[ Our Two Cents About Your Two Bits ]

You’re in possession of some fascinating examples of branding. They’re probably scattered across your dresser or lurking in your bag. You might even have some jingling in your pockets right now. They’re the new state quarters, produced by the United States Mint.

Since 1999, the U.S. Mint has been producing quarters whose reverse sides each celebrate a particular state. The result is not only compulsively collectible, but also highly revealing of a how each state sees itself. And that’s why these quarters fascinate us: because they are an exercise in branding. Each quarter has one chance to reach an audience. Each message is set in stone...a copper/nickel alloy, actually. Like any marketing effort, each was a mix of art, strategy, and committee process. And each quarter had to please several audiences, including its governor (who determined his or her state’s design submission process) and the U.S. Mint itself.

So if we examine the new quarters the way we do other branding efforts, which ones work? Here are a few of our favorites, a few duds, and a few that fall somewhere in between.

Montana– New for 2007, this quarter is very strong. The bison skull is both visually arresting and speaks to the state’s Native American heritage, and the landscape reminds us of wide-open appeal of The Big Sky Country.

Maryland– Sadly, our home state’s quarter gets mixed reviews. Like our license plate,this coin is spare and stately. But our nickname – The Old Line State – is obscure, and our statehouse, despite its colonial significance, doesn’t seem to evoke enough of the state’s spirit.

West Virginia– We hate to pick on our much-picked-upon neighbor. But a quarter should not be a postcard of a bridge.

Florida– Florida’s Gateway to Discovery quarter neatly juxtaposes a Spanish galleon and the Space Shuttle, effortlessly spanning five centuries of history. Brilliant.

New Hampshire– Originally, the state’s choice of The Old Man in the Mountain seemed odd to those not familiar with the landmark. Now it seems like uncanny foresight– three years after the coin was minted, The Old Man crumbled. From a marketing perspective, this was luck at its height: the event received major (and elegiac) media attention, adding to the strength of New Hampshire’s brand.

Indiana– Our Design Director lives and breathes auto racing, and even he thinks this Indy 500-focused quarter lacks the appropriate gravitas.

Texas– From a design perspective, the Doric simplicity of this quarter – the star, the slogan, the state itself – is commendable. But the size of the state silhouette reminds us that Texas remains, as always, fascinated with Texas.

Alabama– Like any good marketer, Alabama uses surprise to cut through the clutter. In featuring Tuscumbia native Helen Keller, Alabama calls attention to its favorite daughter; in using Braille lettering, the state takes full advantage of the sculptural possibilities of the medium. Bravo.

Wyoming– Simply mystifying. We salute The Equality State’s record on women’s suffrage, but slapping this nickname next to a cowboy on a bucking bronco produces a thoroughly muddled piece. Perhaps all the cowgirls were modeling for other coins...

Utah– We’re excited about this upcoming quarter as well. Proclaiming itself The Crossroads of the West, Utah commemorates the Golden Spike and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad...when the West was still wild and mass transit was cool.

Your Name Here– So what about your brand? Can you distill who you are down to an image on a coin face? Try it! Can a nickname succinctly capture your essence? If you had just one chance to speak to the nation, what would you say? A brand solution worth minting is a brand solution worth a mint.

[ On Wiener Dogs, Rats & Search ]

Dachshunds are a smart, compact breed of dog designed to seek out and dispatch their even smaller and smarter adversaries: rats. This February Yum Brands had a rat problem worthy of a whole herd of wiener dogs, in the form of television footage showing rodents run amok in a New York KFC/Taco Bell. When the video found its way online, anyone could search for it. And they did.

We normally think of our favorite search engine as a faithful tool, a trusty hound sniffing out the answers we need from the Net. But like any excitable breed, search might just turn around and bite you.

Which is the real public relations lesson from the Yum Brands rat incident. As Kate Macarthur points out in Advertising Age, while the firm did make its share of typical PR mistakes – a slow response, treatment of the story as purely local, inadequate statements on the brands’ websites – the mechanics of search morphed the crisis into a fiasco. When people searched for “rats” they got Taco Bell; when they searched for “KFC” they found links to exterminators.



