Welcome to The Fourth Age of Brands

Happier times . . .

No matter what industry you work in, it has likely become part of your job to make predictions about what’s going to happen once we return to the post-lockdown “new normal.” Marketing is no different. While much of the immediate thinking has to do with how brands should and shouldn’t communicate with their customers during this unprecedented time, the more complicated question seems to be: What kind of world will we all be living in? What will be the role for marketing, and, for that matter, for brands?

I’ve seen a lot of predictions about what’s going to happen in a “post-COVID” world. You probably have too. The truth is that no one knows. That said, if we are going to think about how the role of brands might change in the near to mid-term, the best we can likely do is look at long-term trends that were already happening before COVID, and then identify whether the pandemic is likely to accelerate or slow those changes. When faced with uncertainty, what we really need is a framework.

Paradoxically, it may actually be easier to imagine what our world will look like a year from now, vs. predict what’s going to happen next month. When we look at trends that have been decades in the making, we can start to make sense of what’s happening right now. “Brands,” after all, have always been changing based on our needs and expectations.

A very brief journey into the past, so that we might make more sense of the present and future:

The First Age: Individual Trust. (1906–1945)

“Is this product what it says it is? Will it hurt me?”

Brands originated in a time when consumers needed help. Brands were, very simply, guarantees that helped them at a time when they didn’t have the information (or, in some cases, the criteria) to make a smart purchase decision. A brand was a promise a company kept: “We the company commit that what’s in the box is what’s supposed to be in the box — and you the customer are going to pay a little more for that peace of mind.” The brand seals the contract. At a time when consumer protection laws were much less stringent than today (or non-existent), brands, and the accountability they created between companies and their customers, were a necessary outcome, particularly when we think about products that had the potential to harm or kill us, like canned food or medicine. If this idea of a brand as an “assurance of quality” sounds anachronistic, that’s because it is. Our relationship with brands has become much more complicated.

The Second Age: Individual Transformation. (1945–2000)

“How will this product change me? Will it make me better?”

The end of World War II brought unprecedented prosperity, and nearly every strata of society became upwardly mobile. Brands became less about safety and trust and more about aspiration — signifiers for who I am, who my family is, and who we want to be: “Is our family an Oldsmobile family or a Buick family?” This is also the age when technology became an integral part of many brands’ stories. We have a tendency to think that we are living in the Golden Age of Tech right now, but what might it have felt like to watch an RCA color TV for the first time? To feel the whirr of a Royal electric typewriter? At one point, you had the option of ordering your new Westinghouse Refrigerator in 50 color combinations. That’s ultimate consumer “customization,” years before marketing professionals started calling it that.

My boomer parents and I grew up in this age. Likely you did too. Its trademark values are still deeply ingrained in who we are as a society, and most advertising you see today comes from an updated version of this decades-old marketing playbook. When I started my advertising career in the mid-nineties, we still operated in this Second Age thinking. What do brands stand for? How might I transform myself through my purchase of Nike running shoes or my consumption of Heineken, or my Bose noise-cancelling headphone, or my iPod? What do these purchases signify to others? What do they signify to me? Of course these aspirational brand relationships persist. But since the turn of the millennium, we have entered a Third Age, which has further shifted our expectations of the brands in our lives.

The Third Age: Collective Trust. (2000–2016)

“Is your company who you say you are? Will you hurt us?”

The transition from the Second to the Third Age of Branding represents two major shifts:

Shift One: The shift in point-of-view from “me” to “we.”

Shift Two: The shift in the core brand relationship from “product” to “company.”

The following all happened in the first decade of the new millennium:

• The Dot-com bubble burst
• Terrorist attacks of 9/11
• The US began the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Enron declared bankruptcy
• The number of people with internet access jumped from around 40% to roughly 70%.
• Apple launched the iPhone.
• Facebook and Twitter launched.
• “Global warming” and “climate change” became widely-recognized terms.
• China grew from the sixth to the third largest economy in the world.
• Hurricane Katrina
• The Great Recession

Many of these events have nothing to do with one another, but taken collectively they represent a sharp rise in both our literal inter-connectedness, as well as a stronger sense of a collective “we.” Add to that a growing awareness of the role that companies and governments have on our collective well-being. Both of these awakenings were accelerated by new technologies that allowed us to share these ideas. As a result, “transparency” became the the concept du jour in marketing circles, and, in turn, consumers became much better versed in the sausage-making that had previously taken place behind the curtain.

