The Think Room

TO: Occupy Wall Street
FROM: Olson PR
RE: Your brand

Wall Street Occupiers,

While we’re quite sure that corporate-world concepts like branding, marketing and messaging are the last things you’re thinking about at the moment, we’d strongly suggest you start soon if you want your movement to hold together and succeed.

Here’s why: Today we live in a world where activism—no matter how organic—lives at an intersection with branding. And the simpler the message, the more likely it is to find a sympathetic following.

Your grievance is one that ought to be well received and for which much of the country was already primed. The U.S. has still not recovered from an economic collapse that most of the country has attributed to Wall Street malfeasance. Even after a massive taxpayer bailout, those firms are still paying huge bonuses and, so far as anyone can tell from the outside, are carrying on as before.

What’s more: the public recognizes that CEO salaries have continued to skyrocket for little apparent reason, growing 300% since 1990, while rank-and-file wages grew only 4% and the minimum wage declined. That holds true even for bad CEOs. Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd got a $35 million exit package after resigning in disgrace following sexual-harassment allegations. Gannett CEO Craig Dubow–having overseen an 86% stock-price decline and thousands of layoffs during his tenure—left that company with a $37 million parachute.

Ought to be simple enough, right? This is about fairness.

But you have managed to make something that ought to be simple complicated by convoluting your message with a litany of tired clichés about corporations, free trade and even capitalism itself. The response to that convoluted messaging: An apathetic view from the center of America, which polls showed was originally quite sympathetic and generally aligned with the fundamental principles represented by your movement. The muddy message and unhinged theatrics have even led to a lack of support from places that ought to be friendly to your cause, like the editors of The New Republic, for instance.

A similar mission creep has also infected the country’s right-wing grassroots movement, the Tea Party. While that campaign has been successful by almost any measure—creating massive awareness, dominating the 2010 mid-term elections and holding huge sway in the Republican primaries—the group’s origin as a potential third party focused solely on an anti-tax message, has been diluted by a wide range of cultural grievances. It has morphed into an almost myopic anti-Obama, anti-Democrat message. What was once a potential legitimate third-party awakening is now firmly under the Republican tent and as it stands today, is struggling to get traction for preferred candidates during key state presidential primaries.

The lesson: Movements with clear, simple messages are the ones that maintain focus and achieve the ends they originally sought, just like well-disciplined brands do. Think about Nike, Harley-Davidson or Apple.

The discipline that delivered for these brands over time also works today for issues and causes. “It gets better” has succeeded in raising awareness of the costs of bullying. Bill Clinton arguably won the White House with a tight message discipline on, “It’s the economy, stupid.” and pulled a massive electoral upset. CNBC host Dylan Ratigan’s “Get The Money Out” effort has exposed the costs of unfettered financial influence in our politics.

Whether you agree with these causes or not, there’s no mistaking what they’re about, and whether you’re for or against their goals.