Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

The Problem With Politics

Leave it to politics to make the commercial branding business look responsible and sane.

Imagine if customers of, say, Crest toothpaste or Geico insurance were as ignorant and impassioned as your average diehard Democratic or Republican voter? They'd buy toothpaste because it embodied the founding principles of dental hygiene, or take out insurance policies so that other policyholders could pay more. When otherwise critically thoughful consumers act like citizens, their preferences are less like learned decisions and more like kneejerk spasms. Their opinions are mostly independent of facts.

Worse, politicians and their parties not only tolerate this stupidity but encourage it, propagating any number of half-truths, scrambled innuendo, and sometimes outright lies in order to win votes. No commercial brand could get away with empty promises like that (or at least can't any longer), yet politicians continue to cast their claims as whatever nuttiness they think voters want to hear. They're happy to play Pied Piper to increasingly detached, ignorant followers.

When the media describe politics in the language of branding, they insult marketers the world over.

The jobs issue has brought it home for me. Out of the myriad of real and pressing difficulties our country faces, the chronic problem of unemployment of about 10% of our population (and underemployment of far more) is perhaps our most dire, in that we can't hope to fix our other problems if we don't have the cash or capacity to do so. Job loss is a syndrome of a far greater shift in our Way of Life, and no amount of government spending, taxes, or trust in the marketplace will bring them back.

Yet politicians aren't talking about it. They talk around it, and over it, and sometimes they ignore it altogether, so instead our national debate is about deficits, healthcare, union bargaining rights, returning to the Constitution, and just about anything else that has next to nothing to do with our biggest, hairiest problem. Both political parties are happy to perpetuate this noisy distraction -- if one more dickweed prefaces a party soundbite with, "the American people know best, and they want…," I think I'll puke -- because a majority of voters are entertained by it.

If Coca-Cola or GM were so disingenuous with their branding, they'd be punished mercilessly by customers and critics alike.

So what are we to do? The U.S. is tumbling into the kabuki drama of another Presidential election cycle, and we're sure to get lots of nonsense about taxes and government projects just as we hear inanity about free market efficiencies and other Libertarian wet dreams.

We need a common ground, not of ideas but of reality and facts, at least for starters.

Many corporate marketers have something called a dashoard on which various important numbers are displayed, sometimes called Key Performance Indicators, or "KPIs." The idea is that the goal of any marketing activity should tie back to influencing one or more of the measures that the company has identified as most important to its success. Using a set of numbers that have meaning across the business -- so things like sales, profits, customer retention -- also filters out all of the qualitative and inferential claims brands are prone to make. You can say something's so until you're blue in the face, but if the numbers it generates don't move the VU meters on one or more KPIs, you're all but talking to yourself.

We have a surfeit of meaningless numbers, from the DJIA to GDP, so replacing them with ones that matter shouldn't be all that hard. Job creation is an obvious one, along with average duration of employment, and salary strength in the face of inflation and cost-of-living increases. Healthcare costs/individual or family would be good, too.

A political party could decide to publish a list, and then allow us to use it as a litmus test for their politicians' pitches. Make them commit to how they'll impact the numbers and then hold them accountable, and use it as a basis for drawing distinctions with the politics of the opposing party. A media outlet (or outlets) could do it too.

OK, maybe it would be pretty hard to right this ship, but the alternative is to keep yelling at one another as it sinks.

(Image credit: our reasoned debate)

Bright Lights Project: Family Radio

Harold Camping predicted that about two percent of  humanity would ascend to heaven at 6 pm on Saturday, May 21, 2011, basing his calculations on twice multiplying three "holy" numbers (5, 10, and 17) and then counting forward from the exact date on which Jesus was crucified (oddly enough, Camping is the only guy in all of history to know the day, which was April 1, 33). This obvious conclusion commanded the considerable financial and broadcasting power of his Family Radio business to convince his followers to pack their bags and ignore their credit card bills. The Apocalypse would involve massive earthquakes that his chosen friends would miss because they were "raptured."

