Malcolm Gladwell, the author of several books that I revere, is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is a genius.
The first thing that I want to talk about is a common denominator—or a lack thereof—in three of your books: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. None of the books have the word “brand” in the index.
No, they don’t, do they?
No, they don’t. Is this something intentional, or is this discovery a surprise to you?
Well, there isn’t much of an explicit discussion of business strategy in any of those books. In that sense, I suppose it’s not surprising. Those books tend to approach the issue of branding sideways.
Yes, they do. But the word “brand” appears numerous, numerous times. You talk about Levi’s and Clairol, and ketchup and mustard, and the Beatles, and as I reread the books before our interview, I couldn’t help but wonder what the index would show for the subject. I was very surprised to see that it wasn’t in any of the indexes.
This is not meant as a snub of your world. It’s such an amorphous word—maybe I’ve shied away from it.
Why do you think it’s amorphous, and why have you shied away from it?
I think I have the same feeling toward the word “brand” as I do toward the word “Africa.” “Africa” is an incredibly problematic word for me. It’s a word used with great frequency to describe an intricately complex area made up of people, countries, and cultures that have no more in common than we do with Uzbekistan.
But because it’s a convenient word, and a well-known word, and a geographically defined continent, we use that word to sum up and generalize everyone who lives within the continent. In a way, it really is unfair. But we’ve inherited that framework, and I think we’d be better off if we banned the word entirely.
Getting back to “brand,” the word has similar implications. Yes, it’s of much smaller consequence—it’s a trivial example of the same problem, but it is a problem. The word gets thrown around so recklessly that I wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off setting it aside. Instead, if we could use more specific words that zero in on what we’re really interested in discussing, it would help the conversation.
If we were to ban the word “brand,” or use it only in specific instances, what words could we use instead?
I would start by trying to distinguish the different dimensions of “brand,” because there aren’t an infinite number of them. “Reputation,” for example, is a large component of “brand.” But very often, it’s the part of brand that you can do very little about. Reputation tends to be very stable.
I’m thinking about this at the moment because I’m writing about college rankings, and this presents a beautiful example of the drawbacks of the notion of brand. If you look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings, for example, a quarter of a college’s rank is based on peer assessment and reputation—which is basically a brand score.
Harvard’s got a great brand. In the category of reputation, it gets the highest peer evaluations. But this can be very problematic, because you can quickly get into areas where you see that different organizations’ reputation scores don’t correlate well with more objective measures of their performance.
So what exactly is reputation if it’s not something that actually corresponds to how well an organization performs in the marketplace? we have the word “brand,” and a big chunk of it is this thing called reputation, and this thing called reputation is disconnected from notions of quality. This makes me think that I should treat reputation separately from the other elements of brand.
Is that because you think that reputation is more subjective?
Yes. But it’s more complicated than that. I’ve been thinking about this because in addition to writing about schools, I’ve also been writing about hospitals. And the situation is even more complex with hospitals. The measurement of a hospital’s reputation or brand value is heavily uncorrelated with the hospital’s actual performance. Everyone says that Sloan-Kettering is a great hospital, right? But this is essentially a meaningless statement. It doesn’t tell us whether or not a person would be better off going to Sloan-Kettering than to a different hospital. And that makes me strongly call into question the usefulness of some of these terms. I’m actually more interested in the idea of what’s left in a brand after reputation is removed.
What do you think is left?
I’m not sure that I have a useful answer. But I wonder where the very, very personal idiosyncratic experience-based reactions to a service, product, or institution reside. In that sense, maybe I’m more interested in the residue.
The residue?
Yes. I don’t have a specific answer to your question about what’s left over after reputation is taken away—I would say the residue is what remains.
But, getting back to where we started, why do you have trouble with the word “brand”? Aside from the subjectivity of reputation, what is it that bothers you most?
First and foremost, the overuse of the word. For example, when people started referring to themselves as brands, I began to roll my eyes.
Because we’re now using the word in every conceivable context. The more broadly you use the word, the less useful it is as a way of distinguishing or describing complex phenomena. I object to its lack of precision.
How do you feel about the word “love”?
