Issue: Dove Accused of Retouching ‘Real Beauty’ Ads
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

In Accidental Branding I write that brands need to ’sweat the details’ - meaning that paying attention to even small, innocuous details of the business that might not obviously affect the brand pays important dividends. A brewing scandal this week at Unilever with the Dove brand illustrates this. Dove has gotten into a mess because a profile of a professional photo retoucher in The New Yorker mentioned that he had worked on the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign - in which Dove explicitly argues against retouching reality. The details are complex, but Dove appears to have neglected to instruct a freelance photographer on the second iteration of the campaign in 2007 - the revered Annie Liebovitz - to avoid making any digital corrections to her photos.

The Dove Campaign for real beauty includes the following:

Original Print Campaign

Dove Pro-Age Print Campaign

Dove Evolution Video

Dove Onslaught Video

The campaign has been acclaimed for bringing body image issues to the fore. It has been criticized because Dove still sells products intended to beautify and because Unilever sells products like Axe that use the exact techniques that the Dove campaign criticizes.

Here are the facts in the unwinding mess:

Writing for the May 12th issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins profiled digital photo retouch artist Pascal Dangin. In her profile, Lauren writes:

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

This paragraph was noted last week by BusinessWeek blogger Burt Helm on May 7th in his Brand New Day blog. Then Jack Neff from AdAge picked up the BusinessWeek story.

Unilever responded quickly, denying the accusations. Unilever’s PR department issued the following statement from the photo retoucher Pascal Dangin who was profiled in the article:

The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the [2005] Dove ‘real women’ ad. I only worked on the [2007 Dove Pro-Age] campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction — both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.

Unilever also released the following statement from Annie Liebovitz:

Let’s be perfectly clear — Pascal does all kinds of work — but he is primarily a printer — and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching, and there was not.

The New Yorker responded by standing by its story - only noting that the word “undergarments” was misplaced - meaning that they agreed Dangin might not have worked on the first campaign.

From this muddle, it is not clear whether Dangin made substantial alterations to the Liebowitz photographs. What is clear however, is that he did touch them and at a minimum made the “color corrections” that he claims in the statement delivered through Unilever. So it seems clear that Unilever and the Dove brand did not explicitly ensure that the Liebovitz photos were completely unaltered. It seems possible that the photos met the standard set for the brand - not altering the appearance of the women - but any retouching of the photos leaves the whiff of impropriety. For the brand, this is a disaster which could have been avoided with more attention to detail.

Branding Bottom Line:
Dove gets mascara all over the brand

Issue: A small supplier decision comes back to bite Wal-Mart
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

[Image from NALIP.org]

In Accidental Branding, I write “Do Sweat the Details”. By this I mean that very small actions that do not at first seem to be related to our brands often have very big consequences for the brand. What I meant when I wrote this is that consumers often cue off of small details that are of no interest to brand marketers, like how the package opens, how customer service handles complaints or how business partners speak about our business.

This week, Wal-Mart has provided an excellent example of how decisions seemingly unrelated to marketing can affect our brands. It’s a big enough deal that I would call this Wal-Mart crisis a textbook example of “Brand Karma” - meaning that what you put out into the world eventually comes back to you. Wal-Mart has never had a great reputation among its suppliers. For years it has been accused of sourcing goods locally in new markets only as a competitive tactic to drive out other retail customers and then ending the relationship in order to bankrupt the local supplier.

This general attitude towards suppliers bit back recently as The Wall Street Journal reports. The company which Wal-Mart used to capture video of sales conferences and other internal meetings for thirty years, Flagler Productions Inc. was dismissed two years ago. It does not take much reading between the lines to suspect that this termination of a longtime relationship was not handled well. INstead of maintaining a fondness for Wal-Mart and seeking to regain the Wal-Mart business, Flagler has gone into the business of selling these candid and embarrassing videos of Wal-Mart events to the general public. It appears that in spite of Wal-Marts general legal rectitude, they never secured exclusive rights to this video.

