Trying to be cool

I've noticed an interesting pattern in marketing articles lately: big brands trying to be cool.

1. HP's trying to be cool with a viral video and new ad campaign. From the New York Times:

(The FingerSkilz video) was revealed to be a “viral’’ advertisement from  Hewlett-Packard, the leading edge of a new global campaign that aims to imbue H.P.’s machines with some of the coolness more commonly associated with Apple.

H.P. executives say the new campaign, which includes television and print advertising in addition to a variety of edgier approaches, is aimed at shaking up perceptions of the company as slightly stodgy, an image that has been reinforced by conservative corporate brand campaigns with themes like “everything is possible.’’

Hmm, so HP wants to be cool like Apple? Ok. First, let's compare company names: HP: blah. Apple: cool. How about web site and advertising? HP: blah. Apple: cool.  Now here's a quick test. Which laptop below is cool?

Yep, you're very good. And what brand is the black computer below? Wrong, it's a Dell. Just kidding... it's an HP. But you probably couldn't tell at a glance, could you?

2. Walmart's trying to be cool by copying MySpace. Slashdot quotes AdAge:

"It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to 'express their individuality,' yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users 'hubsters' -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool."

I can't comment on this better than BL Ochman: "Watching big ad agencies (and corporations) trying to master new media is a lot like watching people who are having mid-life crises trying to look hip, cool and young by adopting the toys, tools, and language of youth. It's rather pathetic."

3. McDonald's tried to buy cool. From BBC News:

McDonald's, the world's biggest fast food chain, is desperate to keep in with the youth market and saw hip hop as the key to a piece of the action. Last year, they offered to pay artists to rap about Big Macs. The deal was cash per airplay for any song featuring a Big Macs. Not surprisingly, the idea never flew, as not a single band would take up the offer from McDonald's.

DJ Semtex, hip-hop DJ for the BBC's 1Xtra radio station, says artists don't want to be seen to be bought. "The way that they came up the scene was like 'yeah, we're going to get into this culture and we're going to exploit and make some money and you're going to buy our food'."

Ouch. Come on, McDonald's... this is so not the way to be cool.

So what makes a brand cool? Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of CoolBrands, said: 

"When we ask about what makes a cool brand, the kind of things we get back is authenticity, originality, uniqueness," he said. "These are things that people are trying to strive for. They don't want to be seen as having the same type of brands as everyone else. They're looking for brands that have that cool edge."

Authenticity, originality and uniqueness. If your brand doesn't inherently have these traits, please... don't attempt to be cool. You'll look like you're having a mid-life crisis, and you will be laughed at. You can play the "cool dad" who's still a grown-up and acts accordingly, but don't try to be 18 again. If it's important to connect with the younger audience, don't do it with your existing brand... this is the time for a new one that's created from the ground up to appeal to a different mindset.

Comments

[Jake]

I don't think that agencies in general don't get it... I think that, like the Web's introduction, many people just aren't ready for it yet, and may be rushing in as they try to teach themselves. Wal-mart is a great example of a company who didn't listen to their highly embarrassed agency when they launched that horrid campaign.

[ROHAN]

Perhaps here we get why a brand must die to come alive.

[Chris Lee]

Awesome blog entry!

It seems sooo true. Embrace your brand identity from the start and maintain that consistency: just like as humans work.

[Edward Cotton]

Nice list of recent examples. All the big guys are dipping a toe in the water of cool from time to time. The reality is that most of these are mass-market businesses, so they flirt with cool, without ever making a serious commitment because their cultures never let them.

The ones that do it best are those that give a dedicated unit autonomy to do whatever it takes, Unilever’s Axe team is possibly the best example of this.

So perhaps your next post can be on the big guys that get it right?

[Jonathan Cohen]

IBM Thinkpad X41 tablets are cool.

So are HP Media Center PCs (the ones with the dual tuners that look like stereo components).

Why aren't they better known? Poor marketing, and poor alignment with corporate branding.

Marketing does matter...and 'un-hip' companies are coming up with cool stuff every day.

