I started thinking about this post a few months ago. Yes, I know, it takes me too much time to go from idea to final copy doesn’t it? Or does it? Among the books I’ve been reading recently (I almost always read concurrently a biography, a novel, and an essay) is How To Do Nothing by Jane Oddell, a most inspired and insightful reflection on the commodification of our thoughts and bodies. There are fewer and fewer spaces, fewer and fewer moments, where we can “resist in place”, not as a way to escape from the world, but to the contrary as a way to reconnect with it. There are times when we must retake our attention and our time, and channel them, inward toward ourselves, outward toward our communities, and transcendentally towards nature and the universe - to use a page from Simone Weil’s philosophy.
This train of thought led me to think about our marketing propension to add more brand-thought to paper, about our innate desire to fashion brands into perfectly centralized and controlled objects. As a result we end up turning brands into macrocephalic concepts, crammed with every bit, piece, item, speck and unit of information that we can add to a 120-slide deck, a mind map or a one-page brand roadmap with dozens of footnotes and appendix pages. Beyond and beneath the vision-mission-ambition trifecta lie manifestos, values, behaviors, personality traits, tones of voice, … Even though these are needed and highly valuable, they bother me for two reasons. The first is that they are conceptual endeavors that are hard to implement and bring to life in a consistent manner. The more intricate the brand roadmap, the less likely the brand is going to actually show up in consistent and distinctive ways across the dozens of channels, formats, touch points and interfaces that are part of the marketing playbook nowadays. AI will most likely make cohesiveness much easier to attain consistently, but that’s a thread for another post. The second reason why I’m not a big fan of dense paper brands is more strategic: a brand is not a one-and-done paper concept, a brand is a living and breathing organism.
What if the brands we had in our care stopped trying to do everything on their own, from the sole vantage point of their centralized nervous systems? What if they started to look outward and welcomed the fact that they are living organisms that are as much defined by what others say, do and feel with and around them than by what we, marketers, jotted down some time ago on paper and updated once in a while? Actually the more mature and confident a brand, the more it can let go of its Demiurgic desire to control all it is, will and should be. The more a brand trusts its place, its products and what it stands for among its many stakeholders, the more it can grow and become.
Fashion, beauty and luxury brands have long known that the faces of those who design them, of those who sport them on catwalks, of those celebs and influencers that put their sartorial and cultural spin thereon, are of the utmost importance. Louis Vuitton and journeys, Chanel and timelessness, Gucci and eclectic romanticism would not come to life were they not embodied and, in more ways than one, created by their famed designers and iconic celebrity ambassadors. In this respect it seems to me that social media is pushing more brands in the right direction, whether it’s FMCG, CPG, travel, or food & beverages. Having to give creators a free rein - otherwise said creators would not be interested in partnering up - has led to a reckoning of sorts. Yes the brand roadmap still matters, but we should accept that some of the strategic components of the brand are going to be defined as they are executed, from the ground up, starting with TikTok creators and their antics.
Brands such as Nerf or Duolingo are hiring Chief TikTok Officers while others like Olipop use TikTok as a distinctive brand descriptor. What does it say about them? That they are confident enough in who they are and what they stand for to allow TikTok creators to co-define and update them, from a strategic perspective! A project I had the chance to be closely involved with offers another good example of brands being partly defined as they are scrolled. Hilton, working with TBWA\Chiat\Day NY (#selfpromo), defined a Disruption® roadmap (i.e. a brand platform) that revolves around the idea of “For The Stay”, that is to say putting emphasis on the amenities, services, team members, comfort and care found at a Hilton property, as the key ingredients that are going to make or break the broader experience of travelling somewhere. Building thereupon, an A-team of creators expanded upon this vision and made Hilton into the hotel brand by and for creators thanks to a 10-minute ad that turned heads and stopped scrolls!
What we need is more dialogue. A dialogue between the printed page and the feed, between the conceptually defined brand and the lively embodied one. Let me make this clear though, a dialogue goes both ways. Both ends must allow themselves to be challenged, influenced and even maybe rewritten by the other. We have seen countless examples of the paper brand rewriting the embodied brand, and that’s fine, provided rewriting the embodied brand makes more sense, makes the whole bigger and more cohesive, adds to each of the component parts, and proves more effective. We should accept and embrace moments when the embodied brand is going to amend and update, for the best, the written one.