The Brand Experience

An item in my morning Twitter feed caught my attention today: a book offered through Writer’s Digest that helps authors find their one “thing” that they are known for, that sets them apart from the pack. Because I’m doing a huge media unit with my AP class now I immediately realized that this book was really about creating a brand.

The concept of branding isn’t new, of course, but what is new is the fact that each and every individual person (at least the ones with something to sell) now needs to invent a brand. Last week I showed my class The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, in which documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock makes a movie about selling and marketing a movie. In the film, Spurlock visits a fancy company that helps people identify their brand identities. They asked him nine thousand questions, pseudo-scientifically compiled and analyzed the data, and came up the idea that Spurlock’s brand was a Mindful/Playful brand. Some brands, the expert guy said, are just one thing, but a lot of brands are combo-brands, which certainly sounds better to me—double fan base?! Although when I think about it, I feel like having watched all of his movies, I could have come up with two adjectives to describe the guy’s work, and I would only have charged like twenty bucks. I shudder to think how much the “official” analysis cost.

So I say to myself, self, what’s our brand? (apparently I turn into Gollum when the topic of brands comes up). I’d certainly like to be a combo brand, so what are my two defining traits? Wait, that’s not going to work. No one’s going to sign up be part of a brand experience of:

Hungry/Sarcastic

Or, on a bad day:

 Grumpy/Tired

(This is starting to sound like the list of Dwarves Rejected by Disney).

This mystical branding process seemed to work in the movie: the company identified several other Mindful/Playful brands, like Mini Cooper, and when Spurlock went after these companies, several of them actually signed on as sponsors of his movie. Maybe I really do need to figure out how to blurb my brand. (If I had any hope of being given a promotional Mini Cooper, I assure you, I’d be highly motivated to crack the brand code of me).

For most of my day, the brand identity I’m striving for is “favorite teacher”—while still not being the one who always lets them turn in late work or have class outside. As a writer, I think I’m still figuring it out. If I were to go for a combo brand, like Morgan got, I might say: Funny/Tragic. But, in addition to being a great example of oxymoron I can use in class, it’s also really just life.

I think I’ll stick to pretending it’s still 1995 and making playlists for every occasion, and if anyone needs a Halloween or Summer or Please Let the Holidays Be Over Already song list, I’m your gal.

Now if only I could get sponsored by iTunes...those $1.29 fees really add up. 

Top Five Books I’ve Pretended I've Read (and Five I've Pretended I Haven't)

5. Ulysses –James Joyce

I “read” this for my Joyce and Woolf seminar my senior year in college. I really did try to read it. Much like Ulysses himself, I got lost somewhere around Scylla and Charybdis. I do remember, in that chapter, instead of almost being eaten by a sea monster, the main character goes to the library. Talk about false advertising. 

 

Maybe someone will do a mashup with zombies or ghouls? Please? 

4. The Second Sex-Simone de Beauvoir

I’ve read about it one million times, I’ve read lots of excerpts, but I’ve never actually read the book itself. I’m guessing I’m not the only one; it’s just one of those books. Anyone who can pronounce her last name and knows the premise feels justified in saying, “Oh, yes. I’m familiar with that work.”

3. A Tale of Two Cities—Charles Dickens

If any past students are reading this, don’t worry—I’ve read this book many times in the decade or so. But I was afraid of it for a long time, because it was assigned in my 7^th grade language arts class. I remember getting so confused about Carton and Darnay. Were they twins? Why did they have different names? I just wanted it all to end. Once I was old enough to actually read the thing, though, I loved it.

2. Lolita-Vladamir Nabokov

This one always seems better in theory (postmodern masterpiece) than practice (actual book about a creeper with a thing for a middle-school age girl).

1.     Kid Klassics

I have no idea what this series was actually called, but I’ll call them Kid Klassics. When I was young, I read scads of these shortened versions of classic novels. Many years and books later, I would become confused about whether I’d read the Around the World in Eighty Days, Gulliver’s Travels, or Journey to the Center of the Earth. I guess these were the Spark notes of my childhood.

And....Top Five Books I’ll Pretend I HAVEN’T Read at Some Point

5. Crash Into Me: The World of Roswell

On second thought—nah. Not even embarrassed.

4. Any Star Trek novel.

3.  Anything with the word Lord or Duke plus a prepositional phrase like “of Scoundrels” or “of Seduction"...

2. A Vampire for Christmas

I haven’t read it yet. But: that title! Come on. That has to happen.

