The Tanning of America (42 page)

The willingness to take a marketing position that goes to the Thinnest Slice is by itself a bold start. Next it's a programming challenge that involves careful planning and ongoing support—all the while staying authentic and true to the brand's original story, but continually refreshing and updating it to stay within the tide of the times. There is no formula or guarantee. But there are those who are better at finessing the Thinnest Slice than others. Before Tiger Woods fell from grace, he had been a good example of an athlete as a brand unto himself who raised the level of the field and brought continuity, another important trait for those who can reside at the Thinnest Slice. Charles Wright rightfully pointed out that Tiger had entered the game as a phenom and maintained that by constantly excelling at the sport. Before Tiger Woods was known to golf fans, Charles observed, “there were different leaders different weeks, a different face atop the leader board.” Once Tiger was in the game, Charles went on, “there was someone to follow—a consistency that drew followers and fans. There was an expectation that either paid off (he won) or didn't (he lost), but within the expectation that he would win we were programmed to follow, and thus Tiger Woods lived at the Thinnest Slice.” To illustrate just how fragile and thin the line is, Tiger's marital infidelities and his divorce and inconsistent performance once he did return to the game show what happens when an icon steps onto the wrong side of that line.

But sometimes the reason for the fall is much less sensational. Sometimes it's an annoyance as trivial as ubiquity that can hurt brands, or as routine as becoming overexposed for entertainers. Sometimes it's complacency, as we've seen, and occasionally it's the effort to be cool when that's not what the brand needs to be doing. Sometimes being too cool kills opportunities afforded to those at the Thinnest Slice.

In many cases, a solution can be found in the DNA, in the original code—which may require deconstructing the brand to find out what buried treasure lies beneath that has gone overlooked. When Translation worked with Wrigley this process revealed a highly important principle for the wary brand manager, particularly at iconic brands. It's the “permission to own real and permission to lead” rule. It goes back to our recurring theme that millennial culture is unapologetic. Brands that have earned iconic stature are granted unique permission to be unapologetically real and to lead.

Wrigley knew it was time for “refreshment” of their brand. They also understood that new packaging—a fine strategy—might sell a couple more sticks of chewing gum, but that was not going to solve their stagnancy. To contemporize the brand we needed radical disruption that also drew from their past and that came with a wow factor too. With the goal of making news out of their evolution (as opposed to reinvention or reincarnation), our mutual aim was to enhance the use and enjoyment of Wrigley-brand products without diminishing what generations have come to know and love as distinctively and definitively Wrigley.

Using reverse engineering, tried and true, we brought on not one, not two, but three different artists to express their affection for the values imbuing the brand with three authentic songs to be promoted through normal entertainment channels and then incorporated into the marketing for Wrigley. From Ne-yo there was a song that referenced Big Red with “
kiss a little longer
” and from Julianne Hough, famous for
Dancing with the Stars,
there was her Juicy Fruit homage with “
the taste is gonna move you
.” The biggest hit, which became a number one smash around the world, was the setup for Doublemint with Chris Brown's “Forever,” which had the lines “
double your pleasure / double your fun
” and that later turned into advertising that brought back the classic appeal of the Doublemint twins.

Why did it not matter to the public, after the fact, that these were embedded marketing messages? Because the brand had the permission to lead, to come into our house, so to speak, and remind us of our shared history—our associations with chewing gum, the values of refreshment and dependability, how familiar the brand already was in the DNA of pop culture, where the chewing gum flavors lived in our collective landscape and in our memories.

Wrigley needed to call attention to their own brand assets, to proclaim that, no, we're not the coolest or the most extreme with taste that pops your eyes out of your head, but yes, we are a true American icon. Could the brand be uncool but in a really cool way? Of course. That's the permission afforded to the iconic, and as such, it implies that we are not static but ever-evolving.

“Ever-evolving” is marketing code that I have found most helpful in other campaigns. “Ever” represents enduring, the promise that the brand is going to always be there, moving forward, remaining true to its essence. It too encompasses timelessness and timeliness. “Evolving” references dynamism, improvement, adaptation. So “ever-evolving,” when it comes to the Thinnest Slice, summons the spirit of a keen sensitivity, of knowing what to change, how, and when.

As an ever-evolving American icon, Wrigley is granted permission to own real and proudly share the values associated with their chewing gum. In the code was the idea of being the real deal, having an independent spirit and an industrious nature, brand values that are American values. Permission to lead comes from being over 110 years old as a brand and an originator of all that is loved about gum. With that status, there is no reason to doubt or second-guess the brand's standing in consumers' minds.

What other brands earn that kind of permission? Some that come to mind for me are Coca-Cola, Tide, Converse, Budweiser, Harley-Davidson, and Swatch, to name a few. And they too live at the Thinnest Slice.

This leads me, finally, to the paradigm that we see going forward for pop culture, for marketing, and for values that I believe we all share in wanting a robust, buoyant economy in which all ships rise. The new rule, written by the next chapter of ever-evolving hip-hop, comes from the understanding of cross-culturalism. The new total-market approach is an outgrowth of research with consumers, analysts, anthropologists, and economists. Johnson & Johnson has a study in the works based on research that predicts 2020 as the first year in which the majority of babies born in America won't be white. The other prediction we've seen well publicized is that by 2050 whites in this country will no longer be the racial majority. We should be asking how these trends will impact all of us and how society is shaping itself to prepare us for what's to come. How will they influence the way we look at each other and respect each other? What do the numbers predict in terms of racial biases and racial tensions? What do they mean in terms of putting people in boxes? How will this play out for those generations that hold on to the old labels and compartmentalizing of culture? The information is only now beginning to be processed as the 2010 census continues to be examined. At the date of this writing, we are only starting to see the numbers of multiracial families being announced state by state. Everyone should be paying attention to staggering changes.

