Volume 78: Comir-wtf-y?

1. Comir-wtf-y: Everything normal people mock about our business.

Tl:dr: Tortured naming nonsense strikes again.

Comirnaty, in case you’ve been off in a cabin in the woods for the past few weeks, is now the official name for the Pfizer-BionTech COVID-19 vaccine. You know, the one we’ve all just been calling “Pfizer.” Apparently, the name comes from “community” (co) “MRNA” (mirna) and “immunity” (ty).

Just shoot me now.

This is a classic example of creating a name you can sell rather than creating a name that’s great. While I had absolutely nothing to do with this particular act of naming destruction, I can absolutely understand how it came about. Let me walk you through it quickly.

Naming is inherently subjective, which means that it’s often one of the hardest things for a client to buy because there isn’t really an objective way to decide if a name is good or not. And while there are plenty of naming analytics and research tools used to try and objectify the naming process, they typically amount to little more than jazz hands.

Because of this inherent subjectivity, it becomes especially difficult to find names when dealing with clients who pride themselves on how rational and objective their decision-making is…like scientists at pharma companies like Pfizer. Add the fact that it’s very hard to find names that aren’t already in use, that have a unique distinctiveness, and that will pass the fairly intense regulatory scrutiny of pharma, and things become even more difficult.

So, with all these headwinds, how do you sell a name to a group of particularly left-brained, logical, rational, and analytical clients while also navigating murky legal and regulatory hurdles? Simple, you don’t sell them the name, you sell them a story instead.

Comirnaty was never intended to be a great, evocative, and memorable name. What it does have is a story. It isn’t an empty vessel, it means “Community MRNA immunity.” And, well, that probably sounds pretty good if you’re on the buying end and that’s how you think about your product.

Unfortunately, sellable stories don’t always make for great names because Comirnaty is awful, even by the already fantastically low standards of pharma. An awkward word with too many syllables, it doesn’t flow off the tongue, and seems horribly similar to “comorbidity,” which is a bad look, particularly in relation to COVID-19, sigh.

So, the name gets announced and the world instantly mocks it, because it looks and sounds stupid and vapid. Then they proudly announced the “inside scoop” on the naming process, as if anyone actually cares, and Twitter literally splits its sides laughing at how ridiculous that sounds. Because, well. It is ridiculous when you take the story out of the context of the sell and instead expose it to the halogen lamp glare of Twitter.

On the one hand, I kind of feel sorry for the Brand Institute which created the name, because I feel the kind of pain they must have been going through and none of us know which potentially brilliant names hit the cutting room floor. On the other, I feel no sympathy at all because Comirnaty is so spectacularly cynical that it feels like nobody cared whether it was a good name or not, just that it was sellable.

Which brings me to the Brand Institute itself. Now, this is almost certainly a brilliant business to own. It operates in a narrow niche with high barriers to entry that very few want to participate in, which means it’s almost certainly one of the few agency businesses that gets to operate on a healthy margin, and likely derives considerable profits. Well done.

They claim to be “the worlds no1 naming company” but the only thing they appear to be no1 at is coming up with appalling names. The best thing they can say about their work is that they’re more likely to get a name through pharma regulatory scrutiny than anyone else, which from a brand standpoint is a very low bar. They also proudly announce on their homepage that they created “all four publicly available vaccine brand names”…really terribly. Well, “really terribly” is my interpretation. Here they are, you decide for yourself: Comirnaty, Spikevax, Vaxzevria and Vidprevtyn. Other than Spikevax, this literally feels like chimpanzees at a typewriter trying to recreate the collective works of Shakespeare and accidentally creating pharma names instead.

It really makes me wish someone with an ounce of actual creativity would take on the regulatory hell of pharma naming. They’d clean up.

BTW > the only well-named Covid vaccine is “Covishield.”

2. Turning off the ads doesn’t work. Don’cha just love it when predictions come true?

tl;dr: Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

I now have the dubious honor of having experienced two massive economic shocks in my professional career. First, the financial crisis of 2008, and then the shutdowns and swift slide that accompanied the announcement of a global pandemic last year. As a result, I’ve been able to witness first hand how different brands react to adversity, and how consistently so-called “data driven” operators act contrary to the what the data says they should do.

At a micro-level, there’s the all consuming fear marketers in a crisis have of being seen as “tone-deaf,” which, like corporate entropy, inevitably drives them toward achingly trite and horrendously morbid and slow-panning “in it together” advertising, when all we really want is for brands to cheer us up and act like things are normal, even if they aren’t. Note to clients: An irrational fear of looking tone deaf appears to have a strong correlation with actually coming across as tone deaf.

However, it’s at the macro level where things get really interesting. Pretty much all of the data leading into and coming out of the financial crisis of 2008 (and much of it before) said you needed to market your way through a recession and that cutting brand investments has an outsize negative impact on business performance.

And, now that businesses have been reporting last years numbers, we can see that a pandemic driven slowdown isn’t really any different. A couple of weeks ago the merry band of Australian marketing scientists at the Ehrenburg Bass Institute released an empirical research study showing the impact of cutting ad spend on both large and small brands (spoiler: Cutting spend is bad for big brands and potentially fatal for small) And now we also have this article comparing the relative performance of P&G and Coca Cola. (spoiler: Coke cut and did badly, P&G invested and did well).