1. Fifty Shades of Wow That’s Embarrassing (I mean Grey).

Top Ten Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Joss Whedon Shows*

10. It really is the little things.

Kaylee from Firefly was intensely happy about that box of strawberries that Book brought on board. Same goes for the mega-ruffled dress and the hot cheese at the party in “Shindig.” She’s got crap-all for creature comforts on board Serenity, but she makes the most of the few she does have. A lot of times you can’t control the big stuff in life—like being arrested as a space pirate. But you can make the most of the little things and enjoy life anyway.

9. Don’t ever let anyone erase your personality and memory and store it in their sketchy corporate offices like they do in Dollhouse.

This one seems pretty self-evident, but, you know—still good advice in case they ever do invent this tech.

(However: would we remember if they had?)

8. Beware the power of the dark side.

Willow fails to heed this advice in season 6 of Buffy, and she goes Dark Willow in a major way. I’m not sure she ever truly recovers from the terrible things she did. Willow’s experiences also show how important it can be to surround yourself with people who bring out the good parts of you—not the bad. Former rat Amy was a decidedly bad influence on the magic-addict. If she’d stayed in her little wheel things may have gone very differently, and Will wouldn’t have had to worry about those pesky dark magic roots in her hair. 

7. Curiosity isn’t always a good thing.

Oh, Fred. You had to open that stupid crate. And then you got killed and possessed by a socially awkward blue demon. Sometimes it’s best to just leave the bad stuff buried.

6. Maybe little white lies aren’t so bad.

On each show, the compulsive truth-teller made a bad end: Cordelia on Angel, Anya on Buffy...Spike became the one who always spoke his mind on the final season of Angel, and then he got dusted (though that was technically on Buffy). I can’t actually remember anyone telling the truth all that much on Dollhouse, though. It might have had something to do with all the brain-wiping going on.

5. Be nice to your boss (and co-workers)

This one’s from all the shows: for example, it seems like the funnest folks all got invited to go make a fun Shakespeare comedy at Joss’s house. Epic!

4. Sometimes you can make a whole lot out of a little chance.

This one’s backstage too: James Marsters was only a guest star for an episode or two, but he so rocked it as Spike that he made an entire career out of it. Extremely epic!

3. Think outside the box.

Buffy solves her final, seemingly unsolvable challenge, by doing just that: she releases the Slayer magic-dust or what-have-you to all the girls with the potential to kick vampire ass. All the other slayers seem to have been thinking too small: patrol, stake, repeat. But being an innovator has its advantages.

2. Running away is a short-term solution.

On all the shows, the main character tried to outrun his or her past, tried to leave and start over, but their past always caught up: Buffy tried to quit several times, and even suffered at least two mental breaks trying to escape being the Slayer. She tried to go to college and be a normal girl. The universe responded by sending her the source of all evil and then her town was sucked into hell. Mal tried to run away from all responsibility, only to accidentally adopt a heaping load of it when he let himself have a soft spot for River. Angel ran to L.A. but his past kept catching up. And Echo was only born because Caroline was running away from who she was—and wow did that not end very well. 

1. You can make your own family.

This happens on all his shows, really—often the characters didn’t have families, or were running away from them for various reasons. But they made their own, and stuck by those folks through thick and thin--and sometimes even hell and back. 

*or, I’m not at Comic-Con—AGAIN—which really sucks

Spartans!

Spartans make me feel bad about myself. You know the type—people who have exactly seven pairs of pants. They’re the ones with improbably empty garages, knick-knack free desks and tabletops, with drawer space to spare. When you go on a trip with a Spartan they make you feel like a diva because you have three bags, while everything the Spartan needs fits into a little black duffle bag.

Of course, the Spartans aren’t the only ones who have the power to make me feel bad—vegans, people who enjoy volunteer work, the super-green—in our modern world of relentless striving to be improve, it’s not hard to find someone who’s just better at life than you are. But do the Spartans—folks who eschew the unnecessary stuff that bogs the rest of us down—do they have something figured out that the rest of us are missing?

As with lots of other personality flaws, I blame my craving for stuff on my parents. Growing up, our two-car garage was so crammed with stuff that it was practically a geometry problem to get one car pulled in. Being sent to the garage to find something for one of my parents wasn’t an errand, it was an expedition. I was an obedient kid, but with a streak of martyrdom, so I’d always tell them, “Yes, I’ll go get that thing you say you need, but just be aware that I might not make it back. I might get crushed like last time, and this time, the neighbor kid might not hear me yelling. Also I’d like daisies at my funeral, just so you know.”

 My parents were never that impressed with my dramatics, and I always returned alive, though sometimes with a stubbed toe or a shiny new dust allergy. We were just a family who liked stuff. Ask me or my brother about our childhood vacations, and we’ll both have lots of fond memories, but one of the most indelible ones involves being crammed into the backseat, our giant duffles under our feet, a huge cooler between us, and no ability to move more than three inches for the duration of the four-hour car ride. We did not travel light.