I suppose it’s mildly problematic in the same way, except that I feel we’re quite expert in understanding the various ways in which the word is used. We’ve thought long and hard about when that word is used in a meaningful way and when it’s superficial. By the time you’re fifteen, you’ve thought about the word “love” in a way that you haven’t thought about “brand” or “Africa.”
We might have spent more time thinking about love, but I don’t know if there’s a way to gather empirically precise data about what it means.
True. But if we were as sophisticated in our use of the word “brand” as we are in the use of the word “love,” I’d be happy.
That’s interesting, because I feel the opposite—I feel there’s probably less mystery to the concept of brand than there is to love.
That’s funny . . . Maybe you’re right. I haven’t thought that much about it beyond the last minutes of this conversation.
In your essay “Listening to Khakis,” you investigate “what America’s most popular pants tell us about the way guys think.” How do you think brands can telegraph how we think?
My answer to that is a little indirect—have you heard of a site called Svpply, spelled with a v?
It’s just a start-up. It’s one of those sites where people sign up, and the software then allows them to go to all kinds of other websites and drag products onto their personal pages. It’s like a Facebook page, but it isn’t filled with your friends and musings, it’s populated with the products that you like. I think it’s rather cool. You can also follow people, so if I find someone whose tastes I like, I can follow them and observe their other marketplace choices. And the site can also find people for you, so if you liked five particular things, it stands to reason that you will like a person who likes the same five things. It’s a collaborative filtering algorithm meets Facebook.
Or Match.com.
Or Match.com, yes. But what I find interesting is that the site is very explicitly making a point about how our personalities are in part a function of the collection of objects, ideas, and things that we surround ourselves with. It picks up on the work that psychologist Samuel Gosling has done in which he goes into your room and has people rate your personality on the basis of what’s there. He’s found that those ratings are as good as or better than ratings that people create after they’ve met you.
I don’t think that kind of assessment would have been as valid fifty years ago, and this shift is tied to the task we have of constructing our identity in our world. But it’s not just an expression of how brands contribute to our collective identity, it’s also related to how we impose our own notion on brands. The user is now helping to define the brand, and this fact and the sorts of conversations that now go on between user and brand are fascinating. It’s not a trivial matter, and in some cases, it can be quite meaningful.
If you look back fifty years ago, you can see how people began associating themselves with brands that telegraphed specific movements or political views. Even something as benign as a Volkswagen car projected certain values that went beyond the basic necessities of transportation. The speed in which these associations have become integrated into the construction of our identities is staggering. What are your thoughts on why we do this?
There was a really lovely piece that the novelist Zadie Smith wrote for The New York Review of Books. She reviewed the film The Social Network, and in the review, she’s quite critical of Facebook. She describes how the constant broadcasting of your likes, your friends, your thoughts, and your things to the world has robbed people of an interior life.
Zadie teaches at NYU and she describes the way her current students are different from her students of previous generations. She’s struck again and again by the kind of emptiness at the core of people’s . . . “existence” is too strong a word for this, but it’s enough to say that everything is on display, and there’s nothing that is “just yours” anymore.
But everything people put on display is simply what they want to display.
I think her argument is that the things people put on display inevitably generate a kind of inertia. In a world where we now have extraordinarily efficient ways of communicating and displaying, the question of who you are becomes incredibly complicated.
I think that brands are a part of this. When you surround yourself with certain kinds of objects, they become a public statement about who you are. There are hundreds of choices that are necessary to fill out your life with objects and things, and I think that requires an inner logic as well.
Maybe the modern version of introspection is the sum total of all those highly individualized choices that we make about the material content of our lives.
You spoke earlier about new forms of social media. Why do you think that Facebook and Twitter are so popular?
As someone who writes for a living, I totally understand the impulse. It’s the same impulse that led me to go into writing, except that in my generation only a select few got to stand on a stage and tell the world what they were thinking.
What do you think that impulse is?
It’s the desire to share your thoughts. This, I think, is universal.
Why?
Why? I don’t know why. We’re fundamentally social creatures. Our brains grew because we wanted to communicate. That’s why we’re not apes, I suppose. This is essential to what makes us distinctive creatures. But before social media and the Internet, there were serious logistical constraints on people’s ability to share. Now, there are increasingly fewer. So it’s not just professional writers and artists who can do this—everybody can.
