Volume 83: I’ll take love over meaninglessness.
1. I’ll take love over meaninglessness.
Tl:dr: Trust no longer matters, apparently.
Over the past twenty years, the arc of branding has been quite fascinating to observe and participate in. I’m pretty sure when Kevin Roberts released the book “Lovemarks” in 2004 he thought this was the beginning rather than the end of the idea that the job of branding was to create brands that were so emotionally resonant and loved that customers would reject all others.
However, what actually happened was that marketing science stepped in with an empirically driven and rather more realist perspective, best encapsulated by Prof. Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow,” (HBG) published six years later in 2010 and widely quoted ever since.
Now, while Professor Sharp has almost certainly been the most important academic voice of the past ten years, I wonder if we aren’t now approaching a similar nadir? For, if those who preached brand love could credibly be challenged as naive and idealistic and disconnected from the hard reality of business, I now fear those pushing the extreme limits of HBG can be labeled equally credibly as branding nihilists.
As exhibit A, take this opinion piece from Mark Ritson claiming that trust is irrelevant in branding because nobody trusts Facebook and yet still it grows, contrasting sharply with the Economist, which this week stated:
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return…Who wants a Metaverse created by Facebook? Perhaps as many people as would like their healthcare provided by Philip Morris.
By only sharing Facebook’s user, revenue, and stock price data and screaming “see,” I fear that Mr. Ritson misses much. Like the fact that Facebook has a well-known fake account problem, that it systematically lies about its metrics, and that it has no independent auditor to speak of. Nor does he mention the fact that Facebook appears to have a big problem attracting younger users (the real reason for Instagram for kids), or that Facebook-branded products like Portal have been DOA, or that revenue growth in the most recent quarter was the result of costlier ads rather than more users (an indication of a mature asset rather than a growing one) or that its forward-looking P/E ratio (a measure of the stock markets view of future performance) lags that of closest peer, Google.
In other words, by cherry-picking the data, we have no sense of the opportunity cost of mistrust - and of whether a more trusted Facebook may have performed better, or been better positioned for the future.
Nor does this opinion take into account that trust tends to be non-linear in nature. It’s one of those things that doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter…suddenly matters. The price paid for being deeply distrusted is rarely a slow decline of business but rather a catastrophic implosion followed by a firmer regulatory hand. For implosions, take Arthur Andersen, which failed following a catastrophic collapse in post-Enron trust, or Theranos, which failed in the Silicon Valley “fake it until you make it” stakes or the more recent implosion of Ozy Media. In regulation, think Sarbanes Oxley, or further back, Glass Steagall, both of which stemmed directly from crises of trust.
Nor does Mr. Ritson’s opinion take into account the fact that trust is a nuanced thing and that while we may trust FB to competently share photographs of our kids with their grandparents, we might - at the same time - deeply distrust its motives and whether it has any interest in doing right by us or by others.
And finally, Mr. Ritson makes no mention whatsoever of the effects of market concentration and the dominance Facebook has over its own market. I’d imagine that if Facebook was required to make its products portable and interoperable like our cellphone services are, then its lack of trust would have somewhat of a more obvious and negative impact on its business.
So, yes, we can observe that people do business with brands that aren’t particularly trustworthy, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have little other choice, but let’s be very careful not to be as lightweight in our analysis as the thing we claim to challenge.
In the same way that a lack of evidence ultimately showed brand love to be somewhat naive and idealistic, I fear extending the HBG philosophy through misleading anecdotes and cherry-picked data will lead to nothing more than an equally irrelevant, and yet vastly more dangerous, form of nihilistic cynicism.
You see, the good thing about love as a goal, even if it ultimately proves unobtainable, is that it encourages corporations to do the right thing, to do right by people and do things they’ll like, maybe even love. Replace this with a vacuum where something as fundamental as trust is dismissed as irrelevant and we’re left with a Zuckerbergian dystopia where anything goes, where corporations don’t need to do right by people, don’t need to bother doing things they’ll like, and as for doing something people might love…well, that company must be a sucker.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in that world. And I don’t think CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, does either.
2. What value aesthetics?
tl;dr: Jumping the “what we can learn from Squid Game” shark because…why not.
It’s funny how often aesthetics and taste are dismissed in corporate environs as being largely irrelevant. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with that compartmentalize how they’re positioned as critical to their business success yet view the totality of their aesthetic presentation as something, other…where free stock photography is fine, and it’s OK for the advertising agency to change everything from campaign to campaign in ways that happen nowhere else in the company (much to every designer’s chagrin.)
Partly this is because nobody teaches the value of aesthetics in business school and partly because the people calling the shots at most businesses come from a financial rather than a visual background. But perhaps they should.
Consider, for a second, the importance of aesthetics in luxury and premium categories - both known for their ability to create desire and command high margins. Or the importance of aesthetics in consistently signaling a brand’s distinctiveness, now widely recognized as critical to its commercial success. Or, the challenges that exist with online commoditization that perhaps a greater degree of aesthetic sophistication might help solve?
Which, in a roundabout kind of way, brings me to Squid Game. Having watched the show in its entirety, it’s very well done (as best as I can tell having watched it in the apparently poorly dubbed and subtitled English), but class-conscious survival horror is hardly a new phenomenon, so why has this show been so globally successful?
Well, partly it could be because Netflix willed it. Certainly, Squid Game advances Netflix’s global cinema aims, and by placing it on the home screens of millions of its subscribers worldwide Netflix certainly gave the show the best possible opportunity. Partly it could be because of the relevance of the story to this cultural moment of pandemic fueled societal inequality. And partly it could be because it’s really well done. But I’m also going to put my money on something else having a meaningful impact. You see, the one truly original thing about Squid Game isn’t the narrative arc or the characters or the acting or the script, it’s the production design and cinematography. In other words, the incredible aesthetics of the show.