Then the moment  came and went with nary a tremor.  The faithful were left disappointed that hundreds of millions of their fellow (though imperfect) human beings hadn't been thrown into cataclysmic destruction and then sent straight to Hell. Some of them felt downright ripped off, I'm sure, as news repots had people blowing through life savings checking out earthly delights before their planned celestial check-in.

Such a shock to a brand would suggest a rethink of the communications strategy, but Camping's response was double-down with another prediction, this time pinpointing the destruction of the world on October 21, 2011.

It's now obvious that 1) he believes what he's saying, since there's no redeeming purpose to it (sorry for the pun), and 2) there's a good chance Camping expects to have his own number called before he has to account for another Big Dud later this year.

If he wanted or cared about marketing advice, though, here are three thought-starters on how his brand could turn the other cheek:

• Admit error, sort of -- Camping has already done this, telling the world that his calculations were correct but his labels weren't, so the world was judged, not destroyed, on May 21 (annihilation will come in October). He should immediately retract that last part and stick with the judgment thing. Holy math is just too complex for a precise answer, but the general trend for apocalypses is sooner vs. later, especially since we've just been judged. Say it's coming, and coming soon, but change the pitch from then when to the what now.

• Say more constructive things -- I never understood all the money and effort Camping's people spent on declaring the End of the World. Why didn't they pitch us on what we could do in order to get a set on the upward-bound flight instead of the other one? The new positioning could allow them to do just that, turning the Family Radio propaganda machine into a constant pitch for better, more virtuous and charitable living. Think of the business tie-ins for everything from good citizenship to healthy products.

• Stop shrugging off the nutjobs -- Doomsday cults are somewhat common throughout history, they prey on a particular type of needy individual, and they consistently seem to survive even when their predictions don't. But today's media make it too easy for the rest of us to learn of his flock's disappointment...the nutjobs who spent their life savings or worked tirelessly to do whatever it was they thought they were supposed to do. So far, Camping has shrugged them off, and I think that hurts him more than being so gloriously wrong with his calendar. It makes him look cruel as well as nutty. He needs to help them.

Again, I don't think any of this matters, whether because Family Radio is broadcasting from another reality or, perhaps, they're right and we've just got six months more to live (and the rapture list has already been finalized). The greater truth is that we all live in our own personal end times, and that every day is potentially our last. Camping could recognize this fact and bring his brand communications in line with our reality, not his, but I don't think it's likely.

What do you think?

(Image credit: Harold Camping)

A Better Forecast

As I write this essay, today's weather forecast is for a high of 75 and a low of 61. I have no idea what that means.

It's going to be nice, for sure, but will it be 75 this morning or sometime later in the day? Will it be 75 for a while or only a brief moment? 75 to 61 is a 14-degree range, so is the spread dramatic or not? Does 75 feel almost like 80, or more like 70? Something in the low 60s isn't necessarily warm but coolish, right? The humidity also changes everything, so the same temps could feel very different if there's lots of moisture in the air. And whatever the day feels like to me, it'll feel differently to the next person because our senses are unique from one another's, at least in part. Our reactions to objectively similar experience as different, too (i.e. one person's grossly hot day is another's nirvana).

I don't know about you, but I find most of what I get in even the best weather forecasts to be pretty much useless. No amount of excruciatingly detailed information makes things any clearer. It's like a lot of color commentary on a sporting event for which I don’t understand the fundamental rules of the game.

I have a simple solution to the conundrum: start every forecast with a recap of the prior day's weather highlights. Skip reporting highs and lows, and instead report the mode (or at least an average). And come up with a better method for calculating probability, and apply it to the temps in addition to expectations of storms.

Call it a weather recast instead of a forecast. Here's my reasoning:

• I have a tangibly explicit recollection of what yesterday felt like to me, so it's a foundation on which I can better comprehend today's forecast. I almost don't even need the numbers. Just tell me if today will be better or worse. Adding all of the whys, from cold air fronts moving across the Rockies to butterflies flapping their wings of Beijing, is fine additional content, but the only way I understand my future is with some reference to my past.

