Why this? Why now?
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A disturbing fracture
More than a few leading marketers of my acquaintance, from both the client and agency sides, have, in very recent conversations, expressed their increasing hesitation to use the term “brand” in anything except the most private conversations.
Marketing appears to be beginning to believe, or at least to worry, that brands and branding may no longer be important. On both sides, remarkably, one can sense an underlying but genuine fear that “it’s more than my job’s worth” to go there.
Most consumers however - if we framed the question appropriately, if they had the time to think about it, and if they frequented the same concepts and vocabularies as marketers, which they notoriously hardly ever do - would surely beg to differ.
Were you and I to pull our marketing hats off, and step across the aisle and into the marketplace, we would immediately and without hesitation feel the same way.
So, what’s happened. And what’s happening?
This paper concerns itself with beginning to resolve what is clearly the most urgent of marketing conundrums, more urgent even than the ubiquitous obsession with digital transformation.
What do brands today mean to consumers? And what, therefore, should they mean to marketers?
“Meaning” is central here, because, as we’ll be exploring further below, a key job (my own belief is that it’s in fact THE key job) of brands has always been to create meaning. But the context for and the rules of this meaning creation have evidently changed. Changed profoundly, and in ways we don’t sufficiently understand. And it’s almost certainly here that the disconnect is rooted.
Defining the problem
A central tenet of this argument is a direct and deliberate challenge to the illusory and destructive idea that brands have somehow diminished in their relevance and their contribution to building customer value and to driving the growth of the businesses that invest in them.
To the contrary - and with a nod to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s deliciously terse quote above - brands are very much alive and well, albeit feeling understandably uncertain, unloved and undernourished. They sorely lack, we could say, the confidence, the clarity and the rigour of a contemporary branding philosophy and discipline that are fit for purpose.
Motivated by our own uncertainty and insecurity as twenty-first century marketers, we have attempted to fit a mean and pinched picture frame across the explosive, expansive and deeply complex contexts in which brands and customers continue to connect, to make meaning, and to co-create value.
This hidden picture is huge, it’s growing and it’s full of opportunity and, yes, uncertainty and risk. The problem does not lie with brands, their underperformance or ongoing relevance to business growth. We need - with both urgency and boldness - to discover and develop a radically new, far more sophisticated frame.
A little history
“I wonder whether all top managements are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully enough that is from the success of brands rather than as products that the profits will come? Do they fully understand the nature of brands? Do they set company objectives in terms of brand positioning or simply in financial terms?”
Stephen King, What Is A Brand?
The lessons unlearned
It’s both astonishing and concerning that since Stephen King of JWT, an acknowledged godfather of brand planning, wrote the seminal paper quoted above half a century ago in 1971, hardly any useful or applicable guidelines have been published to help marketers build, manage and grow brands.
One honourable exception is perhaps How Brands Grow (Oxford 2010) by the perceptive and astringent New Zealand academic Byron Sharp. This work admirably, and without sentimentality, slashes many of the Gordian knots marketers face. It focuses however - as can also be said, and indeed immediately forgiven, given the era of its publication, for Stephen King’s argument - almost entirely on how marketers need to understand the role and value of advertising.
One would have hoped, given that by the time of publication the Web and its digital implications for marketing and brands had already been a major preoccupation for well over a decade, to see addressed the critical underlying challenge of how to think about brands and branding. In fact, How Brands Grow - some of its broader insights notwithstanding - is written more or less exclusively from the perspective of the pre-digital FMCG marketer. For this reason, it ignores the important concerns of - and lessons from - central modern marketing issues such service and B2B marketing.
Consider, in sharp contrast, the critical (and criminally underread) work of US academics Robert Lusch and Stephen Vargo, Service Dominant Logic. While only indirectly addressing brands and branding, they nevertheless admirably challenge and reframe our understanding of the cultural and commercial contexts within which brands operate.
This exemplifies an observation that we will return to, that the most urgently needed and persuasive insights on twenty-first century brand and branding rarely originate from within mainstream marketing’s commonly ponderous and repetitive deliberations about itself.
Brands, we must remember, live in the increasingly turbulent overlap between culture and commerce. This is where, and how, they perform their role of connecting a business with its audience.
So to understand what, and even more importantly how, we need to think about the future construction, management and growth of the modern brand, we need to turn outwards, to front up to and to understand the profoundly changed, and now ever-changing and accelerating, cultural and commercial dynamics that define the environment.
The disruptions of digital
From talking to doing
It’s been a quarter of a century since the World Wide Web turned everything upside down. Countless brands - large and small - have come and gone. Trends such as disruption, disintermediation - alongside another d-word that we just can’t seem to shake - digital - have become normality.
The digital revolution has certainly stamped its mark on business and marketing in a number of irresistible ways. Perhaps most radical is the still-ongoing shift from product value to service value. A great service beats a great product more or less every time.
This links closely with a now well-established trend away from ownership and towards access. The “Spotify effect” is spilling out everywhere, into sectors as diverse as automobiles and nutrition.
We begin to see a corresponding and fundamental shift in the nature and role of brands, from being more or less passive signposts for value, to becoming active participants in the very creation and delivery of value itself.
We could think of this change as moving from simply “standing for” something to “standing up” for it. Or more prosaically, from just “saying something” to “doing something”. Either way, we need to move our thinking on from the simplistic paradigm of brand as messenger, to consider the impact and implications of “brand behaviour”.
Today’s brands have agency. Broadly, we respond today very positively to those that behave intelligently, and dismiss the ones we experience as unintelligent. The attributes and parameters of this brand intelligence are the endgame for this paper.
Ambassador and concierge
While the promises of precision and prediction offered by our increasing obsession with data and analytics are as enticing as ever, as we’ll see, these make up only one contributing piece of the complex puzzle of the intelligent brand.
Two very different examples point up an interesting paradox in brand intelligence. The “Pet Rock” - yes, a stone in a box - was a must-have accessory for millions of children (and I’m sure more than a few adults …) some fifty years ago. Much mockery and bewilderment all round, of course. And yet, actually … how unintelligent was this brand?
Microsoft - certainly during the reigns of both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, less so in recent years - was a goliath of the software business, packed with many of the most intelligent professionals in the world. But during these explosive years, how intelligent was this brand?
One principle that hasn’t changed - while it could certainly do with dusting down and reconsideration - is that brands exist to serve two primary masters. At the most simple level, they create value for the firms that invest in them, by creating value for customers.
A useful metaphor defines and distinguishes these two distinct roles. The modern brand must be a world-class ambassador for the firm, consistently, credibly and confidently representing its interests in a marketplace where linear change has been supplanted by what we might call “chronic turbulence”. And it must recognise and respond to the ever-shifting circumstances and needs of the modern customer, with the same timely, almost magical understanding and service that we experience from a favourite concierge.
The value and the digital
The changed and changing nature of customer value itself now clearly demands our close attention. Obscured behind the woefully inadequate frame we have forced over brand marketing is the rich and complex context - at the overlap between culture and commerce - in which brands and customers perform their dizzying dance.
But before we can grasp the value, we must come to understand the digital.
As it turns out, our interpretation of the profound shifts introduced only a couple of decades ago by the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the Web, conceals many of the misconceptions that have led to our faulty framing of modern brands and branding, along with the role and value of marketing itself.
(The Intelligent Brand - Part Two is here.)