Why brands are losing their edge

To quote the country singer Brett Cobb, it’s not the snake that you see, it’s the one in the weeds which you have to be careful of.

The 2006 financial crisis showed people that the game was rigged, but that only some pay the price, and that social media and YouTube enables us to do what it said it would, find our own truth and tribe. Covid was the clincher. It started as a health issue on the way in but morphed on its way out to a full-blown identity crisis about our faith in institutions.

In today’s world it is best to go back to foundational myths to understand what is happening. It is a global phenomenon but with a different flavour depending on your home. America is defined by the idea of a promised land where you (note, not us) find freedom, so the rebellion is against the enemy within. Europe is defined by class so it’s about who has what, and it’s against those that are new. My childhood home Canada is defined by the same frontier mentality as the States but, being a colder climate, we chose collectivism over rugged and brash individualism.

Canadian institutions are under the same attack but its population's pushback is about the fact we don’t have any more room at the table but are still looking for the same supper. It might turn into a quiet rebellion against our big brother across the border. Time will tell. It’s not a judgement of what is right or wrong, but it is to point out that every country has an origin myth, a start that sits at the heart of the sell and the myth of why we are as we are.

To know this is to know the basis of populist power. I think we forget what Donald’s day job once-upon-a-time was. He was a property developer, which is the ultimate sell before the substance industry. It is not for the faint of heart. Developments are sold as dreams that are then realised. As a brand, Don 2.0 is more like a toddler-in-chief than the strong man leader of the free world, but we miss at our peril that what he represents is what matters. He is mythical in that he stands for a force so grand, so required, that they tried to kill it before it started. One man against those that would take it all from us. Government has become the enemy of the governed and the rebellion is only getting started.

The rejection era

Marketing is not immune. We are going through our own version of let’s blow up the institutional model of the Agency of Record and Marketing Team that has defined our industry since the heyday of the Mad Men of Madison Ave. While the values were beyond questionable, the suits, my god, the suits. I really miss the suits. We have gone from an age of glamour to everywhere you look there are little fires of change. In-housing, out-housing, merging the once powerful, consultancies vs agencies, individuals vs machines, art vs science, data vs vibes.

A quirk of humanity is our ability to pay attention. It gets muted as more stimulus is put in front of us. Our reasoning engine, our prefrontal cortex, overloads when too much information floods the brain. It struggles to prioritise, leading to stress, reduced cognitive performance, and decision fatigue. If we were frogs, we would not even note we were in a pot…so to speak. I reckon the amount of stimulus most professionals have to take in these days also leaves us looking for the short cut that makes it all make sense again.

Branding has become formulaic

Brands thrive at the intersection of differentiation and distinctiveness. It allows them to carve out unique identities that command consumer loyalty. Every brand you claim to prefer today started by swimming against the tide, not swimming with it. Today we are all zig with less zag, and it is to our collective detriment. In its formalisation the power of branding has been diluted, caught in a self-referential loop that breeds more homogeneity. Branding is in a crisis of sameness – not because competition is weak, but because the methods used to define and differentiate brands have converged into a singular, uninspired formula. This is not as much an attack on where we are as it is a natural outcome of a consumption-based economy where everyone has to compete. Competition over time brings everyone to the mean. Our mean now in branding is positioned to inch-perfect perfection. We are shiny shiny.

For all the polish, the challenge however remains unmet: How does it drive preference? A strong brand should be able to command some form of preference with all its stakeholders. The ability to create an emotional or functional justification for higher category penetration beyond what is reasonable (all else being equal) is the cornerstone of brand equity. Where brands once competed fiercely for preference, the battle has now shifted to a place where brands are pawns in a game. A Mars Bar is a Snickers, a Snickers is a Mars Bar – distinctions are increasingly trivial when they both extend through the same formula. Distinctive asset plus safe flavour or format innovation. One has nuts, one does not. Next thing you know Doritos will be delivered in salt and vinegar.

The reason we all do it is because it works, because the dominant challenge of today is to get scale to match the channel you are selling through. The channel has to prefer you, not always the customer. The fight is not between brands but between distribution networks. Retailers now wield significant control over pricing, promotions and placement, eroding the traditional power of brands.

Big businesses need big brands

Once a brand was built through dominant mediums – TV, radio, print – but now, it is constructed across twenty different platforms, each with its own set of rules. The fragmentation of media combined with the dominance of channels has forced brands to adopt hyper-simplified identities. The result? Branding systems that are more self-referential, reinforcing sameness rather than seeking to be different. Stripping away anything non-essential is seen as the key to survival. Just as Taylor Swift has had her ‘Eras,’ brands have undergone their own cycles of reinvention, often shedding identity markers that once made them distinctive in favour of the streamlined, easily recognisable aesthetics we see today. I have even started to miss the overworked brands of the nineties that were layered within an inch of their lives.

Experts like Sharp, Ritson, Aaker and Ries have rightly long emphasised the importance of distinctive assets – colours, logos, fonts, sounds – that make a brand instantly recognisable. The wider something is distributed the more important this becomes. Put me in more and more places in a more and more uniform way.

The problem? Everyone has adopted this playbook. Mimicry in nature leads to mating and in business it dictates that successful strategies will be copied. What made Coca Cola and Dunkin' Donuts so distinctive as an approach to brand is now replicated across industries. Tomorrow’s pioneers will not create a brand system as this is the existing orthodoxy. This is leading to a paradox: the more brands strive for distinctiveness within a narrow framework, the more alike they become.

I have been accused before about completely missing the point by Lord Byron himself on this. I dislike his insecure its ‘a scientific law like gravity is’ he defaults to when challenged, but I have read and re-read the book, watched the talks, worked with the theory and I believe in the gospel. I really just have one problem. I think it should be called, 'How big brands keep growing,' rather than, 'How all brands grow'. The challenge of finding growth at scale is different than finding traction while small.

The best brands have a moat. Any moat will do but they are few and far between. Whether it is Apple and iOS, Telstra and network coverage, Aldi and its mix of value for time and money, Cadbury with a glass and a half, or McDonald's with its restaurant as a machine that can make anything. They have cracked a code of how they can scale. This is because both their product and their positioning are differentiated. They go hand in hand like Steve Jobs and Lee Clow. Differentiated product delivered with a distinct idea.

Where does it all begin? It’s takes two things

People forget that the worlds’ biggest brands all started somewhere small. This is where insurgent brands all start. Not with a system but with a mission to break what is already there. To challenge and stand out, small brands must break the mould not just of the leading brand but often of the category itself. The traditional rules of branding – consistency, repetition and reinforcement – may work for incumbents, but they create barriers for those trying to disrupt the market. The search for differentiation now requires rebelling against category norms, not adhering to them.

When Coca Cola was created most soda drinks were vanilla in design much like the pharmacies that sold them. They went in a different direction in terms of embracing joy and celebration that was in America in the 1950s but they also had and have a product unlike any other.

This is why brands like Liquid Death or Oatly have gained traction but are unlikely to scale. They do not play by the established category rules they challenge them outright. The challenge for these brands is that their product ideas are not as big as the distinct idea at the heart of their product. Liquid Death will always struggle to become bigger not because it is not a big cultural idea, but because it is a small product occasion and assortment. Chobani on the other hand is both. Big product idea matched with a powerful brand concept. This is what P&G used to teach in the day. A great product marketed well will always win.

This is marketing's and branding’s foundational myth, which we seem to be in danger of forgetting: that we were the only ones who understood why what we were making was so great and how to market it to amplify its difference.

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Be better to each other.