Milton and Keats on Verizon's Droid Marketing Teaser Campaign

IDon’t run simultaneous apps.

IDon’t have a real keyboard.

IDon’t allow open development.

IDon’t take night shots.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

It is the Droid formerly known as Tao or “The Path.”

What’s in a name? Gertrude Stein said a “rose is a rose is a rose.”

And Hamlet said, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

All of this poetry goes toward the definitions of identity.

And so Verizon, in its teaser campaign for the launch of its new Motorola Android Google phone has seemingly chosen to call its phone simply: Droid and defined itself as the anti-IPhone.

Now you have to wonder if by defining yourself as who you are not is really the best strategy for defining who you are.

Look what John Milton did for Satan. He gave Satan as much charisma as Mick Jagger strutting across the stage of Saturday Night Live. Here is Satan’s entrance from Paradise Lost:

Satan with his Powers
Far was advanced on winged speed, an host
Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dew-drops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
Regions they passed, the mighty regencies
Of Seraphim and Potentates and Thrones
In their triple degrees and regions to which
All thy dominion, Adam, is no more
Than what this garden is to all the earth
And all the sea.

Now that boy knows how to make an entrance just as much as Steve Jobs strutted the IPhone out there and made a new tao or path for mobile broadband interconnectivity.

Like Satan’s minions, the 85,000 apps that populate the web store ennobled the appeal of the IPhone and helped drive sales. Positive capability yielding positive responses and positive sales.

You have to wonder if Verizon’s negative definition of itself is the best way to drive initial interest in a meaningful long-term way.

That Bright Star, John Keats, in his definition of “negative capability” wrote: “Negative Capability is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

While there can be a lot of appeal in dark attraction, people more forcefully respond to the positive in marketing. The current Verizon teaser campaign can leave you wanting with its negative capability.

One can hope that when Verizon launches its new Droid later this month, the brand building will be a positive one. A true positive relationship such as the one formed between Luke Skywalker and R2D2 that will bring net access and mobile freedom to Verizon subscribers. In effect, Verizon could give its subscribers the true path or positive tao that they forsook in terms of negative imagery.

Otherwise, the sales risk, to paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley, will be for Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, to say, “I fall upon the thorns of marketing. I bleed.”