As with any advancing army, it should be no surprise that people just can’t get their minds off Millennials (and no wonder that any variation of “millennial” makes a most attractive keyword in blog posts). But how well do you understand them, even if you are “them?” And how much are you like, or unlike, the Millennial generation?

Are you 20% Millennial? 50% Millennial? 100%?
The folks at Pew Research developed a handy little quiz to answer that last question: “How Millennial Are You? The Quiz.” It turns out that, while I am nearly a Gen Xer, at least according to this evaluation, I’m only 31% Millennial. (Damn, I guess I’ll have to take my hoodies back to Abercrombie.)

I’m not sure how valuable this “tool” really is in understanding the millennial marketing juggernaut, but it’s fun and at least mildly thought provoking (not to mention an excellent excuse to pack a post with high-value keywords like “millennials,” “millennial marketing,” and “millennial generation”).

It’s not about age – really. It’s about state of mind.
The quiz is quite quick – so please take it and let me know how youthful you really are.

PS: Pew did create a pretty good primer on Millennial beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, which you can download here.

OK, I’m finally going to do it. I’m putting a face, my face, on my personal brand. While up until now I’ve always taken the position that I would prefer to have the professional community judge me on my work rather than my appearance, I’ve finally given in to the profile picture as a “must do,” if only because, in some cases, the most common, or perhaps communal, practice becomes the minimum requirement for best practice.

So no more QR Code (which only my younger contacts liked, by the way). No more blank picture. Which leaves me to ask you, dear reader (assuming you did not already know me), seeing me now do you trust my opinions more, less or is there no difference at all? I’m looking for a gut reaction here. How does this photo strike you? Is this a face you can trust?

Brand Face Value
As I cogitated on my own “face value” in terms of creating trust, I did a little looking into the value of brand faces, which is to say, logos. One study reports that the visual key to a trustworthy logo – one that imparts confidence that a company will act ethically and in a social responsible manner – is symmetry. I suggest that it may not just be the logos’ symmetry that is reassuring, but also (or possibly moreso) their simplicity. They are easier to take in and remember, suggesting that the less we confuse our prospects and customers, the more likely they are to trust us. It’s part of why I have always counseled clients that “simple is good,” a rule of thumb that gets even more relevant in an age of advancing complexity.

Take a Look in the Brand Mirror
So, how important do you feel your showing your own face is to the perceived trustworthiness of your personal brand? And, reviewing your own portofolio of brand logo(s), what’s your response to the research indicating symmetry (or in my interpretation, simplicity) better creates a sense of corporate trustworthiness?

In my last post, Brands as Functional Friends for Millennials, I opined on the potential to create brand trust, and subsequent loyalty, among Millennials by becoming functional friends, i.e., by actively providing useful resources and support. This is differentiated from the notion of “faux friends,” that is, brands that build excitement, if not real attachment, by being a part of the “gimme culture,” wherein your brand is only as good with its audience as its last offer, daily deal, freebie, or other “gimme.” (For more thoughts on that subject, check out Marketing to Millennials: Brand Trust or Transaction?)

So I’m wondering where on that brand friendship spectrum you would place the involved parties featured in last Sunday’s New York Times article On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial.

Can you sell more soap in an Ivory Tower?
The piece talks about the growing, if not new, marketing practice of not merely reaching out to kids on campus but actually becoming part of institutionalized college life. Besides the well-established outreach of “brand ambassadors” and “campus evangelists” (the commercial kind), the article describes how brands are now even creating events on official school calendars:

“Just how far one big company — Target — has permeated [the University of North Carolina] was evident at freshmen welcome week in late August, at what students and administrators alike characterized as a touchstone party for the class of 2015. As part of the official university program, Target sponsored a welcome dinner on a Friday. Then, on Saturday, for the first real social event for freshmen, it hired buses to ferry students to a Target superstore in Durham for late-night shopping, says Winston B. Crisp, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs.”

As a parent of not-quite-old-enough-for-college kids, I cringed a bit at the thought of the hallowed halls of higher learning becoming the hollow halls of hyper-selling. As a marketer, however, I have to admit that my initial reaction was “Wow, Target does it again!”

