Bone & Black essay, 2014
THE COME HITHER OF QUIET
Shhh. There's really no need to say what you're thinking.
At least not everything…it's so much more intriguing when you don't.
Culturally, we seem to have forgotten that fact. Silence, as they say, is golden. (Actually, we’ve also forgotten the full saying: Speech is silver, silence is golden.) The point is, what we don’t say can be more powerful then what we do.
Consider Muji. The Japanese retailer’s name means “without brand.” Yes, Muji is now a coveted brand in its own right, but it got there by offering good design at good prices. The company hires designers whose names alone sell products, but it doesn’t disclose them. Naoto Fukasawa, Konstantin Grcic, James Irvine, Jasper Morrison (they’ve all been commissioned and told)—you can pay hundreds elsewhere for a piece conspicuously designed by any one of them, or spend your pennies at Muji, which you know has the goods. Who cares if they’re anonymous? With Muji there’s no advertising, no look-at-me styling. Just a steady stream of clever, quiet design—and appreciative customers.
Muji is something of anomaly. We live in a culture of static and hype, of brands talking over one another in an attempt to be heard. (Guilty as charged.) By conservative estimate, we’re hit with 200 ads a day. On television and in newspapers and magazines, sure. But also on buses and benches and coffee cups, in elevators and taxis, on your Kindle, in your search results, in your inbox. It would probably be easier to calculate where you don’t see an ad. Of those 200 (some say 2,000) ads, how many do you remember?
And marketing channels are only growing: There’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and the next big thing, all ravenous for content. Brands, like people (and hey, we’re all brands now), have grown leery of the interstitial moment. With so much virtual space to fill, the worry is, if you’re not talking, then no one’s listening. But here’s the real challenge: are they truly listening when you do?
Is the girl at the party who you’re going to remember the one who tells story after story starting with “I” to anyone within earshot? Or the one who lands a choice observation or two? You may not, at first, even notice the second girl is in the room, but you’re not likely to forget her once you do.
Is brand strategy (personal or otherwise) really any different than the social landscape of a party? You can opt to keep talking, as much and in as many venues as possible, just so there’s no gap in the news feed. It’s not always a win simply to be present and accounted for. Sometimes holding back is your best move.
Consider this a plea from someone who’s been on both the giving and receiving end of the din. Time for another post? Or god forbid, a tweet? Have another product to promote? Wait…let’s just take a moment to collect ourselves.
A little mystery goes a long way. Consider the American Express “black card,” merely a gleam in the public’s eye before 1999. But people were so seduced by the idea of this exclusive card that the company made it official. Now that it lives, the black card is no less shadowy. You can’t apply—it’s an invitation-only affair—and the requirements for being selected are kept hush-hush. The card’s tagline serves as a reminder that scarcity has its rewards: Rarely seen, always recognized.
And don’t forget the good old-fashioned art of the tease. In a 2007 TED Talk about things best left to the imagination, screenwriter J.J. Abrams put it this way: “There are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.” He went on to prove it with an unbranded marketing campaign. If you happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting to see Transformers that July (and in 2007, the chances of you actually being in a movie theater were much greater), you were thrust mid-act into a going away party for a guy named Rob. A friend with a handheld camera is capturing the moment when a thundering shudder and an explosion send the crowd racing into the streets of Lower Manhattan, where they’re scattered by a projectile that turns out to be the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty. Someone off-screen blurts, “I saw it. It’s alive. It’s huge!” The only information provided: “FROM PRODUCER J.J. ABRAMS,” followed by “IN THEATERS 1-18-08.” Paramount, which was credited, refused to acknowledge that any such project existed.
Those who followed the teaser’s scant trail and Googled the release date, found the website www.1-18-08.com, containing time-stamped images—some depicting scenes of disaster, some quotidian. The movie poster revealed even less: a ravaged skyline, a headless Statue of Liberty and a date, 01-18-08. It would be months before a name, Cloverfield, was attached to the movie, but no matter. Curiosity had been aroused. Cloverfield, which benefitted from a subsequent viral marketing campaign that laid out the backstory in clues, earned more than $40 million its first weekend—the biggest January opening on record, until the buddy-cop film Ride Along, with bankable stars Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, surpassed it earlier this year.
Another campaign that raised more questions than it answered: Venmo’s NYC subway ads featuring “Lucas.” Only this time, the response wasn’t so enthusiastic. Lucas takes the stairs. Lucas has big dreams. Lucas makes coffee. Lucas likes magic. Lucas pays rent. Lucas loves his friends. Lucas uses Venmo. Any idea what Venmo is? Any interest?
The ads read like a character straight from the pages of Dick and Jane taking his first stab at an eHarmony profile. Lucas, as it turns out, is a software engineer who works for Venmo (a payment app, by the way). “We thought it would be cool to showcase someone that works at the company and uses Venmo, to tell the story of his life,” co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail told Fox News. Sadly, Lucas doesn’t seem to have a very interesting life story to tell. Personally, I’m more drawn to the version of Lucas that Buzzfeed imagined: Lucas has a cavity. Lucas ate egg salad for lunch. Lucas owns a parrot named Jeffrey. Lucas just farted. This guy seems a little unclean, and possibly unhealthy, but at least not dull.
Merely raising questions isn’t enough—they have to be questions people can’t help but pursue the answers to. It’s a strategy that was perfected by Gypsy Rose Lee: drop a hint here, a stocking there. And always leave them wanting more.