January 7, 2005
the kinetic quality/hughtrain etc.
I just pasted the entire “Kinetic Quality” into The Hughtrain. I thought it was something that needed to be more prominent.
Here it is below, in its entirety:
“The Kinetic Quality”: All products are information. The molecules are secondary.
The future of brands is interaction, not commodity. It’s not something you buy, but something you paticipate in.
i.e. a brand is not a thing, but a place.
Here’s an example: My former agency was pitching Gerber ( the US baby food company) a few years ago. During the pitch I told them “you don’t know a lot about babies because you make great products. You make great products because you know a lot about babies.”
Think about it. The average 22-year-old new mom doesn’t go into a Kentucky Wal-Mart looking for baby food. She goes into Wal-Mart looking for information. She wants any information she can get about how to be a better mother, and she’s willing to spend money to get it.
After she has the information, then she wants products that are credible extensions of the information. A good baby-food brand is merely an extension of good paediatric nutrition.… i.e. put the information first, and the products and sales will follow.
So what we pitched was turning their Wal-Mart shelf space into miniature “information centers”. We’d sell the products, obviously, but there would be other things as well– books, leaflets, CD-Roms etc etc. Basically, a young mother would leave Wal-Mart a lot more informed about babies than when she entered… and her shopping bags full of Gerber products. This is what I mean about “the kinetic quality” of a brand. A good brand offers immediate and obvious transformation.
If Mom doesn’t leave Wal-Mart a better informed mom than when she entered, then somewhere along the line Gerber isn’t doing its job.
Of course a good Gerber website/blog would enhance this process. The TV and magazine campaigns would be more informative than ‘selling’. All under the umbrella concept of “Healthy Happiness Hints”. Giving little parcels of managable information, communicated as “hints”.
My point is: the kinetic quality applies as much to package goods (baby food) as it does to media brands (The Economist, The Wall Street Journal etc). A good marketer understands this, and tries to tap into it.
In the old days, the three most important words in advertising were “Unique Selling Proposition”. To me, the three most important words are “By Interacting With…”
–By interacting with Gerber, she becomes a better-informed mom.
–By interacting with The Wall Street Journal, she becomes more tuned into the world of capitalism.
–By interacting with Apple, she brings her entrepreneurial dreams closer to reality.
–By interacting with McDonald’s, her busy schedule is made slightly easier by avoiding a lot of fuss over lunch.
–By interacting with Ralston Purina, she becomes more attached to her canine friend.
–By interacting with your brand, she becomes…?A good brand is a two-way conversation.
What we bloggers know about the nature of information (a great deal) can be applied far beyond our usual diet of media, politics and journalism. Because all products are information. The molecules are secondary.
Which is why I believe this is a very exciting time for all of us.
To me it’s a very easy way for a conventional, large client to implement “Hughtrain Theory” without causing too much pain internally or externally. Also fits in nicely with my current “Smarter Conversations” obsession. Thoughts?
[AFTERTHOUGHT:] The “I Love You” cartoon seems to me very representative of how large, non-Cluetrain advertisers like to use and manipulate language in order to “sell”. Or is that just me drinking too much of the Kool-Aid again?
[UPDATE:] Good Kool-Aid from John Husband in the comments:
Being engaged in constant interaction with others around an issue will define brands, I think .. and this will also create constantly shifting markets as customers and stakeholders cross alll sorts of previously existing boundaries. Brands as we know them today will (I believe) have to redefine their purpose and be able to reflect the appropriate or useful shifts in markets to be effective, and that also means they will have to be honest about what they are today and in enquiry about what they could be or should be in that just-over-the-horizon continuous motion future.
(NB: the intalics are mine.)
bangity bang bang on.
This morning and again later this afternoon I was musing on something similar but workplace/organization related (I would, of course). I’ve even got the title of a later blog post sorted.
It’s indeed about interactivity and participation, and being “in” it.
We’ve now had about ten years of email for the great unwashed masses, all those who wonder if “blog” is some sort of hoicked-up gob of something and think the Internet is about email and company web sites, or just a highly-efficient fax machine. As the new set of conditions we others know (a bit) and love has progressed, the main response in the great middling crowd has been better time management and email in-box control tips … kinda like antibodies trying to fend off an infection.
That’s quickly becoming the past … it will help you cut off a good portion of the good juicy interesting exciting useful stuff (and yes,much of the junk) you might otherwise run acrioss and keeps you “in control”, or so it’s thought.
But .. at the keyboard and behind screens, the future will be about your own and others’ “interactivity management” … learning how to be in interaction with all sorts of diverse people coming at you from all sorts of angles, interacting and swimming in a flow of constant information.
Being engaged in constant interaction with others around an issue will define brands, I think .. and this will also create constantly shifting markets as customers and stakeholders cross alll sorts of previously existing boundaries. brands as we know them today will (I believe) have to redefine their purpose and be able to reflect the appropriate or useful shifts in markets to be effective, and that also means they will have to be honest about what they are today and in enquiry about what they could be or should be in that just-over-the-horizon continuous motion future.
I was talking with my guitar teacher last night, and he mentioned a phone conversation he had with someone at LL Bean about a parka he was thinking of buying. It wasn’t just a nameless voice at the other end of the line, but someone you could call and ask for by name. She answered his questions and in the process of doing so, made a mistake that he called her on in a subsequent call. She was chagrined and apologized. He bought the parka.
All of this was my way of saying that the Kinetic Quality works both ways, that the Gerbers (and LL Beans) learn something, too. I think you imply that by including it with the Smarter Conversations but it never hurts to be explicit about it.
o_O
I do believe this completely answers the question postulated in the comment I left on your previous post.
Awesome.