Brand Trust Winners and Losers
Nonetheless, I think there are brand winners and losers in this scenario. The UNC brand (and that of the 65 other universities in the Target program) is at risk here, at least with tuition-paying parents who may look askance at paying for the privilege of turning their kids into a captive marketing audience. (And then there’s the question of maintaining trust in an educational brand’s commitment to unfettered academic inquiry and intellectual honesty, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

And even the Marvelous Marketing Machine from Minneapolis faces the long-term risk of being seen as a faux friend. After all, no matter how fun and involving the events may be, they are, at their core, selling opportunities dressed up as social occasions. To this crucial demographic group of which one noted survey says “… nothing matters more than authenticity…” events that purport to build school spirit and aid student life, while being commercial at heart, may over the longer term undermine a brands image as an authentic “friend.”

Then again, college kids may just not care – Target’s program is now rockin’ the freshman welcome week ritual at 66 universities across the country. But the business of buying consumer love is a fickle one, as the final quote in the Times article implies:

“Back at Target, Nitin Goel, a wiry, gum-chewing 18-year-old in low-slung jeans, is loaded down with free mac and cheese. He’s carrying a friend’s new beanbag chair. Earlier that night, waiting for the Target bus by the campus bookstore, Mr. Goel had pledged allegiance to Wal-Mart, where he had shopped all his life. Now he doesn’t seem quite so sure.”

My money says that as soon as ol’ Noel gets a free ride and a gaggle of gimmes from former-favorite Wal-Mart, he’s out the Target door once again.

Your thoughts?

The conventional wisdom – and a considerable amount of research – holds that millennials don’t trust institutions. They trust friends. They particularly don’ t trust financial brands, but then, those have been taking a hit across the demographic board. Now research suggests that millennials also may not even trust themselves when it comes to money.

As the offspring of an all-consuming consumer society just now facing up to its excesses and limitations, millennials are exhibiting a new sense of caution, a stepping away from the temptation to buy now, pay later. A recent survey from the Auriemma Consulting Group notes, according to its director Dr. Patricia Sahn, “Millennials have turned away from credit cards in droves since the recession began, and it’s not clear to what extent they will come back when conditions improve.”

I assume she’s referring to financial conditions – but credit card companies will do well to develop better “user conditions,” developing more millennial-friendly offers, features, support and “practical brand personality” (I’m not just talking brand imagery here and projected personality, but the perceived personality which emerges in a user’s mind after multiple brand interactions).

To their credit, debit cards are trying to be better “friends” to millennials
Credit cards can take some cues from their corporate cousins in debit cards, by far the favored financial tool of the millennial generation (for more on that, download the BAI/Hitachi Consulting 2010 Study of Consumer Payment Preferences). One big player in debit, Pulse (part of the Discover family) just introduced a revamped customer information website, debitsavvy.org, aiming more directly at millennials in the hope of becoming a resource to help manage their money, and live their lives, with debit. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and if it attracts millennial participation – becoming, in effect, a brand as “functional friend”, to be relied on and trusted. At this point, the nascent site still feels pretty corporate, awaiting more social features and perhaps not yet totally willing to live in a millennial skin, but I particularly like elements such as the video contest (actually a carry-over from the previous site iteration) and the upcoming Twitter contest.

Your brand, too, can become a “functional friend” to millennials
It’s not just credit cards that could benefit from considering how they, too, can make their brands into functional friends for millennials. Virtually any brand in any category can quit waiting until financial conditions improve and start creating user conditions uniquely appealing – and useful – to millennials. That’s how you friend them. That’s how you earn trust. That’s how brands thrive going forward.

Who do you see doing a good job of this right now?

I ran across an interesting use of the old phrase “the ugly truth,” in an article counseling financial advisers to always, whether in success or failure, be candid with clients. In fact, the title was “The Benefits of Telling the Ugly Truth.”

So, Your Mother Could Have Been A Brand Consultant
The article is based on a recent study, sponsored by Allianz Global Investors (not at this writing a client of ours). Its author, Professor Shlomo Benartzi of UCLA, is quoted as saying what most parents have been telling their kids for centuries: “From a behavioral standpoint, it’s really better for your credibility if you’re honest.”

The study offers other trust-building tips to financial advisers, such as explaining the potential downside of an investment before touting the upside. Not rocket science for seasoned investment professionals? Perhaps. But it is apparently rare enough that the simple act of telling the truth offers financial advisers a competitive differentiator and, therefore, an advantage.

Brand Truth and (Beneficial) Consequences
I would argue that this applies not only to the financial industry but to any marketer in any category. In fact, at Creative on Call we encourage our clients to not just identify and communicate their core truth, but to assertively encourage comparison with their competitors. This enables prospects to come to their own powerfully self-persuading “Aha!” moment.

