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JY&A Consulting
http://jya.net/consulting

Starting the axis of good

By viewing al-Qaeda as a brand, it doesn’t seem as daunting—and that its communication techniques can equally be used for good

Jack Yan
Jack Yan is founder and CEO of Jack Yan & Associates and president of JY&A Consulting.

LAST MONTH, I gave the end-of-year address for the Australian Graphic Design Association’s Victoria state chapter in Melbourne. Most of what I said was intended to inspire. With an audience from many design companies and Futurebrand, I felt it would be interesting to revisit the cyclical nature of branding—and how not much has changed since Naomi Klein penned No Logo.
   In the wake of No Logo, many of us in the branding profession protested, but on most counts, she was right. Window-dressing had made unethically produced goods palatable, while the gap between rich and poor widened globally. But while Klein’s motivations were right, she offered few solutions. So some of us, spurred by the lack of response, came up with Beyond Branding in 2003, answering No Logo.
   But for all the shouting, the business world of 2004 looks much like the business world of 2000. There remains an over-reliance on how the Dow behaves. The indices on measuring companies have not really changed, despite gallant efforts. And one book that has managed to secure a populist audience, Lovemarks, doesn’t really advance the game at all.
   The window-dressing continues. BP has a nice, flowery logo. But it’s to be expected. I asked the Australian audience to cast their minds back to the late 1980s with the Shell logo. It was designed in the 1970s, when geometry and hardness were the rage. The BBC documentary, Design Classics, said that the Shell logo would not make it through the 1990s because it was a more caring decade that demanded softer forms. If anything, the 1990s were even more selfish: Melrose Place, while fictional, indulged in bed-hopping for ratings, while Clinton-era excesses ensured killings on the stock market for anyone clever enough to invest and retreat in the dot com period, but it certainly wasn’t about caring for others. Arnold Schwarzenegger made much of it in his attacks on Gov Gray Davis of California was he ran for the office: California had out-spent itself. Keeping up with the Joneses, surpassing them, and then ensuring they were subservient to you as you gazed down from your Lincoln Navigator (or a Hummer, in the case of Gov Schwarzenegger), was the pastime of the decade, well beyond what any Filofax-armed yuppie could indulge in during the 1980s.
   They used to say it took us 15 years to forget our lessons, but judging by the global economy right now, we’ve forgotten in fewer than five. The pressing problem of 2005 does appear to be the gap between rich and poor, something I want to address through one of our programmes next year. While the rich and the poor have all become richer, if the conservative media are correct, the gap has widened. In there lies the seeds of envy, and potentially of terrorism. I have always believed, without having actually visited the territory, that the enemy of freedom and liberty is not a young Palestinian strapping himself to a bomb and blowing up a dozen Jews. Call me an internet idealist, who started off in the early 1990s believing this medium had the chance to unite all peoples, but whenever I email folks in Syria or Iran, their desires are much the same as mine. And those desires, if you must put a name to them, may be summarized as the American Dream. Or the Australian Dream. Or the New Zealand Dream. Whatever the name, it means the opportunity to be all you can be, to the greatest level of self-actualization.
   But what chances are there of the Dream if there is oppression, corruption or a lack of freedom? I refer not to civil liberties or the Bill of Rights, but basic things such as freedom of movement and capital. I refer not solely to places that the western media like talking about as inferior—North Korea, Fallujah or Zaïre—but much of the west, too. The idealist in me says we all have a right to live our greatest potential.
   There are many ways that one can realize this potential. The Bush administration would argue that its actions in Iraq are the methods. Others would disagree, believing that naturally, this demand would be there and softer approaches in diplomacy would work. I rest somewhere in between: preferring the latter (wouldn’t most of us?), all while wondering if we were being diplomatic to someone who didn’t understand diplomacy, then being forced with a very difficult decision. Whatever one’s ideology, the tools are already there. And it may involve the internet once again as the great democratizer, the great conversation-starter of the planet.
   I have confidence that the internet may still unite. Next year, I finally hope to realize my dream of creating a global forum for businesses, to help narrow the income gap. The technology has been on the server for two years, awaiting a colleague’s book to come out in paperback and pushing the lot out there into the world. I might do it without his book, and see where things lead.
   I am confident not because of any example from the dot-com era, most of which were designed to absorb money, but because we have all already seen the same tools employed in the quest of evil.
   The Madrid bombings were activated by cellphones, which have become very effective and cheap detonators. Nine-eleven, meanwhile, could only have worked because terrorists employed the very tools of prosperity and progress to do everything from unload shares in American airlines to keeping in touch with one another via email.
   We may well be able to use the same tools for good and see just how al-Qaeda and the like can be dismantled.
   For al-Qaeda is a brand.

