Empower me like you mean it

Like beers that claim to be authentic or people who describe themselves as funny instead of just being funny, beware any brand or product offering empowerment.

Earlier this month, Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Times Magazine that ‘empowerment became something for women to buy’. It’s an excellent article discussing how most companies pushing empowerment as an idea gloss over its weighty political origins to sell a flimsy notion of powerful personal identity.  Last week, Hadley Freeman wrote about the watering down of empowerment as a political term, with its origins in revolution, race and feminism replaced by a vapid consumer choice.

Strip a political term of its political meaning, and you strip it of its meaning.  The problem with empowering, as well as other favourites of corporate self-definitions like authentic and disruptive, is that it has become bland and unrevealing. What organisation doesn’t want to appear to give its people greater resources, autonomy and self-determination? What organisation would proudly claim inauthenticity, despite Peter York’s very funny defence of it? Disruptive means future: what organisation wouldn’t want to appear to be forward-looking? As such, countless organisations claim to embody these words to their people, investors and customers, without substantiating it. As a result, these words come to make up what Janan Ganesh exquisitely calls “the weightless lexicon of the TED age”.

Throwing around words like empowering is often lazy shorthand. Not all shorthands are bad. As Sam Biddle recently observed, the “Like X for Y” shorthand in Silicon Valley may be ridiculed for being reductive, but if used properly should explain what a company does. Unfortunately, empowering fails to explain anything about what a customer gets or what a company does. Freeman wrote that in contemporary culture, “empowerment has become the cover for doing whatever the hell you like.” Generic but quite fun. Arguably worse, in consumer and management terms, it has become the cover for doing whatever a company wants you to do, under the guise of choice. “At X, we empower you to do Y” really means “You use our product” or “You work for us doing the thing you do at work”.

Empowering should mean the transfer of power to someone but that is rarely the priority despite the rhetoric. People who work with brands like to talk about how, driven by the democratising force of digital technology, today’s enlightened customer is more sceptical, knowledgeable and demanding than ever before. They say brands are held to higher standards than before and the power balance between people and organisations is redressed. If that is true, brands and organisations need to stop using faddish, meaningless platitudes unless they are properly going to back it up in a way that genuinely works for people.

Talking empowerment alone is not a solid enough basis for a credible customer or employee proposition. Being a technology platform is not the same as empowering someone. For example, ‘empowering’ brands must commit to giving the customer more than the ability to buy/use a product or solely enjoying the benefits of that product. Similarly, an organisation that talks about empowering employees must substantiate it by genuinely distributing unprecedented authority and autonomy to its people, not just creating longer lists of responsibilities for people under the same structures of hierarchy. Put power into someone else’s hands and in doing so, have it leave yours.

It’s simple. The language of empowerment has been reduced to meaninglessness in that using the word runs the risk of platitudinous banality. Brands and organisations that insist on using it need to back it up with action so they can speak with credibility. Better yet, they should think of new ways to serve people without using the same tired terminology as everyone else.

Illustration by Oliver Thein

With thanks to Zami Majuqwana, Krisana Jaritsat and Camilla Grey

Dan Gavshon Brady is a Senior Strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow him  @DanGB88

That Coke repositioning made me do a cry

The greatest brand of the 20th century is catching up, and that’s a shame.

Businesses have always understood that by appealing to a person’s emotions rather than their rationality, they can create huge desire for their products. This was the founding principle of mass marketing in the early 20th century; many of today’s most successful brands owe their prominence to it. Coke is the strongest example of branding there has ever been, creating a globally accessible and globally cherished brand from a simple consumer product of very limited practical utility.

The narrative of how to market your product successfully has changed in recent years (as this excellent article by Ian Leslie describes). As chronic neophiliacs, marketers have looked to innovative tech companies disrupting categories left, right and centre to borrow from their success. Out with emotionally led brand marketing and mass communications, in with product benefits, user experiences and rational messaging. Fast, simple, intuitive, easy. Ad finitum. Coke, a behemoth from the 20th century, with a long line of questionable-to-failing innovation attempts behind it, has clearly got a problem making people happy with their product. So it drunk the kool aid.

With much noise, it has replaced its positioning of Choose Happiness with Taste the Feeling, apparently signalling a focus on the product (the word taste must represent this because it is a drink and you taste drinks). There is a beautifully considered and highly produced campaign to accompany it, with a specially written yet generically emotive song, and the product itself features in every shot I’ve seen so far. There’s also some interactive ‘Make your own gif’ feature, because why not?

