Now that President D.T. Barnum is in office with his Greatest Show on Earth, it’s difficult for business stories to capture our attention.

One story that did manage to break through recently was Uber CEO Travis Kalanick‘s resignation from the President’s economic advisory council. The controversy leading up to his decision allowed Lyft to smartly gain some exposure and acquire some new customers.

Perhaps Lyft should adopt a new tagline: “Lyft. Only One Small Vowel Away from Left.”

This had me pondering an age-old question: Do politics and brands mix? Should brands bravely take political stands, or should they seek to be apolitical?

For most of my career, the answer to this question was clear. Brands were to stay away from politics at all costs. We brand managers used to cower in fear whenever a single, handwritten letter would cross our desks from CHASTE (Christian Housewives Against Satan’s Tools & Exploits) or some similar wacko organization.

But things have changed.

The Changing Role of Brands

The primary role of a brand used to be as a guarantor of quality to the consumer. When faced with the risk of buying something new, especially a high-priced product, a widely-known, well-respected brand provided us with valuable reassurance.

The ironic thing about that reassurance is that it usually came from the brand itself–in the form of advertising. This never was, nor could ever be, the objective truth. Instead, it was a sales pitch full of half-truths, myths, and misdirection, kind of like my marriage proposal.

Why did we accept this blarney as useful? Because it was the best thing we could get. Before the Internet, we couldn’t easily access objective information (e.g. product reviews; consumer testimonials) about a brand’s experience. Today, with that information so easily at hand, advertising sales pitches are far less useful to us.

So does that mean brands are dead?

No, definitely not. Some brands have always served a second useful purpose. Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, a book I’ve never been able to finish, but nonetheless feel free to frequently cite. Veblen suggested that we are compelled to consume lavishly, if we are able, so that we can signal to others how important and successful we are.

Luxury brands have understood and exploited this phenomenon for a long time. A Porsche 911 is a great sports car, but a big chunk of its utility to its buyers is as a signaling platform to others, a declaration that the driver is wealthy and sophisticated. This allows Porsche to charge a large price premium over equally capable cars.

And don’t even get me started about Louis Vuitton handbags.

But it doesn’t always have to be about money, and that’s where the opportunity for many other brands exists. Brands can signal that their owner is hip and socially conscious (Starbucks), creative and tech savvy (Apple), outdoorsy (Patagonia), or doing their part to save the Earth (Tesla). On the other end of the political spectrum, brands can communicate that their buyers are authentically American (Budweiser; Jeep) or traditionally masculine (Marlboro; Jack Daniels).

All these brands are strong because millions of consumers want to use them to broadcast signals about themselves to others.

Today, if you want to have a strong brand, you should provide your consumers with a message they want to project.

Checklist for Getting Political

Strong brands stand for something. And when you stand for something, that means you stand against something else. While it may be possible in rare cases to do this without becoming political, it is difficult.

To be clear, by “political” I don’t mean identifying your brand as Democratic or Republican. I am instead talking about communicating a set of values that have political dimensions, or that some portion of the population will interpret as political. For example, if your brand is for “environmental sustainability,” it’s against tar sands pipelines. Some people will like that, and some won’t.

But before you break out your quill and parchment and spend all night composing your brand’s Declaration of Values by candlelight, I would recommend you go through this quick checklist.

Be honest with yourself—is your product or service naturally political in any way? Some products and services are inherently apolitical. I used to manage the Bisquick brand. There’s nothing political about Bisquick.

Some other apolitical categories quickly come to mind: ballpoint pens, dining room tables, toothpaste, and muffler shops. Introducing a political dimension into categories like these is likely to confuse and turn off consumers.

 

Just be careful about lulling yourself into complacency on this one. Things change quickly. A few years ago, I would have never said that parkas or peanut butter cups could be political. Now, it’s much less clear. Consumers who wear Canada Goose parkas or eat Justin’s peanut butter cups are probably trying to send us all signals.

