Zeus Jones believes brands are defined by what they do, not what they say. Modern brands are guided by purpose and built on experiences. We built a company to see just what would happen if an agency infused this model into everything from product development to design to strategy. We think our case studies speak for themselves.
About our Blog
Welcome! Here you will find essays on technology, trends and our take on making things work. Beyond that, we post design examples we love, and other cool stuff we find.
As Stephen Colbert and John Stewart have very clearly pointed out, this election is all about money. Their parody of Super PAC-funded negative commercials as a primary campaign strategy makes it evident that the focus is definitely on quantity of contributions, rather than the quality of what comes out of them.
For example, Barack Obama has been trying hard to organize a grassroots donation effort, stating that we need to “neutralize the avalanche of special-interest spending to defeat” him. But is it really about matching Republican contributions? Should it be?
Fun fact: In Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, which has fewer than 200 contributors, the average contribution for his main engine is roughly $150,000. Barack Obama’s average contribution is $50.
The way that the election campaigning is happening right now reminds me of brand marketing in the 90′s. It’s all about throwing down as much money as possible, getting on the airwaves and getting your message out there. For example, 96% of Mitt Romney’s Super PAC spending has been on attack ads.
In other words, they’re stuck in an era when marketing was all bout saying the other guy’s burger is 50% smaller. And those are politicians – many brands have long moved away from that game. With the rise of modern branding, brands have realized that messaging-only approaches just don’t work anymore. No matter what your TV commercials say, if your company has bad customer service, you need to fix the customer service, or else customers empowered by the Internet will destroy your reputation. Instead of relying on empty promises in commercials, brands are restructuring their processes so that they can do things better, and do more for their customers. By spending less on telling the story, they are challenging themselves to be creative about using social media, viral marketing and other techniques to get the word out.
So why is the election still all about TV spending? Instead of trying to rival the scope of Republican attack ads, Obama supporters should think of more creative – and less spendy – ways to make an impact. What if instead of asking for money for campaign materials, they used some of what they have to finance small projects or startups, and then publicized their successes? By pumping that money back into efforts that will help the people whose lives they want to improve, they could send a much larger message than any you might find in a commercial.
Look at Pepsi’s Refresh Project – they managed to create their own version of Kickstarter, just using their Superbowl funding.
Beyond how they spend their money, the viral – and free – territory of social media should actually be making funded marketing less important than ever for campaigns. Reputation spreads faster than ever, which is probably why no amount of campaign money can stop Mitt Romney from getting torched by The Onion.
The bottom line is, if our favorite brands have rethought their spending on messaging, isn’t it time for politicians to do so too?
While there’s a bunch of things that could cover, I think the most interesting thing about our evolution is how little resemblance the company of today bears to the company we imagined right up to the day we opened our doors.
We weren’t just a bit wrong about things, we were dramatically wrong. In almost all circumstances, our imagination around the specifics of our business was simply more naive and (thankfully) much less interesting than the reality has turned out to be.
Our ignorance became clear quite early on when we realised that the financial contracts we had written were acting as “sales prevention.” A little later, one of our first clients told us she was going to hire us despite all of our “gobbledy gook.”
We were saved by the simple fact that the specifics of our business were and are far less important to all of the partners than the beliefs that drove us to start the business in the first place.
So the story I plan to tell, is how our beliefs really created our company. How listening to them and letting them guide us, allowed us to move into areas we’d never imagined. How the lesson we learned from our initial mistakes was to resist defining the specifics. And how our refusal to define the specifics of our business has actually been central to whatever success we’ve managed to achieve.
I got one of my first promoted tweets the other day. A tweet from McDonald’s was at the top of my feed, leading me to a video about one farmer who raises the cattle for their beef.
Let’s just say I was not exactly sold.
Turns out that McDonald’s attempt to share authentic farmer stories using the hashtag #McDstories quickly evolved into a bunch of Twitter users sharing McDonald’s horror stories. What started as interruptive messaging to promote McDonald’s integrity quickly turned into a way for negative reviews to go viral.
I think that this might have gone wrong for a couple reasons.
1. McDonald’s looked like an older brand trying to “talk to young people, on their level.” Their tweets replaced “you” with “u” and were full of hashtags and links, instead of more singular, simple messages.
2. It was just too much of a stretch for people to believe that suddenly McDonald’s meat comes from heartfelt, ethically conscious farmers. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that McDonald’s is trying to jump on the bandwagon of being more wholesome, and caring about the stories of the people who provide their product. A lot of brands are. But every customer knows that for McDonald’s, this would be a major overhaul, which clearly hasn’t happened.
