Just when I thought customer service was dead — when I lament how brand after brand gets it dead wrong — a candidate comes along that surprises and delights and restores my faith in brand experience.

About a week ago, my daughter was denied passage on an Alaska Airlines flight. She had planned to travel to Portland, Oregon on her first unaccompanied flight so that that she could visit my sisters for the Christmas holiday. Unfortunately, due to bad weather, Alaska Airlines stopped allowing unaccompanied minors to travel to the region. That in itself was not the issue. The issue was that they didn’t tell us, even when we called that morning (at 4:45am) to ensure she was all set. When we got to the airport, the agent unceremoniously told us Jordan couldn’t board. My little girl was heartbroken, and I was taken aback by the experience. It wasn’t the Alaska Airlines I knew and loved.

I called immediately to voice my displeasure. The brand I knew began to surface again during my conversation with the phone agent. She was calm and professional, despite having been on duty for a double shift. By the end of the call, I had settled down, but I was still disappointed and angry. That is … until this afternoon. FedEx stopped by and delivered an unexpected package from Alaska Airlines. It contained an apology letter and a cute little stuffed animal that was addressed to Jordan. She was thrilled. See, some companies do understand that branding begins with the experience. I often write about the companies who fail at brand experience. I thought it only fair to share an example of a company that succeeded, too.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of the cocktail. Friends know they can count on me to join them for a cool Manhattan any day. If you’re a cocktail enthusiast as well, skip on over to The Internet Cocktail Database, the brainchild of Martin Doudoroff and Ted (Dr. Cocktail) Haigh. Unlike a lot of online cocktail sites, this is a repository for the serious imbiber. All of the recipes are validated in print, and have been researched by experts in the field. You won’t find a hack’s homegrown experiment here–just a treasure trove of recipes dating back to 1862 along with insights on ingredients and techniques. Haigh is better known to many enthusiasts as Dr. Cocktail. He is often quoted and sourced for his in-depth knowledge of perhaps the most American of indulgences. Ring in the new year right — have a good drink.

I’m about seven months behind on my usual geek quest to have the latest gadgets, but today I discovered my newest favorite technology: Eye-Fi. If you are a shutterbug and you haven’t already discovered this handy advance in digital imaging, add it to your holiday wish list or just make your way to the local Best Buy and buy yourself a card. Eye-Fi is an SD-RAM card for your digital camera that includes a built-in wireless chip. With Eye-Fi installed on your camera your photos are automatically sent to your camera to your computer without the need for any cables or card swapping. And the software allows you to seamlessly upload your photos to your favorite file sharing service, like Flickr. I have been snapping photos all day long testing the product out and I can honestly say, it’s the best new technology I’ve sampled in a long time–truly a game-channger.

A friend turned me on to a great story on Studio 360 about signage for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site. Here’s the dilemma: how do you design a symbol that will instantly communicate ‘danger’ to future generations? Think about it. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years. The site needs signs that don’t rot or deteriorate rapidly, and those signs must warn future archeologists about the dangers of the treasure inside without much explanation. The future explorers might not speak our language. How do you create a mark that intuitively deters people? It’s not as easy as you might think. A skull and crossbones sounds good on the surface, but it’s also a mark that is associated with pirates … and treasure. By trying to forewarn the treasure hunter, you might actually incentivize him to dig to his death.

The challenge reminds me of a great article penned by Sidney J. Levy and Philip Kotler back in 1971. In “Demarketing. Yes, Demarketing,” they asked somewhat hypothetically how marketing might apply to reverse market situations. We’re very familiar with the conventional use of marketing–trying to drive demand for products and services when there is ample supply. But they asked if marketing, and branding, could be used to discourage customers. Certainly, some marketers have used this in a widespread fashion with dangerous products, such as cigarettes. Levy and Kotler described the tricky process of using demarketing to reduce demand in unfavorable business segments, and they described the ethical issues in doing so. But, while much of their work focused on marketing practices and policies, they didn’t address the big symbolic question: how do you create a brand that discourages product use. It’s worth contemplating. Sometimes, thinking about questions such as these helps the marketer to better the brands that must do the opposite.

This Friday, StoryCorps encourages people to participate in the National Day of Listening. For all you aspiring storytellers, this is a wonderful way to explore living narrative. It’s a simple process of interviewing a friend or a loved one. StoryCorps provides a helpful guide on how to conduct your interview, with tips on structuring an interview guide and a handy tool to help you come up with questions. My daughter Jordan and I participated and posted an excerpt from our interview on her website.

This is from a presentation I gave earlier in the week to a large technology company. It’s a mix of legacy content from Legendary Brands and new content from my upcoming book, Brandlore.

Wordle is a very cool web tool that helps you map text into clouds (the kind that transform a jumble of words into design patterns, not the kind that hover over the planet and sometimes rain). Pictured here is a wordle map of chapter 2 in my book, Legendary Brands. Word maps using tag clouds can be a very effective way to analyze the emphasis people place on brands and marketing campaigns.

One of the most fascinating ways to study brand equity is to study the deviants–the “dark side” of branding. For anyone who thinks that a brand doesn’t have power, look no further than the Mongols, an outlawed US motorcycle gang.

The Mongols took the extraordinary step of securing a trademark for their logo. The brandmark is synonymous with trouble, so much so that the US Department of Justice successfully petitioned for, and was granted, control of the trademarked logo. As a result, the government has the right to seize possession of any item bearing the gang’s logo. The landmark case is causing a first amendment fire storm, but I think branding is the really interesting part of the story. First, you have an example of a government taking control of trademark rights and using those rights to enforce the law. Second, you have a great case of a legendary brand — a mark that is associated with a belief system that drives a narrative and a culture. It is a great example of a brand as the centerpiece of a narrative and social conflict. The brand can literally get you arrested–or at least detained.

There are many cultural indicators of bad times. Demand for Spam strikes me as one of the most interesting. I’m not sure what I find more shocking — the fact that more people are buying Spam or the fact that the production line turns out 149,500 cans of spam a day. I ate a lot of this stuff growing up. Still, it’s hard to get past the description: “a gelatinous 12-ounce rectangle of spiced ham and pork.” Even for a pig lover like me, that’s hard to swallow.

At their best, brands tell stories. Sometimes it is overt, such as when they advertise, and sometimes it is subtle, such as when they cue a story already in your head with a brand interaction. Because stories are fundamental to the richness of our experiences, it’s no wonder that brand managers talk a lot about brand stories, brand storytelling, brand narrative, and the like. Storytelling has been en vogue with brands for years now, even before I tackled the subject in my 2002 book, Legendary Brands. The trouble is, while brand managers want their brands to tell stories, they don’t know how to systematize an approach. Read the rest of this entry »