For example, when our team was charged with helping the leading independent broker-dealer, LPL Financial Services, recruit more advisers, one of the most effective recruiting tools we created was a workbook that made it easy for them to compare LPL and its competition on all the most important parameters. We identified the simple truth about what the brand delivers and then let it speak for itself within an easy-to-use framework (segmented to both types of adviser prospects, those from independent broker-dealers and those still at wirehouses). It worked wonders.

Does Your Brand Know What Its Simple Truth Is?
A core task for any marketer, then, is to drill down past your feature set (and the corporate-speak that usually attends it) to clarify the essential benefits your brand delivers, the ones that make a real-world difference to your prospects. Once you do that, you’ll discover that the truth is never ugly. It may sometimes be unpleasant, inconvenient, uncomfortable and indicative of needed change. But it ultimately sets you free to succeed – and that is a beautiful thing.

It may no longer be just the “analysis paralysis” of endless meetings that keep marketers from effectively understanding and reaching women. A new study suggests (to me, at least) that it may also be that popular, toxic facial paralyzer – er, beauty treatment – Botox.

What if Consumers Lose the Ability to Read Emotions?
As reported in the L.A. Times, “the study found that when it comes to reading expressions of emotion on the faces of people in photographs, women who received Botox injections in their faces were less accurate than those who had their facial lines plumped with an injectable cosmetic filler. The research contributes new evidence to a key theory about communication between humans: that we unconsciously use facial mimicry to help discern and interpret the emotions of others.”

As concerned as I am (father of two wonderful daughters, husband of one amazing wife) about the constant emotional abuse heaped upon women in our society for the unforgiveable sin of growing older (and the expectation that they should inject toxic substances into their bodies as penance), it is that last part that got my attention as a creator of brand strategies and communications: “we unconsciously use facial mimicry to help discern and interpret the emotions of others.”

A Natural Model for Creating Brand Communications
Mimicry. Great actors are often described as great mimics – and what better acting method could one pursue? After all, mimicry is simply the use of other human beings as mirrors, to better understand life and communicate ourselves. What better method could one employ for creating brand communications? Observe our prospects and customers; react to them accurately and honestly; learn how they communicate, emotionally and intellectually; then reflect their hopes and dreams in all we do, from our core offerings to our marketing materials.

Brand Mimicry vs. Gimmickry
The big question to me is, Are we paralyzing our ability to accurately mimic, and thereby emotionally comprehend, each other?

Is the overwhelming artificiality of our world, and the branding and marketing industry that drives it, limiting our ability for authentic human communication? Are we over-reliant on all things virtual and ignoring the integration of more personal interaction? Minimally, this speaks to me of the need to integrate, integrate, integrate our mesmerizing new media with all those other marketing modalities denigrated as “traditional”, to ensure that we and our customers can accurately read, and send, the emotional signals required to build and maintain trust, brand or otherwise.

Your thoughts?

While the fascination with “brand you,” the personal extension of our brand-centric business culture, may seem a fairly recent development, companies in some sectors – notably those driven by personal relationships and one-to-one-selling – have always let the individual’s brand lead the way. But in an era when more and more relationships are becoming less and less personal (meaning “in person”), relying solely on the power and reach of one’s own brand image, reputation and promise may no longer be enough.

The Favorite Financial Advisor for Millennials is…
Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the category of independent financial advisors. As the big bank brokerages – the wirehouses – have worked hard to destroy their own brand reputations and credibility, formerly captive brokers (and their books of business with them) have hit the road to independence. Your (or your Dad’s) Merrill Lynch guy? He’s hung out his own shingle now, as an independent financial professional backed by LPL… AXA… NFP…

Who, you say? Exactly. Most investors just don’t know LPL Financial, even though it’s the largest independent broker-dealer in America (some 12,000 advisors) or many of its competitors like AXA and NFP (OK, there are exceptions, like Raymond James). And while an advisor’s existing clients may not care, because they do indeed trust the individual more than the distant firm, what about new clients – especially when more and more of them will need to come from among those mystifying-to-many Millennials?

… Google, The Most Influential Financial Advisor (Really)
A recent Capstrat-Public Policy Polling survey showed that while only 4% of the general investor population turns to the online world for financial advice, 43% of Millennials report using online forums for investing ideas and 48% say that Google – yes, Google – has the most impact on them as a “financial advisor.”

This presents the “Brand You” centered model with two issues: First, that “you,” the individual, expert advisor says, is no longer enough – Millennials are no more likely to sit still for a “just sell it to me” model for buying financial advice than they are for any other purchase decisions. They need more information, corroboration and, yes, even inspiration, all available for consumption and inspection on their own terms. Which brings up the second point: that above-mentioned “more’ needs to come from the brand behind the advisor, not just in terms of image and awareness – although that can help greatly in dealing with Google-as-gatekeeper, but also in terms of brand experience.

