#[translation takes a long time and does not match the intended vision for this project] path 1: no global release -> region restricted

[mihotose]

[screenshot of google play store saying rinkura is not available in your region] staff literally want foreigners to die

[mud-on-the-turntable-blog]

Nana Grizol - Love It Love It (2008, Folk Punk / Indie Rock)

Hi! Nice to meet you! We are Max and Michayla, and this is the first post of our music review blog, Mud on the Turntable. The way our reviews work is one of us will recommend the other an album, and we both write some interesting things about the album separately. Read both of them, or just one of us if you like one of our particular writing styles, or neither if you don’t like either. Our first album is one Max suggested, Love It Love It by Nana Grizol. Enjoy!

Max + Michayla! xox

Michayla’s Review

Circles ‘Round the Moon

Feels like walking into your great-aunt’s yellow-walled kitchen at the break of day in the height of August. There is a hand-painted ceramic fruit bowl sitting on the counter full of oranges and grapefruit and limes. Your aunt is making pancakes and the scent of morning air, fresh cut grass, lavender, and clean sheets wafts in through the open windows while the warm morning sunlight pools onto the floors and cabinets and walls.

Colours: #f7f499/rgb(247, 244, 153), #ff693f/rgb(255, 105, 63), #68b233/rgb(104, 178, 51)

Tambourine - N - Thyme

Feels like floating suspended in deep aqua water, glittering fractals of light and swirls of infinitesimally small bubbles dancing around your body, framing you, frozen in a soft scream, watching the surface and the murk around you, but at peace with yourself, so beautifully suspended in fluid water. The smell of mossy dirt and powdered sugar on the tip of your tongue, neon lights shimmering in the distance, far, far away.

Colours: #0d7d99/rgb(13, 125, 153), #e20fbc/rgb(226, 15, 188), #c7f736/rgb(199, 247, 54)

Less Than the Air

Limoncello coloured with patches of red seeping through the page, like sun hitting your eyelashes while walking down an old dusty path, a long, hot sidewalk home, and walking through the front door of your house. Old maple floors lead into your living room, cream walls, pockmarked, covered in part by white linen curtains. You put on a record and dance barefoot in the living room. It feels like light, and the way it blurs your vision when it hits you like a camera lens. Tastes like fairy bread and rosemary.

Colours: #fff0a5/rgb(255, 240, 165), #d60000/rgb(214, 0, 0), #ad7c2d/rgb(173, 124, 45)

Motion in the Ocean

A soft blush pink set against ivory countertops. You find yourself getting ready for a party you never intended on going to, shell jewelry, drops of gold falling from your fingers like tears, the sky is darkening to indigo outside your window. Counting minutes on your fingers only to find you’ve run out far more times than it takes to eat the peaches your mother brought you late at night. Waking up tired and wishing for the sun, the taste of cold water and soft kisses, a memory of a dream.

Colours: #f2cbcb/rgb(242, 203, 203), #fcf6e3/rgb(252, 246, 227), #16074f/rgb(22, 7, 79)

Voices Echo Down Thee Halls

Stopping at a tiny diner along the highway, the vinyl seats are a pale minty-olive, you lean against the wall, faded highway signs and ancient greeting flash before your eyes, technicolour in the key of static radio waves, lying on the pavement, the sun beats down as you roll into the gravel, the dirt. Asphalt and car fumes, toasted tomato sandwiches and too much salt, wooden car panelling and the wrong colour of carpet.

Colours: #5faf56/rgb(95, 175, 86), #d1a877/rgb(209, 168, 119), #ef410b/rgb(239, 65, 11)

Stop and Smell Thee Roses

Like picking daisies in the overrun backyard of your childhood best friend’s house, dirty white picket fence set against mud and grass and a rain-heavy sky. Your laughter feels like home in her hands and you remember the sound of so many of you, running out the screen door, all strawberry-red-stained fingers and polaroid photos and charcoal smouldering in the fire pit, notes scribbled in pencil on loose-leaf paper, store-bought bread sticky on your teeth. The moment retakes you and you fall to your knees and smile and the first drops of rain hit your face.

Colours: #d8c302/rgb(216, 195, 2), #9598a0/rgb(149, 152, 160), #ffffff/rgb(255, 255, 255)

Tiny Rainbows

The rain clearing up and leaving sparkling puddles in the cracks in the pavement around your school, a warm september, you dive in and the droplets fall everywhere except your eyes, a rubber raincoat and not a single lie. Like falling down and finding yourself,a loving embrace after a cold winter day, fresh fruit on your lips, and the smell of coming home.

Colours: #05000f/rgb(5, 0, 15), #d3287b/rgb(211, 40, 123), #ff9011/rgb(255, 144, 17)

Everything You Ever Hoped or Worked For

Watching the sunset burn bright and melt down on another’s face, running away and finding joy in the places you’ve been. Crickets humming along to the beat of your footsteps and lulling you to sleep, to dream of stars and new beginnings at 2 in the afternoon. It tastes like bubblegum and sunshine, spilling down your chin from the back of your glass, bottle green, a telescope to where you’ll be, soon.

Colours: #65b277/rgb(101, 178, 119), #ff4e02/rgb(255, 78, 2), #abad53/rgb(171, 173, 83)

Broken Cityscapes

Washed out denim, sleeping with your jacket and shoes on, preaching holy words in the back alley to the birds, scattering seeds, soft and teardrop shaped, a touch of arange, rosy edges. Windchimes in the distance as they flock on the telephone wires and the words fade out, your hands dry and cracked but worth the smiles of the living, light seeping through the cracks in the clouds on a morning of second chances. The taste of cold tea chokes the back of your throat, garden carrots and lake water up your nose.

Colours: #9398c4/rgb(147, 152, 196), #e08247/rgb(224, 130, 71), #d9d4dbrgb(217, 212, 219)

The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said

Deep saturated garden greens not properly captured behind a grainy sepia photograph. Making notes on old graph paper, left on the desk in the unfinished attic, the trees tapping on the windows as the daylight pours into the room and into you, the exposed wooden beams house secrets and grocery lists, your mother told you to take out the trash, but that was five years ago today. You find comfort in eating cereal for lunch and all those things you would do as a child, now grown, now finding the light.

Colours: #543722/rgb(84, 55, 34), #0b5111/rgb(11, 81, 17), #e0e2b3/rgb(224, 226, 179)

Untitled Hidden Track

Screeching to a halt on a grid road just to see the stars, pen in spilled everywhere after your pen broke, you run and hide, the smell of acetone and burnt toast follows. It feels like shoving everything you wn off a desk and into your backpack and running, tears or blood or sweat running down your cheeks.

Colours: #0a0047/rgb(10, 0, 71), #f4fc58/rgb(244, 252, 88), #ff2b2b/rgb(255, 43, 43)

Overview

Overall, this album feels like falling into a pool of sunshine, and filling your lungs with it. Every song feels like another wave washing over you, the endings of each track hit like breaking the surface of the water for a gasp of air before going under again. If you needed a pick me up, try this one shot injection of good vibes, sunlight, and punchy musical citrus.

Anywho, congrats if you made it through that entire review! If you’re curious about how the songs translate into colours through my synesthesia, go on and copy/paste the colour codes into Google’s handy “colour picker” (just google it and then chuck the bits with a # into the top line of the colour picker) and it should work. I think. . .

Cheers!

Michayla Siwak

Max’s Review

Very rarely do I feel like I am the target audience of an album. However, whether this is actually true or not, Nana Grizol’s Love It Love It is certainly one that matches how I currently feel at this stage in my life.

All throughout this record, there is a sense of nostalgia and bittersweetness that I just couldn’t shake while listening to it. This emotional impact is noticeable from the very first song, “Circles ‘Round the Moon”. It represents a type of fantasy that I, and probably many other 18-year-old music fans who are scared of, yet excited about the intimidatingly massive world they’ve been thrust into, have quite often. Yes, the track tells a story of young relationships and figuring all those out, but it also describes leaving the big city for some place of solitude and simplicity in nature. It’s a beautiful thing really.