• Instead of bookending the temperature, tell me what temp will be the most common throughout the day (in math, this is called the mode). I don't care if the high will happen for a nanosecond, or that it will be really cool while I’m asleep. Four hours of so-and-so temp makes far more sense to me. An average temp would work, only not as well.

• Aobody understands probability (it's why Vegas and workout gurus make money), so I'm not embarrassed to admit that I know only that the chance of a storm at 40% vs. 30% is 10% more of...something. Why not correlate those calcs with historical data for both same day and similar conditions, then translate it into a clearer, perhaps even binary result? We're all gambling on the weather, and forecasters risk being wrong even after they couch their insights into qualified gobblygook. Tell us yes or no.

Such an approach suggests some interesting ideas about how we look at marketing communications, too:

• Do our promises of product or service experience adequately reference consumers' known experience, so they can make more reasoned decisions?

• Do our functional benefits -- from processor speeds to freshness -- stand as exceptional, idealized qualities, or do they represent the most commonly-experienced attributes (and does anybody understand the difference between a gig of memory or a "sell by" date on a carton of milk)?

• Do our statements about reliability, such as J.D. Power rankings, reflect the expectations consumers should have of actual performance? Like the weather, one person's dissatisfied ownership can be another's minor blip in the road, so to speak.

Well, I'm heading out now. Still not sure if I need a jacket.

(Image credit: weather.com)

Bright Lights Project: AT&T

We all know that AT&T's pending takeover of T-Mobile has nothing to do with improving customer value or experiences, and everything to do with cutting costs and "innovating" ways to do less with much less. The fact that the company promised T-Mobile $6 billion in the event the deal doesn’t go through says there's a lot more money to be made once the companies are combined, and the only way any business is so certain about something like that is because cost-cutting is lots more reliable than income-production.

Already, customer satisfaction at the two companies is falling, as per a report earlier this week, and more than one analyst suggests that the only reason AT&T is even in the mobile picture is due to its now-expired exclusive deal to retail Apple's iPhone (and its ginormous size, which in most industries these days is a useful impediment to competition, if also to effective performance). You can just imagine the nonsense branding that’ll get thrown at consumers if and when the deal goes through: We're a new company, focused on excellence, blah blah blah...

All the while, fees will go up as services quality declines. We consumers will have fewer alternatives from which to choose if we want to fire them. 

I'm not optimistic that AT&T can see any other future, or that it cares to do so. But it could consider the merger an opportunity to recast itself operationally as a customer-focused brand. Here are three thought-starter ideas:

• Reinvent customer service. The Conventional Wisdom today uses the language of service to excuse away its demise; more specifically, technology tools have let us redefine service as "fixing problems" instead of obviating them in the first place. Trolling Twitter in hopes of silencing complaints doesn't improve service but rather allow companies to reduce the money they spend on truly improving the experiences of their customers. It also evidences the growing gap between what we expect from brands and what they ultimately deliver. AT&T could use the merger as the call-to-action to change the game. It exists on the bleeding-edge because of the nature of its service. Imagine if it really tried to keep its customers happy?

• Truly integrate the technology & services. I have an AT&T landline telephone, use its DSL for accessing the Internet, and have our mobile phones on a family plan....and there's no reason why I do it except for happenstance. AT&T does nothing to make such synergies produce even the slightest benefits for me, whether experiential, technical, or financial. In fact, I'm pretty convinced that they rip me off, just like they did when they bought SBC (or whomever) and were double-billing me for some charges until I discovered it and challenged them to stop it. Similarly, I had a problem with my iPhone early on, only to find out that AT&T was only responsible for a portion of my experience. How about it skipped all of the marketing nonsense about bundling and instead came up real, tangible reasons how a multi-purpose relationship with the brand offered multiple benefits?

• Change the financial model. This is another chronic bugaboo for me, insomuch that I'm a reasonably intelligent guy and I still can't fathom the 8 pages of invoice detail I get from AT&T each month (on the mobile phones). I truly believe this obfuscation is purposeful; they don't want it to make sense, because there’s utterly no way anybody with an ounce of hope to be understood could have designed the format. Ditto for how the financial deals are structured (two-year this, data plan that). Why couldn't a new AT&T come up with innovative ways to price and communicate its services?

