Volume 107: Live from the 2020 archives.

his week and next, I’m getting a little R&R by the beach in Maine. While I’ll mostly be ambling around in flip-flops and a T-Shirt with a lobster roll in one hand and a beer in the other, I figured it was also a great opportunity to share some things from the archives. Normal service will resume in a couple of weeks. I hope you have a great summer. (My apologies if some of the links no longer work. I did clean up some of the more egregious grammatical errors)

1. 21st Century branding is being held hostage by 20th Century modernism.

Since I’ll be talking at the Brand New Conference in October on this topic, this piece, originally published in Off Kilter Volume 46 in October 2020, feels like an apropos place to start.

tl;dr: It’s not that we can’t; it’s that we choose not to.

In hindsight, it was entirely predictable that branding would respond through a lens of minimalism and reductionism when faced with the complexities of a fast-evolving digital environment. After all, when the sheer complexity of channels, screen sizes, resolutions, software limitations, UX considerations, usability and accessibility, data, and 3rd party design and layout rules must be navigated, the most obvious response is to boil everything down to its most basic component parts in order to ensure both consistency and compliance.

Unfortunately, this has also served to create two interrelated problems. The first is that brand design has regressed to a place of blandly austere and joyless modernism in pastels that’s become way too comfortable to be useful. The second is that this comfortable approach directly impedes any hunger to push the boundaries of what is possible and create new voices for a new time.

The result? A sea of beautifully designed brands paying homage to the mid-20th century that are entirely undifferentiated from each other aren’t particularly distinctive in any way and that we cannot for the life of us remember from one day to the next. And while we may laud the standard of design craft on display, if the results are consistently commodifying even as the volume of direct competitors explodes, have we created something of value, or are we simply talking to ourselves?

Put simply; good design is the new bad design. Good design has never been more available to more corporations for less money, which means it’s no longer a differentiator in its own right. Instead, it’s 21st Century table stakes. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Like all things table stakes, you have to have it, and it has to meet expectations. The problem is that a judicious application of design craft simply isn’t enough to make any brand stand out today in the same way that it did even five years ago.

As a result, craft alone is no longer enough when considering any company's branding. Instead, we require a much greater emphasis on conceptual creativity, cut-through thinking, and deliberate breaking of the so-called rules across the breadth of the designed experience.

And that will be hard because there are few things as conservative as a design community that is both cutting in its criticism and narrow-minded in its idea of what’s acceptable. But our problem today isn’t designing something suitably acceptable; it’s designing something suitably different.

Now, designing different is far from a new idea. The London 2012 Olympics logo was designed as a deliberate response to the narrowing of design taste, and while excoriated by the usual suspects at the time, it’s almost certainly the only Olympic logo you can remember amid the stultifying schmaltz that came before and after. Before that, while Apple’s approach to design might today epitomize the acceptable mainstream, in 1998, it was daringly and strikingly different from the norm. And long before either of these, Coca-Cola created its iconic bottle as a direct response to a sea of copycat cola’s that consumers couldn’t tell the difference between.

So, it’s not that we can’t design brands to be radically and wonderfully different from each other. Or that we can’t embrace richness in digital. Or that we can’t elevate cohesion over rigid consistency. Or that we can’t embrace code and motion and sound and interactivity. Or that we can’t insist upon vastly bolder ideas. Or that we can’t deliberately test the edges in order to be as unique to our time as what came before was to its.

It’s simply that we choose not to.

2. McKinsey places the cherry atop bullshit mountain.

As we loosely enter a post-pandemic phase, bullshit mountain is getting bigger, actively peddled by the likes of McKinsey, where change-porn is necessary to create the FOMO they sell against, exacerbated by the shift from thought leadership (published occasionally, thoughtful, demonstrative of expertise) to content (published often, paper-thin, driving for clicks). Unfortunately, these proclamations are little more than thinly disguised ads. Originally published in Off Kilter Volume 31 in June 2020.

tl;dr: “Performance branding.” Sounds great. Is utterly nonsensical.

Part of the reason I started this newsletter was to call out ‘bullshit mountain.’ The sheer, unscalable mountain of crap that surrounds marketing specifically and business more generally. So, imagine my delight when McKinsey chose to place a cherry on it with a recent thought leadership piece on branding.

Under a title clearly designed for search engine glory, “Performance branding and how it is reinventing marketing ROI,” I found myself reading this steaming pile three times in the vain hope that I must have missed something the first time round, but no. At no point anywhere do they reference anything relevant to or pertinent to the field of branding. Not once. Nothing about building distinctiveness, salience, permission, creating a differentiated experience, the value (or not) of positioning, the importance of repetition, managing and periodically reinvigorating long-lived brand assets, the importance of reach as a counterpoint to personalization, how to manage brand activities v’s activation activities, or how to establish emotional meaning rather than just rational ‘buy now’ promotions. Not even a mention in passing of brand purpose (thank god). Literally none of it.

Instead, we get an incoherent discourse on surveys, analytics, and data counterpointed by their belief that performance marketing will give marketers an edge amidst the unknowns of Covid (a particularly jarring contrast given their otherwise focus on data) and the usual claptrap about agile testing of every nuance of every nuance, etc.

But, the most obvious and egregious error considering this comes from McKinsey is their core conceit about measurement and analysis. The authors fail to understand the fundamental reality that brand effects and activation effects show up across very different timeframes, so seeking to define a “single source of truth” for both via short-term measures designed for activation literally makes no sense. Chopping and changing your brand the way you chop and change your activation campaigns is a surefire recipe for branding chaos and market-mush, not performance branding nirvana.

So, why put their name on it if it’s all such obvious nonsense? Simple. It’s a cynical play from a strategy consultancy that’s increasingly renowned for it. The real problem with marketing today isn’t the ability to utilize performance marketing techniques; it’s the declining strategic value of marketing within the organization. As marketing departments get re-tooled and resources are piled into digital programmatic media and direct response promotions, the remit of marketing is becoming ever narrower and more tactical in nature. As a result, there’s now a generation of marketers who know a lot about tactical activation and very little about what it takes to build a brand strategically. So rather than help them establish a credible knowledge base and understanding of how to make a case for and then actually build a brand, McKinsey says to go ahead and use the tactical techniques you’re already comfortable with. Win! Well, after they’ve sold you a $3m+ consulting contract, it is for them to build out a performance branding stack that’ll get you precisely nowhere. This is such a cynical charade of feeding people what they think they’ll want to hear rather than what it’s important for them to actually know.

Oh, and to put a cap on it, I checked out the bios of the four authors. Not a single one has any branding experience at all. Not one.

Don’t waste your time with this shit. Instead, if you want to know more about how to balance brand and activation, read Binet & Field. If you want to know more about how brands grow, read Byron Sharp. Or, if you need a basic introduction to branding, start with Robert Jones. All are light years more cogent than this nonsense.

3. Brand building: Still a critical competitive moat.

As we witness the likes of P&G and Unilever successfully raise prices in response to/furtherance of inflation, while venture-backed DTC implodes due (partly) to an over-reliance on ad-tech driven discounting to make the sale, I figured this was worth rinsing off. Originally published in Off Kilter 34 in July 2020.

Tl;dr: Don’t believe the mar-tech industrial complex hype.

I commented on LinkedIn a while ago that the “marketing of modern marketing is mostly bullshit,” so I was quite heartened to see this report from Google make a few good points. I’m not going to review the whole thing because it’s quite long. Still, I want to focus on one of the underlying core elements hidden in the downloadable PDF - that brand strength acts as a powerful barrier to entry against new competition.

Why is this important? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, it suggests what we’ve already seen. Namely, that over-hyped VC-backed DTC startups often dramatically misinterpret the markets they enter. So rather than the established brand “ripping people off” with high prices that make it vulnerable, there’s a preference-premium for that brand, making it very difficult to compete against. Second, it’s yet another demonstration of how the marketing of modern marketing is mostly bullshit.

One of the most egregious elements of the shift to bullshit is the idea that the primary goal of marketing is not to build brand strength and establish a hard-to-compete with preference-premium but instead to focus religiously on transactional metrics around short-term campaign ROI and customer activation masquerading under the guise of “performance.” A focus that demonstrably has the dangerous side-effect of a harmful, sometimes fatal, spiral of discounting and price promotion.

Why is that important now? Aside from the chart in the Google report showing that people are more likely to search for the “best” product rather than the “cheapest,” the pressure is going to be on for many brands to compete on the basis of price. That’s the nature of recessions, after all. But the problem with the wanton pulling of the discounting lever is threefold: First, you train your customers to delay the gratification of purchase until the inevitable discount promotion is running, which kills your margin. Second, you accidentally optimize for the least loyal and most price-sensitive customers, which messes with your data-driven segmentation and renders customer lifetime value assumptions moot. And third, you can cause real harm to your brand that’s very difficult to repair. (I’ve worked with more than my fair share of clients looking for a brand revitalization caused by the realization that price promotion has caused real harm to their brand).

The true measure of the marketers who most effectively make it through the recession we’re in today won’t be those who discount their way to marginless oblivion, but those who resist the shiny promises of the mar-tech industrial complex and focus instead on building and sustaining a preference-premium, even if it is only a slim one.