IT IS A DISCOMFORTING THOUGHT to consider that the west’s enemy can be thought of as a brand. It is not unprecedented. The Third Reich’s swastika remains one of the most powerful symbols; its propaganda and use of media equalled only by the richest Superbowl-advertising corporations today. One reason the Third Reich’s "brand" fails modern scrutiny is that it would be impossible to have a consistent brand message: if it existed today, there would be enough dissenters in niche media to make many outside Germany question its motives. In the 1930s, distance and ignorance helped Hitler and his cronies kill millions before anyone took notice.
   I am no student of history and doubtless the above can be critiqued fairly easily, but I believe that al-Qaeda does have more of the hallmarks of a modern brand.
   Originally I said this in jest in Australia, where I even showed a bottle of bin Laden cologne on a slide. Some companies would have to wait a long time, with a lot of brand-building, before considering the extension into fragrances. While I am sure that bin Laden’s toilet water does not pay a royalty to terrorism for every bottle sold in Karachi, Pakistan, the issue is that it exists and it is a sign of the widespread nature of the brand. Indeed, its possible independence from al-Qaeda is symptomatic of a 21st century brand, where consultants such as myself have argued that modern brands must belong to the people. Everyone can use Linux, for instance; bloggers who use Blogger.com can show the company’s logo on their sites. Anything with a sense of community, be it dot-com-boom period or post-boom, permits the use of their logo, with a link usually, to show that while legally one company may hold a trademark, it is co-opted by others. The rule of consistency no longer applies when Google, surely one of the hottest brands of the century, plays with its own logotype and adds cartoon characters to it for special occasions.
   Other hallmarks of al-Qaeda as brand appear in the way the organization is structured. My staff keep telling me not to draw parallels between my companies and a group devoted to evil, but as someone who began a virtual company in the 1980s, I can see these ideas being used for the wrong reasons. Mr Kalishnikov, at his recent 85th birthday party, felt the same way about his clientèle being very different to what he envisaged, though if you are to make a gun, there’s less doubt over what people would wind up doing with it. What I am certain about is that I have had no contact with terrorists, bar one taxi driver in Auckland who told me that 9-11 was an American frame-up and recalled parts of propagandist web sites about spiders in the Middle East that only bit Americans and killed them. One can safely assume that al-Qaeda arrived at its virtual organization structure and methods independently and naturally—which is why I believe the same can be used for good.
   Al-Qaeda has a leader who sets an overall policy for the organization. Being a first-generation firm, such as Virgin, it is hard to separate the leader from the organization. Individual strategic business units—or ‘cells’ as they prefer to be called—are not scrutinized by head office heavily, yet are given autonomy to pursue their targets in line with the vision, necessary in collaborative, virtual cultures. Each conducts research into how their actions might be perceived by their target audiences. Brand communications are left to head office, including promotions and press announcements, rather than each SBU, ensuring consistency with the vision again. This leads to a generally consistent image for the organization: its primary home audience and staff believing one thing (although its secondary audience believes the exact opposite, something that brands do not usually achieve).
   What al-Qaeda dispenses with are aspects of visual communications, with its web sites—from what I can tell on television—having a do-it-yourself feel. But like Klein’s No Logo web site, that encourages community, because of the ground-floor nature of the venture. Like some pyramid schemes, al-Qaeda has operation manuals and, disturbingly, records video tapes of targets that can be distributed for further "staff training". Partner organizations happily proclaim the association through co-branding, as Jemaah Islamiah has done.
   The brand of the virtual organization should bear most of these characteristics, but instead of cells committing atrocities, they can be promoting good. In poorer regions, cells can be forming meetings and cooperatives, going on the internet as a group to seek advice to help export their products to the west. That alone can begin to funnel western-style funds into poorer communities. These things are already happening, without a unified front like that of al-Qaeda: there are countless programmes out there from PeopleTree and Gabriel Scarvelli that are ensuring the growth and prosperity of many communities involved in the fashion business. Dilmah Teas, an example I gave at AGDA, sees its founder donating money to build hospitals, churches and schools. A single vision, a single brand-communication unit, cohesive communications and a strong mantra are really the ingredients the virtual organization requires, presenting a front to its audiences. Allowing community to flourish within the organization, with co-branding as one tool by partner firms or affiliates, such as that of Amazon.com’s affiliate programme, enhances the brand further, giving each partner a feeling of ownership. Much is tied together by the World Wide Web.
   The trouble, and boon, of virtual organizations is that they can exist anywhere. They hinge on the corporate office a great deal: remove it and there is nothing creating consistency, or holding the group together. What happens afterwards is one of two things: if the brand was strongly ingrained into its members, then the organization may well continue, with similar cultures at each unit. The dismantling of Ma Bell was one example. If the brand was more weakly held, then the organization will lose direction and fade away, just like so many internet start-ups that never did much for their cultures and focused too much on securing venture capital.
   Culture is why al-Qaeda retains its fascination by the media and many of the public. The US Government may be right when it says that three-quarters of al-Qaeda has been destroyed, but the brand has its loyalists and its detractors. Individual cells are still doing their ugly business in its name.
   What the US Government might be considering now, as it hunts for Usama bin Laden, is how strongly the brand is held by cells and their members, though not in such business terms. But thinking of it as a business and in brand creation terms may help put it into context.
   Al-Qaeda’s greatest rival is not another terrorist group that could steal its members, because it can easily say the other group is an ally. The red brigades of the 1970s, with their connections to anyone from Col Gaddafi to the KGB, managed their relationships accordingly. Al-Qaeda’s greatest threat is an organization that targets the same audiences with the opposite message: one of hope and peace.
   However, if there was hope, al-Qaeda would not have attracted its members. But a group that is dedicated to encouraging that "Dream" amongst the citizenry, starting off small (as the cells did) and finding paths to prosperity, may be the catalyst to winning the war on terror.
   Al-Qaeda the brand exists as partly a cause-driven one: remove the cause (anti-American-imperalism), it can no longer stand. It becomes, instead, an institution. It is when the active, virtual organization becomes over-institutionalized in its processes that it sinks into being an anachronism, archaic and ineffective. The other limb is in the leadership, because it has become too closely identified with Usama bin Laden. His removal has an equivalent in a hypothetical (at least for the immediate term) Virgin plc without Richard Branson.

