Volume 127: More Than A Commodity…

1. More Than a Commodity, Less Than a Social Movement.

tl;dr: What is a brand anyway?

For the longest time, I avoided getting dragged into the “what is a brand” debate. Not only because I’ve yet to find a comprehensive yet simple enough definition I’m comfortable with but also because I didn’t think having a singular definition mattered all that much.

I always felt that the “how” questions were much more important than the what. You know, like, “how do I build a brand?” Or “how do I commercially exploit a brand for profit.” That kind of thing.

But, as the whole debate around purpose swirled in recent years, it became clear that definitions do, in fact, matter—quite a lot, as it turns out.

This latest piece by Helen Edwards is a good thought starter. In it, she uses the example of Unilever and activist investor Nelson Peltz. On the one hand, she points out that if we were to believe Mr. Peltz, then we’d be stuck in commodity land, and there’d likely be no room for a Unilever at all. (Since, arguably, the primary competence of Unilever is in managing brands we’re willing to pay more than commodity prices for). Yet, on the other, she also acknowledges that the marketers over at Unilever (and others) have backed themselves into a very difficult-to-justify corner around the whole purpose thing.

Indeed, every time I look at Unilever, my first reaction is always that it jumped the purpose shark. Hellman’s Mayonnaise; “fighting food waste,” and Lux Soap; “inspiring women to rise above everyday sexist judgments and express their beauty and femininity unapologetically,” feel like a tough brand-sell, to be honest, even to me.

At some level, when looking at Unilever, I can’t help but think of that old saying:

“The seeds of future destruction are sown in the successes of today.”

For Unilever, acquiring Ben & Jerry’s in 2000 and then releasing the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 made the purpose angle incredibly enticing. However, it’s only when they tried to roll out what was successful in these two pockets across the whole business, seeking to capture magic in a bottle for the third, fourth, fifth time, that we can see that it doesn’t scale all that linearly.

And, even if Unilever seems to have jumped the purpose shark, I get why they did. There was an actual there, there. Dove really did outperform for quite some time off the back of the Real Beauty narrative. And Ben & Jerry’s remains one of the world’s most successful ice cream brands.

It’s just that as we layer more purpose onto brands, we begin to see that Ben & Jerry’s and Dove were perhaps successful for reasons that had had less to do with a social movement per se and more to do with good old-fashioned branding distinctiveness. When these two brands became successful, their respective purposes were a novelty that helped them stand out within their respective categories. Today, with social purpose running rampant across categories, that’s rarely the case anymore.

This, of course, brings me back to activist investors, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and Helen Edwards.

I think she’s right to be doubtful about purpose absolutism because there’s very little to support it being the One Strategy To Rule Them All, and she’s also right to call out the commoditizing impact of making soap be about nothing more than personal hygiene and cleanliness.

As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in the messy middle. Brands have a meaning greater than a commodity and less than a full-blown social movement. And that’s entirely OK. And I don’t think we need to make it any more precise than that, lest we lose whatever it is that makes brands special.

On the purpose side, it seems that the moment every brand has an explicit societal purpose is the moment we stop paying attention. Those brands where it worked seemed to do so at a time when purpose relative to branding was quite novel. Today, the additional meaning driven by purpose is so predictable that we likely won’t even notice, let alone care.

And, if it’s novelty and distinctiveness that we’re really attracted to (and I think it has a big part to play), it suggests the backlash against purpose won’t mean moving toward commodity, utilitarianism, or de-branding. Instead, it will be toward salience-grabbing stunts, the unexpected, the drippingly ironic, and the perfectly out-of-place. Which feels like precisely what we’re seeing. (And will likely see more of at the SuperBowl)

And, to be honest, after years of brands draping themselves in self-righteousness that’s at best tangentially connected to their core business and, at worst, utterly hypocritical, it’ll be a relief to have more brands acting silly and screaming, “look at me” for a change.

2. When Is a Strategy Not Strategic? When a Design Agency Does It.

tl;dr: OK, harsh. But bear with me for a second.

I don’t know about you, but of all the insufferable things on LinkedIn, I find the meme that tries to posit the difference between “marketing” and “branding” the single most annoying. Not just because it’s ridiculous on its face to pretend that everything that might be long-term and strategic should be framed as branding while everything that’s short-term and tactical gets framed as marketing. It’s also that the people doing the pro-brand/anti-marketing meme-ing are also the most likely to tackle branding projects in a fundamentally non-strategic fashion.

I’ve talked before about brand designers having a latent strategic superpower. Well, I’m increasingly of the view that, for many, the keyword in that sentence is latent. The superpower can only activate if you take the time and effort to teach yourself about strategy and how to apply it. You don’t simply get to act like you have a superpower without first putting in the work.

Why do I mention this?

Well, very simply, in the past few months, I’ve found myself pitching against design-focused agencies for strategic jobs, and it’s been eye-opening just how consistently lacking their strategic processes are.

Here’s an example straight from the middle of the bell curve. In recent negotiations with a prospective client, they shared a summary of the approach from a competitor they wanted me to match. (They’d anonymized it first, so I don’t know who it was.) Anyway, it was a strategic process predicated on two “download” workshops with the client team, from which there were to be 16 discreet deliverables (I counted) that would be created, including a positioning statement, idea, key messages, voice, mission, vision, values, purpose, etc.

Yeah, that’s right. They’d provide a soup-to-nuts set of strategic outputs without doing the work to figure out what these strategic outputs should be. Zero market research, no customer interviews, no competitive audit, no looking at customer or tech trends, nothing. Not even asking if there was any recently completed research they could work from. Just two talking sessions with the client team followed by a laundry list of deliverables two weeks later.

To cut a long story short, I won the work after a long discussion about the pros and cons of different approaches and explaining that I wouldn’t do the work at all without engaging the market as a key part of the process.

I mention this because as I prepped to share initial recommendations last week, it struck me how there’s literally no way we could’ve arrived where we did had we not made the effort to engage customers, partners, and prospects in the process. And the reason this job right now looks a lot more like a business transformation, with some pretty fundamental implications, than a messaging exercise is solely because engaging with the market provided so much critical insight.

So, if you’re a client thinking of engaging in brand strategy work, please make sure that you pay attention not just to the strategic outputs your potential partners are proposing but also to the process steps they intend to take to get there and the team they propose to do the work. If there’s zero customer or market input being suggested and nobody with any meaningful strategy experience or education doing the work, then you should be wary. Very wary indeed.

And if you’re an agency that does this kind of work, please ensure you’re doing it correctly. It isn’t rocket science, but strategy is a craft. It’s important to clients’ future success, and it should be treated as more than just an opportunistic add-on that exists primarily to inform design work.

Because if you think a winning strategy will automagically form from two client conversations, then you’re very far wrong. Not only that, you’re being wildly irresponsible with your client’s trust and with their money.

3. Happiness Will Have to Wait...Until You’re 70.

tl;dr: 70-year-olds are like a new generation or something.

Generational segmentation is one of the dumbest ideas in marketing, and it just won’t die. I’ve written about it many times and can boil my thinking down as follows: Yes, people at different life stages will likely have different priorities and consumption behaviors. And, no, a shared date of manufacture doesn’t tell us much about what these are or how cohesive a generational segment might be.

Taken to its most extreme, we see just how utterly daft generational commentary has become. Take “Gen Alpha” (the generational cohort coming through behind Gen Z), where some say we can predict their consumption behavior and preferences with extreme accuracy; even though the eldest member of the cohort is about 12, and many have yet to be born, let alone make a consumption choice. Ahem.

So, with generational segmentation having cockroach-like status as a marketing idea, we shouldn’t be all that surprised to find new data on the lifestyle of 70-year-olds being framed as the equivalent of discovering a “new stage of life.”

The basic narrative goes like this. In the West, people have started retiring in their early to mid-60s and living well into their 80s. This creates a new societal phenomenon of healthy, wealthy, and increasingly happy people in their 70th decade. People who make many consumption choices, often for big-ticket items like cars, vacations, homes, etc., but have largely been ignored by marketers. Up until now. Because now they’re getting a label, “the 70s.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with bell bottoms and gig tickets to The Rolling Stones.

I have to say that whoever decided to connect the dots between the changing habits of septuagenarians with generational segments was a genius. How better to get marketers to pay attention to one of the most valuable demographic groups they largely ignore today?

That’s right, all you need to do is take one of the dumbest ideas in marketing (generational segmentation) and connect it to one of the dumbest oversights in marketing (ignoring anyone over age 35) and Bob’s your uncle, as they say.

Now, we’ll see where this nets out overall, but it’s hard not to see it as part of an overwhelming shift toward marketers paying more attention to more mature societal members as society itself ages.

First, we have Economists talking about the effect of an aging society on the workforce (Fun fact, demographic declines in working populations will likely be a bigger societal issue than the number of jobs lost to AI and automation). Then we have Google and Meta talking about shifting to econometric rather than attribution-based measurement (which will be interesting because econometrics tends to more highly value marketing channels more commonly used by the elderly, like linear TV). And, now, we have researchers framing the decade between our 70th and 80th years as if it’s the discovery of a new generation. I think you can see where I’m going here.

So, yeah. Generational segmentation is dumb. But if it can help marketers be smarter with those who have the money and are making big consumption choices with it, then go for it.

I’m just curious about what we call this new generation of happy, go-lucky septuagenarians because “the 70s’ is terminally dull. So I asked ChatGPT. Here are my top five names in no particular order of cliche:

Sunshine Seniors
Brightest Bloomers
Ageless Wonders
Timeless Treasures
Happy 70s