THE MAKING OF MARK TWAIN, THE BRAND

A shock of white hair. The shaggy mustache. The pipe. An immaculate white suit. This is no informal portrait of the artist as an old man, but the iconic image of Mark Twain, the brand.

A distinguished novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and literary critic, Mark Twain was the creator of  some of the great characters of American literature. His literary achievement was best estimated by Ernest Hemingway when he said: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’.”

His greatest creation, however, was Mark Twain. Himself.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, he died one hundred years ago this year as Mark Twain, celebrity. As every schoolchild used to know, the most famous pen name in the world has its origins as a Mississippi riverboat cry, “by the mark, twain”.

As a former riverboat pilot Clemens was more than familiar with the cry, which indicated a two-fathom clearance beneath the boat.  But he did not invent the name so much as acquire it.

It was one Captain Isaiah Sellers who first used Mark Twain as a name. He wrote river news for the New Orleans Picayune under that sobriquet. When Captain Sellers died in 1869 Clemens saw his chance. “I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains,” as he explained later in a letter.

Clearly Clemens had an ear and an instinct for a fitting name, the first essential of a brand. As the expression ‘mark twain’ had strong associations with the setting of his most famous books, so as a name it was highly relevant and memorable. It also had the virtue of being easy to pronounce and, given Captain Sellers’ demise, it was available.

For Clemens, Mark Twain became much more than a ‘nom de plume’. He manufactured the character Mark Twain around it just as surely as he created Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

His success as an author enabled Clemens to recreate himself entirely. During the course of his life he worked hard at cultivating the image and building the brand until, ultimately, Samuel Clemens morphed into Mark Twain. Like Huckleberry Finn, he became a figment of his own imagination.

As early as 1873 he had tried to trademark “Mark Twain” and in 1908, two years before his death, he formally established the Mark Twain Company to promote his work and image. Starting in 1909 the company, rather than Twain himself, retained copyright to new works. Mark Twain cigars and Mark Twain Whiskey were already on the market.

We may struggle to call to mind what Emerson or Hawthorne or Melville looked like, but not Twain. From early on, he made sure his image remained distinctive and unforgettable, from the mustache, the carefully tousled white hair, the pipe and the white suit worn year-round. This was his brand identity, carefully nurtured and assiduously protected.

He left an extensive photographic trail, he refused to talk to unauthorized biographers and recognized the power of new media, even licensing Thomas Edison’s company to film ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, complete with out-takes of him padding around his estate.

He was ahead of his time. If he were alive today the Mark Twain brand would be as ubiquitous as Disney. He would, no doubt, have a Facebook page, a website, a line of clothing, a cologne for men, all on sale at the Huckleberry Finn Mississippi Adventure Playground gift shop.

Perhaps with an eye to a then imagined future in which the full potential of his brand could be realized, his dying wish on April 21st 1910 was that his unpublished autobiography would not see the light of day until 100 years after his death. For the last century a 5,000 page unedited manuscript of Twain’s autobiography has been gathering dust in a vault at the University of California, Berkeley.

This November his wish will be fulfilled when the first volume of the autobiography will be published. It is, as publishers love to say, eagerly awaited.

The question is: whose autobiography will it be?

Coming up: Westinghouse, the brand name that would not die

Related articles

• Who Is Mark Twain? (brainz.org)
• ‘The silent colossal National Lie’ or the very best bits from Mark Twain (beinghuman.blogs.fi)
• Writers Write: Mark Twain on Ambrose Bierce (shannonturlington.com)
• World’s Top 10 Most Admired Books (mikyunglim.wordpress.com)

CA’s INITIAL NAMING MISTAKE

CA, the company formerly known as Computer Associates, is displaying all the characteristics of Hamlet. It is a company that can’t make up its mind.

Founded in 1976 as Computer Associates International, Inc., the company legally changed its corporate name to CA, Inc., in February 2006 while in the midst of a $2.2 billion fraud investigation that had dogged it for four years.

Explaining the name change at the time, CEO John Swainson said:

“CA is a changed company, but not an entirely new company. We’ve taken the strengths of the past and combined them with new initiatives, strategies and ideas to ensure CA is the clear industry leader in meeting the evolving information technology needs of customers.”

This week, four years on, the company announced it had changed it’s name again – this time to CA Technologies. Explaining this change, new CEO Bill McCracken, said:

“The name CA Technologies both acknowledges our past yet points to our future as a leader in delivering the technologies that will revolutionize the way IT powers business agility.”

Spot the difference?

While the latest statement does make reference to the current industry buzz-term “business agility”, the two statements are identical in their sentiment and intent. There is nothing to help us understand the logic of the addition of ‘technologies’ in the CA name.

Marianne Budnik, chief marketing officer, did add: “The brand and name change to CA Technologies was designed with insights from nearly 700 customers, partners and market thought leaders.”

It begs the question – insights into what, specifically? I would hazard a guess: CA hasn’t worked as a name. It was a hasty, myopic decision made at a time the company needed to distance itself from a debilitating scandal. CA was the easy choice, but the wrong choice. It just wasn’t thought through.

The pros and cons of initials as corporate names aside (more on this later), CA works visually when connected to the original name, Computer Associates, as in the amended logo introduced in 2001, shown above. Dropping the Computer Associates name from the logo was probably regarded as a minor adjustment. And as the internal rationale most likely went: competitors such as IBM, HP and BMC do just fine with initials, so why can’t we?

Well, disconnected from Computer Associates, CA becomes problematic for a number of reasons.

