Let's Put the Brand Back Together
Playing Small
There’s been a trend occurring over the last decade in the marketing industry. An obsession with the analytics a digital ecosystem can provide, coupled with marketing automation, has led many brands to dilute what they are. Many brands seem lost when it comes to what they stand for as they chase the latest shiny marketing fascination du jour.
If you listen closely, you will hear brands that should have a point of view, that should stand for something and push against another thing, describe themselves as, gasp, “companies.” It’s as if they’re quietly whispering to the market that they are just a commodity provider and not to expect anything else from them. They’re happy playing small.
But playing small doesn’t excite consumers to join you. And you can really only engender loyalty when people believe you when you say you stand for something. Having a brand makes you predictable to the market because human brains are lazy and want to make those quick associations, making the old adage of defining your brand before the marketplace does an irrefutable law of brand marketing.
A Kernel of Hope
As you think of some of the most revered brands in the world, you’re likely to pick ones out that have well-defined and well-marketed brands.
Nearly two years ago, Nike wanted to commemorate their iconic “Just Do It.” tagline by featuring athletes who had crazy dreams. As you most likely recall, their banner marketing for that campaign featured an NFL-ousted Colin Kaepernick where Nike encouraged us to, “Believe in Something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The marketing was powerful and successful. Despite some low-level rebuke of the brand, overall, people wanted to join Nike as a brand because they believed in what they were signaling the market they stood for. As Fast Company reports, Nike saw a 31% boost in sales and $6 billion brand value increase.
Changing Disruptions
In a Forrester Prediction from 2019 about trends emerging with CMOs, Forrester noted a well understood trend in marketing that impactful CMOs will capitalize on societal divisions to disrupt, tapping into unresolved problems to create brand value.
In the last decade, it appeared as though technology served as the main impetus of disruption, driving many CMOs and marketing departments to focus on how to connect with consumers through martech, adtech, programmatic and other digital technology.
As CMOs look for advantages, Forrester reports that they are likely to look to other mechanisms of disruption like culture, media, creativity, and economics. That’s precisely what we saw Nike do with Kaepernick. In fact, as we have seen through the recent racial unrest in the U.S., Nike probably played a hand in leading culture rather than just finding the human problem behind the business problem and leaning into that disruption.
A Way Forward for Brands
While returning to brand-building sounds like moving back decades in marketing to some, it is truly the only viable way to differentiate in the market. The marketing world’s obsession with data and analysis over the last decade has shown where it is valuable, but it’s important to know that it is not a silver bullet in connecting with consumers.
Likewise, CMOs won’t be able to cut through the clutter by throwing money at a big-budget mass media buy for brand campaigns.
The solution seems to be clear. The world is becoming ever more digitally connected and a brand’s digital properties only factor into the customer experience more. As marketers, we have to have the discipline to know where building the brand is necessary to bring the digital experience to life so that consumers aren’t confused by the digital experience your brand has put together. And we need to have enough discipline to know where the technology of marketing provides value and can help us answer questions.
But we’ll never know what we are measuring ourselves against unless we know what the brand stands for first. We have to know that north star we are marketing for and against.