Is your product or service used publicly? If nobody will see a consumer using your brand, then it will have no signaling value. Few people witness what toilet paper I use or what carpet cleaning service I employ, so those brands will not help me project messages to others.

Are you ready to leave some consumers behind? Strong brands create passionate advocacy in some by stirring distaste in others. Every strong brand, no matter what it is, has a group of people who detest it.

Many business people, and your boss is probably one of them, have an aversion to leaving behind ANY potential consumers. This is why most brands swim in circles in tepid pools of meaningless mediocrity, hoping that someday everyone will like them.

So go ahead and get political with your brand. Just make sure your career politics are in order first.

This post may not work, because there is nothing funny about murder. Except Murder She Wrote. That was kind of funny–unintentionally. And Columbo. Peter Falk was very funny.

But real murder isn’t funny at all, which is why this may need to get yanked down faster than a Rosanne Barr tweet about African-American history. Should that be the case, please accept my tearful apology in advance.

I was inspired to write this post by an article in the New York Times Magazine about Joe Bryan. Mr. Bryan, a former high school principal, was convicted in 1985 of murdering his wife of sixteen years. He has been in prison for over three decades.

Mr. Bryan was convicted twice, the second time after an appellate court declared his first trial to be flawed. The evidence the State presented against him on both occasions was very thin. As the Times article states,

“Prosecutors asked the jury to believe that between 9:15 p.m. on Oct. 14, 1985, when the Bryans spoke by phone, and the following morning, when Mickey (Joe’s murdered wife)was found shot to death, Joe slipped out of his hotel in Austin; drove 120 miles to Clifton, at night, through heavy rain, even though he had an eye condition that made night driving difficult; shot his wife, with whom he had no history of conflict; drove 120 miles back to Austin; re-entered the hotel; and stole upstairs to his room—all in time to clean up and attend the conference’s morning session, and all without leaving behind a single eyewitness.”

Furthermore, the crack Texas lawmen investigating the case determined that Mr. Bryan was “queer” because he didn’t play poker or go fishing and instead liked to bake pies. This gay affliction, they concluded, must have driven him to murder his wife through pent-up sexual frustration.

Formidable logic, to be sure, but seemingly not the stuff of quick convictions, even in Texas. What could have caused a jury to throw the book at Joe?

The prosecution presented a police “expert” who testified about a flashlight found in the trunk of Mr. Bryan’s car, four days after the murder. The lens of the flashlight had some tiny flecks of type O blood on it. Mickey’s blood type was O, but that’s true of half the population.

This expert, a Mr. Thorman, “. . . testified that the flecks of blood on the flashlight lens were ‘back spatter’—a pattern that indicated a close-range shooting. He wove a narrative that placed the flashlight in the killer’s hand.”

Jurors found Mr. Thorman’s confident testimony very compelling. What they didn’t know at the time was that his bloodstain-pattern training was limited to a week-long seminar he had attended four months before the murder.

Even if Mr. Thorman had been the world’s foremost expert in bloodstain-pattern science, a jury should have viewed his testimony as just one piece in a complicated tableau of evidence. If Joe Bryan had no reasonable motive, if no physical evidence tied him to the crime, if he had thirty character witnesses testifying that he was incapable of such an act, then they should have felt free to question the veracity of the expert and his science.

This is especially true when the science in question is a pseudo-science, a discipline masquerading as a hard science. I’m not talking about things like climate change skepticism or anti-vaccine hysteria. Those cases involve people willfully ignoring the hard science.

I am instead referring to the application of data or “sciency” descriptions that lure the audience into setting aside all the other evidence, or the collective wisdom of their prior experiences. This is what happened in this tragic case, where the jury valued the bloodstain-pattern testimony over everything else. They did not understand that bloodstain-pattern analysis, as the National Academy of Science would describe in a 2009 report, is associated with “enormous uncertainties.”

Which brings me to the current state of marketing.

