Hal O'Brien

Seth Godin had a great blog post yesterday. Great enough, and short enough, that I'm going to quote it in full here:

Pushing the spectrum

Marketers have long tried to turn happy events into shopping opportunities. Macy's and Gimbels and others pushed us to see Christmas as a chance to buy gifts. Shopping is right next to happiness on the spectrum of emotions, I guess, just as green is next to blue in the rainbow. They did it to Valentine's day and now, of course, Halloween.

Lately, some marketers would like to push us to move from fear to hatred. It makes it easier for them. We honor and remember the heroes who gave everything, the innocent who were lost, the neighbors who narrowly escaped. A day to hate? I hope we can do better than that.

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My only concern is, one could view the push to market "a day to hate" as being the embodiment of another recent post of Seth's: Sell the problem. Alas.

First, let's check in with Joel Spolsky from 10 years ago:

"Speaking of Verizon (formed by the merger of BellAtlantic and GTE): whenever a company changes its name, the only thing that it logically means is that they concluded that their old brand name was a liability, not an asset. BellAtlantic and GTE have spent so long pissing off so many people with such bad customer service that their names had negative brand equity." {emphasis in original}

For those who don't know, BP insists they're just "BP" these days, and not "British Petroleum," because they went through renaming the company after a merger with Amoco in the late 1990s. First it was "BP Amoco," and then it was solely "BP." So what does BP stand for, if it doesn't mean "British Petroleum"? Nothing. Or, one can think of it like a Sesame Street sketch: "This company is brought to you by the letter B and the letter P."

As Mr. Spolsky points out, this is probably because someone sold management on the idea that all three of the constituent names -- "British," "Petroleum," and "Amoco" -- had negative brand equity.

The other self-referential-to-the-point-of-autism rebranding that took place at a similar time was BAE Systems. BAe once stood for "British Aerospace." Now, the all-caps BAE stands for, you guessed it, the letter B, the letter A, and the letter E. (And I forget who wrote about that clusterfuck fannishly, but I remember reading about it at the time in some fanzine from the UK written by an employee.)

My point, though, is that these are among the most incompetent rebrandings of all time. Because letters are not names. Letters, when used in a proper noun, represent something. And it's not like this doesn't have a known solution -- as Exxon, Verizon, Altria, and many others demonstrate.

So, Dear BP: Too damned bad. It's British Petroleum until you can be bothered to get the job done, and actually come up with something else.

Seth Godin has a great post on the business consequences of "dumbing down."

"The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?

Dumb customers.

And (I'm generalizing here) dumb customers don't spend as much, don't talk as much, don't blog as much, don't vote as much and don't evangelize as much. In other words, they're the worst ones to end up with."

So, here's the thing:

Apply this analysis to news media.

And politics.

UPDATED TO ADD: D'oh! Only now have I noticed the most important part. Think about education. I really believe half of our school problems are because we're convinced our kids don't want to learn.