The Tanning of America (31 page)

The next challenge we took on for HP was to create opportunities for their proprietary technology and place it in culture. We noticed that while there were lots of brands that had cameras on the market, few had figured out how to engage with consumers with respect to the growing popularity of photography. This wasn't about fancy photographic equipment or printing technology but more about having a cool camera and sharing photos on social networking sites. The Flip camera, for instance, didn't make the best high-def video but it was fun and easy to use, and its videos could be posted quickly without a large learning curve.

With coolness and compatibility being of the moment, I proposed that HP release a limited-edition Gwen Stefani camera and got the thumbs-up. With her passion for Japanese design elements, it was called the Harajuku Lovers digital camera and it made taking photos as hot as the latest club dance.

In so many ways, Gwen Stefani was the visual profile of our consumer target—cross-cultural. A California suburban blonde with urban sensibilities, she could be hip-hop and rock, reminiscent of Blondie and Madonna but with her own twist. Likewise, the Harajuku Lovers camera was HP's offering to consumers to put their own twists on their images.

When we went to Las Vegas with Gwen for the annual consumer electronics show to unveil the camera—and the “Hollaback Girl” video that was tied in to a commercial spot and happened to coincide with the release of Stefani's solo debut album—you would have thought that the merchandisers from around the world on hand to see it had died and gone to heaven. After the commercial aired, the limited run of Harajuku cameras we made, all five thousand of them, sold in a week. The cool was so potent that it packed an intergenerational wallop, making moms and female consumers not necessarily in the millennial age range part of the excitement.

In all of the HP marketing, what made the technology appealing and what made it matter was that it was part of culture. With the iPod skins and the Harajuku camera we were starting our relationship with the brand by instigating
instant cool
. Such efforts are aimed at pushing a brand to the top of the cool hill, whereas the next phase of work aims at
perpetual cool,
and finally a third stage, to prolong activation forever and ever, is about
embodying cool.

As we've seen at every stop of tanning, cool is not a given evolutionary principle but something that can happen instantly, with profound implications for brand success. And once you're there, you're there. That is, until they decide you are gone. Perpetual cool, therefore, requires long-term commitment—the kind that a brand such as Nike epitomizes. It's all about being vigilant in staving off the slide toward being “over,” a constant fight against inertia. Perpetual cool demands focus, investment, and frequent refreshing via innovation. The strategy phase of embodying cool is about a full translation when a brand has successfully earned respect and loyalty from the consumer and has received permission to also be cool. It's all about understanding nuance. John McBride's position on embodying cool is for companies to “find the intersection where understanding those consumers can be translated to the hand of their brand, and then the brand can be taught to speak as if they're in the culture, and they can speak with a wink and a nod.”

Brands sometimes want to skip steps in attaining levels of cool. What we hear most often from brands is that they want to be loved. The question comes up with every account—how can they become a loved brand? My first response to that is, well, maybe we should start with becoming a
liked
brand. Even before getting to the “like” stage, there is an approach we use that is akin to crawl/walk/run. The stages for consumer brand perception that span a relationship beginning as functional and evolving into emotional are Convenience, Consideration, Respect, Like, Love, in that particular order.

Convenience brands are those that offer rational product solutions and messaging without differentiation in a given category. Vizio, make of lower-cost home entertainment electronics, is an example of a convenience brand. Marketing of such brands is usually based on goals of short-term sales, rather than a long-term vision of brand building. Convenience brands do not innovate, nor do they contribute to wider culture or extend into people's lives. Customers for convenience brands won't intentionally “seek the brand out” or ask people within their community for advice about the brand. Convenience brands initiate a one-way dialogue with their consumers and rarely care what they think.