At the same time, and as a result of these new dynamics, marketing and communication thought leaders started talking about the need for brands to think less in terms of “top down” marketing and more in terms of “engagement,” “communities,” “movements,” and “relationships.” Brands started to cultivate followers on social media and started engaging with them in real time, throwing out the decades-old marketing rulebook, along with its sacred tenet of “brand consistency.” This is when we started talking about campaigns “going viral” and the power of “earned media.”

The outcome of this shift was that consumers started becoming much more aware of the role that brands — and the companies behind them — play in society. In the same way an individual might have expected not to be harmed by DOLE canned peaches in the 1930’s, we now collectively expected that a company like Wells Fargo should take some ownership for the well-being of its customers in 2016.

The Fourth Age: Collective Transformation. (2016- )

“Will your company change us? For better or for worse? How do we know?”

Why choose 2016 as the beginning of this Fourth Age? Sure, the election happened, but if anything Donald Trump represents a throwback to the Second Age — his marketing playbook, whether you buy into it or not, is all about aspiration and identity. The president’s approach to marketing is a 1950’s Buick campaign stripped down of any nuance or art: “Be a winner.” Subtext: “Don’t be a loser.” Admittedly, it’s an approach that still works, albeit with a slowly shrinking cohort.

We can peg The Fourth Age of branding to the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which, regardless of its details, whether it is enough, and which countries have dropped out of it since, represents a collective yearning — a cry for accountability from government and corporate leaders to transform our world — to change it for the better. And if this moment represents the Prologue to this Fourth Age, a sign of things to come, then we might recognize the marketing blunder that came months later as the first paragraph of the first chapter — full of good intention, yet awkward and tone-deaf in execution.

Much has been written of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot — almost all of it rightfully critical — and I won’t pile on. In fact, the most interesting thing about the spot to me is the impetus behind it — someone felt strongly enough that Pepsi should wade into the “Black Lives Matter” protests that they were willing to take massive risks inherent in doing so. Strong brands, particularly youth brands, are in a constant search for relevance, and despite Kendall’s and the Pepsi team’s misstep, more brands have embraced the issues that matter to their customers and employees, with mixed degrees of success. Think of these efforts in the same way that toddlers take their first steps — haltingly at first, with an occasional tumble.

The easiest examples to point to are the ones where we can see ads (and, frequently, celebrities): Nike and Colin Kaepernick, Always’ #Likeagirl campaign, and REI’s #OptOutside. These campaigns all take a point of view and, importantly, sacrifice something — either customers or revenue. Another great example is Luna Bar, which paid each member of the women’s national soccer team $31,250 — the difference between the US men’s and women’s World Cup roster bonus. Luna’s action signified the change it wants to see in the world. As a company — a group of people — it was a statement of intent to transform our society towards a more equitable future, where men and women are compensated based on the value they create, not their chromosomes.

But in addition to these statements, we are increasingly seeing the rise of company actions that are embedded into the business plan, including new products and services. Is there a better example of a company doubling down on their values than Patagonia’s launch of “Worn Wear?” In what world does it make sense for an apparel company to disrupt its core business by creating a marketplace for its used items? By radically embracing its values, Patagonia receives extreme brand loyalty from its customers.

So how to operate in a world where your customers expect your brand to transform the world? Probably best to start now, as expectations will only continue to rise in a post-COVID world. It’s a tall order, but you can start small. Here are three actions you can take:

1. Listen to your employees. What issues are important to them? What actions would they like to see your company take to make the world a better place? What efforts would they be excited to be a part of? In addition to giving you a sense of their own energy and intention, their thoughts and ideas are likely a good proxy for what your customers care about.
2. Revisit your values. You know the ones. Three words that sit in your brand pyramid. One of them is probably “Authentic.” Start by asking yourself: Are these the values that truly reflect the people who work at your company? Is your company living those values? (Not in a “do no harm” kind of way, but in a “change the world” kind of way.) How do these values come to life in the real world?
3. Don’t be afraid to talk before you act. I know — this one is counterintuitive. But inertia is a powerful force in most companies. Companies often feel like they have to establish a track record before they can message their intent, but sometimes publicly committing to a cause or issue is what’s needed to get the internal wheels of change turning. Say something, and then pilot an internal response to that external rallying call.

I’ll leave you with one data point. Every year Edelman publishes its “Trust Barometer,” a global survey of 34,000 respondents about their trust in institutions. In the 2020 edition, 74% of respondents agreed that “CEO’s should take the lead on change rather than waiting for governments to impose it.” That number was up 9 points from 2018, and it represented public sentiment — before COVID.

If you had been thinking that social impact is a passing fad that your brand might simply wait out, you might rethink that approach. Now is the time.