The era of brand is over

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Hello Spark reader,

We’ve been speaking a lot about brand in Spark lately and this week’s edition takes that conversation to a possible conclusion! This debate was originally kicked off by marketing guru and courter of controversy, Professor Scott Galloway, at last year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, when he made the bold claim above – that the era of brand was over (or at least ending).

Our Editor Mimi isn’t one to shy away from controversial topics, so naturally she’s had this on her radar to explore for a while. But we’d really like to hear from you on this one; so be sure to tell us in the poll below whether you agree and feel free to share your most unfiltered responses via email!

In other news, you may have seen that the Vivace website and Connection Request are sporting a new look – but don’t worry, the pink will be back, just in more of a supporting role.

-joel

Is brand dead?

Guest essay by Mimi Hayton

I know this ranks as one of the most click-baity Spark subject lines of all time, but it was an actual proclamation by Prof. Scott Galloway last year, at Cannes Lions no less. Undoubtedly to a room full of brand-advocates, if not brand-fanatics – a bold statement to say the least (certainly a headline-grabbing one and isn’t that the whole point of the event?).

I first heard Prof. G speaking about this hypothesis on an episode of The Uncensored CMO, which happens to be the only marketing podcast that has ever held my attention for more than 10 minutes, where he was interviewed back in May.

According to Galloway, the era of brand building or brand-lead marketing began in 1945 and lasted until 1995, at the inception of Google, after which it has slowly been dying. It was the rapid rise of cheap broadcast media through TV & Radio after WWII which “allowed companies to get away with manufacturing sub-standard products and still create shareholder value by attaching it to notions and ideas, rather than letting the product speak for itself.” (Bandt)

These brand codes were the primary means of creating irrational returns for shareholders during the golden age of advertising where 60-80% of US households were tuned into one of three TV channels each night – a world that digital media and innovation disrupted, ultimately fragmenting the media ecosystem with too many channels to manage:

“Brand used to be a weapon of diligence” says Galloway, one that could be used as a proxy for a certain level of experiential expectation when you had very little other information to rely on, but now you can use “weapons of mass diligence” (social media, online reviews) to find the exact right thing for your needs, tailoring your experience to reach that next level without needing the brand recognition.

Likewise, traditional advertising, he argues, is increasingly expensive, inefficient and fragmented, and as a result, ineffective. Not to mention that tech-savvy audiences are going out of their way to avoid ads, as well as paying a premium for content that is ad-free: “Advertising, in my view, has become a tax that the poor and the technologically illiterate have to pay.”

So what replaces brand in this new world order? The smart companies, he says, are pouring money into ‘the boring stuff’:

In tandem, the advertising that innovative companies are spending on, is increasingly product-based, and more purely focused on features and specifications: “product is the new black again”.

Convinced? I’m not. Perhaps its my unwillingness to abandon a skillset I honed over years, but I’m pretty sure that brand – as a discipline, strategy and tool – which has its roots in Ancient Egyptian cattle branding circa 2700 BCE, is never going away.

I agree that ‘traditional advertising’ and perhaps ‘traditional branding’ is dead in the sense that it’s no longer enough to run a big shiny ad campaign every year through traditional channels, nor is papering every spare inch of digital screen space with digital banners (which is just the traditional ad model made digital) going to buy your way to long term growth or brand recognition.

I also agree that you can’t have “a mediocre product and just instil it with great emotion” – no amount of brilliant branding or creative advertising will obscure a subpar product experience. A competitor is always just a button click, or at most an irate phone call, away, in almost every market.

But there are ways that brands can (and must) evolve to meet these challenges without throwing the brand out with the bathwater. Surprise surprise they are very aligned with what we’ve been speaking about in the last few editions of Spark.

The smart response to ineffective advertising is not necessarily no advertising; it’s better advertising or, as we at Vivace have always believed, advertising that doesn’t actually look, or sound or feel like advertising. This is exactly what Lauren Denowitz spoke about in ‘Bravery through brand entertainment’ – a call for brands to step beyond traditional marketing content and engage with their audiences more creatively, the same way an entertainment brand would.

Look also to the rise of interactive campaigns, brand-world building and ‘fandoms’ which demonstrate that brands that are willing to allow customers to step into the role of co-designer or co-collaborator with their brand assets can build communities of fans far more powerful and loyal than your average consumer base (see Zoe Scaman’s The New Fandom Formula).

On a strategic level, a poor product with a great brand will not compete with a great product. However when you have a whole lot of good products competing, a great brand can still be the ultimate differentiator. It still has the power to increase preference in a market saturated with choice – “Branding isn't dead. It's now forced to do what it always should have done: enhance a great product.” (Aaron Shields)

Galloway also somewhat contradicts himself in my view, when he says that branding and brand strategy as a skillset is becoming outmoded, but then goes on to speak about how “storytelling and an ability to communicate is key” and will always be in demand. I don’t disagree with the latter, but isn’t the foundation of good branding, and brand-building, storytelling?

The CEO of the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising, Andrea Martens, said it well when she said:

Given I know I’m speaking to a highly marketing-literate audience of experts here in the Vivace community, at this point I’d much rather pass the mic over and know what you think. Please tell us, is brand dead? Is it just going into hibernation? Or is Prof. G* full of it?

*Full disclosure, whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, I am generally a Scott Galloway fan and a longtime listener of Pivot

Mimi Hayton is Vivace’s Head of Media and Spark Editor-in-Chief, as well as a freelance brand and content strategist, writer, and content creator.

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Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Send us your shout-outs and strong opinions to include in next week’s edition at [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace, a global b2b creative studio and consultancy that helps businesses drive meaningful brand and commercial impact. Get in touch if you’d like to chat with any of the team. Have a great week ahead.