Another important part of this is that these forums are available to teenagers. Never before have we had these kinds of communications technologies in the hands of those who have the greatest desire to communicate.
But I also think that when we look at these new technologies, we’re confusing two things. We’re confusing age-specific preferences with long-term technological changes. A lot of what we see on Facebook and Twitter is specific to the lives of teenagers and young adults. It’s a phase that we all went through, and that everyone will always go through, but it’s being magnified in the current young generation because they’ve got this extraordinary tool they can use to communicate.
But just because someone is a massive Facebook user at seventeen does not mean she will be one at forty. To my mind, the jury is still out about what will happen to our desire to use these technologies as we get older. I was on the phone nonstop when I was fifteen. Now I barely use the phone at all.
I feel bad for the teens who are using Facebook to reveal their thoughts so publicly. If anybody were to get their hands on my diary from when I was a teenager, I’d be horribly embarrassed. It was so ridiculously girlish, unsophisticated, maudlin, and obsessive.
The incredibly complex process teenagers once had for working out their self-identities has now become even more fraught with emotion, excitement, and danger because everything is so public. In the past, you could have worked out all that angst inside your own head privately. Teenagers nowadays will rue the permanence of some of the stuff they post.
Do you think the way we’re communicating on the Internet is an evolution of the way we once communicated on the telephone? I remember that right after the iPod came out in 2001, there were quite a few articles written about how it was causing today’s youth to be totally isolated. There seemed to be a real concern that the iPod was encouraging social anomie. But the introduction of social networking sites has countered that trend. Do you think social networking is just an evolution of our limbic needs?
I would say that the introduction of the telephone was far more socially transformative than the introduction of the Internet. I think these are all points along a kind of evolution. They are all extraordinarily meaningful. But this is a process with very, very deep roots.
We’ve been upending, reshaping, and redefining the norms of social interaction for 150 years.
Do you think that it’s just part of human evolution? Do you think we’re finding out anything new about ourselves? Do you think that it’s profound in any way?
Well, each time we change the norms of interaction, there’s a refocusing of those norms. Each technology has its own implicit biases, and each favors one kind of interaction over another. They’re not necessarily dramatic changes, but we tilt the lens in a different way each time.
I believe that we’re currently tilting in favor of weak ties that have become quantification tools. They provide a quantitative measurement of impact, and not necessarily a qualitative measurement. Previously, letter writing and diaries were very qualitative and not quantitative. Those particular forms of social expression tilted in favor of strong, deep, meaningful ties and the formulation of really powerful, close-knit friendships.
Right now, we’re focused on scale when it comes to the realm of sharing information with people. In previous generations, the focus was on intimacy. So, there’s been a trade. The kind of information sharing that we have now is really, really great for innovation, for the adoption of new ideas, and for forming new coalitions.
Each era has its own specialty, which is neither better nor worse than the one before. They’re just different. And it may be that the next iteration in this ongoing revolution turns back to a previous norm. I suspect it will turn back toward close-knit, intimate ties.
I have no idea. We have no idea what the next iteration is. We didn’t see Facebook coming. We didn’t see cell phones coming. We didn’t see any of this stuff.
Do you think that there’s more superficiality in the way that people are interacting now?
I wouldn’t use that word. It’s a trade. If you’re interested in having large numbers of contacts, and if you’re focused on things like innovation and broad-scale social organization, then it’s wrong to use the word “superficial.” Those are incredibly important aspects of cultural interaction. And they happen to be what is best suited to the kind of technologies we have now. The trade-off is that the interactions you have tend to be thinner and weaker. But that’s just the other side of the coin. It’s not a judgment. I’m very, very hesitant to use value-laden language.
I recently wrote an article about social media that featured a scenario about a man who formed a group on Facebook to find and match bone marrow transplant donors. Facebook is beautifully adaptive for that kind of task. It’s an extraordinary feat to be able to canvass that many people in an incredibly short period of time, with no money, and still solve a discrete, difficult problem. This is new technology at its absolute best. And it happens to be a superficial tie that is used for a profoundly important end.
In this same article, you talk about how social networks are based on weak ties and that they’re ill-suited for activism that challenges the status quo. You say that for that type of revolution, you need strong ties. What about the Obama campaign?