Musically, this feeling of homemade simplicity is reflected in every track. Far and away my favourite musical aspect of this album is the horns that will often come in and add to the pretty intense emotional impact this album has. The little imperfections and human-ness that is added by these wind arrangements serves as another tool to emphasize the feelings I’ve been writing about so far. Beautiful swells of trumpets cause your stomach to do little flips of excitement and emotion in songs like “The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said”. They add so much to the crescendos and dynamic changes throughout the album and are an indispensable part of the project as a whole. The songs all feel organic, like they’re being played by a group of friends in the background while you’re at some house party, stoned out of your mind and feeling insecure about the stupid shit you say in front of individuals of your preferred sex.

“Motion in the Ocean”, a huge highlight on the album for me both lyrically and musically, resonates with me more than almost anything else on this record. Lines like “It seems that we are clams inside our shells / Side by side on rocks we feel the tide as the sea contracts and swells” emphasize the feeling of powerlessness an 18-year-old Canadian who just failed his first year of university in a city of 2.463 million people (as of 2016) can feel sometimes. Yes, perhaps many of these lyrics are a tad on-the-nose and almost approaching cliché, but that adds to the beauty of it. Does this really make the messages and emotions conveyed by Love It Love It any less powerful or have any less meaning? These emotions and themes feel so genuine it’s hard to hate them, as much as the cold, cynical, pretentious arsehole in me wants to. What can I say? I can’t help but like and relate to this dumb little album. It’s great.

Yeah, sure. There’s lots of folky indie rock out there that will give you these kind of feels. I’m sure there are thousands of bands like this that try to do the same things. I can’t call this album revolutionary, or even especially fresh and different. No, the power in this album lies in its consistency and lovability. It fits very comfortably in a genre and mood that’s been done to death, but the playful, casual arrangements, lovably self-deprecating yet optimistic lyrics, and complete relatability to this young, confused college student make it pretty damn special in my books. Listen to it with some friends in the forest and let the stresses of post-adolescent mediocrity float away from you for a bit. At the very least, you’ll feel a helluva lot less alone after giving this a spin.

Perhaps this was a very fitting album for our first review in the gargantuan community of music reviewers. It’s pretty hard to recommend a better album for a couple of kids just starting their journey into a brand-new world who have no fucking clue what we’re doing. Anyway, I hope you enjoy our reviews.

Love,

Max Gilmour

Bandcamp

[cocoeventsfdec521-blog]

The Ugly Truth About 360 video booth rental

 Exactly how to Plan the most effective Event in 10 Hassle-free Steps

 Wondering just how to plan an event? Certain, thinking about it may experience a little like trying to research alchemy. You start with merely a vision and a finances, then you transform it right into an event filled with visitors and moving components.

Depending upon the form of event, lots of details are going to vary. Yet no matter what, there are actually normally ten steps you can trust in the quest from idea to shindig.

Below our company have actually rounded up those measures, alongside loads of tried as well as true tips for planning an event. Good luck! 

Align on the event purpose with stakeholders.

Planning a successful event starts by identifying that participants are actually searching for greater than an event-- they're looking for an adventure. And also to make an adventure, every little bit of part of the event needs to map Visit the website back to the purpose, from the site to the meals.

Establishing that objective begins through working with essential stakeholders to figure out why the event needs to have to occur. We assume Marriott's "Meetings Pictured" platform does a terrific task of boiling this concept down to seven prospective objectives:

    Celebrate-- Commemorating a success or milestone (Instance: One millionth customer occasion)

    Make a decision-- Describing methods or even a road onward in some manner (Example: Quarterly board appointment)

    Inform-- For the reasons of professional or instructional growth (Instance: SaaS consumer conference)

    Ideate-- Integrating to generate new techniques or ideas (Instance: Internal concept sprint)

    Network-- Produce options for people who may share popular enthusiasms to hook up (Example: Tradeshow)

    Create-- Guests work together in the direction of a details objective (Instance: Volunteer event)

    Ensure-- Interacting brand new offerings or ideas to generate wish amongst a brand-new viewers (Instance: Item launch party)

Exactly how will you assess results?

Among the most important pieces of working along with stakeholders is to align on just how you'll establish the effectiveness of the event based upon the objective. While participation is actually a mark of success no matter the meeting function, excellence normally has numerous layers.

As an example, if the objective of the event is actually to ensure a brand new product, the step of effectiveness is actually more than likely heading to be actually the amount of tops created for your purchases group.  While for an event where the objective is to enlighten, a key action of results are going to likely be just how well material translates in to attendee engagement.

Your effectiveness as the event planner relies upon your potential to not only develop a productive event, but also your capability to interact that success to stakeholders based upon mutual functionality signs that reveal event ROI.

Secure your event spending plan.

You event relies on the objective coming from a visionary perspective, but when it involves execution, the truths of what you can accomplish boil down to your event finances. That number is most likely arising from your stakeholders, and also there's certainly not constantly heading to be actually wiggle room. Yet that is actually certainly not to mention you can't discuss.

Tips for bargaining a bigger event finances

When it pertains to bargaining an event spending plan, the foreign language stakeholders communicate very most fluently is records. Unfortunately, if you do not possess previous events under your belt, you perhaps do not possess any information on hand to create your situation.

To receive the budget you prefer, you are actually going to need to place a little extra effort in in advance. Arrange every part of your event (our experts'll reach this in the upcoming section!) that requires invest, and feature a taught prophecy on how much it is actually visiting set you back to carry it out well. After that comes the absolute most vital part. Inquire!

While you might certainly not have the capacity to haggle sufficient of a boost to shut the void almost everywhere, you may be able to comply with in the center with a little added budget the items you appreciate many.

Exactly how to plan an event finances

For a typical event, the majority of your amount of money is actually heading to approach the venue rentals, meals and beverage expenses, and A/V needs. But there are plenty much more where those originated from! Only check out the infographic below that our team craft utilizing exclusive poll data gathered by Social Tables.

When you are actually planning your event budget, are sure that you are actually featuring each of these pieces in your quotes to prevent going over budget plan.

Pro Pointer: Referring pricing problems, there are concealed prices to keep an eye out for, including late printing projects, or extra audio/visual sources. Price quote anywhere from 3-10% of your overall prices as well as feature within your spending plan to guard you, in the event you receive any sort of terrific concepts, or add-ons that could happen after your preliminary finances.

Figure out who your potential guests are actually.

Now that you understand "why" you are actually planning the event, it's opportunity to find out "that" needs to come. That's usually a question of 1) that's visiting gain from the function of the event or even 2) that needs to have to be present to function in the direction of a goal.

For tiny events where you recognize your viewers, putting together as well as getting to a visitor listing may be straightforward. But also for much larger events like a seminar or a community-wide event, the participant pool is actually likely to become a lot extra dynamic.

The energy of guest identities

If you are actually planning a large event, your prospective guests likely have various preferences, desires, learning designs, and so on. So administering the exact same formula across the board at any type of stage of the event direct would certainly suggest weakening just how properly you are actually taking on any type of offered person.

The larger as well as even more complicated the reader, the extra handy it can be to bucket potential attendees right into people based upon commonness. Using these identities to create targeted strategies essentially leads to additional tailored expertises that have more powerful entice people that you are actually attempting to connect with.

A real-life instance of just how to plan around people

The event knowledge company Experient makes use of a collection of 20+ event personas to assist event organizers get a better comprehend of attendee inspirations. At a latest meeting organized by the provider, coordinators put a few of these identities to utilize in their own planning to make special experiences for each and every.

Some of these characters was the "be-wellster," the type of participant who is quite concentrated on wellness and also holistic health and wellbeing. For this character, the Experient staff intended operates, yoga sessions, healthy meals, and also even breakout time for in-session mind-calming exercise.

Certain, your event might not be as progressed as Experient's, however every event can gain from some personalization. The "that" riddle consistently has more than one response when you aim to the upcoming level.

Locate a location that fits your event function (and also finances!).

A wonderful place choice can easily boost attendance through as long as 80% depending on to a current research study! But that is actually just one small part of why it is actually a big deal. It also has huge ramifications for the success of the material distribution as well as total attendee interaction.

An easy means to think of selecting a site is actually setting show business for a play. You can't possess a great enjoy with the inappropriate stage set up, thus what is actually the excellent backdrop for your certain objective? As well as just as notably, is it heading to fit your finances?

