NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY ABOUT YOURSELF.
Some of the ideas behind The Wild Detectives' communication.
Famous designer and artist John Maeda, former Director of the MIT Media Lab, and now a venture capital consultant at Silicon Valley said at a SXSW conference back in 2014: “A logotype is just like a haircut,” meaning that, unilateral prefabricated messages are no longer effective to build brand equity; they’re nothing but plain onanism. The real question is not what my brand says, but how it feels from an experience point of view.
Two years before, my BFF Javi (Javier García del Moral) called me to work on a logotype for a new business he and Paco (Paco Vique, another great friend of mine) were planning to open in Dallas; a bookstore bar that was quite suggestively going to be called The Wild Detectives.
A logotype; the essence of a brand encapsulated in a synthetic graphic structure, connected through time with crests, emblems and heraldry, a bet on prestige, a mandatory and expected manifestation of ego. Little did I know back then this was indeed nothing more than a hairdo.
Our logotype could work as signage on a detective door (something you can still see when you come to the shop). It reminded me a bit like cattle branding, it felt vernacular, like those wooden letters used in rodeos but stylised and more contemporary… It ticked a lot of boxes for us, but overall it was simple, yet bold and iconic.
Let’s move forward to 2014. Late February. On my way from London –where I lived back then– to SXSW, I stopped in Dallas first to visit my friends and attend the opening of The Wild Detectives. Boy, I was proud; proud of my friends, of what they were trying to achieve with that space, of being part of such a cool project, proud of how my logo was looking on the door… The store looked good. We looked good. My ego was exultant.
And then, the next day, I went to Austin and SXSW changed the way I approached communication forever. In addition to John Maeda, people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Umair Hague, Blake Mycoskie, or Jason Silva, were talking about how hyper informed audiences will rely on circles of trust rather than on brand messages, to which they’re mostly indifferent.
New audiences demand “real,’ they look for authentic and genuine voices they can trust. Their ‘bullshit radar,’ as Gary Vaynerchuck called it, is sharp, and they don’t give a warm turd about what you have to say about yourself. If they’re curious enough about you –and you’re lucky if they are, considering all of the noise around us– they’ll google you and access everything they want to know mostly through all of the different channels.
Once the distance between individuals and organizations has been reduced down to a 1mm screen, the only way for brands to be trusted is to behave and communicate like a human. They must display those same human emotions and behaviors that trigger liking in others: sense of humor, humility, commitment, honesty, ingenuity, vulnerability, authenticity, generosity…
In this new ecosystem, brands have to be meaningful. They have to find a way to create value upfront in order to be even considered. As Umair Hague put it, “brands should move from empty differentiation to meaningful difference.”
I went back to London, ignited, wanting to do things differently at the agency I was working for. But big structures are resistant to change and that company was monolithic. So I quit; the company and advertising all together. I couldn’t see what I was doing as valuable from a, let’s say ‘cosmic’ perspective anymore.
My friend Javi was aware of the process I was going through and the ideas behind it. We had long conversations over the phone that summer about how we could go beyond the logotype, how we could infuse real meaning and value to the W and D on our logo, which looked kind of nice but that was about all it could be. Before the end of the year, they offered me the chance to come to Dallas and become their brand guy. I said yes without hesitation.
We’ve been working since on becoming a space that has something to offer back upfront to the community. We think we’ve been very lucky. It seems we were at the right place at the right time, and a lot of creative spirits coalesced around our spot. Local media was also generous with us and started to talk about a literary scene in Dallas and how The WD could have been the catalyst for it to happen.
When there is a talented scene around you you’re continuously co-creating with others. You talk with people to people, your audience is both the object and the subject of your communication. You become a channel for others to share their voice, a platform that empowers the scene around you and connects them with the community. Because, remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them.
Accomplished arts journalist, Lauren Smart (her name couldn’t be more accurate) helped us to put together our month long festival focused on bringing visibility to the excellent work done by local women in the arts. In this video you can see Lauren discussing with Javi, The WD’s co-owner, about how a festival like this is still necessary. Unfortunately.
Our website is also a good example of co-creation. It was planned as a magazine where anybody could share their thoughts about Culture in general and Literature in particular. We publish our audience and then we do our best to put their words in front of as many people as possible, not just by spreading their content on our social platforms but also by sharing it with some specialized media. Thankfully, our PR skills have become a bit better this year and we’ve been able to spread some of these articles through big literary websites like Lit Hub. We’re always looking for collaborators, so if this sounds appealing to you just click here and share your voice with us.
So far so sweet, but being a business you can’t just feature your friends, you have to talk every now and then, you need to tell people about the events you’re hosting, the things you’re selling, new initiatives you’re starting, achievements you’re proud of… If you’re going to blow your horn a little you better find some nice hooks.
When it comes to our own communication we try to engage with our audience following the classic BBC motto: inform, educate and entertain. For example, we usually promote our music shows with some funny, catchy videos. For our Old School Hip Hop night, we focused on the “School” part of it and combined scratching with drawing by numbers illustrations.
On our second anniversary we put together a one day electronic festival called 'Wild Beats.' We wanted to explore the patterns of rhythm, so we created a 16 beat matrix and invited our friend Tempranillo to compose a simple tune for the occasion.
Recently we had The Obscure Dignitaries playing in our backyard. It’s a band that combines music from all over the world. We loved the idea of being just one world. We came up with this concept of a map with just one continent called Folkloria. Winter was coming, so we couldn’t help giving it a Game Of Thrones feel to the video.
We thought our menu could be a good place to establish micro-conversations with our customers. Being a bookstore we thought it’d be cool if each section (coffees, beers, tostas, cocktails…) was introduced by a well known author quote. We invited Laura Pacheco, a super talented Spanish illustrator to draw scenes taking place in the shop based on those quotes. We like to think that our customers cracked a smile as they ordered their cocktails.
As we explained on this TEDx talk at UTA we did this year:
“We want our space to encourage people to have a drink and talk to one another, to open up and share ideas, to hang out smartly, to engage in a conversation that will open new realities for them. That’s what talking culture does. It opens spaces that weren’t there before. Because culture accumulates into more culture.”
This is an idea we’ve been pushing every time we had a chance to do so. For example, we turn off our wifi on the weekend to help people disconnect from their workdays and encourage them to talk to others. We also released this campaign –drawn by Laura Pacheco as well– that offers a free drink when you talk to a stranger.
We’ve extended our collaboration with Laura to our newest project, a comic series called “Reading Quirks” in which we explore all those weird things we readers do. We publish them weekly on our social networks (look for the hashtag #readingquirks) and we ask our audience to share their own; the idea is to feature some of them in future cartoons. We’re very excited about this project, If the series gets enough traction on social we’re planning to publish a proper book next year, which is a good example of how advertising can become product, how your communication can go from unsolicited to (hopefully) wanted.
We also curate interesting literary quotes that we publish weekly on instagram (#WildQuotez). These short nuggets work as introductions to authors we want to bring attention to.
It’s all about engagement, about how we can get people truly excited about what we are and those things we stand for. The way it works is by staying true to yourself, sharing your voice, your creativity, and all those things that makes you tick. Same way you would like any other human being on Facebook to do.
This is a long-term bet. It takes time to build a trusted, delighted audience. It’s not a question of width (the size of our audience) it’s a question of depth (the strength of our bond with that audience). Brands should start moving from advertising to caring. Again, it’s about feeling human, it’s about truly caring about the people you interact with. Because nobody will care about you if you don’t care about others.
Peace out.