Choose Happiness is not exactly pointed (and sounds a bit like a CFAR doctrine which judges anyone who fails to choose correctly) but it’s kind of bold. It is a carbonated sugar drink trying to ‘own’ the largest and broadest inoffensively positive emotion there is. Taste the Feeling makes Choose Happiness look niche. Taste the Feeling suggests that it is moving away from emotion to product by leading with taste, but it’s pretty clear that this is a clever rhetorical trick. Taste the Feeling is afraid of losing relevance by talking about happiness, and instead just wants any reaction, any feeling, from its audience. Coke seems so needy that it needs to own the entire market of all human feeling.

For a long time, marketers intuitively clocked and subsequently exploited the power of creating an emotional response in people. Today, measuring that emotional response is much more professionalised. As William Davies has written in The Happiness Industry, our emotions are nothing more than a new metric to be monetised, with crude proxies such as likes, shares and rudimentary brain scans to value them. However, the blunt, sledgehammer approach that marketers often take to try to elicit emotions is patronising and basic. Of course a communication or message is substantiated by an emotional response, but that doesn’t mean you need to say “feel the thing” in order to make someone feel some thing. In fact, it can be inflammatory: this Atlantic article shows how people mischievously riff on Coke’s user-generated gif feature, and how Coke pre-empts this with blacklisted words which doesn’t convey the right tone.

It’s easy to see how Coke has got here, and the clever thinking that has gone into it. It appears innovative (seemingly product-led when actually about big marketing) and democratising (not everyone can get happiness but everyone can get feelings). It is a line that doesn’t really mean anything and yet means so much, appealing for attention in the blandest possible way, reflecting the tone of a childlike internet generation that cannot stop emoting but cannot possibly emote with any subtlety, depth or fluency. It is sharable catnip for the ‘this cat video got me in the feels’ generation. It appears to be modern whilst being conventional, and with its broad coveting of all feelings it is all-measurable – the highest praise of all.

There’s something a little sad about a great brand (even one with a questionable health legacy across the planet) becoming so mundane. If Coke, a product of little practical utility to people, had anything to offer, it was the unashamed, optimistic spreading of hope, joy and happiness, and the creating of Santa as a red suited jolly man. Changing tack and getting in behind everyone else doesn’t just undermine its heritage, it also feels a bit flat.

Illustration by Vivian Yang. 

Dan Gavshon-Brady is a lead strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow him at @DanGB88

Wolff Olins Travel Grant 2015

For the last two years, I have been involved with a charity called the Akili Trust. This is a very small organisation which has built two community libraries in Kilifi County, Kenya, and which provides bursaries for secondary school students who would otherwise be unable to remain in education. Though coastal (and therefore in parts, a tourist attraction), the area is one of the poorest in Kenya, with low levels of literacy and school attendance, especially at secondary school.

In February, the opportunity of an Akili trustee visit came up, to conduct some training with the librarians and engage with them, students, schools and community members. Wolff Olins were able to support the trip, through the annual travel grant available to anyone who works here, as part of our learning and development programme. Working with Ellen O’Connor in particular, I wrote and shaped a proposal, outlining what the trip would involve and how it would benefit the Akili community, what Wolff Olins could learn from it, and how it would contribute to my own personal development.

I had hoped to come back with loads of insights, answers and solutions that we could learn from and use to inform how we think about critical issues and industries in places that are less known to us (not only developing areas but rural ones too). That was naïve and arrogant. I didn’t come back with any grand solutions, but with a snapshot of how things are in a particular area at a particular point in time. I have lived in Uganda and spent a decent amount of time in Kenya before, but long enough ago that many memories were out of date. If there was any big lesson, it was not to discount the basics:

- Listen to what people have to say rather than make assumptions about what is best.

- Progress will always be piecemeal without the proper infrastructure to support communities.

- Education is vital: increasing access and opportunity not only to a young generation but to parents throughout communities makes a difference.

 First, and most importantly, this was a trip that shone a light on issues close to our heart: access, education and opportunity. In Kenya, primary schools are universally free. However, this is a deceptive statement: many schools are desperately under-funded and under-resourced, with parents expected to pick up the shortfall through the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) as well as ancillary costs for schooling (uniforms, materials, and so on, which aren’t cheap). Secondary schools experience a drastic drop in enrolment as people cannot afford to pay the school fees (from 84% to 50% across the country).

In one way, these issues are quite simple (though not the solutions to tackle them): there is a fundamental lack of structural ingredients to provide a universal service which many people – justifiably – take for granted.

Secondly, it dispelled for me some lingering myths that kick around about developing countries. Africa as a single entity is often represented as an exciting and vibrant place, where the economy is growing and everything is poised to take off. All of this is simplistic, even if there are truths in there. Kenya, for example, is a country of similarly high inequality to the UK: however, without the safety nets and infrastructure that the most vulnerable in the UK mostly benefit from. This is reflected in critical areas of life: despite the government pledging insecticide-treated mosquito nets for every household, malaria is still a killer, affecting the least educated and least solvent. I spent a lot of time talking with local nurses about the mismatch between access (to nets and other preventative measures with malaria) and education (about why they are important and how to use them). Primary education is notionally available to everyone: however, comparing the two schools where Akili has built community libraries (where one is nearer to a tourist area), for the more isolated Kakuyuni primary school, it means an eight classroom and 400 desk shortfall. In a classic catch-22, the government provides no more teachers until the classrooms exist for them to teach in. The solution is never as simple as making a grand pledge for access or just providing money: fair and effective distribution of resources so that potential is not wasted is hard to get right.

Thirdly, and most encouragingly, there is so much human potential. This sounds like an awful phrase about production per capita, but what I mean to describe is amazing things people are doing when given the opportunity and means. Unsurprisingly, education sits at the heart of this, and not just generic exam results but people reading for exploration and discovery. We heard that all the students who qualified for bursaries for secondary school in one school were in and out of the Kakuyuni Community Library all the time. Hearing stories from the librarians about how the libraries are used, by children, students and people who lived nearby as well, was incredibly humbling, especially given the casual disregard for libraries here. Education matters, and reading for reading’s sake can – over time - change lives.

Not making assumptions about what the right answer is or what is best for someone is so crucial to growing a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship. The first library that was built by the Akili Trust came about because the local community were asked what they wanted if some people were to get involved in the area. Their reply was not a school classroom or building but a community library. Working over time in that spirit, in partnership with different people in the area, we have seen the effect that libraries can have on a community. And not just in the transactional sense of more people reading more, but in the hub it creates, the opportunities it creates and the stability it gives to an area where so much of life is precarious.

To see more photos from Dan’s Trustee visit, check out our Facebook page.

Dan Gavshon Brady is a Lead Strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow him @DanGB88

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Can you explain your job to your Mum? Anyone who works in branding (yeah, it’s a bit like advertising but…) or consultancy has probably struggled to pass this test. Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, tracks the life of U, a corporate anthropologist working for a firm called the Company, on a large international project called… the Project. It’s a timely and thoughtful read on the weird existence of people who look outside the business world in order to feed the machine of corporate life.

U describes his trade as that of an anthropologist, but in a business, as opposed to a tundra or jungle: “Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations: identifying these, prising them up and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light – that’s my racket”.

He describes what the Company does: [It] “advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas – to the press, the public and, not least, themselves. We dealt, as Peyman [the charismatic founder] liked to say, in narratives.”

And he describes his role: “a purveyor of cultural insight […] unpicking the fibre of a culture and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this particular fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product).”

In essence, this is what any consultant, designer, researcher or strategist is doing all the time in trying to create futures for their clients. Reading a book like this is uneasy territory for anyone working in an agency or consultancy, people who live between the lines of the real world and the structures that shape it. Mainstream popular culture about corporate life and corporate individuals deliberately and exaggeratedly shows it all as a bit ridiculous (Office Space, Silicon Valley, Mad Men). They are grotesque examples of broken systems and the often-unwitting players in it, not a reflection of the dual agent role U, or anyone in a similar position, holds.

This book, however, is subtler in showing the complicity between the individual and the system. It’s more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, where the lead Cayce (physically allergic to brands and selling her services as a cultural barometer to ad agencies) is a hugely sympathetic character caught between an odd vocation and its application. There’s a great line where U says what he does is essentially not that different from the work of soothsayers and ichthyomancers, cutting open fish to gain wisdom from their entrails. “The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds”.

Like U in his work, McCarthy has openly appropriated and repackaged other ideas, through direct and indirect reference to an enormous range of sources. U himself matter-of-factly talks of stealing concepts from French philosophers Deleuze and Badiou to help sell jeans, “leaving out all the revolutionary shit; big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters”. My favourite reminders were of William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Martin Amis and Euripides, but what’s great about this book is that any reader will create their own personal longlist.

With its numbered sub-divisions for chapters, the book is structured like a debrief or final presentation from consultant to client, but one you want to re-read rather than discard for the next project. There is so much strong imagery and so many winding trails of thought and ideas to pore over; this is just a tiny snapshot. For anyone working in this world, it’s thoughtful and funny and offers many further clues for describing your job to your mum, although you may not want to use them at work.

The Nether

Last month, a bunch of strategists from Wolff Olins London went to the Duke of York theatre to see Jennifer Haley’s play, The Nether. The play was a troubling and provocative peering into a future that, like all good science fiction, is all too easy for us to recognise in our present.

The Nether is a future state of the Internet, ‘a new virtual wonderland providing total sensory immersion’. Think a slick combination of mid-90s dial-up Internet, Second Life and entering the matrix. Its allure is clear: just log in, choose an identity and indulge your every desire. It poses the question of whether something done in the virtual world has any consequence in the real one.

The play follows an extreme criminal narrative to explore the question and exaggerate the point, but it’s a pertinent enough question to think of it in mundane terms. What does the pronounced hyper-reality of the Internet do to real life? What happens when seemingly innocuous behaviour in one domain has instant and hard-hitting ramifications in another (consider public shaming, explored in Jon Ronson’s new book)? And if it is foolish to distinguish between the two domains, should we just accept that, like everywhere else, the Internet is not a utopian playground but an expanse of land monopolized by a few big corporate and state conquerors? Though the World Wide Web is 25 years old and the Internet nearly double that, answers to these questions are still far from clear cut, as The Nether points out.

Hollywood and AI

What the advent of robotics means for our cultural world

In our innovation-obsessed society, there’s a lot of talk about automation, about robots, about the end of jobs and of supercomputers. This is the adoption of technology as corporate tools. Elon Musk has been in the news recently saying the same thing he said a few months ago, talking darkly about Terminator and the dangers of artificial intelligence. This is the science fiction of human disaster films.

  A year of robots

At the end of this month in London, the BFI will screen the showpiece to its Sci-fi season, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterpiece is probably the most iconic exploration of the human perils of developing artificial intelligence. It is a pertinent choice for this season, given the coverage afforded the issue in mainstream cinema.

The first half of 2014 welcomed Her and Transcendence. The coming months will see Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie. All, in different ways, explore our relationship with AI. The conventional understanding of Her is a romantic tale of a man who falls in love with his OS (although it’s more a rebirth or overcoming the monster story, if you subscribe to Booker’s schema); Transcendence is a cautionary tale about Kurzweil-esque Singularity; Ex Machina and Chappie appear to examine our uneasy relationship with superintelligence, collectively and individually (Blomkamp’s, naturally, looks at our propensity to segregate what we fear). 

Having more supercomputers in film is not interesting in itself. Rather, it is interesting that Hollywood insists on the anthropomorphosis of their robot protagonists, choosing implausible portrayals of otherwise plausible storylines.

  Are film robots made more human to warn us of the implications of AI, or to confuse us?

Moravec’s paradox asserts that when it comes to AI, the hard problems are easy and the easy problems hard. More specifically it states that, contrary to conventional assumptions about robotics and AI, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” In short, Google can now – extraordinarily- recognise pizzas, but C-3PO is still quite a way off, let alone Kubrick’s Hal or Spielberg’s David from AI.

It is understandable that films try to make machines seem more lifelike, more human. It allows us to look at man vs. machine, loneliness and segregation as part of a socio-technological discussion, of course very relevant to our lives today.

The real world does the opposite, and tries to make us more robotic. It does not take a particularly hard look to see that Apple is not about humanising technology, but automating humanity. Similarly, it isn’t the world’s information Google is organising to make accessible and useful, but us. We see the effects in the most mundane aspects of our lives in the real world, beautifully illustrated here by our homogenous, robotic, physical behaviours. We also see the effects in our personalised, predictable and hyperreal digital lives.

  How film reflects our world

In a fascinating book, the film critic James Hoberman shows how the aftermath of 9/11 saw a huge surge in popularity in films with high body counts “to capitalize on the nation’s new bellicosity”(although, interestingly, just two weeks after 9/11, President Bush urged Americans in an act of defiance to “get down to Disney World”, the utopian hyperreality). Black Hawk Down was rushed into cinemas early, Collateral Damage, We Were Soldiers, The Sum of All Fears and Attack of the Clones all came out in spring 2002, to greater success and marketing than envisaged. The political, social and corporate context at the time forced a response in culture (normally this happens the other way around); but the story of war is a more straightforward one to tell on screen.