It’s a brand disaster. The videos, as Gary McWilliams reports, contain:

A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores.

I have written a lot about Wal-Mart in the past several years, and I don’t think it’s an evil company. Their basic goal of trying to reduce prices for average working families is a good one. They have made some good steps forward (along with Target) on trying to bring prescription drug prices down. They’ve also tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to bring down the horrible, predatory purveyors of pay-day loans with fair competition.

Where Wal-Mart seems to falter is that they have no corporate instinct for the integrity of their brand. A corporate obsessed with costs is bound to bruise a lot of “little guys” in the process. (See Wendy Bounds nice blog post for more on this.) And not shockingly, one with the ability to really hurt Wal-Mart has finally bitten back.

The lesson? Everything affects your brand. If the way you treat your employees, suppliers or customers is not consistent with your brand, they will become a cancer in your system. Brands may not practice Buddhism, but they should believe in Karma. It all does eventually catch up with you.

If anyone has links to the Wal-Mart videos, please feel free to post them in comments.

Issue: Why bad packaging hurts your brand
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Today I suffered what might almost qualify as a repetitive-motion injury: I cut myself while trying to liberate a consumer product from its packaging. The offender is often the clamshell style of package.

This package can only be opened with sturdy scissors or - if you’re reckless - a knife

The offender today was actually a Zyliss Ice Cream Scoop which had a plastic band wound so tightly around the slender part of its handle that I briefly considered removing it with a soldering iron (which would have been safer). Instead, I used a pair of scissors which rebounded to nick my finger.

Other examples of this type of consumer-unfriendly packaging abound from CD and DVD jewel cases covered with that same clam-shell and clad in hard-to-tear plastic and sticky, sticky tape to pill bottles with shrink-wrapped plastic neck covers that defy tearing.

All of this is actually expense management at the cost of the brand. The problem is that the wrong people are in charge of elements that really affect the brand - either finance managers worried that packaging which is easy to open will invite pilferage or salespeople responding to pressure from retailers to make packaging which will be difficult to open and hard to shoplift.

But it’s a brand disaster. Why would any consumer product knowingly cause someone to bleed? It is unimaginable.

If you’re a brand manager, it is time to start examining your packaging closely. It might just be undercutting your brand message.

Issue: Online Communities and Brands - Our New Hometowns
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

[Image from Church of the Customer]

Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands has a theory about people in the 21st century. We’ve mostly been torn from our hometowns. We don’t live with our grandparents or parents and may not even know our neighbors. We may share an income level with them but we might not share other core values or beliefs. Increasingly, we use brands as a short-hand to communicate our values to our neighbors and those we encounter socially. Driving a Volvo? I know you’re affluent, have kids and probably send them to private school. A Prius? We obviously are both Dems who share a passion for the environment. Wearing Ralph Lauren? You have money, like to make a nice impression but think fashion with a big “F” is vulgar.

The question brand marketers who see this are asking is: how will this translate to the online space? So we are all watching online communities very closely. With a few key exceptions, many online communities started by marketers are clunky, unusable affairs. We brand people are far too nervous about control to nurture communities well. Some good lessons come from urban planners. They have learned that tightly controlled or barren spaces actually attract ‘undesirables’ (drug addicts, homeless, vagrants, skateboarders) because they cannot be customized by the community. Thus, when Bryant Park was designed, over 1000 lightweight chairs were included, which were intended to be moved by park visitors. The park continues to be a safe and vibrant space.

There aren’t any definitive answers for brands with online communities, as the models are fast evolving. Sites like craigslist.org, FlyerTalk and TivoCommunity have created strong communities of interest, but they are not fully evolved social networks. Many social networks, like Facebook and MySpace are less efficient as brand havens (with the notable exception of the success of independent music on MySpace). Private label sites like NING allow brand marketers to create gated or single-interest communities, but are still in early stages of development.