    "It's like making show business. What type of sense perform you prefer the stage to have when your participants show up? It has a direct influence on their adventure."

Christine "Shimo" Shimasaki, CDME, CMP, President 2Synergize, Inc.

. Thankfully, the web has made the search a lot easier, specifically along with the increase of site internet search engine. Planners can match up sites, filter results based on event specifics, as well as even provide eRFPs (digital ask for proposition).

For larger events, there's also the added possibility of collaborating with the CVB (events & & website visitors bureau) of a range metropolitan area. Significant urban areas make use of income tax amount of money to create these non-profits, which aid hook up events along with places at no charge to planners.

Think about costs, dates, and space.

Wondering exactly how to pick an event place that's really visiting operate? Usually, a you may locate a wonderful fit for your event through considering it in regards to "costs, times, and room."

Begin along with rates.

Your place choices are actually limited by your economic truths (we don't need to tell you that!), so the hunt starts below. Perform a little study and also receive a sense of the types of locations that fit your spending plan. While you will not know the exact quote for your event yet, you should have the capacity to find out sufficient to judge if it is actually an option.

Beginning putting together a listing of these locations without way too much scrutiny apart from being sure they have a space big (or even tiny!) enough to match your necessities. The other components our experts cover are mosting likely to aid you narrow traits below right here.

Shorten by thinking about area.

When you were coming up with your first listing, you took a look at ability, however it's important to deal with how the area will definitely match the extra particular requirements of your event past simply headcount.

Are you going to need to have outbreak areas to manage treatments at the same time?

If individuals are arising from out of city, will they have the capacity to travel certainly there simply sufficient?

Do you wish the capacity to make use of an outdoors event caterer?

You will not quite have the specifics you require to select between finalists, yet it's these kinds of concerns pertaining to "space" that are actually heading to help you come to that aspect.

Time to speak times.

At this point, you possess a little checklist of places that you presume can probably work effectively for your event. The ultimate filter that's mosting likely to help you limit it to the finalists is whether or not there is actually room accessible for your days.

If you possess a particular time,  you may be a little minimal. However if you're day is actually versatile, that's something you may utilize to bring down your quote when the moment arrives. To get you to move coming from a more busy date, sites will definitely commonly deliver to pencil you in elsewhere on the calendar for a reduced fee.

Provide your RFPs & & get ready to bargain.

When you have your listing of finalists in palm you'll have to provide an ask for plan to many of all of them (specifically accommodations!) to obtain a quote about what your event may set you back. If the accommodation or even place sees appropriate potential market value in your RFP, you'll get a plan detailing their quote as well as the specifics of the companies featured because rate aspect.

Most of the times, the information of the plan aren't carved in stone. With some wise capabilities as well as a side of assurance, working out a location contract can easily bring about a final arrangement that is actually far more ideal than what remained in the preliminary proposal. Simply keep in mind: If possible, consistently seek an in-person internet site inspection before you enroll the dotted line.

Create the event crew.

Unless your event is really tiny, you are actually mosting likely to need to have a palm. Well really, you are actually visiting need a couple of sets of them. Considering that while you may have the eyesight for the end product, you're heading to be actually stretched a little bit of lean if you're counted on to pay attention to whatever when planning an event. And also, one thing like say, digital marketing may certainly not exactly be your forté.

As the ideal, your role is supervisor. It falls to you to certainly not simply construct your team, however also to ensure that the various steering wheels are all spinning in the right path.

Depending on the dimension of your event, here are actually a handful of staff member that may help you manage all the relocating parts. You'll additionally be teaming up with place agents and your fair allotment of suppliers, but this is who you may consider your "interior" staff.

Online marketer(s)

Our experts'll discuss every thing that enters into a great advertising plan a bit later on in this message, yet trust us when our company say you could yearn for a pro to assist you advertise your event. Marketing experts can easily aid you assembled a logical strategy stretching over a mix of channels, therefore you may prolong your scope and draw in individuals to your event. (And make the most of your marketing budget plan while you go to it!)

System Administrators

When it involves the excellence of your event, content is actually key-- specifically if the function is to inform or promote. Your plan administrator(s) will help you generate as well as accomplish a compelling program that always keeps attendee interaction higher for the entirety of your event.

Accountant/Treasurer

Events must each go by the book and always keep every little thing on guides. For larger events, that may be a bit a lot more complicated. A treasurer or even financial advisor will definitely assist keep your finances in order as well as ensure you are actually staying within your budget. (If you're placing on a fundraising event, you are actually most definitely mosting likely to require one!)

Artistic

What's your event logo design? What are your colors? How are you visiting carry the individuality (e.g. brand name & & voice) to lifestyle? Each of these are actually inquiries for imaginative specialists like graphic designers and also copy writers. These employee operate very closely along with your advertising and marketing staff and system supervisors to see to it all communications and also security embody your brand name.

Generate a powerful & & active event program.

The days of back to back speakers in a ball room are over! In these times, event coordinators and also groups must extend their imaginative chops to maintain attendees engaged. The absolute most reliable means to offer guests a fantastic encounter is through letting them place the schedule in their own gives. (Remember your people!) That suggests structure possibilities in to both the event space and also the timetable.

It likewise suggests thinking of creative event ideas that make content shipment an interactive experience. Since in the end of the time, attendees really want an odds to include in the discussion as well as get in touch with each other around the web content supplied.

A suggestion for customization

Just possess one room in the location? It is actually still achievable to make one location feel like numerous and also provide your attendees the wide array they crave. With some mobile wall structures, a bit of creative imagination, and some decor variation, you can easily produce lots of rooms within one area. These areas can easily at that point be actually utilized as breakout areas, spaces for attendees to "unplug," making contacts areas, as well as more.

A suggestion for developing even more communication

Don't permit your guests get too pleasant in their seats! Some planners are achieving this, especially at networking events, by delivering far fewer seats than there are actually genuine guests. When folks are actually rising as well as relocating, it stimulates unplanned interactions as well as motivates attendees to electric motor around and also meet brand-new individuals.

Once you know how to plan an event ...

It's time to deliver the reconstruct and also create a great event knowledge. Planning an event takes time, money, and also creative imagination. Integrate those 3 things with these 10 actions, as well as you'll be effectively on your technique.

To learn more Please

browse through web site

[glenmenlow]

Why Global Brands Fall Into The Gap Of Meaning

Perhaps the most dangerous split in branding is between what brands say and what they do. What brand owners often fail to understand is that the validity of one’s own actions is always being judged in the total context of their overall behaviors. This is true for both brands and people. That’s why the context is so important – as a brand (or as a person), when interacting with others, like it or not, you are carrying with you the legacy of the total sum of all perceptions that were ever made about you up until this point. This is your ‘meaning footprint’. That’s how our human minds work: we monitor the validity of all that we come in contact with in the context of all our previous perceptions and experiences.

In semiotics, we call this phenomenon a presupposition – it’s the implicit assumption we make about things based on how we view the world and what we take for granted. It’s the survival instinct as our minds are first and foremost programmed to protect us by relating pieces of information to one another. The known to the unknown. The proven to the new. This also explains the low rate of radical innovation at the expense of incremental improvements. We feel uncomfortable with uncertainty as it threatens the latent beliefs we have about the world and our intrinsic need to feel safe, loved and nurtured by the people around us.

The Four Biggest Brand Disconnects

There are many disconnects in branding, marketing and business today, but they all have one common denominator: the erosion of meaning. When basic meaning structures are destabilized in brands, it then influences the brand’s relevance, trustworthiness, ability to create long-lasting value, attachment with people and positively impact social change.

Each of these disconnects can divert value creation and stunt brand growth. They also make it hard for brand owners to navigate where exactly their value got lost and why messages didn’t have the results they intended.

This is where both efficiency (erosion of brand meaning creates more jobs to be done due to inability to clearly navigate the process and streamline brand value) and effectiveness (the final outcome doesn’t have the desired social impact as anticipated that would create an exponential return on investment) tends to suffer as brands lose value but don’t know why.

The four most frequent gaps in branding, marketing and business are:

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

Is what you’re saying and doing culturally relevant anymore?

