Who Are You? Meet Cropper 6.0

Know thyself, said Socrates. This elusive piece of wisdom is crucial to personal fulfillment, but also to effective branding, according to media and marketing mastermind Jon Cropper.

“As a consultant, I’ve met with dozens of CEOs, and I ask them, ‘What do you stand for as a brand?’ Rarely is the answer clear and precise. But the very best of them will tell you with unwavering focus: ‘This is our mission, this is what we’re about.’”

He knows who he is: “I’m Cropper 6.0.”

Acknowledged as an expert in youth and urban culture, Cropper has enjoyed many successful marketing permutations as an executive for MTV, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Quincy Jones, Nissan and Young & Rubicam. Colleagues in the field say he has the “Midas touch.”

He doesn’t stop until he finds that “nugget of genius, that genuine aspect” of a company that hasn’t yet been fully leveraged. And then he brings it out into the light. “The answers to the deepest questions reside in your own history,” he says. “Innovation is driven as much by a respect for your history, as it is about being a futurist.”

Cropper’s exceptional Nissan campaign stands out as a decisive marketing model for the existing mediascape. It spiked Nissan sales, earned him an Effie award and landed him on the cover of Brandweek magazine as the “Best Marketer Under 40” in 2004. Somehow, he managed to turn the sensible, middle class Nissan sedan into a hip option for a rising and somewhat jaded generation of car buyers.

His strategy was a combination of seduction and performance that met the consumer head-on, a tactic that is sedately referred to as “non-traditional outdoor / experimental advertising.” Live music and celebrity interviews broadcast from the backseat of a purple Altima. An Armada inside a cherry-red and glass storage container displayed in select cities. Graffiti and street sculpture promoting the Maxima. And guerilla theater, where poets stand up in movie theaters during a Nissan ad and yell to the audience, “Who are you?”

This live interactivity is part old-school in the way it draws on the energy of one-on-one sales. But it’s also new. Audiences appreciated the effort and attention paid to them. It’s an antidote to the mass marketing ‘numbification’ of print and screen advertising.

Cropper insists that marketing is “not how many eyeballs you reach, but how many hearts you touch.”

He knows that young consumers today are a tough sell. They don’t just want a product to jump out at them. They want it to mean something. They have such effortless access to merchandise and services that they’re not easily impressed with quick delivery, good prices, or even something cool.

Cropper proposes that brands also have a responsibility to help reduce the current mood of economic anxiety. He says, “To provide peace of mind as part of your sales organization to me is critical.”

That’s why he insists that companies need to “out-teach vs. out-sell” the competition: “If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, you should be deploying those resources in a way that the customer is getting something for it. It’s about giving people useful information.”

One way that brands can make themselves useful, according to Cropper, is to educate. Higher education has become so expensive, and in many ways so out of touch with the vocational needs of today’s graduates, that some brands are filling that void with things like Cisco’s entrepreneurship programs, Google Code University and Apple’s iPhone Developer University Program.

By extending themselves through educational channels, brands become more intimately connected to their consumers. In turn, consumers have the chance to be trained in specialized areas by experts in the fields they value. Through this mutual extension, both sides come to know themselves more fully.

Everybody wins.

Cropper is entering into this “branded knowledge future” himself as co-founder of FuturLogic, a 100 percent online digital entrepreneurship institute. It is an unprecedented, for-profit educational model that brings together brands, technology and outstanding talent from around the globe.

Coming from a family of educators, Cropper deeply respects traditional learning, yet he is awed by the highly positive potential of a space where brands and educators collide. He anticipates that youth culture will get it.