(Un)Intelligent Design: Marketing’s Lagging Evolution
Classical brand marketing has fallen behind.
Our marketing channels and tools have evolved at the pace of Moore’s Law and broader technology, but the discipline of brand marketing and its leaders are trailing by at least a decade.
How we talk about ‘brand’ is a loaded and inherited term from the old economy, too broad and misused for the modern company.
That’s not to say there’s no value from meticulously executed brand initiatives. More precisely, there’s no value in brand’s ambiguous language and lack of scientific scrutiny.
‘Brand(ing)’ can describe nearly any free parameter that makes an argument work. Here’s how marketing executives discuss brand investments:
- Step-1: Investment
- Step-2: Branding
- Step-3: Positive impact, observable or not, over any unaccountable period of time
No major business discipline should be off the hook from the burden of falsifiable statements. Everyone should be held to same standard of scrutiny.
We should be especially strict in silicon valley, where science and engineering rule. Yet, even the most progressive tech companies let their leaders make large blind bets, wrapped around an opaque premise, defensible only by analogy.
Steve Jobs Shouldn’t Run Every Company
“When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” — Daniel Kahneman
When pitching brand investments, rather than refine what we mean by branding, most people instead point to companies with unquestioned authority on the subject.
Apple, Nike, BMW, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc. These companies may be aspirational, but they’re incredibly different from ours: different time, market, product, people, resources, strengths, weakness.
How & why things “worked” for them are not universal principles that can be applied blindly across any context.
It’s difficult to think independently about your own unique company; it’s easier to think about Apple and copy them. No one gets fired for following the Steve Jobs playbook, but no one stands out either. Analogy is lazy logic and a poor framework for making big consequential bets.
Poetic Nonsense
“The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised” -David Ogilvy
“anything that leaves a mental picture of the brand’s identity” -Leo Burnett
“A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark.
A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.” -American Marketing Association
Top ad & marketing execs like going into a stream-of-consciousness monologue, describing brand as storytelling, intimate customer relationships, culture, identity, etc.
These narratives are poetic and loaded with abstract buzz-words rapidly strung together, allowing them to dodge any specific falsifiable position.
This is inherited wisdom from old boys’ club marketing execs, forcing causality where there is none to justify accolade-seeking ego-driven marketing spend.
Stories can make intuitive sense, but are not a reliable heuristic; they oversimplify the world and encourage us to stop thinking for ourselves. Instead, you should fully embrace the uniqueness of your position, define a precise testable hypothesis, and detach your ego from the result.
Brand with Accountability
- Perception & reputation
- Awareness (or volume of awareness)
- Name, logo, & Identity
- Design, aesthetics, language, packaging
- Pricing, discounting, and premiums
- Ads, tag-lines, promotions, endorsements
- Culture & environment
These types of topics can be individually managed, tested, and measured for observable outcomes. If any term or goal is exceptionally fluffy or abstract, you must first test whether it exists at all.
“But not everything important is measurable.” I disagree in the context of business. This measurement problem stems from one of two cases:
- You’re not asking the right questions. Refine your question until you arrive at the first-principle issue that is, in fact, measurable.
- It’s not measurable because it does not exist or exist enough to be important.
Even abstract qualities like ‘reputation’ and ‘culture’ must have observable outcomes if they matter at all. If you can’t observe any consequence, positive or negative, it’s not important enough to invest in.
For example, “good” vs “bad” company culture should have downstream consequences found in employee retention. A great vs terrible “culture” should have measurable costs or saving in recruitment, training, & productivity.
Likewise, large brand ‘awareness’ investments can be broken-down into: (1) addressable market size, and (2) intent.
Market size & intent have consequences measurable from several channels:
- Market Size → exposure to previously inaccessible consumers should yield new targetable audiences, previously inefficient to target. An increased addressable market is pure incremental gain.
- Intent → digital ad CTRs (CTRs absorb intent), impressions & CVRs of new organic users (organic search, install page CVR), existing users re-engagement (sessions, purchases, etc).
Once channel consequences are measured, you can finally scrutinize, form a new hypothesis, and optimize for improved degrees of success. Rinse & repeat.
Brand terms need to be broken down into their manageable components. There are specific performance & business KPI for every ambiguous brand term. It’s time to level-up our language.
Software Driven Natural Selection
We’re amid a shift in marketing and its place within popular business culture. Old school brand marketing will no longer be the dominant religion. Authority and vanity spending will be disciplined into perspective.
This is not to say that branding will no longer be important. On the contrary, it’ll become more successful and we’ll advance how we talk about it.
Branding will evolve to become more precise, transparent, efficient, measurably successful, and accountable. We’re certainly moving in the opposite direction.
Some companies will benefit from an increasingly complex & scientific environment.
Other companies will stick to authority & consensus, only to find themselves in an increasingly competitive & confusing world. Ego will will take precedence over shareholders.
In this new economy, tech-driven natural selection will indifferently produce winners & losers.
