Marketers would like to live in a world where brands behaved like a perfect science – a world where all you have to find is the right framework and you’ve cracked it. You can push the brand forwards using each element of the framework, and the brand will always, obligingly, act the way you want it to.
But the obsession with logical and linear frameworks hides an inconvenient truth: much like the consumers they appeal to, brands are inconsistent and elusive entities whose existence is driven more by paradoxes and contradictions than any reliable measure.
Effective advertising can be transformative. John Lewis earned £8 of profit for every £1 spent from their iconic Christmas campaigns. Ariel’s ‘Share the Load’ led to a 106% increase in value sales. Yes, these are rare cases – the best of the best – but econometric data shows that on average, ads (across all media) deliver a total profit ROI of £3.24 in the long term.
So clearly the business impact of advertising can be powerful. Yet on the individual level advertising is surprisingly powerless. It rarely persuades or converts consumers. For the most part it doesn’t convince them of a brand’s superior features and benefits. And, much to the dismay of marketers, it struggles to create brand advocates who buy the brand and nothing else.
Imagine a world where advertising did have this magical persuasive ability. Brand growth would come from buyers who were extremely frequent, 100% loyal, and who considered it to be highly differentiated among the competition.
In the real world we see the exact opposite. Brands rely on lots of very infrequent buyers in order to grow. These buyers purchase multiple brands in a given category. And they see brands in the category as largely similar.
So if not persuade, what does advertising do? The best evidence suggests advertising’s role is to provide a gentle nudge. It slightly increases consumers’ willingness to buy a brand at the moment of purchase, by reminding them the brand exists and building memorable associations in their head.
Humble work for such a transformative tool.
A central principle of neuroscience is that the brain is hardwired to save energy. As a result it operates mostly on autopilot – ignoring most information and noticing only the unexpected and out of the ordinary. This means that for advertising to cut through, it needs to break expectations. It needs to show something surprising or different.
But in order for advertising to be processed and remembered by consumers, it has to reinforce existing brand associations. In other words, it must stay the same. More consistent associations mean a greater chance of the brand being identified in the advertising, and a greater chance of the brand being thought of in a buying situation.
McDonald’s, for example, has used the same branding associations (golden arches, Ronald McDonald etc) relentlessly for over five decades. It is now instantly recognisable and the biggest restaurant chain in the world. Tropicana, on the other hand, lost an estimated $30 million in sales when an existing association (the orange) was suddenly removed from the packaging and communications.
So advertisers must walk a tricky tightrope: create an ad that is unfamiliar enough to be noticed, but familiar enough to be processed.
As a general rule, people don’t think or care much about brands. They spend little time choosing between brands; they see brands as highly substitutable; they often don’t assign a single personality trait to brands in the categories they buy. Overall – and especially compared to friends, families and work – brands play a minor role in most people’s lives.
Yet these seemingly insignificant entities are human unifiers. Colgate is bought by 60% of households worldwide and known to many more. Visa is used in over 200 countries, connecting countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. Coca Cola is enjoyed in even more countries than Visa, and available in the most remote places. Its presence is so universal that the Zambian Health Minister complained that his country’s small villages stocked the brand but not life saving medicines.
It’s hard to find another type of cultural icon – actor, musician, athlete – that is more widely recognised than brands. George Clooney might be known by everyone in America, but his fame quickly diminishes across continents. Billie Eilish might be known to every teenager, but the chances of your grandparents knowing her are slim.
Brands, by contrast, transcend barriers and borders. They overcome race, gender, age and any other demographic that exists. Even social status is trampled by the biggest brands. Andy Warhol recognised this when he said: “all the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Not bad for a soft drink.
Marketers are in the business of building brands. A strong brand is seen as a success. A weak brand is seen as a failure. Brand growth is desirable, brand decline is undesirable. In short, measuring our professional output requires us to be able to measure brands.
And yet measuring brands is extremely difficult to do. It’s not enough to look at price, distribution or the efficacy of the product. These are objective measures which the company can (for the most part) control. Brands, on the other hand, are managed exclusively by the minds of consumers. They are continually shaped by each and every interaction that consumers have with the product. Even the most fleeting and unintended encounter alters the brand.
It is this slippery nature of brands that explains why it’s so hard to define them. Even among industry experts, there is little consensus as to what a brand really is. David Ogilvy defined a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” For David Aaker it is “a set of assets linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to the value provided by a product or service.” According to Dan Pallotta, “brand is everything, and everything is brand.”
And this disagreement is reflected in the fact that marketers use the word brand to mean three completely different things. The (1) company: ‘brands need to have a more positive impact on society.’ The (2) controllable input: ‘the brand has strong distinctive assets.’ The (3) uncontrollable output: ‘the cultural meaning of the brand.’
Given the centrality of paradoxes to brands, it’s no wonder people find the idea of them confusing. This is not just a minor annoyance – it presents a huge challenge to brand managers, who are required to convince CMOs to invest lots of money into what seems to be no more than an intangible perception.
The obvious question is what to do about this challenge. One response might be to play it down and carry on as normal – hoping that the elusiveness of brands doesn’t cause problems in the future.
Another response would be to try and solve the paradoxes, for example by doubling down on technology. By improving measurement tools and using new data sources, maybe we can make brands more logical and coherent?
But instead of trying to change the paradoxes, or outright rejecting them, what if we decided to embrace them?
What if we accepted that paradoxes are here to stay, and actively looked for more of them? Might we get a better understanding of our consumers and our brands?
After all, as Rory Sutherland says, there’s no point looking for insights in logical places, because someone else has already looked there.
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