Dmitry Petrov
pegasus1962@mail.ru

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013

So it happened. Once upon a time in America, and more exactly back in 2006, in California.
   Viktor, a Russian friend of mine interested in the philosophical dimension of branding, and I are riding through California towards the Nevada border, following the route we got two weeks before from Stanley Moss at a dinner in the Ritz–Carlton Hotel, in Virginia.
   We had started from San Francisco’s Beat Museum, stopped in Oakland for a brief look at the pot-shops in this town (quite unusual at the time in the USA), drove south to Tehachapi Pass, famous for its beauty and jail, and headed for the arid city of Bakersfield.
   That was our first visit to the west coast. And it was fun to drive through picturesque valleys and small towns, making stops, visiting spots, talking about the stories we would tell friends after our victorious return. The importance of the stories in human communication—that was our main topic for this period of the trip. The power of the stories people tell, sometimes about very simple things, making these things amazing and popular, helping them to sell well. Converting stories into brands.
   So we’ve been on the road, chatting and listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘America’ (one great story, by the way). And no doubt, there it was—America on all sides.
   We headed towards the mountains, through the hot day, with the air conditioner turned on, dreaming California dreams and watching the Californian sun going down. We wanted to get to Bakersfield by midnight. The final part of the route we spent in darkness, passing the string of giant trucks, afraid to squeeze our Toyota into this endless line in order to sneak out to our exit. Nevertheless—just barely—we made our way off, and soon we got a room in a local saloon. Actually, it was a Holiday Inn with its complete set of standard furniture and standard hospitality so common for this brand. But there in the room we found something not standard at all.
   It was just a sheet of paper. Small, pale yellow and nice-looking. And there was something printed on it. Definitely not usual, at least for us. It was a story. A story of a ‘Holiday Inn Bakersfield cinnamon bun’. Wonderful and unique. We soon found out that such a cookie could only be found here and nowhere else on earth.
   We knew something about rolled cookies. My mother-in-law was a great cook and she was very good at baking them. But I had never known that a description of such a simple thing as a cookie could be so colourful, poetic, expressive and convincing. Oh, Lord! It was magic! I regret that I foolishly did not take this pale yellow paper with me, did not frame it, never put it on a wall, never learned it by heart, and now cannot quote it to you.
   It told us about the woman who invented the cookie. And how she composed this harmonic symphony of cinnamon, sugar and pastry. And how she added something of herself to every one. But it was not just a recipe. This cookie appeared right in front of us—before our inner eyes: fresh like a rose, soft like a bride’s cheek and sweet like her breath, tender like Mommy’s voice, warm like a spring morning and totally unique. When we finished reading, we could not withstand a temptation to read it again. And again. I even wanted to sing it. It was like a hymn, a hymn to a cookie that one must taste once in his life and recall forever. It was a must. I wish I could repeat at least a small part of this myth, legend, fairy-tale. It really deserved it!
   But we should not be late, the letter warned. For the amount of cinnamon buns was limited and the crowd of guests quite large. And—lucky folks—we knew we could comply with its directive at breakfast tomorrow. Yes, we certainly would! We knew that it was important not to miss the experience. But at the end of a hard day we did not want to wake up too early. So we agreed to set the alarm for 8 a.m.
   Tired, I fell asleep. Happy. I knew: a cinnamon cookie full of wonders would be waiting for me in the morning. Just downstairs. I can’t say for certain, but now it seems that for that particular night a California dream gave way to a Cinnamon dream, light and bright.
   The morning was friendly, shining and promising delights. I woke up whistling a Glenn Miller ‘In the Mood’ thing. Then, like a child in wild anticipation, barely dressed, I rushed down to the restaurant. You know what I wanted to grab there. Yes. The cooookie!
   Viktor was running ahead of me. It was a race, with a great prize at the finish line. And I entered the restaurant only a few seconds after him …
   When I did, I found that something in our world had gone terribly wrong. There he was, my friend, standing by the table where the cookie tray was supposed to be. His face was pale. He looked lost. The tray was empty. Embarrassed, we gazed around the dull and standard room, full of happy people chewing our cookies. The winners. The cookie-eaters. The cinnamon dream was vanishing before our eyes. But hope dies last. So we asked the waitress: maybe there are some extra cookies in the kitchen, madaaaam? Two. Or even one…
   ’Well,’ she said coldly, ‘no. You’re too late, guys.’
   Silently we had our standard breakfast of fruit juice, bacon and eggs. Silently packed our things. Silently said goodbye to Bakersfield, California. And started slowly for the Grand Canyon, leaving the pale yellow paper there on the table in the room.
   And talking about the mightiness of stories people tell each other. Sometimes about very simple things.