That’s why transparency is important. Large brands are actually improving the way they do things, and slowly suiting them to meet customer demands. But it is a slow process, and they need to be honest about that. Messaging that expects customers to believe that your food suddenly comes from wholesome farmers just begs for skepticism and backlash.
Instead, McDonald’s should present any mission to get back in touch with farmers as just that – a mission. When you’re honest about the fact that you’re only a couple steps in, customers are a lot less likely to torch your reputation.
As for promoted tweets, I expect I’ll have to get used to them.
Today a friend of mine wrote a happy new year message in Chinese on her Facebook. I noticed a fairly new feature – Bing in-context translation. I clicked it and got this:
“United States Central time new year’s day. We wish you all the best of the new year, research on sophisticated, a happy horse!”
Not a very good translation, as you can see.
As a lover of learning foreign languages, and the mistranslations that can ensue, I’ve been playing around on translation software since the beginning of this century. For the most part, it was laughably erroneous, with AltaVista’s Babelfish tool giving me countless pages of hilarious nonsense.
Since Google translate has come around, I’ve started to believe that software can actually help you learn a language the way it’s used, not the way a bunch of algorithms lay out. Language is itself not always mathematical, or perfect.
Google translate is interesting in that its creator, Franz Josef Och, doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of rule-based algorithms. Instead, they use a comparative system drawn from a large database of texts translated into every language, which they collected from the UN. This system translates the texts into English and back, meaning you eliminate the necessity for collections like “Swahili into Norwegian.” This system isn’t perfect, mostly since English is a wacky language, but they have more human controls that have allowed for suggested translations, as well as drop-down alternative translations. The overall effect is a lot more human, and thus more accurate.
Bing’s translator is nothing to write home about (or to write in foreign languages with).
I know Google and Facebook are rivals, but it’s disappointing that Facebook can’t utilize Google’s translator to help friends speak between languages. Facebook as a place to translate social messages in context could be a huge opportunity for language learning, and it’s too bad Microsoft’s underwhelming software had to be the go-to choice.
“Let’s face it: drinking scotch isn’t about geekery, it’s about appreciating the finer things in life while enjoying good company, ideally in a room decorated with rich mahogany. You don’t want to worry about futzing around too much with the app, which is why Zeus Jones’s decision to make Proof an HTML5-driven webapp—rather than a bona fide, download-it-from-iTunes-and-wait App—is a canny one. There’s nothing to install with Proof, so when it’s time to break out the bottles, you just type in a URL and there it is, instantly.”
In the process of rummaging through the files for a speech I’m giving shortly I came across this:
Because we were cheap and had no money, we used search results to track the effectiveness of our launch idea which was to participate as a fictional person in a bunch of communities around the web. I’m posting the original deck because I some of of our employees haven’t ever seen this:
For as long as I’ve been involved in marketing (which isn’t that long) we’ve been wrestling with different ways to involve consumers with our brands. For the longest time this involvement meant getting consumers to generate content to be used to market the brand.
Oh, how we’ve overlooked their potential.
One of my favorite articles about branding was published by the New York Times in 2006 called “Brand Underground.” The article starts with the premise that “savvy millennials see mainstream branding as something that appeals to the lowest common denominator.” And it goes on to profile a few young entrepreneurs who asked themselves “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?” and launched companies like The Hundreds, aNYthing, Retail Mafia, etc. To me this showed that some people have a sophisticated understanding of business and branding and we often don’t give them credit for it.
I think we’re starting to see the digital equivalent of this type of thinking maturing into something that might draw more participants from the mainstream. People are starting to realize that they possess very valuable assets that brands need, but can’t replicate for themselves.
Unique POV and Voice
For years, people have been making a living through their blogs. Some have even become simple corporate shills. But the better ones are using their blogs to cultivate their own personal brand, which gives them the leeway to get into merchandising, personal appearances, partnerships, etc.
Influence and Personal Networks
While we sometimes make fun of Klout, I think it’s an important first step in allowing people to understand the nature of their influence. Despite some people debating the value of targeting influencers, it’s still the general approach digital, social and PR strategist employ to push through brand messaging and build buzz. If a person were to understand where they are now in terms of influence and what it takes to get to a more desirable state, they could potentially turn networking into a job and monetize their influence. Douglas Rushkoff had an article on CNN about how traditional jobs are becoming obsolete and we need to rethink how we can support ourselves. This would be an instance of that.
Data
An entire industry has been created to collect, analyze, visualize and store data. Some businesses are greedily mining data with no particular plans except that it might be useful someday. The crazy thing is that consumers are just giving it away. A few small companies have popped up to help people better manage their own personal data and control who gets it and who doesn’t. Adage had the best headline to sum up the potential of this space: “Here’s my personal data, marketers. What do I get for it?”