I hate to be so negative, but there's no reason to believe AT&T cares about doing anything differently...other than getting bigger and making its costs smaller. After all, this is the business that spent a cool million bucks to use three seconds of an Oasis song in its branding a few years ago, and now it's going to rollout 4G when few of us ever understood (or enjoyed) 3G. But what it's doing works, up to a point, and perhaps the T-Mobile takeover will help it work into the future.

My bet is that this merger has nothing to do with improving the products and services it sells to its customers. What do you think?

(Image credit: AT&T logo)

Bluster

My recent essay in Advertising Age prompted quite a response, most of which was petulant and angry. I could have made my case more convincingly, but even with that said the comments revealed a shocking ignorance of recent history, and a willingness to replace reason with bluster.

My point was simple: It's a bad idea for the US military to use faux blog posts and other dishonest efforts to counter the lies that extremists propagate in open chat rooms (think Facebook, only in Farsi), because it won't work (we've seen it fail when companies try to do it), and because there are better ways to sway public opinion while respecting our own principles (i.e. tell them the truth). I wrote that I was surprised that my fellow marketers hadn't spoken out on this, though the reaction I got could be one of the reasons why they haven't uttered a peep.

The comments about my essay made three broad complaints:

1. All's fair in war, and it was naive of me to think otherwise.
2. We won the Cold War through similarly devious uses of public communication.
3. I had no expertise or right to suggest a different approach for our government.

Again, I take responsibility for much of their confusion, as I must not have made my position clear enough. But I suspect that a good number of them didn't read my piece, which says something both about their biases and initiative, and the limitations of using tools like comments following blog posts and calling it a "conversation."

I want to address each point:

All's Fair in War

Duh. I understand that the point of fighting a war is to kill your enemies until they give up or exist no more, and that there's nothing fair or polite about doing it. Enemies should be lied to, tricked, and misled if it means more of them will die (and fewer of us). A good number of comments made this point as if it wasn't a given. I should have stated it more clearly.

But my essay wasn't about fighting a war, just as the military program I questioned isn't about enemies. The $2.76 million program (out of a $200 million psy ops budget, which is a bit over 1%) is intended for public forums in which the military wants to sway people to favor America. So this has nothing to do with lying to our enemies, but instead lying to potential friends. It's a virtual hearts-and-minds program in which we plan to fight lies with different lies. Do we need our military managing faux online personas to deliver such pro-American propaganda? I think there are better ways to do it, most notably by delivering genuine pro-American information instead of working secretly to jinn it up (the military's contract specifies "excellent cover and powerful deniability"). The whole point of a public forum is to get the public involved, and last time I checked there were 300 million-plus real people here who might be willing to pitch in.

How We Won the Cold War

I can't take responsibility for commenters' misunderstanding of history. Our military didn't win the Cold War, but rather fought the Soviets and their minions to a stalemate that was as necessary as it was enduring. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) meant that neither side could outfight the other, and that's one of the reasons why the war went on for more than generation. What eventually toppled the USSR was its inability to provide for the economic and intellectual fulfillment of its people. They spent themselves into collapse trying to keep up with us -- "Star Wars" being either a brilliant propaganda move or just an insane idea, though it doesn't matter since the outcome was the same -- and they could no longer cover-up the shortcomings of life under their rule.

What helped make the triumph of our political system impossible to deny by anyone other than an appartchik, as evidenced by things like stocked supermarkets, was communications between the peoples of the US and USSR, such as the student and professional exchange programs that functioned as a nascent social media of its day. It was the awareness of the truth gained through such activities, which spoke truths that were more powerful than the best propaganda lies propagated by the Soviets, that helped win the war; in fact, we didn't win it as much as they lost it or, better put, we made their failure inevitable through a number of different means, military, economic, and psychological. Lying to the world about our way of life, or in any way purposefully deceiving any of the proxies which we hoped to recruit to our side, wasn't one of them. To declare otherwise is nothing more than the bluster of a fist-pump.

