Having just breezed through the “Creativity” issue of Advertising Age, I’m left with the impression that the people who presume to be experts remain as clueless as the rest of us about most of what’s going on, or not going on, in this wacky business.

I learned that transparency can be a good thing, but only to a point. Doesn’t that feel a little like a contradiction?

I learned that for any idea to have the potential to be a big idea, it must be “social”, whatever that means. I mean, really, is that a helpful thing to say? To speak nothing of . . . Is that true?

I read, for the zillionth time, that “authenticity” is good. Now, if only I could read a comprehensible explanation of just what authenticity is.

I learned that Lee Clow is no less wise than he was the last time I read anything he said, which was probably a decade ago. Unfortunately, in this business, wisdom often means recognizing how little wisdom (or even understanding or knowldege or insight) there is out there. For example, Mr. Clow says this: ” We haven’t come close to figuring out how to use all these new-media opportunities and most clients are very conflicted about what media they should use, why and how.” This is a rather damning observation, considering that our business is largely about knowing this kind of stuff.

So, while the industry continues to chase an endlessly increasing number of tails, I’m just going to stay here in my tiny corner of the world, trying to figure out what makes this or that brand tick, and then trying to write a little piece of magic that will tickle the appropriate brains.

I’ve been surprisingly conflicted in my reaction to Draft/FCB’s recent “Pottymouth” campaign for KMart. On the one hand, when I first saw the “I shipped my pants” spot, I found it funny. I have no idea what the commercial was about, but they sure drove home the joke over and over. The humor doesn’t really hold up very well over multiple viewings. At least, it didn’t for me.

I found the more recent “Big gas” spot considerably less funny. First, it’s just not as funny and has less shock value, because “ass” is a far more comfortable, less verboten term than “shit”. Even in the context of a commercial. Second, because it’s the second spot based on the same “concept”, the novelty is already wearing out.

So whether this campaign “has legs” is highly in doubt. But the more important question is about the implications for the brand of taking this lowest-common-denominator approach. Tapping into a type of humor that I’m guessing they have research to indicate their target market enjoys makes sense on the face of it. But it raises questions about how people relate to brands. Will these spots further endear KMart customers to the brand because “They’re one of us” or something like that? Or do you want the brands you hold allegiance to behave in at least a slightly elevated manner, to be held on a tiny pedestal, to be a little “classier” than the way in which these customers behave amongst themselves at the backyard barbecue or at work, etc.?

I don’t know the answer to that. I wish I could say, “Well, we’ll see how sales go for KMart in the next quarter”, but I don’t think that is going to be a reliable metric by which to measure the effectiveness of this campaign. As is the problem with trying to measure the effectiveness of most advertising, there are just too many other variables.

Full disclosure: I once worked at FCB long before the Draft takeover. It was not a happy experience. On top of that, based on my own limited first hand experience as a freelancer at Draft, combined with what I’ve read about Draft and heard from employees, I have no great love for that agency. I look  askew at any advertising I know is the product of Draft/FCB.

So a big part of me is hoping that this winds up blowing up in their face and hastens the inevitable demise of KMart. However, I can well imagine that the campaign could give the brand a big boost, at least in the short run. It certainly has gotten the job done, talk value wise.

Bob Killian, for those of you who don’t know—or know about him—is one of the sharpest marketing minds I’ve come across in my 32 years in advertising. He runs his own shop and writes great white papers and other such vehicles carrying his wisdom. Much of what he says is simple, seemingly common sense stuff that eludes many companies and many advertising people.

Bob sent an email out recently containing his most recent blog post addressing the Google/Penguin rule changes development. While I have little interest in most of the SEO world, when Killian speaks, I listen. Check out his recent blog post and learn a little something regarding how to think about the Google rule changes code-named “Penguin”.

More interesting to me is the general point Bob makes about how to think about your marketing and how to prioritize your efforts.

Allow me to share with you this excerpt from the post:

“Brand visibility is your first duty in marketing, even before differentiation. (Hey, if a differentiated tree falls in the forest, but nobody sees it, what possible difference does it make what that differentiator is? You can be the low-cost provider, or the most responsive, or have intergalactic customer service – and say so, but until your key prospects actually hear it, it’s futile.)”

Given how much time I spend focused on differentiating brands via taglines, it’s good to be reminded of this simple truth.

These days visibility is largely dependent on smart SEO thinking. I am of little use in this regard, since I understand only the most rudimentary things about SEO. But, once you succeed in making your brand visible, you’d better dang well have something to say that’s worth hearing, and that doesn’t just mean some unique offering. “Worth hearing” has to do just as much with how you sound and look as it does with what you have to say or offer. Likeability, provocativity or at least evocativity and other aspects of your brand’s voice and personality often differentiate you more than the product or service you offer. The converse of Bob Killian’s point above is also true:

Differentiating your brand is a waste of time and effort if your brand is invisible. Conversely, if your brand is bland, generic or generally unremarkable, you’re squandering the visibility you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

A few years ago, I coined this term, “Differessence”, to refer to that core, central, essential aspect or characteristic of a brand that also differentiates the brand from its competitors. The point being, in part, that any brand has many aspects, characteristics, attributes and benefits. But very few if any of them is truly differentiating.