I think the sum of these three points show that consumers have an increased understanding of marketing in the digital space. Or at the very least, they are aware of what’s going on. This definitely helps prove the old idea that “marketing to” people is no longer as effective as “marketing with” them. But what’s different is that it’s not exclusively about content anymore. Consumers aren’t content producers, they’re more like business partners because of the value they can potentially add. Here are some examples of brands taking this approach:
From the article: “So what if you were to enable people to sell the shoes they design to their mates on Facebook in return for stuff, like free shoes? What if you enabled people to open their own storefront on Converse’s Facebook page? What if you turned the fans of a brand into the retailers?”
From the article: ” Creative customers are being challenged to create tasty new flavors using fruits, herbs, or other natural ingredients. The contest runs through the end of April, after which a panel of judges will pick a winner, and the winning recipe will go into production. Aware that co-creators should share in profits, Frenkenburger will pay the winner one euro-cent per bottle sold.”
From the article: “Danish Vores Øl (‘Our Beer’) claims to be the world’s first open-source beer. The recipe and the entire brand is published under a Creative Commons license, meaning that anyone can use Vores Øl’s recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative.”
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I’m pretty excited about these developments for a number of reasons ranging from finding a slightly friendlier version of capitalism to exercising a different creative muscle to take advantage of these opportunities.
But the most exciting thing is seeing the emergence of a tangible role for social media with businesses and individuals. Now there’s a real answer to the annoying question of: “What’s the point of Twitter, Facebook, etc.?”
When I was growing up, the biggest brands in the world were Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Being a chubby kid that watched a lot of TV, I loved Coke and McDonald’s equally, and associated those brands with a huge part of pop culture. As I got older, this admiration turned into cynicism. I always felt like they were talking at a market-tested version of me – “TTYL!” It was flashy, sometimes funny, but not exactly earnest.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that era is ending. While I might have grown up to associate branding with
• Unhealthy food
• Sexy spokespeople
• Huge budgets
• Bottom-lines
• The entertainment industry
The biggest brands today are operating in vastly different modes. Kids right now are growing up in a culture where Facebook, Google and Apple are the Big Brand Superheroes, and even if some of us don’t realize it, we have internalized ideas about a brand’s role in culture that depart greatly from what they used to be.
I started thinking about this when reading about how Rupert Murdoch doesn’t believe Twitter will be financially valuable. What any kid who uses the Internet regularly has learned is that brands that have staying power right now tend to
• Grow slowly, without even considering profitability for years
• Understand that social currency is more important than immediate profitability in the long run
• Care about innovation more than marketing messages
Beyond that, we see how a self-taught individual can create a service on a small budget that can not just change society, but lead to corporate success. It will take awhile for that shift in thinking to surface, but for kids growing up now, it will be internalized. Sure there’s a lot of noise – Shake Weights, Slap Chops, ads stuck in windshield wipers – but while those things fade, the people doing it right are succeeding. And that’s a reason to be less cynical.
Yesterday’s arrival of Betty Wrightthe movie, sparked a conversation with Joseph about the upcoming Bobby Womack/Damon Albarn album (which I am very excited about), which prompted a conversation with my wife about how this was a continuation of a trend that has included Will.I.Am and his various collaborations with Sergio Mendez as well the Jack White/Loretta Lynn album Van Lear Rose and dozens more of examples of modern day artists resurrecting the careers of performers whose day in the sun has been over for a while.
My daughter added that it was “like sampling except going back to the source rather than the copy,” which I really liked as an idea and that got me thinking about how there’s something quite profound going on in culture here where artists of one generation don’t reject or revere the last, but instead they collaborate with them and how that’s a win for both generations.
I think there’s lots of ideas here that I might have had time to explore in a lengthy blog post a few years back but which I don’t have the time to do now, so I thought I’d at least try to get it down on paper so to speak because maybe it sparks something for someone else.
We had an opportunity to look into pivotal moments that defined a brand for one of our clients. The most interesting bit we took away from looking at these case studies is how they were able to clearly articulate the brand’s vision.What was really effective about these stories is that they become the answer to questions about the brand’s culture, values and personality. It’s like a shortcut to the brand pyramid we all love.