It's None of My Business

The personal attacks were the toughest parts of the comments for me, only because it showed such shallowness and anger. My guess is that the angriest complaints came from folks who didn't bother to read my piece but chose instead to shout some preconceived opinion. As I discussed in my first book, this is a common behavior in the social space: Comments comment on comments, not substance, and certainly with no intention of understanding, let alone persuasion. The people who accused me of failing to understand the issues or claimed I had no right to offer an opinion revealed the shortcomings of the format of blog comments as much as their own failure to understand the debate. Their opinions may have come from the right place of patriotism, they were arguing about the wrong things.

It's a simple, sad fact that our government has waged a piss-poor campaign to communicate brand America within the countries in which our enemies are found, converted, and inspired, and I hold both Democratic and Republican administrations responsible. I also blame my fellow marketers for not volunteering our time and expertise -- remember, we still lead the world in the creation of commercial and entertainment content -- and it was to these readers of Advertising Age to whom I complained in my essay. We have been all but silent, both in defense of the media on which we presume to build our own fates, and in offering support on how our government could use it better.

Our war against terrorism threatens to last as long as the Cold War, if not longer, but I firmly believe that we can win it if we find ways to communicate who we are and what we stand for. A campaign that presumes to do so in the court of public opinion as part of our military's psy ops activity isn't the right strategy. The way to attract more people to our thinking isn't to lie better or more often than our enemies.

We should go surreptitiously lie to the bad guys and then kill them in the ways that wars must be fought. We'll convince everyone else of the righteousness of our cause by publicly telling them the truth.

(Image credit: What are you really saying?)

Bright Lights Project: Sony

Sony is under attack. Literally. "Hacktivist" group Anonymous mounted a denial-of-service attack against Sony’s website a few weeks ago, then another group brought down its online network serving PlayStation and Qriocity customers. 77 million customers were without service for five days before Sony admitted that it had been a purposeful event which included theft of user names, emails, and encrypted credit card information. Now there are rumors it will be attacked again.

Oddly enough, at least two of the attacks seem to be motivated by personal or professional grievances: the first attack was in response to Sony's lawsuit of a few people who hacked their PS3 consoles, and it has been suggested that the next attack would be punishment for how poorly Sony responded to the last attack.

So it's part revenge, part white collar crime, and part insanity.

Sony's choices from a technical perspective are plain. Fix the problems. The alternative to a secure online network is no online network, and it's kind of surprising that Sony’s PSN, Qriocity, and Sonly Online networks could be so much weaker on the security front than its competitors. Whether it is or not does't really matter, actually, insomuch that it has to resolve the problem ASAP so it can tell its users that all is well. Do whatever it takes. Quantum encryption. Secure third-party intermediaries for member financial details, so users appear to Sony's databases like drug smugglers appear to their Swiss bankers. Make it up.

The harder problem to solve will be the damage to the credibility of Sony's brand. Why should anybody believe its even qualified, let alone interested, in authoritatively changing its business practices and solving its problems?

Here are three thought-starter ideas for how it might go about it:

• Invite the enemy inside. Going after people who had the interest and ingenuity to hack its game consoles was a stupid idea, and my guess it came out of the company's legal department (they might even be claiming they can win the case, even as they've already lost it in the court of hacker opinion). Why isn't Sony encouraging people to customize their devices? Maybe certain elements or chips need to be sacrosanct, but why not otherwise invite people to do cool, weird, and different things with its stuff? Hackers are really just interested and capable intense customers, if only Sony can get its legal and marketing heads around bringing them inside.

• Innovate in online management. The fact that a global online services provider like Sony collects detailed financial information from individual customers as if it operated like a neighborhood retail store is antiquated, to say the least (just as it's odd to me that anybody is ever comfortable with sharing that information). You'd think that a database of 77 million users would encourage Sony to come up with some novel ways to manage that information. Why not get one of the keiretsu partners in the financial services and technology areas to gin up a better approach, not just for Sony but perhaps offer it as a new standard for its industry?