To avoid being in the doghouse, here’s what to remember:
• The more people visit a site, the higher it climbs in the rankings. To give your firm’s message equal billing, you need viewers to visit the sites you point them to...because they’ll already be checking out your site of disaster. A media crisis is a marketing crisis, so be sure your crisis communication plan addresses all forms of communication. It’s vital to get your message right and your click rate up.
• Be mindful of the need to advertise against negative search terms. Unhappy combinations of search terms – like a company’s name and “rodents” – can bring up damning sponsored links. You can fend off such results by buying up the relevant terms. Yum Brands seems to have taken this advice – now such a search yields zero sponsored links, instead of a who’s who of exterminators. (Over-reliance on computer-generated advertising is also unwise, even downright ghoulish. Adrants notes that when Anna Nicole’s son died, IntelliTXT ads offered new Smiths for sale at Target.)
• On the Net, mistakes are global...and they linger. At time of writing, one of the top 10 results for a Google search of “Taco Bell” involves union boycotts, and the sponsored links reference E. coli and law firms specializing in food and drug cases. Steady PR and search monitoring are always needed to offset such messages.

On the Net, the complications from poor crisis management can breed like rats...and it takes dogged persistence to sort them all out.

Unless of course,the dog dies from eating tainted pet food.

Which is why, as Ad Age and Yahoo! News report, organic pet food producers are experiencing a bonanza in the wake of pet deaths from tainted brand-name products. After all, the whole point of search is that it lets people find you. So paid-search ads drove concerned consumers to natural and organic pet food providers, whose sales have skyrocketed. Menu Foods’ debacle is a godsend to these companies, who recognize an opportunity to reach a vast, suddenly interested audience.

Thus, while organizations need to anticipate and protect themselves against potential crises, they also need to be nimble and alert to new opportunities. Disasters may linger on the Web, but golden opportunities don’t. When a competitor stumbles, ask what marketing communications tools might be used to capitalize on the moment...including, of course, search optimization strategies.

When well trained, search can be man’s best friend. Don’t let a crisis be your organization’s obedience school.

[ Baltimore: To Be Determined ]

Behind our offices there used to be a giant mural. It featured the bricks of our building melding into a stage curtain, which in turn parted to reveal the prow of the USS Constellation. The ship cut through churning water. The Inner Harbor stood proud in the background.

Actually, the mural is still there; it’s just hidden. No longer visible to cars streaming toward Baltimore’s stadiums, the mural is now part of an alley behind a new building that will house...whatever. And while new construction should be welcomed for the jobs, opportunity, and sheer energy it brings to our city, it’s sad to see this proud image of Baltimore’s sailing past covered up.

But it’s our present image that currently concerns us. By now you’ve probably had more than enough time to digest (or forget) last summer’s much ado about the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association’s tourism slogan. Bright and cheery ads, banners, and a website all trumpeted, “Baltimore: Get in on it.” From almost the moment it appeared, reactions to the campaign were...mixed, to put it kindly.

In an editorial, the Baltimore Business Journal’s Joanna Sullivan blamed the widespread resistance to the branding effort on Baltimore’s continuing “inferiority complex.” We respectfully must disagree: you can love a city and still loathe its tagline. (Similarly, Cornerstone practically runs on Diet Coke...but we vastly prefer The New Seekers teaching the world to sing in 1971 to G. Love teaching the world to “chill” in 2005.)

Meghana Kulkarni, in The Urbanite’s August 2006 issue, summed up the campaign’s central problem in a nutshell: “Seems like we answered the question, ‘What do we have that everyone else has too?’” Of the 14 icons that make up the logo, at least eight are generic to any large town, let alone a world-class city. As for the tagline, what specifically are we supposed to be getting in on? Kulkarni wisely notes
that a successful civic slogan, whether official (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”) or controversial (“Keep Austin Weird”), emblazons its city with one distinctive notion, from which the rest of its character can be extrapolated.

BACVA’s mistake was in focusing on everything Baltimore has to offer – in their own words, “the totality of the Baltimore experience” – instead of focusing on what Baltimore is – the essence of the Baltimore experience. Branding is an act of peeling away layers to find the core. Slapping on a new facade (or 14) just obscures the central work.

True, last summer is long over; in fact this summer is speedily approaching. But what’s important is what you can glean from the debacle. After all, it’s easy to nod in agreement with these principles. It’s another to apply them – to focus the same coldly critical eye on your own advertising. Are you trumpeting all that you do, or what you do best? Are you merely establishing the credentials that put you in line with your competitors, or are you shouting what makes you unique?

Perhaps this test is the most telling: when you last circulated your marketing campaign for comments, did everyone point out what could still be excised? Or did they start dolloping things back in? Sometimes, everyone getting in on something doesn’t help. In the rush to answer dueling constituencies, you can forget to address who really matters: the audience.

Meanwhile, we’re glad a new building went up behind us. We wholeheartedly want what’s good for Baltimore. But we miss viewing our sailing mural, so emblematic of this historic city’s unique charm.

Huh. “Charm.” Now there’s an interesting notion to attach to a city. Maybe one worth a campaign.