Tim Kitchin
The i-dealist
tim.kitchin@gmail.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013

The title of this short essay is a barely amusing paraphrase of the famous quotation from Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753).¹ Berkeley was an idealist, which means, in philosophical terms, that he believed that mind predominates over matter. In fact, Berkeley was something of an extremist among idealists, believing that matter, or the material world, does not actually exist at all.
   Berkeley was also a monist—disbelieving the duality of mind and body advocated by Descartes. But finally, most intriguingly, he was an empiricist—believing that experience shapes our appreciation of the world. His beliefs stand in sharp distinction to those of Continental rationalists like Hegel who believed, as Plato did, that concepts are primary, pre-existent and transcend experience.
   Rationalists believe that there can be a priori metaphysical knowledge; empiricists don’t.
   If matter does not exist though, the question arises as to where, exactly, experience arises from? Berkeley’s answer is that is comes from perception. ‘Esse es percipi,’ he says. ‘To be is to perceive.’ And what we perceive, he maintains—our experiences—are only ideas. If physical substance does not exist, though, these ideas can only arise, ultimately, from the mind of God. This is indeed what he believes. And the reason that reality does not jolt about, flashing into existence like a neon bulb to please the perceiver, is that all reality is permanently perceived by the mind of God—and thus the personal illusion is sustained.
   To modern ears, schooled in the natural sciences, with our deep-seated western materialism, secularism and realism, this sounds like lunacy at worst or a sort of religious anachronism at best. Common sense tells us the world exists.
   I would simply point out that common sense used to tell us that women didn’t deserve the vote. That homosexuality was criminal. That Newtonian physics was a sufficient explanation of movement. That the earth was the centre of the universe. Common sense is a malleable idea. We should not be too distracted by it. The clue is in the name.
   In fact, I will argue that Berkeley’s views are not only relevant today, but that they are also in large measure “correct”. And finally, that they are deeply practical—and even inspirational, particularly for those of us concerned with branding.
   Having been concerned with law and ownership originally, branding evolved to become an economic activity attracting customers. In latter decades it moved on further to become a largely psychological discipline, managing customers’ relationships. And even more recently it has evolved still further to become sociological process—managing a sort of memetic ecosystem. In future decades perhaps we will see its final incarnation as a philosophical science: branding not as epistemology, nor even as ontology, but as metaphysics …
   Let’s examine each of Berkeley’s idealist arguments² in turn by picturing a glass of red wine. Berkeley’s first argument is that the temperature of our Bordeaux—warm on the lips; cold on the tongue—is clearly dependent upon the mind. It has no objective reality in and of itself. The example he actually uses is to imagine that one of your arms is bathed in ice; the other in hot water. Plunge both arms into a basin of tepid water and you will receive two contradictory signals about temperature. It follows, according to Berkeley, that secondary qualities like temperature are all in the mind; and also that such secondary qualities are dependent upon primary qualities such as density, structure and energy. It also follows that these features must likewise be mind-dependent. They too are merely ideas, the content of experience. Thus all experience is mental and detached from any underlying substance.
   His second line of argument is to interrogate what this thing might actually be, the wine that we taste as cold? He unpicks this problem in two parts: Firstly to ask specifically what it means to “be cold”? And secondly, to ask what it means to “be” at all?
   The first problem amounts to asking what it means in general to support or generate a given property. Any problem ultimately reduces down to a question of causality. Does the mind generate the attribute “coldness” and retroact its causality to a particular object, or does the idea of an object pre-exist and generate a set of impressions that we choose to describe as cold. It is clear—to Berkeley at least—that neither directional relationship can be true. In which case “to be cold” is simply a metaphorical relationship, and thus a linguistic trick, which tells us nothing of reality.
   Secondly, Berkeley wonders what it means to “be”? Subsequent to Berkeley it has been argued that “being” cannot be explained, on the grounds that it is explicitly indefinable; that it is universal; or is simply self-evident.³ None of these evasions will suffice though. In fact the problem of “being” caused the celebrated 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger to spend an entire book trying to define it, and still come up short. It is thus unsurprising that Berkeley also decides that being is conceptually inexplicable. On both sets of grounds, material substance is thus a meaningless concept.
   Thirdly, Berkeley argues from the basis of knowledge. It is, in pure logical terms, at least possible that my glass of wine might exist. But if it did, how would I know? I would either have to know it by reason or from my senses. For Berkeley the senses prove to be a dead end as they can only inform us of our perceptions—which we know to be divorced from any concrete reality. And sadly reason, too, proves to be a lost cause, because there is no necessary connection from physical objects to mental experiences. Thus he concludes that my glass of wine is unknowable, even if substantive.
   Fourthly, he argues against the possibility of physical causation of experiences, noting that there can be no causal relation between the material and the mental as nothing may straddle their essential dualism. The impression I form—the particular taste of blackcurrants, the velvet texture, spices and intoxication cannot come from a physical form. Only the mental can affect the mental:⁴

How can any idea or sensation exist in, or be produced anything but a mind or spirit?

   This definition and the impasse it causes, leans of course, on a definition of mental as being “in the mind”, rather than “before the mind” as Bertrand Russell⁵ notes based on the elaborations of Kant⁶ and then Schopenhauer⁷ through the concept of representation. Likewise, Berkeley’s argument does not account for the possibility that the causal relation may be neither mental nor material, as the philosopher, Stephen Priest has argued. It is not impossible that it may be of some other form.
   Finally, Berkeley argues from the limitations of imagination, not as an asset but rather as a process of conceiving. Specifically he focused on our inability to imagine physical objects. Berkeley argues that it is impossible to imagine a physical object. His point is that at the very moment that I might theoretically “imagine” any such object, it instantaneously becomes a mental object alone and thus divorced from any putative physical origin. If follows nothing that is or can be conceived is material.
   There are issues with many of these arguments, of course, but they are essentially sound and remarkably hard to refute. But I am less interested here in their logical resilience, than their practical, or rather their creative implications.
   What can branding practitioners learn from a 17th-century man who denied reality?

