By Sérgio Brodsky
The futurist brand is a bit of a blur. Those outside the community don’t understand the Futures Thinking discipline and those inside have a hard time to explain what they do and how value is added from their craft. The future may be bright, but the present is a pickle.
This is a fascinating challenge and the reason why I – as a recently anointed brand futurist – came to deliver a workshop at the 5th Asia Pacific Futures Network, themed under ASEAN 2030, which focused on culture, technology and security. And, when it comes to culture, brands represent a universal language in today’s consumer society – something futurists could benefit from. This is a topic I already explored through work and then expanded on my column for Marketing Magazine and now gets recombined in the context of strategic foresight professionals.
Authenticity has been one of the most over utilized terms in business these days. Both brand managers and their agencies have emphatically shared different research pieces about how much customers value authentic brands. Yet, few have actually dropped their happy-go-lucky veneers of positive communications for more vulnerable, self-deprecating and, at times, negative communications.
In a commoditizing and incredibly predictable landscape, it is increasingly hard to define and defend a brand’s unique selling proposition when there’s nothing truly distinctive about it. For futurists, it’s quite the opposite, their distinctiveness is extremely pronounced. They have their own language, methods, associations and constructs. The problem is that this degree of complexity is hardly understood, making futurists undervalued and even mocked at times.
Moreover, Futures practitioners often have a blended background with most of them transitioning from a foundational career and into the Strategic Foresight field. In my workshop, we had educators, engineers, business people and many other backgrounds. Thus, the need to forge a clear professional identity that denotes value, provides reassurance and establishes its area of domain is of utmost importance
This struggle to communicate their worth in a compelling way, can certainly be addressed… my suggestion was to embrace such weaknesses and turn them into superpowers. But how can this make sense?
Those who watched Pixar’s animation Inside Out, will remember that four out of the five main characters represented negative emotions. Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness and Joy were not only fictitious characters, but the actual makeup of the most basic emotions hardwired in our brains.
According to a Fast Company article entitled This Is Why We Default To Criticism (And How To Change), Dr. Julia Haber, clinical assistant professor of Organizational Behaviour at Fordham University states “The human tendency for negative bias evolved over time to help our ancestors survive by being responsive to potential threats. As such, negative stimuli in our brain are processed almost instantly, ensuring it’s stored in our long-term memory.” On the other hand, positive experiences have to be held in the brain for at least 12 seconds before they are stored as long-term memory.
And when capturing audiences’ attention is one of our biggest challenges, why not drop the mask and cash in?!
Or, in other words, it’s very easy to remember the last few bad experiences we may have had at a restaurant or hotel or high street. But we really need to make a concerted effort to remember a nice experience. And, realistically, experiencing something extraordinarily positive is not common and hardly cost-effective.
Creating bad memories of your brand is certainly not the point I’m trying to make. But a memory from something that went wrong could certainly have a very positive effect. For example, few Hollywood A-listers would have a brand stronger than Jennifer Lawrence’s. Yet, when J-Law tripped over her dress just before collecting an Oscar her personal brand valuation went through the roof. By elegantly smiling at a moment of total vulnerability, Lawrence moved from one of the most loved to THE most loved Hollywood celebrity.
How can it be? The explanation lies in social psychology through a phenomenon called “Pratfall effect”, which is our tendency for attractiveness after an individual makes a mistake or has vulnerabilities openly exposed. At first glance, this may sound weird but if we think about this for a moment, we’ll remember that the people we like the most (a.k.a. friends) are those with whom we’re able to share our weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and embarrassments. Simply put, those we can authentically interact with and relate to.
But does it work for brands? Can brands really be authentic to the point of exposing themselves and becoming more likeable and… profitable?! This takes courage and is certainly possible.
Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, holds a manifesto that is overly negative calling their people…The crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. Clearly, thinking different enabled the company to earn different (and better) too.
Dove has been taking a similar approach via its “Real Beauty” long-running campaign by putting contrasting messages on the same creative – ugly spots/beauty spots; wrinkled/wonderful; fit/fat– and turning negative elements into positive memories.
Burger King went the full length to sadistically remind people that the brand takes its flame-grilling unique selling proposition seriously through a series of print ads showcasing real episodes of some of its restaurants in flames and smoke with firemen, hoses and the whole shebang!
Burger King Flame Grilled Poster Ads – credit: Fortune
For my fellow futurists, I put a confronting mirror against them and challenged them to embrace some of the perceived weaknesses to their own benefit. The below quadrants represent the results of a small research I conducted to understand the perceptions of the futurist brand.
The horizontal axis informs whether foresight efforts are perceived to be made for the greater good or, at the other extreme, for selfish intellectual pursuits. The vertical axis informs the gradient of futurists being perceived as super-smart given their capabilities or just dumb due to disputed views on the application of their craft. And, within each of the quadrants the caricatures that must be addressed.
The initial reaction was shock, immediately followed by laughter and positive nods. That continued with 40 minutes of transformational reframing from participants that were divided into groups according to the quadrants they identified the most.
The ‘Incomprehensibles’ rebranded themselves as ‘time and knowledge translators’, the Charlatans became ‘Charming Chameleons’, those deemed ‘Irrelevant’ reframed themselves as ‘Determined Lifelong Learners’ and, finally, the ‘Paranoids’ derived new meaning as ‘Alert Dot-Connectors’. More than just coming up with new descriptors, groups developed taglines, logotypes, manifestos and proof-points backing their reimagined brand. I was worried about being kicked out of the room from such confrontation and this outcome went beyond my very own preferred scenario.
Futurists are incredibly smart, considered, kind and inspiring people. Their work was never so important. Futurists project planetary solutions for the most pressing issues confronting all of us in the Anthropocene. However, the lesson my brand strategy foundational career can share is that what really matters is the communication of our own narratives.
For those who were not able to join the workshop and understand why having the audacity to embrace our vulnerabilities can be a powerful form of communication, here are some questions to ask yourselves:
- What has or risks commoditizing your personal perception?
- To whom are you losing business opportunities because of your professional image?
- Are others able to engage in meaningful conversations about what you do without cynicism?
- Most importantly, can your mom clearly understand what you do for a living?
If your answers indicate the need for reinvention and the more traditional avenues of ‘selling your brand’ and business value are not delivering expected returns, then just embrace those vulnerabilities. The same weaknesses that get us stuck in that “used future” are those able to propel us to desired ones. The future may be imagined but reality bites. Authenticity is not about forceful smiles, esoteric discourses or Pollyanna-like attitudes, but the trials and tribulations facing us every day. Accept that and start communicating today your prosperity of tomorrow.
About the Author:
Sérgio Brodsky (L.LM, MBA) is Founder and Principal of strategy consultancy SURGE, Marketing lecturer at RMIT, Columnist and Editorial Board Advisor at Marketing Magazine, Columnist at The Fifth Estate, Chairman of the prestigious The Marketing Academy, alumni, and recipient of multiple awards and honours in the marketing, media and advertising industry. He can be followed on twitter @brandKzar and www.sergio-brodsky.com
