Author: dtpennington

  • I only work with punks

    I only work with punks

    At the outset of any business is this feeling, this dread, like if you say “no” to something you might watch the only revenue walk out the door. The default mode for just about every American is one of scarcity.

    In a land of plenty, you had best bend over backward for your fair share!

    This is not a sustainable way to do anything. Eventually you start to hate everything and find yourself crawling back to the shelter of the corporate world. At least, here, you don’t have to choose who you get to work with.

    It’s just a job; you can go home at the end of the day.

    When you mention “punk” the kneejerk is universal: “You ain’t punk man, you a fuckin’ poser.”

    Apologies – egg whites are getting too expensive to keep my liberty spikes prim and proper. My nose ring is a paper clip and it sort of falls out when I sleep. When you turn 40, sleeping in the gutter ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

    I’m in bed by 10, friends.

    Still, I’d rather only work with punks – as clients or collaborators – because it makes for a better world. It’s more or less what OutWord is built on – look at you: you are punk.

    You are welcome here.

    This isn’t about mohawks and safety pins or thrashing chords and mosh pits. This is about the other, the counter, the friction. Every generation has its punks.

    But this isn’t about fellating Sid Vicious or cutting new holes in the Misfit’s shirt that you picked up from Target. It’s not about the music. You can be punk and jam out to Bad Brains or to Taylor Swift. I don’t care…and that’s the point.

    Punk is a mindset. Punk is a way of being. This is what I look for when I say, I only work with punks.

    Mindsets and Methods

    The punk says, fuck this. They look at what the world is offering and laughs. Our surroundings are built for the many to squash the few. We are flattened and homogenous – there are no surprises in this world.

    Because when everybody looks the same, we get tired of looking at each other. Make your own clothes when nothing on the rack fits. When the radio sucks you shut it off and whistle your own tune.

    Write the books you want to read. Say the things you wish you heard from others.

    This is the mindset: do what isn’t being done for the people who want something else. Do it for the people who have yet to realize there is another way. Show your little slice of the world that there is a different way of doing, being.

    Your company, industry, competition – it is an establishment that breeds your friction, your resistance. Why not be the sugar in the gas tank of the steamroller that only exists to make the world flat and easy?

    There are no best practices, there are only people who are starving for what you have to offer. A punk feels this, knows this, and wants nothing more than to do something about it.

    punks in business

    A business can be punk until it establishes a hierarchy. Once you can say “I am more important than the next person,” you lose.

    The headlines are full of “alternative” executives who claim to be rewriting the playbook on how things should be done in the world of business. I say: unless you’re willing to give everything up to elevate every person in your company above you, sit down and shut up.

    You don’t hire me and I don’t take you on as a client. This is a collaboration. Knot your tie, follow your agenda, and call me when you’re ready to break something.

    No Employees

    OutWord will never have employees. Yes, I want this to grow, but not if it cannot sustain itself and the people connected to it.

    I want more people to discover a totally different way of doing business…but I’ll be damned if I am in the place where I’m assigning work to others. Again: collaboration. You show me how it looks and I’ll help it in any way I can.

    No due dates. No boxes to check.

    I’m not hiring people to do things. I’m building a stage with a microphone and a big-ass PA system. I want to bring in outside acts who have something they want to share, who need a place to grow.

    I don’t need someone who will write what I ask. I want people who know how to grow.

    This is an opportunity.

    Drop out. Step aside from the race. Cut a new path. The opportunity is in what’s next, and you get to decide what that gets to be. If you have that feeling in your gut, go with it.

    I’m just here to show you where that feeling can take you.

  • Kill The Brand

    Kill The Brand

    “Te apetece otra copa, amigo mío?” Alberto asks.

    “Ci, cerveza por pavor.”

    “Modelo, Corona, Pacifico, Sol?” the names flow off his tongue, a menu he recites two hundred times a day. This is a paradox of choice, isn’t it? Four names, four brands, one option — pale Mexican Lager. Forget the blind taste tests, no one can pick one beer out from another in this lineup.

    Same goes for any beer. Bud and Coors and Miller. Strip three IPAs of their labels and it’s anyone’s guess. The exception, I suppose, is Guiness.

    You always know it’s Guinness.

    In a world defined by brands, there is no choice and there is no “best.” The more precious a company is with their branding, the shittier their product ends up being.

    Hear me out, follow along.

    A decade ago I was contracted to write copy for a marketing agency on behalf of a celebrity brand. It’s a celebrity you know and probably see a dozen times during the commercials of any major sports broadcast. Back then he was pushing a performance supplement that would, as the benefits stated, give you “better workouts, faster reflexes, and quicker recovery.”

    I asked the director in charge of the project, “What’s different about his product? Like, what makes it special?”

    “Beyond him? Nothing. It’s just a B-12 vitamin.”

    The same B-12 you can buy at your supermarket, 160 tablets for ten bucks. Or, you could subscribe to the exclusive membership tier and receive 30 doses a month for just $79.95.

    When a brand reaches a certain value, there’s no point in creating a new product. Why innovate when your audience will buy whatever you slap your name on?

    This same celebrity also shit out a line of fast fashion, a fitness app, and some kind of teeth-whitening product. All of it a waste of time. He probably makes more cash with one movie than you or I will ever see in ten lifetimes.

