First, an admission. I belong to a fraternity. A huge, national, button-down shirt, blue blazer, captains-of-industry kind of organization that celebrates all things left-brained and tangible. At one point, I was even president of my chapter. But that’s another story.

As the token creative in the group, my job was to “design” party t-shirts. Of these, one stands out in my memory. You’ve probably seen it — or one exactly like it. That’s because the “concept” was as follows:

1) Start with the logo for one of Bavaria’s… er… Germany’s most recognizable sports car brands
2) Cleverly add the fraternity’s Greek letters in place of the three initials in the existing logo mark
3) Alter the carmaker’s ubiquitous tagline by one word — replacing “driving” with “party”

This last step — the ingenious substitution of a single word in the tagline — sent a clear message: “Compared to other ‘machines’ engineered for the specific purpose of partying, we consider our fraternal organization (or ‘machine,’ if you will) to be the ultimate.”

You get the idea.

Flash forward to 2005. A wealth management firm hired me to rename its business. They targeted professional athletes and other younger, self-made types, and they felt their current name (the principals’ initials) wasn’t relevant. I showed them a bunch of names — including a few edgy, “made-up” words (think “Xerox” before it was a word). Ultimately, they asked what it would cost to buy the rights to the name of an existing wealth management firm. As if this weren’t crazy enough, the existing firm had a name like “Aspen Glen.” Never mind that it had nothing to do with wealth management — they just liked it, and they wanted to use it. I showed a few more rounds of names, collected my fee and quietly disappeared.

A year or two later came the story of the new burger joint in town. The owners / founders did extensive research on two major chains, and they asked me to name some items for their “Secret Menu.” Then they pointed me to an established chain’s secret menu items. Same recipes. So, what they really wanted were new names for the other joint’s burgers. They even wanted to promote one of those recipes as their own flagship / namesake burger. I had to explain, “First, that’s a bad branding idea — because it doesn’t differentiate your burgers. And second, what are you thinking? Do you want to get your pants sued off?”

The opening example of “copycat” marketing is basically just a first-level idea that didn’t get pushed beyond the obvious (and actually used the obvious as its “hook”). It was coat-tailing off the success of another established brand. And while it was certainly questionable from a trademark standpoint, its major crime against branding was a lack of originality.

What’s more disturbing about the bean counters and the burger flippers is this: It serves as a chilling reminder that there are people out there who are so afraid to do something unique that they’d rather do something boring — and not to mention potentially illegal.

Are these people afraid of failure, scared of ridicule or just horribly unimaginative? And as communicators, how do we deal with them?

Discuss over a burger.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:44 am and is filed under Advertising, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.