walk the line me july09r
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Unless you live on a sweet potato farm inLancaster, Pa., brands are a big part of your life.
You wake up in your combed-cotton Ralph Lauren sheets to youriPod playing though your Bose sound system. You brush your teeth
with Colgate Total Clean Mint Paste before stepping into a hot show-er and scrubbing your scalp with Burt’s Bees shampoo bar. Afterdrying off with Jonathan Adler, you brew a trusty cup of StarbucksBreakfast Blend (or maybe you prefer Stumptown, Gorilla, Lavazzaor any of the countless other specialty roasters) and pour a glass of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice. You know what you like.Your favorite brands are your favorite for a reason — you like theway they look, taste, feel. You trust them to be what you need themto be. But what if something changed? What if, for some reason, youcouldn’t find your favorite brand?
In February, Tropicana famously learned that a picture is worth alot more than a thousand words. The classic American juice compa-
ny changed its package and, among other things, removed the imageof the orange with the candy-striped straw that had illustrated the“never from concentrate” product since Anthony Rossi pioneeredthe flash pasteurization process in 1954, making it possible forfreshly squeezed juice to stay just that for three months (the packag-ing itself, the wax paper cartons commissioned by the American CanCompany, also boosted shelf life). Then one day it wasn’t so easy tofind: “The new package looked so generic,” says one customer. “Iassumed there was something wrong with the company. So I boughtthe Minute Maid instead.”
“The original design is not great design,” concedes Paula Scher, a
partner at design firm Pentagram. “It’s just familiar.”But consumers weren’t satisfied with simply switching brands.Some were outraged (surprising, perhaps, given that the actualproduct hadn’t changed), bombarding the company with emails andforming Facebook groups. It soon became clear that this was morethan a failed attempt at the “new look, same great taste” switcharoo.Tropicana quickly realized that the people buying their product werebuying more than just a carton of juice: They were buying somethingfamiliar, even nostalgic. “It’s kitsch,” says Scher. But consumers“like it because they know it: It’s your familiar old buddy.”
Walk Walk thethe
line line Brands with
cult followings
deal with the
paradox of the
passionate
By Courtney Humiston
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John Gerzema, chief insightsofficer at Young & Rubicam Group
and coauthor of The Brand Bubble,
says Tropicana underestimated thevalue of its brand, which includes
such intangible assets as logo, asso-
ciations, sounds (the Intel “ding”),
trademarks, reputation, even smells.Paul Woolmington, founding part-
ner at Naked Communications,
has gone so far as to suggest bot-tling the “clean, metallic” smell
of an Apple store: “It’s the smellof intuitive technology,” he says.
These intangible assets, accordingto Gerzema’s research, have become
increasingly important to consum-
ers over the past few decades. Usingthe patented model he calls the
Brand Asset Valuator,
Gerzema and his col-leagues determined
that brand values rose
in their contribution
to shareholder value
from 5 to 30 percentover the past 30 years.
“We have moved froma tangible to an intan-
gible economy,” says
Gerzema. “Consumers
discriminate based onemotional imagery.”
In Tropicana’s case,
Gerzema argues that the value lies inpeople’s associations with the pack-
aging: “It reminds them of child-
hood and breakfast, which is one of the most intimate times of the day.”Whether or not you agree with
his fond assessment of breakfast
(maybe your mom was in the habitof burning toast and throwing
shoes at you, and you would
like to forget both child-
hood and breakfast), it wasat least comforting to know
that you could find the juice
you like (No Pulp, Some Pulp,
Lots of Pulp, Calcium + Vitamin D,or Light ’n Healthy) and get thehell out of the cooler section before
you froze to death. Zain Raj, CEOof Euro RSCG Discovery (and decid-
edly a No-Pulp devotee), was pret-
ty thrown when the new cartons
appeared on the shelves. “I wasn’tsure if I was buying the right one
and I ended up getting the one with
‘some pulp.’ Changing the packag-ing ruined my ritual. I couldn’t
start my day the way I usually
do.” Which is, he believes, whereTropicana went wrong: Most peo-
ple probably aren’t too passionate
about their juice, but they knowwhat they like. “Tropicana made
it more difficult to buy their prod-
uct. A brand that makes things
Branch Davidian leader and polygamist David Koresh famously
tooled around Waco, Texas, in a classic 1968 GM Camaro SS.
