2013年06月01日
在角逐世界头号经济体的赛跑中，美国对中国至少有一个优势。我们塑造品牌的本事要强得多。美国公司里有好多怪人，壮志未酬的小说家，不好相处的前瞻型企业创始人，他们擅于创造各种品牌，让世界各地的消费者趋之若鹜，冲着品牌就愿意多花一笔钱。中国公司在这方面做得很糟。每隔几年就会有中国官员提出要采取行动，打造有号召力的品牌，结果永远是令人失望的。
HD贸易服务公司(HD Trade Services)最近的一项调查显示，94%的美国人说不出世界第二大经济体的任何一个品牌。不管在其他地方表现多么卓越，中国人始终没能制造出一个具有文化影响力、全球吸引力和精神感召力的资本主义风格。
- 查看大图Josh Haner/The New York Times戴维・布鲁克斯
为什么？
在中国工作过的品牌经理人说，他们的管理层倾向于从交易而非关系的层面看待商业往来。在一个刚刚摆脱贫穷不久的国家里，竞争残酷，利润微薄，腐败横行，信誉稀缺，你可以想象这里的企业高管在交易中会更多地选取一种短期的眼光。
然而，如果中国真想和发达经济体抗衡，就必须经历一系列突破性转型。要创造有效的品牌，不能只是从一个低端资本家的角度思考，要做的事比这多得多。这是一个截然不同的思维模式。
想想拉尔夫・利夫席兹(Ralph Lifshitz)如何将白人盎格鲁-撒克逊新教徒(WASP)的雅致发扬光大，创造拉尔夫・洛朗(Ralph Lauren)品牌。想想史蒂芬・戈登(Stephen Gordon)如何抓住阿迪朗达克屋舍的华美，创造Restoration Hardware品牌。想想耐克(Nike)围绕着体育竞技不屈不挠的理想构建的神话。
创造出伟大品牌的人，通常都是在寻求满足他们自己内心的某种渴望，某种在更高的层次或更酷的朋友圈里生活的梦想。
最伟大的品牌缔造者中，有不少人是对商业本身心怀些许憎恶的。比如在当代美国资本主义感觉形成中，影响力最大的人物可能就是恰好有个贴切姓名的斯图尔特・布兰德（Stewart Brand，其姓氏Brand即为“品牌”之意。——译注）了。你可能还记得，他就是创办《全球目录》(Whole Earth Catalog)的那个嬉皮士。
这份反文化建议大全看起来是在抨击商业美国。但却受到史蒂夫・乔布斯(Steve Jobs)、史蒂夫・沃兹尼亚克(Steve Wozniak)等众多高科技先锋的青睐。个人电脑这个词就是布兰德本人提出的。早在1972年，他就认识到电脑可以是酷的、反文化的、革命的，而在当时，它还只是一堆金属和塑料组成的怪东西。我们以为硅谷和苹果(Apple)的气质与生俱来，但那氛围是布兰德这样的人给的，并启发了成千上万的工程师和设计师，以及亿万消费者。
品牌管理公司Beanstalk联合创始人塞思・西格尔(Seth Siegel)说，品牌的塑造会“将一件商品去商品化。”它为一个产品裹上意义的外衣。它需要向消费者传达一种体验的品质，双方的每一次接触都需要巩固这种体验，在商店入口，在洗手间里，在购物袋上。品牌塑造的过程从根本上就是白日梦的表达与操控。这里面浪漫主义起到的作用，不比商学院少。
这样一来，品牌塑造的成功可能是完全无法预料的。最反感现有体制的叛逆者，可能走在市场潮流的最前沿。这样做的人往往是拥抱商业的，即便他们在道德层面存有抵触——比如加州湾区的前嬉皮，意大利和法国的奢侈品手工艺者，或提倡社群主义的斯堪的纳维亚半社会主义者。这些人一边卖东西，一边给东西注入一种更具诱惑力的精神联想。
美国零售业的创造力所面临的最大威胁，也许是我们已经没有什么反文化可以借力了。我们的反资本主义气质可能已经消磨殆尽，无法再给产品加上酷的光环。我们可能养育出了一代对商业甚少质疑的人，这会令他们在商业上越来越缺乏创造力。
但是中国的麻烦更大。一个不欢迎异议的文化是很难在这个领域崛起的。一个鼓励人们生而顺从于权威的文化，很难做到这一点。一个权力阶层不会本能地寻求与弱势阶层对话的国家，很难在竞赛中不落后。中国若想卓有成效地塑造品牌，在经济食物链顶端展开争夺，可能还要经历更多的文化革命。
要想成为领先世界的经济体，总有一天你需要建立起和消费者的关系。你必须撇开那些损害信誉的东西，例如窃取知识产权和网络恐怖主义，创造出各种能激起依恋和幻想的品牌。在那一天到来前，中国就算能在统计数据上成为世界最大经济体，也不会拥多么深远的影响力。
翻译：经雷
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Romantic Advantage
By DAVID BROOKS June 01, 2013
In the race to be the world’s dominant economy, Americans have at least one clear advantage over the Chinese. We’re much better at branding. American companies have these eccentric failed novelists and personally difficult visionary founders who are fantastic at creating brands that consumers around the world flock to and will pay extra for. Chinese companies are terrible at this. Every few years, Chinese officials say they’re going to start an initiative to create compelling brands and the results are always disappointing.