Look at the legacy values and behaviors versus what is relevant in our culture and society today. This is the meaningful and valuable versus irrelevant, redundant and obsolete exercise that affects the future relevance, value creation and growth of your brand and organization.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

Is what you’re saying and doing contextually relevant?

Look at the creative and cultural ideas versus their mode of framing and execution that creates the final meaning and brand experience. This is the intended versus unintended message exercise that affects the future perception, brand/corporate image and key attributes of your brand and organization.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals VS Actions & Corporate Behaviors

Is what you’re saying relevant and trustworthy, given that it’s you saying it?

Look at the total sum of your brand and corporate ideals (values, mission, vision, purpose) versus how well they are being translated into the real-world actions via your corporate behaviors, policies and customer experience across touchpoints. This is the intangible to tangible exercise that affects your future integrity, backbone and purpose as a brand and organization.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Do you have the mandate to be saying what you’re saying in the first place?

Look at who you are as a brand or an organization (identity, value system, worldview and actions and the role in lives of your customers) versus the message that you intend to communicate with the world (what and how you want to say it). This is the accountability exercise that affects your future trustworthiness and loyalty as a brand and organization.

Let’s look at all four of them, one by one.

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

The progressive view of gender is a much debated topic these days, not just in advertising, but throughout society and politics. Collectively, we are starting to feel the need to open up the outdated boxes of gender and evolve our traditional views, so that we can move on and function as happier and more wholesome individuals in our society. Men need to feel safe to nurture and show their more sensitive and emotional side the same way that women need to not be judged or labelled when they choose to express themselves in ways that were traditionally associated with masculinity. As a society, we need to liberate people from the cultural constraints of gender stereotypes so that they can express themselves wholly to live their most authentic lives.

Paradoxically, Gillette – now embracing the new progressive man idol – has been guilty of promoting gender stereotypes of hard masculinity for decades. This makes the strong social stance on fighting them somewhat confusing and unexpected. It might point to maturity and heightened self-reflection of Gillette as a brand, but the question of what has motivated this sudden shift remains. What also remains is the question of why marketers would think that challenging hard masculinity is a strategy that would not alienate the target customers of men who bought into this very image that Gillette created in the first place. As a strategic brand move, it is simply difficult to understand.

The campaign’s lead image above clearly shows the gap between the ‘imagined reality’ on one hand and the ‘real consumers’ on the other. There are very few images that illustrate this cultural and social vacuum between advertising and real people better than a strange set-up of progressive men having a BBQ. This in itself is a bizarre juxtaposition of the familiar/unfamiliar and the progressive/traditional as it simulates the progressively minded men with supposedly new social values engaging in the traditionally masculine and culturally residual behaviors.

In Gillette’s case, the biggest tension is precisely between the ‘real’ versus ‘imagined’ reality, which creates a warped representation of a world with distorted gender ideals that simultaneously looks familiar on the outside – as it projects the social values we desire, but strange on the inside – as on a closer inspection it is a world that’s troubling and very unfamiliar.

As brand marketers and strategists, we need to make sure we evolve brand narratives with the evolution of culture to avoid future fails that discredit brand reputation. But we also need to know what the evolution is and how to do it. Fernando Desouches, Managing Director of New Macho and a former Lynx/Axe marketer, made a stellar point in his Campaign article:

“Men are in crisis, but they are not the enemy. The underlying issue is that most men were told since they were boys to behave in a particular way, despite who they really are. They were expected to repress certain emotions and exaggerate others; to perform appropriately so to be considered “real men”. The real enemy, here, is the word “perform”. If we perform who we are instead of being who we are most of the time, we will live in pain. And so we are. At issue is Gillette’s focus on telling men how they need to behave and its failure to help them feel comfortable being who they really are. Time to wake up, Gillette. Because there’s only one thing that will make men the best a man can be: himself.”

Desouches makes a very important distinction here: it’s the cultural image of a ‘real man’ we have in our heads that’s the problem, not the real men. It’s the symbolic concept of what the “real man” meant in the past versus what it means today that we should fight to evolve our society in a more positive light, not the real men themselves. First comes the cultural image of manhood, which then validates real men’s behavior. It’s important to grasp this difference and view all social and cultural categories as symbolic/abstract first and tangible/physical second. Everything we see around ourselves today was an abstract image in somebody else’s mind in the past. It was us – humans – who created this world to match our beliefs, values and views of what it should be like and filled our mental forms with physical content.

To affect change in the world we must therefore not take action in the physical world first by changing people directly, but tackle change on the abstract symbolic level instead. We first need to evolve our ideals, values and old outdated classifiers of reality that we use to abide our everyday lives by. Only after we envision and create more realistic symbolic categories (meanings and ideas) representative of the actual world we live in, we can go out and inspire people to act differently. We must know what ‘The Best Men Can Be’ means and what it looks like as a symbolic concept and alternative system of values and behaviors to the old outdated stereotype we are trying to change. Otherwise, it’s just smoke and mirrors that sounds much more like men-bashing and victimization than it does like inspiration and enlightenment.

The best thing that Gillette has done here was to become a catalyst for the male conversation, albeit at its own expense. Its ambition was surely much higher.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

As Peter Drucker would say, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Even though this sentence has become somewhat of a cliché in the marketing world, its meaning is now more relevant than ever before. The power of this sentence isn’t actually about Culture itself as much as it is about how much power the (invisible) cultural context has over completely rewriting your (visible) strategy.

Brand owners and creative agencies need to understand not only what various ideas and concepts MEAN in the current context of culture (culturally) and how this cultural climate can shift and juxtapose their meaning, but primarily what these culturally adapted ideas and concepts MEAN FOR THEM, in the context of their own brand and business (commercially). This realization then guides the creative execution and all marketing activities.

What Gillette aimed to present in their ad was a beautiful uplifting message executed in a dreadfully disempowering way. They missed the mark by overestimating the brand’s own importance in people’s lives. It sounded arrogant and patronizing, talking to men as if all of them were predators-in-the-making, victimizing them the same way that toxic males victimize both women and other men. Victimizing men isn’t the right path to stop female harassment. If anything, it is the very approach that will only make things worse because men will now feel collectively guilty and ashamed by default over some men’s actions, which is a recipe for a social disaster, as the anger clearly has to be channeled somewhere.

Brands should communicate to everybody with respect. And if brands want to emulate social ideals, marketers should make sure they know how to frame these ideals creatively, so that good intentions don’t get turned against them. To reinforce the message in the right context, you need to know what these ideas and cultural concepts mean to you as a brand first, then to your customers and lastly in the context of culture.

Focusing blindly on maximizing cultural traction while having a very little idea of how this portrayal of culture plays back to your brand strategy and target audience is an approach that’s more dangerous than it is beneficial – in fact, it’s the opposite of how cultural ideas should be executed on. This is a great way to create cultural fads, instead of strong, meaningful and culturally relevant brands rooted in the fabric of society, which in turn helps them grow faster.

Cultural strategy without relevant commercial execution is nonsense. It might give you the mimicry of culture (the illusion of relevance) to hide behind temporarily, but in a long term it will not be effective. You cannot be culturally relevant without being brand relevant first. Culture is a great source of potency for brands but it needs to be deeply locked in with your own brand strengths – values, personality, positioning – and your target audiences. Otherwise, your cultural efforts will be decontextualized. And it is the Context that sells brands, to begin with.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals Versus Actions & Corporate Behaviors

The deep divide between presenting ideals worth striving for versus behaving differently in the real world makes corporations look as though they have no conscience. We know how to call people who behave in self-interested and shameless ways: the narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. It’s exactly this lack of self-reflection and accountability for one’s own actions that creates more damage than good when brands talk about noble social ideals while lacking the follow through. Why should corporations be held to different social standards than those we have for people?

Most successful brands were founded on ideals worthy of social pursuit. The difference is that those companies used these ideals as guiding principles to create the reality in their image, too. Their ideals came to life through everything that they did. This is what has made Patagonia so successful. The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, made it his life’s mission not to sacrifice the integrity of his own values to make a global success. And the rest was history.

Contrary to the popular belief, companies don’t have to sacrifice their own integrity and become hypocrites in order to make commercial profit, it is their own choice to do so because they lose sight of why they were in business in the first place. We just need to choose better and hold brands accountable to deliver on their promises and act as they talk.