Financial Branding – Especially Investment Branding – Matters More than Ever
So you’d think that the investment industry, including independent broker-dealers, would be all over creating bigger-than-the-individual brand impact and experience aimed at Millennials, right? Not so much. A recent Mintel survey notes that “Investment firms typically ignore this younger group…” even though ‘…over half are still concerned about having enough money to retire one day.” As they are maturing into a much different financial world than their parents grew up in – one devoid of trust and overwhelmed by choice – the Mintel researchers conclude that “Financial companies need to push investment options is a way that instills trust and simplifies the message.”

Sounds like a job for meaningful, non-traditional, bigger-than-Brand-You branding to me.

FULL DISCLOSURE NOTE: Chuck Kent and his team have in the past created (very effective) advisor recruitment campaigns for LPL Financial.

FREE STARBUCKS CARD ALERT: It’s Friday… time to sit down, join the copyklatsch, and do some big thinking over a cup of coffee. As a reward to the first ten who add their insights in the comment section for this post, we’ll send out free $5 Starbucks cards.

It’s very popular these days to create surveys, studies and indices of brand trust (many of which I leverage here for my own content-hungry reasons). But which would you say offers more meaningful measurement of consumers’ real-world trust in a brand – surveys or sales? In a put-up-or-shut-up world, you can make a pretty good case that purchase equals trust.

If you buy that (and I do, to a degree), then a bit of 2010 research from comScore ARS should be of interest (even factoring in the self-serving nature of research on the impact of good creative sponsored by a copy-testing service). On the one hand, their findings are achingly obvious to anyone with any experience in the business:
• Better creative drives better sales
• Great creative starts with a great strategy

What may not be so obvious is how often, in the rush to just get things done, creative work isn’t informed by reliable strategic insight – and how infrequently marketers make a consistent investment in strategy, either at the brand or individual communications level.

The strategy IS the idea… Creative is just the expression of it
I realize – and sympathize – with the fact that every marketing department is under enormous pressure to make things happen NOW. But it’s just common sense: you have to stop at least a moment or two to map out where you want to go, and determine the best way to get there, if you ever want to have any hope of actually arriving at your (marketing) destination.

And while this may be heresy to those who worship at the creative altar, I always tell my clients that the strategy is the idea… what we come up with in terms of copywriting, design or the latest social media integration is “only” the expression of that core idea (however, as the comScore ARS research kindly quantifies, the quality of the creative has a tremendous impact on marketing success, i.e., sales).

Tell Your Creatives to Go to…
I know, I know – every marketing director would, from time to time, like to tell his or her agency creatives exactly where to go. And the hell of it is, if you do tell them where to go in the beginning, strategically speaking, you’re much more likely to end up exactly where you want to be. Or better yet, get them to help you determine direction as part of the strategic team – take advantage of their talents of observation and distillation to identify and more concisely express core insights (some of us of make that standard operating procedure).

Even if you feel you’re just too pressed on time and/or budget to pursue extensive qualitative and quantitative input and analysis, you can always create a streamlined path for essential strategic investigation and formulation (for an example, see my guest post about our approach to “express branding” on the blog Sitegiest).

Effective Advertising 101
As a copywriter turned Creative Director and Brand Strategist, I have to say that comScore’s research feels more like Effective Advertising 101 than New Insights into the Impact of Creativity on Marketing Success. Nonetheless, it is sometimes worth restating the obvious… particularly when the obvious is so often overlooked.

Do you insist on a solid strategy prior to starting creative development?
And do you involve your (or your agency’s) creative people in the strategic process?
Please give us your thoughts (and remember, if you’re one of the first ten to do so, we’ll give you a free $5 Starbucks coffee card).

The word “pendulum” always scares me just a little, likely because I had to watch Roger Corman’s version of the “Pit and the Pendulum” in school as a kid:

So when I spotted a “Brand Trust Pendulum” in the latest Edelman Brand Trust Barometer, I almost started to break into a nervous sweat. It’s not called out, but it’s right there, on pages 3 and 19 of the summary.

Page 3 is the historical overview of the Barometer, which clearly marked 2002 as the “Fall of the Celebrity CEO”, and 2005 as the year where our Facebook friending, social trending peers surpassed traditional authorities as those most deserving of our trust.