Actually, the Obama campaign was a good illustration of weak ties on a number of points. In the grassroots organizing, social media was an adjunct to an existing and incredibly well-organized, on-the-ground, precinct-by-precinct movement. Social media was used in a secondary role to raise money and to supplement the far less efficient phone trees and mass mailings that have defined previous campaigns. It did not replace the nuts-and-bolts, neighborhood-by-neighborhood activation that has been part of every campaign since political campaigns began. People were recruited via social media to go door-to-door. The campaign used the incredibly efficient tools of connection to mobilize people for real work. And when I say “real,” I mean face-to-face, on-the-ground work.
What social media also provided for Obama was support that was a mile wide yet only an inch thick. The minute there was the slightest unsteadiness, everybody abandoned him. I have never seen a bigger group of fair-weather friends for a candidate. This doesn’t make me feel better about digital forms of organization. From the vantage point of three years out, there is nothing in the way that social media provided support for Obama that makes me feel better about social media.
In one of your earlier pieces in The New Yorker, you wrote about the Clairol hair color slogan, “Does she or doesn’t she?” You wrote, “All of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us—over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we wear matter, the food we eat matters—and our brand of hair dye matters, too.” Why do these things matter so much?
One reason is that our material choices as consumers are no longer trivial. They are now amongst the most important choices we make. They have consequences well beyond our own selves—they have global consequences. They have consequences on our economy, on the community we live in. When you eat a McDonald’s hamburger, you are casting a vote for a certain kind of agricultural system, and for a certain kind of climate. In a sense, everything we do casts a vote for a certain kind of world. And this isn’t true in the same way it was one hundred years ago, or if it was, we weren’t aware of it. We weren’t forced to make that connection because our world wasn’t being driven on this macro level by the sum total of consumer choices—at least not in the same way. So it makes perfect sense that when you decide what car you’re going to buy, you think long and hard about the choice, and when you drive a Nissan Leaf, or a Chevy Volt, you’re saying to the world, “These are my values. This is the kind of world I want.”
When we do this over and over and over again, we will find that it can address some of the problems and crises in our world.
The declarative value of consumer choices and the public statements made by consumers in their brand choices are an enormously powerful tool.
If we were to tally up the votes cast for the various possibilities of our world, what do you think we could say about the kind of world we’re creating right now?
We’re in transition. The fascinating elements of the consumer space right now are the macro choices implicit in our micro choices. We’re suddenly much more interested in things that are green and sustainable, and we’re much more interested in the longer-term, broader implications of our choices. People are beginning to see that when they buy a pair of jeans, they’re making a choice that extends well outside their own borders.
At the beginning of this interview, you seemed to be quite dismissive about the idea of “people as brands.” Why is that?
Well, I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s just that a person is not a company or a product. Can we talk about the kind of abstract dimension of someone’s appeal? Yes, absolutely. Is Madonna selling a product—which I would say is her and her music—the same as General Motors selling cars? Maybe.
What about Martha Stewart?
Or Martha Stewart. Yes, clearly, there are cases where it’s a useful term. But what I was reacting to was the “everyone is a brand” movement that I felt was in vogue a year or so ago.
The Tom Peters, “the brand is you” kind of thing?
Yes. At a certain point this takes us further away from meaningful human interaction, not closer. I have the same reaction to that as I have to people who take the Myers-Briggs test, and then declare to the world that they’re an “INTJ.” It’s not useful or helpful to define oneself according to this crackpot, incredibly narrow, restrictive personality typing system, and then tell the world, “This is who I am.” No. It’s not who you are. Human beings can’t be reduced to four letters. Fast-food franchises can be reduced to four letters because they’re selling the same burger over and over again, in the same context, and in the same kind of building, according to the same kind of rules.
Human beings aren’t that way. The beautiful thing about Facebook is that it allows people to express themselves in their full complexity. I’ve seen some of the lists of people’s likes and dislikes, or of the things they listen to, and these lists can run on and on. That’s a meaningful contribution to our understanding of each other, not “I’m this kind of brand.” It’s simply an oversimplification.
So why do you think those personality tests are so popular? Why do you think they’re given so much credence?
It gives people a superficially appealing “understanding” of each other. I think that we should be fighting pigeonholing, not enabling it.
Do you think you are a brand?
No. I hope not. I am a person.