Conversely, a brand may have a very differentiating attribute or benefit, but that attribute or benefit isn’t really central to the brand. Instead, it may just be a temporary thing, like a the competitive advantage a brand may gain from some product innovation that is only differentiating until the competition catches up with that innovation.

I’ve found the term, “Differessence”, very useful, especially when trying to explain the role of taglines in the branding communication spectrum.

One thing I’ve learned since I started using this term is that a brand’s differessence often, maybe even always, involves some intangible quality of the brand that can be variously characterized as brand personality, philosophy, world view, or a brand point of view regarding its offering, its customers or the world in general. For example, some brands’ differessences are related to a particular sense of humor which is key to the brand personality. This is the case, often cited, with Geico. They constantly push the ease and cost-saving benefits, but the vehicles they use to deliver this message, (The Gecko, The Caveman, and more than a dozen other, less easily identified, campaigns over the last decade or so), are always humor-based.

These campaigns have been remarkably consistent in their humorousness, with a couple of exceptions. First, lately the Gecko is showing signs of having been used up. And the latest addition to Geico’s campaign collection is a very uncharacteristic stinker, seemingly created by summer interns. I’m speaking of the ads with the two musicians ham-handedly delivering punchlines that needlessly “explain” the preceding visual illustration of just how happy a person will be when they save money on insurance that precedes the appearance of the two musicians. This campaign is structurally flawed, ensuring that every spot will be unfunny because it insults the viewer by overexplaining the joke.

To quote Ellen, “Anyway . . .”

The point I’m getting at is that a brand’s differessence often doesn’t ride on some unique, ownable or proprietary benefit of the product or service. Rather, it may have more to do with the what I might term the “brand manner”—they way in which the brand expresses itself, relates to its customers or views the world.

Brands that don’t really understand their own differessence are often revealed simply by way of the inconsistency of tone, attitude or personality their advertising takes over time.

To stay in the insurance category, both State Farm (with what I call it’s “beer ad” campaign), and Allstate, (with its Mayhem campaign), have recently turned to humor, which marks a dramatic departure from the tonality of decades of previous ad campaigns. It is ironic that this puts both brands in the position of appearing to be copycat wannabees to Geico, which is the relative newcomer on the insurance advertising block.

We won’t even speak of the sad, lame Progressive campaign.

When I first coined the term, “Differessence”, I assumed that the term would usually refer to some benefit the brand promises, (like shiny floors for Mr. Clean), but it turns out not to be so simple. A brand’s differessence can certainly be about a unique benefit, but it seems like it is more often about that benefit wrapped in a unique personality or philosophy, or else it is about that personality or philosphy itself, while any benefit the brand offers is relegated to secondary status.

NOTE TO READERS OF THIS BLOG: It is always my hope that this stuff I spout won’t go unchallenged. Push back, people, if what I’m saying seems like stuff I’m just making up or whatever.

I love the Santana song that carries that name.

What I don’t love is when a company is so undisciplined that it chooses to attempt to be everybody’s everything.

Take  Global Medical Products, for instance. They proudly display their tagline:

Clinically Driven. Patient-focused. Value-based.

In addition to being FAR too wide a swath to stick their flag into, this particular group of three claims suffers from the “pick two” syndrome. While I’m sure they’d like to achieve all three of these objectives, and who in their business wouldn’t, there is a tension between these three that calls the whole proposition into question. Call me skeptical, but I’d be impressed if even two of these attributes was true.

Do I even need to point out that this is a classic example of a tagline with the “arrows” pointed at the company rather than the customer? Sometimes you can get away with this me-centric orientation, but only if the way you characterize your own attributes is interesting, different, engaging, entertaining, surprising. This tagline is none of those things. Meanwhile, you leave it to the prospective customer to do all the work of translating your attributes into some possible benefit for them. That’s usually too much to ask. Smart brands do that work, connecting the dots so the customer doesn’t have to.

Oh, and did I mention how boring this tagline is. I have to imagine that their business, and their brand, have the potential to be a whole lot more compelling than that dry line.

Or, rather, about a vacuum. Oreck, to be specific.

Oreck’s old tagline, Clean Made Easy, was a snore. Simple, short and boring.

Then, recently I saw a new commercial for Oreck. Their new tagline is:

A Lot Goes Into It.

Wow. SO much better. Again, so simple, pretty compact, but that quiet little play on words, both meanings of which allude to brand-differentiating stories, is so nice. Not blindingly brilliant. Not unforgettable. In fact, between the time I saw the commercial and I sat down to write this post, I, in fact, forgot what the line was. It took a bit of searching. But it was worth it, because I got to enjoy it again upon rediscovery.

