What a cannibalistic serial killer can teach us about branding

In the film Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling picks the psychotic brain of imprisoned murderer Hannibal Lecter to help find another serial killer still on the loose:

"Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, his man you seek?," Lecter says.

"He kills women."

"No. That is incidental." 

I thought of this exchange, oddly enough, when I read this post over at Spin Sucks about personal branding, and how people and organizations can stay relevant in a world of rapid change. The writer, Steve Kaplan, points to the example of Blockbuster, struggling to regain its market position after having its business model vaporized by Netflix:

Blockbuster lost sight of what the marketplace was doing, partially because they were tied up in real estate with their stores and couldn’t fathom people not showing up at their doors. By the time they embraced the online purchasing frenzy, Netflix was annihilating them, with others soon to follow.

The Blockbuster brand image was that of an old brand behind the times, tarnished almost beyond repair. While they have somewhat clawed back, it came at a heavy price, and in no way are they back to where they were before the switch to online rentals. Perhaps if they would have made staying relevant a priority, they might have seen things coming a little sooner and been able to salvage more of their brand image.

The problem with Blockbuster, however, was not that it clung too long to an outdated business model; that, as Dr. Lecter would say, is incidental. The problem was that Blockbuster didn't understand exactly what its business was in the first place. Remember what we've said here about newspapers? Like the railroad companies that thought they were in the railroad business, but were really in the transportation business, newspapers believed they were in the newspaper business but are really in the business of journalism. The delivery method should be -- you guessed it-- incidental.

Blockbuster is an entertainment company. They may not produce it, but they deliver it, and their mistake was getting too invested in one particular method of delivery. Walt Disney understood that his company was an entertainment business, not a movie studio, which was why he so easily transitioned to television when his competitors were crusading against it.

Netflix, for all its well-documented troubles, seems to understand that it isn't a business that sends DVDs through the mail, or streams them online, but that delivers entertainment in whatever format its customers demand at that particular moment in time. The lesson for all our organizations is to understand our nature, what it is we really do -- and not that which is merely incidental.

May I have your attention?

I mentioned recently that I'm reading The Idea Writers which is a guide for advertising copywriters in the digital age but which is applicable to any kind of content creation. Case in point:

"today, as a copywriter or other brand creativity maestro, you're not just making something that will compete with other brands and other messages created by brands. You're making something to compete with every other piece of content, every other media experience that a person has during her waking hours."

Years ago I did some freelance writing for an excellent magazine editor named Robert Mendelson, who at the time was the editor of Pitt Magazine. (Today he's the editor of Carnegie Mellon Today.) Robert told me that Pitt Magazine wasn't competing with other alumni magazines. (Most people only get one, anyway.) Instead, it was competing with everything thing else that Pitt alumni had to read, everything that arrived every day in their mail box. So it better be a damn good magazine that anyone would want to read, whether or not they knew the first thing about the University of Pittsburgh. Now that I supervise the publication of the alumni magazine at Robert Morris, I've adopted that same attitude.

In other words, the competition for attention that we face as content creators didn't begin with the Internet or social media, though those things certainly intensified that competition, increased it geometrically. Each new medium threatens to steal the audience of the media that preceded it. The creatives who survive and thrive are those who refuse to be chained to any single discipline. In the 1950s, Disney was the first film studio to embrace television, because Walt Disney didn't see himself as being in the movie business; he saw himself as being in the entertainment business. Many newspapers have been flailing because they think they are in the newspaper business, and forget they are in the journalism business.

It's also worth noting that audience control over content didn't begin with the Internet -- it really began with the TV remote and the VCR. The remote control freed us from our own laziness at having to get up and walk to the TV to change the channel when we were bored with what we were watching. Not only did it impact advertisers, since we could avoid commercials, but the producers of TV programs could not longer take us for granted. They had to grab our interest and hold it if they wanted us to keep watching.

As for the VCR, it may be clumsy and primitive compared to a DVR, but remember how liberating it felt to be able to record a program when you were out, or watch one program and record another. I remember as a kid, the final episode of M*A*S*H aired the same night -- in 1983 -- as a Cub Scout banquet. The pack leaders had to promise everyone the event would end in time to get home to watch the show. Now, the only thing you have to worry about is reading a spoiler on Facebook or Twitter.

For those daunted by the jumbled and fragmented media landscape we face today as content creators, it's helpful to realize these changes are evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary, in character. Sometimes, though, evolution takes a great leap forward. This is one of those times.