Koresh was the perfect match for this muscle car. The testoster-
one-fueled preacher allegedly bedded hundreds of teenage girls,
bullied a flock of submissive churchgoers and fought the FBI like
his name was Rambo. Although the manly Koresh did not survive
the fiery “siege of Waco,” in which the Davidian Mount Carmel com-
pound burned to the ground, the Camaro did endure — complete
with dents from the FBI assault vehicle that rammed into it — and
was later sold at auction. Take that, bankruptcy.
It’s a foolproof marketing technique — turning customers into slav
unthinking, devoted followers of products. In other words, zombies
It’s a strategy that can create legions of pod people dedicated to
particular brand, leaving all rivals in the dust. The best customer
brand could have is an actual cult follower.
“The people who join cults are most likely to be like you,” wr
adman Douglas Atkin in “The Culting of Brands: When Customers
Become True Believers.” “The popular image of cult members is
that they are psychologically flawed individuals, gullible and des-
perate. While some do conform to this image, the majority do no
Demographically, they tend to be from stable and financially com
becoming a cult brand becoming a cult brand
Change your
brand too
much and
next thing you know,
people will
be drinking
juice from
concentrate.
David Koresh and Camaro
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harder has no place in my life.”Scher agrees. “What the design
company did was faux modernism,
so it looked like a generic prod-uct . . . . The cleanness took away
the character,” and, of course, the
familiarity. Scher argues that the
container “could have been tweakedso it maintained recognizability but
became a better designed object.”
So why did they change? Raj,who is currently working on a book
about brand rituals (brands that
are closely associated with certainbehaviors), explains the phenom-
enon, which may include the efforts
to “improve” the packaging foreverything from soft drinks to cable
networks, thusly: “Marketers get
tired of a brand decades before con-
fortable homes and are above average in intelligence and education.
They are, in fact, a desirable target audience.”
On the flipside, it seems reasonable to assume that the best
spokesperson a brand could have is a cult leader. One need look
no further than Oprah. When she puts her seal of approval on
miracle butt paste, tubes fly off the shelves.
Sure, maybe there have been a few, shall we say, unfortunate
relationships between brands and cult leaders, but the savvy
cult marketer shouldn’t be deterred. It’s hard to think of a bet-
ter product placement than the Beatles and the Manson family. Of
course, there have been other partnerships. —Richard Linnett
Be careful that a larger brand
doesn’t steal your thunder: The
Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, in
which more than 800 members
of the Jones cult committed mass
suicide, has forever been wrongly linked to Kool-Aid. The popular
phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” referring to people who blindly
follow authority, is one of the lasting legacies of the Jonestown
massacre. And yet the powdered drink that Jones laced withcyanide to kill his followers was not Kool-Aid but a knockoff rival
called Flavor Aid, a product of
the Chicago-based Jel Sert
Company. Flavor Aid still com-
mands a sizeable share of
stomach, as marketers like
to say. But nobody
says “Don’t drink the
Flavor Aid,” do they?
Rajneesh was an Indian mystic who
promoted promiscuous sexuality and
became known as the “sex guru.”