    Coke and Pepsi are essentially the same company shilling the same product. You’re buying the brand. Tesla is a brand with name recognition and a loyal fanbase even though their flagship product is rusting in the streets. Every few weeks some marketing chump publishes something like “here’s why Apple is the gold standard of all things Branding” even though they haven’t evolved their product as you might expect from a 40+ year old company.

    Try as they might, no one is making anything new or interesting. When the brand is valuable enough, they don’t have to.

    Costco white labels major products (Duracell, Huggies, Starbucks) with the Kirkland logo and sells it at a wholesale discount to its members. It’s the exact same stuff without the brand you know. Amazon’s Basics white labels generic products with the goal of undercutting competitors in items most commonly bought in bulk.

    Is any of this a bad thing? Only when the brand is more valuable than the product they are selling.

    Strip away the colors and the logos and pretty much every new car model looks the same. Cut the tags and labels and you will never know the difference between one t-shirt and the next.

    It gets worse when it trickles down to the small business level. We’re in this weird time where every business owner feels like they are in competition with the majors — because they are. At the very least, you’re competing with everyone in your field with a bigger following and flashier branding. But the song remains the same: the more precious the branding, the shittier the product tends to be.

    Consider the “marketing experts” who want to sell you a course. Naturally, it sells like gang busters because they are marketing experts selling a thing. Everyone wants to quit their life, sell a widget, and live by the pool. But these “experts” are business owners, not teachers. They’re more interested in conversions than education. The product is, always, trash.

    The Fuckin’ Point

    When the Pacifico runs out, Corona does just fine.

    “Is Pepsi OK?” Yeah, sure. Whatever.

    Because the cats at the very top of the ladder, the marketing execs who have endless budgets, think the end all be all is to achieve brand loyalty. I’d rather die of thirst than drink the other soda!

    But this isn’t the case, is it?’

    When you stop innovating a product, you end up relying way too much on the branding. You can have the prettiest, most precious logo and color scheme and ethos behind your brand, but it’s all for shit if you’re not solving a problem.

    A company fails when they keep taking your money even though the problem is no longer resolved. When the problem kept growing and the product stayed the same, leaving all the brands to pose the question: how much market share can we not help today?

    In other words: make something that works. Make something that helps. Make something good. Do that first, do that always.

    The brand will find its way.

  • Innovation? Dead

    Innovation? Dead

    Every so often there is a huge event hosted by Apple where they wheel out all the stuff they’ve been working on, because of course they do. It’s marketing — invite a ton of press to an event and they’ll write up all kinds of content about what’s about to hit the market. Apple takes the initial reactions from this press to fine-tune the product before it gets released.

    In the early days, these events were loaded with the Apple Fanboys — the original draft of the modern-day nerd who spent a lot of time thinking about computers and all the custom stuff you could do with them. Apple stans are still around but they are more about flexing the expensive stuff they can afford as Apple isn’t exactly known for their custom builds.

    This year’s event they announced that the iPad would finally get a calculator app. Mind you, this is the same vent they announced the iPod and iPhone at years ago — stuff that changed the world.

    Also: you can now schedule when iMessages are sent and place app icons anywhere on the screen. Not to brag, but I’ve been doing this on my not-apple phone for years.

    This is what passes for innovation. No wonder people are keeping their tech for longer — there’s nothing worth upgrading for. It says a lot when the biggest competitor digital camera companies are facing is film. Or that there is a YEARS long wait to get your record produced and pressed on vinyl.

    And as much as I love rolling with anecdotal observations, people who are way smarter than I are observing it in real time. “Economists have long struggled to understand why aggregate productivity growth has dropped in recent decades while the number of new patents filed has steadily increased. I offer an explanation for this puzzling divergence: the creativity embodied in US patents has dropped dramatically over time.”

    Innovation was never about technology. Innovation is about challenging the way you think in a world that fetishizes the status quo. Innovation is about doing something wholly new and insane and “you can’t be serious…” but yeah, I am, and I can see that it is making you a bit nervous.

    Instead, we have this “innovation” to see who can find ways of making stuff quickly and cheaply to extort the largest profit margins from a population who is making do with the “whatever” options they get served. Nothing is new, nothing is innovative. There is nothing on the horizon that will change the way we live like the iPhone did. And don’t come at me with the headset tech or the AI stuff we’re kicking around, they are little more than the same ideas in a different suit.

    I think, I know, we fear creativity. The true, base, archetypal drive to create something unique from the way we observe the world. There is no room to think expansively, nowhere to do it safely, and no audience we can trust with genuinely new ideas. I can’t blame you. In centuries past those with the “new ideas” were thrown off boats, to the wolves, or torched at the stake. Today, we risk unemployment and homelessness which I think is far more horrifying than having your guts dragged out by a wolf.

    And it’s not just you and the hobby you’re avoiding. It is everywhere. From the stockroom to the executive suite, creativity doesn’t happen when there are monthly revenue goals and quarterly quotas. If a campaign is yielding a 5% conversion rate and your profit margin is perfectly balanced, why would you want to change a damn thing? A creative risk could mean a drop in performance or a loss of customers. Then again, it could also mean discovering the next iPhone.