The future of brand is vertical

It’s nearly spring here in Victoria where the longer and lighter days give you more time to fixate on what might happen to you after mistakenly touching the Hello Fresh delivery without your safety mittens on. This is what we have become, happy-scared to see someone, mask-wearing hobbits secretly worried that the police are hiding in the bushes waiting to slap a fine on us for being 5.1km away from our registered address, “Sorry officer, wasn’t me mate, Google Maps sent me this way.” 

I think the lockdown experience can best be expressed with a simple formula, which calculates your coping score. 

P.T: (Perception of time). It’s not that you don’t get on with things, it’s that time flies past like being swooped by a magpie or it drags with the certainty that tomorrow will be just like today. You score based on a number out of 10 with 1 being slow and 10 being fast and times it by a coefficient of 1.5. 

C.P: (Competing priorities). The sense that your work diary doesn’t capture completely what you are actually doing. Juggling the role of teacher, parent, partner, employee and individual. You score again based on a number out of 10 with 7 meaning you’re smashing at least 3 priorities, whereas 1 meaning you’re struggling to juggle any. Strategic choice is key here.

A: (Attitude). How is your world view holding up? If you are still mildly optimistic give yourself a 3, neutral gets a 2 or pretty over this shit gets a 1. Then you minus 2 from this score.

This simple formula equals your coping score. The higher it is the better off you are (and yes you can get a negative number!) Regardless of how you went, some are doing better than others, but not many people are thriving. Behind every closed gate, door and window there is a unique story of the impact of this pandemic. It’s difficult to walk in someone else’s shoes when you no longer can see them on a video conference, but it’s still important we try. 

The search for context

I always like to search for the base case to find context. It’s good sense and better strategy to look at what has come before to help you figure out the road ahead. Our last global pandemic was the Spanish Flu. While named not for the country that was its source but actually the country still free to report without censorship during WW1 wartime, Spanish Flu is the benchmark for Covid-19 even though it’s from a century ago. 

So how different are we in 2020 than we were in 1919? Controlling for the fact that the population of the world is five times the size, Spanish Flu had a higher morbidity rate (10% vs 3.5% based on hack math of the John Hopkins data at end August) and affected more of the population. The outcome was worse for those who contracted it and it affected the young just as much as the old which doesn’t seem to be the case with Covid-19. What piqued my interest though was the recommended approach to containment and how little it has changed. The winning advice then as it is now was stay the hell away from one another and do this as early as possible. Of course, influenza is different from coronavirus but isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings were the tools we used then and now. The jurisdictions who acted earliest had the best chance of getting on top of it. Today, best practice looks like New Zealand, whereas in 1919, it was St Louis. That’s surprising because nothing good has ever happened in Missouri as far as I’m aware.

You can either look at this as a judgement on our lack of progress or you can simply look at it as the rules of being human. We carry disease and we spread it to one another without pre-existing immunity. After all we don’t question gravity, but we do accept that it exists. It makes more sense that our immune systems work exactly the same as they did 100 years ago but our views on the acceptable human toll, the norms of conformity and naming the source of virus after a country have shifted considerably.

The biggest changes are social ones and these shift continually. Beyond our shared immunity with our forefathers we also share the same desire to find meaning and see this pandemic as something of a sign, a portend of a changed future, whereas really it is something that simply happened because we inhabit more and more ecosystems so our contact with novel viruses is now much higher. Rather than redefine our sense of meaning or society writ large it is much more likely it will simply accelerate what was there before. 

I am hopeful that this will drive a green power economy as 1919 drove a combustion engine one.

I am just as scared the splintering of the silent majority that holds together a more liberal world will continue. Much like Flu Española marked the end of the steam era, we are now entering the digital era in full. The goal in business remains the same (create and capture value however you define that for the organisation) but the way to do this has changed in expression and in method. This is the context change we as marketers must focus on without the noise of short-term trends.

From star brands to style of play brands

To deal with consumers no longer seeking to conform but seeking to be their ‘best me’, brands need to become more like a style of play versus relying on stars. I explain this as the English Premier League versus the NBA. The NBA is in trouble in America because it is running out of stars. Its entire way of viewing the world is to build stars who cross over and lead the sport to remain relevant, but its leading coaches now teach offence based less on stars, and more on system. Its brand is facing an existential crisis as a result of its attributes now clashing with the product being sold.

Contrast this with the Premier League which is a style of play. It’s fast, it’s physical and now is becoming more and more technical. It has never relied on stars but relies on a style of play. You can add attributes to a style of play but will struggle if you are based on stars.  Apple is a style of play based on design and usability whereas Sonos is a Star that focuses on a narrower sense of premium sound design. Apple can pivot to music streaming much more quickly that Sonos can.

The slide is no longer horizontal 

The reason this change is so critical is that the digital economy bends categories and brands; it must now be able to slide up and down in a vertical scale of value rather than across to another category. It really brings into question the relevance of attitudinal segmentation when no one actually shops that way anymore. The best brands are based on themes rather than projections and judgements of the worth of those themes. It’s better to be based on the theme of happiness than it is to be connected to why or why not your happiness is worth more than mine in the grand scheme of things.

In 1919 General Motors was pioneering the multi-brand model where they used different brands to move you through their funnel based on writing the prescription for how you show the world who you are. They built cars for types of people. You still see this all the time in business where people believe there are differences based on segments of the market rather than targeting widely held beliefs. Then it was The Oldsmobile for the CEO and Pontiac for the young executive. Today, Tesla leads the way in selling you a style of play and a world view that sells everything from roofing for all to long haul trucks for some. 

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Be better to each other.