Change Pulpit by Adam Hanft

03:21 pm | 0 recommendations | 5 comments

Innovation: Does the iPhone Look So Great Because Everything Else is So Bad?

A week after D-Day for the hype machine, the media after-glow continues, with the usual combination of snarky contrarianism and fulsome sectarian praise from Apple worshippers.

Flaws aside, and I find the keyboard a thumb struggle, there’s no question that the iPhone – like its iPredecessor, the iPod – is a seductively wrought, craftily engineered jewel of a product for a generation of Pod People. Whether it’s truly a culture-slamming revolution remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the product taps into the powerful need for our deepest consumer urges to be dazzled.

It also shines so brightly because so much of the consumer market is mired in what amounts to a dazzle-free zone. Consider the automotive industry. America is a car-culture; remember when the Auto Show once grabbed the national imagination? Today, it’s a non-event, with media coverage desultory at best. And why should it be big news, like MacWorld is? When was the last time a car made anyone’s spirits soar?

GM just had their worst June in nine years. And it’s not like the foreign automakers are bringing any turbo-charge of excitement to their showrooms, either. BMW, Mercedes, Lexus and Audio make perfectly fine vehicles, but there are only predictable, incremental improvements from model year to model year. The only semblance of consumer intensity – for hybrid vehicles – is fueled by politics, not engineering.

Wherever you look, there’s almost nothing to see. When was the last time a food company introduced something new that you actually wanted to try? The giant brands are eons behind their consumers and the trends. Kraft is a case in point. The company is struggling in all of its core businesses – which is why Nelson Peltz is hovering – and blaming private label inroads. But private label can only succeed when businesses are skidding to the commodity side of the ledger.

The online world, which has been the engine of innovation, is also suffering. A few weeks ago there was a telling piece in the New York Times that talked about a new “dot-calm” world where consumers are growing “weary” of the channel. Again, it’s a failure of imagination. How long has it been since Amazon lit up the market with their 1-Click technology?

Why is so much of the consumer economy so boring? In large part, marketers talk about creating a culture of innovation, but then either isolate the truly original ideas, Guantanamo-style, or subject them to death-by-PowerPoint and death by research. It’s easy to look at the iPhone and then reverse-engineer the arguments that would have killed it off at damn near any other company:

• “Consumers will reject a keyboard they can’t feel.”
• “No one will spend that much for a phone.”
• “You can’t expect people to get a new number online.”
• “You can’t succeed working with just one carrier.”

The objections would have gone on and one – almost as long as the lines outside the Apple store last week. C’mon now, Steve Jobs is good, but he shouldn’t be lapping the rest of the American consumer economy.

11:52 am | 0 recommendations | 6 comments

Does Drinking Coca-Cola Make You Dumb?

You're in the business of selling high-margin liquid in bottles. You've built a pretty good business doing that, and you're guarding a formula that is supposedly as well-protected as Osama bin Laden. Money's not the issue; you've got bottomless pockets to fund the study of social, cultural and consumption trends.

You've also got legions of people working at company and at your advertising agencies -- and at the swarm of consultants that buzz around your honey pot -- who are supposed to do nothing but observe consumer behavior, study our beverage guzzling habits, and develop new products to proudly put more plastic bottles into landfills.

So if you were Coca-Cola, it doesn't seem like you would have to be a marketing genius to put two fundamental trends together: we're drinking more and more bottled water, and we're looking for quick shots of healthy living that create the illusion of righteousness (off-setting all the other horrible stuff we do to ourselves).

That low-wattage confluence would have led you to create Vitamin Water. But the light bulb didn't glow in Atlanta. Instead, a guy named J. Darius Bikoff had the idea, and his insight was rewarded last week when Coca-Cola paid $4.1 billion for his company, Glaceau.

What accounts for this big-company failure to innovate? It's a variety of factors. Innovation outside the core acknowledges that your model is flawed. That's tough to handle. There's an over-reliance on research; but focus-group testing at best produces incremental innovation. And there's always the default of "we can buy it."

True, Coca-Cola has the cash to wait till someone innovates and then swoop it up. But what kind of signal does that send? It tells investors you've lost your innovative chops. It tells increasingly savvy consumers that you are a vacuumer, rather than an inspirer, of new ideas. And perhaps most discouragingly, it tells employees that the source of fresh thinking lies outside the organization.