After traveling the world, he and
his followers settled in Oregon and
established an ashram that attracted
notoriety for prolific sexual hijinks,
drug use and a large collection of
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. The Bhagwan
(it means “blessed one”) bought hisfirst Corniche in 1980, had it plated
in armor and afterward demanded a
new Rolls for each day of the year,
ordering two a month from deal-
ers. All told, the Bhagwan owned
more than 100 Rolls Royces; the
commune featured a service center
staffed by Rolls engineers. The car
company was pleased, especially by
the Bhagwan’s “Rolls-Royce-a-day”
diet. “We thought this was a splen-
did idea,” an
executive told
the Associated
Press. They
were not so happy,
however, with the
Bhagwan’s taste in
customized paint jobs;
many of the motorcars
were covered in psychedelia.
o obtain a really devoted following
Jim Jones and Kool-Aid
Rajneesh Chandra Mohan Jain and Rolls Royce
Applewhite founded Heaven’s Gate, a
UFO-worshipping sect in San Diego that
believed the world would end with the
appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet. On
arch 26, 1997, 39 members of the cult,
orders from Applewhite, committed mass
icide by swallowing phenobarbital washed
own with vodka. All of them died wearing
rand new, identical, black and white Nike
apparel — shirt, sweats and sneaks —apparently in preparation to “just do it”
in the afterlife.
arshall Applewhite and Nike
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sumers do.” They are sitting in theiroffices surrounded by the brand,
thinking and dreaming about thebrand, whereas most consumers
think about it once a day (when
they pour or purchase their O.J.), or
maybe not at all.Realizing its mistake in less
than two months, (thanks, in part,
to social media’s power to generatemomentum so quickly) Tropicana
followed in the footsteps of another
infamous failure, New Coke, andwent back to the original.
Juice may, after all, just be some-thing to go with your bagel or your
Champagne, and your devotion to
the brand isn’t likely to go any fur-
ther — like, say, getting it tattooedon your back. While researching his
book, Buying In, Rob Walker, writer
of the weekly “Consumerist” columnfor The New York Times, talked to a
young man who had literally branded
himself with aPBR
logo tattoo, giv-ing the explanation: “It’s part of my
subculture.”According to Walker, PBR’s revival
as the beer of choice for a certain
segment of America’s 20-some-
things began in a skater bar inPortland. The cheap local beer went
belly-up and the bar replaced it with
PBR. What happened next was a
Shepard Fairey–worthy experimentin real-life consumer glory. The
It doesn’t take a genius account
planner to know that trace amountsof cocaine recently found in Red
Bull’s new cola product will not
bring down that brand. On thecontrary, this special ingredient is
already elevating Red Bull’s statusas an edgy product and energizing
its die-hard fan base.How does Red Bull do it? How
does it stay on top? Simple: It’s
not just a drink, it’s a way of life.In other words, Red Bull is a “cult
brand,” which any marketing egg-
head will tell you is a product that
has a special charisma, commandsunprecedented customer loyalty
and needs little to zero advertis-
ing to keep sales humming.
Cult brands are nothing new.Case in point: Remember Hadacol? At one time
it was one of the most potent cult brands around, and a
distant “coozan,” you might say, of Red Bull. Hadacol wasinvented in 1945 by Dudley LeBlanc, aka “Coozan Dudley,”
a peripatetic Cajun salesman, the Billy Mays of his genera-
tion, who was so well liked he was elected state senator.While in office, Coozan Dudley was taken ill and treated
by a doctor who spoonfed him a multi-B-vitamin drink. He
recovered, stole the recipe (and later admitted to it) and gave
a name to the new elixir by mashing up the initials of hiscompany — The Happy Day Company — and adding the
letter “L,” for LeBlanc.
Hadacol was a B-vitamin drink (mixed with nicotinicacid) that tasted foul — like swamp water, some said — but
found a huge following, just like Red Bull. Unlike Red Bull,
Hadacol was not promoted as a sports or energy drink; itwas billed as a tonic for virtually any health issue.Hadacol ads claimed the pungent syrup relieved ner-
vousness, irritability, indigestion, chronic fatigue, dyspep-
sia, loss of appetite, loss of strength, inability to sleep, lossof weight, malnutrition, skin disorders, eye disorders, gas-
siness and constipation, writes Floyd Martin Clay in Coozan
Dudley LeBlanc: From Huey Long to Hadacol, a biography of
the “Hadacol King.” Testimonials from devoted custom-ers (the brand evangelists of their day) went even further.
