Volume 121: Idealism over Nihilism.

1. Idealism Over Nihilism.

tl;dr: Heed the data, but reject the nihilism of modern marketing commentary.

I’m very conflicted when it comes to the modern focus on marketing effectiveness, marketing science, econometrics, etc. On the one hand, I feel it critical that we better understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. And I tip my cap to anyone doing the hard yards of trying to figure this out because it’s both important to our future and a critical counterpoint to the ocean of snake oil that has drowned us in recent years.

However, as valuable as I find this work, I also find its nihilistic overtones to be a little disturbing and perhaps commercially dangerous.

When I say nihilistic overtones, what do I mean? Well, and forgive me for overgeneralizing a little, it’s the attitude of “nothing matters except salience, so we should solely focus on being noticed and not think any deeper,” which leads directly to an increasingly common view that brands don’t matter much, don’t mean much (because customers don’t care), and that salience (being noticed and remembered) is king. And, when it comes to salience, anything goes, no matter how daft or potentially destructive.

The problem with this attitude is the overt sense that nothing matters as long as people notice. Which would suggest that what Elon Musk is up to over at Twitter is super smart, while to me, it looks more like destructive chaos. Or that Burger King’s penchant for stunts should be the paragon of effectiveness when that doesn’t appear to be true. Or that the current storm around Balenciaga, bondage bears and all, is totally valid as a way to garner attention. When in reality, it’s a controversy that risks spiraling way out of control.

And, while the data is the data on what works and what doesn’t, the nihilistic overtones seem more like human interpretation than something blaring at us from the data itself. So, why? My theory is that it’s largely an overreaction to brand purpose, which dominated the branding conversation over the last few years and massively over-sold the importance of social meaning. And, like most overreactions, we’re almost certainly now swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

Why? Well, mainly because nobody notices when you agree with something; they only notice when you run contrary. And with that in mind, I deeply suspect high-profile talking heads are using this nihilistic anti-purpose frame to raise their own prominence so they can sell more books, or marketing courses, or both. And, yes, that would seem a bit cynical. But then again, cynicism is exactly the playbook promoted by the modern marketing nihilist.

Me? I’m an idealist and proud to be so. I’d like to think a few of you are too.

When I started in the branding business, it was a time of true idealism. We talked about building brands people would love, and we meant it. We talked about the power of ideas to attract people to your brand, and we meant it. We talked about the value of standing for something and delivering on it, and we meant that too.

And, even though we’ve found over the years that brands being loved is more fantastical than it is real, it still has real value as strategic intent, even if it’ll rarely if ever, be achieved. To counter this, the nihilists will shout you down that having customers love your brand is irrelevant and that you’re stupid even to try. But they’re stuck in a land where all that matters is how noticed, and thus controversial, your ads are, and we know that ads are only a small part of the overall brand package. Ironically, it also means that if we continue down the path of marketing nihilism, all that’ll happen is the CMO remit will shrink even further than it already has as we flit from one disconnected “look at me!” stunt to another.

Instead, if we shoot to build a brand that people will love, it forces us to consider the total package across all four Ps of the marketing mix. It forces us to think about the experience, the service quality, the value proposition, the product, innovation, pricing, the ideas, the idealism, the channels, the partners, and all the qualitative things that make brands valuable to people rather than simply what we can easily measure quantitatively.

Take airlines, for example. Here, the nihilists might suggest that salience is all that matters. Bullshit. That doesn’t consider the reality of the experience and how appallingly so many airlines (hint, JetBlue, American) responded to post-pandemic travel. (Personally, I refuse to consider both for a very long time)

And this is important. Cory Doctorow has written about qualia, which represents qualitative information that cannot easily be quantified. His observation is that when we seek to quantify everything, we ignore that which cannot be quantified. Not because it doesn’t matter but because we can’t measure it. We then conveniently justify this by simply assuming that because something can’t be quantified, it never really mattered in the first place. Except that, all too often, it does.

This is what I fear about modern marketing’s love affair with overtly quantitative nihilism and where we may end up as a result. It makes the huge assumption that qualitative factors don’t matter. That all that matters is the attention we can quantify. And that by quantifying this attention, we land in a place where the true nature of brands will be understood.

But, sorry, as much as I value the data, I have to reject this conclusion because of all the missing qualitative data. Idealism in branding matters; seeking to create something people will love matters (even if we’ll never achieve it), and those qualitative factors that cannot be quantitatively measured also matter.

So yeah, love your brand. Be an idealist. And reject the nothing matters crowd because I truly believe they’re wrong, or at least only partially correct.

2. Who Cares if You Can’t Read The Logo?

tl;dr: Kia is an excellent example of a great rebrand.

There’s a news article flying around the interwebs right now that breathlessly tries to slay the Kia rebrand as being awful because “30,000 people a month are searching for KN.” Because, as the accusation goes, the new Kia script is illegible.

What a load of old bollocks.

The Kia rebrand is great. It feels future; it feels cool; it feels differentiated. And, unlike other car brands, you sure ain’t going to mistake the Kia badge for any other car out there.

I’ve been meaning to write about Hyundai Motor Group, which comprises Kia, Hyundai, and luxury sibling Genesis for a while because this is by far the most interesting car company right now, setting itself up to win in the race to electrification. (well, at least in terms of what’s available in the West. There’s some fascinating stuff going on in China and Vietnam that we haven’t seen here yet).

As a core part of re-positioning the entire group as a modern, future-forward automotive company, the Kia rebrand is a shining light. Rather than claiming 30,000 KN searches a month is bad, I’d rather suggest there are 30,000 people a month so curious about a Kia they’ve seen and so engaged they’re searching to find out more. Really, this should be a “bravo” rather than a “bah, humbug.” (Not to mention the fact that including KN in your SEO/SEM strategy isn’t exactly hard).

Rebranding, in general, has been given an increasingly bad rap in recent years. As more and more visually inept people read How Brands Grow and regurgitate distinctive asset blah, blah, we’re being beaten over the head that rebrands are universally bad because they take away the distinctive assets that have been painstakingly built over the years only to replace them with something completely new, which is a bad thing because nobody has seen the new stuff and so cannot recognize nor remember it.

This is fine as a theory but doesn’t consider the basic question of, “what if the assets we’re investing in are shitty, nobody really notices them anyway, and/or they no longer reflect the kind of company we’re becoming?”

So, before moving on, let’s first address the tiny little elephant in the room. Do we lose something when we significantly change how a brand is visually presented to the world? Unequivocally, yes. By definition, replacing something familiar with something new will take time to bed in, so there is always a short-term negative impact to take into account. That shouldn’t be in question. The question should really be, how significant is this negative impact likely to be? How much upside can we potentially gain over time from making the change? And will it be more or less harmful in the long run to make a big future-facing push with the old identity hanging around our necks like a noose?

Enter Kia.

For many years, Kia followed a similar path to other South Korean brands: think early Samsung or Lucky Goldstar era LG. Entering Western markets with copycat products with mediocre design and competent engineering at bargain-basement prices.

And that’s what the old Kia logo symbolized. Cheap, mediocre design attached to a cheap run-of-the-mill car. This wasn’t a badge anyone was going to feel emotional about. I certainly didn’t want one in my driveway, not just because of the badge but because of the vehicle it was attached to.

Yet, in hindsight, we can see the strategy wasn’t to keep building cheap, mediocre cars. Instead, the strategy was to double down on differentiation through design, technology, and a semi-luxurious cabin experience, allied to a shift to value rather than bargain-bin pricing. Buying a Kia would no longer represent a compromise, and someone somewhere decided a new logo was necessary to support this shift.

At the time, I admit, I didn’t get it. It felt like an identity that had exited the realms within which the company operated. It felt like the proverbial lipstick on dogshit. And yet, I’m delighted to admit that I was completely wrong. I pulled up behind a Kia EV6 at the lights the other day, and the back end of that thing is unequivocally futuristic and sexy. It just screams, “search KN on Google,” haha.

And that’s the thing about rebranding. Yes, if all you do is slap a new coat of paint onto the same old thing, you’re probably not going to achieve much. And, as the marketing scientists have shown, you’re probably more likely to end up net-negative, at least in the short term. However, if you’re making a more fundamental shift in strategy. If like Kia, you’re literally becoming a different kind of company with a different kind of product, then rebranding remains a powerful part of the overall package. You certainly don’t have to do it, and you should go in with eyes wide open, but it’s potentially a lot more valuable over the medium to long term than some would have you think.

I can tell you right now that the EV6 with the old logo would’ve looked like hot garbage. So, yeah, today, I’d happily have a Kia in my driveway. And that, my friends, is precisely the kind of transformative change the marketing science community doesn’t seem well set up to measure because it rarely–if ever–occurs in their preferred CPG/FMCG playground.

I’ll follow up on that later because treating every brand in every category as if it works exactly like oven fries is one of branding theory’s biggest and most consistent fails.

3. Work Now, Get Paid Eventually.

tl;dr: Payment terms reaching ridiculous levels.

One of the most frustrating things I find myself dealing with is the sheer insanity of trying to work with large corporations. 2-3 times a year, someone from a large corporation will reach out looking for help, and almost without fail, the most challenging part of the whole job happens before it even starts; navigating the hurdles erected by procurement.

Often, these hurdles include onerous insurance requirements, all-encompassing multi-year noncompete clauses, forensic multi-page bureaucracy where you have to detail everything about your business, financial position, etc., scary indemnification clauses (Yeah, like it’s cool to demand a single-person company blanket indemnify a multi-billion dollar corporation), spreadsheet after spreadsheet requiring you to detail your proposed FTE equivalents and average billing rates, and yes, payment terms commonly in the 60-day range, and increasingly pushing 90.

It’s not uncommon to find yourself saying no, even though it’s work you want to do, because there’s simply no way to get a contract signed off on in a timely and cost-efficient manner unless you and your client find a way to get insanely creative. Or they bring you on as an individual contractor, which brings with it the humiliation of having to go to a lab to take a piss test.

But, for all that I’m faced with, it’s nothing compared to others. I thought I’d seen everything when General Mills issued an advertising RFP requiring 120-day payment terms that also claimed ownership of all IP created by the agencies pitching, even though none were paid to pitch.

But no. Now there’s this. Keurig Dr. Pepper, a huge CPG/FMCG conglomerate (WTF is going on with that logo, btw), recently issued a public relations RFP that included…wait for it…360-day payment terms. Wut?

Aside from it being morally wrong to treat any vendor like this, especially one you want to act as a partner in your success, this trend toward increased contractual combativeness is hugely destructive to the client organization for a few simple reasons.

First, while onerous procurement requirements are nominally intended to drive value, they often achieve the exact opposite. Accidentally optimizing the client so you can only work with the largest, least efficient, and least creatively or strategically interesting partners.

Second, the price value you seek is an illusion. The agencies responding to RFPs with onerous terms are all factoring in the cost of meeting those terms in their response. So, while 360-day payment terms might look like great cashflow management on paper, any agency response will factor in the cost of whatever loan they’ll need to take out against the value of the contract. Either directly in the form of higher fees or, more likely/additionally, by understaffing the work with inexperienced, cheap talent.

Third, you eliminate the possibility of working with anything even approaching the best talent. (Clearly demonstrated by the Keurig Dr. Pepper homepage) The best at anything are usually in demand, so they don’t have to respond to nonsense like this.

Fourth, whomever you do work with is now in a combative relationship you created. They’re not looking out for your success; they’re not going above and beyond; they’re never going to color outside the lines for you. Instead, they’re focused on financial recovery, charging through the nose for out-of-scope requests (which they’ll track like bloodhounds) and applying the most junior, least costly talent on your business to squeeze some meager margin out of you.

And, you know what? If you really wanted to both save money and get a higher quality of work, you’d do the exact opposite. Here’s why.

Amid all the furor about agency holding companies being disrupted by consulting firms, there’s been another trend bubbling along under the surface: Talented people have been leaving both to hang up their shingles as independent contractors and as small boutique consultancies or agencies, often to escape terrible working environments exacerbated by combative approaches to procurement.

This means there are now incredible pockets of strategic and creative talent that don’t bring big agency overheads, inefficient bureaucracies, and people who’re just there to make up the numbers. (A sad fact of our business is that all too often, bigger teams don’t deliver better work, they’re just there to pad the fees and make the work more expensive…partly to cover the cost of onerous procurement terms).

The first large corporation to recognize this and switch procurement approaches from one designed to squeeze cost from large agencies to one designed to advantage independent talent will gain the upper hand. Streamlining the bureaucracy, eliminating the most onerous requirements, and engaging in prompt payment for services rendered. Do this, and you’ll have a veritable army of brilliantly talented people delighted to work with you at lower cost and higher quality.

If anyone from Keurig Dr. Pepper is out there, maybe you could try that next time and do a compare and contrast? You might be surprised.