Why is it that big company innovation happens relentlessly in the high-technology world, whether it is at Google or HP or Apple? But in the consumer goods area, the food and beverage innovation, the forward-looking, trend-right thinking, is coming from small companies. While the big ones lumber late to the game, whether it is the LOHAS movement or New Age beverages or low-carb.

It's great news for entrepreneurs, for sure. But the giant consumer goods companies need to do a lot of soul-searching to get back in the game. Perhaps they can sit back with a nice, iced, bottle of Vitamin Water and start the process.

09:54 am | 0 recommendations | 4 comments

Firing Neeleman; JetBlue Just Blew It

Mark February 14th, 2007 as the day that destroyed JetBlue. Not because the airline massively screwed up, stranded 1,000 planes, and turned passengers into captives. But because David Neeleman, JetBlue's founder and CEO, was unable to recover from the debacle. Despite more apologies than Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin combined, last week he was removed as CEO from the company he visioned into flight.

The board did what boards do: replacing a passionate, entrepreneurial creator with a skilled "operator." In this case, it's David Barger, who had been president since the airline got started.

Why Barger, as president, was Tefloned from responsibility for the February 14th fiasco is another question. Shouldn't the guy who's responsible for the day-to-day at least take some of the heat, rather than be promoted? Doesn't make any sense to me.

The more important point is that Neeleman remains the best person to guide JetBlue through its next phase of growth -- whatever that might be. The fact that the airline was able to survive the incident, and that JetBlue's apology was accepted by most of the flying public, was solely based on the enormous reservoir of affection that the airline had built up thanks to Neelman's vision of an airline that would challenge the conventional wisdom of the industry on every level.

Back in 2005 I wrote a column for Inc. about this very subject, disputing the conventional wisdom that mature businesses eventually outgrow their cowboy creators, and need to be replaced by professional CEO. Tell that to Apple shareholders, who watched helplessly as the board pushed out Steve Jobs and replaced him with a series of ciphers. Michael Dell back at the helm is another example of what happens when the founder is kicked out, or kicked upstairs.

The JetBlue scenario follows exactly the script that I warned against back then, and I predict that the airline will gradually squander the emotional connection it has built via its relentless and joyous focus on the customer.

The press reports on tossing Neeleman out of the cockpit include the issue of first class service; Neeleman is against it, holding to the democratic nature of the brand's value system. The speculation also is that because Delta is emerging from bankruptcy and the low-cost market is getting tougher, that JetBlue will soon will decide to compete by becoming "like any other airline."

Under Barger, we can expect to see all the qualities that made JetBlue, JetBlue gradually vanish. How dumb is that? Seems to me that this marketing context demands more Neeleman, not less Neeleman.

11:46 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

The Survey Secret

Here's a piece I wrote for Sunday's "Boston Globe" that ran in the Ideas section. Once you realize how this
game operates, the old selective perception phenomenon will guarantee that you'll start seeing
examples of these sponsored or promotional surveys all over the media landscape. You will also start to think about how they can work for your company.

After I filed this piece I came across an annual survey done by the consulting firm Booz Allen about CEO tenure and other related issues. The survey found that brand-name, outsider CEOs do great for a couple of years, then flame out. This is valuable stuff, and the fact that Booz Allen does it for PR visibility and hence commercial gain doesn't mitigate that. In fact, it could be argued that rigorous, sponsored surveys provide insights that would otherwise remain uncaptured and unrecognized.

06:17 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

"I've Been at My Job a Real Long Time: Six Months"

The other day I was in a meeting and everyone went around the table introducing themselves and giving some background information. One person (who shall remain nameless) announced that he had been with his company for eight years. He said it a bit apologetically, and a few people made some comments about his lack of mobility that were both half-joking and dead-serious.

Now we all know that the job-for-life model is dead and buried. No talented, ambitious, self-respecting woman or man is going to keep working for the same company for eight years -- unless there are some crazily extenuating circumstances. I fully recognize that the sedentary, rung-climbing approach to corporate life is deadening, can be a cop-out, and sucks the dynamism out of the economy. "Fast Company," with its "Brand Is You" mantra, has helped trigger that reformation, and that has generally been a good thing.

