Blue smoke.

Back in 1996, one of my first roommates was Steve, an ex-Coast Guardie with a great dry sense of humor. When my Dell grayscale laptop booted up quickly one day only to be slow the next, he would joke, “blue smoke man, blue smoke. There’s no real reason to why computers function good or bad–it’s all up to the blue smoke inside.” Steve’s experience in the Coast Guard had meant that he spent some time in isolation with engineers and techies. They told him their legend and joke: That blue smoke is the magic stuff inside computers that makes the cyber world go round.

The nerds got it wrong: Blue smoke has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with marketing. Blue smoke is the stuff inside brands that helps them take the same exact product from two different companies and make one stand out: Be higher quality, less disposable, stratospherically expensive. New unpublished research shows that brands don’t just determine value in the world of retail, but even extend online to shape the information that we consume.

There’s nothing to brands, really. They’re intangible, and like blue smoke they dissipate with the wave of a marketer’s hand. Yet it’s undeniable that a brand adds value to a product. The most basic example of this is any article of clothing sold by Nike: How much will you really pay for that T-Shirt? Most people will pay more simply because it has a swoosh on it. For some reason they value that T-Shirt more, justifying the price to themselves because the clothing is a “better” piece of technical equipment, less likely to degrade, uses nicer organic cotton, is cooler-looking, etc.  So how does this kind of concept extend to the online world and the information that we consume?

Bharat Anand and Alexsander Rosinski of Harvard (as discussed in “The Power of Branding to Validate, Chrysthia Freeland, March 25′s New York Times) took a news piece about Greek public finances, used a sample size of 700 and asked their subjects to give it a quality score. They made two kinds of modifications in their experiment:

1. Showed the online content under three different brands: As Unlabeled, from The Huffington Post or The Economist;
2. Later added advertising, showing the  piece with either “cheap” or “good” ads alongside the content

What happened? In short, the quality of the piece changed according to the brand which stood behind it: It was higher-quality if branded under  The Economist, decent if it came from The Huffington Post, and a distant third if unlabeled. The quality score results are in the first column below.

Consider what this means: Readers online aren’t really objective or thinking critically. We all might want to be, but to some extent our opinion about the content has already been shaped by the brand and other tangential factors, like advertising. Readers found it annoying to see ads alongside the article when looking at the content under the brand of The Economist. This was even if the ads shown were for regular advertisers associated with the magazine and website, like Jaguar and Credit Suisse (per Freeland). If the ads were “cheap” the perception was even worse, transforming The Economist’s quality level essentially into that of The Huffington Post. In contrast, advertising was a net benefit for unlabeled content, conferring legitimacy on an unknown brand.

There are two lessons here, one for the online world and one for the workplace. Today we are all consumers of vast quantities of information online, to an extent far more so than ever before. The intuitive leap I’m taking is to say that the scrutiny and critical thinking we apply to what we read has declined by orders of magnitude. We simply consume too much information, at too high of speeds to say otherwise. So, recognize that you are not as discerning nor as objective as you think. The quality of what you read will depend upon the brand associated with it, and even the tangential things that occur: The annoying video ad you have to watch before you can read beyond the headline, the site that has linked to the content you’re reading.

The second lesson is for the nonmarketers out there. In the workplace, stop grimacing when marketers go off into brandland and start discussing intangibles. Believe me, I know it’s frustrating and annoying. Even I’ve wanted to run out of a room at times and build a spreadsheet just to get back to something concrete. But the marketers have a point. When they talk about brand attributes, values, consistency and architecture, the transference of legitimacy—all those ethereal things–that’s what makes up the blue smoke, my friends. Those are the factors that actually help create the brand, which then shapes vision and perception. Whether a person is trying to buy a new pair of shoes or think critically about Greek public finance, brand matters.

Brands are shaping your vision everywhere, all the time.

PS–Two things. One, I wrote “degrades*”  in some cells in the table because unfortunately, other quality scores were not available in Freeland’s source piece. Two, I find it amusing that Freeland’s column was published not only as a New York Times piece, but as a blog post for Reuters, a piece for Canada’s CTV, Globe and Mail, and Ireland’s Examiner. We live in a world that craves content and her article was syndicated; so the writer who points out that brand affects content quality is herself going through that very phenomenon with her work.