As near as I can tell, this line was created by the Buntin Group in Nashville. If this is true, kudos to whomever wrote it there.

Alexian Brothers Health System has a campaign, unremarkable, as far as I can recall, but with a pretty good tagline:

Our Passion Is Powerful Medicine.

A really tight play on words, and either way you read the meaning applies equally well to their benefit. It’s interesting how, as the sadly limited lexicon of words being used in healthcare taglines is being used up, the word “passion” has become more acceptable. In 1990, when I tried to sell a hospital client on a tagline that made use of the word “passion”, they balked. While they couldn’t articulate their concern very well, it became clear that, in a classic case of overthink, they felt it might be seen as having a slightly salacious connotation.

I’m sure there are still clients who would have this discomfort with the word, but I’ve seen several examples of healthcare brands that have taken the leap and chosen to use the word in their taglines.

The other tagline that caught my eye was for Habitat Corporate Suites Network, an unfortunately clunky brand name.Their tagline is:

We’re the people you stay with.

Not exactly a new bit of word play within the hospitality industry, but this particular articulation works particularly well. While it carries much of the same intention as New York Life’s The Company You Keep, since it’s a different industry, it doesn’t feel at all like a knockoff.

I do love the well-played play on words. It makes a short burst of language work twice as hard, and tickles the brain, thus imbedding the thought more effectively into that brain. And, as with these two examples, there is zero groan factor in a truly well-crafted play.

Duluth Trading Company makes work clothes. They have a very entertaining, quirky TV ad campaign that I’m smitten with. Yet, they don’t seem to have a tagline. Instead, they seem to have something resembling a tagline for each line of clothes they feature in their tv spots. For example, on of their clothing lines is Flex Fire Hose Work Pants. The commercial that focuses on this clothes line ends with what I initially took to be their tagline:

Crouch Climb Conquer Comfortably

But then I saw a commercial featuring Duluth Buck Naked Underwear, and the list of benefits was different, which makes sense. But it is structured and placed in more or less the position where, typically, a tagline would go. Just as Crouch Climb Conquer Comfortably was placed in the first commercial I saw.

I can only assume that, for every spot they’ve produced featuring one of their clothing lines, they have a different set of benefits functioning as a tagline of sorts.

While I wish a brand as creative and fun as this one would have included a real, overarching tagline that would apply to everything they make, I must recognize that their approach to the tagline—customizing a tagline for each clothing line, but using the same structure—is not without merit. After all, here I am writing about it.

It is because I almost always find drug advertising, be it prescription or over the counter, to be abhorent, that I must point acknowledge the TV campaign for Osteo-BiFlex, which I guess is an anti-arthritic of sorts, supposed to relieve joint pain. Rather than the typical shots of seniors dancing in a contrived fashion, smiling, laughing, all that baloney,the Osteo-BiFlex found a fresh take on this with some vintage footage of real people dancing circa 1940, give or take a decade. On top of that, they found a very fetching old song from that era, the hook of which is “The joint is jumping”. And the campaign tops it all off with a very nicely done tagline:

The Best Stuff in The Joint.

Each of these elements does such a nice job of complementing the others. The whole campaign hangs together very comfortably and the spot is dang likeable, as hard as I tried not to like it. The downside: what do they do for an encore. Could be tough to put together another spot that works this well.

As I gaze out the window of the Burger King that is my branch office, the UNFI truck passes by, presumably having just emptied its contents at the nearby Whole Foods.

UNFI is “North America’s leading distributor of natural, organic and specialty products”. Starting with the brand name, this company is a marketing communications mess.

The name, an acronym for United Natural Foods, Inc., is terribly unappetizing, more appropriate to a company that might work with the United Nations on financial matters. ANY of the names of the smaller distributors that this company was built on—Mountain People’s Warehouse, Blooming Prairie, People’s Warehouse, Stow Mills, Albert’s Organics, Northeast Cooperatives, Select Nutrition, Root’s ‘N Fruits or Millbrook Distribution Services—would have been a better choice.

The tagline:  Driven By Nature. A tight little combination of two of THE MOST overused tagline plays on words in tagline history. A tagline beneath contempt.

The mission statement is 43 words long. The vision statement is singularly uninspiring, and as generic and vacuous as I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.

This is a well-intentioned company unwittingly littering the landscape with its marketing language spill. It’s a big company, and no doubt it works with some run of the mill B To B agency, doing run of the mill work for UNFI.

It’s a shame. There are thousands of businesses like this out there, who know their own business very well, but just can’t seem to get a clue about how to be an effective brand.

I find this disspiriting. Especially because it doesn’t seem like there’s any fixing this mess of bad messaging.

I’m going to take a nap,