Even so, when this poor guy started to visibly shrink in his seat after announcing his tenure, it made me wonder if the proverbial pendulum had proverbially swung too far. There is a lot of value that resides in perspective and historical memory. Companies need people who are actually capable of institutional loyalty, and are able to strike a nuanced perspective in the delicate calculus of what's-good-for-the-company and what's-good-for-me.

I doubt if we will ever return to the era where staying in your job is a reason for pride. But it would be much healthier for all, if it wasn't seen as a reason for disdain.

Even so, when this poor guy started to visibly shrink in his seat after announcing his tenure, it made me wonder if the proverbial pendulum had proverbially swung too far. There is a lot of value that resides in perspective and historical memory. Companies need people who are actually capable of institutional loyalty, and are able to strike a nuanced perspective in the delicate calculus of what's-good-for-the-company and what's-good-for-me.

I doubt if we will ever return to the era where staying in your job is a reason for pride. But it would be much healthier for all, if it wasn't seen as a reason for disdain.

01:45 pm | 0 recommendations | 31 comments

Gap's "Forth and Towne" Debacle Being Misinterpreted; Blame AARP

The business press has been all over the Gap's decision to close their "Forth and Towne" division after having sunk $40 million into this ill-fated attempt to win over women 35+ who were -- or so the argument went -- disenfranchised by the fashion world's obsession with the youth market.

Looking for an explanation for what went wrong, the New York Times noted that "...analysts said merchants rushing to fill a perceived gap in the mall created too much competition in a niche market." Huh? The market is far from niche. As the Times reported only a few paragraphs later, "In slides for investors the executives...ticked off the numbers that seemed to ensure success: Baby boomers, they said, spent $42.7 billion on apparel last year, while teenagers spent $20 billion."

The problem wasn't that the niche market couldn't support the number of competitive stores, or that the merchandise assortment wasn't appealing. The problem was that baby boomers don't want to be addressed as baby boomers, and even women as young as 35 don't want to be put into the age box.

The truth is that age is the last remaining taboo in American marketing. It's okay for manufacturers and retailers to target based on every conceivable demographic and psychographic slice of the market. In this post-feminism age is perfect fine to reach out to women as women. You can target gays. You can put Latinos in the marketing cross-hairs.

But for millions of Americans, any reference to age is dicey. And Forth & Towne wasn't exactly subtle; their website proclaims that they were created for "a new generation of women, determined to find current, wearable fashions in fits that flatter. Women who have grown-up, grown into themselves, and want to look as fabulous as they feel."

That kind of ill-disguised, in-your-face-appeal to the older crowd is bound to backfire. Blame AARP for that. Their ham-handed, stereotypical representations of mindless, happy retirees have made most people over 50 await the arrival of their membership package with the joy that awaits an IRS audit notice.

The Times also pointed out that department stores have experienced something of a resurgence, and that their growth "has overtaken that of specialty clothing chains." That's not a surprise. A 42-year old woman who walks into a department store isn't making a public branding statement about her being 42, as she does when she walks into Forth & Towne. Hence the plug-pulling.

The Gap's flop with female boomers mirrors a larger challenge. Marketers are salivating over the buying power of this market, but don't quite know how to target them without turning their brands into Centrum Silver. Even more progressive marketers, like Fideliity, who are trotting out boomer icons, are running a risk. Because the more obvious your messaging becomes, the more obvious your failures will be.

02:36 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

JetBlue and Merck: Whom do you trust?

JetBlue is having its own Katrina crisis, but they will emerge successfully not just because they have a CEO willing to listen and learn, but because they have so much goodwill in the image bank that there's enough reserve currency for them to draw upon. The full-page, full-on national mea culpa that ran today in the New York Times and other papers is a key step in their public repentence process.

The reason the will prove resilient is that they "saved" for a rainy -- or a snow and icy -- day, by years and years of innovation. It wasn't spin, but a revolutionary customer-first spirit that everyone who flew the airline could feel.

Even the fundamental reason for the breakdown -- an inadequate investment in infrastructure and communications -- can be rationalized by some as another example of the carrier's dedication to keeping costs down, an ultimate consumer benefit. They tried too hard for those they love.