The Church of the Consumer described an interesting framework (crediting Ray Bard for the visual reproduced above) for thinking about different types of online communities, or different stages in the development of an online community. Cliques are small, exclusive and anti-establishment. Networks are large and intended to facilitate introductions or the spread of information. Cults have rituals, belief systems and charismatic leaders. Finally, Nations are egalitarian, sovereign and committed to an all-consuming cause.

This leaves open the question of how a brand can create an online community. For this, I was happy to get a sneak peak at Forrester’s new report on Online Community Best Practices (thanks to Jeremiah Owyang and Tracy Sullivan). Forrester is careful to differentiate the different reasons that brands form online communities into Listening (an online standing focus group), Talking (get across a brand message), Energizing (nurturing brand enthusiasts), Support (allow brand users to support each other) and Embracing (involve brand faithful in developing the brand). The report goes on to describe some of the steps in creating an online community and - importantly - how to deal with different types of online troublemakers. At seventeen pages, it is still a brief summary, but very useful for those considering a plunge into the water.

Issue: Why are retailers suing their customers?
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

We have been ranting for some time about companies that pursue business strategies that harm the brand. A Wall Street Journal front-page article yesterday highlights another such practice. Companies including The Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Lord & Taylor are hiring law firms to threaten or pursue civil litigation against suspected shoplifters to recover damages. They do this in addition to criminal proceedings.

If handled appropriately, this might not be a foolish practice for the brand. Recovering damages from those who have committed criminal acts against the brand lowers the cost for law-abiding consumers. Unfortunately, like many other practices administered by corporate financial people without any brand oversite, this one casts too wide a net with disastrous results.

In one case cited by the Wall Street Journal, a handyman in Miami named Glenn Rudge was detained at Home Depot after he checked out because a clerk observed a set of $8 drill bits poking from his shirt pocket. He was handcuffed in the store by a guard and the store refused to let him call home and ask his wife to bring the receipt for the drill bits in to the store. He was charged by prosecutors who then dropped the charges when he produced the receipt.

To add insult to injury, a month after the charges had been dropped, Rudge received a letter from the Palmer Reifler law firm demanding $3,000. That sum increased by another $3,000 when he ignored the letter. Mr. Rudge was threatened with a visit from the Sheriff’s office in the second letter. Fortunately, Mr. Rudge was doing handyman work for an attorney who filed suit for him and recovered undisclosed damages from Home Depot.

This example is one of many detailed by The Wall Street Journal and experienced by innocent consumers around the country. Retailers are combating a real problem - the estimated $40 billion annual cost of shrinkage (losses to theft, shoplifting and other consumer fraud) - but doing so in a manner that harms their brands and causes unmeasurable damage to their revenue.

This all stems from a very anti-brand attitude which assumes that consumers are all guilty until proven innocent. The price for this belief is huge reputation damage in word of mouth and negative publicity.

Retailers would be wise to adopt a more customer-friendly attitude towards potential theft. A few thoughts:

1. Approach customers politely - some of them will be innocent.
2. Do not forcibly detain customers - unless unambiguous evidence of a crime exists.
3. Allow customers to explain - accept reasonable explanations even if some may be false
4. Do not sue customers - who have been judged innocent in criminal court.
5. Add common sense to your shrinkage policy - why are customers purchasing hundreds of dollars being detained for $8 items?

It seems unlikely retailers will heed these warnings. In spite of repeated negative publicity, they continue to learn lessons from the music industry - suing their own customers until they have no business left.

Issue: As the Writers Strike End, Network Executives Contemplate Alternatives to Pilot Season
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

The strike may be over, but the longterm effects of the Writer’s Strike are only just beginning. Chief among them is the question of how to develop new shows for network television. The old model - a pilot season where money is lavished on producing many shows which never see the light of day - is expensive and inefficient.

