The Mind of TCHO

Amazing what you can do when you’re liberated from having to dump your promotion budget into television advertising. Was in LA last Thursday to visit our space design buds Ubersee and had to drop in to the Kwik-E-Mart on Venice Blvd at Supulveda, one of seven 7-11s around the country that have undergone rebranding to Springfield’s favorite convenience store.

Quite the scene, with convertibles full of young, stylish Japanese tourists and lowriders with gang bangers crowding the parking lot.

The place was so popular, you had to wait in line to get in.

Your favorite bank was there.

Once, inside, there were Apu’s cousin and his brother-in-law at the counter.

He’s watching the hordes ricocheting around the store searching for the products which had been rebranded.

Unfortunately, Buzz cola was only available in cans.

And apparently they didn’t make enough Krusty-Os.

But there were lots of spinklicious donuts.

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And plenty of attitude, even when it may have been highly ironic in the context of their host body, the 7-11.

And yet more attitude!

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Wish there was more to buy or find, I’d have stuck around longer, but as it was, I had an appointment to go to, so I grabbed a six pack of Buzz cola for Boris and Nik, and motored on to Pasadena.

Apu bid me adieu.

We’ve been talking about this for a while. This is from an email exchange I had with Erik and Susanna:

Until we put together target audience, positioning, and marketing strategy, all we have are pretty designs.

We have one more thing to do with regard to target audience—understand who we are talking about. We both have rooms full of Millennials, and we can listen to them, and they might think they know who they are, but actually we need a deeper understanding.

I am trying to get a historical-social prospective on this. There’s a book we used at Wired called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 which I think is crucial. It’s the history of the United States by generation. The Millennials are a precise group, born of the Boomers and Gen Xers, arriving at adulthood now. In reality, they are too young to be the group we are defining as 18 to 35. But because the previous group was so weak (X-ers), the Millennials will be defining the whole cohort, and will pull along those Boomers who are not totally brain dead, or who are seeking heat.

The Millennials are not little Boomers. They aren’t opposed to Boomers. They are different. They grow up looking at their self-absorbed and hypocritical parents, they witness the rubble of the social institutions tumbled by the technological revolution, and their response is not more of their parents’ me-me-me, but us-us-us—let’s fix the problems and re-invent civil society for the 21st century. They are looking back to find out what’s worked, and they are looking forward to build a better future. They are simultaneously more traditionalist and future-forward.

The book How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding is fascinating. The central point it makes is that each era’s iconic brand answers each era’s fundamental social angst. The original DDB Volkswagen campaign responded to the conformity and mass marketing of the 50s. The Coca Cola ad with the kids on the hillside joining hands about how they wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony responded to the social disintegration and atomization of the anti-Vietnam and civil rights protests of the 60s. The Corona campaign that turned a cheap, mediocre beer into the leading imported beer in the US with the commercial of the dot com couple on some deserted beach, the guy lazily skipping stones on the still water, and when the beeper goes off, picking it up and skipping it too talked to the need for people who were working 80 hours a week needing to completely decompress—Change your latitude.

I’m not saying that we are building VW, Coke, or Corona. But this kind of thinking provides us with an analytical framework on which to set a brand direction.

We are focusing on the Millennials because they are not being focused on by the chocolate industry, because they are going to be the next generation of chocolate consumers and we might as well become their brand, and because they are, by definition, modern. What is their mission, and their angst? Their mission is to join together and rebuild the civic space, how we live together as human beings. Their angst is the deep divide we find ourselves in, both in the US and around the world—a divide that is altogether understandable given that it separates eras of policy, politics, culture, religion, development, civilization. And a divide that millennials are yearning, and will ultimately be responsible for closing.

I propose that the overall thematic message, the core of the TCHO brand, is connection. We have already talked about how we are connecting the consumer to the producer by making the supply chain transparent. I want to generalize that: TCHO chocolate connects us to the land, to the producers, to each other. Chocolate as a ritual of sharing. The brand as a message of unity.

So imagery of connection, sharing, embrace: a handshake, an arm around a shoulder, an arm around a waist, a passionate embrace, people working or playing in groups—a football huddle, kids playing with each other, listening to a teacher, soldiers sharing an embrace or standing with a group of kids, brainstorming at the office. The symbols could appear on our “magazine cover” bars, it should appear in our promotional materials, it should be a conscious/subconscious theme in all the media we generate—if we have a video of Timothy visiting a farm in Ecuador, when he steps out the small plane at some remote airfield, the camera should show him greeting his contact, literally focusing on his handshake or embrace.

Unity, connection, sharing, embrace.

Check out ray oldenburg’s concept of the Third Place (he is an urban sociologist who wrote a book called The Great Good Place).

may not be what we want, but it is still interesting to see what some big cafe chains have used for inspiration.

Third Places

Oldenburg identifies third places, or “great good places,” as the public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), third places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them. Third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Oldenburg suggests that beer gardens, main streets, pubs, cafes, coffeehouses, post offices, and other third places are the heart of a community’s social vitality and the foundation of a functioning democracy. They promote social equality by leveling the status of guests, provide a setting for grassroots politics, create habits of public association, and offer psychological support to individuals and communities.

Quotable

“In the absence of informal public life, living becomes more expensive. Where the means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.”

“What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably--a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”

“Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’”

“The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends...They are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.

Starbucks. This article contains a lot of blah blah, but it also has this quote:

Seth Godin, author of numerous marketing books including Permission Marketing and Survival Is Not Enough, attributes creative packaging and messaging to Tazo’s success. “I think the very best brands start with no meaning,” says Godin. “Starbucks and Nike and Apple are far more powerful than American Airlines or AuctionDrop. The brilliant branding happened for Tazo with the packaging. The text, the type, the colors, they all tell a story. Words like Tazo have no real meaning. Instead, they have color and shape and a hint of atmosphere that consumers are drawn to.”

Can you build a brand with a succession of short-lived products —like limited edition chocolates? Apparently yes, according to this Business Week story:

Only a lucky few ever got to try Pepsi’s Ice Cucumber soda. The pale green drink began appearing on shelves at Japanese convenience stores in early June. Within days, clips of people swigging the stuff were showing up on YouTube, and bloggers were debating whether the taste was more melon than cucumber. A couple of weeks later, all 4.8million bottles of Ice Cucumber had sold out. But instead of ratcheting up production, Pepsi brand managers in Japan did the unthinkable: They discontinued the drink. “We didn’t want it on the market past the summer,” says Keiko Ishihara, who oversees PepsiCo Inc. sales for Suntory, the Tokyo beverage maker that markets the soda giant’s products in Japan. “The value of Ice Cucumber is that it’s gone already.”

How about one from Weiden Kennedy Amsterdam? This time, we’re mainlining ecstasy, joy, and optimism.

The ad ran during the Super Bowl, and was cut from a five minute documentary the W+K shop did for Coke in 2006. This is a still from the documentary—and perhaps a theme for the factory?

Gondry, by the way, is the director of the fantastic Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. As well as this trippy ad:

Only to be topped by this mindbending music video:

And while I’m on this jag, this Spyke Jonz video is from
The Works of Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry boxed set. And yes, that’s Christopher Walkin dancing and doing the wire tricks to Fatboy Slim.

Maybe not . . .

Still think it’s a good idea? Try this one: