Feelings Are More Important Than Facts (Branding in the ‘Post Truth’ Era)

Over the past two weeks I did a series of lectures called BRANDING IN THE ‘POST TRUTH’ ERA. They were a lot of fun and led to a TED Talk offer.

It is easy to understand why the idea of a ‘post truth’ era has captured our attention so much, but what does it all mean for brands in 2017? Shoot, what does it mean for humans alive right now? It’s a messy, noisy and confusing world out there where it’s hard to discern where the truth is.

Trump helped put a blinding spotlight on ‘fake news’ and has only turned up the diatribe since awkwardly assuming his ill-fitting role. During the campaign, it was revealed how influential social media can be in creating perception, even beliefs. Equally intriguing was experiencing how algorithms designed to curate for us can (unintentionally) create filter bubbles where ‘news’ is often posted with no context or journalistic integrity. Still, worse has been the proclamation that real news that doesn’t support our current authoritarian’s position is labeled as ‘fake.’ The global village that was once the Internet has been replaced by digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.

All this noise should remind us of the power of belief, and perhaps more importantly, that somewhere in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a nice strata dedicated to our drive to be a part of something outside ourselves; “belief.” Even better if the belief can be authentically validated. We all want a story, something that compels us and if we just get around to reading the headline of the story, we’ve gotten real adept at reading between the lines based on our predilections. Sometimes very creatively.

Sadly, today the truth is grayer than ever. But should it be so surprising that things are as dynamic as they are? There seems to be no singular truth, but rather variations on a widening spectrum.

This is all a roundabout way of stating what we’ve known all along, but it bears repeating “FEELINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FACTS.”

Today, more than any time in the past, we can spend our time and money amplifying what others are saying about us rather than paying others to advertise for us. One need look no further than sponsored content and native ads, which have become qualified ways of sharing without doing so much branding.

What are the takeaways for marketers crafting brand stories in the ‘post truth’ era?

The rise of a 'post truth' world should remind us all about the importance of a brand; having a vision of what heaven looks like married with a practice, or religion, through which the brand approaches its heaven. This doesn’t apply exclusively to brands either. It applies to institutions of all sorts; sports teams, religions, schools, nations, even personal brands.

Today a Con Man has risen to the highest throne; mendacity tweets out from the toilets of high rises and gets retweeted one hundred thousand times before the truth has had a chance to down its Wheaties. Both of which intrigue and repel those of us in the brand world... or the real world, for that matter.

The ‘post truth’ era was ushered in via the nastiest election ever and it gave us two things. One, a reminder that if people’s desires for a different future are harnessed they might be so numb as to be willing to place their future in the pockets of a Con Man who has the longest list of perpetual business failures of anyone on the planet. Two, more optimistically, others have become un-numb and woken up to the idea that the most important things in life may require a fight to hold onto.

This gives us the dichotomy we live in. With feelings being more important than facts, we clamber onto the raft of a captivating story and paddle to safety more than we assimilate the facts and stand on firm ground. This is what matters in branding in the ‘post truth’ era… a story is more compelling than the boring facts.

The ‘post truth’ era really is just an acknowledgement—ushered in hastily by the strategic use of deceit and manipulation of information to win an election—that we are being lied to all the time. Things are getting so mired in mendacity that now everywhere we turn we are being told, “I’m the fastest, the biggest, the smallest, the lightest, the heaviest, the best. I have the best words. I’m the BESTEST.” They’ve lost us, because none of that makes sense to us any more. We believe what we want to believe, what we feel is the truth, and the rest is just noise.

Those who are to succeed in 2017 and beyond will understand that the truth, no matter how soiled, sanguine, sullied, superlative, stained, sexy or stupid, will be the only touchpoint of trust in the new year. Now, because we are all expecting to be lied to, telling the truth, no matter what that might be will be the prime mover for the brands that shine through the clutter of circumvention.

Social media has blown things wide open and now everything is out in the open. The truth and the lies. There are tools available to both sides of the truth line in the sand. Technology’s double-edged sword offers those on the left (honest) side of that line a conduit for gathering, congregating, protesting and activating.

Facebook was forced to address the ‘fake news' on its platform. People have rallied together on crowdfunding platforms to literally buy the votes of dubious lawmakers. Macy’s got rid of Trump products after immigrant remarks, Lego ended its agreement with the Daily Mail, Kellogg’s blacklisted Breitbart and many companies have set up nondiscrimination policies in response to what the White House is doing.

When police officers murder civilians these acts are often caught on film. When Nordstrom dumps the failing Ivanka Trump line, they get attacked by the White House, and in turn their stock actually goes up. When our highest-ranking lawyer stands up for the constitution, she is promptly fired, and as a result, because of her truth, her stock has forever risen in the eyes of the public. When New Balance supports Trump people trash and burn those shoes. When Under Armour’s CEO Kevin Plank enthusiastically endorses President Trump, a social media backlash is triggered, with people going as far as to call for “mass burnings” of the company’s garments across America. The list goes on. People have expectations across the board and some brands are catching up while others will be forever off the back.

In this new ‘post truth’ era, brands will fill the void. Not products. Not things. Brands will break through. And maybe our sports teams, churches and schools will as well, but these too will have to act like successful brands do in order to capture our attention.

So, if as consumers we get to ask brands or politicians this question: “What would you like me to understand about you?” I hope that the answer isn’t, “I have the biggest words.” The answer I am imploring us all to make, which is that there is a combination of a common topic (a vision, a version of heaven) that our audiences are all curious about and a belief system (mission, religious practice) that intersects with it. That's the perfect answer to this question in the ‘post truth’ age of violent transparency.

What matters most is that truthful definition of who you are and why you matter and why you apply those chosen philosophies to a topic. That happens to be the magical recipe for the strongest brands in the world. It’s about authenticity.

It’s that simple. It’s simple, because it’s the truth.

And here are the eight immutable laws I believe should govern our practices in branding in the ‘post truth’ era.

#1 – Don’t Assume Anything. It’s all new.

We no longer get to assume anything. It doesn’t matter how many focus groups you have done or what your poll numbers say. Maybe those we are polling or interviewing are afraid to tell the truth. Maybe they think it is ok to lie now that they see how far it can get some people. This is new, the ‘post truth’ era. There is new competition and there are new customers. Look at the disruptive innovation that's going on around us. ‘Pre-truth’ organizations thought they knew their competition. Clearly they did not. So all of us have permission now to think in new ways and to not make the same assumptive mistakes the previous generation of brands made. This should be exciting to young people just entering the marketplace. The doors are blown wide open. There are no rules. This is absolutely the Wild West. We assume nothing in this new ‘post truth’ era. New problems will require new solutions.

#2 – Empathy

We cannot talk down to our customers. We cannot ‘sell harder,’ which is a term I actually heard a Chairman of the Board make repeatedly in an attempt to create more sales. Instead, we need to be peers of our customers; honest participants in communities where we offer added value and a point of view.

I don't like being talked to as a customer. Don't you hate it, doesn't it feel yucky? Empathy is NOT some Chairman commanding his minions to use bigger words and bigger promises, while he stands there with his finger pointing at a spreadsheet. That’s not empathy. Empathy is understanding who your people are; who the members of your congregation are and what they are feeling. It’s also understanding which things are impacting their belief system. Empathy is fundamental, not only for customers, but for employees too. Empathy goes inside and out. It isn't just about your audience's understanding. It's also about the employees that are representing your belief. If you can’t get your own employees, coworkers or teammates to embrace that vision of heaven, no matter how many times you yell “SELL HARDER,” it wont work. You’ve lost them. People will know you are lying to them.

#3 – Culture Eats Strategy

We must create an environment that is filled with trust and enable great people to do the things they were hired to do without telling them they must sell harder and work harder.

Culture is a considered and nurtured blend of beliefs, psychology, attitudes, communications and operations that create pleasure and momentum or pain and miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. The strongest have a well-articulated vision and the mission being employed to get there. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the mission, conducting themselves with a sense of standing, stability and empowerment rather than navigating their days through a steady flow of extensive processes and energy sucking meetings. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better results, with high employee psychic equity, strong internal communication and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve the newness that is required to thrive.

#4 – Celebrate Them (not you)

To celebrate means, as with empathy, that we recognize our mutual roles and respect each other. On the branding side, this means creating new ways to share with customers and to share their voices with the world. Celebrating them is as much about creating products and services that enrich their lives as it is about finding ways to amplify their stories in mutually reinforcing ways. To be in love with our customers is to transcend the idea of the transaction by giving to them even when there isn’t a dime, a “like” or a data point to be had.

#5 – Relationships Matter, Selling Harder Doesn’t

The thing that has been true through time is that through the fostering of relationships good things happen. Representatives of companies commune with buyers of stores, develop rapports and open doors. Expert retailers act as advocates on which products are best for their clients. People are what matter. And while the rise of e-commerce shifted things a bit in terms of human touch, the pendulum is swinging back in favor of the trust involved in personal relationships. We must be members of our communities. Not speaking down or at them. We must be peers in all of this.

It’s about people dong business with people.

#6 – Curate For Communities

We hear this word a lot now. In the old days of art you had a curator… some guy that rented some room in some shopping mall and then he would go to some artists and say “I’m going to take your art and I’m going to curate it. I'm gonna put it on these walls and I'm gonna have some customers come buy this from us.”

In a recent role I played running a company that sold a lot of products, there was a mandate to show everything all at once, rather than create small, crafted offerings for various constituencies (which requires more thought and work). The proclamation from the BOD was let’s offer everything at once so people can see how much we do. The mandate comes from the same mentality of ‘Sell Harder.’

