transparency, quality, and best faces forward

Right now I'm at the pool of an apartment complex in the Buckhead district of Atlanta. Buckhead is that well-to-do, glitzy/wealthy area every city has, and every business/residential complex/everything else anywhere remotely nearby tries to claim they are a part of. While you could genuinely claim one side of this particular complex as true-blood Buckhead (there's a beautiful neighborhood of high-end real estate just as you come out of the entrance), the reality is that it's easier and more intuitive to get in/out of the complex through the opposite side, which comes complete with a series of run-down storage facilities, a late-night "health" spa, and a less-than-attractive stretch of I-85.

This got me thinking about a newsletter I haven't removed myself from yet, a weekly set of thoughts from the founder of JobFox that I started receiving when I used their visual experience map-building tool once upon a time. The founder typically shares some insider insights on the recruiting/job market world, the most recent being a comparison between the current state of affairs for employers and home buyers.

Essentially the following point was being made: just as buyers in the real estate market can currently afford to expect nothing less than perfection at a perfect price, so too are employers settling for nothing less than perfection in candidates, every step of the way. The newsletter more or less recommends putting your best face forward, at any cost.

Back to the apartment complex. I got to wondering how much better off the complex would be were it to put it's best face forward and direct potential residents through the nicer (but less convenient) route to the property. Clearly this is a larger set of thoughts regarding the nature of transparency. I'm thinking that it's questions like these that are putting our intense (although brief) fascination with openness and transparency back into perspective. My initial thoughts are of the starry-eyed transparency camp: certainly this would be a thinly-veiled attempt at concealing the convenient-but-unaesthetic route onto the property. Certainly this assumes that residents are idiots, and when they figure out they've been duped in a way, they're certain to be resentful. Certainly "putting your best face forward" is something of an attempt to hide important realities.

After talking through the idea and the implications for brands, I was reminded at the pool that housing, resumes, and brands all live in somewhat different worlds when it comes to expectations. While I consider successful personal and consumer brands that are driven by a sort of "you know what? We're NOT perfect. These 'imperfections' are a part of our unique story, and we're going to use them to our advantage" philosophy, I also recognize that there are institutions like medical school admissions that absolutely expect and actively encourage in some sense the best faces forward approach (@ashleydickinson's confirmation of the JobFox thoughts).

I find it important to note that even in the brand world, only those of truly quality substance can afford to make that 'unique story' argument anyway. The apartment complex illustrates this well; even if it were the case that people searching for apartments expect less transparency from complexes than from brands, I still find the face forward approach a bit too dishonest for my taste. On the other hand, transparency falls flat here, in consideration of what is unfortunately a true dealbreaker for many people: less than ideal location.

I suppose that outside of thinking about expectations first, there's no clear winning strategy here, no catch-all advice. Just some thoughts to consider as we begin to take a closer look at what transparency truly means. I suppose the only true catch-all strategy is to put the hard work into actually being that quality brand/person/location/whatever (it's more work than you think). And avoid the ones that aren't (also prohibitively difficult).

BK, comparison, and the real problem at hand

AdAge's article What Crispin's Lauded BK Work Doesn't Do: Gain Ground On McD's reflects on the last 5 years of work by Crispin Porter & Bogusky and Burger King, noting that while creative, ground-breaking and buzz-building, it hasn't made a dent in the gap between BK and top dog McDonalds.

I'm compelled to immediately think two things:

1>> Again it comes to light that there's a stark difference between driving advertising/awareness, and solving the real problem at hand (evidently this goes beyond just traditional advertising and reaches into sacred social media ground as well). Is BK's problem that they aren't branded/social media'd/buzz-generatingly rad enough??? Or: is it that they essentially serve chunks of meat in various manufactured forms? Not to say that with any definite expertise, because I'm certainly no burgerologist or anything (it's prob been approx 5 years since I've even been to a BK, and a McD's maybe twice or so in the same period) so it's reasonable/likely that it's some other third thing. But I think it's a question worth asking and I think this is becoming increasingly more obvious.

2>> Does comparing BK to McD's measure how well BK is performing to the people that matter (read: consumers)??? Or: does it measure something that only matters to executives and people reading ad/industry magazines?

These two probably contradict each other on some level, but my end thought is this: A successful brand always lives and breathes some raison d'etre, and it's never 'money' (or any other metrics for that matter). It's almost always 'other people.'

time, perspective, and decision-making

There's a lot of profound thinking packed into these 6 minutes. Phillip Zimbardo of the 1971 Stanford Prison experiments has some very wise things to say about happiness and decision-making in relation to our perspective on the past, present, and future, all solidified in years of behavioral research.

Interestingly enough, he also briefly alludes to the idea I've be taken by lately, that our decision-making is far more outside of our conscious control than we ever care to believe.

And I of course love the key idea that perspective determines our reality, particularly as applied here to forming habits and having the discipline to achieve goals.

advertising, agencies, and failure

Lately I've been savvy to considering the problems inherent to advertising, as I'm becoming more and more frustrated by deep-rooted fallacies that have been part-and-parcel of the industry.

(disclaimer: these fallacies are applicable in varying degrees to varying organizations. I very much admire some outstandingly innovative thinking that exists out there.)

I'm using "advertising" to describe what can essentially boil down to "push messaging" specifically, which is of course a different beast from the more general idea of "marketing." The issue I take with advertising is that in approaching advertising as a marketing strategy, one immediately turns away from product and service and becomes blindingly consumed by message and medium. The fundamental goal of message advertising is to wrap a product in shiny paper, with the only regard for the stuff inside being to identify the limits and constraints the message can work within.

...well, that and "awareness." (To be fair, I'm kind of torn on the nature and function of awareness so I'll save some thoughts on that for later. Perhaps you have some on the matter?)

So timely enough, today I ran into Jeff Jarvis' very smart thoughts on the nature of advertising, and how he's happened upon the notion of advertising as failure. I'm an easy sell.

Jarvis - "This, then, is about the impact on the ad agency as a middleman:"

"Oooh, that's Clever!"

Oooh, that's Clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)

View more Microsoft Word documents from nicepaul.

Fascinating presentation on the art of designing the unexpected into products and experiences. I'm taken by the idea of integrating the little things that most people won't notice, but those that do will be sure to talk about. How To Break Anything can be applied here - creativity is about context. It's an excercise in understanding a medium well enough to break the rules governing it. Just ask Boone Oakley.