NOT LONG AFTER I MOVED to Chattanooga, I had coffee with a writer who had successfully transitioned into advertising. Aware I might have to do something similar, I asked him how he’d managed his mid-career reinvention.
“It was hard at first,” he said. “Then I went to my LinkedIn profile, deleted ‘Writer,’ and typed ‘Content Strategist.’ Haven’t stopped working since.’ ”
This exchange was a perfect introduction to both the world of advertising and this strange era in which people appoint themselves absurd titles like “Brand Evangelist,” “Sensei of Storytelling,” and “Demigod of Demand.”
The hope when one traffics in such nonsense is to inflate their significance and appear more relevant to whatever’s the latest thing. (This explains how so many folks shifted from “Crypto Guru” to “AI Expert” in the time it takes to type eight letters. It also explains why “imposter syndrome” is such a popular topic.)
I share this as context to warn you that people who are so cavalier about their own overnight transformations will have no second thoughts about doing it with your company, if you let them.
This won’t be apparent right away, though. It will often begin with a conversation about the “benefits behind the benefits.”
To get a sense of what that looks like, let’s say a local ice-cream shop hires a “Brand Innovation Sherpa” to help boost business. Up till this partnership, the shop has always just paid a local photographer to take mouth-watering pictures of their ice cream, which they used on billboards along with their logo and address. A simple approach that everyone who likes ice cream understands.
But now the Sherpa says, “But what’s the benefit behind the benefit?”
Naturally, because regular people don’t talk like this, the question leaves the shop owner perplexed.
“People buy based on emotion,” the Sherpa says, working himself into a soliloquy. “You’re selling more than just ice cream. You’re selling an experience—couples and families bonding over ice cream. You’re selling happiness and memories!”
Soon the billboards change from pictures of ice cream to a family artificially smiling as they eat cones and hold hands or something.
In this moment, the ice-cream shop has stopped selling ice cream as ice cream and started selling ice cream as a tool to achieve the fantasy of better relationships.
Many in advertising and branding would say, “Yeah, of course. Engineering emotion through fantasy is what makes advertising work.”
But embracing this tactic is risky because people already know what eating ice cream is like, and there’s no way that “experience” can legitimately promise a family will be happy together. In fact, any parent knows just how rare it is for family members to all be happy at the same time.
Another danger that comes from this exploration into the benefits behind the benefits is that it often leads down a slippery slope to matters of positioning, differentiation, and “owning” a point of view.
So if happiness becomes the differentiator, you end up with employees who have to greet customers with, “Welcome to Sprinkles Ice Cream, where happiness is the main course!”
Or if the company leans into a political stance, you might get a video with an actor dressed in uniform, shouting “Come on down to Sergeant Delicious and get yourself some Freedom Cream and a Patriot Pop!”
Or if the company decides to focus on organic ingredients, you end up on a website that says, “At Peaceful Acres, our ice cream is harvested from free-range, cruelty-free cows that receive weekly ketamine treatments for any trauma we might have caused when squeezing their teats with a cashmere mitt.”
What this kind of positioning does is renovate a once-charming ice cream shop into a chamber of hell that will suddenly see a huge increase in to-go orders. Because when it comes to ice cream, most folks just want to plow through a vat of Rocky Road, not have their worldview validated.
So before you trust the expertise of someone with a job title they obviously made up, remember we’re all just making this stuff up—often to no one’s benefit.