Marketing has always been about shaping human behavior, about getting consumers to make irrational decisions. This isn’t always true—sometimes a brand is clearly, objectively superior, and the marketer just needs to make consumers aware of its advantages. But often the differences between products are minimal, so marketers hope to convince consumers to buy their brand through “brand affinity,” an emotional connection to the brand that causes consumers to be something other than cold, rational calculators of utility.

This is why there are Coke people and Pepsi people. Or Ford men and Chevy men. Exactly how this happens is still poorly understood—no matter what somebody tells you at some conference.

Because we don’t really know exactly how this works, or perhaps more accurately, because how it works is unique to each individual, marketing effectiveness has always resisted precise measurement. This led to the now-famous adage, “I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

The digital revolution promised to change all this. Everything would be measurable now. We would know exactly what messages were seen by whom, we could track the consumer’s subsequent behavior, and we would be able to calculate, with complete precision, our return on our marketing.

Like bloodstain-pattern science, digital marketing uses data and all kinds of “sciency” language to impress us, to get us to ignore everything else we used to know about marketing. We don’t look at digital marketing’s output as a piece of evidence that fits into a tableau, we instead view it as the only evidence, the only authoritative truth because it has cold, hard numbers attached to it.

As I’ve written before, those numbers often don’t tell the whole story, or are even deceptive. They are crude simplifications of a complicated reality. At their best, in bottom-of-the-funnel applications, with proper A-B test protocols, they can be quite useful in helping us find what messages are most likely to cause someone to click and buy. At their worst, they absorb resources that should have been dedicated to affinity and consideration, causing us to stop tending the fields that will produce next year’s meal.

This is not an appeal to stop marketing through digital channels, or to stop striving to better measure your marketing effectiveness. This is, instead, a call for all of us to start using our brains and respecting our judgment again.

As one bloodstain-pattern analysis critic wrote about Joe Bryan’s case, “If you don’t understand the basic science, then you won’t understand its limitations.”

Amen to that.

Some secrets aren’t kept well. Take Putin’s secret missions, for example. Somehow his campaigns to assassinate political opponents always end up as front page news, with his agents leaving radioactive polonium-210 or Novichok residue throughout England, spraying these exclusively-produced-in-Cold-War-Soviet-labs toxins around like they’re using Glade in a bus station bathroom. Boris and Natasha were stealthy ninja warriors compared to these clowns.

Likewise, good management practices are not a well-kept secret. We all know that great managers do a few simple things:

1. Hire talented people
2. Treat them respectfully and trust them to do their work
3. Encourage a culture of transparency and integrity
4. Reward those who do the best work and make the whole team better

There’s no secret to great management because we all have been managed by others. We know how we want to be treated and we know what kind of environment allows us to be our best. It’s the corporate manifestation of the Golden Rule.

So why are we constantly assaulted with self-help business books and LinkedIn articles proclaiming that the author has discovered the secret to good management? Because even though we all know how to be good managers, few of us actually do it. We’re like dieters attending a frosted donut convention. We know we’re not supposed to be eating the samples at each booth, but we can’t help but succumb to the temptation.

I believe the reasons we fail to be great managers can be sorted into four categories:

Because We Are Afraid

We are afraid of not knowing all the answers.  Steve Levitt (the economist and co-author of Freakonomics) once told me that all business managers are loath to admit that they don’t know the answer to any question. When he first said this, I thought it was an unfair characterization—a smear, almost. But then I started watching and listening. I now think he is right.

Managers seem to believe that it’s their job to know everything about their area, whether it’s the technical dimensions of their function’s operations, or the most minute details of their team’s accomplishments. If they don’t, they feel like they’re not doing their jobs and, to be fair, they may actually face that accusation from their boss.

Steve noticed this I-know-all-the-answers phenomenon because it’s the opposite of an academic environment, where the unknown is celebrated as an opportunity to learn.  Let’s all take a moment to be thankful that business leaders weren’t tasked with fueling the Enlightenment.

Let’s all take a moment to be thankful that business leaders weren’t tasked with fueling the Enlightenment.