One might wonder whether the current swathe of films examining AI is performing a similar function. Rather than reflect a wounded and angry country in the aftermath of a shocking attack, films – like us - are grappling with the more complex ramifications of the information age. In a post-Snowden, post-Wikileaks, post-Matrix era of Facebook and drone delivery, these films are trying to create powerful human stories instead of the mundane, everyday deference we show to automation. It may be less cinematic, but is no less significant.

Dan Gavshon Brady (@DanGB88) is a strategist at Wolff Olins, London.

Card Clash

How our ‘helpful’ technology is getting in the way.

Getting the tube every morning is a monotonous experience, so any small change to the routine is discernible. An increase of signs (as above) posted near ticket barriers, warning against ‘Card Clash’, has caught the eye recently.

Card Clash occurs when commuters tap in using their Oyster card but also have a contactless credit card in the same wallet or sleeve. It can result in punters paying extra, confusing the machines and causing queues to build up, especially in rush hour, when time means money and the platforms are crowded. It is not a new issue, but for TFL it is an increasing concern with the rising prevalence of contactless cards.

This prompts several questions about our reliance on helpful technology.

Technology, conventional wisdom presumes, makes our lives easier and run more smoothly. TFL’s Oyster card system is a great example of excellent service design which does this (even if the technology’s hastening of ticket office closure has been met with industrial action). Contactless card payments and transport apps, whether CityMapper or Hailo, do the same.

We carry more and more of this technology on our bodies at all times. Oyster cards, smartphones (connected to sensor-enabled thermostats like Hive and Nest), FitBit and FuelBand, contactless credit cards and building or key fobs. We carry so much that it can become a physical and financial hindrance, as with Card Clash. People can be put out of pocket from this, but there is a larger issue at play here.

Many of these services which we now keep so close to ourselves in fact come under the domain of fundamental, infrastructural utilities and sectors. These are absolutely necessary to the fabric of a society. For FitBit or FuelBand, read Health, for Oyster read Transport, for Nest read Energy and so on. Much of this is held together by smartphones, for which we would traditionally have read Telecommunications, even if all-pervasive software has disrupted how we conceive of communication.

It is debatable whether this is a positive social phenomenon, with our tacit acceptance of the transferal of responsibility to individuals from institutions on issues like health, energy savings, and public transport. Is it helpful to have your thermostat in your hands at all times? Or, as suggested recently on this blog, is mobile ‘on point’ better than ‘always on’? The technical ingenuity of a remotely-controlled washing machine is not in doubt; rather, could we not be spending our time doing something that has a bit more meaning?

However, that people seem so willing “to take control”, as the rhetoric goes, of these aspects of their lives reflects a loss of faith in our institutions. This surely presents an opportunity for brands in these fundamental areas of people’s lives to do something uniquely positive and helpful, not exploitative and cynical.

We should shoulder some responsibility for allowing ourselves to be duped into taking on the work of companies and institutions under the glistening veneer of technological progress. Rising fares, bills and unconnected, frustrating customer service whenever anything goes wrong do not suggest at progress or empowerment.

This is not an either-or argument, but a spectrum. It is not outlandish to suggest that we should bear some responsibility for how healthy our lifestyles are (although this recent, quite scary European Commission video seems to stretch the credibility of “taking control”), but in areas where infrastructural systems and contracts keep customer influence limited, is it fair that the customer assumes more and more responsibility? And especially if they do not know it?

Health, communication, transport and energy are vital to people’s lives. Brands who take responsibility and pride in this over anything else stand to build something quite remarkable for themselves and for the people who rely on them. Three starting points could be:

1) True customer-centricity (e.g. flexible billing structures which adapt according to usage)

2) Implementing effective two-way services which allows for inevitable errors in the system and doesn’t leave customers stranded twice

3) A focus, where relevant, on the real and collective benefits which technology can bring on a structural level, not the clandestine transferal of accountability to the individual customer

There are many great initiatives and features companies have created which harness the benefits that emerging technology can bring. Some may even bring happiness to millions of people. However, whilst they remain predicated on shifting the work to the customer, the concern of people living in a utility-seeking, always-on and individualistic environment persists.

Dan Gavshon Brady is a strategist at Wolff Olins London, you can follow him @DanGB88