Compare that with the scrutiny that Merck is under for the curious rapidity that has 21 states attempting to make Merck's new vaccine for cervical cancer a mandatory innoculation for young girls. Merck's past behavior has created cynics out of us all, so everything they do is subject to question. Even a potentially life-saving public health innovation is being scanned for ulterior motives with the same scrunity as a pathologist looks at a slide of potential cancer cells.

Merck's less-than-transparent history with regard to Vioxx, and their refusal to accept responsibility, isn't just bad for stockholders, it's bad for young girls who might be deprived of the vaccine because of the questionable history and practices of its developer. It's a remarkable moment when a discount airline has engendered more long-term trust than a pharmaceutical icon.

There's a lesson in this. Not every company has a Katrina moment. But every brand will hit a crossroads where the loyalty of consumers is tested under fire. What are you doing now to add assets to your reputation bank?

01:12 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Advice for the British Company Buying Greyhound: Make it Greenhound

FirstGroup, the British transportation company that's going to take over Greyhound, has an opportunity to make bus transportation cool by making it green.

All they need to do is buy some hybrid fuel buses, install free wi-fi, upholster the seats in hemp, get themselves some Voss water, offer meals from Whole Foods Market, and they're set.

There's a huge market that is awaiting a better way to travel mid-range distances. Think about it. Flying a few hundred miles is always a dilemma: there's the hassle of getting to and from the airport; the rip-off last minute pricing; the torture of the TSA the risk of delays. Is it worth it? Plus, you need to get to and from the airport. And then there's the fossil fuel that those greedy big birds buirn.

Greenhound, on the other hand, takes you bus terminals centrally located, right in the heart of the city. What could be more geographically convenient or politically correct?

For the last three decades, bus travel has been in a declinist spiral. It's the trailer park of public transportation, used by the optionless among us, including college students, the carless, and other transient souls who seem like refugees from a Raymond Carver story.

Re-invented as the Greenhound, bus travel could become a rediscovered 1950s artifact like bowling or fondue. Riding the dog, once a jokey symbol of economic desperation, can be the next prideful statement of enlightened sustainability.

06:42 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Terror Network for Today's Marketers, Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

"The following appeared in the October 4th edition of the Boston Globe"

LAST WEEK, THERE was a successful terrorist attack in Boston. The perpetrators were Turner Broadcasting and the Cartoon Network, and they succeeded in hijacking something that every American holds dear: our attention. For a moment, Scooter and Baghdad and Mary Cheney's pregnancy were shoved aside by a talking milk shake, fries, and meatball.

There's nothing at all complicated about the desperate ideology that hatched this plan, dispersed 38 LED devices across the city, and splattered "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" across our cultural windshield. It's an ideology fueled by a fear of irrelevancy. As jaded consumers grow resistant to conventional messages and techniques, marketing becomes terrorism by other means.

The theory is simple. If a commercial message is "ambient" -- meaning, in the industry jargon, that it's expressed through an unexpected medium in an unexpected place, say a device stuck on an overpass -- it's more likely to sneak past our mental screening devices and warning systems. In this way, the Cartoon Network is not alone; it's actually just one of many thousands of marketing jihadists dreaming up new ways to get around our perceptual defenses, whether the message is painted on foreheads ("headvertising") or calling out to us from an airplane tray table.

But what happened last week was more than a reaction to the hardening of consumer defenses. It was also a reaction to profound changes in the way media is consumed. Time and place are shifting, audience segments are turning into shards, and media people are starting to sound like the Joint Chiefs, speaking of "non-linearity" and "asynchronous" strategies.

So don't blame the Cartoon Network for last week's panic. Blame the remote control, the Internet, PlayStation, TiVo, Slingbox, and every other attention-fragmenting technology. After all, if viewers were watching TV the way they were meant to, curled up on the couch and doing just one thing at one time instead of indulging in promiscuous multitasking, there would have been no need for the Cartoon Network to go to all that trouble.

The leadership of the state and the city are hopping mad about all this. And of course Turner Broadcasting is apologizing all over itself.