The answer to this question already exists though - and it’s in a place few are looking for examples these days - major league baseball. The major leagues understand that very few high school or college baseball players are ready to hit 100mph fastballs on day one. Instead of setting these guys up for failure, they send them to compete in leagues designed to develop their skills. Those who flourish get a chance to join the big show - the major leagues.

Network executives have already accidentally done this by promoting series like Showtime’s Dexter and USA Network’s Monk to prime time slots during the strike. Now they should consider a more serious and nuanced development plan.

Internet channels are crying out for content, for one thing. A series could be tested on iTunes, Joost, YouTube or a myriad of other places online. Three or four pilot episodes might be enough to pull together enough of an audience to justify a season-long run on a basic cable station. Then if the audience grows (in size and in passion) the series could make the jump to a broadcast network. This would also give each series a backstory - something for new fans to explore.

The writers’ strike has given television networks an unprecedented opportunity to change their business model. It would be a shame to waste it.

Issue: A surprising choice in the Democratic primaries
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Political campaigns are usually the stuff of brand managers’ nightmares. The advertising is coarse, unsubtle and unconvincing. It argues with consumers. The media plans are absurd, bombarding consumers with spots so many times that they are as likely to revolt as be convinced.

In this year’s Democratic primary, however, a strange thing is happening: the candidates have constructed two very clear brand paradigms.

While the window dressing of the campaigns may have you believe that the campaign is about experience vs. youth (for Clinton) or change versus the status quo (for Obama), decoding the brand paradigms suggest that the real struggle is even older and more familiar for brand strategists.

It turns out that this primary is really about management versus leadership.

Why do we say this? Decoding the language Sen. Clinton uses to speak about her candidacy and the language of her advertising yields a classic trove of pro-management imagery. Clinton values experience, understands the mechanisms of power, knows the people who actually get things done. She promises to be ‘hands on,’ surrounds herself with party elders and speaks of herself as the safe choice. She unfailingly uses the first person “I” when speaking about her campaign - indicating she will take personal responsibility for the results and values accountability highly.

Sen. Obama speaks of the urgent need for political transformation and uses the language of movements rather than management. He suggests that creating a post-partisan administration and transcending “blue versus red state” mentalities is more important even than specific policy objectives. In spite of repeated attacks from his opposition, he continues to speak more about opportunity and to use his media to motivate rather than to specify. Sen. Obama rarely uses “I” and almost always uses the second person “we” to speak of his campaign as a movement.

This makes for a surprisingly substantive choice for voters. It’s not just flash and posturing - the two candidates are presenting two real alternatives to the question of how executive power is wielded. And they are using classic brand paradigms to do it.

Senator Clinton presents a rational argument for competent management being the most important quality for the next leader. She points to this as the greatest weakness in the current administration (failure to plan for the occupation of Iraq, poor follow-through in Afghanistan, mismanagement of disaster relief after Katrina, etc.). She suggests that only a great manager will be able to deal with the war on terrorism and work health care reform through Congress.

Senator Obama tells us that leadership rather than management will be necessary characteristic of the next President. While bad management may have gotten us mired in Iraq, only leadership will extract us. Rather than a President who can move the levers of power he suggests that we need a President who can inspire others to make fundamental changes.

These competing brand paradigms give us a stark, pragmatic choice. In Senator Clinton’s vision, the best way to avoid a terrorist plot being hatched in Munich, but bound for the United States is to have a President who can get the FBI and CIA to share intelligence, work smoothly with the German government and one who has put the right capabilities into place to stop the plot once uncovered.

Senator Obama suggests that changing the underlying mistrust of the United States in the eyes of foreign nationals (through visionary leadership) would more effectively foil the same plot by making the German Police more likely to trust their U.S. counterparts and share intelligence and also make ordinary citizens of both countries less fearful to cooperate if they were themselves Muslim.

These are two valid arguments and both need to be considered. And - although politics is not the usual place to find it - a good example of successful brand positioning.