The integrity of brand values has to be embedded deep inside of an organization to fully count as ‘values’. This is also another reason why the new Gillette ad seems more like a parody on social awakening than a serious attempt for social change. A brand from the P&G portfolio that charges women a “pink tax” on their female products lecturing men on respecting women while disrespecting them in their own commercial practices is in itself amusing.

Brands need to become more accountable for their corporate actions and learn to talk the talk only if they intend to walk the walk. Otherwise, the brand’s image will split into the narcissistic layer devoid of any accountability for the brand’s real world actions. To build trust and value, don’t create social masks, create brands of real substance that shines through your actions.

The Purpose Of Brand Purpose

This is exactly the reason why Mark Ritson criticizes brand purpose so much. It is because of big global brands like Gillette that cannot execute on their purpose in a way that makes it believable, that we doubt if brand purpose actually has a purpose at all. But, that’s not because the idea of striving for social ideals wouldn’t be worthy for brands to pursue. Brand purpose – in theory – is not a nonsense, the problem is that it is continually being executed by brands as if it were one. And that is a huge difference.

Purpose was wrongly relegated to a quick consciousness Band-Aid without carefully thinking through the implications of such strategy onto the world at large to be carried through by the brand’s corporate behaviors. The idea of purpose is very necessary for brands to pursue as it’s connected to growth and social prosperity, but for it to work, brands need to really mean what they claim. The purpose needs to inform their business strategy and production model to allow for more purposeful value creation, not just put their best face on in the new marcom campaign.

Before companies communicate their social stance on the world through their brands, they must make a careful revision and inspect if these values and ideals are embedded in their corporate policies, product development, pricing strategy, organizational processes, and leadership and management styles. Meaning originates organically – at the core of an organization. The inner coherence and consistency of an organization is equally as important (if not more important) as the coherence of the brand and its image. That’s where true integrity comes from.

Corporations without commercial integrity don’t have the right to tell people how to behave. Especially, as a large part of these global players don’t even pay their fair share of taxes to the local governments, and thus take away from the prosperity of people and economies around the world that they’re rightfully entitled to in return for the consumption of their goods and services. You cannot talk on one hand and act differently on the other. Act ethically as an organization first and then you can give people ideals worth striving for. Otherwise, you’re not being purposeful; you’re being deceitful.

When big corporations pay their taxes right, stop creating an artificially manufactured division between men and women, stop objectifying women and vilifying men and start applying the same pricing policies to the products marketed to women as those that they sell to men, then they might earn the right to lecture people on how to behave in society. Because by that time, they will lead by example.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Lastly, there’s the gap of social impact. If what you’re saying falls short of position you hold in society to be able to respectfully claim such a thing, no matter the relevance and urgency of your message, you are probably not going to get the social approval you are looking for. It will be seen as irrelevant at best and downright insulting at worst. Continuity and consistency is key here. You need to build the foundations first and strengthen your position, then you can communicate and leverage your brand values, recognition and image to generate momentum with your new message.

In Gillette’s case, the tonality killed the message, as the brand no matter how big or established has no social stance on telling people how to behave in society. Especially, if it’s doing so in the manner of social instruction. This is the role and social obligation of policy makers, not that of a brand. It’s not the role of Gillette to police masculinity and present desired modes of behavior as opposed to socially inappropriate one. Gillette clearly overshot their social mark with this ad.

Brands can guide our actions – but by inspiring us, by giving us ideals to desire and by emulating values worthy to aspire to, not explicitly through norming our social conduct. As commercial entities whose success rises and falls with their profitability, brands don’t have the political mandate to tell people what is right and what is wrong. And to assume that they do is deeply disturbing. Brand purpose is supposed to guide the brand’s own actions, not position brands in a role of a social watchdog to guide ours. The ad conveyed a well-motivated and important message spoken by the wrong entity, which ultimately distorted its social and cultural validity.

When brands want to tap into the power of Culture, their role is to show us why the cultural ideal has evolved, what it means for what the brand believes in, what world they want to help cultivate and why that’s important to the betterment of our society. Gillette failed to do that and focused on the cr

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[markjsousa]

Why Global Brands Fall Into The Gap Of Meaning

Perhaps the most dangerous split in branding is between what brands say and what they do. What brand owners often fail to understand is that the validity of one’s own actions is always being judged in the total context of their overall behaviors. This is true for both brands and people. That’s why the context is so important – as a brand (or as a person), when interacting with others, like it or not, you are carrying with you the legacy of the total sum of all perceptions that were ever made about you up until this point. This is your ‘meaning footprint’. That’s how our human minds work: we monitor the validity of all that we come in contact with in the context of all our previous perceptions and experiences.

In semiotics, we call this phenomenon a presupposition – it’s the implicit assumption we make about things based on how we view the world and what we take for granted. It’s the survival instinct as our minds are first and foremost programmed to protect us by relating pieces of information to one another. The known to the unknown. The proven to the new. This also explains the low rate of radical innovation at the expense of incremental improvements. We feel uncomfortable with uncertainty as it threatens the latent beliefs we have about the world and our intrinsic need to feel safe, loved and nurtured by the people around us.

The Four Biggest Brand Disconnects

There are many disconnects in branding, marketing and business today, but they all have one common denominator: the erosion of meaning. When basic meaning structures are destabilized in brands, it then influences the brand’s relevance, trustworthiness, ability to create long-lasting value, attachment with people and positively impact social change.

Each of these disconnects can divert value creation and stunt brand growth. They also make it hard for brand owners to navigate where exactly their value got lost and why messages didn’t have the results they intended.

This is where both efficiency (erosion of brand meaning creates more jobs to be done due to inability to clearly navigate the process and streamline brand value) and effectiveness (the final outcome doesn’t have the desired social impact as anticipated that would create an exponential return on investment) tends to suffer as brands lose value but don’t know why.

The four most frequent gaps in branding, marketing and business are:

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

Is what you’re saying and doing culturally relevant anymore?

Look at the legacy values and behaviors versus what is relevant in our culture and society today. This is the meaningful and valuable versus irrelevant, redundant and obsolete exercise that affects the future relevance, value creation and growth of your brand and organization.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

Is what you’re saying and doing contextually relevant?

Look at the creative and cultural ideas versus their mode of framing and execution that creates the final meaning and brand experience. This is the intended versus unintended message exercise that affects the future perception, brand/corporate image and key attributes of your brand and organization.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals VS Actions & Corporate Behaviors

Is what you’re saying relevant and trustworthy, given that it’s you saying it?

Look at the total sum of your brand and corporate ideals (values, mission, vision, purpose) versus how well they are being translated into the real-world actions via your corporate behaviors, policies and customer experience across touchpoints. This is the intangible to tangible exercise that affects your future integrity, backbone and purpose as a brand and organization.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Do you have the mandate to be saying what you’re saying in the first place?

Look at who you are as a brand or an organization (identity, value system, worldview and actions and the role in lives of your customers) versus the message that you intend to communicate with the world (what and how you want to say it). This is the accountability exercise that affects your future trustworthiness and loyalty as a brand and organization.

Let’s look at all four of them, one by one.

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

The progressive view of gender is a much debated topic these days, not just in advertising, but throughout society and politics. Collectively, we are starting to feel the need to open up the outdated boxes of gender and evolve our traditional views, so that we can move on and function as happier and more wholesome individuals in our society. Men need to feel safe to nurture and show their more sensitive and emotional side the same way that women need to not be judged or labelled when they choose to express themselves in ways that were traditionally associated with masculinity. As a society, we need to liberate people from the cultural constraints of gender stereotypes so that they can express themselves wholly to live their most authentic lives.

Paradoxically, Gillette – now embracing the new progressive man idol – has been guilty of promoting gender stereotypes of hard masculinity for decades. This makes the strong social stance on fighting them somewhat confusing and unexpected. It might point to maturity and heightened self-reflection of Gillette as a brand, but the question of what has motivated this sudden shift remains. What also remains is the question of why marketers would think that challenging hard masculinity is a strategy that would not alienate the target customers of men who bought into this very image that Gillette created in the first place. As a strategic brand move, it is simply difficult to understand.