Will we adapt? How will we repurpose and reinvent new marketing rules? Take, for instance, the products that dominate our shelves—the fact that we have a black beauty aisle or ethnic beauty aisle for women, say, for African-American women looking for hair and skin products. What does it do to these boxes as the new realities start coming out? Are these companies going to sit around and fall victim to the changes, like those companies that didn't recognize that the digital age was coming? Will brands adapt to cross-cultural thinking and pool resources to respond to consumers' needs—as to forces in radio that didn't care about television and network TV powerbrokers indifferent to the movie business? Will the new shared mental complexion and the actual ethnic sharing remind all of us how these changes affect one another? Will it be remembered what has already happened in all kinds of industries because no one wanted to recognize change? Well, hopefully so, because culture's speaking and a change is coming.

We have a chance, me and my generation—all of us watching this metamorphosis of cultural diversity and shared values—to prepare and lead this change. This is what Martin Luther King was speaking about when he had his dream, now a reality as people come together from all backgrounds. One in seven marriages in America is between people of different cultures, different races, proving the power to choose outside the boxes and to be with the love of their lives, someone with whom to spend their life and raise a family, someone with whom they share true values but not racial or cultural demographics.

The faces of this mixed-race, tan America are not just on college campuses, but they dominate politics, business, and sports. The ethnically ambiguous are especially ubiquitous in movies and television shows, advertisements, and news, joining with one another in social networks, dating Web sites, and even mixed-race film festivals.

Cultural curiosity is alive and well too.

In studies done of the 2010 census, we observed an emerging like-minded community around music coming from Latin culture and with it an abundance of exciting cross-cultural marketing opportunities. From the earliest days of ragtime music, minorities in this country have created the majority of pop music consumed by the general population. This reality has unleashed the development of a deeper way of reaching the general market based on multicultural insights. Stay tuned.

Cross-culturalism is the next phase of tanning and is not about homogenizing or mixing cultures to the point of diluting the elements that make them distinct in the first place. It's about loving one another, the last critical point I would like to add to our conversation about rules for the new economy, which I hope has only just begun. Very simply, the credibility in pop culture movements, as in brands, that is required for sustaining loyal followers and consumers as much as it is for attracting new ones is built on love.

The marketing rule, as Procter & Gamble's Jim Stengel told an interviewer at
Fortune
magazine not too long ago, is that “businesses and brands that are breaking records are those that inspire trust and affection and loyalty by being authentic, by not being arrogant, and by being empathetic to those they serve.”

Let me hone in on the affection part of the dynamic for the economy. As long as brands and companies are showing the love, they're almost always forgiven for missteps and miscues. Love is rarely discussed in boardrooms or in marketing meetings. Love is a seriously undervalued commodity. Though it should be obvious, consumers do not want “wham bam thank you, ma'am” from marketers. That's why culture serves appropriately as a conduit for showing the love between companies and consumers.

It's easy to survey the current landscape and pick up on the extremism and the hate that is out there. There is unfortunately a reactionary backlash against the epic forward motion of a change election that was buoyed by a generation unafraid of going off into the unknown; it has been inflamed, frankly, by a fear of the tanning of America. The hate has volume, it's extreme, and it's fed by propaganda and people in media who make a ton of money from stoking the flames. They are hate profiteers, and outside their own industries, they are just bad for business. Besides, they are not cool and never have been. The war against culture hates the fact that tan is the new cool, that they are losing the weapons of mass distraction they use to separate us because of our differences.

Love, on the other hand, is timeless and is the universal currency, the common tongue, the language we all know. To speak of it, to talk of our love for one another, our love for products, for the emotion we feel when we hear music, the love that allows us to fulfill our human purpose, to come together with all of our differences, not to be like each other but to live peacefully with each other, sounds corny. I know. But it's true and it is what builds economies, helps culture grow and flourish, and keeps us in spirit “young forever.”

CULTURE'S NEXT IN-CAR
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S
o it's a Sunday morning at the end of January 2011 and I am seriously past deadline on turning in these final thoughts. They're not just about where tanning is taking us next but also about how we can all use cultural insights, in practical ways, for the betterment of everyone. The problem wasn't so much putting down
what
I wanted to say and who I was going to ask to expand on some of the key points but simply—where to begin?

Then, lo and behold, I wake up and have the answer delivered to my front door. It's a featured series in
The New York Times
entitled “Race Remixed” with the subtitle reading, “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.”

First of all, what a validation it was of the value dear to my heart that I've embraced for most of my career—both as a record industry veteran and then moving on to the advertising business. It validated the lessons that I had been fortunate to witness up close and personal, as I speak about early in the book, while watching how culture happened in response to the offerings from the record business that in turn had to be very, very honest. It was amazing to watch the influence of radio stations and their need to play music that was ethnically and culturally relevant on the local level because those local stations were in the front lines of culture. The rule was clear: If they didn't play the music that the people in that zip code or area code or bandwidth reacted to, they were out of business. Just as amazing, but to my despair, was how far away from the cultural pulse were too many in the advertising, film, and television industries—and how their business models didn't encourage them to replicate what was happening on the front lines. That distance has been mind-boggling to me.