Issue: Howard Schultz back as CEO of Starbucks
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Two news items today put a glaring light on the diminished fortunes of Starbucks. McDonalds announced that it would add baristas to its staff and serve cappuccinos, lattes and espresso as well as smoothies and frappes from stainless steel espresso machines.

Simultaneously, Starbucks announced that chairman Howard Schultz would replace Jim Donald as the company’s CEO. This amounted to an admission of very serious issues for the Seattle corporation. “We must address the challenges we face and we know what has to be done,” Mr. Schultz said in a statement.

Followers of Starbucks know that the challenges Mr. Schultz referred to have been reflected in the dismal stock performance - down 48% over the past year. The most commonly cited causes for the share performance are a decline in same store sales, saturation of the U.S. market and operational issues around new product lines.

Beneath this, however, lies a more serious branding crisis that Starbucks has faced and failed. And it may have started in the supermarket.

When Howard Schultz created the vision for Starbucks, he talked of creating a ‘third place.’ Like many creative entrepreneurs, he was synthesizing several very different trends he had observed in diverse arenas. One came from the old world - the cafe experience in Italy and the ability to find refuge in a small bar and sip a tiny cup of espresso for three hours as the world passed by. The second was from the U.S. itself. Borders and Barnes & Noble reinvented the bookstore by creating an environment where customers would feel more comfortable picking up and reading books - going so far as to put cafes into bookstore where customers were encouraged to bring books they had not yet purchased. This seemingly heretical thinking spurred sales as browsing customer turned into buyers.

Starbucks initially did a great job of creating this ‘third place.’ Baristas were well trained and well compensated. They memorized customer names and drink preferences. In urban areas, Starbucks became the preferred spot for impromptu business meetings or for students or writers whiling away a day.

But very early on, Starbucks made some fundamental decisions about brand extensions that weakened the brand. Those decisions led lesser brand leaders than Howard Schultz to take Starbucks in dangerous direction. The culprits? The frappuccino and the Starbucks cart.

The frappuccino itself was a wonderful invention, offering the Starbuck’s lover a new treat and the first blockbuster sub-brand within the Starbucks franchise. The decision to sell the Frappuccino in grocery stores under the Starbucks name, however, was a brand disaster. As was the decision to sell Starbucks coffee from carts, and later from drive-through windows. And to permit huge lines of walk-through Starbucks customers in Starbucks stores.

It would have been very difficult to argue this point a few years ago. The Frappuccino was a huge financial success and Starbucks ubiquity strategy made it a global brand. Bigger was better for Starbucks for a dozen or more years. The result, however, was to create exactly what Howard Schultz primarily despised - another fast food outlet. Year after year in small, barely noticeable ways, Starbucks retreated from being the ‘third place’ that Schultz had envisioned. It added more food, changing the atmosphere. Then other types of merchandise, from coffee mints to music, were promoted, each making Starbucks feel minutely more like a retail chain and less like a refuge. Catering to commuters further shifted the dynamic, as long lines inside the cafes made the morning an unappealing time to sit down for coffee. And the carts, supermarket items and even Starbucks coffee in hotel rooms and homes made the brand into a mass market commodity.

Starbucks points to the central difficulty with great branding in all public companies: investors want public companies to grow as quickly as possible while brands are more conservative and sensitive to change. By pursuing all opportunities, Starbucks fatally weakened its brand, and greatly diminished its unique cultural contribution.

Issue: Will 2008 presidential campaigns waste millions on strike-crippled network television?
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

As the Hollywood writer’s strike spins through the holiday season into 2008, the distinct possibility of a perfect storm for advertising in the 2008 US Presidential campaign season looms.  Could the combination of the strike with lavish television  advertising spending on the race waste millions in donated money?

If it lasts any longer, the Hollywood writer’s strike will have two significant victims: the fall TV lineup, and the presidential campaigns which already upend conventional advertising wisdom every four years with absurdly over-saturated media plans.  This all comes at a time when television advertising is already a dubious proposition: primetime television reached just half the households last year as it did in 1994, even though the U.S. has added 40 million residents.  In the same period, primetime CPM (the cost to reach 1000 prime time viewers) has spiked from $7.64 to over $20.

