I Believe in Brand Fundamentalism
“The duty is to urge people to jihad and to enlist the youth into jihad brigades”[1]
Introduction
The terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 have variously been described as a declaration of war[2], America’s greatest tragedy[3] and a “work of art”.[4] They were also the most chillingly effective advertising the world has ever seen, bringing the Al Qaeda brand front of mind in countless millions of people, whether potential victims or recruits.
Al Qaeda has formed a deep connection within both these targets: post-millennial fear in its victims; post-millennial fervour in its supporters[5] by evoking a simple, powerful myth: the triumph of righteousness over iniquity.[6]
We have always needed simple stories to resolve vexing existential questions – in this case, a growing sense of impotence among Muslims who view the United States as overpoweringly militarily and culturally imperialistic.[7] Iconic brands often provide those stories.[8]
All of which makes it one of the most interesting and compelling brands of the current age. A modern brand icon in the truest sense of the word, its power lies in its ability to awaken, engage and empower its fundamentalists by purely viral means.
The brand’s resilience in the face of the stiffest military competition is a function of this viral nature: whether or not an Islamist terrorist cell committing acts in the name of Al Qaeda has any legitimacy to use the brand name is rather beside the point; the experience, both for victim and supporter, is indistinguishable. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show satirised Al Qaeda in a segment in which it compared its operation to the “Quiznos model”[9] of business, but as with the best satire, the humour lay in a truth: Al Qaeda is a global multinational terror organisation.[10] A franchise into which anyone can buy, if their ideologies map.[11] The brand’s fundamentalists are inseparable from the brand-proper, whether or not they have ever had any kind of contact with Osama bin Laden.[12]
Brand fundamentalism, then, is the phenomenon by which “radicalised” brand advocates simultaneously feed off, create and spread the brand, and Al Qaeda is by no means alone in creating this tendency. The most successful, iconic brands of the 21st century will be those that create brand fundamentalists: the human vectors who enable brands to become viruses.
The Al Qaeda virus
“An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it”[13]
The irony of Al Qaeda, which translates as “the base”, is that it barely has nor needs a centre now. Osama Bin Laden’s ideology, the Al Qaeda brand essence, is purely and simply a meme: a self-replicating unit of cultural transmission which can respond to selective pressures,[14] devastating in its flexibility. Memes operate like viruses: they infect the mind and poison it against competing memes.[15] The Al Qaeda brand is a very clever virus.
Just over a decade ago, the brand rarely warranted more than a handful of column inches on the international news pages. Today it is an umbrella brand for a very modern[16] form of terrorism and is both catalysing and capitalising on a growing audience of radicalised Muslim youth: modern Islamic terrorists are made, not born.[17]
Al Qaeda is made up of three elements – a hardcore, a network of co-opted outfits and a nebulous worldview: an ideology and those who subscribe to it. It is this element which has become the most important in the dissemination of the Al Qaeda brand.[18] Al Qaeda has been described as “a virus which easily attaches itself to different host organisations,”[19] and the efforts of Western governments and security agencies across the world have failed to destroy this element: Al Qaeda the pervasive idea. “The formula, not ‘the base’, is more powerful than ever.”[20]
Beginnings
It is not fanciful over-intellectualisation to think of Al Qaeda as a brand; the organisation views itself in similar terms, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In an Al Qaeda memo the organisation referred to itself as a “company” with “openings for profitable trade”. [21] Business literature has borrowed from Sun Tzu’s Art of War for decades; why shouldn’t warmongers apply a little SWOT analysis?
That an organisation like Al Qaeda views itself and is regarded in such terms is an indication of how far brands have come.
When they were first conceived, brands were logos – marks of origin which served as a guarantee of quality or consistency of performance.[22] While now it is perhaps easier to think of brands as constantly evolving phenomena,[23] at their heart, strong brands must be a “storehouse of trust”[24] as choices multiply. Fundamentally, though, a brand is merely an idea held in the minds of its lapsed, current and potential users.[25] Without users, a brand is nothing.