Now, before cutting to the chase, I must point out that I predicted the P&G/Coca Cola divergence way back in April of last year. Yay me.

Anyway, what happened is that P&G achieved outsize performance gains by increasing ad-spend into the teeth of the pandemic, while Coca-Cola achieved the opposite as it slashed spending. Something that always looked like a bizarrely self destructive act by one of the worlds most sophisticated marketers.

Now, when I talk about not cutting spending, I do need to caveat that for some businesses there wasn’t even a choice. It was cut or die. And it’s important to acknowledge that if you’re simply fighting for survival then all bets are very much off. However, a business like Coca-Cola is very far indeed from fighting for survival. Instead, this looks like it was either a fundamental strategic error made because of the ridiculous pressures of short-term ROI in the marketing function, and a complete lack of understanding of how marketing works, or a cynical short term act designed to appease Wall Street. I’m willing to be charitable and say it’s probably the latter, because the former is oh-so-very scary if we consider that marketing is supposed to be Coca-Cola’s primary competence.

So, why, one wonders do businesses turn off the ads when things turn tough, even when the empirical and anecdotal data both say not to? Now there could be many reasons, but I think a lot of it is down to that fact that it’s easy to do, that there’s a general lack of marketing leadership at the most senior levels of most businesses, a lack of Wall Street understanding of the performance gains driven by advertising, an underlying desire for advertising to be unnecessary, a deep lack of trust in anything any advertising agency has to say on the subject, and the fact that debt, stock buybacks and associated financial engineering has left many corporations without much wiggle room to fight economic shocks.

Which, takes me to a third observation about tough times, which is that the best managed businesses almost always come out of tough times vastly stronger than their weaker competition. Very simply, the best managed tend to have stronger balance sheets that allow them to continue to spend and pickup share gains at the expense of the weak. And while I don’t normally spend much time even thinking about P&G, it has to be said that as a business they seem to have played the pandemic brilliantly. They leaned into the crisis and came out the other side much the stronger. Well played.

3. Beige New World.

tl;dr: Designers commodifying themselves out of a job.

Across my career, design has undergone a truly unprecedented transformation from what was largely a niche skillset played out in the far corners of the economy by a chosen few to a core competence that every company needs to succeed.

As a result, design has never been more commercially influential than it is today.

And what are designers doing with their newfound influence? Well, mostly it looks like they’re trying to commodify themselves out of a job. Let’s face it, if everything is going to look and function the same way anyway, why do we need designers in the first place? Surely an algorithm can knock out a pastiche of Helvetica driven modernism that’s easy to interact with more cheaply than a human can? Shit, Squarespace has been banging out templates for $18/month for years that are at least as competent as any of this stuff.

Now, there’s an additional layer of commodification I didn’t even realize had a name. Not Helvetica in Pastels, but Corporate Memphis. What is Corporate Memphis you might ask? Well, put simply, it’s the flat geometric “big-tech” illustration style that’s taken over the web in recent years. And well, it’s absolutely everywhere.

It’s easy to understand why it happened. Apple and Google dominate the digital design landscape through their design languages - Human Interface Design and Material Design, which moved from Skeuomorphism to flat, geometric systems almost ten years ago now. Then we have tools like Adobe Illustrator and services like Humaaans that make it trivially easy to produce these graphics that fit with these systems. And, finally, we have a style that’s attractive because it’s largely inoffensive and un-noticeable. It feels friendly, it represents humanity while avoiding tricky issues like ethnicity or gender or religion or body-shape or mood, and has a generally modern, fresh, feeling about it. Oh, and it’s a lot cheaper to create than photoshoots or custom illustrations.

What’s particularly troubling about Corporate Memphis, though, isn’t just that it commodifies the brands that use it. It’s that it commodifies the people it claims to represent. By avoiding the reality of our differences, it doesn’t just render the brand personality-free, it renders the people it purports to represent - us - as being completely personality, and individuality, free too. Which means that it isn’t just lazy and commodifying, it’s making a depressing statement about conformity too.

But, like every pendulum that swings too far, the utter blandness of the modern digital realm represents a wonderful opportunity for brave designers to do something different. You see, far too often, we get suckered into the idea that copying success will make us successful too without properly understanding what it is that actually made others successful in the first place. Jonny Ive didn’t create a minimal, modernist design aesthetic for Apple computers because everyone else was doing it. He created it because nobody else was doing it.

Equally, in the early 1900s, Coca Cola didn’t commission the design of its iconic bottle because everyone else already had a curvaceous bottle. They wanted something completely different from everything else that would be “instantly recognizable even when lying broken on the ground.”

We’re now in the exact same place today. The brand winners of tomorrow will not look and function like the winners of today. They’ll look different, be different. They’ll buck the trend and stand out, because standing out makes brands successful.

But it’ll take bravery to happen because one of the most toxic aspects of the design community is how narrow minded and small c conservative it is. As a result, work that departs from ever more narrow definitions of acceptable taste gets castigated, while work that falls neatly inside the bell-curve is praised, even though this is work that represents exactly the kind of commodifying thinking that, if left to do its thing, will ultimately render designers as unnecessary.

No, it’s time for a few brave souls to stand up for the things that are different, to stand aside from the beige new world, and to truly fulfill the promise of design being as commercially influential as it has every right to be.

We need to make this right. Because if not us, then who?