• Hire a security ombudsman. We live in the Age of Distrust, and with good reason, so I'm not sure Sony (or any brand the suffers a major crisis of confidence) can regain its credibility without admitting its inadequacies and asking for independent, third-party help. Why couldn't it hire a senior executive and let her or him manage a team that did nothing but test, challenge, and affirm all of the thorny and unpleasant possibilities that Sony management are so keen to ignore? The days of Japanese understatement are over (witness the Fukushima debacle); maybe it's time to bring in the authority that the company lacks internally?

With the likelihood of more attacks in its future, I don't think that Sony can afford to credibly fix its security exposure and then discredit it with some nonsense branding or inauthentic customer communication. It's also likely that we're going to see more attacks like these only against other big brands. I wonder if they're dealing with that potential with the level of operational and branding creativity the challenge requires.

What do you think?

(Image credit: Sony)

Less Cute, More Clarity

Progressive insurance came up with a novel program that melds technology, relationship marketing, and pricing to deliver a unique benefit for its customers...and then buried it in its nonsense branding. This is a classic example of how truly new thinking still gets ruined by old habits.

The program, called Snapshot, redefines the abstract and distant nature of insurance policies by basing at least 30% of an auto policy's cost on actual driving behavior. Customers install a tiny gizmo under their dashboards that wirelessly reports driving habits, awarding points for gentle breaking, minimized driving during peak hours or super-late at night, and driving less than the state's average. This data can be accessed through a secure website so customers can track their progress. With a month's data collected, Progressive applies the earned discount to the policy.

I love it. The value proposition for insurance is a tough nut, considering most people don't understand the math beyond a monthly fee (or what feels like one) and the good of an actual payoff isn't perceived before first experiencing the bad of an accident. This equation is particularly hard for the life insurance crowd, though companies like New York Life have done some really inventive things to overcome it. And it's why most of the auto insurance pitches focus on minimizing the expense side of the equation, as if cost is a tax and the benefit found solely in reducing it.

Progressive has attacked the challenge head-on (oops, bad metaphor), calling Snapshot a "Pay As You Drive" program and thereby linking it to good driving and, by association, the risks of bad driving. It takes authority for a portion of the insurance cost out of the hands of anonymous actuaries and put it in the hands of the insured. It personalizes it, and in doing so the wireless connection and online access are the platforms not only for reporting but other personalized, real-time experiences of community. Snapshot is a novel program that could suggest many other ways and reasons to define the equation for buying insurance.

But you've probably never heard of it, because Progressive has buried Snapshot in its irritating TV spots, or grossly mishandled it online.

Its recent branding has relied on "Flo," a chatty cashier in a somewhat abstracted, whitewashed store setting (that could be a retail outlet in heaven or hell) where shelves are filled with boxed insurance products, and wherein she describes Progressive services in her ditzy schtick to various demographically-appropriate characters. In the Snapshot spot, she introduces a lame middle-aged white guy to the program, and it excites him so much that he starts posing for goofy pictures that she snaps with her flashbulb camera. His wife finds him striking a particularly silly pose and ends the clip on a focus-group approved note of good-natured chagrin. Get it? Snapshot. There's a goofy photo contest underway on its site and its Facebook page to further reinforce the message.

Huh?

I think there are two philosophies doing battle within Progressive. The traditional brand clique is driving the Flo spots, which are now being morphed into a campaign centered on a smarmy 70s X-rated movie star spokesman. The thinking is that awareness...of anything...is the goal, and that consumers are dumb and need to be manipulated. There's nothing enlightened, transparent, or particularly truthful about basing marketing on a creative invention -- whether a clerk, lizard, or duck -- unless its a vehicle to deliver real, meaningful information. Serious stuff needs to be handled in a way that makes it palatable, and doing so is harder than being creative and fun with no purpose.

Faced with the choice between healthy vegetables and a greasy cheeseburger, traditional branding types will opt for promoting junk food every time. It's easier to let the sales people worry about converting all of that broad awareness into sales. There'll be content with gathering stupid pictures and clicks on the company's Facebook page.

The Snapshot program suggests to me that there's another philosophy making some headway within Progressive, though, and we should do everything to encourage it. This approach evidences an understanding that true brand benefits come from behavior, not image, and that better brands offer better products and services, not better branding. The fact that the program crosses technical, financial, and other operational departments is exactly where new marketing should be based (and customer relationships defined). Orchestrating Snapshot must have been quite a task, and I applaud Progressive for getting it to market.