The campaign’s lead image above clearly shows the gap between the ‘imagined reality’ on one hand and the ‘real consumers’ on the other. There are very few images that illustrate this cultural and social vacuum between advertising and real people better than a strange set-up of progressive men having a BBQ. This in itself is a bizarre juxtaposition of the familiar/unfamiliar and the progressive/traditional as it simulates the progressively minded men with supposedly new social values engaging in the traditionally masculine and culturally residual behaviors.

In Gillette’s case, the biggest tension is precisely between the ‘real’ versus ‘imagined’ reality, which creates a warped representation of a world with distorted gender ideals that simultaneously looks familiar on the outside – as it projects the social values we desire, but strange on the inside – as on a closer inspection it is a world that’s troubling and very unfamiliar.

As brand marketers and strategists, we need to make sure we evolve brand narratives with the evolution of culture to avoid future fails that discredit brand reputation. But we also need to know what the evolution is and how to do it. Fernando Desouches, Managing Director of New Macho and a former Lynx/Axe marketer, made a stellar point in his Campaign article:

“Men are in crisis, but they are not the enemy. The underlying issue is that most men were told since they were boys to behave in a particular way, despite who they really are. They were expected to repress certain emotions and exaggerate others; to perform appropriately so to be considered “real men”. The real enemy, here, is the word “perform”. If we perform who we are instead of being who we are most of the time, we will live in pain. And so we are. At issue is Gillette’s focus on telling men how they need to behave and its failure to help them feel comfortable being who they really are. Time to wake up, Gillette. Because there’s only one thing that will make men the best a man can be: himself.”

Desouches makes a very important distinction here: it’s the cultural image of a ‘real man’ we have in our heads that’s the problem, not the real men. It’s the symbolic concept of what the “real man” meant in the past versus what it means today that we should fight to evolve our society in a more positive light, not the real men themselves. First comes the cultural image of manhood, which then validates real men’s behavior. It’s important to grasp this difference and view all social and cultural categories as symbolic/abstract first and tangible/physical second. Everything we see around ourselves today was an abstract image in somebody else’s mind in the past. It was us – humans – who created this world to match our beliefs, values and views of what it should be like and filled our mental forms with physical content.

To affect change in the world we must therefore not take action in the physical world first by changing people directly, but tackle change on the abstract symbolic level instead. We first need to evolve our ideals, values and old outdated classifiers of reality that we use to abide our everyday lives by. Only after we envision and create more realistic symbolic categories (meanings and ideas) representative of the actual world we live in, we can go out and inspire people to act differently. We must know what ‘The Best Men Can Be’ means and what it looks like as a symbolic concept and alternative system of values and behaviors to the old outdated stereotype we are trying to change. Otherwise, it’s just smoke and mirrors that sounds much more like men-bashing and victimization than it does like inspiration and enlightenment.

The best thing that Gillette has done here was to become a catalyst for the male conversation, albeit at its own expense. Its ambition was surely much higher.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

As Peter Drucker would say, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Even though this sentence has become somewhat of a cliché in the marketing world, its meaning is now more relevant than ever before. The power of this sentence isn’t actually about Culture itself as much as it is about how much power the (invisible) cultural context has over completely rewriting your (visible) strategy.

Brand owners and creative agencies need to understand not only what various ideas and concepts MEAN in the current context of culture (culturally) and how this cultural climate can shift and juxtapose their meaning, but primarily what these culturally adapted ideas and concepts MEAN FOR THEM, in the context of their own brand and business (commercially). This realization then guides the creative execution and all marketing activities.

What Gillette aimed to present in their ad was a beautiful uplifting message executed in a dreadfully disempowering way. They missed the mark by overestimating the brand’s own importance in people’s lives. It sounded arrogant and patronizing, talking to men as if all of them were predators-in-the-making, victimizing them the same way that toxic males victimize both women and other men. Victimizing men isn’t the right path to stop female harassment. If anything, it is the very approach that will only make things worse because men will now feel collectively guilty and ashamed by default over some men’s actions, which is a recipe for a social disaster, as the anger clearly has to be channeled somewhere.

Brands should communicate to everybody with respect. And if brands want to emulate social ideals, marketers should make sure they know how to frame these ideals creatively, so that good intentions don’t get turned against them. To reinforce the message in the right context, you need to know what these ideas and cultural concepts mean to you as a brand first, then to your customers and lastly in the context of culture.

Focusing blindly on maximizing cultural traction while having a very little idea of how this portrayal of culture plays back to your brand strategy and target audience is an approach that’s more dangerous than it is beneficial – in fact, it’s the opposite of how cultural ideas should be executed on. This is a great way to create cultural fads, instead of strong, meaningful and culturally relevant brands rooted in the fabric of society, which in turn helps them grow faster.

Cultural strategy without relevant commercial execution is nonsense. It might give you the mimicry of culture (the illusion of relevance) to hide behind temporarily, but in a long term it will not be effective. You cannot be culturally relevant without being brand relevant first. Culture is a great source of potency for brands but it needs to be deeply locked in with your own brand strengths – values, personality, positioning – and your target audiences. Otherwise, your cultural efforts will be decontextualized. And it is the Context that sells brands, to begin with.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals Versus Actions & Corporate Behaviors

The deep divide between presenting ideals worth striving for versus behaving differently in the real world makes corporations look as though they have no conscience. We know how to call people who behave in self-interested and shameless ways: the narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. It’s exactly this lack of self-reflection and accountability for one’s own actions that creates more damage than good when brands talk about noble social ideals while lacking the follow through. Why should corporations be held to different social standards than those we have for people?

Most successful brands were founded on ideals worthy of social pursuit. The difference is that those companies used these ideals as guiding principles to create the reality in their image, too. Their ideals came to life through everything that they did. This is what has made Patagonia so successful. The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, made it his life’s mission not to sacrifice the integrity of his own values to make a global success. And the rest was history.

Contrary to the popular belief, companies don’t have to sacrifice their own integrity and become hypocrites in order to make commercial profit, it is their own choice to do so because they lose sight of why they were in business in the first place. We just need to choose better and hold brands accountable to deliver on their promises and act as they talk.

The integrity of brand values has to be embedded deep inside of an organization to fully count as ‘values’. This is also another reason why the new Gillette ad seems more like a parody on social awakening than a serious attempt for social change. A brand from the P&G portfolio that charges women a “pink tax” on their female products lecturing men on respecting women while disrespecting them in their own commercial practices is in itself amusing.

Brands need to become more accountable for their corporate actions and learn to talk the talk only if they intend to walk the walk. Otherwise, the brand’s image will split into the narcissistic layer devoid of any accountability for the brand’s real world actions. To build trust and value, don’t create social masks, create brands of real substance that shines through your actions.

The Purpose Of Brand Purpose

This is exactly the reason why Mark Ritson criticizes brand purpose so much. It is because of big global brands like Gillette that cannot execute on their purpose in a way that makes it believable, that we doubt if brand purpose actually has a purpose at all. But, that’s not because the idea of striving for social ideals wouldn’t be worthy for brands to pursue. Brand purpose – in theory – is not a nonsense, the problem is that it is continually being executed by brands as if it were one. And that is a huge difference.

Purpose was wrongly relegated to a quick consciousness Band-Aid without carefully thinking through the implications of such strategy onto the world at large to be carried through by the brand’s corporate behaviors. The idea of purpose is very necessary for brands to pursue as it’s connected to growth and social prosperity, but for it to work, brands need to really mean what they claim. The purpose needs to inform their business strategy and production model to allow for more purposeful value creation, not just put their best face on in the new marcom campaign.

Before companies communicate their social stance on the world through their brands, they must make a careful revision and inspect if these values and ideals are embedded in their corporate policies, product development, pricing strategy, organizational processes, and leadership and management styles. Meaning originates organically – at the core of an organization. The inner coherence and consistency of an organization is equally as important (if not more important) as the coherence of the brand and its image. That’s where true integrity comes from.

Corporations without commercial integrity don’t have the right to tell people how to behave. Especially, as a large part of these global players don’t even pay their fair share of taxes to the local governments, and thus take away from the prosperity of people and economies around the world that they’re rightfully entitled to in return for the consumption of their goods and services. You cannot talk on one hand and act differently on the other. Act ethically as an organization first and then you can give people ideals worth striving for. Otherwise, you’re not being purposeful; you’re being deceitful.

