What is a 21st Century Brand?

Since 2005, the IPA’s capstone qualification, the Excellence Diploma, has always finished with the same simple yet challenging question: what do you believe the future of brands to be?

Now a new book brings together 20 of the best essays that, taken together, represent 10 years of the latest brand thinking R&D. Rather than focus on any one essay in particular, it is interesting to take a step back and explore the common themes that have come to define the brand at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Theme 1: A new relationship between producer and consumer

Rewind to the 1970s (when Stephen King wrote What is a brand?) and the biggest concern on the brand agenda was the rise of retailer power. Brands had to respond to a world of discounting, eroding margins and private label threats.

Today, it is consumer power that occupies the brand agenda. Digital technologies have made producers, retailers and media owners out of the people previously known as consumers. How then do you build a brand when people control the means of branding?

1. Build the brand from the outside in. One school of thought says brand should be built by starting with internal employees before taking it out to consumers. In contrast, outside-in brand building starts with finding the consumers most likely to go to work for your brand. Don’t start with your employees, “employ” your consumers.
2. Build the brand from the bottom up. 20th Century brands were built by imposing a centrally controlled big idea top down. 21st Century brands understand how to create the conditions where lots of small ideas spread, evolve and compete for primacy. This is Darwinian survival of the fittest applied to cultural ideas.
3. Forget brand, think community. It is not uncommon for people to view more and more of our everyday lives through the lens of branding. We live in country brands, vote for political brands and even “brand” ourselves. But brand language can often obscure more than it illuminates. A more fruitful producer-consumer relationship may come from better understanding the other structures people use to organise their lives and apply those to branding. Think about how religions mix myths, ritual & sacred texts to organise their communities.

Theme 2: The real challenges today are about engagement

Technology has provided the tools for people to create more content and the platforms to distribute that content further and wider. But while the supply of content is almost limitless, our attention is a fixed, finite resource. The result is that attention is concentrated in time and distributed across space. It is both fleeting and fragmented.

How then do we cut-through in a world saturated with content? How do we keep the brand coherent in a world of fragmented attention? How do we create something enduring in world the is increasingly impermanent?

1. High-involvement ideas that are better equipped to earn attention. In world of diminishing attention, you could learn from the games that engage engage people in interaction for prolonged periods of time. In a world full of low-quality junk content, you could act as a knowledge centre and editor, bringing much needed signal to the noise. In a world full of content produced by regular human beings, you could aim for the superhuman, favouring the extraordinary over the ordinary and the fantastical over the real. Or in a world obsessed with being good, you could find whitespace by embracing the dark side, going where others daren’t follow.
2. Low-involvement ideas that side-step the need for attention. Often what a brand says doesn’t matter as much as we think. People are expert at picking up on a brand’s implicit signals. These signals communicate far more, far quicker than a brand’s explicit messaging. And because they work subconsciously, they are far less taxing on our precious attention. What if we stopped thinking of brands being built through communication and started thinking of them being built through osmosis instead?
3. Differently shaped ideas that work across space and across time. If attention is distributed across space then maybe so should your idea. Rather than a single idea expressed in multiple channels, a transmedia idea is split into self-contained elements and spread across channels. Integration is no longer performed by the brand, but by people piecing bits of the narrative together themselves. They are ideas distributed through space. In contrast, long ideas are ideas that endure through time. Rather than creating campaigns what if we created customs, rituals or rites? Could we create some permanence in an otherwise impermanent world?

Theme 3: The mindset of a 21st Century Strategist

Finally, alongside each original essay is a short personal piece outlining what each author has or hope to do “therefore”. Do being the operative word. Whilst the 20th Century strategist was a thinker, the 21st Century strategist marries a faculty for critical thought with a bias for action.

All of the authors have spent months studying the shared texts of our industry and debating the finer points of various theories, but every one of them also shares a fear of the dangers of over-thinking. They know that theory only becomes valuable when it is put into practice. Theory provides a useful place to start but we must drive forward by action and reaction.

And so the 21st Century strategist mindset owes as much the the mindset of digital entrepreneurs: test your thinking on the world early and iterate quickly around what you learn.

“I think therefore I do”