According to a recent survey by HD Trade services, 94 percent of Americans cannot name even a single brand from the world’s second-largest economy. Whatever else they excel at, Chinese haven’t been able to produce a style of capitalism that is culturally important, globally attractive and spiritually magnetic.
- 查看大图Josh Haner/The New York TimesDavid Brooks
Why?
Brand managers who’ve worked in China say their executives tend to see business deals in transactional, not in relationship terms. As you’d expect in a country that has recently emerged from poverty, where competition is fierce, where margins are thin, where corruption is prevalent and trust is low, the executives there are more likely to take a short-term view of their exchanges.
But if China is ever going to compete with developed economies, it’ll have to go through a series of phase shifts. Creating effective brands is not just thinking like a low-end capitalist, only more so. It is an entirely different mode of thought.
Think of Ralph Lifshitz longing to emulate WASP elegance and creating the Ralph Lauren brand. Think of the young Stephen Gordon pining for the graciousness of the Adirondack lodges and creating Restoration Hardware. Think of Nike’s mythos around the ideal of athletic perseverance.
People who create great brands are usually seeking to fulfill some inner longing of their own, some dream of living on a higher plane or with a cooler circle of friends.
Many of the greatest brand makers are in semirevolt against commerce itself. The person who probably has had the most influence on the feel of contemporary American capitalism, for example, is the aptly named Stewart Brand. He was the hippie, you will recall, who created the Whole Earth Catalog.
That compendium of countercultural advice appeared to tilt against corporate America. But it was embraced by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and many other high-tech pioneers. Brand himself created the term personal computer. As early as 1972, he understood that computers, which were just geeky pieces of metal and plastic, could be seen in cool, countercultural and revolutionary terms. We take the ethos of Silicon Valley and Apple for granted, but people like Brand gave it the aura, inspiring thousands of engineers and designers and hundreds of millions of consumers.
Seth Siegel, the co-founder of Beanstalk, a brand management firm, says that branding “decommoditizes a commodity.” It coats meaning around a product. It demands a quality of experience with the consumer that has to be reinforced at every touch point, at the store entrance, in the rest rooms, on the shopping bags. The process of branding itself is essentially about the expression and manipulation of daydreams. It owes as much to romanticism as to business school.
In this way, successful branding can be radically unexpected. The most anti-establishment renegades can be the best anticipators of market trends. The people who do this tend to embrace commerce even while they have a moral problem with it — former hippies in the Bay Area, luxury artistes in Italy and France or communitarian semi-socialists in Scandinavia. These people sell things while imbuing them with more attractive spiritual associations.
The biggest threat to the creativity of American retail may be that we may have run out of countercultures to co-opt. We may have run out of anti-capitalist ethoses to give products a patina of cool. We may be raising a generation with few qualms about commerce, and this could make them less commercially creative.
But China has bigger problems. It is very hard for a culture that doesn’t celebrate dissent to thrive in this game. It’s very hard for a culture that encourages a natural deference to authority to do so. It’s very hard for a country where the powerful don’t instinctively seek a dialogue with the less powerful to keep up. It seems likely that the Chinese will require a few more cultural revolutions before it can brand effectively and compete at the top of the economic food chain.
At some point, if you are going to be the world’s leading economy, you have to establish relationships with consumers. You have to put aside the things that undermine trust, like intellectual property theft and cyberterrorism, and create the sorts of brands that inspire affection and fantasy. Until it can do this, China may statistically possess the world’s largest economy, but it will not be a particularly consequential one.
Copyright © 2013 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