According to them, Hadacol could cure everything from
epileptic fits to the “after effects of a cold” (though tellinglynot a cold itself). It was even said to be an aphrodisiac and
a viable substitute for antifreeze in cars.The drink became a sensation, despite the fact that it
didn’t actually cure anything, at least not to the satisfactionof serious health professionals. Cynics claimed its popular-
ity derived from its own special ingredient: alcohol. Coozan
Dudley insisted alcohol was only used as a preservative. Theelixir contained 12 percent ethyl alcohol, as much as wine
and strong beer. Basically, Hadacol was the equivalent of a
Red Bull cocktail.LeBlanc produced his own ads, but more important, he
Big surprise. Red Bull really does give you wings, exactly as advertised.
Step Right Up Step Right Up The rise and fall of Hadac
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blue and white cans had inhabitedthe coolers of working-class men for
decades but hadn’t been aggressive-ly marketed in nearly as long. Pabst
Brewing Company had, in fact,
stopped brewing its own beer alto-
gether in 2001 (contracting produc-tion to Miller) and, says Walker, the
label had resigned itself to certain
doom: “They were essentially wait-ing for the people who drink it to
not be around to drink it anymore.”
calling it “anti-fashion fashion.”PBR became a part of their anti-
consumerist identity: an accessorylike, say, Crumpler bags, white
V-neck T-shirts, fixed-gear bicycles
and skinny jeans. By assigning
meaning to the brand based ontheir own values, it became some-
thing personal, what they wanted to
communicate about themselves tothe world. “Brands are essentially
cultural information,” says Walker,
Lacking any fresh association, itwas easy for young members of
this subculture (the very kind thatClint Eastwood’s Pabst-swilling
Walt in Gran Torino would prob-
ably scowl at) to make it their own.It became the “underdog” of beers,
says Walker, who interviewed
some of the early second-wave con-
sumers. “They liked that they weredrinking something that society
had rejected.” Woolmington agrees,
created a cultural movement around the product by staging
elaborate events called Hadacol Caravans that traveled the
country. According to Clay’s book, the caravans consisted of “seventy Hadacol trucks, twenty-five automobiles, two air-
conditioned buses for the performers, one photo-lab truck,
three sound trucks, two beauty queen floats, three airplanesand two calliopes.” The stars on hand for each event ran
the gamut from George Burns and Gracie Allen, to Mickey
Rooney, Chico Marx, Jack Dempsey, Bob Hope, DorothyLamour, Hank Williams and “Coozan” Dudley himself, whowas fast becoming a celebrity in his own right.
The caravans hawked Hadacol comic books, T-shirts, lip-
stick and water pistols. The company distributed “CaptainHadacol” cards to kids, redeemable for the drink. Coozan
Dudley hired comedians to write quips about Hadacol’s
alleged aphrodisiac properties and its alcoholic potency.
He commissioned a hit song, “Hadacol Boogie,” that wentlike this:
A-standing on the corner with
my bootle in my hand,
And up stepped a woman, said
“My Hadacol Man.” She done the Hadacol Boogie, Hadacol Boogie
Hadacol Boogie, Boogiewoogie
all the time
All of this hoopla helped crown Coozan Dudley the “mil-lion-dollar medicine man.” According to Time magazine,
Hadacol sales grossed $24 million in 1950. At the height of
the brand’s success, the Federal Trade Commission steppedin and played killjoy, ordering LeBlanc to stop advertising
the therapeutic properties of Hadacol and to cease making
claims that the drink assured good health and restored
youthful feelings. The only claim the FTC allowed LeBlanc
to make was that the drink was good for you if you needed
the ingredients in it.But that wasn’t what killed the Hadacol phenomenon.
