The key trends:

• Luxury design and luxury products are becoming more common at the mass level
• Actual luxury shoppers are searching for the truly unique
• Relationship is of growing importance
• Design plays a key role in brand relationships

For more on luxury branding:  http://www.levinedesigngroup.com/

Naming as a descriptive exercise has fallen away in favor of naming that seeks to persuade. Yet, in choosing persuasive names, politicians sacrifice clarity. The WJS blog quotes an expert at legislation naming Brian Christopher Jones as saying, “For a long time, bill titles and the United States Code fended this [affliction] off, and you could have a reasonable short title that could inform a legislator or a member of the public as to what the bill is in reference to. Nowadays, you could read the title and have absolutely no idea what the bill is about.”

Beyond sacrificing clarity, crafty naming can also sacrifice integrity. I’ve covered doublespeak in previous posts, both as a political tool and a commercial tool.  A few examples:

Toyota spins “recalls: into “special service campaigns”

When “reconciliation” becomes a new way to fight–political doublespeak

In the hands of government regulators “neutrality” is anything but

In an ideal world, language, even marketing language is honest, clear and persuasive. Sadly, the trend is in the other direction. Still, brands and politicians both should think twice before pulling something clever. Trust is hard to earn and easy to destroy.

Don’t do this to your brand:

Brands should take notice: How your people look conveys a powerful brand message.

“A company that has employees meeting the public must realize that what they convey about the brand is just as important—if not more important—than the logo,” says New York-based business consultant Rob DeRocker. I talked to Rob after The Financial Times interviewed him for an article on dress codes.

I thought back to last year when my computer blew up while I was traveling. I had to get it fixed fast. I found a small local shop manned by guys with tattered t-shirts and plenty of body piercings. They were probably talented computer nerds, but I ended up in the safe environs of Best Buy, with their well-groomed and uniformed staff.

Ensuring staff conveys the brand with their grooming and dress can take many forms:

• UBS has a 43-page dress code that gets into the details of how men should knot their ties and what color underwear women should wear. Too detailed? Maybe for some, but it might be just right for a Swiss bank.

• The Hooters brand aims to be “delightfully tacky yet unrefined,” and that requires a very specific dress code that specifies flesh colored nylons at all times, no body piercings or tattoos and no bra straps hanging out or visible midriffs. Shorts must “not be so tight that the buttocks show.” Hooters even has a Web site devoted to achieving the ultimate Hooter-Girl look—be advised that the content is mostly pictures.

• TGI Friday’s brand spirit of employees having as much fun as their customers with “an attitude of serious showmanship” was famously lampooned in the movie Office Space where the waitress character said, “We’re, uh, we’re actually required to wear fifteen pieces of flair…I, uh, I just grabbed fifteen buttons and, uh, I don’t even know what they say! Y’know, I don’t really care. I don’t really like talking about my flair.”

Dress codes can be controversial. Disney is still locked in a legal dispute with an employee who wants to wear a hijab to work. Disney’s position is that employees are entertainers portraying characters and types. The dispute is ongoing. One wonders what will happen when the employee portraying Snow White wants to wear a burka.

Company dictates on fashion are not merely about looking nice; they are about conveying brand. The human interaction experience has far greater impact on making a brand impression than the logo, name, color scheme, typography, etc. As Rob says, “People ultimately do business with people.”

Wikileaks Logo

The New York Times is reporting that Bank of America was threatened by Julian Assange with a promise to bring them down and expose “the ecosystem of corruption.” The company is trying to get a jump on the crisis by finding out where they are exposed, how they are exposed, and what will be exposed. Their expensive counterespionage team is conducting a massive document review, investigating every lost, stolen, or missing computer, and crafting a security, operational, and brand reputation response. What should you do to be wikiready for a Wikileaks attack?

Don’t Be Evil

Google’s informal corporate motto may be derided, but it is one everyone should adopt. Even before Wikileaks, our “information wants to be free” world had become too transparent for companies, governments, executives and politicians to have a realistic expectation that their actions can stay hidden. The days when a president like FDR could keep his wheelchair secret or a senator like Chris Dodd could conceal his sweetheart Countryside mortgage deal are long gone. Task one for companies seeking protection from a Wikileaks-type assault is to avoid doing anything that would be embarrassing or damaging when made public (not if). Know that someone is always watching.