As I follow the situation, though, what I'm thinking is how bummed out they must have been before the Boston mess. They must have been thinking: We have this brilliant idea to generate some buzz, we hire this cool guerilla marketing firm, they manage to tuck these goofy boxes into the warp and woof of 10 cities without incident -- including hypervigilant New York, where there are subway posters that intone "If you see something, say something" -- and then...nothing. Weeks of buzz-less silence.

In retrospect it might seem like the plan made no sense, with its outcome either invisibility or excoriation. Nonsense. I think that despite their protestations of shock, the Cartoon Network is secretly thrilled about what happened. This PR manna is absolutely glorious for the Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, the evening cartoon block that houses "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." Their younger audience is steeped in irony, marinated in irreverence, and proud of its outsider status, so to them "Aqua Teen" and its network are cooler than ever.

The coolness vibe even continued into the courtroom, where the two unlucky schmoes who were hired to plant the devices --and who are now staring down five-year sentences --are still playing along, taking the performance art into a new, equally irreverent Act 2. At their hearing, they mocked the district attorney, and at their news conference, they mocked the society they had threatened by only taking hair-related questions. This has turned out to be very much on-brand for Cartoon Network, though it's not entirely clear whether the whole ploy was ingenious or just perversely lucky.

If I were advising Turner, my counsel would be to stay in front of the cameras. They were smart to take full responsibility for the stunt and to take out the checkbook to pay for the financial hit the city took on Wednesday. It's a balancing act: With the instantly hot "artists" in court thumbing their noses at the Man -- are the galleries already lining up to represent them? -- the kid (Cartoon Network) maintains its defiant streak, while the corporate parent (Turner) assures the world there's a level-headed grown-up at home.

The authorities have it all wrong when they pin the hoax label on what happened. Classic hoaxes seek to convince us that something fake is real, like the Piltdown man, Turk the chess-playing automaton, and the Hitler diaries. The Cartoon Network's strategy wasn't to create a bomb scare. The aim was to be hidden in plain sight and to speak in code to the target audience. It turns out there's a fine line between being dangerously cool and just being dangerous -- but don't expect ad agencies to shy away from that line any time soon.

Real terrorists, the kind Boston obviously has on its mind more than New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta, want to destroy our way of life because they hate us, or so we've been told. Marketing terrorists, on the other hand, are desperate to have our way of life succeed, at a healthy but non-inflationary GNP. So if you were stuck in traffic last week, or momentarily frightened, you might take heart in the recognition that the incident wasn't conceived and executed by those who hate us, but by those who love us too much.

Adam Hanft is CEO of the marketing/advertising firm Hanft Unlimited and blogs for Fast Company and the Huffington Post

04:37 pm | 0 recommendations | 5 comments

The Man Behind the Culture Code

While anthropologist, Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, is out there preaching the gospel of indelible cultural imprints, some critics argue that his methods stereotype cultures. In this in-depth interview, we uncover the culture code as well as some of its criticisms.

While it seems we're living in a time of homogenized cultures -- a Gapified, Starbuckian world of creepy familiarity -- Dr. Clotaire Rapaille is out there preaching the gospel of indelible cultural imprints. Rapaille, a French-born anthropologist, believes that culture is destiny, and that we are conditioned by early archetypes that shape and sculpt our "reference systems." So a French child and an American child see the world through vastly different optics -- such as Barbie versus Brie. And they always will. So why in the world would a company's marketing plan target them in the same way?

Rapaile's new book The Culture Code demonstrates how code can explain national behavior, and the marketing consequences that spiral out of it.

Do Jerry Falwell and Chris Rock share the same cultural code?

Absolutely, although they would think I'm crazy for saying it. And that dichotomy is a unique expression of the AMERICAN CODE. You see, a cultural code is not a simple box. It is a complex system -- what I call a "reference system. " It is imprinted at an early age, and contains within itself many tensions. So can we say that we are the land of the free, and at the same time be the land of prohibition and political correctness? Absolutely.

We seem to be sprinting towards homogenization. MTV and Starbucks everywhere. Immigration is churning the social architecture. Globalized companies are spreading consistent values that are country-agnostic. Are cultural codes getting weaker in a so-called flat world?

We are not speaking of countries, or nations, which are obsolete concepts, but of cultures. In that context, cultures are becoming more and more aware of their uniqueness, and are ready to fight and die to protect and preserve them. And when some die in the service of that culture, their deaths have a special meaning, which in and of itself is also a cultural imprint.