Burt’s Bees
In the early days of the company, they were in talks with Target about carrying some of their products. The talks were going well until Target wanted to put one of the products in cases of two, instead of cases of six. The founder, Roxanne Quimby, was opposed to the idea because it would produce more waste so she told Target: “Screw you, I’m not using three boxes” and ended up losing the deal. (Source)
Stonyfield Organics
Stonyfield is the beloved organic yogurt company that was bought out by Danone in 2001. The negotiations between Stonyfield and Danone took a year and three quarters because Gary Hirshberg, the CEO, was building poison pills into the contract to protect the integrity of the company. There were terms such as committing to organic, donating to certain charities, etc. where if they were broken, Stonyfield would have the option to buy itself back from Danone. (Source)
Marks and Spencer
Former CEO Stuart Rose took Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” with him on vacation and came back inspired and convinced that doing good is good for business. He rallied the top 100 people in the company and took them to a screening of the movie to get everyone on the same page. What happened afterwards was the development of Plan A, one of the most ambitious retail business strategies in play right now. (Source)
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The other thing we learned is that it’s never too late to take an action that can become a great story later. Often times, our bias is to refer to the brand’s history for something inspirational, but we forget that we have the option to create new stories, as shown by the Marks and Spencer example.
If you want to read more about the impact of stories in a company, there’s a great research paper from the Journal of Business Ethics.
When I think of the word “sustainability” I picture Al Gore. I picture packaging made of recycled cardboard. I picture the lady selling me organic cheese. Sustainability, for people my age at least, has been almost completely associated with the green movement. To us, it’s about businesses ensuring that our kids will be able to breathe clean air and pet sheep and all the stuff my parallel universe self is doing while I watch MTV.
What’s odd about this association is that sustainability has become an emotional word, whereas technically, it’s a very unemotional concept. Think of it this way – for skeptics, the green movement inspires suspicion, because people feel like it’s not necessarily an efficient way to do business. There’s a misconception that in the interest of doing things in an eco-friendly manner, we’re making a sacrifice, valuing morality over functionality, good-feelingness over necessity or demand. As a result, it’s easy to associate sustainability with what we assume are emotional motives.
But sustainability isn’t about the environment, it’s about using design thinking to maximize functionality. Basically, sustainability is the capacity of something to endure – and to create something durable and long-lasting – it has to be well-planned. Let’s say I want to start a small business that sells ice cream cones. In order to make sure it lasts a long time, I’m going to design the whole experience of creating, selling, marketing, in the way that is most efficient, in terms of resources and time. It’s that word there – resources – that has made it so easy for the green movement to adopt.
Once you start thinking of sustainability as being first centered on efficiency, the green movement starts to look a lot smarter – not just more ethical. Conserving resources isn’t just good for the environment – it’s cheaper too. Starting the conversation this way makes it easier for economics-minded people to get on board, and put the green movement in language that businesses speak.
Oftentimes green-friendly and organic processes do take the long way, but that’s not the same thing as being inefficient. When a process is designed to deal with long-term complications up-front, it might take more time to produce something, but that result will be more efficient in the long run. You don’t have to go green to appreciate sustainability – you just need to like a process that was well thought-out.
The other day, for obvious reasons, I ended up on the Facebook page of a local donut shop. I didn’t know much about the place, and I wanted to see what they were all about. 20 minutes later, I’m still there, analyzing their hours of business and looking at pictures of salted dulce de leche donuts. Yes I clicked “like.”
Since I used to be a local arts and entertainment editor, I have followed a lot of local businesses on social media, and I’ve often been inspired by their simple efforts to connect with customers when working with our own clients. I’ve noticed some key differences in the way businesses of different scale approach social media.
Here are common practices I’ve noticed with small businesses on social media:
-Announcing what is happening in the store today (i.e. “Today we’ve got vegan rosemary croissants and fresh red velvet cake.”)
-Announcing their hours or, for food trucks, location.
-Profiling their employees or customers in interesting ways.
It’s a combination of generally useful information and a peek into the culture of their company. The result is a transparent, human feel that’s often creative and fun.
Compare this with the common social media efforts of many large brands:
-Housing and expanding on their current TV campaign.
-Constant efforts to create shareable “memes.”
-Big Brother-style monitoring for any mention of the brand and direct addressing of complaints from a voiceless individual.
Many of these efforts add another channel for their larger campaign messaging, which often ends up feeling expensive and elaborate. Instead of working with Facebook, they work against it to turn it into a micro website to talk at customers, rather than with them.
It makes sense when you think about it. Small local businesses are good at social media because they need to be. They can’t afford large, expensive campaigns, or even fully functional websites – so Facebook and Twitter play an integral part in communicating with their customers. When you start from a place of necessity, it’s easier to create something functional.
