place.

So that’s the state of world for relatively unscripted marketing words coming out of organizations, but what about the visual expression of their brands?  Photos and the like.  Now we’re talking about thousands of words.  But, as most bloggers can tell you, companies are loath to share their visual content.  If you want access to a photo from a website, you’d better be ready to contact their press department and kiss the ring.

But not General Motors.  Their marketing team is pushing lots of great photos to a public Flickr gallery.  And pulling in photos from the gearhead community.  This is good marketing.  Yes, it would be better if everything were published under a Creative Commons license to really free up usage, but this is a great start. 

Why not share some of your corporate visual content with the outside world?  The reality is that people are going to take your online content anyway.  Why not do it in a way which engages your fan base, encourages participation, and rewards good judgment and creativity?  What’s the worst that could happen?