‘Living’ Brands: Getting Macs and Avoiding Noids

Peter’s car was beautiful, man.

It’s been more than 20 years, but I can still see him cruising into the parking lot in his arrest-me-officer red Acura with the black leather seats that made you feel like you were sitting on a cloud. Good weather or bad, Peter kept his ride shining so brightly that lost mariners could have used it to find their way home.

Here’s another thing about Peter. He was an anus.

We’re not talking about someone who was just a little grumpy; this dude performed at an all-star level of sociopathy that few can maintain. Whenever I think of Peter, the first thing I see is his contorted face, mid-tantrum, spittle spraying from his rattish, buck-toothed mouth.  The second thing I see is his Acura. And the first thing I see when I think of Acura is Peter. That’s why I will never even consider purchasing an Acura.

Which is utterly unfair. Acuras are exceptional cars driven by hundreds of thousands of perfectly wonderful people. But, in my mind, Acura is Peter, Peter is Acura, Peter sucked, and I want no part of that equation.

You probably make connections between brands and horrible people you know, too, but instead of Acura, maybe it is Kate Spade, or Axe, or Skippy peanut butter that you find irrationally repellant.

We are good at personifying things and ideas. Icarus flying too close to the sun is an obvious metaphor for hubris. Ebenezer Scrooge is a metaphor for greed. ‘Karen’  is no longer just a name; it is now a metaphoric label Americans slap onto any privileged white woman who behaves like a nitwit.

A savvy marketer can deploy this kind of deft symbolism like a stiletto, especially when using it to personify a competing brand or a problem that your brand can solve.

 

Personifying the competition

Just like Peter is, unfortunately, my metaphor for Acura, Apple made a hapless doofus played by John Hodgman into a metaphor for PCs. Its Get a Mac campaign hit the airwaves at a time when Mac’s sales were slumping. In a break from previous communication efforts, which were mostly self-congratulatory messages about the Mac’s coolness,  ‘Get a Mac’ humanized the brand while juxtaposing it against the boring and glitchy PC.

Ironically, a few years later, Samsung flipped the script on Apple with The Next Big Thing, which mocked iPhone users as trend-obsessed, self-congratulatory hipsters who wasted hours queuing up to purchase an arguably inferior product.

Clever creative ideas don’t always work, of course. When the Ford F-150 introduced a small rail that allowed people to more easily climb in and out of its truck bed, Chevrolet countered with a brutal ad called Man Step.  Square-jawed football hero Howie Long smirks as a portly F-150 owner awkwardly uses the rail to clamber to the ground. “Hey Buddy!” Long hollers. ‘You left your little…uh…. ‘man step’ down.”

The implication, of course, is that the F-150 and its ‘man step’ are for men who are a little less manly – and that a real man drives a Chevy Silverado.  As it turns out, though, truck owners loved the man step. Maybe it doesn’t provide for a swashbuckling descent, but it beats leaping three feet off the tailgate every time and hammering your knee cartilage into goo.

Ford ultimately won the case, hands down. In fact, today’s Silverado might have more steps than the F-150. Nonetheless, ‘Man Step’ was a valiant attempt to turn a highly beneficial product attribute into a disadvantage through the use of metaphoric personification.

 

Personifying the problem

Domino’s revived The Noid this spring, as part of a campaign to publicize its experimentation with the Nuro R2 self-driving delivery robot. The Noid first appeared in the 1980s as a Wile E. Coyote-type of character who concocted spectacularly unsuccessful schemes to prevent you from getting your pizza in 30 minutes or less. Now the evil genius has returned as a metaphor for the many pitfalls that can waylay your pizza on its journey from the oven to your home.

Although the ad never mentions these perils explicitly, we can co-create them in our minds, based on past experiences.  We have all sat with a rumbling stomach, waiting endlessly for a lost delivery driver. We all know how it feels to be anticipating that delicious pizza, only to have it show up lukewarm or with cheese plastered to the top of the box. The Noid is a fun metaphor for those headaches, which makes the campaign less about the cool technology of the Nuro R2 and more about how that cool technology benefits consumers.

 

Lamisil is a treatment for toenail fungus, a condition that is hard to take too seriously. Sure, it is unpleasant, but it’s not going to get you into the obituaries. Lamisil’s early marketing efforts emphasized the brand’s cosmetic benefits – clear up your toenail fungus and feel free to kick off your sandals and walk on the beach with confidence. Unfortunately, that messaging further trivialized the condition, and neither physicians nor patients took it very seriously.

Enter Digger the Dermatophyte. The brand used Digger as a metaphor for the condition. He was a sadistic, scabby, puke yellow character (raised in Queens, evidently, from how he sounded) who peeled back your nail and burrowed into your toe. The imagery is as creepy as it sounds – and that was the point. Digger transformed nail fungus from a cosmetic problem to a medical problem and boosted Lamisil’s sales by 19% in the first year of the campaign.

The problem need not be represented as a visible character, either. In its award-winning Take on TJ campaign, which was aimed at teenage athletes, Nike used the never-seen TJ to represent that competitor who is always a little better than you. You didn’t need to see TJ because anyone who has competed in sports knows a TJ – the crosstown rival who is a half-step quicker or just that much stronger.

Simple messages like ‘Your punt is TJ’s field goal’ and ‘You get winded. TJ gets a second wind’ vividly illustrated the struggling athlete’s frustration and implied that Nike not only empathized but also could provide the gear you needed to vanquish your foe.

In that vein, a Gerber Knives campaign called Hello Trouble featured a man in a one-sided dialogue with an invisible character called ‘Trouble’, which represented the world’s unexpected dangers. As you drive to the supermarket this afternoon, you probably won’t have to cut yourself free of an anchor rope or neuter a calf. But. You. Might. So, you best be prepared.  (Allstate’s Mayhem character embodies a similar argument in a different context.)

 

Why do these personifications work?

Like all metaphors, personifications provide a mental shortcut; no need for an in-depth discussion of product attributes or tedious descriptions of personal benefits. These kinds of symbolic campaigns engage people with compelling visuals and original storylines and give consumers the space to tell themselves, ‘That ain’t me’ or ‘I don’t want that.’

We can’t assign consumers their own personal Peter, but we can still offer them useful proxies for the ‘enemy’. The magic is that the brand doesn’t really do the persuading; instead, consumers buy into the characters and persuade themselves.

 

Photo by Tom Strecker on Unsplash