As someone who overthinks pretty much everything I have to wonder about that last sentence—about the implications of traveling light versus choosing to tote around a heavy burden. “It’s just a thing,” you’ll hear people say, after a fire or a theft. It’s true—and it’s an easy thing to say, when it’s not your thing that’s been destroyed or lost. Or when you’re one of those folks who just doesn’t get attached to stuff. I’ve always envied the travel-light people: people who don’t seem to need much to be comfortable or happy. Sometimes these people enjoy camping, for example, squatting in the woods with a sleeping bag and a fire and a bag of dried food. Do they commune with nature? Are they somehow a few steps closer to understanding the secrets of the universe because they’re not up the highway in a hotel room trying to figure out how to access the pay-per-view movies? 

I’ve made peace with my non-Spartan nature, though—I realize I’ll never travel light in the same way I’ll never like sports or math or be a good candidate for survival in a zombie apocalypse. The light travelers probably do have some insight that I’m missing—but I’m betting they’ll miss out on some things on the other side too, like the joy and comfort of having plenty of fresh pairs of socks with you on a trip. Nature loves balance, right? At least that’s what I heard on NatGeo channel while I was channel surfing at the Holiday Inn. 

Who's Counting?

I subscribe to a couple of fashion magazines. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not like I’m all that fashionable. I like and wear Birkenstocks, and if I thought I could get away with it without public ridicule, I’d still wear socks with them. I don’t even own a pair of heels, and the only thing that would fit me at a sample sale is a scarf. Maybe it’s the fact that print is very nearly dead, and it’s like six bucks to subscribe to an entire year of a fashion mag. I usually skip through the fashion pretty fast, but I do enjoy the articles.

Health articles I sometimes skip. I’m not too keen on finding out more about how I got too much sun in my twenties, or the evils of sugar—or, God forbid, coffee. But the other day I accidentally read one in Elle, lured in by the opening description of the writer’s new gadget. Technology, I like. To use and enjoy technology, you don’t have to have zero percent body fat, possess athletic skill, be twenty-three, or have, say, the self-control to never eat carbs. To figure out gadgets, you just need your brain, and of course you have to be able to afford them (they’re still cheaper than high fashion, and spending five hundred dollars on something that can talk seems a lot smarter than spending it on shoes).  

So imagine my chagrin when the article turned out to be about using technology for evil instead of good. The author’s gadget was a UP—a bracelet used to track calories, sleep, activity, and more. (No clue what the acronym stands for. Unending Panic? Unbearably Particular? Unbelievably Pathetic?)

Jawbone's slogan is: "Know yourself. Live better." Not sure this is necessarily a causal relationship.

The device, the writer went on to explain, was one of many new tools for those who are part of the Quantified Self Movement, or Quantified Selfers. The helpful UP is worn all the time, and sends the users “insights”—sound bytes on fitness and health, as well as nudges toward whatever goal the user entered.

This bracelet sounds like a terrible idea to me for a number of reasons. First, there’s the whole “quantified” element: anything that adds more math to my life is automatically suspect. Second, it could just be my overactive imagination, but after reading the article I immediately pictured a dystopian future government jamming one of those things on my wrist, administering nudges in the form of electric shocks every time I tried to eat butter. The “insights” feature would make a fine medium for delivering Orwellian propaganda tidbits from The State. (Maybe the “P” stands for propaganda!)

But I digress. Of course all modern technology could easily be perverted into a dreadful weapon, like the ridiculously named “Thorngate” device on Scandal last season, in which our computers and cell phones can be used to spy on citizens. Could be they already are, but, one would hope, the program at least has a less cheesy name. The real reason I hope to never get peer-pressured into quantifying my self is that it sounds kind of dreadful. A device on my wrist monitoring how fast I walk, how many calories I burn, how much sun my skin absorbed, how much REM sleep I achieved? What’s the outcome here? Presumably, the idea would be to examine the data and try to do better. But the thing is, you’d never be finished trying. The new numbers could always be bested. There are forums where Q.S.-ers can go online and trade data—so there would always be someone else’s numbers to beat too.

The bottom line is, if you like fitness data, or even math, go on with your bad self. Count away. I feel about this idea the same way I felt about video cameras. Rather than having my face stuck behind a camera, I’ll just have the authentic experience, and do my best to remember it, imperfections of memory and all. I’ll take my life the same way—I’ll let my iPod count my steps while I’m out seriously walking—but then I want to shut the step counter off. However many steps it takes to walk the dog, I’m happy to let them go uncounted, along with most of the rest of my life. It’s just Willow and me out for a little stroll. And I’m not counting.