The Anti-Marketer

All the conventional wisdom in marketing says that building a strong brand is your key to success in business. In fact, building a strong brand is the key to success in any endeavor, including non-businesses, like churches.

Brands are the ultimate straw men, and quite an achievement. Basically a brand works like a word in the language. The sound by itself doesn't mean much, if anything. Everything that gets put into a brand is artificial. It's completely made up by humans communicating this idea, trying to get it ingrained in other people's minds. Generally, the more money you spend, the more people's heads you can get into. Branding success isn't necessarily sales. It's getting everybody to associate your product with an identified need. It's getting embedded in everybody's mind, that when they have problem A, they get an X. [X being the brand name, and not the generic name for the item.] Viral marketing can have a big impact for little dollars spent, but it can also sometimes backfire, creating unwanted associations with your brand, such as illegality at worse [cf. Aqua Teen Hunger Force], or illegitimacy [cf. YouTube vs. Viacom] in some cases.

A brand is like any other word in the language, but on steroids, because people want you to learn this word. No one gets paid if you learn "ignominious" (Merriam Webster's Word of the Day 11 July 2008) but someone gets paid to teach you "Bacardi Mojito."

Anyways. So much for what brands are supposed to do. Now for my idea on the anti-brand. What if there was a thing that was un-pin-down-able. What if there was a thing out there, a thing that had no set spelling, no set definition, and no way to brand it? Could it still be made into a marketing success? I have to believe that yes, it could, and once it was done, it would be amazingly successful. Essentially, this would be something totally new, something that's never been thought before. See my previous post on the name of God for some similar thoughts. But basically I want to start a brand that is never spelled the same way twice. I don't really care what product it is. It could even be a religion, for all I care, but it would be the ultimate anti-brand.

In a way, it would be using all of the traditional principles of branding. You'd pay someone to try to educate the public on the brand, but once you get it going, people would educate themselves. There's nothing people like better than being on the inside.

Here's one of my favorite examples. Take E. E. Cummings. Notice what I did there? Most people think that the "correct" way to write the poet's name is with lower-case Es. People will even take time out of their schedules to correct someone on the spelling on the internet. And yet there's not a lot of evidence that Mr. Cummings himself ever signed his name this way. He had his own opinions on capitalisation, but as far as his name went, he didn't seem to have this idea that his name should be always written with lower-case Es. Another great example is Prince. People go crazy when somebody famous changes their name. He changed his name to a symbol, and everybody was saying "what are we supposed to do now?"

Heck, maybe my great new idea isn't so new after all. I mean, look at what's been done by Sean Coombs and Jennifer Lopez. What? You don't recognize those names? How about P. Diddy and J-Lo?

Still, even these experimental artists have to stick with a particular brand for at least a small period of time. They change the brand though, and the fans go wild. I don't know if you need a huge, dedicated fanbase to start with, but I do know that this name-changing thing does fan the flames of fame. People who weren't interested in you before are suddenly asking "what's the meaning behind this change? Should I be interested in him now? Is he reinventing himself? I liked/didn't like the old Puff Daddy, but maybe I'll like/dislike P Diddy. I'd better take a listen and find out." A name change is news.

But there are practical reasons for changing your name from time to time. People love putting things in categories. Puff Daddy made one kind of hip hop music. [Is it hip hop or rap? I probably shouldn't be using him as an example so much, because I know absolutely nothing about his music, only that he's a guy who changed his name a lot.] P Diddy might make a slightly different kind of hip hop music. And Sean Coombs is the millionaire producer.

Prince, on the other hand, had his name changed over issues of copyright and ownership of his name, if I have the story correct. That's another can of worms though.

Which brings me to my blog. Problem is, people want things categorized. If I'm going to get people to read my blog (and no one has even seen it yet), I might want to categorize things so that they can find the topics that interest them. In fact, it might even be preferable to have multiple blogs, multiple identities blogging about multiple issues. As you might be able to see from the few scant entries so far, my thoughts are kind of wide-spread.

So a blog with a changing name, or a name that's never spelled the same way twice, could work, or it could be a total dismal flop. I don't even see how it could technically be done, except if I just made a new account every week and people had to go find it. I'd use a different provider every week too. No, that's not really what I want to apply this idea to. Maybe there is no perfect model product that this idea can work on, but I'm willing to watch what floats by in the stream of life to see if anything fits the anti-branding model.

Stay tuned, I guess.