The product did not die because it consistently reneged on
its brand promise to cure almost all ills. What brought itdown was a combination of brand fatigue and bad business
practices.In 1951, LeBlanc sold the brand to a New York financial
group for $8 million. When the new owners opened upthe company’s books, they found it had been operating in
the red, with more money spent each year on advertising
and Hadacol Caravans than the brand brought in. Also, thecompany had racked up major debt, as much as or more
than the sale price of the company, and the new owners
found themselves enmeshed in 14 major court proceedings
with creditors.The new owners panicked, eliminated nearly all adver-
tising and put a halt to the caravans. The fact that Coozan
Dudley, joined at the hip to the Hadacol brand like Jared
Fogle and Subway sandwiches, was no longer associatedwith the product didn’t help. Although Hadacol lingered on
store shelves into the ’60s, without a constant barrage of
media support and the familiar Dudley face, the fad beganto fade. On Dec. 6, 1968, after years of ownership changes
and multiple bankruptcies, the Hadacol brand was put up
for auction, the trademark was sold for $200 to a speculatorand Hadacol vanished into final obscurity.
As Coozan Dudley was fond of saying: “If you don’t tell
’em, you can’t sell ’em.” Richard Linnett
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referring specifically to the kid with
the tattoo: “The PBR logo, to somepeople, has meaning as a symbol
that relates to identity.”
Consider the identity of someone
wearing an image of Che Guevaraemblazoned on a belly-T. Michael
Casey, in his book Che’s Afterlife: The
Legacy of an Image, tells the story of a young woman he met in Argentina
who wore her Che T-shirt every day.
When interviewed by Casey and his
team, she evaded questions aboutthe Cuban revolution, but was able
to talk about the image on her
T-shirt with zeal. “She didn’t knowthat much about Che as a person,
but the T-shirt meant a great deal,”
says Casey. Since the famous photo-
graph of Guevara was taken in 1960,it has appeared, controversially, on
everything from belt buckles to
mud flaps (and countless biceps, of course). Some Che loyalists (of the
person, not the brand) say this hasminimized his achievements and his
sacrifices. Casey disagrees: “What
makes an icon powerful,” he says,
“is how the image is received. Peopleinvest their own feelings and project
their ideals onto it.... It becomes a
very personal thing — my hopes,my wishes, my dreams — and it’s a
good thing. We have to accept that
symbols change meaning; to becomedefensive about its past is to deny thepower of the present.” In that sense,
to some people, the PBR logo means
“beer” about as much as Che’s image
means “Viva la Revolución.”
Barack Obama also has been criti-cized for being less of a savvy politi-
cian and more of a brand: a brand
with a following devoted enough —a cult, if you will — to make him
the most powerful elected official in
the world. Indeed, he has all the ele-
ments of a brand, including a goodlogo with a close connection to con-
sumerism. It’s no coincidence that
the Obama logo so closely resemblesAmerica’s favorite soda cans. Scher
says that when Coca-Cola redesigned
its logo to look more modern, it start-
ed “a mini design revolution.” Pepsi,of course, followed suit, and by the
time Obama came around, people
were prepped for clean contempo-rary design. Anything “elaborate or
decorative [like McCain’s image,perhaps?] became outdated.” Caseyisn’t troubled by the duality of the
person and politician, Obama and
Brand Obama. “You can’t have one
without the other,” he says. “It has tobe sexy in some way, because these
things matter to us and they always
have. The alternative is Big Brother.”Which begs the question: Who cre-
ated Brand Obama? His campaign
or his consumers? The answer, as
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with any true cult brand, is both.Fiskars has been making scissors
since 1649. Is it any surprise that
they have developed a devoted follow-ing over the years, given how many
scrapbooks and quilts there are to be
made? Fiskars successfully tapped
into the passionate crafting com-munity in 2006 when they started
the “Fiskateers,” a community for
crafters sponsored by the brand butcontrolled primarily by the consum-
ers. “The truth is,” says Casey, “whatmost brands want to do is transcend
being a cult brand and get huge.”This can be difficult to accomplish
without alienating loyal customers.