However, the manner in which brands are created, nurtured and disseminated has dramatically changed since Bass first stamped a red triangle on its casks of ale.
John Grant identifies three ages of branding. The first is the aforementioned age of the trademark, where the brand was the badge of trust. This was followed by the age of aspiration, in which manufacturers acknowledged the need to evolve from being mere goods-producing processes to organisms dedicated to creating and satisfying consumers;[26] an effect they achieved by reframing their brands to reflect buyers’ wishes and desires.
The third age is the era of new marketing; an era in which brands have become “freestanding ideas that take hold and spread”[27] – in essence, viruses. Grant talks of the role of modern brands as “ideas to live by”[28] – ideologies in all but name.
There are a number of prerequisites if these “ideas to live by” are to create fundamentalists and subsequently achieve the Al Qaeda level of viral potency. Brands must:
- Have a clear ideology – a unique point of view, a cause; something for the fundamentalists to believe in
- Have an iconic, charismatic leader – someone able to motivate both internal and external support[29], [30]
- Tell a simple story[31] which is capable of being retold repeatedly
- Use high-impact events to tell that story and crystallise support[32]
Only then will the brand fundamentalists (be they supporters, believers, fans, advocates, loyal customers etc) feel the degree of ownership of the brand required to communicate it and, even defend it: Al Qaeda neither controls nor produces the legion of jihadi DVDs, its brand fundamentalists are more than willing to take on those roles.
Recruiting fundamentalists
No brand, not even one with as rabid and radicalised a support as Al Qaeda’s, can expect equality in terms of the participation of its support: those that feel a sense of affinity with the ideology massively outnumber those fundamentalists prepared to act upon it.
In this sense, Al Qaeda is like any other brand that invites participation: the passive supporters far outnumber the active agents. Studies of wiki involvement and participatory sites such as Amazon or Trip Advisor commonly suggest a 90:9:1 rule of participation:[33] 90 per cent of users barely contribute beyond identifying themselves as users – in the Al Qaeda example, these are the broad, global supporters. Just 9 per cent are moderate contributors: the fundraisers and jihadi DVD salesmen; the majority of activity comes from a hardcore 1 per cent[34] – the brand fundamentalists; the content creators.
Radicalisation
The key questions for any brand looking to mobilise and utilise its fundamentalists are first, how to find them and second, how best to arm and engage them.
Thankfully, for the majority of brands with passionate fans, finding those fundamentalists isn’t the issue – they are far more likely to approach the brand. But the brand must be ready to begin a real dialogue with these people when they do so. This means going beyond the “soothing, humourless monotone of the mission statement”[35] and messaging in which brands shout to no-one in particular about how wonderful they are, towards marketing activities which add as much value to the buyer as they do the seller.[36] Marketing which is worth buying into and passing on. Most brands are not geared for this type of engagement.
While many brands moved to address their “marketing myopia”[37] and reinvented themselves as consumer-creating and serving entities, businesses have in the main retained the misguided belief that they alone create value for consumers and that it is the marketing department’s role to communicate that value.[38]
But mass behaviour – the support of a violent jihadi terrorist movement; the decision to vote for the first black US president … even the purchase of a certain type of chocolate – is neither the result of individual rational choice nor unseen external powers. Such behaviour is the product of interaction between individuals,[39] who pass on viruses and, crucially, alter the DNA of those viruses in order to make them more communicable.