Unlike IBM, HP and BMC, ‘CA’ has no hard letter sounds. Consequently, CA it is not heard as two distinct initials, C and A. It is heard as ‘seeyay’.

Seeyay? Come again. Oh, you mean C and A, the old Computer Associates?

CA is nothing but a weak proxy for Computer Associates, a whiter shade of pale. It is too phonetically lightweight and nondescript as a name and simply not robust enough to acquire meaning of its own.

The other, not insignificant, problem – Google CA and up come pages of reference to California. CA means California first and foremost.

A new CEO brings in a new perspective. Bill McCracken decides change is necessary, and this time it will be based on research. Hence, the 700 insights Ms. Budnik mentioned. But they were probably given in response to a very specific question concerning the CA name, and very likely centering on preferences between modifiers, such as CA Software, CA Solutions and CA Technologies, etc.

Only in such a range of soft options could CA Technologies emerge as a winner. ‘Technologies’ is a verbal Band Aid and adds nothing other than a glottal stop to a very inadequate name.

Simpler options

This latest name change amounts to little more than fiddling around the problem, and in doing so CA creates another problem for itself.

In her statement, Ms. Budnik also said the name was “developed to ensure that we tell a consistent story in the market that reflects the full breadth and depth of what we offer.”

A redundant word in a name makes for inconsistency, not consistency. ‘Technologies’ is a such word. Lucent Technologies was always referred to just as Lucent, for example. No doubt CA Technologies will appear on things the company can control, such as corporate signage, stationery and collateral. But in all other cases it will be CA.  The company’s ticker symbol is still CA, it’s URL is still ca.com, and the company still defaults to CA in references to itself on its website. It will still be CA in headlines, analyst calls and in conversation. Where is the consistency?

Rather than finessing with the corporate name a simpler option would have been a tagline to anchor the name in some specificity for marketing purposes. EMC’s “Where information lives”, or GE’s “Imagination at work” are two of the better examples.

The better and braver option for Computer Associates would have been to change the name of the company in 2006 when it had reason and opportunity to, the accounting scandal apart. While Computer Associates’ success was built on mainframe software a different future beckons, one in which companies manage their technology in what the industry calls the “cloud.” The name should have claimed that future unequivocally.

JUST ADMIT IT BP, YOU’RE AN OIL COMPANY

 

“Yes, we are an oil company. But right now we are also providing natural gas, solar, hydrogen, geothermal. Because we live on this planet, too.”

No, this is not part of a mea culpa from BP. It’s a couple of lines from a Chevron ad, and one which BP would do well to consider emulating given the situation they are in.

With smart and refreshing directness, Chevron’s “Human Energy” TV ad from McGarry Bowen makes the case for oil and an oil company better than it has ever been made.

Actor Campbell Scott narrates the 150 second spot that unapologetically states Chevron’s case and its position in the global energy debate as an oil company searching for solutions.

“…today, tomorrow and the foreseeable future, our lives demand oil. But what’s also true is that we can provide it more intelligently, more efficiently, more respectfully”.

It is in marked contrast to BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign. Chevron seeks to explain and educate; BP tries to obfuscate.

The problem with the “Beyond Petroleum” campaign for me is that it has always smacked of rebranding spin. Why? Because BP is, undeniably, an oil company. And a very big one at that. Like Chevron, BP is one of the world’s six oil majors, along with ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Total of France.

Any attempt to deny that fact, or at least mask it, was bound to tempt fate in an industry in which major shit happens, as with the 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas, and the Alaska oil pipeline leak a year later. Now, with oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico unabated and officials giving no indication that the flow can be contained soon, BP is unfortunately up to its oily neck in an imminent environmental disaster. Any lingering credibility attached to its pretense of being an energy company that has gone beyond petroleum has been deep-sixed along with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Hold the oil

The “Beyond Petroleum” campaign was born opportunistically out of BP’s merger with Amoco in 1998.

Back then, BP was British Petroleum. After a brief but respectable period as BP Amoco, the company was recast in 2000 as plain BP. Replete with its elegant, Landor-designed sunburst logo, the intent was to send the message that the company was looking past oil and gas toward a benign, eco-friendly future of solar and renewable energy.

John Browne, the CEO at the time, wanted to position BP as a broader energy company, not just an oil company, ahead of the looming issues of climate change, energy security and supply scarcity. Just as all oil companies are now attempting to do, he saw it as a way to “gain a seat at the table, a chance to influence future rules.”

The slogan “Beyond Petroleum” was a clever if specious way of utilizing the initials ‘BP’ to emphasize they no longer stood for British Petroleum. “Better people, better products, big picture, beyond petroleum” went the alliterative mantra.

But idea was pushed way beyond the bounds of its limits.  BP’s ill-advised attempt to position itself beyond  the petroleum sector on the basis of its laudable but marginal investments in renewables is rather like China claiming to be “Beyond Communism” because it now owns capitalist Hong Kong. It is a huge stretch of a small, albeit desirable, truth.

How can an oil company be ”Beyond Petroleum” without actively distancing itself from its core product? It’s a very hard sell when your  logo is emblazoned on 10,000 gas stations in the US alone and the vast majority of your profits come from the black stuff.

BP has really tried to clean up its act over the last few years. How the company extricates itself from its current predicament will be proof enough of whether we are seeing a new BP.

One thing it can do is finally move beyond “Beyond Petroleum” and talk about the business it is in with conviction, not what business it isn’t in.