[Bullshit Observer]

For a cool brand to come off cool, marketers need to take they're sweaty little paws (do paws sweat?) off the ads and let the agency and one or two client side people do what they're good at. No trust, no bling.

[Dan Creswell]

It's amazing what big companies will try to make a bit more cash isn't it?

I think cool is one of those things that you can either attempt to convey using pure spin or you can indoctrinate it into your company.

When your focus is money and minimal effort/minimal change to make more money, spin is the obvious option.

What Apple does, takes guts and can be costly and most big companies don't want anything to do with that.

[Doug Baker]

HP's is the sort of campaign that reinforces Seth Godin's view that more money placed in designing a product means that less money is needed by marketing to make it desirable. If you want something to be cool, make it cool, don't just sell it as cool.

Support of truly talented designers appears to me a good way to establish some 'cool' credibility. Take, for example, the limited edition Adicolor range from Adidas. A combination of renowned designers and a grass roots competition resulted in a clothes line that drew in people who usually avoid adidas (myself included). It further developed a particular aspect of their brand giving their fashion line a more cutting edge feel.

This campaign boasts autheticity, orginalness and uniqueness in its honest support of design and individuality.

[Graham Hill]

Jennifer

"Sad, mad and bad". That's the only way you can describe the three miserable attempts to be cool that you highlight.

They are all trying too hard to do the wrong thing. They need to think and act obliquely.

The British economist John Kay describes the concept of "obliquity" in an article in the Financial Times. As he describes it, if you want to be happy, the worst approach is to simply try to be happy. As anyone who has ever suffered an emotional break-up will testify, it just doesn't work. The best approach is to do as many things as you can to lead a fulfilling life and happiness will probably follow as a side-effect. (See http://www.johnkay.com/strategy/317).

If brands want to be cool, they should just get on and design brilliant products, that help customers achieve the outcomes they desire with ease and simplicity, and that don't cost the earth to buy and own. They should focus on what their products help customers to achieve, rather than on the narcissistic brand itself.

Coolness will have a better chance of arriving obliquely by doing all the right things and by doing them well, than by any faux attempt to pretent to look cool.

Graham Hill

[Daniel P. Sims]

I don't think the size or the age of the company matters. You don't determine if you are cool or not. It is out of your hands completely. Other people decide this for you. Didn't we work out this rule in high school?

[csven]

Authentic
Original
Unique

Not every company can be all these things. And I don't believe it's necessary. "Original"? What exactly does that mean? Is Pepsi doomed because Coca-Cola is - by virtue of chronology - considered the "original"? No. There are many facets to originality. Is Nike "unique"? Not really. They make shoes just as cobblers have made for centuries and other companies make today.

The one thing that truly matters imo is being Authentic. No one likes a fake. It's smacks of deception and no one likes being deceived. It gets the blood going in a way that being unOriginal or unUnique don't.

So if a company is honest about their product and what it is they do, and in this way are both Authentic to and Respectful of their customers, then they don't need to be Original or Unique in today's market (after all, being Authentic could also be considered relatively Original and Unique in our increasingly fake world). It certainly helps, but at the core of this is a genuine dialogue with consumers. And this is where I think so many companies are having difficulty: for decades it's been a one-way discussion. Now that consumers have both so much choice and a medium which gives them a voice, it's screwing up the established order of how things are done.

In my opinion, companies just need to remember one thing: they owe their existence to their customers. They can't forget that. They can't let their arrogance - or a perception of arrogance - interrupt that dialogue. And that perception comes with trying to think you can pull the wool over people's eyes by being fake.

So don't try to be something you're not. It's deceptive. And that's the height of uncool whether it applies to a company or an individual.

[MissBiz]

Just noted one of your past posts in my blog - the one on "blog depression". I remember reading it a year ago and it jumped out as I was writing a post for my blog today.

[Brian Fidler]

I disagree with the author in that if you currently have a "stodgy/conservative/whatever" brand that in order to resonate with a cooler/hipper audience you need to start from scratch. Apple is a good example of taking a brand that had been cool, became ordinary, and reinvented itself to be cool again.

