Branding 2022: health, wealth, stealth and self
Having fun yet? Relaxed summer catch-ups have been replaced with the logistics more commonly associated with party planning for your parent’s fiftieth. Remember when Uncle Fred being a bit too opinionated after a couple was our main worry? Or when RATS were furry and easily trapped rather than wrapped in plastic and as common as sighting an exec in the office in early Jan?
Entering year three of the new normal, it’s all more than a bit flat. My summer listening was a history of pandemics across recorded history. Our great grandparents would laugh at the length of our suffering much like we would think their lack of Tik Tok quaint. My mood was slipping fast. So, I did what anyone who can do does when faced with monotony and a case of the blahs, I ran under the guise of seeking something different and went to visit my family in Canada.
Travel is movement. It does lots of wonderful things but perhaps the main thing it does is adjust your perspective. Having lived in a Victorian lockdown bubble for a couple of years it was nice to experience different paces, spaces and attitudes toward life across the wide expanse of the Pacific. What was clear was that everyone, from those in idyllic islands to small-town Canada, from little to big-city America, is grappling with their own responses to a pandemic that is rapidly becoming endemic. As someone far wiser than I put it while out on the road, society ultimately decides when a pandemic comes to an end. It feels like this point, for better or worse, is approaching quickly.
Math writes its own narratives
Having run the gamut of bureaucracy gone a bit mad across five countries, it is fair to say the natives everywhere are getting restless. Small moments of friction and rebellion always bring about a change in the narrative. In most places, it felt like a move towards acceptance, whereas other jurisdictions felt far less dynamic and as if they are stuck fighting against the consequences of decisions made yesterday. I was also struck by how Australia is portrayed when viewed from beyond its own shores. It’s the first time I have ever experienced a sense of people feeling sorry for me for living here. Our brand image of sunshine and That’s not a knife friendliness is fast changing to a story of a burnt land intent on lockdowns and lockouts. The Joker then played the ultimate wildcard and turned up for his time in hotel quarantine. In a social media news cycle, the images projected around the world don’t look good for us whatever we think of him.
T is for trouble
So full disclosure… I got Covid while overseas. Immediately upon arrival in fact. Rapid tested and saw the dreaded C & T combo we are becoming all too familiar with. My own dance with the Rona was more an inconvenience than anything approaching an illness. I was A for Asymptomatic in that I had no fever, no cold and no cough. Nothing. Iso time in a wintery Canadian wonderland with some cold-water surf in easy reach is far from anything approaching a problem. Hot tip: spending significant amounts of time in five degrees Celsius water could help cure your case of Covid. Maybe Wim Hof was onto something.
My experience was at one end of a bell curve, I would think. Like anything else in life, experience is contextual and individual but the midpoint of the distribution does seem to be moving.
Finding what you came for
Post iso it was back to what I originally went for. To explore a wider world. It’s quite striking, noticing that the only thing more contagious than a virus is the veracity and commonality in the idea that drives consumer behaviour.
I am a firm believer that in a capitalistic economy the biggest proof of what we believe in is what we buy. It’s changing, but in a way that is familiar. We are not changing our consumption in terms of the format of the things we like but we are changing what goes into them. It’s no longer disruption, it is simply remixing the same four trends we see in day-to-day life, just accelerated through the sheer size of the total addressable market.
Health: The desire for better becomes behaviour. The world is awash in products with less harmful ingredients. What this means is that we are saying more for things that are done in a more sustainable or better for you manner. While arguably great for consumers, it is also undeniably great for retailers because they create margin. Like for like it is typically a 20% to 30% premium on the less better version of the same thing. For retailers, this is important as it is margin creating in a world awash with inflationary pressures faced with static consumer wages. It is also a competitive advantage as in emerging categories retailers, through their own controlled brands, can pick up a disproportionate amount of the spoils.
It is the same for CPG brands; the clamber to get to better health outcomes and better planet outcomes is not changing the leading brand but is changing the mix of who will come second or third. We have written about the Whales and Fish dynamic previously, which can be read here. The race for second place (typically the most profitable) in supermarket categories is getting interesting after years of incumbency. Take men’s shaving. Still dominated by Gillette the second brand is a newcomer, Harry’s. Let’s put it this way, I didn’t see much Schick product left on the shelves and it had nothing to do with supply chain disruption.
Of course, like any trend, there is always a shadow side to the story. The Darth Vader to Skywalker. My undisputed favourite of anti-good is the focus on all types of fried chicken. The bigger, the crunchier, the better. As long as it’s served in fully recyclable packaging and made from free-range chooks of course. We ain’t heathens after all.
Wealth: The dreaded inflationary pressure of free money is a good deed returning for its piece of flesh. If you have enjoyed a run up in your assets under management, you can’t complain when your fuel costs 20% more. It is running hot everywhere. For example, US inflation is running at 7%. For context, the Federal Reserve there runs at a target rate of 2%. Turns out that Friedman was right – print money and you need more of it to buy the same thing.
What will be the give? This is the better question to ask. One of the things hidden in our ‘return to the same shit as last year’, is that removing the commute is one of the few things helping to manage the family budget. Profits these days are through assets rather than wages. Inequality now is striking and everywhere. It wasn’t the tent cities on the west coast of North America that caught my eye and disturbed me, it was the tent cities on the east coast of small-town Canada.
Stealth: The desire to hide under the duvet is also becoming more and more prevalent. The biggest thing I saw on the roads after doing 2000km plus of driving, were the tell-tale signs of social retreat. From the ads for ‘DuckDuckGo’ offering to hide your interweb activities, to the stories of a lack of volunteers, from even enlightened ‘people facing’ employers struggling to attract workers, to the most common brand sharing the road with me, Amazon Prime, we are moving into our own worlds shaped by our hidden consumption. It was all a bit Frosty the Snow Person. Has the pandemic driven us to retreat more? Perhaps, but it is also consistent with what has been with us for a decade-plus now.
The pressure on our time is being filled by digital-based services that pull us further and further away from the public sphere. A visual example. Standing in a Starbucks now, you suddenly realise that the noise of orders being called out and people chatting while they wait has been replaced by silence, as people order via the app and lurk outside waiting to pounce the moment they get the notification for their completed frappe.
Self: More hopefully, our sense of health is widening from what we put into ourselves to how we care for our planet earth. Driven by local and provincial/state mandates we are learning to live in a way where our world can sustain humans. Green is the fastest-growing type of good in any category you see. From compostable plates to plant-based treats, from low impact alcohol to natural teeth whitening, it is on every shelf and in every facet of our lives. It is not a fad and no longer a calling of the few. It has become the mass consumption of the many.
The other truth about travel is by leaving where you live you clearly see just how great you have it at home. It's great to be back in the land down under for one more lap around the sun.
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Be better to each other.
