Businesses are currently obsessed with customers, consumer journey mapping and human-centred design. I believe your focus should be elsewhere: on understanding, defining and disseminating your brand throughout your organisation and to consumers. Prioritising the consumer over the brand erodes brand value and sets it on the path of homogenisation. Your brand will become just like the others. As you read this book, be open to the message to stop listening to the consumer and, instead, start to hear your brand.
Why do all cars look the same?
I recently bought a new car. During the protracted search, I became more and more confused as the brands, features, appearance and styles merged into one other. We wanted a family car with a bit of personality. This pretty low bar soon became a high bar. When I was a kid, I remember feeling proud as punch when my parents bought a Datsun 120Y. This was a car with power and grunt. And it was a radical shift from our previous car, a Fiat, which was seen as very exotic and European, particularly in Australia at the time. As a kid, I was into cars. Compared with today, the car back then had so much more character and functional differences.
But in the years that followed, something happened. Through globalisation and a flattening of consumer tastes, most cars are pretty much the same. Even car engines for different branded vehicles are made in the same factory. For example, the Volkswagen Golf GTI has the same engine as the Skoda Octavia RS. The Mercedes-Benz A180d has a dCi Renault diesel engine, which is also used by Nissan. It's the same story with the chassis, with similar frames rolling off the same lines for different brands.
Convergence isn't only happening with cars. Most products in the shops are similar. Cereal, tinned tomatoes and shampoo are similar. Branded and home-brand tortillas are often made by the same manufacturer with very little, if any, difference. Beer is similar. Insurance is similar. If you make an inquiry about your superannuation fund, the customer support services are often shared by several funds. At a functional level, brands are similar (if not exactly the same). Brands and businesses have become homogenised and it's a challenge for marketers to differentiate them.
The problem is more pronounced the more established the category, and the more established the brand is in that category. Take, for example, the Big Four banks in Australia. Most bank accounts are similar. The interest rate may vary slightly, but the offering is essentially the same whether you bank with Westpac, ANZ, Commonwealth or the NAB. Apart from the different-coloured logos (two of which use red), there's hardly any differentiation between them. But it wasn't always like this. Even banks once had distinctive and differentiated positions in the marketplace.
In addition to homogenisation, something else is happening. The fun bits of a car have disappeared. My wealthy uncle was a bit of a car fanatic, and I remember riding in a variety of them with him. Each was shaped differently, with unconventional design elements. Muscle cars of the 1970s had exaggerated bonnets. There were large tail fins on so-called ‘Yank tanks'. The lime-green Porsche in the 1980s had a whale tail. You don't see these flourishes in car design any more. It's all so … practical.
It's a similar story with architecture. In the foyers of banks from the Victorian era, wealth and opulence exuded from every corner, with elaborate cornices, ornate marble pillars and panelled wood walls. Or walk down a street of an inner-city suburb with houses from Victorian and even Georgian times: there are detailed flourishes and finishes everywhere. In the 1950s, it was common to have big curved walls within living spaces. Many of these design elements were not practical — they were artistic. Whereas buildings constructed today tend to all look the same as each other. The art and aesthetic has been removed. Buildings designed by architects who break away from the norm, such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, stand out because they are distinctive, with a vision that withstands practicalities, committees and possibly focus groups.
I see the same homogenisation process at play in politics: Australia's mainstream politicians lack vision. They are interchangeable middle-of-the-road people with interchangeable ideas. True, US President Donald Trump isn't from that mould, but I think he's an aberration. Politicians today are obsessed with polling and focus groups. In Australia, parties ditch leaders when they fail to win polls. Not election polls, but Newspoll, even though it got it very wrong in the 2019 federal election. Politicians seem to lead by consensus, not vision.
Let's apply this logic to my world of advertising and brands. These days, it can be a tough slog. In days gone by, advertising focused on entertainment and the creation of big responses. There were boundary-pushing themes (progressive and conservative) and campaigns were either so shocking, scary, charming or weird they were bound to get attention. This is mostly missing in the industry today.
It's not only advertising that's afflicted. The grit, beauty, romance or weirdness of pop culture has been shaved or chopped off in this sanitised, efficient and practical world. I believe the main reason this is happening is because of advertising's reliance on focus groups. Well, not focus groups alone; but I think there's an over-reliance on people's opinions at the expense of creating a vision and sticking with it.
Love him or loathe him, Steve Jobs had vision
Deft alignment is needed to make your business or organisation stand apart from the pack. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned as CEO of Apple after 12 years away from the company, he told staff:
This is a very complicated world, it's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So, we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.
I'll repeat the important part: ‘So, we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.' I love this. Jobs knew Apple had to fight against conformity and make the brand different from others in the personal computer market. Ensuring your brand is different and distinctive in the minds of consumers is difficult and takes enormous effort. The entire organisation needs to align behind this understanding and what the brand is aiming to achieve. Steve Jobs was amazing at instilling this within Apple.
‘Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.' This is how Steve Jobs introduced the era-defining iPhone in 2007. And he wasn't wrong. In addition to its brilliant technology, Apple was smart in its naming protocol. It didn't come up with a complicated technical name for the new phone. As Mat Baxter, a friend and global CEO of media agency Initiative observed,
… the ability of Apple to use product names and language that was less technical and more human than its competitors' was a key differentiator, and proof point of its ‘Think Different' brand positioning.
But something changed in 2017. The tenth-anniversary iteration of iPhone was named iPhone X. But consumers were confused. They called it the letter ‘X' rather than Roman numeral ten. Mat is obsessed with technology companies and a keen observer of their fortunes. When Apple broke its naming convention, he was mortified and wrote an article on LinkedIn saying,
Of course, product naming blunders can be forgiven. Perhaps someone in marketing felt the ‘X' made the iPhone 10 feel appropriately special for its anniversary year. Or maybe it just looked better as an ‘X' on the packaging and marketing materials. Whatever the reason, Apple had every opportunity to reset and get back on course with its famously simple and non-technical product names. Oh boy, did they stuff that up.1
Mat suggests this small stuff-up is a signifier that Apple is becoming just like other technology companies. It has lost one of its points of differentiation — its naming convention. If Apple doesn't get its brand, what hope is there for the rest of us? For so long, Apple and Virgin, the world's consumer champions, have been held up as the benchmark of strong brands. But even great brands stray off course if not tightly and holistically managed. Apple's shift away from its previous naming convention was detrimental to the brand, and an indication the company is losing its way.
It's challenging to keep brands on course. The irony is the more you use the consumer as your rudder, and the more you ask them what they want, the easier it is to be thrown off course. You can end up creating something generic, vanilla and missing the interesting bits.
The customer is not the answer. Most of the time, the consumer doesn't even know what they want. As Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, is reputed to have said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' The more you listen to the consumer, the more your business or brand is in peril. And I predict that if you hear me out, you'll agree with me.