It is in our nature to mimic, to copy and to reinvent ideas which have been passed to us. Brand fundamentalists are those who do so most passionately and actively: the two Los Angeles-based Coca-Cola fundamentalists who created the soft drink’s Facebook fan page[40] (the brand is second only to Barack Obama in the number of fans it has attracted on the site); the thousands of YouTube members who have created their own version of the Cadbury drumming gorilla; the Nike, Harley Davidson… even VW lovers who literally brand themselves with a name or logo tattoo:
Fundamentalist autonomy
Granted, embracing these guerrilla cells means ceding some control: it would be a mistake for marketers to expect uniformity or totality of messaging from their brands’ fundamentalists. As brands are held solely in consumers’ heads, it follows that brand viruses will mutate: this shouldn’t be of too much a concern to truly iconic brands: flu has many strains, but the flu experience is broadly similar. Equally, a fractional brand experience is still a brand experience. Just as Coca-Cola designed its famous bottle so that it would be recognisable by an one of 100 shattered pieces[41], so iconic viral brands are recognisable when experienced at the micro level – a small piece of jihadi propaganda in the Al Qaeda case; an iPhone app as an analogue of the overall Apple experience in the more commercial brand world; the user-created “making of” films of Bravia spectacle advertising, in which the brand becomes as much virally exploited as it is exploiter:
Numerous brands are already engaging their fundamentalists. In a brave move, Mars has given over its skittles.com website to fans – a visit to the homepage currently calls up a Twitter feed. Others have gone further than mere communications and have involved fundamentalists in the design process: Threadless prints and sells t-shirts designed by and for its members; the laptop manufacturer ASUS involves its brand fundamentalists in the design of its future computers via its webpc.com site.[42]
Arming the brand fundamentalists
Brands need to put tools in place to awaken, engage and empower the fundamentalists effectively so that, either as a group or individually, they might better transmit the brand virally. This necessitates a shift from customer relationship marketing (CRM) to vendor relationship marketing (VRM).
VRM aims to improve markets by “equipping customers to be independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors”.[43] Inevitably, many of these tools will be web-based social media ventures, such as the Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s participation in a Twitter feed with consumers following a successful trial with journalists, but they needn’t all be limited to the virtual world. PayChoice, in which readers, viewers and listeners decide how much to pay for media the consume, has succeeded in creating new fans for bands: Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” album, released digitally and sold on the PayChoice model, has outsold all of the band’s previous albums,[44] creating real fans who, in turn, share their obsession in real-world social settings. One of the best examples of arming fundamentalists in recent times is President Obama’s election campaign, in which campaigners could download scripts to cold-call undecided voters and spread the “believe” message virally.
Crucially, though, the brand needs to maintain its dialogue with its fundamentalists. As the virus spreads and creates new fundamentalists, so it mutates. Without contact with the source, the brand can turn into something very different, as the Al Qaeda leadership is discovering to its cost: while the US-led “war on terror” has failed to prevent a dramatic increase in jihadi acts of terror, it has seriously impaired bin Laden’s ability to communicate with his franchises, leading to a number of attacks which the Al Qaeda leadership consider “off brand” and counterproductive.[45] The brand virus is only as potent as the fundamentalists who communicate it; the fundamentalists as efficient as the tools they are given.
– End –
[1] Osama Bin Laden, January 2009, in an audio tape posted on jihadi websites and broadcast on Al Jazeera
[2] The Guardian, 12 September 2001
[3] Ethan Casey, 09/11 8:48 am: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy, BlueEar.com, 2001
[4] Karlheinz Stockhausen, press conference, Hamburg, 16 September 2001; the British artist Damien Hirst reprised the theme in a BBC interview on the first anniversary of the attacks
[5] It’s worth noting here that as a jihadi organisation, Al Qaeda’s primary audience is, technically, God. Acts of jihad (literally, struggle or endeavour) are primarily a demonstration of faith, their immediate local aims or enemies are largely irrelevant
[6] This is in many ways an ur-myth which can be traced back as far as the Book of Revelation: In a great battle, the people of God will, under a quasi-divine leader, destroy the satanic forces and inaugurate a thousand-year reign of purity and virtue
[7] Nigel Inkster, director Transnational Threats, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, quoted on Analysis: Al Qaeda’s Enemy Within, BBC Radio 4, 7 August 2008. For a full transcript, visit: http://tinyurl.com/demvbm
[8] Douglas B Holt, What Becomes An Icon Most?, Harvard Business Review, 2003
[9] The Daily Show, 14 February 2008. Quiznos is a US sub/sandwich shop franchise, similar to Subway. The brand now has 16 franchises in the UK www.quiznosuk.co.uk
[10] Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, Columbia University Press, May 2002
[11] Rita Katz and Josh Deven, Franchising Al Qaeda, The Boston Globe, 22 June 2007
[12] Noam Chomsky, Radio B92, 18 September, 2001. For a full transcript of the interview, visit: http://www.counterpunch.org/chomskyintv.html
[13] James Lovelock, Gaia
[14] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford Paperbacks, 1989
[15] http://www.adliterate.com/archives/2005/03/here_come_the_m.html
[16] John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, Granta, 2003. Gray argues that it is wrong to think of Al Qaeda as a throwback – it is, in fact, a very modern idea. The mistake lies in the belief that modernism is a force whose effects are universal. “Al Qaeda is modern not only in the fact that it uses satellite phones, laptop computers and encrypted websites. The attack on the Twin Towers demonstrates that Al Qaeda understands that 21st century wars are spectacular encounters in which the dissemination of media images is a core strategy.”
