DJ COMMUNITY

HOW HIP HOP CULTURE INFILTRATED CORPORATE AMERICA

By Steve Stoute

TODAY books

updated 12/12/2011 12:06:39 PM ET

In "The Tanning of America," celebrated advertising executive Steve Stoute explains the importance to brand marketers of keeping up and effectively harnessing the cool of urban culture. Here's an excerpt.

There’s often a confusion that I hear from brands about how far it is advisable to go in marketing into trends when trying to get the nuances right for embodying cool. Specifically, many corporations still view hip-hop culture as a trend at best and an anomaly at the least. Even as a marketing strategy, many brands visit the platform with some trepidation and hesitancy. The results in those cases tend to either fall flat with ads that have recycled concepts set to beats or are embarrassing because of inappropriate attempts to imitate cool—to try to use Ebonics or have people rolling their r’s to promote Latino brands or force multicultural groupings that come off just as contrived as Dell DJ’s effort to promote its own viral success. For these reasons, one of my priorities with brands and with artists is to assure them that nothing in the pursuit of cool will put their core values at risk. The job of the translator, as a rule in the new economy, is to find the sweet spot between the brand’s core values and the cultural cues. The good news is that our millennial generation is the most diverse in history. The more juxtaposed, the better. Differences no longer frighten. A fusion of tastes and styles is sought after. The tanning of and by this, the hip-hop generation, is diversity that celebrates individualism and the brand identification that marketing offers. This is why I’ve argued that tanning has done more to enrich brands and the economy at large than any cultural phenomenon like it. Brands appeal to kids and young adults in this cross-culture who like to stand out but who also go with the crowd. With relevant, cool brands, they can meet their goals of being different and of being affiliated with networks. They use brands for code and shorthand to express where they’re from, what team they love, what they’re all about, and to “brandish” their status as a badge of honor.

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What about turning off older consumers or those who aren’t fans of urban culture? Interestingly enough, the marketing of cool has yet to turn off any core or older consumer in any case study or anecdote to my knowledge. On the contrary, a brand offering that is new, exciting, and stirring the hearts of the young and trend-savvy consistently provides the proverbial halo effect for the brand in general.

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The millennials, as we’ve touched on briefly, really are products of the branding age. Trends do matter to them. They want in. Moreover, they define themselves by their brands and expect their brands to keep up. Because of the blurring of the lines, marketing to one group has spillover to other groups — so it has to be accurate. Word travels fast. For brands that’s big bang for bucks. By the same token, with ubiquitous connectivity, the shelf life of newness grows shorter and shorter. Clothing designers, as an example, bemoan how quickly they can be embraced and then abandoned without warning. That leaves whoever came late to the trend holding the bag with unsold inventory. The key to trend survival, no surprise, is all about adaptation. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a trend as part of the perception of nuance. There is nothing wrong with playing into a trend. But a word of warning to marketers: If you don’t have control and you’re not at the forefront of seeing the trend, you’re in the back getting killed. Trend really can be a Ponzi scheme. When everyone moves on and you as the brand are the last guy to get the memo, you’ll be chasing the last dollar and there won’t be anything left.

As the Translation motto puts it, “Trends are perishable, cool is forever.” Let that be the clarification of the rule that urban culture has bequeathed to the new economy. My take is that it goes back to being at that party or in the club. You don’t want to be the last one to leave. That’s uncool. So in the business of cool, you’ve got to leave money on the table when you’re chasing trends. Like economies built on bubbles, brands built on trends have never had lasting power — but especially not in this time of the empowered millennial consumer. What happens is that when the trend dies, so do the brands attached to it. This is as true for those artists who are brands as it is for fields of industry, as it is for Fortune 500 fortress brands. Like Alvin Toffler said, you have to be fluid.

Back in 2004, Larry Light — the marketing visionary who had come to McDonald’s and helped turn it around when it was losing consumer share — began to talk about that fluidity as a change in storytelling. Instead of having one catchy message or one simple idea to be hammered home like nails in the sensibilities of consumers, he argued that the time had come for a broader chronicle of many stories that spoke to why the brand mattered in the context of the times. He calls this approach “brand journalism.” As I would have the good fortune to get to know him and work with the talented team at McDonald’s on launching their turnaround, I saw Larry’s approach in action and became a fan of this philosophy and the strategies it inspires. Brand journalism suggests that there is a continual flow of news and information that is consumer generated and needs to be followed. In 2004, Larry’s cautionary advice at a conference called AdWatch was that the timing marked the “end of brand positioning as we know it” and that “no single ad tells the whole story.” Introducing the concept of brand journalism was his way of ringing the bell for new rules that mind the millennials. By using many stories to create a brand narrative, rather than looking for that clever hook to reach everyone, he wasn’t trying to say that niche marketing needed to go further than it already had. That kind of thinking still ran the risk of overdoing trends instead of embodying cool and of overusing the demographic boxes. Larry Light’s explanation was, “We don’t need one big execution of a big idea. We need one big idea that can be used in a multidimensional, multilayered, and multifaceted way.”

At AdWatch, he encouraged marketers to see these series of stories as context for authentically showing “what happens to a brand in the world” and to develop communications that follow the news of what culture cares about. During future shock remix, with increasing media fragmentation—providing opportunities and challenges—the narrative for the brand, not summarized in a single slogan or one ad, can be the mother ship of cool from which daring departures into new territory can be taken. Clearly, survival of the fittest in our marketplace means you have to be ever evolving and always paying attention to cues. Branding and brand building, I often say, are like raising a child. You shouldn’t do it if you don’t have love to give. But once it grows up and learns to embody cool on its own, that brand—like hip-hop and the effect tanning—can have true, positive impact and make a real difference in the lives of human beings on this planet.