Consideration brands, in contrast, provide a rational alternative to respected brands. Consideration brands manage to transcend a sea of sameness through one-off products or communication. Take, for instance, the Kodak celebrity campaign with Drizzy, Trey, and Pit Bull, marketing that may manage to deliver short-term buzz but doesn't sustain momentum. Considered brands are normally in this category by virtue of their rational proposition versus an emotional connection—using Kia cars as an example. A considered brand is not seen as having a conviction beyond building market share.

Respected brands are those that have achieved trust from the consumer thanks to the delivery of a successful brand promise and as the result of long-term brand building efforts. A respected brand has a clear identity for both employees within the company and for customers, and typically follows wider cultural trends. A respected brand, say, like Samsung, enjoys customer loyalty and has a logo that inspires global recognition and trust. However, respected brands are invariably threatened by brands that deliver greater emotional appeal.

A liked brand is seen as having convictions that matter to its community and as caring more about the greater good than financial gain. Liked brands are often driven by outspoken founders or CEOs, say Richard Branson, who convey the brands' identity in personal ways. Liked brands are driven by the art and science of new media and technology, employing multiple approaches to communication with minimal messaging repetition. Like brands surprise and delight their fans through innovation and content yet work as hard at caring for existing customers as they do at attaining new ones—take the Soho House as a very much-liked brand. Liked brands have shared values and purposes with their user base. Their logo becomes a signifier that transcends race and geographical boundaries. Sony has achieved liked status for years.

Then we arrive at the characteristics that describe a loved brand. A brand that has a relationship with the needs and beliefs of communities of consumers, one that has evolved organically, can become a loved brand. This shared emotion can be so strong that consumers would genuinely feel their lives wouldn't be the same without the brand in question. In fact, loved brands benefit from these internal stakeholders who act as a wider marketing department. Loved brands regularly have a CEO who spearheads branding efforts for the company. Certainly Apple remains a leading example of a loved brand. Loved brands don't market to different cultures in different ways or stereotype people via their race. They utilize one narrative and allow cultural nuance to build emotional connections. Loved brands are culturally curious and look for advice from consumers, thus transcending a one-way conversation into a two-way dialogue and ultimately a megalogue that is advantageous to all.

How does the injection of instant cool affect a brand? Well, in the case of Hewlett-Packard, it set them on a direct course to being a liked brand. They then embarked on a journey to perpetual cool by next embodying cool—or that was the intention—with a campaign to reinvigorate the notion that the “PC is personal again.” When Hewlett-Packard asked me to take a look at the campaign design—which was being helmed by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a masterful West Coast marketing company—I could see that the platform and the ideas were terrific. There was one problem. After all the work that had been done to gain instant cool, the new platform needed a better way to continue building on what it was that had come alive already. To launch marketing for the “PC Is Personal Again” campaign, they were going to use Robert Redford and Drew Barrymore. Both happen to be iconic actor/directors, both connected to film culture and global issues. But neither was right, in my view, to kick this big marketing idea out of the gate, coming from where it had already been, and for giving it some radical disruption with cool attached.

When I met with the marketing agency, I was blunt, saying, “If you start without a cultural context, I think you run the risk of losing the notion of cool that you're trying to build on. Why not start with artists who have a cool aspect to their own brand and who are not the most likely candidates?” The idea of having a shock or surprise element appealed to them when I mentioned Kanye West and Jay-Z, for starters. Then possibly after that we could go to less obvious choices. I proposed, “Once the platform has been launched you can then migrate to Redford and Barrymore.”

My friend and partner, Jay-Z, once again trusted my instincts and loved the platform. The commercial was stupendous and aired the first time during the NBA finals. When it broke, not only did it drive awareness for HP—and it went on to win numerous advertising awards, including one at the Cannes Film Festival—but it enticed other celebrities from different fields to come on board, each embodying cool for different reasons. There was Olympic snowboarder Shaun White; entrepreneur/sports franchise owner Mark Cuban; Pharrell Williams; Mark Burnett, the creator/producer of the TV reality show
Survivor;
Serena Williams ; and even Santa Claus (via the voice of Tim Allen from the popular film trilogy). In fact, when all was thrown into high gear, the marketers chose not to go back to Redford or Barrymore once the goals of embodying cool had been met.