Change your brand too much andnext thing you know, people will
be drinking juice from concentrate.
Woolmington identifies two problemsbrands face when they try to make the
transition from being a much-loved
cult brand to being a much-loved
“huge” one. First, as a brand becomes
more popular, consumers are likely toask themselves, “Do I want to belong
to a club that everyone is a memberof?” Woolmington emphasizes the
need to redouble efforts among cult
followers, or “nurture the zealot,” as
he puts it. He uses Nike as an exam-ple of both a cult and a mass brand.
“Nike feeds the sneaker pimps,” he
says, “but you can also walk into justabout any shoe store and get a pair.”
The second obstacle: “You have
to be careful when you become ‘theman’,” he says. Lose your edge,your uniqueness and someone else
will replace you. PC, for example, is
The Man to Steve Job’s Mac. Virgin
(music, airline, finance) became suc-
cessful as an extension of founderRichard Branson’s personality: char-
ismatic and provocative, in contrast to
other old fuddy-duddy brands in theindustry. (“In the beginning it was
just about the business,” Branson
pany and its sole product is inten-tionally vague, even evasive. While
the drink appears to be targeted spe-
cifically at someone — extreme ath-letes, ravers, students — the brand
identity is actually pretty nebulous.
You could argue that what Red Bulldrinkers have in common is a taste
for the edgy and faintly dangerous.
But what does this really mean?
Obviously, any attempt to articulatesuch a thing would immediately
destroy it. The great thing about amurky brand is that you can let yourcustomers fill in all the blanks.”
Is there something strange and
vaguely creepy about
the important rolesbrands play in our
lives? That we depend
on them, that we needthem, that we use them
to identify ourselves,
to communicate with
the world, to meet peo-
ple? That we give ourbrands meaning and
personality? That weform relationships with
our brands? (“People
talk to their coffee,”
says Raj, “especially if it’s Starbucks.”) That
we turn people into brands? Casey
is optimistic. “There is nothingdemeaning about people project-
ing their ideals onto something,”
he says. “Symbols have always beena way of reducing complex ideas
into something simple.” Christians
have been wearing the cross for cen-
turies. Yes, it represents a certainideology, but ask most people who
wear it around their neck what it
means to them and chances are youwill get a very different, and very
personal, response. Don’t even get
them started on why they picked the
beer they drink.
has been quoted as saying — “nowit’s about the brand”).
PBR’s success, says Walker, was
50 percent phenomenon and 50 per-cent marketing strategy: “They did
smart things with their lucky break.”
Sensitive to its consumers’ delicate
sensibilities, the company beganquietly (no giant banners or girls
in PBR-emblazoned bikinis) spon-
soring skateboarding competitions,bike-messenger gatherings and the
like in cities across the country. Itwasn’t long before the brand had a
whole new personality.A cult brand does not become
successful because it is the best or
the only. There are lots of scissorsthat cut things just fine and more
than one cheap beer on the market.
What cult brands have in common is
their consumers have filled the brandwith meaning and personality. “Not
too many successful brands start by
allowing the consumers to decide
what they mean,” says Raj. “Mosthave to establish a clear identity.…
Here’s what we can do for you.”
The less a brand tries to meansomething to a certain target demo-
graphic, the more open it is to
meaning whatever users want it tomean — as happens in the 1980
comedy, The Gods Must be Crazy,
where a tribe in the Kalahari desert
finds an old Coke bottle, and it soonbecomes an integral part of their
daily lives. Throw a product in frontof people, let them decide what itmeans and soon they may not be
able to live without it.
Walker uses Red Bull as an
example of this kind of marketing— what he calls murketing : “Usually,
the wizards of branding want to be
extremely clear about what theirproduct is for and who’s supposed
to buy it. Red Bull does just the
opposite. Everything about the com-
Pabst was
essentially
waiting
for the
people
who drink
its beer
to not be
around to
drink it
anymore.
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