This may be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.

Now I’m a bit of a coffee nut and also a serious fan of design and technology, so this one pushes all the right buttons for me personally. Plus, you can make coffee with your iPhone!

But even if you’re not into those things, you’ll understand that this is some serious innovation in a category that needs it badly. Search Amazon for Espresso Machine, and you get over 1,200 results, most of which are basically the same. Sure they have different logos on the front; some are silver while others are black, and you have a handful of different options for feature sets. But the last real innovation the category saw was the K-Cup, introduced nearly a decade ago and knocked off by everyone in the business, including retailers like The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

It’s not that any of those machines are bad, but none of the competitors really distinguishes itself from the others. By contrast, the Scanomat TopBrewer is elegant, functional, convenient, and above all, interesting.

Think about this: What can you do to make your brand or product all of the above?

Then think about this: Buy me a TopBrewer and I’ll make you coffee anytime you want to come over.

Don’t be one of those people!

Think about where you are wasting time that you can get back, for yourself. That time you could be sleeping, working out, practicing your art, traveling, or putting to good use to make more money for yourself and help Rebel Industries build a better company. You could be learning, exploring, growing. Or just having more fun.

How many meetings are you in that you don’t need to be in? Or that don’t need to happen at all? How much time are you spending commuting to an office you don’t really need?

How many conversations are you having more than once with the same people? How many times do you have to repeat yourself because other people aren’t communicating?

How much time is spent because someone was out of the loop? Because expectations were not clearly communicated? Because what was said was not understood?

It’s amazing to think about what we might be able to accomplish if we could just get out of our own way.

In contrast to Van Gogh, Rembrandt was a bad motherfucker. Van Gogh slept on his brother’s couch; Rembrandt lived in a 5 story crib with a view of the canal. His rent was $15,000 a month, in the 17th century. Pimp.

Of course, like a real rockstar he spent all his money and the crib got repo’ed, with his artwork in it. But this is not a post about fiscal responsibility. This post is all about branding.

Was Rembrandt a better painter than Van Gogh? That question has no answer. It’s a matter of taste. In public opinion, they’re both doing okay these days.

The key difference is that Rembrandt ran a tight game. He hustled. He taught other painters how to be great. He collected and studied their works. He marketed his shows and his art. He networked with royalty, with ballers who could afford to buy his stuff and recommend it to their wealthy friends.

Does that sound like a lot of work? Damn straight. You never saw Rembrandt in a Snuggie watching Holland’s Next Top Model. Dude was getting it in.

That work pays dividends. We’re still talking about him today. We’re still paying the man.

What are you doing to build your legacy? Or are you too busy, too distracted, too preoccupied to get serious about creating something that matters?

How’s your art history?

True or false: During his time, Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most important painters in the world.

False: He died broke, crazy by some definitions. Most importantly, he was considered unimportant. Dude was sleeping on his brother’s couch before he committed himself to an asylum, one earlobe short.

Math quiz: If your ancestor had bought a painting from Van Gogh back in 1880, what would it be worth today?

That’s a trick question. Van Gogh only sold one painting throughout his entire life.

Next question: How many artists have entire museums devoted entirely to themselves?

Not many, but Vincent Van Gogh is one of them.

On a Tuesday afternoon last month, school children, retirees, and assorted travelers (including me and my family) were lined up down the block. The Van Gogh Museum was packed with people who paying to experience a guy who, during his life, was very much a failure.

Was he ahead of his time? Maybe. Did he have a marketing problem? Clearly.

One fact is very clear here: Society, culture, the people around Van Gogh really missed out. They were never able to have Van Gogh touch them with the beauty of his art, to be moved and inspired like the generations of us are today and as we will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

In fact, the people failed: Consumers, marketers, patrons, they failed to see what we see now.

Van Gogh wasn’t a failure; he just didn’t have the right timeframe for calculating his ROI.

Don’t make this mistake with your brand.

Break a sweat. Make an emotional connection with real human beings who might come to your museum.

Would people visit an Apple museum? Damn straight. Ever been to an Apple retail store? Would they spend time admiring the art created by Red Bull (Art of Can), Nike (Sport Is Art Collection), Scion, RVCA, Porsche? They do it all the time.

What are you doing to create art with your brand?

Writing that piece on Old Spice’s social media campaign reminded me of an article I read in Muscle and Fitness in the 1980s* that has stuck with me ever since.

It was an interview with a famous bodybuilder of that era called Arnold Schwarzenegger. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he was talking about his techniques for building his previously skinny calves. As a skinny teenager myself, I was particularly interested in what the Austrian Oak had to say that might help me out. The answer was very disturbing.

I don’t remember the actual workout, but he said he would use it for a year or two to build up his champion calves.

I remember wanting my money back from the magazine. A year or two? That’s insane. I didn’t have that kind of patience. Summer was coming up and I had to get my calves looking good for the week or so of shorts season we got in San Francisco.

Years later, I realized that this is possibly the best advice I’ve ever gotten from an Austrian. You want to build your calves up to show them off next week? Or even next month? Well, too bad. It’s simply not possible. Get your ass in the gym every day and work out really hard for a long time. That’s how you get in shape. Shapely calves are not a short-term outcome. They are the result of a long-term discipline, and that kind of investment also yields numerous other benefits.

