Volume 39: The idolatry of efficiency & dancing on pins.

1. What other people are working on blows my mind.

Tl;dr: So many interesting conversations, thank you.

So, after last week’s catharsis via send button, I had well wishes and quite a few conversations with people I either haven’t talked to for a very long time or have never really had a chance to talk to before. It’s fascinating to see how different people come at the same topic from different places. From building new businesses focused on regenerative economics to how we push capital to embrace a more encompassing approach to business, to seeking a new set of incentives and measures to guide the capitalist system as a whole. Phew.

What I found most interesting from all my conversations is that the idolatry of efficiency, the financialization of everything, and the perverse scenarios this creates are common themes. The story of the pear grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, and eaten in the USA neatly encapsulates the common-sense defying brittleness of efficiency as applied to international supply chains. (I also never for a second thought I’d ever have a fascinating conversation about the perils of industrial-scale washing machines in Mongolia. But I did.)

Taken more narrowly, the lauding of efficiency above all else is something I see all the time in the marketing sphere. Marketing is meant to be a function that creates value, but this view is increasingly rare even among marketers. It’s much more common to see marketing defined not by its potential to create value, but through its propensity for waste. A philosophical position where efficiency is the only metric that matters (hello marketing ROI) that then creates huge issues with how effective marketers can be in delivering the business strategy, growing the brand, and acting as a meaningful driver of value to both customers and shareholders.

More on this to come.

2. The Great Diversion. Cause for optimism?

Tl;dr: Are our savings really just latent demand in disguise?

One of the single most notable and ongoing impacts of CV-19 is that many of the experiences we used to spend our money on, like restaurants, flights, hotels, concerts, professional sports, etc., are now notable only by their absence. This begs the question of what happened to the money we used to spend on these things.

I call it the Great Diversion, and put simply the money has broadly gone to two places. First, we’ve been spending some of it on our homes. This is why retailers like Home Depot and Best Buy have done so well alongside more obvious candidates like Amazon. Second, we’ve been saving it, which is why the US savings rate jumped to an incredible 33.5% in April from a long-term average of just 7.5%. (Although it has slowly declined since then)

The real question now is, what will happen to that saved money in the future? While at least some of it is there to protect against uncertainty (as the media quite rightly points out), I also believe a significant tranche is waiting it out until experiences are back again, which has some potentially huge implications.

If the money that looks like savings is actually a backlog of latent demand for experiences, then any economic improvement coming out the other side of the pandemic can be faster and more explosive than people currently believe. If people rush to do the things they’ve missed out on just as soon as they feel safe to do them again, there won’t be an empty seat in the house. This means cities like New York being (wrongly) written off could potentially move quickly to a more sustained renewal momentum. Already cruise holidays, ground zero for CV-19 infections in March, have seen record bookings as latent demand and a desperate desire to be anywhere but home kicks in.

So, is that a ray of hope? Maybe. There’s no doubt that our current economic situation is dire and many people are living at the edge of the margins. But if a big enough chunk of the money that looks like it’s being saved is, in fact, a latent demand for experiences, then it’s entirely possible we’ll see a more explosive return to growth than anyone expects.

3. Dancing on the head of a pin of differentiated distinctiveness.

Tl;dr: So much energy devoted to the largely irrelevant.

Anyone who designs logos, visual systems, branded experiences or anything that helps a brand stand out should really read Byron Sharp’s book “How Brands Grow.” In it, you should pay particular attention to how he frames the role of distinctive assets and their importance in growing a brand. It provides a language to be used with clients that can help re-frame loosey goosey, arty farty graphic design narratives into something hard enough and business-oriented enough for a non-visual client to see the value of standing out and looking and feeling different compared to competitors.

But after reading Professor Sharp's words and understanding the broad thrust of his argument, you should feel free to ignore much of it because, like many other business authors, he tends to dance on the head of a pin for effect.

Unlike the binary separation between “strategic” and “non-strategic” Prof. Sharp espouses, the practical truth is that in most cases brand differentiation and distinctiveness are the sum of small differences that are often intangible and emotional in nature. Of course brands like Adidas and Nike are similar in that they are both targeting the same broad market, and as a result are often interchangeable with each other (If you expect to buy Adidas sneakers but end up buying a pair of Nike’s instead because they were in your size, it doesn’t particularly matter to most people), but this does not mean the only thing differentiating them are the logos and whatever ad-campaigns they happen to be running.

When I work with clients, I try to treat differentiation and distinctiveness as together and the same. These are not somehow binary opposites, they’re complementary factors in any brand strategy and as a result they are both strategic. How you position a brand helps drive permission and outlines the direction of where you are going and what you want to be known for. How this is symbolized via your logo, design system, name, or any other distinctive asset should be intrinsic to this strategy as opposed to somehow extrinsic and separated. (Although sadly, this separation is all too common at both clients and agencies)

Now, surely you might think this is as obvious as it sounds, but often it is not, because we tend to artificially separate things that are quite nuanced through arbitrary lenses like “strategy” and “creative,” which then results in a series of unfortunate side-effects as visually incompetent “strategists” and strategically impaired “creatives” struggle to jointly create something that holds together with any kind of cohesion without ever actually talking to each other about it.

So, rather than continuing to dance on the head of a pin, let’s break down the walls created by these arbitrary definitions and instead focus on all of the things that will make the brand stand out, differentiate, and be distinctive at the same time.

As an aside, the sheer nonsense of these arbitrarily narrowing definitions is why I absolutely hate being referred to as a brand strategist, a term I try very hard not to use myself.