[17] Jason Burke, Al Qaeda- The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin Books, 2007
[18] Ibid
[19] Nigel Inkster, BBC Radio 4, 7 August 2008
[20] Jason Burke, 2007
[21] Jason Burke, 2007. The memo reads: “We have made it possible for the teachers to find openings for profitable trade […] our relatives in the South have abandoned the market and we are suffering from international monopoly companies. But Allah enlightened us with His mercy when the Omar Brothers Company was established […] one benefit of trading here is the congregation in one place of all the traders who came from everywhere and began working for this company.” As Burke notes, the code is a crude one: the “Omar Brothers Company” is clearly the Taliban; “relatives in the South” are Sudanese cells; and “international monopoly companies” are the American government and its intelligence agencies
[22] Gary Duckworth, Understanding Brands: By 10 People Who Do, ed. Don Cowley, Kogan Page, 1997
[23] Ibid
[24] Niall FitzGerald, quoted in “Pro-Logo – Why Brands are Good for You”, The Economist, 8-14 September 2001
[25] Paul Feldwick, What is Brand Equity, Anyway?, NTC Publications, 2002
[26] Theodore Levitt, Marketing Myopia, Harvard Business Review, September/October 1975
[27] John Grant, New Marketing Manifesto: The 12 Rules For Building Successful Brands In The 21st Century, Texere Publishing, 2000
[28] Ibid
[29] The idea of the chief brand officer as a position distinct from chief executive is gaining momentum. The CBO takes responsibility for the brand’s image, experience, and promise, overseeing marketing, advertising, design, PR and CRM. See: Scott Bedbury, A New Brand World: 8 Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century, Penguin, 2003
[30] Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need you to Lead Us, Piatkus, 2008. Godin argues that anyone has the opportunity now to start a “movement”. In this sense, all brand fundamentalists are potential brand leaders
[31] Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Stories in a Low Trust World, Portfolio, 2005
[32] A concept bin Laden clearly grasped with the September 11 attacks, which were conceived as much as a media strategy as they were a terror tactic
[33] http://www.useit.com/altertbox/participation_inequality.html
[34] http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html
[35] Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Perseus Books, 2001
[36] Alan Mitchell, Right Side Up: Building Brands in the Age of the Organized Consumer; Harper Collins Business, 2001
[37] Theodore Levitt, 1975
[38] Mark Earls, Herd: How To Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing Our True Nature, John Wiley & Sons, 2007
[39] Ibid
[40] Abbey Klaassen, How Two Coke Fans Brought the Brand to Facebook Fame, Advertising Age, 16 March 2009.
[41] Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: How Everything We Believe about Why We Buy is Wrong, Random House Business Books, 2008. Lindstrom talks about “smashable” brands, an idea that goes back to 1915 when the Coca-Cola company asked a designer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to design a bottle that consumers would still recognise as a Coke bottle even if it shattered into 100 pieces
[42] www.wepc.com
[43] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page#About_VRM
[44] http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke
[45] Stephen Ulph, senior fellow, Jamestown Foundation, Washington, BBC Radio 4, 7 August 2008