Stephen Covey calls this the Law of the Farm, which basically means that you can’t cram a season’s worth of patient, consistent care and feeding into some kind of quick fix. You know, the way you might cram for finals in college…

Similarly, I like to say it takes nine months to have a baby, no matter how much brains, money, or muscle you throw at the problem.

Building a solid brand is the same way, isn’t it?

Do you think your company, your brand, and your social media strategy are all immune to the laws of physics and biology? They aren’t.

You want to have an event and then sell a ton of product? Or launch a fun Facebook app and get anyone to care, even if they say they “Like” you? Or watch your videos just because you spent a lot of money on them? Or find the perfect candidate to employ?

Too bad.

*I think it was Muscle and Fitness, and I think it was Arnold. Gimme a break, that was a long time ago.

Image Source: MediaPost.com

Old Spice’s man on the horse has set the bar for corporate social media. And why not? Seems like the whole world saw it and shared their reactions online. Millions of users posted their consumer feedback. They watched the ads over and over again on YouTube, commented, liked it, voted for it, replied to it, and initiated an Internet frenzy with a strong link to the brand. The metrics are certainly off the chart compared to anything else Old Spice has ever done in marketing.

The detractors will tell you that the online consumer response didn’t move the needle on sales of Old Spice products. In fact, there was a spike in sales that might also be attributed to discounted pricing that ran concurrently with the ad campaign.

Do you want the truth? Can you handle the truth?

Truth is, they’re both wrong. Old Spice looks good in the short-term, and not so good in the intermediate-term. But the real win for the brand is to be had over the long-term. What Old Spice has essentially done is bought the attention of millions of consumers who had previously not paid attention to the brand before this campaign.

Think about what this long-term success means for the brand’s next campaign. What defines a brand at its core is building viewer expectation and setting precedence. Viewers are now watching and waiting to see what Old Spice does next.

If the brand reemerges soon with similarly brilliant entertainment content, the reception will be tremendous. If it can successfully repeat this process over and over, you can be certain that years from now, Old Spice will be enjoying the fruits of its investments.

See folks, social media — just like all marketing, business, and life — is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t get to work out one day and then sit back and admire your abs the next day. Nobody places a single stock trade and then retires.

Old Spice just expended a lot of money, energy, and creative genius in order to earn the right to do it again. Most companies haven’t earned that right, so Old Spice currently enjoys a tremendous advantage over the corporate social media status quo. If you think that’s a raw deal, you’re probably in the wrong business.

Now that's subtle

Does anyone think QR codes are the answer to our marketing problems? Of course not. Anyway, let’s hope not. But they are symptomatic of a bigger problem.

A recent article about the generally poor consumer adoption of QR codes got me thinking about all of the reasons that might be true. Then it hit me, probably because the article said it very clearly:

QR codes are pushed by brands, not people. This isn’t the path to mass adoption.

That’s absolutely right. We live in a world where people are in charge. People decide that Friendster, or MySpace, or Facebook, or Twitter is going to be the next big thing. Then brands race to catch up.

The other way around doesn’t work. Kids today don’t give a damn about what the brands are into. (Sorry, I just like saying “kids today.” Makes me feel old.) But brands better know and care about what the kids are into.

I think it’s funny that Rebel gets branded as an out of the box thinker. We don’t sit around and come up with wild ideas. Instead, we go out into the world, and on the web, and make sure we know all about what consumers want, and what they’re already doing.

Our best ideas come from identifying things that consumers already like to do, and then thinking about all of the ways a client make those things better. We think about how brands can give back to culture, and then how to use that to create business results.

This is the future of marketing, and the present. If you aren’t thinking about how to make people’s lives better, what are you thinking about?

Does it have people in it doing superhuman shit like this one? Does it have anything that anyone who doesn’t work for your company would care about? Or is it just a clever new name for a commercial?

Unless you answered Yes, Yes, No, in that order, there’s your problem.

What’s even cooler about this video than all of the action sports stunts and other insanity is that it’s a music video. A band called Hadouken took popular clips from the web and cut them into their own video. Legal? Maybe not. Genius? For sure.

Twitter helps you get it right

As Mashable explains in “How Twitter’s New Media Blog Aims To Teach By Example,” Twitter is taking a pro-active role in teaching users how to make the most out of their service.

For all the folks out there — haters and otherwise — who continue to question the validity of Twitter as a communication medium, y’all need to pay attention.

media.twitter.com isn’t just a blog. It’s an important step forward in the evolution of technology-based communication.

MySpace started us off on the wrong foot by building a massive audience and not knowing quite what to do with it themselves. Let’s assume they did their best to learn on the fly how to turn their website into a marketing platform, and as it goes with trial and error, success was very hit or miss (with lots of emphasis on “miss”). Most importantly, in typical old-media fashion, the assistance they provided was for serious advertisers only and it involved swarms of sales support teams and conference calls to help you figure out what to do to reach their crowd.

Then Facebook came along, with its brashness and anti-corporate attitude. Kind of like, “we don’t care, you figure it out.” It’s taken years for them to come around, and even now most of their assistance is human-based. And it’s mostly around advertising programs, rather than community building.

So now here’s Twitter, putting it all out there on a blog for anyone to see. Their open style is the way of the future. They’re giving us tips and case studies. It’s almost like they want us to be successful using their service. What a crazy concept!

I’m not arrogant enough to predict where social media is heading, and I’m not here to say it’s going to be all about Twitter. But I am certain that as things continue to get more complicated, the companies who take an active role in creating win-win relationships between marketers and their audiences will have a huge advantage.