The problem is that we no longer curate art the way we used to. When it comes to product offerings, brands shouldn't just put all their product on some shelf in some room or on one page of their website. No, no. We are not the same. We, all of us consumers, are not the same. Brands need to curate for us. They need to package the things that are the most relevant to our specific lifestyle. Instead of following the mandate, I surreptitiously created different social media accounts for different customers, recognizing that different audiences must receive different types of curation.

Can you believe they wanted a website where all their wares were on offer? Come on, really? They wanted customers to click all these tabs and sort through all of this information because more is better; is selling harder? They did not understand the word empathy.

Curation is not just you selecting to your taste, it is an empathy like understanding of your audience and just collecting the things that are most relevant to their needs in the moment. It goes back to understanding who your congregation is and serving them.

#7 – Edify and Entertain

When I was hired to turn around SPY Inc, the primary change we made was creating a vision for the brand around a common topic (happiness) and the religion we practiced in support of that vision [a happy disrespect for the usual way of looking (at life)]. We went from being a failing eyewear company that sold black sunglasses for men to a thriving brand that offered curated versions of happiness for myriad communities.

Instead of selling harder, the team focused its efforts on spreading and sharing the idea of happiness with the fortunate mechanism through which to do so—The first ever patented therapeutic lens technology, aptly named the Happy Lens. With a completely different vision of the future, the teams’ efforts turned toward sharing the idea of happiness. Often, messaging would focus on things that we can all do in our day-to-day lives to create more happiness, in others and ourselves. Our irreverence was entertaining and our communications were often edifying. Imagine a picture of cashews with the words: 2 handfuls of cashews is the therapeutic equivalent of a prescription dose of Prozac. Or, simply an image of a particularly happy girl with the words: Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage—spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosts positive mood, but broadens thinking and improves memory…

So, for brands, when we speak there must be sharing in our voice. There must be new understandings, new learnings. We must edify and entertain, because not only is commercialism in the midst of a new era, so is academia, so are our primary channels of learning.

Brands that educate consumers on not just the product they’re buying but the context in which they’re used—think Betty Crocker teaching women how to cook or Lunchables teaching kids how to assemble a sandwich—hold a special value.

What does Tesla do when it launches an electric car? They're teaching us not about their cars; they're teaching us about the future of transportation and how electric motors work. They are sharing information that may or may not apply to our transaction, but it still makes us feel that this is not an organization trying to sell harder. This is an organization that is sharing wisdom. In this paradigm, we can learn new things and be enthused to share it. How much more fun is it to say to your friends, “Guess what I learned today?”

#8 – Give (back)

Brands have to legitimately care.

Today there is an ever-growing trend of capitalism-with-a-conscience through the collective buying power of younger consumers and their deep-rooted desire to do good. We are not content with being passive observers in a brand’s larger plan any more. We demand a “participation economy” that allows us to contribute, co-create and shape the giving behaviors of brands we love.

Our newest generation was raised on instant gratification, and this immediate sensation of giving back while making a purchase became a major factor in the success of the “one-for-one” model. You get a great product and there is a tangible social benefit resulting from your purchase.

Now we correlate our purchasing decisions and willingness to recommend a brand to the social good being generated by that brand. Brands interested in selling to us can't afford to ignore the opportunity to create social good. The "one-for-one" model proved that companies could have profit-driven goals while integrating philanthropy into their brands’ bottom line. We now want even more.

This should tell you that just because your company did well this quarter and you got a little extra profit that scraping off some for a non-profit aint doing good. That’s not giving back. That’s not corporate or social responsibility. That's some executive taking a little less bonus this week. What matters in the ‘post truth’ era is CARING, reflected in action taken, intellectual properties, human capital and then applying them to a real world problem.

When I was running SPY, we had a Happy To Help program that was run by the employees in an effort to raise awareness and funds for the charities that the employees felt most passionate about. It was our sort of tithing in the modern era, when say 10% of the effort went to being in service to others; to offering a happy, helping hand.

These things boost employee morale and us to share with our customers about it. In the new era, it's about real and honest organizations, which means people. What's an organization but a collection of people. It’s not business-to-business. It's not business doing business with business, it's a person in a business doing business with a person in a business. So in the ‘post truth’ era you can't just attach a sign to a branded message that says “BUY HERE.” Our efforts have to be supported by intellectual and human capital investments and that's the care that we need as people.

In closing, it all comes down to what your version of heaven is and your commitment to that vision. It’s a commitment to the True North that guides your every action, utterance and offering, best represented in a mission or religious practice employed to get to that heaven.

What matters in branding in the ‘post truth’ era is that a story is powerful but a story grounded in an absolute truth is more compelling than the boring facts or lies.