The effect of the Hollywood writer’s strike thus far has been modest, evidenced mostly from the emergence of questionable reality tv pilots and gameshows onto the prime time schedule (Battle of the Choirs, anyone?)  But the strike is already threatening the traditional winter/spring pilot season, when networks invest in producing test episodes for a host of potential new shows for the fall.  Even if this archaic system is restructured, a strike lasting into the Spring would wreak havoc on the fall television lineup.

Add to this the enormous and distorting effect of presidential campaign television spending.  The Wall Street Journal estimates that “candidates, political parties and issues groups are expected to spend $3 billion this election cycle.”  Most of this will be spent on television.  These will mostly be spot purchases in local markets, but they will have a tremendously distorting effect on an industry much in need of reform.  And television depends on high-visibility content from primetime to drive overall viewership.

So the likely result may be this: billions of dollars will be spent on clumsy, unsubtle television advertising.  In order to reach the least frequent television viewers, candidates and other political ad buyers will scrap conventional wisdom on ad wear out rates (how many times a person can see the same ad before it starts to wear out and have the opposite effect intended) and oversaturate the medium.

The shame of all of this is that campaigns seem to be ignoring a huge opportunity with new media.  There are more people than ever watching video on the web.  A number of advertisers, from Smirnoff Raw Tea to Brawny have demonstrated the ability to create appealing branded entertainment with video on the web.  And if the Hollywood writers strike continues, the audience for this type of programming may skyrocket.  In addition, there are a large number of talented writers currently idle, unable to work for studios or production companies, who could still be engaged directly by advertisers.  In spite of this, web campaign spending is below relative viewership rates of television to the Internet.  Ironically, politicians may be the ones getting sold a bill of goods in this election season.

Issue: Does a funky new website point to the future of journalism?
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

There’s something new, and distinctly odd, out there on the frontiers of the Internet.  The site Truemors aims to empower ordinary citizens to spread, well, rumor.  Ideally those that are true.  Anyone can contribute, and the rules are simple - write stuff that is actually true and don’t break the law.  The result is a very eclectic stream of information which users can rate, and thus sort.  What rises to the top is the stuff the most people believe - or like.

Whether Truemors will prosper remains to be seen. But the central idea behind it - that citizens can report information directly on a joint forum - is an intriguing step forward.  The success of blogs has proven that credible reporting need not come from the most established sources.  Even mainstream media like CNN and Fox have solicited and run video taken by eyewitnesses.  Truemors tries to take the process a step further, shoving the microphone directly into the hands of the average joe.
Part of the concept has already been proven.  Perhaps one of the most important developments on the Internet has been the rise of social bookmarking with sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon.  These sites allow ordinary people to organize the Internet by explicitly selecting and tagging sites they deem worthy.  It is a much stronger approach than Google search for finding contextual information when it works, and it is one of the core ideas behind the Web 2.0 concept.

Truemors, founded by entrepreneurial guru Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start)  along with Will Mayall and Kathryn Henkens faces a high hurdle (and indeed some initial skepticism from luminaries like Seth Godin).  The result of putting publishing power into the hands of absolutely everyone is chaotic (a recent scan of the homepage contrasted stories on Dora the Explorer and the Liberty bell with an expose on a couple charged in an identity theft case.

Beyond the marketing question of whether Truemors will catch on is the bigger question of whether unmoderated citizen journalism will degenerate into gossip and innuendo or whether a Wikipedia-like effect will raise the level of contributions.  Voting on posts creates a ‘greatest’ list which is placed above the running list of posts.  But ‘greatest’ may be more like ‘best of craigslist’ than a highly combed-over Wikipedia entry: it may be more about entertainment value than accuracy.

In truth, Truemors may have just reinvented the oldest network of all - the ancient marketplace where news, gossip, rumor and innuendo walked hand in hand.