It is ridiculous, of course, to pretend one knows all the answers, but in the case of management behaviors, it’s also very destructive. It creates enormous pressure for managers to micromanage their employees instead of trusting them to do their job. Micromanagement is like Novichok to any high-performing employee.

We are afraid that we will be displaced.  Few people will admit it, but almost everyone fears this at some point in their career. In the olden days, you were relatively insulated from this threat when you reached the top, but now even CEOs are tossed out as if they were a carton of last week’s Chinese takeout.

What does this have to do with bad management? It’s as simple and as disturbing as this: Managers know, at least sub-consciously, that their bosses will view them as being more expendable if the team below them is strong.

This means that obscuring your team’s virtues and suppressing your reports’ development, though morally repugnant, may be an economically rational decision (for the manager, not the firm.)

Great managers won’t do this, of course, because they will be constrained by their moral code and they will understand how a great team contributes to their own success. But many other managers, especially those who aren’t confident they have the support of their boss, will stray faster than a Russian oligarch buys up Kensington real estate.

Because We Aren’t Humble

Humility usually wanes with success, unfortunately. With each promotion and the accolades that come with it, the temptation to think highly of ourselves grows.

This fading humility shows up in two important ways with managers. First, we tend to believe that our position in an organization is complete and permanent validation of our judgment. This is silly, of course, but it’s very real and it’s exacerbated by the modern mythology that holds that we live in a perfect meritocracy.

Second, we don’t understand or remember that with each promotion, our access to information about what’s really going on is reduced. The farther we get away from the coal face, the less we see and hear.

These two effects combine to ensure that many managers are overly confident about their judgment and mistakenly believe that they have a clear view of all the relevant information. With this skewed perspective, managers often feel compelled to overrule their teams’ decisions. To a high-performing team, this feels like gargling with a cup full of radioactive polonium.

Because We Are Rewarded For Bad Behavior

Our managers often don’t see how we lead. They usually only see the end product.

This is especially true as we get more senior. Boards often have little idea how the CEO is leading, CEOs have little understanding of how their EVPs are leading, EVPs have little . . . etc. And if we’re being really honest, even if they did know, they often wouldn’t much care. They value most the financial results that happen under a manager’s watch, regardless of how those results are achieved.

Laziness drives some of this. It’s easy to see the short-term results, especially if they can be reduced to a number on a financial statement. Understanding how well someone is leading a team, however, often requires a lot of homework.

Few things are more dispiriting to great employees than seeing a bad manager get promoted. It’s like being forced to look at a picture of a shirtless Putin with some kind of Clockwork-Orange-like-contraption holding your eyelids open.

 Because We Aren’t Self-Aware

Some managers are missing a gene or a set of developmental experiences that would allow them to accurately perceive how their behaviors are affecting others. There’s no malice or ill intent of any kind. They’re just bumbling along, thinking they’re doing a great job.

This should be uncommon, but it’s not—we’ve all seen it many times. It is a testament to how poorly organizations identify and address bad managers.

How Do We Fix This?

If I knew that, my friends, I would be a very rich man, able to buy yachts and dachas as big as any Russian bureaucrat’s. But I do have some ideas, and I have tried to keep them relatively free of platitudes.

Any senior leader who is serious about improving the quality of management throughout her organization should try to address the human failures enumerated here. She should be asking herself questions like:

How can I demonstrate that not knowing the answer is not only OK, it’s to be expected? 

How can I publicly reward managers who most effectively develop our next generation of leaders?

How can I model humility? How often can I admit that I don’t know what’s really going on in this organization, that my only chance of knowing is through my team?

How can I reduce incentives that reward bad management behavior? Should I insist on 360 degree feedback before anyone is promoted?  Should we have internal, anonymous employee ratings for senior managers (like student ratings for professors at college?)

How can I root out people who are not self-aware? Should we have psychological assessments performed on anyone who is about to be crowned a vice president? 

If someone can discover how to do these things well, that will be a secret worth keeping.