WE THEN COME BACK to a discussion about what the first world is doing to help the second and third. While it pollutes or abuses workers, then it is going to win no friends. Hearts and minds are won not by propaganda, but by real changes. That means fair wages and living the environmental policies that companies proclaim. That means overturning the culture of greed and rises in the Dow Jones that have nothing to do with a firm’s value. Indeed, we come back to 2001 and 2002, when I wrote of "moral globalization".
   This can still be achieved, by the smallest groups. Most will now be familiar with the story of Spaceship One, a spaceship created by a private group on a shoestring budget (relatively speaking, compared with NASA’s). On a more down-to-earth level, al-Qaeda got to where it is with a tiny budget, too: bin Laden may have a quarter-billion-dollar war chest but it is meagre compared with nations’. So the good—groups that drive capital to those who might otherwise be tempted to commit atrocities, giving them a chance of true, productive self-actualization—can also be accomplished with a clever use of the World Wide Web and access to information. If destruction can be achieved, then global construction can, too. All it needs is leadership, which many of us are prepared to give. I still believe in my forum idea and if I can lead a virtual organization for 17 years, I can give this one a shot, too.
   Remove the conditions of envy, create the conditions of hope, and the tools of evil can become the tools of good. Idealism? Perhaps. Attainable? Watch this space. •

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References
Yan: ‘The moral globalist’, CAP Online, May 2, 2001
Allan: ‘Well Beyond Branding’, CAP Online, November 20, 2003
No Logo web site
Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA)

	Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003, 236 pp. $39·95
	Anholt: Brand New Justice: the Upside of Global Branding. Woburn, Mass.: Butterworth-Heinemann 2003, 179 pp. $34·99
	Roberts: Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands. New York: Powerhouse Books 2004, 224 pp. $18·15 (save $9·35)
	Anholt: Brand America: the Mother of All Brands. London: Cyan Communications 2005, 179 pp. $9·71 (save $3·24)