The way you handled Alderaan was bad enough. Now we find out you're a Raider fan too?

Darth Vader had a great play in Super Bowl XLV. If you missed it, it’s probably because you got up during the commercials. Vader wasn’t anywhere on the field, but instead showed up to lend his adorable visage in a Volkswagen commercial. And yet it was more than Vader’s celebrity power that helped him push the ad for the new Jetta to success. What really made the difference was that the VW spot made great use of music to hold the viewer’s attention and get its message across.

Last week my team at IE Business School discussed how to use music effectively in advertising. Our argument: To be effective, marketers using ads need to keep in mind that music communicates meaning to its audience in two ways, independently and contextually. Play with that, and you’re playing with power. Independently means that the very nature of the music itself–the tempo, key, rhythms, tone–communicates meaning to listeners absent of anything else. If you were blindfolded and listened to Mars, the Bringer of War by Holst, you would know it sets an ominous tone, even if you’re unaware of the title. For a contrary example, play Groove is in the Heart by Dee-Lite and it’s clear that even without the lyrics it sets the toe tapping.

Our team–Laura Bozzano, Daniela Mora and myself–didn’t come up with this on our own. We were inspired by a series of six talks that Boston composer Leonard Bernstein gave at his alma mater, Harvard, back in the 1970s. Entitled The Unanswered Question, Bernstein started off the series of lectures exploring as to whether music can be like language. Do we all have a built-in, independent faculty to understand and interpret it? Regardless of culture, can music alone carry its meaning completely independently of context? Possibly. Examples Bernstein used in his companion book include how notes which ascend can sound like a question–mimicking the interrogative–how pentatonic scales are found in most world cultures, and how children from different cultures often sing the “Na-na-neee-naaaa-naaaaa” song when they play games. Here’s Bernstein using this concept to analyze the meaning of Beethoven’s music:

As for the second way that music communicates, it’s the other side of the coin: Not what the music communicates on its own, but it’s really about the power of what the audience brings to the piece, the contextual meaning. Think about it: We bring a lot of baggage with us when we listen to a piece of music. You might consider who the composer is, the significance of the lyrics, your personal history or a cultural background as you listen. A song recorded by Kanye West might make you expect inventiveness and hubris; listening to Jack and Diane by John Mellencamp might make you think of love (via the lyrics) or the first dance you went to in high school (via your personal history). Consider that this latter example is completely culturally related; if someone from Bulgaria happens to hear Jack and Diane, some of the American cultural contextual meaning is probably lost, and the music only retains its independent meaning.

And yet music can have a global context. The best example comes not from our hyperconnected world, but from the 1970s: Play just four seconds of  The Imperial March by John Williams, and most people with even a slight exposure to pop culture will know exactly that the song came from Star Wars. They may even picture Darth Vader walking down a hallway, striding with purpose. Without its context of appearing in Star Wars, as a musical piece The Imperial March would have far less significance. Yet independently, it of course serves its purpose, and like Holst’s Mars imparts a sense of foreboding in the listener.

But for Volkswagen, that independent meaning was less important than the contextual. It was the latter element that Volkswagen played with brilliantly in their ad: The music started. We knew we were going to be somewhere related to the Star Wars universe, we knew that it would probably involve Darth Vader. What we didn’t know was that it would be completely adorable. The ad is successful in that it grabs our attention by playing with our contextual expectations. We don’t have Vader walking around destroying things, we have a little boy who wants to bend the force to his will, but with no luck. And somehow along the way, the Jetta is not only put on display for us to enjoy, but is shown as a car that will fulfill the American family’s needs. It even has a mean-sounding engine underneath the hood.

I can’t find anything wrong with this ad. It’s pure genius. And yet there was one advertisement in Superbowl XLV that was better at getting its point across, that made an even better use of music. That’s coming up in Part II of this blog post, so stay tuned.