In the 90's they had succumbed to beige box syndrome and were creating computers that had a very limited market share and weren't differentiated in product design. When Steve Jobs rejoined the company, he brought a vision that incorporated differentiated products and entirely new product categories.

I think that often, one single vision, or recognition of vision (was it Steve Jobs, or did Jobs just recognize the best of Jonathan Ivy's designs?) can totally remake a brand/company/anything.

[Diary of an Ad Man]

It's hard to dress up a pig. Hate to say it, but if the brand experience is bad, than you get a bad a brand, a la MickieD's, HP, etc.

[Mohak]

I think most of us on the pretext of being 'cool' begin to act as hypocrites.

I strongly believe in 'instant brands' and instant brand building with virals, and other guerilla and underground marketing activities.

However, what companies like HP et al don't understand is that a lot many times the perceptions engrained over a period of say a decade are hard to change in one flat stroke.

Virals are 'cool' and entertaining, but how they could dynamically and rapidly change HP's perceptions in my mind?

Customer experience, retail experience and even to the smallest newspaper insert will still talk the same 'tonality' as earlier!

Correct me if I am wrong!

Cheers

[Nina]

I don't really think that "cool" has anything to do with being that unique from thers. After all, look at all the people who buy from Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch and all the girls who have sidebangs. It's being able to pull it off that makes you cool, I think. Also, if someone is cool, a lot of the time they have money. They have the latest phone, camera, hottest clothes, etc. You get my point right?

[vaspers the grate]

This reminds me more of decaying corpses trying to resurrect, as they slip down to the brink of oblivion.

We must be sure to keep the heat on these pseudo blog bummers. We must make it extremely difficult for marketing intrusions into the blogosphere to opportunistically try to "cash in" on our peer to peer trust network.

[kcbhatt]

Regarding the comment of VasperTG, is not there a process of natural selection in blogosphere, that eliminates the opportunistic elements. Ideas good enough are difficult to imitate. Any attempt at it will be like making fool of oneself.

[Mark True]

It points out again the value in LIVING the brand rather than just ADVERTISING the brand. If you ARE cool, you don't have to TELL people you're cool.

Replace "cool" with "fast", "personal", "friendly", "sincere", "cutting-edge", "high-tech", "old-fashioned" or any other desirable characteristic and the same holds true.

It's brand ownership, not advertising that makes the difference.

[Matt Devlin]

I have a bit of professional insight into the HP FingerSkilz campaign. I work in one of HP's ad agency's, though I wasn't involved with FingerSkilz. I think that you've lumped it unfairly with your other examples.

There's an assumption that because HP made a viral they were trying to be 'cool' - as if there aren't other brand attributes that are worth being associated with.

I'm not at all sure that being 'cool' was the objective of FingerSkilz. I suspect it was much more about trying something new, entertaining and differentiating.

It's like the brand 'exercise' where you ask yourself what role your brand would play at a party. I agree that Apple would be the popular kid, but it's worth keeping in mind that even in high school not everyone liked the popular kids. Why shouldn't a brand point out the things that make it nice, entertaining, helpful or friendly?

You also imply that HP isn't significantly different from Dell and until it is it shouldn't try to use advertising to say it is. I'd say that the opposite is true - HP is a substantially different organisation and advertising is probably the best way to illustrate that.

[Emilee]

Have you seen the electronic comic books? Cool reminds me of the interactive books with sounds, touch. Could we have interactive books with scent?

[Mike Peter Reed]

Cool just means standing out from the crowd a little, not always following the herd.

Branding means burning your initials on a cows ass so they don't stand out from the crowd and are part of the herd.

Contrived cool today is tomorrow's cheese.

Cool is just ... cool. No matter where it comes from or whose logo is stamped on it.

Commodity is not cool, unless it's somehow Warhol cool. Dramatise your differentiating idea and you'll look a lot cooler. Or evil. It's a thin line.

Good luck, conglomerates!

[Jackson]

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