The sheer visual punch of the Escher-like staircase (which has spawned a sea of Roblox games), combined with black-masked and red-suited figures distinguished by triangles, squares, and circles, a black-clad frontman, tracksuited and numbered contestants, bow-tied coffins, and bejeweled VIPs, all shot from an array of extreme close and very wide angles is breathtaking. This, I’d suggest, is what makes this show stand out from the crowd.
Don’t believe me? Well, consider for a second that Netflix places a huge emphasis on personalizing the thumbnails we view before clicking on a show. On average, we spend just 1.8 seconds on each thumbnail and will click out of the app entirely in just 90 seconds if we don’t find something to watch. Then consider the aesthetics of Squid Game I just mentioned, and how this directly translates into the most striking of thumbnails. Then ask yourself what you’re going to click on tonight? The crazy-looking Escher staircase dripping with blood and filled with red-suited and be-masked characters, or something much more boring and predictable? As a Netflix-produced show, it’s highly unlikely this is coincidence.
Often, when we do what we do, we’re dealing with the smallest of differences. This means our biggest job isn’t coming up with something clever, it’s figuring out how to amplify what’s already there so that it gets noticed at all. And in doing that, we could do a lot worse than pay deep attention to a stand-out aesthetic.
3. Cutting through.
tl;dr: Thoughts on a critical yet misunderstood concept.
A couple of weeks ago I noted that cutting through is critical to a good brand strategy, but what does it actually mean? Through my formative professional years at Wolff Olins, “cut-through thinking” was dogma without explanation, meaning individuals had to figure it out through trial and error and magical osmosis. FWIW, here’s my interpretation.
First, as a concept “cut-through” does not live by itself. It lives hand in hand with “fit for purpose,” “actionable,” and “obvious in hindsight” as key elements of a brand strategy - something I’ll come back to in a minute.
In order to establish a cut-through strategy, I generally look for the intersection between three elements:
Something inherent to the business that’s unique to it that will be very difficult for others to copy. This could be how it’s structured, its own sense of self, its organizational purpose and belief system, its business model, its ambition, its capabilities, its product roadmap, its infrastructure, etc. Specifics don’t matter as much as looking broadly for something unique to this client that others don’t have.
Something in the customer research, insights & data that overlaps with what makes the client unique, and where that uniqueness changes how we interpret the research. When everyone has access to the same research, insights, and analysis that you do, what matters is how you interpret it, the unique patterns you identify, and the sometimes unexpected connections you choose to make. If you start with a hypothesis of uniqueness, this becomes a critical filter in how you choose to make this interpretation.
Establishing a perspective on where the puck is going from a customer and industry perspective; what is broken in the category, what competitors might be missing, how customer behaviors are changing, and thus the market gaps or opportunities that are either waiting to be filled or are likely to open up. We want to point our brand at these opportunities for the future, not get stuck overly much in the past.
I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to picture these things as abstract concepts, so let me provide a quick example to add flavor. This is based on work done for a bank many years ago that was subsequently acquired by a bigger bank, so I’m comfortable there isn’t anything proprietary being shared.
There were three things that made this bank unique and interesting. First, its sense of self was defined by its position as an iconoclast in the market, which meant that it had no problem stepping aside from the groupthink of its competition. Second, it was a recognized market leader in customer service, giving us something to jump off from. And, third, it had a focused product portfolio and a drastically simpler organizational structure relative to its competition.
In terms of market research, the primary insights were of an overwhelmingly undifferentiated category with poor service, a general lack of value, and a confusing array of products.
In terms of market opportunity, the competitor banks were overwhelmingly complex to navigate and deal with, largely because of what appeared to be an over-segmented array of offerings - illustrated by competitors having an average of seven different kinds of subtly different checking account nominally focused on the needs of different segments, but manifesting as a confusing quagmire of choice, exacerbated by the differing silos within each bank all trying to out cross-sell each other.
As a result, there was an obvious path to cut-through - by doubling down on its simpler portfolio and structure backed up by its advantages in customer service and iconoclastic attitude.
We framed this through an idea labeled “simpler banking and more smiles,” which the advertising agency despised and referred to as “fundamentally un-advertisable” before being fired by the client. Their mistake was failing to understand that they weren’t the audience. Coming back to what I mentioned before about “fit for purpose,” “actionable” and “obvious in hindsight,” this was a strategy that didn’t live or die on the basis of advertising that told you how simple the bank was, it lived or died on a customer experience and operational reality that delivered greater value, more simply, in a customer-friendly way. And on that basis, this was a great example of fit for purpose cut-through because this clunky-seeming statement broke down into two highly actionable questions:
“Is it simpler for the customer?”
“Will it make them smile?”
On that basis, the bank went through its experience from soup to nuts. It innovated online account signup (nascent in the category until that point) to an industry-leading 10-minute process, it eliminated rarely incurred fees to make it simpler for customers and cheaper for itself to manage, it cut the terms of service agreement accompanying account openings from 147 pages of lawyer-speak to 3 in plain English, it eliminated niche products to put more value into core offerings, it put online account signup technology into branches to speed up account openings, it instituted a cross-company employee award for standout service rather than hitting sales targets, etc. And it worked. They led new account signups 3-1 in the markets they served, signed up over 100 branches worth of new online customers per day, extended customer service leadership, and watched net promoter scores increase across the board.
Of course, almost none of this success had anything to do with what we were doing directly, that was down to the client. But the transformation was underpinned by a fit-for-purpose, cut-through, and actionable strategy that seems pretty obvious in hindsight.