1. Subjectivity
The first lesson, of course, is subjectivity. At the most fundamental level possible, the universe is subjective. Therefore any branding activity that relies upon conjuring a common attitude among audiences must note, first and foremost the subjectivity of perception. When I say I taste blackberries in a fine Bordeaux, you may find the reference meaningless, pretentious, or even absurd. And the more my language departs from the commonplace the worse the problem gets. Bordeaux may taste ‘stormy’ or like ‘rhubarb and custard’. Communicators know this of course, and try to stick with universal ideas which they can then twist. When Nike adds the word ‘just’ to its slogan ‘do it’ it taps into a universal desire to rebel; to act out; to stand up for oneself. The best slogans and brands to this—they find the universal subjective which Husserl⁸ as a function of eidetic phenomenology. The act of perceiving imbues reality with structure. Every brand owner must ask ‘how’—with what attitude of mind—his or her brand should be perceived.

2. Responsibility
The second lesson, dependent upon the first, is responsibility. Berkeley’s reflections should encourage us to question the structure of experience. We know now that time is relative. We also know that atoms are far from being the smallest particles—a finding that leaves around 99 per cent of the universe unexplained. We know now that matter is probabilistic. It comes into being in an ad hoc way and its location is unknowable. Its existence or non-existence depends upon the observer, at the quantum level. We can also make a very good case that time is not linear. And finally we can make a perfectly coherent and sound argument that the universe is actually composed of encoded information.
   When we as branding practitioners speak of experience and seek to mould it, we are merely reprogramming information. Telling you that I taste cherries in this wine has fundamentally altered its makeup as a set of prospective sense-impressions. Branding does not simply alter psychology; it alters reality.
   The truth is not “out there”, it is “in here” in our own experiences. This realization should both scare and empower brand managers. A brand’s ideas can and do change the world, irrevocably. But with power comes responsibility.

3. Serendipity
The third lesson is serendipity. Berkeley shows us that there is no cause and effect, except within the mind itself through a process of self-communion and comprehension. And also, whatever we might do, the physical world has no definite connection with the world of mind. Our glass of wine is ultimately unknowable. And meaningless. Its mysteries cannot be simply and methodically extracted. Furthermore, we must understand that whatever we might do as “information managers”, events and experiences will always intervene to override our efforts. Traditionally, brand managers try to squeeze out the opportunity for serendipity, leaving nothing to chance. Berkeley’s logic suggests that this is misguided—that the very personal context of experiences is what makes them resonant and “sticky” for the individual. Allowing space for improvisation to intervene within the mental, for experience and experimentation with your brand, is the key to effectiveness.

4. Helplessness
The fourth lesson follows from the denial of causality and encourages the embrace of helplessness. As children we understand well the experience of helplessness, and reach out accordingly. However, as we grow, this helplessness is crusted over with narcissistic efforts to deny it—either by seeking a sense of control, which cannot really exist, leading to frustration, or by feeding that helplessness to a constant search for affirmation, manifest in human perfectionism and competition. Berkeley tells us that we are, ultimately helpless. We are shaped by ideas and no amount of effort can control the “causes” of these ideas, because we ourselves are that cause. The only way through, says Berkeley is an embrace of the universal. Berkeley saw this universal as the mind of God—mankind as merely the filament for His energy. To us, in a more secular era, we may simply reinterpret this universality as a common human instinct for survival, protection and growth. Strong branding should acknowledge the fundamental helplessness that underlies our subjectivity, and offer us ways to reaccess and reacquaint ourselves with this universal truth of childhood. When brand managers talk of empowering the customer, this is what they must address: the existential loneliness of empiricism.

5. Anti-reason
The fifth and final lesson is anti-reason. In principle, as an empiricist, Berkeley is against reason. Berkeley argues that imagination is a bubble, closed to the outside world, and only capable of imagining ‘what can be brought before the mind’. But Berkeley’s argument only holds for those objects we can hold in front of our mind. It does not apply to those objects, experiences or ideas that we may hypothesize, rather than picture. A pink elephant may be an imaginary object, but the trillionth prime number is something that cannot be called to mind, but does, nonetheless exist. This is the difference between conceiving as picturing by imagination and conceiving or hypothesizing by reason. Berkeley denies that the trillionth prime exists, in his sense. Berkeley calls on us, as brand managers to focus on what can be touched and felt; to keep our feet on the ground; to give feeling primacy over thinking.
   Berkeley’s idealist empiricism is ultimately a compromise between the emergent scienticity of his era, and his own faith. It is a counterattack on the perils of scepticism into which Hume and others descended. It is a rigid and rather unforgiving philosophy: staunch, curiously pragmatic, and fiercely optimistic.
   Great branding is a mental, subjective, responsible, serendipitous, unreasonable process. It empowers us not to escape helplessness, but to come to terms with it—to find deepest connections to the “worldmind” that surrounds us, whether we see it as human, divine, or merely a set of algorithms.

Notes
   1. ‘If a tree falls in a wood and there is no-one around to hear it. Does it make a sound?’
   2. I follow here the same sequence of dissection as S. Priest: The British Empiricists, 2nd ed. London: Routledge 1990.
   3. M. Heidegger: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell 1967.
   4. G. Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues. London: Penguin 1988.
   5. B. Russell: The History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin 1957.
   6. I. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. London: Penguin 2007.
   7. A. Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover Publications 1967.
   8. E. Husserl: Ideas. New York: Routledge 2012.

Mr Saracco has over 20 years’ experience in marketing and branding strategy, working with companies in Europe, the Americas and the Asia–Pacific. He was a partner of Arthur D. Little International and an executive director of FutureBrand/McCann-Erickson WorldGroup. He serves as a professor of marketing, branding and innovation in graduate programmes and executive education at the Universidades Pontificia de Salamanca and is a visiting professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella. He created Brand 3.0, the social network for community branding, in 2008.

