A troubled history
Stephen King's brief, urgent paper, "What Is A Brand?" was produced 40 years ago at the dawn of the seventies.
Even then, branding was struggling for its seat at the high table of commerce:
I wonder whether all top management are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully enough that it 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?
The answer – then, and perhaps all the more so now – is an emphatic “No”.
Now the unforgiving context within which marketing and advertising must operate, along with a number of questionable assumptions that have come to prevail, have forced branding’s role and value even further into the background.
One of the least satisfying developments since digital advertising has so radically disrupted the industry, is the current demand for ROI at every turn. This has pushed brand managers into a position so defensive that they can often only point to e-commerce conversions to justify investment in anything digital, other than perhaps the most meat-and-potatoes search program.
The assumption seems to be that the lion’s share of brand building is still best achieved by blanket messaging via above the line advertising, and that digital investment sits – as it perhaps always has since its inception – further down the pipe, alongside direct marketing and retail.
Such developments, given particularly that the balance sheets of many of the world's biggest businesses continue to list brand equity as a dominant line, are surely an immense concern.
At a time when swathes of quality consumer attention are lavished on social and smartphone, can we seriously continue to imagine that brand equity – like royalty at a rugby international – watches from comfort and safety in a warm hospitality box, while every other significant aspect of the connected consumer’s life, including our own products and services, is kicked vigorously around the chilly playing field of digital?
No. Brands, for better or worse, are being actively, constantly and irresistibly constructed and deconstructed in digital. We are fascinated and bewildered by capricious shifts in the tribal sentiments of connected consumers: utter indifference to our most exquisite, flattering siren calls one moment, and the next, their inexplicable rush to engage en masse, triggered by an apparently tiny flutter of influence in a corner we never knew existed.
We have to date gained no convincing idea of how to play under the ever-shifting goal posts of 21st century marketing. Certainly the performance of advertising in digital – while spend increases every year, the bulk of the investment is still in the “defensive”, hygiene-factor area of search – continues to vex all but the most dedicated of advocates.
Here we revisit and review this important element of Stephen King's substantial legacy, the argument for advertising’s key role as architect and builder of the brand equity that translates as preference and premium prices, through the unsentimental lens of post-digital culture and commerce.
An evolving role
… whatever people might wish to call the process of creating a property that combines tangible and intangible attributes, can be symbolized in a trademark that creates influence and value if properly managed … Well, that is branding by any other name.
Rita Clifton, Chairman and CEO, Interbrand
Adaptation is, as it happens, part and parcel of branding's story. Stephen King wrote in terms of its “waves”, or evolutions, within the broader history of marketing.
He wrote about branding very much as a defensive imperative, first used by consumer product manufacturers to push back against the wholesalers that dominated consumer product marketing from the late Victorian era, and second – starting in the 1950's – against the retail chains whose dominance of brands' channels to market, alongside their aggressive own-brand programs, created a game of cat and mouse that continues today.
The latter in particular challenged manufacturers to investigate sources of value, beyond the product itself, to sustain both preference and margin.
So Mr King completed his paper by pointing to the need for advertising to build and sustain new forms of ownable added value around the consumer brand.
First, we can recognise that in the 1970s it may well have a different role from the past. Added values and their effects on profits will become more important … Secondly, we can improve our methods of setting advertising’s objectives, by thinking of them in terms of the advertising’s contribution to the added values of the brand … And thirdly, we can recognize that advertising itself is a totality … If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand … (which) will never come to life.
As we read his words, we have feelings of both familiarity and regret. His argument could live very comfortably in any seminar in 2012, but what have – indeed since long before they were written – always been common sense marketing rules to live by, remain curiously, stubbornly peripheral to current marketing practice.
Nevertheless, we also realise that a large element of the historic role performed by branding, before we arrive at the generally accepted creation and attribution of added value, has in sharp contrast been defense against an ever-threatening – and ever mutating – diminishment of perceived value.
If wholesale and retail have been the source of such threats to date, has digital introduced a new player?
Shifts in power
Branding has always been just as much about power as about value. This is even more evident, at a time when connected consumers are still in the early stages of flexing newfound powers of “mass self-expression”[1], co-created meaning, identity and belonging, and their own tribally-based, direct influence over which ideas attain currency, and which fade away to nothing.
These are the kinds of cultural tasks of search and selection that brands have performed for us until recently. Do they still deserve their rather exalted position? Because viewed through a lens of global connectedness, brands are (until we intervene … whether and if so, how we do so is the subject of our enquiry) merely “yet more ideas” floating among a cast of literally billions.