In the process, HP had marched right into perpetual-cool territory belonging to competitors, claiming benefits ruled by others—the customization associated with Dell, the creativity of Apple, the dependability of IBM. By tapping into this broad range of consumer passion points at a time when no other competitor was on a message of why making the PC personal again mattered, HP's measure of coolness was reflected by seismic growth in its stock price. Marketing cool had allowed the brand to surpass Dell and become number one in worldwide PC market share.

There's often a confusion that I hear from brands about how far it is advisable to go in marketing into trends when trying to get the nuances right for embodying cool. Specifically, many corporations still view hip-hop culture as a trend at best and an anomaly at the least. Even as a marketing strategy, many brands visit the platform with some trepidation and hesitancy. The results in those cases tend to either fall flat with ads that have recycled concepts set to beats or are embarrassing because of inappropriate attempts to imitate cool—to try to use Ebonics or have people rolling their r's to promote Latino brands or force multicultural groupings that come off just as contrived as Dell DJ's effort to promote its own viral success.

For these reasons, one of my priorities with brands and with artists is to assure them that nothing in the pursuit of cool will put their core values at risk. The job of the translator, as a rule in the new economy, is to find the sweet spot between the brand's core values and the cultural cues. The good news is that our millennial generation is the most diverse in history. The more juxtaposed, the better. Differences no longer frighten. A fusion of tastes and styles is sought after. The tanning of and by this, the hip-hop generation, is diversity that celebrates individualism and the brand identification that marketing offers. This is why I've argued that tanning has done more to enrich brands and the economy at large than any cultural phenomenon like it.

Brands appeal to kids and young adults in this cross-culture who like to stand out but who also go with the crowd. With relevant, cool brands, they can meet their goals of being different and of being affiliated with networks. They use brands for code and shorthand to express where they're from, what team they love, what they're all about, and to “brandish” their status as a badge of honor.

What about turning off older consumers or those who aren't fans of urban culture? Interestingly enough, the marketing of cool has yet to turn off any core or older consumer in any case study or anecdote to my knowledge. On the contrary, a brand offering that is new, exciting, and stirring the hearts of the young and trend-savvy consistently provides the proverbial halo effect for the brand in general.

The millennials, as we've touched on briefly, really are products of the branding age. Trends do matter to them. They want in. Moreover, they define themselves by their brands and expect their brands to keep up. Because of the blurring of the lines, marketing to one group has spillover to other groups—so it has to be accurate. Word travels fast. For brands that's big bang for bucks. By the same token, with ubiquitous connectivity, the shelf life of newness grows shorter and shorter.

Clothing designers, as an example, bemoan how quickly they can be embraced and then abandoned without warning. That leaves whoever came late to the trend holding the bag with unsold inventory. The key to trend survival, no surprise, is all about adaptation. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a trend as part of the perception of nuance. There is nothing wrong with playing into a trend. But a word of warning to marketers : If you don't have control and you're not at the forefront of seeing the trend, you're in the back getting killed. Trend really can be a Ponzi scheme. When everyone moves on and you as the brand are the last guy to get the memo, you'll be chasing the last dollar and there won't be anything left.

As the Translation motto puts it, “Trends are perishable, cool is forever.” Let that be the clarification of the rule that urban culture has bequeathed to the new economy. My take is that it goes back to being at that party or in the club. You don't want to be the last one to leave. That's uncool. So in the business of cool, you've got to leave money on the table when you're chasing trends. Like economies built on bubbles, brands built on trends have never had lasting power—but especially not in this time of the empowered millennial consumer. What happens is that when the trend dies, so do the brands attached to it. This is as true for those artists who are brands as it is for fields of industry, as it is for Fortune 500 fortress brands. Like Alvin Toffler said, you have to be fluid.