When It’s All Blown Up – Beyond Crisis Communications.

The “disaster in the Gulf” has generated far more than sad deaths and leaking hydrocarbons – as if these are not enough. There was big-time yelling (did you see James Carville on TV yesterday?). Plenty of finger-pointing and blame-passing. Tremendous political pressure. And also, engineering challenges and potential triumphs when the leaks are stopped and the clean-up has been accomplished.

Looking back to the quiet times BL (Before Leak), you may find reading “Schumpeter” instructive. BL in this case is April 8, 2010, a couple of weeks before Deepwater Horizon blew up. The Schumpeter to whom I’m referring is the nom-de-plume of the regular Business editorializer for The Economist.

This Schumpeter wrote here about “Brand rehab.” He outlined two rules for successful crisis management:

First, the boss needs to take charge. This means sidelining corporate cluck-cluckers such as lawyers (who worry that any admission of guilt will lead to lawsuits) or financial officers (who obsess about the bottom line). It also means putting the survival of the company above personal considerations. Many of the most damaging crises, by contrast, have resulted from foot-dragging at the top.

The second rule is that crisis-racked firms should redouble their focus on their customers.

Now we’ve gone beyond the normal activities of crisis management, or crisis communications. In the case of the leaking well, all the stakeholders, from the crew and families of the sunken rig to the people who live and work along the shores of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to company shareholders, to politicians, have been seriously affected.

It’s not like the Tiger Woods version of the problem which The Economist article actually addresses. It is much more serious for everyone, including BP and Halliburton (which are clients) and Transocean (which is not).

No company operating in the Western business world today will ever be free of intense scrutiny. And so much has been written, broadcast and screamed about what ought to be done, should have been done – including nationalization of the offshore wells and lynching oil company executives – well, Signalwriter isn’t going to add to the load.

Except to ask you to take the long view. (Hard but not impossible.) The real Schumpeter – Joseph Schumpeter, 1883-1950 – wrote:

Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process [of Creative Destruction] and within the situation created by it.

The creative destruction of this offshore drilling event is going to massively affect business and regulatory strategies. The event’s going to change companies and regulators too. Will the effects and the changes be revolutionary…or evolutionary? I don’t have the answer; I look forward to taking part in the dialogue.

PS: I certainly expect some readers will take me to the woodshed because I’m wiritng about branding and marketing in the same post as the tragic events which began with the April 20 explosion and fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig. So, dear readers: “There’s lots of copy on these subjects – Google it for yourselves.”

If a Better Boeing Brand Bombs, It’s Not So World-Ending.

Big is back. That’s the word from The Economist. The August 29, 2009 number even has a whale on the cover to emphasize its story, “The return of the corporate giant.” Big’s beautiful again even if for some of us the beauty part never went away. And The Economist mentions Boeing in the same sentence as Yahoo (in terms of 1998 capitalization, the nod went to Yahoo).

Coincidentally, in the 9/15/09 Marketing News, Elisabeth Sullivan wrote a three-pager about Boeing’s recent brand developments – her “Building a Better Brand” case study is available here. As a survey piece it’s not so bad but it leaves a couple of questions hanging around.

The how-it-came-to-be article trumpets a cohesive brand identity story, carefully quoting Boeing’s Fritz Johnson and Jim Newcomb; Boeing’s ad agency Draftfcb; corporate design firm Methodologie Inc; and (wait for it) an aerospace and defense industry think tank exec, Teal Group VP Richard Aboulafia.

The narrative gravely mentions “brand DNA” and “triple helix” and “design roadmap.” All good things, all quite contemporary. “Everyone should be managing the brand,” Newcomb says, adding that every employee now is interested in Boeing’s branding process.

For public consumption, though, it seems like the Boeing brand is constantly being reinvented. Whatever happened to the Horizons Global Advertising Campaign that Draftfcb launched for the company at the very end of 2001?

Was that the same introduction as the much-touted $50-million “Boeing: Forever New Frontiers” global television and print advertising campaign? Boeing’s brand management VP Anne C Toulouse said at the time (January 2002):

This campaign captures the spirit of Boeing, celebrating the power of human imagination and technological achievements…the Boeing brand is one of our most valuable intangible assets. Our investments in the brand help strengthen the company's long-term business position.

Now the company’s apparently gone back to the drawing board. It’s possible that the spirit of the big company changed in the eight or so years since “Forever New Frontiers” went public. Eight years is a long time in major corporations these days. (It’s also like the sign I once saw in a 3M conference room, “We’re going to keep having meetings until we find out why there’s no work getting done around here.”)

More telling to me is the hesitation Marketing News attributed to Aboulafia, the defense industry think-tanker. He’s wary of endorsing any external manifestations of the Boeing “One brand, One company” strategy discussed in the Marketing News article. Maybe he suspects that a new mega-branding effort on the company’s part will have little if any impact on its military and civilian customers and prospects.

Boeing isn’t just a mighty big company, with more than 158,000 employees in the US and 70 countries. It’s a mighty big brand, too. It’s been the world’s premier manufacturer of commercial jets for 40 years and arguably the most influential producer of warplanes for, like, forever. Despite the company’s participation in a wide array of other industries, from finance to software, it is principally viewed as an ironmonger.

So it probably doesn’t matter if the corporate people are tinkering with the cohesiveness of the company image. Boeing’s products…fly. That’s a great brand.

PS: I spent a large part of my military service time with aircraft produced by McDonnell-Douglas, now a key part of Boeing: A-3s and A-4s, and the propeller-driven C-47s, C-54s, C-117s. I’m a long-ago member of Mach Nix, which may explain why I’m slow on the uptake: Why didn’t I write this blog post back in May, when Boeing per-share price was $29? Photo: USAF.

Lifeless Snoozers

I’m about to do Korean Air (and other major international companies) a grave injustice – I guess. But the example ad above, featuring KA’s “reclining Kosmo Sleeper,” is ink-on-paper proof that The Economist has the most boring ads of any major weekly magazine on the planet Earth. They’re mostly tedious. They’re dreary, lifeless snoozers.

Please leave aside, for the moment, whether the entire Korean Air ad campaign, with TV spots created by director Michael Buckley, is good or bad. (This particular print ad has been called “Stunning” and “Absolutely brilliant.” Blog-posters say they love flying the airline.)

No, what I’m after is why The Economist, a massively important and very well-written news magazine, has such generally uninspiring advertising, week after week.

Well, I guess I know why, but I sort of forgot, and then the magazine itself reminded me. A recent article, “Heated arguments,” pointed out that attack ads are on the rise – in America. But, oh dear, the rest of the world still doesn’t like them: “Attack ads tend to go down badly in Europe and Asia.” And, “Some governments even ban them.”

The article really isn’t news, it’s observation. I learned about Europe’s unease with provocatively combative adverts at the knees of my Dialogue International colleagues.

So there are like these…rules…for ad campaigns that will run internationally. Outside-the-US Rule 1, no English-language puns – non-native speakers often don’t get the jokes and they can hardly ever be translated into other languages anyway.

Rule 2: Make only claims that can be proven in court – and if in doubt, don’t make them at all. So paging through, say, The Economist, you’ll see terribly boring ads for SAP or Royal Bank of Canada. (There’s often fancy watch ads on the back covers, though.)

“Stop the reader” is my Rule 1. I call The Economist ad slate boring because I don’t think the ads bring readers to a screeching halt. This doesn’t have to be done with funny headlines or provocative pronouncements . Use a dramatic photo once in a while. (What are you people paying your ad agencies for, anyway? Sleep-aid adverts?)

Wake up. Get a life. And only read The Economist for the articles.