One of author William Faulkner’s most iconic phrases concerns the lingering influence of yesterday: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” (Requiem for a Nun, 1937.)
Divorced from context, those lines seem alternately romantic, insightful, absurd, comforting and creepy. In context, they speak of the need to set fire to the failures, lies, bigotry, stupidity and optical illusions of history, and to create new and better ideas from the ashes.
“‘Tried-and-true’ and ‘innovation’—that’s an oxymoron,” said Greg Daake, CEO of his eponymous design and rebranding firm Daake.
Daake cited the downfall of Blockbuster Video as a useful cautionary example.
“Blockbuster should have been Netflix,” he said. “All the infrastructure was there. They had the deals with the movie people, and all the ways to make it happen. But they had these ghosts in the hallways that said, ‘We have brick-and-mortar, we rent tapes, we get them back in two days, and we fine you if you don’t rewind them.”
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And so, as the company headed toward the new millennium, with thousands of stores and kiosks worldwide, total domination of the movie-rental market, and even its own superfluous awards show, Blockbuster was doomed.
Get Lost
There’s an old adage about artists, one that could also apply to businesses: great artists get out of their own way.
To harness creativity, you need to stray from the habitual path. Even if—or especially if—that path is well-lit, because the more light there is, the harder it is to see yourself as the obstacle. Blockbuster couldn’t step around itself, so it stepped on itself.
“There’s a graveyard of these companies that were just too old to succeed. It’s like the opposite of too big to fail. They didn’t even know they were the problem,” Daake said.
Be Like Netflix
Throughout the eighties and nineties, Blockbuster had crushed the video-rental industry. They were the undisputed monarch of home entertainment, unwilling to see themselves as anything else. Why worry about some upstart little brand with a weird name and a seemingly deranged business plan to mail people DVDs? Let them eat tapes.
That little upstart totally streamlined the movie-rental process, though. Customers no longer had to blitz the door at quarter-to-midnight to swerve a late fee. With a small change to their routine, people could save time, energy, gas and mental bandwidth.
Sure, the in-person experience was lost. The ritual of leaving home to rent a movie had become ingrained in popular culture. But rituals are fun to abandon if they lead to more time and freedom.
Netflix had designed a better experience, so people felt better about Netflix.
That’s a lesson Daake wants brands to internalize.
“When customers come in the door or visit your website, imagine they have an invisible sign around their neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.”
Well-designed experiences go a long way to helping customers feel valued. But the branding process is more than that, Daake said. “It’s anthropology, it’s ethnography, it’s psychology. It’s not just ‘teal is the color of the year.’”
But how can particularly haunted brands shed the weight of the dead?
The answer, while different for each company, can be found at the place where creativity, design and strategy meet. The crossroads might be hard to find, because there is no map. But it’s not impossible. Some wonderfully simple directions will take you there.
“Wonder more, worry less,” Daake said. “Ask yourself: what are you going to do with all this future?”