It's just too bad that its traditional branding police buried it, because it deserves not only a better promotional push on the front-end but lots more clarity on the back-end. The program gets short shrift on the website and it raises far more questions than the FAQ answer (like what happens to the data long-term, can it be shared with other businesses that might use it to charge me more or less for something, etc.). Even the map that purports to illustrate which states offer the program has no legend. Goofy photos? Please.

But the branding sure is cute. Old habits die hard.

(Image credit: Progressive)

 

Bright Lights Project: Japan

Things in Japan seem pretty messed up, at least to this foreigner.

The nuclear disaster is officially at Chernobyl-level, and I seem to remember that the ultimate solution in Ukraine was to bury the entire village in concrete and turn the larger area into an empty wasteland. Weren't Swedish cows producing milk that glowed in the dark for years thereafter? Japan is little more than one-sixth the size of Ukraine, so it doesn't have the same flexibility for writing off large hunks of real estate.

But it might have to. It's still unclear how much radiation was released into the air and water, but we know it was significant at the site and within 12 miles of the Fukushima plant (people another 6 miles away are still supposed to "stay indoors," whatever that means). Good radiation (Iodine 131, which dissipates in a week or so) has turned up in 12 prefectures (about one-fourth of the total), while bad radiation (Cesium 137, which has a half-life of about 30 years) is in nine.

This nuclear crisis came on top of a natural disaster on which the details are murky also. The tsunami two months ago killed at least 12,000 people (15,000 are still missing) and destroyed five million homes. Hundreds of thousands are still without electricity, and it doesn't help that the areas worst hit by the deadly wave are also Japan's most impoverished and politically weak. Japanese businesses will continue to suffer for months, as many don't expect production to return to pre-disaster levels until the end of the year. It will be years more before the country understands the full impact of the nuclear damage, let alone rebuilt the villages and towns destroyed by the tsunami.

Oddly enough, there's a far worse crisis facing Japan, and that's the crisis of confidence in its brand.

The Japanese government was slow to acknowledge the disaster and did a piss-poor job keeping people informed as the crisis unfolded. There are lingering doubts that anybody outside of the country's leadership really knows what's going on; worse, the level of their hesitation and understatement suggests maybe not so much cultural quirks as it does the scary proposition that nobody has a clue, or that the government is powerless to do anything.

This has to have significant implications for its business and personal vacation travel industries (I know that some American airlines have reduced flight schedules to Tokyo for lack of demand). Here are three thought-starters on how Japan might use marketing communications to start rebuilding confidence in its brand:

• Involve us in the reconstruction -- Why not let American towns "adopt" Japanese towns hardest hit by the crisis (but otherwise similarly sized), literally linking families with families, schools with schools, and encourage conversation that yields intellectual and emotional support (at least) and perhaps ongoing micro-giving or other more tangible contributions (perhaps)? Now that the wave has passed and the news is onto other crises, what's going on in the north of Japan is about as visible to the rest of the world as what's shakin' in North Korea, and more images of water and chaos really wouldn't tell us anything more than we already think we know. Where's the social media platform(s) to make this happen? I bet there's some translation app that would let us talk to one another.

• Get third-party involvement in damage assessment -- The Japanese government needs to come to terms with the possibility that it has zero credibility (again, this could be the unfortunate result of linguistic and cultural differences, but it's no less real as an outcome). So there's no way it can tell us everything is OK, and we're suspicious that if things aren't that it won't say much of anything at all. Where are the third-parties that could tell us what's what, and do so with some regularity? Truth trumps fear.

• Help everyone else -- Right now, Japanese authorities as well as individual citizens know more about what they wished they'd known before the various disasters struck, from the minor tactical considerations (like homes near the shore having emergency supplies wrapped in water-tight plastic) to the strategic (quicker access to vast amounts of water for cooling reactors). Maybe they should start quantifying and delivering these insights to the rest of us...help us be prepared and, in doing so, engage with others on a positive and proactive way of looking at the horrible news.

