Between Sets

I put a courtroom into Herough Herough.

Not a scene about a courtroom. A transcript. Speaker labels, the clipped call and response of testimony, the format doing the work description usually does. Nothing in the book asked for it. I wanted to see if I could hold that structure, and I thought a witness under oath would hand over backstory in a way a paragraph never could. People answer questions differently when they can’t leave.

Right now I’m in the middle of a Murakami novel where a chapter stops being prose and lays itself out in newspaper columns. After a couple hundred pages of one rhythm, the page changes shape in your hands. The reading muscle you’d been using gets to set its instrument down. Best twenty minutes of the book so far. Fifteen minutes between sets, and the second set hits different because of it.

Half the people who hit a chapter like that shut the book. They didn’t sign up for columns. They wanted the thing they were already enjoying, more of it, uninterrupted, and the author got cute. The other half sit up straighter, because somebody is clearly driving.

It’s a smoked beer. Rauchbier splits a room inside one sip. Campfire, ham, a bonfire in a glass, and you either want the whole pint or you want it moved to the far end of the bar. Nobody is neutral. Nobody forgets it either. (As craft beer geek of a person I am, get that smoked beer away from me…)

The easy lesson here is be polarizing. That lesson is thirty years old and has been laundered through so many decks that it’s now the safest thing a marketer can say out loud.

The move only works under two conditions, and both of them are boring.

First, you need a rhythm worth breaking. The newspaper chapter is a thrill because two hundred pages taught your hands what the book feels like. Same reason smoke is interesting in a glass: you’ve had enough regular beer for your mouth to have an opinion. Swerve on page one and you haven’t swerved, you’ve just started weird. You don’t get to be strange until you’ve been legible. Most brands reaching for divisive skipped the years where anyone learned their shape.

Second, the reason can’t be the reaction. I didn’t write the courtroom to split readers. I wrote it because I wanted the challenge, and because it lit the backstory from an angle prose couldn’t reach. When the only argument for a strange move is that it’s strange, people taste it. There is a difference between a beer that’s smoked and a beer that’s smoked for the ad.

Which makes the swerve less a marketing decision than a permission structure. Somebody on staff has to be allowed to put the rauchbier on tap and be wrong about it. (Take it from me, just get it in cans. It really ruined one of our beer lines and I had to replace the whole thing…)

If your team can only make choices that poll well, your brand can’t make a decision. It can only make an average.

…And an average is safe the way a hallway is safe.

The people who love the courtroom chapter aren’t loving the courtroom. They’re loving the evidence that a person was at the wheel and could have crashed. That’s the entire transaction. Nobody has ever felt chosen by something that was never at risk of refusing them.

Stay Positive & What Have You Been Talked Out Of?