When big corporations pay their taxes right, stop creating an artificially manufactured division between men and women, stop objectifying women and vilifying men and start applying the same pricing policies to the products marketed to women as those that they sell to men, then they might earn the right to lecture people on how to behave in society. Because by that time, they will lead by example.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Lastly, there’s the gap of social impact. If what you’re saying falls short of position you hold in society to be able to respectfully claim such a thing, no matter the relevance and urgency of your message, you are probably not going to get the social approval you are looking for. It will be seen as irrelevant at best and downright insulting at worst. Continuity and consistency is key here. You need to build the foundations first and strengthen your position, then you can communicate and leverage your brand values, recognition and image to generate momentum with your new message.

In Gillette’s case, the tonality killed the message, as the brand no matter how big or established has no social stance on telling people how to behave in society. Especially, if it’s doing so in the manner of social instruction. This is the role and social obligation of policy makers, not that of a brand. It’s not the role of Gillette to police masculinity and present desired modes of behavior as opposed to socially inappropriate one. Gillette clearly overshot their social mark with this ad.

Brands can guide our actions – but by inspiring us, by giving us ideals to desire and by emulating values worthy to aspire to, not explicitly through norming our social conduct. As commercial entities whose success rises and falls with their profitability, brands don’t have the political mandate to tell people what is right and what is wrong. And to assume that they do is deeply disturbing. Brand purpose is supposed to guide the brand’s own actions, not position brands in a role of a social watchdog to guide ours. The ad conveyed a well-motivated and important message spoken by the wrong entity, which ultimately distorted its social and cultural validity.

When brands want to tap into the power of Culture, their role is to show us why the cultural ideal has evolved, what it means for what the brand believes in, what world they want to help cultivate and why that’s important to the betterment of our society. Gillette failed to do that and focused on the cr

[joejstrickl]

Why Global Brands Fall Into The Gap Of Meaning

Perhaps the most dangerous split in branding is between what brands say and what they do. What brand owners often fail to understand is that the validity of one’s own actions is always being judged in the total context of their overall behaviors. This is true for both brands and people. That’s why the context is so important – as a brand (or as a person), when interacting with others, like it or not, you are carrying with you the legacy of the total sum of all perceptions that were ever made about you up until this point. This is your ‘meaning footprint’. That’s how our human minds work: we monitor the validity of all that we come in contact with in the context of all our previous perceptions and experiences.

In semiotics, we call this phenomenon a presupposition – it’s the implicit assumption we make about things based on how we view the world and what we take for granted. It’s the survival instinct as our minds are first and foremost programmed to protect us by relating pieces of information to one another. The known to the unknown. The proven to the new. This also explains the low rate of radical innovation at the expense of incremental improvements. We feel uncomfortable with uncertainty as it threatens the latent beliefs we have about the world and our intrinsic need to feel safe, loved and nurtured by the people around us.

The Four Biggest Brand Disconnects

There are many disconnects in branding, marketing and business today, but they all have one common denominator: the erosion of meaning. When basic meaning structures are destabilized in brands, it then influences the brand’s relevance, trustworthiness, ability to create long-lasting value, attachment with people and positively impact social change.

Each of these disconnects can divert value creation and stunt brand growth. They also make it hard for brand owners to navigate where exactly their value got lost and why messages didn’t have the results they intended.

This is where both efficiency (erosion of brand meaning creates more jobs to be done due to inability to clearly navigate the process and streamline brand value) and effectiveness (the final outcome doesn’t have the desired social impact as anticipated that would create an exponential return on investment) tends to suffer as brands lose value but don’t know why.

The four most frequent gaps in branding, marketing and business are:

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

Is what you’re saying and doing culturally relevant anymore?

Look at the legacy values and behaviors versus what is relevant in our culture and society today. This is the meaningful and valuable versus irrelevant, redundant and obsolete exercise that affects the future relevance, value creation and growth of your brand and organization.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

Is what you’re saying and doing contextually relevant?

Look at the creative and cultural ideas versus their mode of framing and execution that creates the final meaning and brand experience. This is the intended versus unintended message exercise that affects the future perception, brand/corporate image and key attributes of your brand and organization.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals VS Actions & Corporate Behaviors

Is what you’re saying relevant and trustworthy, given that it’s you saying it?

Look at the total sum of your brand and corporate ideals (values, mission, vision, purpose) versus how well they are being translated into the real-world actions via your corporate behaviors, policies and customer experience across touchpoints. This is the intangible to tangible exercise that affects your future integrity, backbone and purpose as a brand and organization.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Do you have the mandate to be saying what you’re saying in the first place?

Look at who you are as a brand or an organization (identity, value system, worldview and actions and the role in lives of your customers) versus the message that you intend to communicate with the world (what and how you want to say it). This is the accountability exercise that affects your future trustworthiness and loyalty as a brand and organization.

Let’s look at all four of them, one by one.

1. The Gap Of Culture: Brands & Organizations Versus Culture & Society

The progressive view of gender is a much debated topic these days, not just in advertising, but throughout society and politics. Collectively, we are starting to feel the need to open up the outdated boxes of gender and evolve our traditional views, so that we can move on and function as happier and more wholesome individuals in our society. Men need to feel safe to nurture and show their more sensitive and emotional side the same way that women need to not be judged or labelled when they choose to express themselves in ways that were traditionally associated with masculinity. As a society, we need to liberate people from the cultural constraints of gender stereotypes so that they can express themselves wholly to live their most authentic lives.

Paradoxically, Gillette – now embracing the new progressive man idol – has been guilty of promoting gender stereotypes of hard masculinity for decades. This makes the strong social stance on fighting them somewhat confusing and unexpected. It might point to maturity and heightened self-reflection of Gillette as a brand, but the question of what has motivated this sudden shift remains. What also remains is the question of why marketers would think that challenging hard masculinity is a strategy that would not alienate the target customers of men who bought into this very image that Gillette created in the first place. As a strategic brand move, it is simply difficult to understand.

The campaign’s lead image above clearly shows the gap between the ‘imagined reality’ on one hand and the ‘real consumers’ on the other. There are very few images that illustrate this cultural and social vacuum between advertising and real people better than a strange set-up of progressive men having a BBQ. This in itself is a bizarre juxtaposition of the familiar/unfamiliar and the progressive/traditional as it simulates the progressively minded men with supposedly new social values engaging in the traditionally masculine and culturally residual behaviors.

In Gillette’s case, the biggest tension is precisely between the ‘real’ versus ‘imagined’ reality, which creates a warped representation of a world with distorted gender ideals that simultaneously looks familiar on the outside – as it projects the social values we desire, but strange on the inside – as on a closer inspection it is a world that’s troubling and very unfamiliar.

As brand marketers and strategists, we need to make sure we evolve brand narratives with the evolution of culture to avoid future fails that discredit brand reputation. But we also need to know what the evolution is and how to do it. Fernando Desouches, Managing Director of New Macho and a former Lynx/Axe marketer, made a stellar point in his Campaign article:

“Men are in crisis, but they are not the enemy. The underlying issue is that most men were told since they were boys to behave in a particular way, despite who they really are. They were expected to repress certain emotions and exaggerate others; to perform appropriately so to be considered “real men”. The real enemy, here, is the word “perform”. If we perform who we are instead of being who we are most of the time, we will live in pain. And so we are. At issue is Gillette’s focus on telling men how they need to behave and its failure to help them feel comfortable being who they really are. Time to wake up, Gillette. Because there’s only one thing that will make men the best a man can be: himself.”

Desouches makes a very important distinction here: it’s the cultural image of a ‘real man’ we have in our heads that’s the problem, not the real men. It’s the symbolic concept of what the “real man” meant in the past versus what it means today that we should fight to evolve our society in a more positive light, not the real men themselves. First comes the cultural image of manhood, which then validates real men’s behavior. It’s important to grasp this difference and view all social and cultural categories as symbolic/abstract first and tangible/physical second. Everything we see around ourselves today was an abstract image in somebody else’s mind in the past. It was us – humans – who created this world to match our beliefs, values and views of what it should be like and filled our mental forms with physical content.

