Meet the Whales and Fish of branding
Bonjour from Lockdown 2.0!
2020 feels like the future showed up for dinner early while we were all still in the bathroom getting ready. From lockdowns to more locking up in ‘one’ China, from taking a knee to Kaepernick 7 becoming the uniform of a long overdue change, to the complete disconnect between the Street of Wall pricing in a world of long term cheap money while Main Street holds on by their fingernails hoping to survive the ride. To top it off this happened…
A new brand for Australia. Seems we have missed the opportunity to double down on some iconic Ken Cato Kangas in favour of some insipid Coronavirus-looking wattles. Talk about a strategic own goal. Like it or not Australia is defined by the kangaroo internationally as much as my home country is defined by the maple leaf and New Zealand the sliver fern. Somehow, Canada and NZ have managed to get these ‘standard symbols’ to work in a more ‘premium services’ context. Surely, ‘Twiggy Forrest’s love of gold,’ would be the more honest explanation of the chosen approach for the new Australian logo. It feels like we are all living the life of Sal Paradise from Kerouac’s On the Road …
"We gotta go and never stop going ‘till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don’t know, but we gotta go.”
Now in another lockdown, I have been trying to make sense of the world we live in and what it actually means for what I and others do for a living. Don’t worry there are no plans for a book or a masterclass, but I do have some observations to share around a world increasingly being defined by large Whales and small Fish.
Why Whales and Fish?
There is a tremendous piece of research from the Italian Institute of Technology (link below) into what makes humans adopt tools. Due to our opposable thumbs we can grasp objects and more importantly we can understand the causal relationship between tool use and obtaining a goal. Our awareness that tools give us an advantage over others or our environment has driven human progress and has formed the basis of all technological developments.
Technology is interesting because it is inherently advantageous to those who have it first. It is beyond first-mover advantage, it tends to define civilisations. Think Arabian horseback, Incan stone cutting, British naval cannons or American fission in WW2. Any technology gives unequal advantage to those who control it first and naturally leads to inequality amongst those left on the other side of the fence. In today’s context it is why we have Whales like Amazon, Facebook and increasingly China INC. They understood and employed the tools of the digital age before others did. They and many others broke the existing equilibrium and this is what we are seeing in our world writ large.
But what did digital technology break?
The introduction of new technology took away the advantage that used to be gained from controlling the source information. Instead, the advantage has been given to those who track the data with which that information begins. It’s better today to know how many people search for face masks than it is to have a warehouse of them. If a connected digital world was the stimulus then what is the result? It is a world filled with large Whales and small Fish. One or two dominant players ten times bigger than the rest and a whole bunch of smaller brands swimming around in their wake.
Most brands are based on appropriating a cultural truth built on mass cultural beliefs. This was how organisations scaled and became a Whale. They stretched their brand meaning as far as they could. In the pre e-commerce world Wal Mart defined the word and wrote the playbook on gaining spend category by category. Come for clothes first off, then into furnishings then into grocery. That’s how they built their business but their brand was built on a mass cultural belief (saving and thrift), communicated through mass media channels (cable TV) and coded through a culturally true mass message (Save Money, Live Better). Uniformity and repetition drove brand recognition.
Fast forward to today, Amazon is a whole of customer killer, and it defines our age. Today’s Whales are about gaining more and more of an individual’s spend so that category becomes whole of customer. It is based on grabbing all your spend no matter what the category. They have built their brand using the same formula as Wal Mart with one crucial distinction. Mass now needs to be replaced with Individual in the equation. Brands now have to be individually true but built on culturally-relevant beliefs (everything I need to save), communicated through mass customisable channels (my digital platforms) through individually unique proof (I save on nappies so my family lives better). Velocity and proximity drive brand recognition. Good brands are keeping the theory but updating the playbook as we move from the age of mass production to individualised digital.
For those of you who never saw Sharp versus Ritson drop their man bags and have it out during London’s festival of marketing a few years ago let me summarise. One for attributes and one for assets. While super entertaining and I would give it to Ritson on points it was more like a husband and wife having a spat in front of the kids over who does more chores around the house than a debate with a clear outcome. The truth is that the brand family needs both attributes and assets to function well. What has changed though is that categories are blurring and are no longer binding. Most new spaces of value are found using data and digital tools to capture their value. In branding of value, human beings still connect with all the meta concepts but rather than communicating a mass cultural message you have to tailor the message to mean something to them. Robert Jones’ big idea no longer holds true; the future is not bright, the future is not orange. The future is me and I want to pick what shade.
What we have to focus on is the switch from the values of our brand to the values of a customer under a tent big enough to hold them all. What we are seeing is the switch from branded values to proving consumer value. And it's making the Whales bigger and the Fish smaller.
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Be better to each other.