But wait… on page 19. Is that an ascendant C-Suite I see in 2011? And our peers… has their cluttering of our every moment with social media minutiae cost them our trust, leaving them discredited, ranking well below even those sleeping watchdogs of the Great Recession, financial industry analysts?

The Brand Trust Pendulum Keeps Swinging
Yes, the Brand Trust Pendulum has swung back, and it will keep swinging. Given the inherently fickle nature of our consumer culture, you can’t stop it – but you can manage it to your brand’s advantage. As matters of trust continue to swing between opposites, undermining the brand loyalty that trust can provide, those who create reliable, solid ground for consumers to stand their hopes and expectations upon will come out ahead long term.

Creating that solid ground for consumers to stand, and stay, on with your brand requires nothing more than the basics, well-executed. There’s no great shock here, I suppose… save that the following is so seldom fully delivered:

1. Identify, and stick with, the essential, simple truth.
Make sure that your brand platform is built on what your product/service truly delivers to consumers and employees/brand stewards alike. Avoid excessive “redecorating” of the platform to suit the latest marketing fashions.

2. Invest in belief.
Maintain an active commitment to animating that simple truth among the troops, from your call center to your CEO. That certainly includes an on-going, internal communications program, but it also has to encompass employee policies and rewards. By bringing the brand promise to life internally, you ensure that your brand stewards will reliably deliver it to the outside world… no matter how the pendulum is swinging.

3. Sound like yourself.
The “you” here is, of course, your brand, and the sound is your brand voice. Is it distinct? Is it recognizable? And perhaps most pertinent to this discussion, is it consistent? As the pendulum swings, and loyalties with it, your consumers are more like to stay attached to your brand if they can recognize a trusted voice amidst the cacophony of change.

Do you see the Brand Trust Pendulum swinging and, if so, how do you manage it?

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COMMENTARY! This is another of my “Free Coffee Card” posts – be one of the first 10 to leave a comment on this post and I’ll send you a free $5 Starbucks coffee card. It’s my way of sitting down to have at least a virtual coffee break as we discuss ideas (hence the name, copyklatsch).

Brand trust is up! Brand trust is up! Raise a glass, brand trust is up! Oh… wait a minute. Let’s check to see if that glass is half full or half empty.

Brand Trust – Resilient or Retreating?
The newly released 2011 Brand Trust Barometer, from Edelman, reports that trust in all institutions (business, media, government and NGOs) is up anywhere from two to five percent. But look a little closer; those gains barely pushed the average past the 50% mark – and in the case of media, only 49% currently trust the institutional category overall. I think the real news here is that over half of college-educated consumers worldwide – from millennials to boomers – distrust our institutions, particularly our commercial institutions. In the U.S., business trust is down 8%, to 46% – and while one of Edleman’s video recaps is entitled “Trust in Business is Resilient,” it’s only resilient if you’re setting the bar awfully low.

It’s part of an interesting, and continued, drift in corporate/consumer sentiments. The overall conclusion of the 2007 report – before the economy tanked – was that business was more trusted than government. By 2009 the conclusion was that business needed to partner with government to rebuild trust – but two years later, that trust seems not to have been rebuilt across the board.

The New Holy Grail? A Trinity of Trust
Edelman offers a perspective on what it will take for corporations to build trust now: profit with purpose; transparency; and engagement. I’ll let Richard Edelman speak for himself:

He makes some very good points, but two things occur to me:

1. The Old Trust Framework is based on profit.
2. The New Trust Architecture is based on profit.

OK, so the New Trust Architecture is painted with a gloss of currently popular purpose, but really… what’s the big difference?

No Profit is Without Honor Except in its Own Self-Deceiving Country
It all seems to reflect more corporate posturing than a new spirit in business. The foundation is still about profit. We’re talking about mostly public corporations who have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize value – so saying that “profit with purpose” is the new corporate cure is to me just putting a new coat of paint on the same old foundation in order to appeal to the latest consumer sentiments.

What’s Wrong with the Simple Brand Truth?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I see no inherent evil in the fact that capitalism is based on a profit motive. So why can’t we be honest about that? And why can’t we make an honest profit by offering up goods and services that actually have a value? Why do we need to dress it all up with a pretense of corporate altruism? It lacks credibility, and any lack of credibility undercuts trust.

All of which brings me back to my core conviction in this business of building brand trust, brand equity and brand sales: identify the simple truth about your brands, communicate it simply and truthfully, and consumers will buy, and keep buying.

Do you see “profit with purpose” as a seismic shift or just a continued drifting in the fickle corporate breeze?