Welcome to your dark side!

 An interview with pop rocker, Jarvis Cocker, in Tokion magazine got me thinking about the dark side. In describing his latest album he says, “There’s some kind of recognition of the darker side of human nature––a recognition that without that dark side, life would be pretty dull. It’s the destructive urge within people, but that struggle between the two sides of yourself is what creates things. I think you give yourself over completely to one side or the other, you become fairly creatively inert. The interest is in the struggle, I think. That’s life, isn’t it?”

It struck me how few brands embrace their dark side. And I thought, “What a shame.”

As brands back off the hard sell, they are adopting the soft pedal. We are creating justification for our existence by tempering the commercial with the communal, shouting about how much we care in order to connect. Brand pyramids and core values are being reshaped to reflect the pervasive attitude of optimism that consumers seem to want from us. Inc. magazine proclaimed “Fun!” the new core value. We are living through a do-gooder moment in marketing right now. Hey, I am a part of it. But, being a do-gooder doesn’t mean you have to be a goody two shoes.
Very few brands have figured out the criticality of the dark side to building a brand that is not only more believable, but more likeable. We feign transparency but haven’t gotten any closer to being brutally honest.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to watch a brand’s struggle with the light and the dark; to see the creativity and humanity that emerges? A few brands have been brave enough to reveal this dynamic, the smart ones have given consumers a ringside seat. American Apparel comes to mind. They flirt with sexual taboos as they espouse progressive manufacturing techniques. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re naughty. This causes the same people who hate them to defend them and the people who defend them to apologize for them. This makes things interesting.

Mr. Cocker has it right. Life is in the struggle. As marketers strive to give their brands more dimension, more life, it makes a lot of sense to take a good look at all of the brand’s qualities…and those of the people behind the brand. Let’s stop trying to spin the negative and instead see what happens when we admit to our own human nature.