Volume 46: 21st century branding, McKinsey makes stuff up.

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

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

With 20:20 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, if the sheer complexity of channels, screen sizes, resolutions, software limitations, UX considerations, usability and accessibility, data, and third-party design and layout rules must be navigated, the most obvious response is to boil everything down to its most basic component parts to ensure both consistency and compliance.

Unfortunately, this has also created two interrelated problems. The first is that brand design has regressed to blandly austere and joyless modernism in pastels that’s become way too comfortable to be useful. Second, 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, 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 like it did even five years ago.

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

And that will be hard because few things are 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. 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 epitomize the acceptable mainstream today, in 1998, it was daringly and strikingly different from the norm. And long before either, Coca-Cola created its iconic bottle as a direct response to a sea of copycat colas 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 to be as unique to our time as what came before was to its.

It’s simply that we choose not to.

2. McKinsey: “We’re just making this shit up as we go along.”

tl;dr: It always pays to check your sources.

It’s become something of a cliche that anytime you see a bold statistic like “40% of all consumer spending is influenced by Gen Z” that digging below the surface will show the originating datapoint to be shady at best and a downright fabrication at worst.

So, it was absolutely no surprise when I stumbled on this Tweet that someone actually bothered to do their homework and follow the rabbit hole to the source for the data. And lo and behold, it was an arcane journey of a paper that referenced another paper that referenced an article that referenced a book…and so on until finally arriving at the original source, which had basically made up the statistic as an estimate to make a point. (And if I may have made some of that journey up myself, so what. Why does McKinsey get to have all the fun?)

So why is this you may ask? Well, I can’t be certain, but I think there are a couple of driving factors for why this happens and why it’s becoming so prevalent. First, McKinsey has an agenda to sell strategy consulting. And to sell that work they need to establish narratives that are big enough and significantly concerning enough to engage senior executives in broad-scale strategic change. Second, we’ve traded quality for quantity and substantive dialogue for clicks when it comes to thought leadership. Today's pressure is to publish a large volume of content measured in clicks and ‘engagement’ rather than objective quality. And just as in other aspects of our lives, saying boring but accurate things like “in 2020 consumer attitudes are broadly the same as they were in 2019” simply doesn’t get the clicks.

Not that I’m blaming McKinsey alone, mind you. There’s an entire thought leadership and content marketing industry dedicated to doing this, and even previously untouchable institutions like the Harvard Business Review increasingly publish articles that have more in common with pulp novels than any kind of rigorous academic analysis.

So, what does it mean for you and me? Well, first, it pays for us to check our sources before relying on them, even if that source appears nominally reputable. Second, it pays to check our sources in case we use them with clients, and they do the checking and call us out on it!

3. Atomizing your brand to become more successful? Hang on there a minute.

tl;dr: Beware the people who say you “must” do something.

The Sociology of Business is a newsletter I generally like to skim through weekly. While there’s a tendency toward over-intellectualizing, it’s generally well written. As the author focuses on a fashion world I don’t really play in, it’s nice to read about things from a different angle.

This week, I was interested to read a definitive recommendation for how brands like J-Crew, Hollister, Ann Taylor, etc., should get back on track: break into a portfolio of smaller, more focused, and more niche-oriented brands. I find it exceptionally hard to agree.

Quoting from a couple of macro-trends, the diagnosis might at first glance seem to make sense, but what bothers me is a failure to acknowledge the basic economics of such a shift. While I may not work in the fashion world, brand fragmentation is something I have much experience with. Brands are expensive things to build, grow, and maintain, and the more you have, the more thinly your resources get spread. The smaller and more fragmented these brands become, the less likely any will achieve the necessary scale to be successful. This is why strategies of brand consolidation tend to be much more common than strategies of brand fragmentation. Yes, there are obvious portfolio players like P&G, but even here the portfolio tends to be comprised of category level brands. P&G, for example, doesn’t have a broad range of niche-focused toothpastes and toothbrushes, it has Crest and Oral-B as category-level brands for oral care.

That brings me to a critical point the break-up supposition is missing. The root problems faced by the likes of J-Crew, Hollister and the rest have almost nothing to do with failing to meet customer desires. Instead, the common factor tends to be a history of debt that has led to terribly weak balance sheets. Because of this weakness, these businesses have not been able to afford to maintain, let alone grow their brands, respond to market shifts, or engage in broad scale transformative innovation. Instead, their focus has been cost-efficiencies rather than growth. Combine declining brands with an inability to innovate and too much focus on the cost side of the business, and you end up in a place where relevance is lost, and sales promotions become the only lever for short-term cash flow. Layer in a pandemic-induced recession, and you quickly find yourself in the fast lane to Chapter 11 insolvency.

This is why it’s highly unlikely a niche-focused approach could serve any of these businesses well. Even if there’s consumer demand (which I’m skeptical of), most of these businesses simply cannot afford to embrace a more costly operating model that spreads out their already meager marketing resources and increases the complexity of their management environment.

Instead, might I suggest Levi’s as a possible model. Here, rather than splitting the brand apart, management put in the hard yards of a multi-year brand renewal that focused the business, led to a reduced reliance on sales promotion and was enhanced by smart innovation bets and targeted investments in digitizing distribution. It’s a lot less sexy than creating a whole bunch of new brands, but probably a lot more successful.