To affect change in the world we must therefore not take action in the physical world first by changing people directly, but tackle change on the abstract symbolic level instead. We first need to evolve our ideals, values and old outdated classifiers of reality that we use to abide our everyday lives by. Only after we envision and create more realistic symbolic categories (meanings and ideas) representative of the actual world we live in, we can go out and inspire people to act differently. We must know what ‘The Best Men Can Be’ means and what it looks like as a symbolic concept and alternative system of values and behaviors to the old outdated stereotype we are trying to change. Otherwise, it’s just smoke and mirrors that sounds much more like men-bashing and victimization than it does like inspiration and enlightenment.

The best thing that Gillette has done here was to become a catalyst for the male conversation, albeit at its own expense. Its ambition was surely much higher.

2. The Gap Of Context: Big Idea Versus Creative Execution & Brand Experience

As Peter Drucker would say, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Even though this sentence has become somewhat of a cliché in the marketing world, its meaning is now more relevant than ever before. The power of this sentence isn’t actually about Culture itself as much as it is about how much power the (invisible) cultural context has over completely rewriting your (visible) strategy.

Brand owners and creative agencies need to understand not only what various ideas and concepts MEAN in the current context of culture (culturally) and how this cultural climate can shift and juxtapose their meaning, but primarily what these culturally adapted ideas and concepts MEAN FOR THEM, in the context of their own brand and business (commercially). This realization then guides the creative execution and all marketing activities.

What Gillette aimed to present in their ad was a beautiful uplifting message executed in a dreadfully disempowering way. They missed the mark by overestimating the brand’s own importance in people’s lives. It sounded arrogant and patronizing, talking to men as if all of them were predators-in-the-making, victimizing them the same way that toxic males victimize both women and other men. Victimizing men isn’t the right path to stop female harassment. If anything, it is the very approach that will only make things worse because men will now feel collectively guilty and ashamed by default over some men’s actions, which is a recipe for a social disaster, as the anger clearly has to be channeled somewhere.

Brands should communicate to everybody with respect. And if brands want to emulate social ideals, marketers should make sure they know how to frame these ideals creatively, so that good intentions don’t get turned against them. To reinforce the message in the right context, you need to know what these ideas and cultural concepts mean to you as a brand first, then to your customers and lastly in the context of culture.

Focusing blindly on maximizing cultural traction while having a very little idea of how this portrayal of culture plays back to your brand strategy and target audience is an approach that’s more dangerous than it is beneficial – in fact, it’s the opposite of how cultural ideas should be executed on. This is a great way to create cultural fads, instead of strong, meaningful and culturally relevant brands rooted in the fabric of society, which in turn helps them grow faster.

Cultural strategy without relevant commercial execution is nonsense. It might give you the mimicry of culture (the illusion of relevance) to hide behind temporarily, but in a long term it will not be effective. You cannot be culturally relevant without being brand relevant first. Culture is a great source of potency for brands but it needs to be deeply locked in with your own brand strengths – values, personality, positioning – and your target audiences. Otherwise, your cultural efforts will be decontextualized. And it is the Context that sells brands, to begin with.

3. The Gap Of Trust: Brand Image, Values & Ideals Versus Actions & Corporate Behaviors

The deep divide between presenting ideals worth striving for versus behaving differently in the real world makes corporations look as though they have no conscience. We know how to call people who behave in self-interested and shameless ways: the narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. It’s exactly this lack of self-reflection and accountability for one’s own actions that creates more damage than good when brands talk about noble social ideals while lacking the follow through. Why should corporations be held to different social standards than those we have for people?

Most successful brands were founded on ideals worthy of social pursuit. The difference is that those companies used these ideals as guiding principles to create the reality in their image, too. Their ideals came to life through everything that they did. This is what has made Patagonia so successful. The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, made it his life’s mission not to sacrifice the integrity of his own values to make a global success. And the rest was history.

Contrary to the popular belief, companies don’t have to sacrifice their own integrity and become hypocrites in order to make commercial profit, it is their own choice to do so because they lose sight of why they were in business in the first place. We just need to choose better and hold brands accountable to deliver on their promises and act as they talk.

The integrity of brand values has to be embedded deep inside of an organization to fully count as ‘values’. This is also another reason why the new Gillette ad seems more like a parody on social awakening than a serious attempt for social change. A brand from the P&G portfolio that charges women a “pink tax” on their female products lecturing men on respecting women while disrespecting them in their own commercial practices is in itself amusing.

Brands need to become more accountable for their corporate actions and learn to talk the talk only if they intend to walk the walk. Otherwise, the brand’s image will split into the narcissistic layer devoid of any accountability for the brand’s real world actions. To build trust and value, don’t create social masks, create brands of real substance that shines through your actions.

The Purpose Of Brand Purpose

This is exactly the reason why Mark Ritson criticizes brand purpose so much. It is because of big global brands like Gillette that cannot execute on their purpose in a way that makes it believable, that we doubt if brand purpose actually has a purpose at all. But, that’s not because the idea of striving for social ideals wouldn’t be worthy for brands to pursue. Brand purpose – in theory – is not a nonsense, the problem is that it is continually being executed by brands as if it were one. And that is a huge difference.

Purpose was wrongly relegated to a quick consciousness Band-Aid without carefully thinking through the implications of such strategy onto the world at large to be carried through by the brand’s corporate behaviors. The idea of purpose is very necessary for brands to pursue as it’s connected to growth and social prosperity, but for it to work, brands need to really mean what they claim. The purpose needs to inform their business strategy and production model to allow for more purposeful value creation, not just put their best face on in the new marcom campaign.

Before companies communicate their social stance on the world through their brands, they must make a careful revision and inspect if these values and ideals are embedded in their corporate policies, product development, pricing strategy, organizational processes, and leadership and management styles. Meaning originates organically – at the core of an organization. The inner coherence and consistency of an organization is equally as important (if not more important) as the coherence of the brand and its image. That’s where true integrity comes from.

Corporations without commercial integrity don’t have the right to tell people how to behave. Especially, as a large part of these global players don’t even pay their fair share of taxes to the local governments, and thus take away from the prosperity of people and economies around the world that they’re rightfully entitled to in return for the consumption of their goods and services. You cannot talk on one hand and act differently on the other. Act ethically as an organization first and then you can give people ideals worth striving for. Otherwise, you’re not being purposeful; you’re being deceitful.

When big corporations pay their taxes right, stop creating an artificially manufactured division between men and women, stop objectifying women and vilifying men and start applying the same pricing policies to the products marketed to women as those that they sell to men, then they might earn the right to lecture people on how to behave in society. Because by that time, they will lead by example.

4. The Gap Of Social Impact: Role & Identity Versus Message & Tonality

Lastly, there’s the gap of social impact. If what you’re saying falls short of position you hold in society to be able to respectfully claim such a thing, no matter the relevance and urgency of your message, you are probably not going to get the social approval you are looking for. It will be seen as irrelevant at best and downright insulting at worst. Continuity and consistency is key here. You need to build the foundations first and strengthen your position, then you can communicate and leverage your brand values, recognition and image to generate momentum with your new message.

In Gillette’s case, the tonality killed the message, as the brand no matter how big or established has no social stance on telling people how to behave in society. Especially, if it’s doing so in the manner of social instruction. This is the role and social obligation of policy makers, not that of a brand. It’s not the role of Gillette to police masculinity and present desired modes of behavior as opposed to socially inappropriate one. Gillette clearly overshot their social mark with this ad.

Brands can guide our actions – but by inspiring us, by giving us ideals to desire and by emulating values worthy to aspire to, not explicitly through norming our social conduct. As commercial entities whose success rises and falls with their profitability, brands don’t have the political mandate to tell people what is right and what is wrong. And to assume that they do is deeply disturbing. Brand purpose is supposed to guide the brand’s own actions, not position brands in a role of a social watchdog to guide ours. The ad conveyed a well-motivated and important message spoken by the wrong entity, which ultimately distorted its social and cultural validity.

When brands want to tap into the power of Culture, their role is to show us why the cultural ideal has evolved, what it means for what the brand believes in, what world they want to help cultivate and why that’s important to the betterment of our society. Gillette failed to do that and focused on the cr