As Umair Haque, the economist and media theorist, has correctly pointed out[2] from 10 years ago, where media, pre-digital, were scarce and thus highly valued, and consumer attention was plentiful, now media are overwhelmingly everywhere and consumer attention is the new gold.
We see a dramatic shift in power here, one that overturns the brand communications apple cart once and for all.
It's the power of the connected consumer that sets the scene for branding's next, “third wave” challenge. Along Stephen King’s branding timeline, first wholesalers and then retailers have historically set the challenges that great advertising has met, time and again, shoring up meaning and value not only around products and services, but crucially, within consumers’ own daily lives.
We now have a third protagonist, globally connected consumers themselves.
And while the battle for control of meaning and value remains the focus, we are today severely handicapped not only by earthquakes on our playing field and goal posts that never stop moving: we now learn that our star player is injured and may never return to top form.
The moving goal posts
Advertising, brand-building’s primary weapon of mass communication, is today in trouble. At its root, uncertainties about its role and value boil down not to its effects – arguably more measurable than ever before – but to a growing doubt about what it’s actually for. The strident insistence on ROI at every turn, points in the end not to questions about what is achieved in any given campaign or tactic therein, but about what it’s worth. Not so much what are we doing or how, more why.
We’re reminded of the familiar description of an accountant as one who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Measurability per se is, at least in digital channels, not a challenge. To the contrary, it’s the struggle for advertisers to reach some post-digital equivalent of the impression, of familiar, trusted reach and frequency, that underpins this crisis.
While ad spend remains stable for now, there's an emerging sense among brand owners that, even when bullseyes are consistently hit, they're shooting at the wrong targets. That somehow, the game has moved on.
I think this is close to the truth. Consumer presence and consumer attention have – a key and rarely-acknowledged legacy of the digital revolution – become uncoupled. The implicit value exchange that has underpinned advertising's very successful partnership with media is fractured, when formerly precious content is commoditized by sheer volume and choice.
Why else would we be hearing incessantly about the challenge of "engagement"? Behind all the talk about this still-elusive concept, is the sense that while the consumer eyeball may still drift over the messaging, the mind is elsewhere, “otherwise engaged”.
The fragmentation that so concerns advertising and the media that serve it, is happening just as much within a single consumer’s field of attention, as it is amongst a brand's target audience. And attention is a zero sum game.
So what has happened to cause this? And if branding is, as we noted above, concerned with building associations around products and arrives, then how, in this age of consumer empowerment and tribalism, are these often far richer and more plentiful associations being built. And perhaps more vexing, by whom?
Macromedia and Micromedia
Think of today's powerhouse brands. Coke, Mercedes, and the remaining handful of other great legacy brands were built, and continue to thrive, on the back of enormous advertising budgets. They are, in fact, entirely constructs of media. Ever since its rightly-famous “1984” campaign, Apple has marched in that number too. Steve Jobs was in many ways an advertising man more than a technologist. But do we feel that the Apple brand resides in advertising? Or is its victorious brand nourished by some other, deeper source?
Think now of the 21st century barbarians at the gate. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter are representative. For their billions of daily users, life without these brands is unthinkable. And yet, Facebook only began to advertise in September 2012, and Google only some 2 years previous to that, launching its now-won Chrome browser war against Explorer and Firefox.
Without contradicting Stephen King’s core premises, the new powerhouse brands of the digital age are clearly being built without any direct dependence on the media and advertising system.
This, perhaps, is not big news for most of us. But where does this leave the FMCG brands whose products and services are not, as the technology giants are, hardwired into daily consumer culture? How are they to argue their way over the threshold into the party?
It helps if here we divide media into two constructs. Visualize them as two separate circles, like you’d see in a Venn diagram. Consumers and brands map across both, but as we’ll see, the power of advertising – digital or otherwise – to create and distribute brand meaning and value in both is highly restricted.
Let's call these circles “Macromedia” and “Micromedia”. Big TV, Big Web, and Big Advertising are all largely moored in Macromedia. It's corporate, it's about big stakes, big budgets and big risk. But these days, it also has a fair amount of nose pressed up against the window of Micromedia.
Micromedia is that personal, “me and mine”, tribal zone of intimacy that is the most fascinating and troublesome consequence of the connecting of consumers.