[ On Diamonds, Pencils & Corporate Chemistry ]

It’s easy to see why employees and managers get frustrated when the time comes to nail down an organization’s values. No matter how hard you work to capture your company’s unique essence, the values always seem to come out strikingly uniform and bland.

Honestly, who doesn’t value Excellence? Is any company going to say they don’t care about Character, Quality, Partnership, Communication, or Integrity? So what’s going to make your corporate values distinct?

Corporate culture. Personal connections and interactions. In short, chemistry.

The analogy is an apt one. Think back to high school. You learned that when a lot of carbon atoms bond a certain way they form a soft substance that slides apart easily: graphite (the “lead” in pencils). But under a different set of circumstances, these same carbon atoms bond another way, forming the world’s hardest mineral: a diamond.

The elements are the same. What changes is how the bonds are expressed. The resulting substances are radically different.

The same is true for organizations. Instead of chemical bonds, we mean the bonds between people – in other words,your organization’s culture. The values may be the same, but it’s your company’s culture that affects how these values get expressed...and how they get put into action.

For instance, two firms might both name one of their values to be “Communication.” A large computing firm might see Communication to mean having clear email protocols and using online discussion listservs. A small consulting firm might see Communication represented at the weekly round-table discussions attended by the whole staff.

One structure isn’t necessarily better than another, nor will it work equally as well for all companies. A diamond is useless if you’re taking the SATs. And you’d look silly exchanging engagement pencils with your future spouse. Likewise, round-table discussions might be unwieldy in our giant tech firm. And a rigid email chain won’t foster freewheeling brainstorming sessions among our consultants. The goal of clear Communication may be constant, but the path to achieving it is different for each company. The same goes for the rest of your values – Integrity, Quality, Partnership, Efficiency, and so forth.

So when the time comes to define your core values, take some extra time to look at how those values actually play out in day-to-day operations. By understanding your organization’s culture,you can track how its values are put into play,and by pointing to the values as models for behavior,you set goalposts for performance. By understanding your organization’s chemistry...how the bonds between people are forged, broken, and transformed...and how values get brought to life...you can stir up quite a reaction.

www.cornerstonemtm.com

[ On Bullet Points, Shuttle Explosions & Loving the Paragraph ]

“Executives don’t read.” That’s what we’ve been told, again and again. “They don’t have time.” “What’s the gist?” And worst of all: “Can you put it in bullet points?”

We know of one consulting firm that doesn’t even use word processing programs anymore. They do everything – everything – in PowerPoint.

We think that’s a shame. We use bullet points ourselves – in everything from office emails to the work we produce – but it’s difficult to fathom an entire workweek composed of nothing but. Besides the horrific image of flavorless slide after flavorless slide, we think it’s just bad communication...and bad business.

What gets lost with bullet points? Story. Nuance. Shading. Bullets fragment ideas and concepts. Bullets can emphasize or de-emphasize the wrong information. They masquerade as facts, when they are, in fact, just points.

Growing up, you learned to read critically. When an argument is fishy, something feels out of place. But when you read a PowerPoint slide, you have nothing against which to judge what you’re being told. What happens if the person who wrote that slide is misinformed? If they’re leaving something out? If they have an agenda?

Or what if they’re just bad at organizing? We learn to privilege information at the top and left of the page. So what happens when someone delivers a dire warning – say, about a shuttle explosion – in the bottom right?

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was damaged during takeoff by a falling piece of foam. Upon re-entry, it disintegrated, costing seven astronauts their lives. Later, The New York Times learned that a significant danger sign – the foam chunk that initially struck the shuttle was 640 times larger than anything NASA had tested for – had been flagged by engineers during a review of the initial damage. Yale professor and design information expert Edward Tufte pointed out that this crucial information was buried at the bottom of a cluttered PowerPoint slide. The alarm was there, but went unnoticed. Three years later, the shuttle program is only now getting back on its feet.

Chances are, the use of bullets isn’t going to cost your company what it cost NASA. But it could mean the difference between landing a client and losing one, or between being a step ahead of the market and being behind. So we hope the next time someone hands you a bulleted list, you don’t take it at face value. Ask to see the research. Take the time to have someone walk you through the analysis.

But it’s the larger assumption about upper-management attention spans we’d like to tackle, too. Maybe it’s true that you only read bullets. But maybe you haven’t had reason to read more.

We’d like to give you that reason. We’d like to give you a break from bullet points. We want to give you something to think about over your morning coffee – with content, conversation, and yes, even whole paragraphs. So we’ll be sending more of these short missives. We believe you have five minutes to pause, read, and reflect, and that as a smart business person, you’re hungry for the chance to do so.

www.cornerstonemtm.com