Other jury presidents are Leandro Raposo (McCann Europa), Maxi Itzkoff (Del Campo S&S), Antonio Montero (Grey España), Flavio Pantigoso (Y&R Perú), German Yunes (O&M Argentina) and Mar Guerrero (S&S Health ESpaña). The festival will be held in Bilbao from May 30 to June 1.

Medinge Group member Dmitry Petrov’s book on Vassily Aksionov, the famous Russian-American writer, novelist and Soviet-time dissident was published in early March in Moskva. It is now retailing in leading Moskva bookstores and is in the top 20.
   Aksionov was a legend in his own lifetime, but Petrov uncovers more about the author, who was frequently the target of gossip, denunciation and myth. Petrov worked with relatives, friends, enemies and critics of Aksenov in an attempt to uncover the truth about the author.
   One of the retail links for Аксенов can be found here.

Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
ph@ph8.fr

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

Parisian subway riders careening through the tunnels of the 3rd arrondissement barely notice a particular stop, one whose name contains a clue and potential warning as to the direction culture is headed in the coming era. The name of the station is Arts et Métiers, Art and Technology. It’s a name born of the era known as the Belle Époque, which occurred during the last decades of the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1880–1910.
   There’s a distinct arrogance emanating from a period of time whose inhabitants refer to it as a ‘beautiful era’. To make such a claim alone implies a single-minded confidence in the righteousness of one’s own actions. But the Belle Époque was sincerely powered by noble aspirations, a religion of progress, which held high hopes for the marriage of technology and art, and the sense that with such a conjunction everything was possible. Contained in this unbridled optimism was the powerful notion that beauty could be given to all at the same time. And that such beauty could be dispensed on any scale, with the orchestra as a meme for the simple model of progress, subdisciplines intersecting to create a harmonious whole. In today’s language we would call the phenomenon good management of new technologies.
   In the new millennium, we regard the visual style called Steam Punk—rivets and girders and turning gears—inseparable from Belle Époque’s worldview. Our conception of the era recollects Verne, Eiffel and Méliès. The submarine-builder, the tower-maker, the lunar explorer scientists. Theirs was a religion of progress, poised at direct odds with the church of Mother Mary. Technology had become the primary vehicle of faith, in which all grand aspirations were invested. It was an era that canonized its own creators.
   The transmission of knowledge mattered heavily to the technocrats of Belle Époque. Even the original lycées built during the era look like castles, lofty temples of enlightenment, unmistakeable semiotic statements about how human intelligence and potential were venerated. It heralded the heyday of the École des Beaux Arts, and the flowering of Art Nouveau. Great improvements were made in public education, resulting in concurrent elevation of literacy levels. Across the Atlantic the spirit of the times infected the consciousness of Andrew Carnegie, who in his lifetime built 2,811 libraries throughout the US and English-speaking world. The direct result could be gauged in the success of self-education pursued in libraries by individuals like Thomas Edison.
   So Belle Époque was real, the beginning of a new era, and it paid in discernable dividends. It was an age of notable advancements in public health, hygiene. longevity, nutrition, in the eradication of disease, and the completion of monumental public works like the Panama Canal. In 1908–9, during construction of the Parisian underground Number 4 Line, excavation for the tunnel crossing under the river Seine was effectively achieved by freezing the river, and involved the installation of two huge refrigeration plants which allowed the movement of supercooled brine to stabilize the saturated ground. In a world whose dreamers felt nothing was impossible, every great challenge like this one could be met, and every guiding mind was thought of as un marchand d’espoir, a dealer in hope.
   Belle Époque occurred during a long period of unprecedented peace in the western world. Its accomplishments, albeit remarkable, ended with the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in 1914. What followed the era of such a religion du progrès was all the more surprising for the horror it brought, monumental demonstrations of the brutality of humanity which deployed the very technology once worshipped for all the good it promised. Over the next seventy-five years the world would experience WWI, Nazism, the Shoah, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, 9-11, the international financial collapse of 2010 and the epidemic suspicion that something unsavoury and sinister is at play with the globalization of our industrial economy. Perhaps we are poised at the threshold of a rebirth.
   The recent passing of Steven P. Jobs was followed by a wave of soul-searching and deconstructionist thinking about what made for the success of the Apple brand under his leadership. What had Jobs known, done, understood, achieved that explained the rise from a two-man start-up founded in 1976 in a garage to a company briefly rated the world’s most valuable in 2011? What explained the massive outpouring of grief for a man who gave the world devices: the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad? More than once the consensus turned in the direction of a successful intersection of art and technology, arts et métiers. We had been here before. The products Apple continually created brought the best of both universes together in the interest of progress and hope. Steve Jobs had demonstrated good management of new technologies.
   All the same signs are here again: visionary people deploying new technology, merging it with humanistic and artistic vision. If we are witnessing the beginning of a new and beautiful era, let it proceed like the last one. But let it not be followed by a gross abuse of the power, or the leveraging of these advancements for greater horror. The opportunity is here to push the reset button, to launch a renaissance of humanistic thought that optimistically celebrates the intersection of arts et métiers.
   Let’s think of it as a Belle Époque 2·0.

The article is a version of a paper published in the Journal of Brand Management (2011).

