Death to Talking Points
Photo by DJ Impulse
We need to ditch talking points. I can feel Amy Burke Friedman (Profiles PR) side-eying me as she reads this. I have, on more than one occasion, diva texted her the morning of a televised interview asking simply “what are my talking points?” I crave the safety of having them floating around in my brain somewhere (in fairness to her, they’re almost always floating around my inbox in an email that I previously read and disposed of). I suspect by now that she knows the contents of the message before opening it and that her first thought is probably, “why do I even bother?” She then sends me some on-brand, thoughtfully crafted, easy-to-digest bullets to guardrail the conversation, not to limit me, more so to establish a perimeter. Then I get on camera and immediately hop the fence. I’m the worst. But, so far, it hasn’t ruined us. Not yet, at least.
Today’s most sought-after consumers have had the most outstanding marketers who’ve ever lived messaging at them since they exited the womb. In a study called “Pleased to Meet You” by Professor Hugh Wilson and Dr. Emma Macdonald at Cranfield School of Management and Dr. Charles Randall at SAS UK and MESH Planning, it’s noted that 38% of people fall into the “detached introvert” category. Ruth Mortimer says, in a piece for marketingweek.com, “Imagine a group of people who are totally disconnected from marketing messages. These consumers don’t like receiving communications from companies, rarely discuss brands with others and only contact firms when strictly necessary.” They’re battle-tested and well-informed. They study the brands they support and evangelize on behalf of the ones they love. They also actively endeavor to topple the ones they hate. The middle of the brand universe is involuntarily occupied by a sea of companies trying everything they can think of to strategize their way out of the commercial friend zone.
“People come to Revival because it’s real. I love that about what you’ve done there.” —Erica Jackson
At the top of the year, we started having quick mini Q&A sessions with folks who work at or from Revival (there are a dozen or so people who live in the area who work from the cafe or the lobby a few times a week). We get a ton of fantastic feedback from people staying at the hotel both directly and through online review platforms like Google or TripAdvisor but, we wanted to hear why the rest of the Revival family chooses us. We recorded some of these conversations, and they were incredible. What’s resonating with this group is the authenticity of what we’re doing. Not only is it not buttoned up, there may not even be any buttons to button up. It might be a sweatshirt. Whatever it is, it’s well-curated, and it pushes the boundaries. It’s not provocative for the sake of being provocative, which would be equally inauthentic, just on the opposite side of the spectrum. We’re comfortable being what we are and not being what we aren’t. And according to the folks we talked to, this exceeds their expectations at every turn. There’s a quote that’s often attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” A lot of people interpret this as an ego-driven way of saying he believed his customers lacked imagination. It may be. Lord knows I’m not on Beyoncé’s internet trying to polish up Ford’s missteps. But, optimistically, I see this quote as a battery in the back of people who care enough to think to ask what their customers want and to go beyond the ask if they know there’s more that can be done.
This brings me back to talking points and traditional brand messaging tactics. I’m not saying they don’t have a place in today’s marketplace. But, I am saying that people aren’t sitting in lawn chairs outside The Apple Store waiting for the next iPhone to drop because Tim Cook stays on message in interviews. Savvy leaders have known for decades that authenticity beats formality and even polish. That’s when “edgy” CEOs started dressing like Larry David and dropping well-placed F-bombs during presentations. And just like that, a new baseline for realness was created for brands that aspire to live in the beloved bucket of highly evangelized enterprises. If your product is unremarkable or your primary selling point is value, you should keep cooking with wood.
“Someone mentioned Revival has great PR.”
I’ve been asked, more times than I can count, who does our PR. We’re a few billion impressions into the partnership at this point, and Revival is an interesting model of a more fluid approach to the agency/client dynamic. We live in a time when we can effortlessly find media contacts online, and platforms like HARO make it increasingly easy to connect with them to get exposure. If the only value PR firms add to the equation is their contact lists, it’s only a matter of time before the jig is up. Once we figured out our brand story, our PR agency was able to join us in the crafting of honest, authentic, and often candid storytelling. We have a high degree of trust and alignment. We don’t program to capture placement opportunities. We invest energy and resources in telling our unique story from the perspectives of multiple internal stakeholders in the most natural way to them. Over the years, we’ve gotten pretty good at talking our s**t (I’m a lil’ bit edgy, too), and Profiles has successfully packaged and pitched that.
When people slide in my DMs or shoot me a text about media traction, it’s always “who does your PR?” and never “how do you all partner with your agency and your internal creative brain trust to build fresh, authentic storytelling?” The former is a quant question based on the volume of hits. The latter is the substantive question that most of these conversations are really getting at. But, folks would have to have both the time to comb through the content and the discerning eye to identify that they’re looking at something that was constructed in a fundamentally different way.
The Catalina Wine Mixer
Our brainstorming meetings are like high school cafeteria food fights. Nobody is winning or losing or even trying to. We’re throwing things around the room and having fun. They’re spontaneous, and they happen any and everywhere. Everyone intuitively pops their head up from their laptops or puts their devices to the side when we hear “What if we…” or “Hear me out.” (This phrase has become so synonymous with Revival that we were gifted t-shirts with it printed across the front). And then that idea, whatever it is, becomes a momentary group project until we get it to a place where it’s workable for the person who’s responsible for getting it over the line. It’s often not the person who had the light bulb moment that started the conversation. But that’s just fine.
Amy has been the one constant at Profiles on Team Revival. She has been supported by others whom we’ve loved working with over the years. I don’t know what she tells them before they hop on the phone with us for the first time. I could ask. But maybe I don’t want to know. I hope it’s something like, “It’s different. But it works.” Maybe she says nothing at all and just lets them go in blind. Maybe if they make it through the entire agenda of their first meeting without snapping, they get a cat-herding endorsement on their LinkedIn profile.
Either way, we live in an environment where there’s more demand for authentic content than ever. But, people are hardwired to ignore commercial messaging without even thinking about it. A substantial amount of the content we consume is user-generated. It’s raw and unfiltered and engaging as hell. As a result, we’re addicted to “warts and all” realness. You know the scene at the end of “Step Brothers” when Brennan and Dale are at the Catalina Wine Mixer adulting, and Robert tells them about wanting to be a dinosaur? As much as he wants structure and “normal” for them, he now realizes it’s not worth trading in their sleepwalking, bunkbed-building, drum set tea bagging, tuxedo-wearing, boat-wrecking authenticity. People have killed to be in the position you’re in. “Don’t lose your dinosaur…Listen to me. Don’t listen to me. Prestige Worldwide. That’s what you gotta do.”