The Kurds, who are dispersed in several countries, still preserve their culture, as do the Shia and the Sunnis. Quebec is going to fight again to become independent. The French are actually (and unfortunately) more French than ever.

The Japanese will return to being a military power, following their code, and despite half a century of pacificism. The Russians have snapped back to their code, which combines elements of a Tsarist structure and deeply seated religious beliefs. Culture-codes are enormously resilient, capable of surviving incredibly hard times. In fact, the more they are attacked, the stronger they become as they wait patiently for their time to come back.

People have said that your codes are cultural stereotypes. Can a complex country like the U.S. really be reduced to a bumper sticker?

Reference systems are a complex construct of tensions. The code is a simple way to access this system. But if you just look at the code without knowing the system, it looks like a cliché, or a stereotype. A better way to think of a cultural archetype is as an empty structure, a magnetic field that organizes new content, for generation after generation. A "stereotype" is just an expression of the cultural archetype.

For me, the question is not about the validity of these stereotypes, but about their very existence. They cannot be denied. They cannot be ignored. We should use the culture code to understand them. So we need to ask: Where are they coming from, what do they reveal about the collective unconscious that puts them to use?

America, you maintain, is an adolescent culture. Isn't that a post-1960s phenomenon? The so--called "Greatest Generation" who marched off to World War II wasn't wearing backwards baseball caps and refusing to grow up.

Oscar Wilde said that Americans are obsessed with their youth, and he was right. We have been obsessed by it for about 300 years now, way before botox existed. What changes is the temporary expression of the code, but not the code itself. The so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s has been followed but the “say no to sex” boomerang. This is the tension I speak of.

So like adolescents in general were are obsessed by sex. But that doesn't mean we have a sexual culture. We're like impulsive adolescents; we never read instructions. Of course not all of us. I am describing what the culture code offers to people in order for them to function and be accepted in a given culture.

Hold on. Aren't there many dimensions of American life that are far from adolescent? Take our love of self-help and our fixation on germs. Adolescents reject touchy-feely self-improvement and see themselves as immortal.

Yes, of course, adolescents are complex. One day they are invincible, the next day they are depressed and want to kill themselves. For the same reason, we cannot understand the sleeping giant, without the superman archetype.

So these adolescent tensions stay with us as we get older. We have a long-term perspective when it comes to principles -- we believe our Constitutional principles are self-evident, universal, and valid forever and ever. Contrast this with our fascination for the "now time," the quick fix, the easy solution, the microwave metabolism. Both sides are, again, part of the American code. We have the oldest written constitution still operating in the world but we are obsessed by short-term results. Up and down all the time, that is the adolescent mind driven by hormones.

You say that cultures move at glacial speeds. Would you tell that to a 70-year-old black woman or gay man who lived through the difficult years of the 1950s? They're living in a radically re-structured world.

The times have changed but the tensions haven't. Here, it's between our obsession with new (new world, new man, New York, New Orleans, etc) and at the same time creating a place where we can be as rigid and conservative as we choose. We are not tolerant. We just created a new world where all the intolerant people can live together.

"America has never produced a world class classical composer," you opine in your book. Is Aaron Copeland chopped liver?

Sorry but nobody will ever compare Copeland with Mozart. Most of the people around the world have no idea of who this guy is, but they all know Mozart.

Do companies have Codes? How about religions?

Yes. We have done the code for General Electric, Procter and Gamble, and General Motors. I've never tackled religions, but they definitely have deep and resonant codes.

Are there some cultural codes that pre-determine a nation for wealth and success? Or is it the other way around...does economic success shape the Code?

Of course it does. Max Weber is the cultural North Star on this question. Quebec is a good example of a code working against prosperity; it's a Catholic culture unable to lift its people out of submission and poverty. Confucianism, on the other hand values success. See Joel Kotkin's books about tribes, identity, and resultant success. Look at the Jews after the Diaspora; the Chinese, Indians and Brits. Their success is based on some basic code elements that they share: tight family structures, a belief in education, and a flexible but powerful network.

Adam Hanft is a nationally-known authority on consumer marketing, business strategy and social trends. He and Clotaire Rapaille have worked with some of the same companies.