Jack Yan¹
Jack Yan & Associates
jack.yan@jyanet.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS have been hailed as the next media for marketing, its proponents pointing to the presence of politicians and actors on Twitter and Facebook. Since mainstream media pointed out that actor-writer Stephen Fry was on Twitter, there was a sudden growth in subscribers in the UK. A further mention on The Oprah Winfrey Show saw some talk about an ‘Oprah effect’ on Twitter, spurring growth Stateside. The most complimentary publicity for Twitter, however, was for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with some crediting the service for his success.
   Each one of these statements has an element of truth to them. There is no doubt that celebrities have managed to harness social media to broadcast to their fans, bypassing the press and setting the record straight. Fans feel somehow connected, as though their idol is talking to them directly.
   The Obama campaign, meanwhile, tapped in to a group of voters who are computer-savvy. The campaign managed to mobilize people who might not have voted, giving the senator an edge that his principal opponent, Sen. John McCain, did not consider.
   But how real are these phenomena and how do they impact on branding?
   Aside from setting some ideas for future research, this paper aims to provide an examination of blogs and social networks, considering their branding potential and what organizations need to consider to build their brands using them.

Why brand online?
The case for online branding has been set elsewhere, with the conclusion that most of the same rules apply. Brands still need to be differentiated and communicated to audiences, and it was found that successful online firms in the late 1990s tended to have strong CEO involvement in their websites.² As the web mainstreamed, countless exceptions emerged: there was no longer a talent vacuum when it came to managing website relations with consumers, and CEOs could step back from answering feedback forms. Staff who grew up in the web era understood how to deal with online questions; databases with copy-and-paste answers were developed; and, in some cases, “knowledge bases” looked for keywords in a submitted question and fielded prepared answers without human intervention.
   In essence, the promise of the 1990s’ World Wide Web began disappearing: once seen as a democratizing force where stakeholders could speak directly to company heads, especially in the small- to medium-sized enterprises that went online in the early days, it became just another medium.
   Blogs were seen as the next step: Chua and Parackal have done some incisive research into CEO blogs,³ which give some leaders a chance to provide audiences with an idea of their philosophy. But in an era of competing media and short attention spans, Facebook updates, fan pages and Tweets became part of the branding lexicon.
   Facebook’s commercial potential was always present, from the minute founder Mark Zuckerberg took the service away from its North American college-campus roots and allowed non-students to create profiles in 2006. It has become more commercialized (and arguably less concerned with user privacy)⁴ since then, in order to capture business and profits through advertising. Originally a site that aimed to connect friends and contacts, Facebook broadened to include groups and fan pages for organizations, creating a closed network of 400 million (and rising) users who advertisers might wish to pitch.
   Many flock to the service. Facebook allowed blogs to be imported, forcing more users to stay on the site rather than go to the source. It gave the impression of direct engagement: companies could, for instance, communicate directly with their supporters. It attempted to bridge the gap between organization and audience again, much like the web and email once did.
   In politics, the author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Outside politics, the author has observed the growth of the designer Tamsin Cooper, whose Facebook page, set up during the first quarter of 2010, has brought 658 fans at the time of writing. Cooper lives in a town, Arrowtown, New Zealand, of 1,700: the Facebook page has been a way for her to centre her international marketing activities, complementing her website and online sales. Importantly, it allows Cooper to interact directly with her supporters and clients.
   Twitter, which claims to have Sen. Barack Obama as a user—though later it emerged that the ‘Tweets’ were those of his campaign team⁵—is less formal. One user Tweets a statement of 140 characters, usually an update of what that person is doing. In terms of the Obama campaign, the Tweets pertained to the senator’s political speeches and campaign ideals, and followers could ask questions and engage with him.
   It was a masterful use of the service. While it was not Sen. Obama himself on there, it gave the illusion of his presence. It certainly reflected his views. Secondly, his campaign team was careful to follow back as many supporters as possible—Twitter users can see who has become a “follower”, giving them an option to return the favour. This, too, satisfied netizens’ feeling of being engaged: that there was a genuine belief of a two-way street in communication with the senator.
   The desire for engagement is not limited to the United States. The Residents 2010 conference in Wellington, New Zealand, brought residents’ associations from around the country together for a day, discussing issues that were pertinent to them. The Hon Peter Dunne, MP, stated early in the conference that such organizations need to ‘band together’ to fight for their communities, acknowledging that ‘power resides in the community, with their representation and their engagement. Community engagement is not political … local democratization is occurring more in residents’ associations.’
   Showing a video from author John Ralston Saul,⁶ it was stressed that one of the causes of community alienation stems from specialized managers who are employed to solve various problems. But their specialization restricts citizens who have other ideas, which combats the democratic nature that one expects.
   Other comments heard include, ‘The Local Government Act does not empower local representatives to represent local people’; ‘Councils will become less representative, because their business objectives will alienate citizens’; and ‘As [local issues] become more pressing, how can we activate the public response?’
   In another speech, New Zealand’s native Māori population was a victim of “ticking the boxes” when it came to their needs, trivializing and indeed restricting what they were about. (Parallels were drawn with the rights of women and blacks in the US in earlier centuries.) There was a general fear of politicians losing power through engagement, and talk after talk highlighted that engagement was not happening early enough with citizens.
   If there was one sector where engagement was called for consistently, it was in local politics. In her concluding conference speech, New Zealand Chief Ombudsman Beverley Wakem stated, ‘The internet’s tools are important [in describing] how to mobilize and educate people regarding their rights and the legislation.’
   Short of an Obama-style campaign engaging the public, New Zealand’s local political scene was in dire need of politicians and political processes that could engage the public. In the wake of the American presidential election, citizens’ feeling of alienation could quickly be dealt with through social media.
   The author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Far more trivial, though no less interesting from an academic perspective, is the Twitter account of a fictional character, Jim Keats, from the recently finished television show Ashes to Ashes. An unofficial account, it was set up in January 2010, long before the character was introduced on the show. After the show commenced, the Keats account (at twitter.com/jimkeats) attracted an average of 100 additional followers per week, of fans wishing to supplement their television viewing with Tweeting—even if it was with a fictional person. Very few of the 900 followers the account attracted were bots, surprisingly. ‘Jim Keats’ interacted with other fictional characters on the service, all role-played by other fans. It helped take the programme’s brand on to Twitter and provided viewers with an additional access point to the TV show.
   In most cases—those in which fictional characters are not involved (!)—blogs, Facebook and Twitter are helpful in revealing the thinking of the people behind the brands. They satisfy a need: the desire of engagement with a brand they wish to be associated with, or, to put it in Engeseth’s terms, to feel “one” with the brand.⁷ Their motives are connected to the idea of corporate citizenship and how successful brands promote its ideas.⁸
   Engeseth’s theory is that the separate nature of many brand relationships—the “them” and “us”—is obsolete. Companies need to collaborate with consumers not just for R&D, but for everyday marketing purposes. Examples he cites includes Linux, where the user base collaborate on developments to the operating system and become evangelists in the process. WordPress, the blogging platform, is another. Engeseth also points out that Michael Dell spends 40 per cent of his time dealing with Dell computer customers directly. As does Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea.
   Brands cannot be controlled centrally or in a top-down manner in these circumstances. Coinciding with these developments has been the rise of virtual working, of people expected to unite under a single banner with a uniform brand despite being based in homes or in spread-out offices.
   But Linux is a real collaboration: the results speak for themselves. The real fear with brands in the social networking era is that they will fall into the same traps they did with email and the web, where the interaction with those in charge is gone. Facebook and Google, two brands that rank relatively highly in surveys, are notorious for being opaque: Facebook’s privacy changes frequently prompt criticism, while there is virtually no support for the free users of Google, unless they are lucky enough to find a person in authority. Both companies may provide tools for online interaction that can aid transparency, but neither practises it when it comes to their core products.
   Above, the author has pointed out that Barack Obama’s Twitter account, during the presidential campaign, was not manned by him. Thus, it is as easy to obscure one’s identity with these services as it is with any other medium.