If Macromedia is about the heft and swagger of Big Media, Micromedia's ruler is the powerful, often ruthless consumer (increasingly a troubling word, in terms of its assumptions). If Macromedia is about consumption of media by consumers, Micromedia is about self-expression by consumers to each other and, in some instances, back to our brands.
We have to now largely acted as if Micromedia were a new, younger, subordinate territory within Macromedia. We have thus assumed that plain vanilla digital advertising would, as traditional advertising has done so well in the past in Macromedia, build brands and drive purchasing in Micromedia. But this is where the “digital is just another channel” school of thought has failed so crucially.
In Macromedia, digital is indeed “just another channel”. But in Micromedia, the very fabric of the environment is digital, and furthermore the primary dynamic, the prevalent flow, is not from industry to consumer, but quite the reverse: outbound consumer self-expression and co-creation. These are the “extensions of man” that McLuhan wrote about so cryptically back in 1964, finally come to life in social and mobile, with transformational results.
This is I believe why the consumption-based advertising that has always ridden, with enormous success of course, on the tails of content, has struggled so frustratingly in Micromedia. Advertising in Facebook and mobile remain at the time of writing profoundly unconvincing in terms of both consumer acceptance and brand acceptance.
We have long talked about above, below and through The Line. I call this new challenge “Behind The Line”, the line of course being the far-from-permeable membrane that separates Macro- and Micromedia.
The technology giants that have ridden the web to commercial dominance have without exception done so by establishing a strong base in Micromedia, by empowering our already power-hungry self-expressing, co-creating connected consumer. While they do advertise, they sustain their brand equity above all by further empowering their customer Behind The Line.
Note, by the way, what happens when any – and it doesn’t matter how dominant they may have been – of the new powerhouses steps out of line (another Line to worry about here, perhaps!). Netflix (pricing), Facebook (trust and data), Apple (maps) and plenty more have felt the freezing breath of the hostile consumer tribe when their exhilarating new power is diminished or threatened even slightly.
A brand built in Micromedia is thus a still a house built on sand, that shifts along with the restless, capricious moods and desires of the globally connected consumer. Even a luxurious palace like Apple’s is intensely, incessantly vulnerable. So perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.
Experience and Expectation
While we may now understand a little more about the constructs and dynamics that make up Digital The Culture, as opposed to Digital The Channel, the question remains, if we are to build brands in digital, what must change?
I’m still myself in the early stages of developing planning frameworks that bring Macromedia and Micromedia together to enable true “Behind The Line” brand communications.
It’s my belief, however, that branding in the post-digital era demands we move far beyond messaging, to take on the active management and optimization of consumer experience across all key touchpoints, right along the entire product lifecycle.
I also belief as a consequence that brand equity can be viewed and ultimately valued as a sort of snapshot in time of the sum of goodwill and otherwise that such experiences engender in what is, remember, a globally connected, highly tribal consumer.
Brand building, which has till recently lived almost exclusively in advertising, has been primarily a brand-controlled system of linear, almost entirely one-way “Promise and Delivery”. In the digital age, a new and, for now, chaotic dynamic has come into play, disrupting a lot of what we knew before, challenging all the rules and roles of marketing.
In contrast to the regimented lines of Promise and Delivery, we have in Micromedia a corresponding but very hard to reach cycle of consumer Experience and Expectation. Our brand Experiences – good, bad, indifferent – drive our brand Expectations (and also, note, our own brand Expressions via social to our hundreds, thousands or millions of networked cohorts). And round again of course.
But what matters most here is that the cycle is driven not by brands, but by consumers in tribes. Advertising (digital or otherwise makes no real difference) holds little sway here. To revisit McLuhan, the medium is in this case not just the message, it’s also the product or service itself. There is no time, in digital, between the Promise and the Delivery. Indeed, there is no longer effective difference between them: what we say and what we then do are held up for public scrutiny
So the dynamic between Experience and Expectation, how that plays out across the network, and how in turn we choose to invest in engaging the attention of the consumer, will I suggest be the future of brand building in digital. Advertising’s more precise role has yet to unfold, but clearly whether it’s digital or not, branding’s traditional vehicle has, in Micromedia, a secondary role.
If digital is indeed to build brands, and one way or another we must find out how, my last point is that less focus on Return On Investment, and more focus on improving the powerful consumer’s Return On Attention, would be an excellent departure point.
With this imperative in mind, I’ll leave you with a final, wise thought from The King.
How to measure advertising and its effect is not terribly hard if you work out in advance what sort of response you are trying to get, because the basic question then is: Are we getting that response?