Websites have gone through a lot of awkward evolutions. Sparkly GIFs. Angelfire madness. Angsty Live Journals. It was a rough puberty. For brands, these growing pains culminated in the Flash-addled microsite, which they elaborately sculpted to house their current TV/print campaign somewhere clickable.
These microsites had elaborate art, all kinds of media, all kinds of textures, and one simple nav menu that leads you through the narrow exploration process. With unshareable text that was invisible to search, they made little impact.
But brands are figuring it out, slowly but surely. Oddly enough, their solution seems to be one that merges with other types of sites, from magazines to blogs to shopping sites to personal portfolios. The answer is a simple one, weeding out the clutter and taking inspiration from pop-up blogs. What everyone is creating right now are editorial sites.
The basic elements of these sites are as follows:
A gridded structure and a long page:
Instead of cramping the whole experience onto the space of one screen, the format encourages you to explore, to scroll down for chapter two of a story or to play with a well-organized grid to find the story you’re looking for.
A navigation structure organized by topics and categories:
Instead of building a ton of custom modules to make the site do all kinds of tricks, it’s fairly simple to use the editorial format’s built in tags and categories to create countless, specific but visually unified portions of your site. This means categories creating the overarching navigation and tags let people browse by countless topics.
A large footer:
A chunky footer summarizes the site, encouraging you to scroll down to the bottom.
One-pagers:
While most editorial sites act like entire magazines, some are long, scrolling pages that act like one short story.
Recently I started thinking about why editorial websites might work so well for everyone. But the more I thought about it, the more strange it struck me that it took us so long to understand that websites work best when we treat them like magazines.
Magazines themselves are smart objects of design – timely, topical, labored-over, designed, packed with photography and thought-provoking writing, and affordable. They have a beginning and an end, although those rules don’t need to be adhered to – it’s more about exploring. When we find a magazine, we know what to do with it. Creative content hits us as useful and interesting more than intrusive.
It makes sense that this format would work for more than just publications. One problem that brands have is that their content feels inauthentic. That’s because their strategy is rooted in years of nothing but imperative language (try this tonight!) and useless claims (the best taste since 1945). By borrowing the format of a magazine, brands can use their digital presence to work with people in a way they like working, and provide content they’re actually interested in.
Now that so many sites are focusing on exploration and storytelling, we’re also learning more about what the Internet could bring to the magazine. Some of the coolest contributions are creative footers as bookends, interactive dialogues, and of course social media sharing.
It could be that this a current trend, but I think it’s more than that. After years of interesting experimentation, the website has finally settled into something that works.
Carlos is a planner in Brazil who has a very cool blog called Unplanned. He’s been collecting advice and interviews from planners all over the world and yesterday, finally, I sent him some of my thoughts. The article is here, but for the anglo-speakers, the question was, what’s your advice for young planners.
As you know, I believe that marketing is about doing things for people rather than saying things to them. A direct implication of this is that marketing ideas are things we do, not things we say.
I also believe that strategy is about deciding what we will do, not deciding what we will say. And this means that our practice of separating strategy and ideas no longer makes sense. It is a relic which holds us back instead of moving us forwards.
I hope the next generation of young planners will work to redefine the output of their agencies rather than simply trying to redefine their role within the agency.
I hope the next generation of young planners will remember that the role of planning is to move the industry forward, which may require leaving planning behind.
Lately at work I’ve been thinking about the personality types of marketers. How come everyone at ZJ is so similar? But maybe that’s just the ZJ personality. Get to know us, by checking out the stuff we like right now.
Music: The Field
This is the album we’ve been playing on our Sonos a lot lately. At first it sounds like simple electronica, but it has a weird, eery, quirky feel that makes you stop and listen.
826 Seattle, a youth writing and tutoring center started by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s, just relaunched their website. The design is playful and functional. When will McSweeney’s finally get a new site?
One thing I’ve learned at Zeus Jones is that companies will sweat to make a men’s product-related website. Whereas lady websites are like “Here’s some stuff, you know you want to buy it!”, men’s websites are full of stunning design, smart and witty editorial content and innovative content structures. And now one of the hot ones, Gear Patrol, has an equally sleek iPad app. I’m jealous.
Videos: Sam Calagione’s TED talk about reinventing beer
Movies: Martha Marcy May Marlene
I spent Halloween night at a screening of this film starring Mary-Kate and Ashley’s younger sister Elizabeth. It was the scariest Halloween I’ve had yet.
Food: Rolos
We’ve been in a Rolo phase lately when it comes to candy. For more amazing candy shots, visit Scandybars.
Social Media: Tumblr
We’re now on Tumblr. Follow us for even more stuff!