   An analysis of some of the top celebrities and politicians indicate that they are not engaging their fan base, undermining the use of the Twitter service. There is little or no engagement by some of the most-followed users of the service, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore (Table 1). For them, Twitter is a one-way service, an extra broadcast channel where the relationship with the audience matters less than their own message. However, President Obama, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry have better ratios, indicating more engagement, or at least, a greater intention to engage. (The ideal number is 100 per cent, although this is impossible to expect, especially when a Twitter account acquires mass following over a short period of time.)
   Given this, are they genuine tools for transparency and the sort of “oneness” preached by Engeseth? And what advantages can organizations get from using them?

Brands and social networks
The theory behind social networking is sound. Brands must be genuine. Those that are “surface” are soon uncovered. It is no different from a government offering sound bites that seem pleasant to the public ear, but whose policies differ from the electorate. It is a sure way of being unelected at the polls the first chance voters get.
   By going to blogs and social networks, people can understand the personalities behind the scenes. In fact, this can prove more useful for the smaller organization because the principal can be the one who writes, updates the Facebook fan page, or Tweets. It allows that organization to be more responsive to audiences and consumer demands. It also allows the chief decision-maker in the organization to grasp the prevailing mood of the public.⁹ They are more cost-effective media than above-the-line advertising or even formal PR,¹⁰ and go some way to levelling the playing field for small- to medium-sized enterprises.
   Brands that are unsupported by additional media can fail because they are not letting their stories shine through. The importance of “legends” inside the organization have been shown by many writers and researchers to be important, providing a hook for brands to be understood internally and externally. Therefore, even the less well presented company, lacking the budget to look as swish as a richer competitor, might be able to exploit a competitive advantage by telling a story without the interference of a communications’ department.
   The personalities can come through: a traditional law firm might still Tweet but do so in a formal way—writing in complete sentences, never abbreviating or using internet acronyms, and providing useful knowledge to its followers. It would have to stop short at revealing any privileged information, but its personality can still come through. At the other end of the scale, a musician might provide samples of her work online, downloadable through a blog, and connect that blog automatically on to her Facebook page and Twitter account. Regardless of the situation, a unique voice can emerge, one that is sufficiently differentiated from competitors. The organization manages to solve not only the question of differentiation, but those of transparency, engagement and accessibility.

Issues
   With an increasing amount of activity happening in the social media sphere, it would seem prudent to examine how to incorporate the media into a brand strategy.
   Along with his colleagues at the Medinge Group, the author participated in writing Beyond Branding,¹¹ which dealt with the growing consumer desire for transparent brands. There is nothing to suggest that that desire has lessened in the last seven years: anecdotally, it has grown as social media have.
   It would suggest, for many organizations, a total change in how they communicate, abandoning the top-down process for something that accepts inputs from audiences to drive strategies.
   When many authors discuss transparency in branding, it is not simply about ethics. There are obvious savings in communicating the same message to internal and external audiences. By being open, every audience has the same potential access to the same information. Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders feel that sense of corporate citizenship and oneness, which helps build brand loyalty and grows awareness.
   Issues for practitioners will include:

• how to include this level of transparency into a branding strategy, and whether the organization itself can handle the added work. As part of the vision-setting for the organization, organizations must ask themselves if they desire extra scrutiny. Questions will include whether principals are willing to schedule in regular entries on to a corporate blog, and work alongside their communications’ department. The structure is flatter. They might want to consider whether they wish to read the feedback personally. Ideally, they will need to ensure that it is their voice and not one that has been too sanitized by communications. The organization has to consider whether these statements appear in a corporate account or a personal one, and the relationship between the two;
• it will have to look at researching its audiences and whether they demand the level of interaction that social media provide. Some businesses might not need it because their audiences are not connected online: those targeting elderly audiences might find conventional media to be more useful. The author notes that a growing number of clients are finding that their audiences are demanding, at the last, a Facebook presence;
• the organization will have to look at extending the rules surrounding its brand usage in to new media. It will also have to consider whether it is to influence the appearance of personal accounts. If personal blogs and Twitter accounts have already been set up before the organization has created its own, it needs to ask itself how official they are;
• the organization needs to consider how to measure the success of branding in social media, either through surveys on whether audiences believe transparency has increased, or using other measures, such as brand equity constructs, revenue, market share, or follower or fan numbers.

Challenges to transparency
   Labour malpractices, child exploitation and environmental harm have nothing to do with branding, even if, in the eyes of Klein¹² or Quart,¹³ the profession is complicit. Equally, the misuse of blogs and social media are not due to any inherent problem with the platforms. If certain parties choose to use Twitter as a one-way channel, then it is their choice: there is no rule book that governs the service. But it would be a wasted opportunity, doing little to promote interaction and understanding audiences. Instead, those that use the technologies as top-down media risk making themselves look separate, going against transparency and oneness. In an era when both are valued, the brand, whether personal or organizational, is weakened through appearing “above” one’s supporters.
   Secondly, there is the problem of having someone other than the claimed person behind the blog, Facebook or Twitter account. The organization should ensure that in the case of a shared blog or Facebook fan page, the identity of the writer is known; but ghost-written media can prompt criticism; this can only undermine the brand.¹⁴
   The looming problems are also technological. Each medium starts off being exclusive. The programming that appears on that medium appeals to that exclusive audience. But as it mainstreams, that exclusivity is lost.
   For the most part, there is nothing wrong with this diffusion of an innovation. Television would be useless if TV sets cost the equivalent of a motor car; motor cars would have failed to transform society if they remained the playthings of the rich.
   But with the democratization of technologies, they have become utilitarian. Email was once exclusive; it is now a tool, with few business people using it for leisure as they did 20 years ago. Along the way, spam threatened to make email useless; email newsletters risk being caught in spam filters.
   The same tendencies are emerging in the blogosphere, with some websites generating fake entries. Blogger, the blogging platform owned by Google, has been using a bot to detect fake blogs that are created using automated scripts. A small percentage of legitimate blogs have been deleted including, for a brief period in 2010, one for the respected UK firm Minale Tattersfield, which was out of action for two weeks. Vox, the blogging service owned by Californian firm Six Apart, is a target of many “sploggers” (spam bloggers).
   Twitter, which is much harder to patrol and easier to manipulate, has its share of fake accounts, with programs adding followers and Tweeting fake messages. Reports of Twitter’s growth stagnating have surfaced in the technological press during 2009 and early 2010.¹⁵
   Facebook, meanwhile, is turning off a small minority of users fed up with its privacy changes—although the carrot of 400 million users is too great for many organizations to abandon it.
   All may well turn users away at some point, especially when they feel they can no longer have the sense of engagement and oneness with the brand.
   Therefore, while these tools are useful, they may well be replaced by others in the 2010s. Perhaps those tools will integrate visuals and the person’s voice, things that are (at this point) harder to automate. For now, they are real, and they need to be considered in a branding strategy.

Conclusion
   Audiences have demanded greater ethics and transparency from brands for many years. However, that demand has become far louder as audiences found their voices through the internet, in particular, driving a greater awareness of social responsibility in the 2000s. Alongside those demands have been ones for transparency, forcing organizations to work more closely with their audiences. People want to know that they have some influence over the brands they connect with.
   As technologies change, social media are where audiences can interact with those brands. They have their pitfalls, with many organizations not building them into their overall branding strategies, or failing to use them to interact. In neither case is transparency increased. Technological problems limit their appeal.
   Nevertheless, if used correctly, blogs and social media can be useful tools for differentiation as they allow a company’s personality to shine through. They also provide means for audiences to engage and access brands. Importantly, they can provide greater transparency, a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking of organizations, giving their brands greater relevance and appeal.