Fix The Problem First

If Wikileaks is going to reveal something damaging, fix it. Too many marketing and public relations people go into damage control mode, controlling damage to a brand reputation before fixing what is causing the damage. This kind of response is worse than counter-productive. BP doubled-down on the harm to its brand by trying to protect its reputation while the oil spewed. Focus on fixing the problem, not on minimizing the problem or on issuing defensive message. Honesty and transparency can be painful, but brands that respond this way do bounce back. Admit, apologize, atone–and don’t do it again. People won’t forget, but they will forgive.

The Bigger the Brand the Bigger the Target

Last week, I wrote on the expanding role of brands. No longer are they strictly commercial expressions. Brands are increasingly co-opted for larger economic, social and political debates. If you have a powerful brand, be ready for that power to get turned against you. Big brands are highly vulnerable to security breaches from:

• Lost laptops or laptops left in places where others could quickly download information to a portable hard drive while you are out getting coffee
• Data sent to outsiders by disgruntled employees—or customers
• Data in the hands of outsiders who may not protect it adequately (Bank of America’s data may have escaped from the documents given to the Securities and Exchange Commission, congressional investigators and the New York attorney general’s office, though those organizations naturally deny it)
• Old fashioned hacking–like the coordinated cyber-attack on 2500 companies in 196 countries that began back in 2008 and continued for years (finally revealed publicly in February 2010)
• DNS attacks that can bring down a Web site like Mastercard’s
• Co-opting of a brand to make a political statement (think McMansions or Disneyification)

Be Ready

If you have a valuable brand, digital vandalism, a wikileaks assault, or cyber-attack is a matter of when, not if. Have your communications infrastructure in place and operating. USAir and Continental didn’t seem to know how to use Facebook or Twitter before or immediately after their plane crashes. BP used one-way corporate-speak on Twitter and Facebook and were more than one step behind on YouTube.

Reconciliation Seems a Strategically Fitting Name
On the face of it, calling the processes of passing the healthcare bill with 51 votes “Reconciliation” seems like a good naming choice. For a country hungry purportedly hungry for bi-partisanship, the meanings of that name are a strong strategic fit. Reconciliation means bringing differences into harmony, settling disputes, becoming friends again. But in Congress, Reconciliation is just another way to fight.

Dictionary Definitions Don’t Matter in Naming
But marketers know that the actual definition of a name doesn’t mean a thing. It is the associations that matter. Over the course of the last several months, the parliamentary process called “Reconciliation” has become associated with strong-arm tactics, a my-way-or-the-highway arrogance, shutting out the opposition, even “Rahm-ming It Through” or the “Nuclear Option.” The real world meaning Reconciliation has come to mean the opposite of the dictionary meaning. Hence the strategic need to rename.

Rhetorical Benefits of the New Name “Simple Majority”.
The rhetorical benefits of the new name for passing healthcare through parliamentary maneuver are many. “Simple” means:

• Easy to understand
• Not artificial
• Modest
• Uncomplicated
• Free of deceit

These are great associations for a complex, contentious bill topping 2000 pages that few have read and ever fewer understand. Even better, these meanings try to free the strategy from the complexity and cynicism of back room deals and the intricate rules of Congress. Add the basic playground fairness of “majority rules” to the idea of “Simple Majority”, and it looks like you’ve got a winning name.

Genuine Name or Doublespeak
Naming works when it is genuine. Marketers—and politicians are marketers as much as they are anything—do long-term irreparable damage to their reputations and their ability to earn profits (or votes) when they fail to be truthful. When naming descends to doublespeak, the brand suffers. Just ask Richard Nixon, King of Doublespeak, who will be forever known as Tricky Dick and worse.

In his groundbreaking book Doublespeak, author William Lutz defines doublespeak as language that misleads rather than leads, that pretends to communicate, but really doesn’t, that tries to avoid or shift responsibility, and communication that conceals, limits and prevents thought. Not a wise strategy for brand building.

People are cynical, connected, informed and empowered to broadcast their opinions far and wide. Companies are rapidly learning there is no place to hide and that doublespeak hurts. People will find your missteps and “misspeaks” quickly and will spread the news at warp speed. Just ask Toyota suffering from their mishandled approach to recalls, and Apple on new information of underage workers at their manufacturing plants in China.

Brands that lie can lose market share. Politicians can lose elections. Rather than being smart strategy, healthcare strategists might just be underestimating voters and outsmarting themselves.