c.010101 The Art of Radical Brand Transformation

It’s Friday afternoon, September 25^th, 2015 and the insistent buzz of helicopters overhead in Center City Philadelphia has become so constant that it almost fades into the background. Almost. I’ve walked the city, posting photographs of the lockdown preparations. The combination of cleared, almost deserted streets and military barricades lends the city an East Berlinish vibe.

Pope Francis is due here tomorrow and city officials estimate that over a million people will descend on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which when less trampled, is one of my favorite walking paths. Historically, papal visits generate a sense of exuberant celebration, but this pope is well beyond exceptional even in his rarefied company. With broad strokes of pastoral pronouncements, he has upended so many of the most familiar elements of the “Catholic brand” which (unless you’ve lived a hermetic life for the last two decades), has been synonymous with exclusion, sex scandal and privilege. The pope has always been the Catholic brand ambassador, but this pope is the first one to radicalize the Church’s global agenda.

Borrowing from Catholicism’s first brand ambassador, this pope’s slogan seems lifted from Matthew 19:24, Christ’s incredibly inconvenient assertion that “I’ll say it again–it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”

The fact that Christ felt reiteration was necessary is not lost on his current vicar. Whether he addresses the faithful in St. Peter’s Square or Latin America or the fickle in the joint session of U.S. Congress, Francis tenaciously stays on message. Christians of all stripes, not just the “First Church,” memorized this metaphor from our Catechism days, but it was always one of those damned inconvenient directives, particularly in contemporary Christian America with its revisionist sense of the godliness of entitlement and the sinfulness of poverty.

The rich young man Christ addressed was earnest in his desire for heaven, so Jesus told him “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” The young man walked away, crestfallen. How many good church folks have also wriggled in their pews at the starkness of this practically unattainable standard? Conservative apologists argue that the Church is renowned for its collective philanthropy and charity has always been part of Catholic orthodoxy. It’s the independent personal directive for deep sacrifice that has largely been buried in the good Christian’s to do list. Francis, like a pitbull, seizes it, prioritizes it, elaborates on it; speaks of income inequality and redistribution of wealth. Never before has a pope challenged the basic premises of modern capitalism more doggedly and consistently. As you think about that, consider The New Yorker report that “the real-estate assets of the Catholic Church worldwide have been estimated at two trillion dollars, a sum comparable to the G.D.P. of Russia, India, or Brazil.”

Francis has also challenged his church and the entire First World to become stewards of the planet, very much in line with his own saintly namesake, Francis of Assisi, who is patron, not just of animals and the environment, but also the sick and workers.

1. Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.[1]

2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth.

There are doctrinaire types still poring over their bibles and clutching their rosary beads, apoplectic that this loose cannon with one bold stroke, extended Catholicism’s brand to include treehugging. I think it’s safe to say that nobody saw that coming. For others the message is working and environmental advocacy is filtering down from the pulpit to the pews:

 For Catholics who attend church weekly, the pope’s encyclical on the environment was significantly more influential than an article citing climate-change experts. Fifty-four percent of such Catholics assigned to read the pope’s comments agreed humans were responsible for climate change, compared to 41 percent of those who read the experts’ take. And 84 percent of pope-readers said humans have a moral duty to take care of the environment, compared with 75 percent of expert-readers.

Argentine friends explain that this pope is a Peronist who hews to his socialist roots. Yet in matters of morality he deflects from familiar and rigid Church condemnation of abortion, divorce and homosexuality. He has redirected the brand message away from his predecessors’ chiseled virtue of orthodox order against contemporary societal disorder. Many of his “department directors” who have not realigned their own messaging to his have found themselves rather quickly on the outs. This is a CEO who has not been afraid to demote from within. And he has the power to do it.

The first lesson of radical brand transformation is that it requires a transformational leader. One man or woman who can appear controversial, dangerous, even a loose cannon, yet is elevated in the hierarchy of his or her organization. The second lesson to those of us who follow brands is that the transformational brand ambassador seizes on messages that are already core components of the portfolio, but he or she reprioritizes and contextualizes them for the contemporary audiences. And this is certainly a man who spellbinds contemporary audiences. This dichotomy of visionary radicalism and elevated position is the sort that doesn’t come along for generations.

One wonders about the men in red hats, in Rome, if they’d had it to do over …

Add to which, church dogma regards the pope as infallible, making Francis arguably the most powerful CEO on the planet. The amusing part, for me at least, comes in counting the flurry of Vatican and parochial press releases whose lead lines can basically be distilled to “What the Holy Father really meant to say was …”

Except that he didn’t. An observer less burdened by orthodoxy could see this pope’s pastoral agenda as the nose end of the long dogma game—that his gentle but insistent redirections are not the superficial positioning of a skilled flackman but rather the groundbreaking for massive doctrinal reengineering to come. It’s a truly amazing thing to anticipate, breathtaking, especially when it comes from organizations that are historically glacial responders to contemporary calls for hope and change. Hope and Change. Now there’s a tall order.

The second best case study for radical brand transformation is going to cost me some lasting derision from conservative and even liberal friends. I am happy to embrace it. Eight years ago, the United States of America, like the Catholic Church had severe brand negatives. A global financial crisis, millions denied basic healthcare, two Middle Eastern wars, one whose entry was based on false premises, a reputation for arrogance, adventurism and naïve unilateralism …  And that’s just the high points. 😉

In the most improbable of Horatio Alger fables, Barack Obama got elected, goes to work each day, ready to expend any political capital he has (in no particular order) for major change–healthcare transformation, multilateral nuclear treaties, economic stabilization, financial reform, consumer protection.

Imagine, to elect one of its own in 2016, the Republican Party has the unenviable task of turning good into bad, progress into fear, shinola into manure and it would take a far more persuasive liar than any in its firmament to pull that off. I almost pity them except that the problem for the Democratic Party is NOT that Obama was such a bad president. No, the real problem is that none in the current crop of Democrats measures up.  I find that very worrisome, given the Republican front runner. End digression.

To add insult to injury, in the waning months of his second term, rather than becoming a lame duck, and fade into the obscurity his opponents would wish on him, Obama unleashed a slew of executive actions that have swung away at immigration reform, the minimum wage, worker health, sick leave, environmental sustainability, normalized relationships with Cuba. While Congress stews in its ineffectualness, Obama makes impressive progress against withering political obstacles. This mixed race Nobel Prize winner with his “funny Muslim name” and his elegant family have become the most potent symbol of America’s potential for radical transformation in history. They have become the new brand.

The parallels between Pope Francis and President Barack are both surface and deep—their styles, their stated priorities, their sense of vision and even their manner of speaking. The organizations they run are massive, unwieldy, and slow to innovate. Yet they’ve exerted the power they have to engineer huge changes with the promise of more to come. Not all my friends will agree with the virtues of these changes, but again so be it. What I think is that this president and this pope look at each other and see the hopes of the next generation. And that in a nutshell is true transformational brand leadership.

You can elevate a brand or crash it to its knees. Send it to heaven or hell. I’d planned a third case study, a stark counterpoint to the two above, a sort of “Art as Artifice” discussion, but I think we’ve gone on enough. Let’s leave VW and whoever else deserves it for Part II–Brand Hell.