Notes
   1. LLB, BCA (Hons.), MCA. CEO, Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net); Founding Publisher, Lucire (http://lucire.com); Director, the Medinge Group (http://medinge.org). Copyright ©2010 by Jack Yan & Associates. All rights reserved.
   2. J. Yan: ‘Online Branding: an Antipodean Experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185-202.
   3. A. P. H. Chua, and M. Parackal: ‘Co-creating value through corporate blogs: a proposed research framework’, 5th National Conference on Computing and Information Technology (NCCIT), Bangkok, Thailand, May 22-3, 2009.
   4. B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Willis: ‘On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks’, Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Barcelona, Spain, August 17, 2009.
   5. M. Kirkpatrick: ‘Obama: “I have never used Twitter”‘, ReadWriteWeb, November 15, 2009, <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_i_have_never_used_twitter.php>.
   6. Cf. J. R. Saul: The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin 2006.
   7. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan-Marshall Cavendish 2005.
   8. N. Ind and R. Bjerke: Branding Governance: a Participatory Approach to the Brand Building Process. Chicester: J. Wiley & Sons 2007, pp. 51-7.
   9. An example of a responsive CEO is Christian von Koenigsegg, who made modifications to his company’s sports car after criticism on the TV show Top Gear. A new model was ready for testing within weeks. A larger company would have added the criticism to a longer improvement cycle and the modification might not have been seen for years.
   10. S. Engeseth: The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising. Stockholm: Stefan Engeseth Publishing 2009.
   11. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   12. N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.
   13. A. Quart: Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing 2003.
   14. Especially in politics: opponents of the two high-profile politicians in the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, flung accusations about ghost-writing.
   15. D. Gross: ‘Has Twitter peaked?’, CNN.com, January 26, 2010, <http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/26/has.twitter.peaked/index.html>.

Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
ph@ph8.fr

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

GENERATIONS AGO in the time of the Ancients, and long before the current era of peace, two kingdoms lived side by side, separated by a mountain range and unending war. They had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember. People had forgotten what started the quarrel in the first place. There were years when an uneasy truce would prevail, but one side or the other would eventually break it, causing the kingdoms again to lay siege on each other, advancing, retreating, attacking, defending, plundering. They understood nothing but perpetual struggle.
   Finally, in the Year of the Hawk in the 10,000th Dawn, the advantage fell to the kingdom of the west, Jandrigar. They had worn down Indrigar, to the east. The ruler of Indrigar was an elderly monarch known as Karek the Wise. It was his misfortune to have presided over a disastrous campaign, which left the countryside in ruins, his subjects starving, his fortress surrounded. His councilors and generals were summoned, but they were of no help, and he dismissed them in exasperation.
   He had the further disadvantage of an impatient and disrespectful son named Prince Lorono. This short-tempered youth knew one day the throne would be his own. This particular prince kept his head in the clouds, and had a romantic notion about the power of political causes. He would often admonish his legions, urging them on with the hollow words claiming that together they could change the world. He pretended that he trusted and believed in his father, and falsely asserted that he knew in his heart there should always be hope.
   But behind closed doors, in the dark throne room of the king, amidst the light from torches hung upon the stone walls, and in desperation of their dire circumstances, he accused Karek. ‘You led us into this battle, and it is because of you we suffer now. We have no weapons left.’
   ‘Weapons will not win this war,’ his father countered. ‘We need to listen to the ancients.’
   ‘Will the ancients feed our families?’ the son asked. ‘All the food is gone. We have no sorcerers.’ He shifted his heavy shield to the other arm, and moved his sabre to the opposite shoulder. ‘How do we live today?’ the prince asked. ‘How do we live when your solution is not working? In the world of the ancients the king ruled, and you do nothing but recite the old words. Your father used to tell us, let the throne look to the mirror. I’ve looked in that mirror a hundred times and I don’t know what it tells me. I am trying to find acts which can change the world, or at least learn a way to behave in this situation.’
   ‘You don’t know what to think,’ the king said. ‘You don’t remember the great heroes—so how do you expect to act if you do not study our legends?’
   ‘Exactly,’ the prince thundered. ‘I am looking for a solution, any solution. I seek the ancient knowledge.’
    ‘The greatest person is the one who holds the blue box,’ the king said wearily. ‘It is so written. Let the throne look to the mirror. The person who holds the blue box will not be touched. Look to the mirror,’ the king repeated. ‘The truth is in the mirror.’
   The prince said, ‘That old story had been often repeated, but it does not help us with the invaders outside our walls.’ He knew the words by heart from childhood, yet the meaning eluded him. Still, he decided to placate his father, so he said loudly, ‘Yes, I think I begin to understand. We are supposed to look deep inside ourselves for the wisdom, as in a mirror, and the blue box represents the answer.’
   ‘The answer,’ his father said, ‘is something you deserve to get. You receive it at the moment you need it. Soon a secret will be revealed to you.’
   The Prince could take it no longer. He thought of the ragged people huddling along the walls, starving, frightened, sleepless. He remembered the army encamped outside the city walls, its bonfires blazing, war machines at the ready. Soldiers standing in a menacing line along the western horizon. He thought of the hardship of the war campaigns.
   ‘There is nothing left to do!’ he shouted. ‘Nothing left to think! I have seen enough of the mirror!’ And saying that he hurled the heavy shield at the mirror, which broke into a thousand shiny pieces. Behind the space where the mirror had been they could see the entrance into a chamber. Inside the chamber, all could see that the legendary blue box rested on a mountain of gold.
   ‘All you needed was the right key,’ Karek the Wise said.
   ‘We are saved,’ Prince Lorono exclaimed, and ran to the treasure, taking the blue box in his hands. He reached the parapet, where he stood facing the enemy. Then he held the blue box above his head.
   The enemy knew what had been written, that peace would come from the blue box. Nobody really believed in the legend any longer. But the time had come to sue for peace. One by one, the enemy put down its arms.
   Three days of feasting reunited the kingdoms of Indrigar and Jandrigar. And thus from the frontiers of the kingdom of the East to the deepest ends of the kingdom of the West began an era of lasting peace and joy.