Longbars: Opensource Nutrition Bars
In case you've been wondering what I've been up to...
You can see it all at the Longbars Blog. 5 months from starting with scratch to publishing the LLC notices on Dec 1!!
Read all about it.
[Edit: Just got publication notice from the paper! Two weeks later. You'd think they'd be more eager in such times... lazy pigs. jklol?]
The Cover Story
Well, as it turns out, my 10 year high school reunion is this weekend. What a painful slap in the face that is.
So, yeah... I think I am (perhaps to a fault) hypersensitive to criticism about my strange personality and it's effect on the masses. That sensitivity probably stems from years of being referred to as 'strange' or 'weird' by people who I didn't think had a shred of credibility regarding personality or real-worth-as-a-human.
My yearbooks are a testament to the early experience of life as a strange kid... 90% of the signatures from the 4 yearbooks I own say something along these lines: 'lay off the crack' or 'you're strange' or 'you talk too much' or 'i really think you behave in a way that's not socially acceptable'.
But there's more to it than that... there's a lot of signatures in these books! And that's due to those same uncomfortable teenagers feeling comfortable enough with my strangeness to be friendly to me. Even though I was totally outside their frame of normal behavior and rightness in the world, they were willing to invest in my strangeness and sign that yearbook. It's that friendly-ness & comfort-ability & willingness to invest that will translate to business in a meaningful way. That is to say... people will buy it.
But that's just my short-cut-beat-around-the-bush definition of Gonzo marketing. That's the sort of line I'll deliver @ the reunion... to all those scumbags I only barely liked in the first place.
Because a serious effort to be totally clear about my thoughts on the idea of marketing and branding a business would be impossible to pull off in any worthwhile way... similarly any self-respecting reader probably would dismiss it as mindless jibberish. But if I were shoved, at knife-point, to the edge of a cliff and told to fake it.... this is how I would pretend to do it:
- After years of living this terrible dream, I've come to realize that people enjoy me because I'm running on a frequency just a touch different than their own, ever-so-slightly polarized to their wavelength. And while I recognize the importance of having a responsible attitude to business (the whole business <nudge nudge> if you know what I mean), I don't want to give the impression that I'm interested in, or willing to be part-and-parcel to, life as a status-quo-business-personality. Remember that job I just quit, I hated it just like every other job that I've ever had. These bastards were intent on wearing me down, breaking me in and subduing my mind. I went to work and died inside because they made me wear pants every day, and they wanted me to be there at the same time every day, and play by all their shitty rules every day. But let's not kid ourselves; those rules, just like the rules of any organic system, came to be through millions of tiny unguided evolutionary steps. These are the Rules of Corporate Death, and that's what I want to change first...
- We need to take a big step back from the world as we experienced it every day. We need to gaze on the universal manifestation and take it all in... one big, painful mouthful. Then, just as our minds are becoming fully inundated with the choking awesomeness the universe and our brains are suffocating, struggling to maintain a shred of consciousness, and just as the painful breathlessness is the searing into our skulls a real understanding of the meaninglessness and purposelessness of the human condition... we can have some true experience of enlightened judgement (however briefly) about what our condition really is, and how this world should operate. And then as we come back from that gnosis to write it all down as fast and thoroughly as we can... before it burns off in a haze of dreamy confusion... we'll understand that we must rewrite the Book of Business. Because so many of these accumulated Rules of Corporate Death are just like pinky-toes. They've been begging to get chopped off and left rot in the mud. For me, this venture is about cutting through the bone and sinew, right through to the filthy dirt below, hacking off those tiny-worthless immovable rules and really fucking with peoples minds in a terrific way... not selling my selfimage to the man, but selling my wholeself to the marketplace. Let's hope they bite.
- Perhaps it's clear, but let me gesticulate a bit longer, because it's coming so naturally now. Any brand that we might cultivate should not strive towards the radical, ultra-psychotic, maniac fringe of anarchist society any more than I think it ought to try dryhumping the legs of every crystal-crunching, vitamin popping, heathens at the neighborhood church of liberal douches. In my vision, we strive for an *appearance* of bucking-the-corporate-trend in a square-friendly way, and the *appearance* of offering a totally-new-and-different-sort-of-product-through-a-totally-different-sort-of-business... gently pushing them over the knife-edge between the comfort of the flock and deep into the inevitable pit of the Singularity. For me, this is about relentless terrible acts of warfare on the status-quo, because it's out-dated and wrong... This is about delivering carnage and casualty to the squares, right in their fucking living rooms while their looking for the remote... some outrageously muscular postal carrier breaking down the door and stomping through the house in combat boots and baseball hat, eyes blood-shot and about to pop out of his skull, screaming into a bullhorn: "WHICH ONE OF YOU MINDLESS ZOMBIES WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?!?! I SAID EAT THIS!!!! NOW FUCKING EAT IT!!!!"... balls out and exposed in front of god and everyone. This is about more than defeating dogma... it's about facing the mindless sheep and their soylent future head on, taking them to task and telling them all exactly what the fuck to do, and how the fuck to do it. THIS IS THE PURE FUCKING SHIT MAN... straight down their throats and deep into their numbed sense of what it means to be alive and kicking. And I want to do all this under the cover of a culture-concious, eco-friendly, delicious, nutritious, party-crashing, mail-order fruitbar... and two gentle, caring friends @ the lemonade stand who sold it to them. This is it folks, this is the beginning of a revolutionary event in human history.
- So, as it relates to branding and marketing, I believe that I can capitalize on my weirdness. And I've got an alias, asthma, ADD, and endlessly migrating islands of hair or bald-spots trapesing around on my head... so I'm left with no choice but to embrace my strangeness or to sell out, get a wig and go job-hunting @ Aberteenie & Snitch or The Bandana Republic. Tough as that choice may seem... I can make it in a snap. I choose strange. And I know that there are examples of successful folks who don't fall into the mainstream trap, and I suspect they'd see it my way once I had a few hours to lecture them on the benefits of screaming at frightened, t.v. watching, stooges... Here's a short list of successful weirdos who would also choose strange...
So, I hope that my readers don't take this 'heartfelt plea for understanding' as an attack on a reasonable and healthy respect for restraint and self-image... I'm not exactly suggesting that I want to spout off on the Company Blog about strange dreams, conspiracy theory, alkaline water, or gonzo marketing. I don't, because in all honestly it couldn't be real-deal true-to-form balls-deep gonzo marketing if these glass-eyed lithium-binge fruitcakes were hip to the act...
Perhaps I've gotten myself all worked up. What I should be saying is that my thoughts on branding are different than what the world might be used to, or what it's really ready for...as good or bad as that may be. And in the end, if the business can't sell a snack because the people are turned off by weirdness... well, that would suck and I would capitulate quickly. But if this unnamed business could capture more customers by offering a unique 'two-guys-and-a-truck' sort of weirdness than we lose to conservative personal dogma.... then we win. And if we can scale that, then we win very big.
Any schmuck can bulk-order a fruitbar full of sweaty nuts and sugar-free douche, strap on a t-shirt and beat the streets to his very own, made-to-order American Dream ... what i'm saying is that it takes real genius to be this weird and and make it happen, too. I have that genius. (god, i fucking better after this longwinded bullshit).