There's a line between what the Japanese government and its major businesses should sponsor, but the line is kinda fuzzy. Imperfect action on the communications front would speak far more loudly than delayed perfection, and we might not believe it (or care) when it finally arrived. The tools exist, and the times don't call for some faux reassuring ads or pronouncements on state visits. The time to engage with regular people is now, isn't it?

(Image credit: Destruction)

It's the OS, Stupid

Microsoft shares cratered nearly 5 percent last Friday after the company announced a decline in sales of its Windows computer operating system. Its mention of 21% higher revenue in sales of Microsoft Office and Xbox didn't do much to mollify freaked out investors.

Hello? Where's the Harvard Business Review case on how this company has not only been missing boat for the past half-decade (or more) but why the boat it's in right now is sinking?

Microsoft has always been a provider of an OEM product to computer hardware manufacturers. It's a big one -- arguably the most important one, since Windows is the software that enables computers to think and remember -- but it wasn't conceived as a consumer products company. It reaped windfall profits from an industry that was all but genetically predisposed to buy its operating systems. Its leaders saw that this cushy arrangement wasn't permanent, though, and likely saw it even before we did. So it invested some of those zillions into other businesses, like game consoles, mp3 players, mobile phones, and a host of worthy experiments (it recruited Ray Ozzie in the mid-200s, who'd founded Lotus Notes and had done really cool online collaboration things at Groove).

The problem is that none of those experiments have turned out to be worth much of anything.

All the while, Microsoft treated its Windows OS like the cash-cow it was, rolling out new versions every 18 months or so for no other reason than it needed a reason to make its customers buy newer versions of the product. Many of these iterations were not only unnecessary but actually worse than the systems they replaced (Vista, anyone?). Its approach helped encourage users to assume an OS was a given unless something went wrong, at which time it was a burden. Microsoft turned its flagship product into a brand name with no experiential upside, and an endless capacity to take the blame on the downside. This should be a textbook case about how to destroy a brand.

I have been arguing for a few years now that Microsoft should have invested its money in making Windows the most amazing, irreplaceable, valuable system for making any and every thinking electronic device perform wonderfully...from the biggest most brainiac desktops to RFID chips that did nothing more than regularly chirp their existence. Imagine if Windows were the go-to OS for everything? This was not only possible, but Microsoft was uniquely positioned to accomplish it. It had the money and the brainpower.

Instead, it chose to ignore this opportunity and pretend that OS was just one of its many divisions. The business media played along, as did the industry analysts and academic institutions that are supposed to see what's going on. Somebody at Forrester or wherever should have pulled the emergency cord in 2000 when Windows ME was introduced into the market and promptly crashed any pretense that the next OS was better than the last. Perhaps this was a public indication of an illness within Microsoft that predated it (it must have, since it took years to come up with that clunker).

So now here we are, well into 2011. More devices are running leaner OS (with more thinking and remembering happening via teeny apps or in the cloud), and the company's erstwhile competitor now rules the roost with its chronically closed and utterly successful ecosystem of devices, programs/apps, online services, and its own OS. Microsoft is starting to show the hurt in its profits, and no amount of funny advertising or marketing expenditure can change this reality problem inherent in its brand.

There's still a good many years left in its OEM business, of course. The company could continue to milk it -- I mean, jeez, I should be so smart and fortunate to suffer such failures as it has -- or it could develop an actual business strategy that had some teeth.

Operating systems aren't one of many things the company does...its the most important thing it does, and it should be the thing it does best, not worst. So I'd say skip the games, music, phones, and every other distraction, and marshall every resource now to make its software the soul of every thinking and remembering device in the same way that Intel aspires to be the functioning heart. It should stop pretending to be a consumer products company and focus on what it should have focused on all along.

I wouldn't put my money on that happening, though. They're just too smart for that. And, for what it’s worth, I sometimes wonder if Google isn’t following down the same path...developing every conceivable business its megazillionaire founders can imagine instead of continually reinventing the core search business that pays the bills?

(Image credit: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory)