Volume 54: Rebrand-a-palooza.
1. Rebrand-a-palooza.
tl;dr: 12 months of introspection bears fruit.
Well, the first month of January is bearing much re-branding fruit. While last year we had to dine on the solitary meal of GoDaddy’s Rorschache-inspired rebrand, this year we’ve already seen significant rebranding exercises for Pfizer, GM, Burger King and the CIA (of all organizations).
Why is pretty obvious. As the old saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste. Specifically, the crisis of the past 12 months has led to much introspection on the part of many corporations, especially in relation to existential questions such as “who are we?” “What is our purpose?” and “where are we going?”
With those questions in mind, Pfizer is metaphorically shifting association away from what was its cash cow product (the blue Viagra pill) to the double helix of DNA. This makes much sense for a bunch of reasons. First, Viagra at this point is the past rather than the future, and just as importantly reflects only a tiny part of what they do. Second, pills are terrible metaphorically in a world that’s paying a lot more attention to the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. And third, the future of their business is tied deeply to the development of the CV-19 vaccine. Not just in the literal sense but in the scientific advances of computational pharmacology that were required to get there so fast. Design-wise, I’d call this “fit for purpose”, and leave a more detailed design commentary to others. For me, the key here is that conceptually this is a corporate identity in the classical sense and better for it. This is a company telling the stock market and prospective employees that it isn’t a pill company but a science company, and with the shift we’re seeing in investor behavior toward story stocks, that makes a ton of sense.
With the story-stock idea in mind, we move on to GM. Visually, this is a horse’s ass and possibly the best ad I’ve seen for using an external agency rather than your internal design team. Conceptually, their claim is that it reflects the electrification future of their business, with the forms of the M and the underline being representative of plugs and batteries. Sigh. But clearly this is a story they need to stick with the stock market as EV leader Tesla is now valued 12X more highly than GM, while selling 14X fewer cars. (That’s nuts, btw)
The CIA rebrand is less about trying to tell a new story about the CIA than it is seeking to create new relevance with a newer, younger and more diverse audience. They’ve been pretty open that there are national security implications to not being able to extend the hiring profile of their agency, and this is clearly the direct result. Design and advertising, Twitter has had a field day with this one, describing it variously as looking like a “Berlin modular synth festival” and a “Detroit techno label”. It’s not often these days you see such a night and day change for a government agency, so I’m definitely willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt. At least I can see what they’re trying to do…
…Unlike our friends over at Burger King. This is by far the best designed and most conceptually lacking of the four. The only way to understand this is to view it as Instagram-ready and little else. Like most marketing at Burger King, they’ve treated their identity as a stunt rather than a considered undertaking that will live on for years. And by taking such a blatantly nostalgic approach, they’re playing into a gen Z fetish for retro that’s likely to be fleeting at best. At a practical level, the generically nostalgic logo in muted tones is just going to flat out disappear when you’re driving down the highway looking for a pitstop. Which is definitely a bad thing if you’re in the burger business.
But really, here’s the thing. While this might look good on their shiny new concept restaurant on Instagram, as soon as you start applying it to their actual restaurants, all it will do is show off how tatty and tired and old-fashioned the average Burger King really is. (Which is their real problem, btw) Adding nostalgia to tired and old won’t make BK cool, it’ll just make people drive 50 yards down the street to eat at McDonald’s instead.
2. Purpose as a defense against long term value destruction?
tl;dr: We’re probably thinking about purpose wrong.
Over the weekend, a friend sent out a Tweet bemoaning the fact that he’s constantly being asked for the business case for purpose. Which got me thinking. Not that there shouldn’t be a business case for purpose, but that like many things in business, we’re probably thinking about it wrong.
What do I mean by that? Put simply, the thing that connects purposeful companies to each other is not how their purpose contributes to profit, but how the purpose defends the organization against opportunistic profit taking that might otherwise impact the long-term health of the business.
We see this across a wide and varied group of organizations. For example, Patagonia could easily increase margins by compromising on manufacturing quality and use of recycled materials, Chick-Fil-A could increase revenues by opening on Sunday, and Costco could increase profits by bringing employee benefits down to the floor set by other retailers and raising prices on items such as their famous $1.50 hotdog.
Yet none of these organizations pursue these obvious and easy paths to greater revenue and profits. Why? Because to do so would conflict with their own internal sense of purpose. It isn’t market forces driving these decisions to forgo profit, but internal leadership choices. And, I’d argue, all three of these businesses are stronger as a result.
Contrast this with corporations that have either died or nearly died because of short-term opportunism: Schlitz went from being the largest beer producer in the US to complete irrelevance because in the 1970’s they decided to make their beer as cheaply as possible, making it undrinkable in the process. Or Levi’s, a business that’s taken years of rebuilding to atone for disastrous decisions regarding offshore production and turn the brand into a low-cost commodity. Or, more recently, the Wells Fargo account fraud debacle, which was driven by extreme pressure from the top of the business to expand cross-selling no matter the consequences.
Perhaps the business case for purpose isn’t about making profits at all, but the protection against destructive profit-taking. Perhaps the true value of having a clear corporate purpose should actually be measured in terms of it’s contribution to resilience, long term sustainability, and its contribution to a culture that isn’t willing to sacrifice the future on the alter of this quarters numbers.
3. Brand safety has a dumb logic problem. tl;dr: This isn’t that hard, so why are we doing it this way?
Branded is definitely the most valuable marketing newsletter you can sign up for right now. I highly recommend it, especially as the impact of what they’re talking about has now become so obvious.
They focus on how advertising budgets are being captured and funneled toward monetizing some of the worst actors on the web, while simultaneously de-monetizing hugely valuable news content. If I oversimplify, they show how bad actors are gaming terribly ill-conceived ad-tech solutions and misinformed marketing decision makers to fund disinformation and hate while simultaneously de-funding the kinds of news that actually matters to a functioning society.
Currently, Branded is taking a multi-part look at the exceedingly murky world of brand safety keyword tagging. These are the terms brands use as a “do not advertise against” list. Normally, they’re kept top secret, but the ad-tech providers who manage these solutions somehow forgot to encrypt the terms, so a professor collected them up into a neat little database and the results are, well, kind of shocking.
How about this for a single data-point: Fully one third of the content of the NY Times is deemed off limits to major brands due to keyword blocking. Now that’s certainly bad for the NY Times and for journalism, but it’s also bad for the brands themselves and for us. Why? Because by blocking NY Times journalism due to keyword infringement, brands are preventing themselves from accessing a valuable audience. Worse, the money has to go somewhere. So, instead of going against important journalism, the money instead pays for ads on sites where bad actors peddling hate speech and disinformation have no qualms about spoofing the keyword systems.
Sigh. Time we did better, marketers. Time we did a whole lot better.