An open letter to Marketing
Hello (quasi)colleagues (as Marketing and Branding are inextricably linked).
Let me open this open letter in an open way by making a few points:
- I have the utmost respect for the Marketing discipline and its highly valuable insights; professions are professions for a reason, and their professionals offer intelligence, talent, preparation, expertise, and experience;
- because of the above, I dislike it when a profession confidently and arrogantly pontificates on another profession; - Marketing uses Branding for success, and Branding uses Marketing for success: while we can argue cause & effect, sequence, and dependencies, the relationship between the two disciplines is a symbiotic one, and one which would be / is very unwise to break; and finally
- I can anticipate receiving some hatemail; that’s fine, I can take it, and I’m old enough not to care. But I’ll always accept and in fact welcome intelligent counters and criticisms.
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Brand and Branding have existed for a very long time, and Marketing always seemed kinda disinterested in it - until the late 1990s. Earlier in the decade, conglomerates such as Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic had acquired communications firms of every kind, from Advertising to Public Relations to Design - including the leading Corporate Identity-then-Branding consultancies. They flooded all of them with rightbrained Business and Marketing people to exploit the opportunities enabled by service consolidation and the power of integrated communications (and ‘branding’ within it).
That trend expanded like wildfire: look at industry data and at the founding dates of many firms who specialize in Marketing but also speak loudly about Brand, and at some related seminal work: the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science was formed in its present form in 2005, Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow (which in its very title started to blur the line between the word Brand and Company, which today are often used as synonyms - and that’s … really bad and causes a lot of problems) was published in April 2010, and Simon Sinek’s Start With Why came out in October 2009 (which led to the explosion of ‘purpose’ - why I exist - being celebrated as the new thing - more on this later; but … in the mid-1970s McKinsey had defined the word Mission as ‘why I exist’ already).
From the roots of Corporate Identity then evolving into the deeper and more meaningful Corporate Branding and in the context of communications consolidation, at the turn of the century the Science of Brand took shape, in a hurry, in just a handful of years.
But ... while the Science of Brand indeed started then, the Tenets of Brand were very well in place already: those rightbrained professionals looked at them, didn’t go below the surface of logos and colors, and in so doing missed the smartly reliable strategic foundations that existed. They started ‘the science of brand’ from scratch - and solely from their marketing perspective. Pity, really.
Which brings me to the Marketing + Branding content of last week’s Ritson-Sharp pow wow in Cannes. I must note that I wasn’t there and that as per this moment the session hasn’t yet been made public, but I read multiple detailed commentaries on it - and several of them from highly respected professionals, who all report on the gist of it: two disagreements and five agreements - all widely (but not universally) celebrated. Let me review them.
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WHAT THEY DISAGREED ON
• Targeting vs. Mass Marketing: Sharp advocates for marketing to the entire category to reach all buyers while Ritson argues for a two-part model that leverages mass reach for long-term brand building, but using targeted campaigns for short-term sales activation. For me, Ritson is right because he lived and worked in the real world and what he says is as logical as it can get, while Sharp’s view seems to be one of an academic thinker. This is a true marketing issue that I’ll leave to expert and their solid data - with Brand evidently as an actively influential component of a reasoning.
• Brand Distinctiveness and/vs Differentiation: Sharp believes brands grow via distinctiveness rather than differentiation. Ritson doesn’t like reducing ‘brands’ to just recognizable assets, and states that unique positioning / brand meaning still hold great value. I fully agree with Ritson on this, obviously, and see Sharp’s view a bit naive - maybe because of his academic perspective (and related limitations).
One comment on Distinctiveness: only an overthinking rightbrain would think that that’s even a question: like … as opposed to what? My logo, shapes, color, comms, words, market presence at large to be … bland and non-distinctive? I could have gotten up in that theatre and politely ask the panelists why they were even debating it.
The whole distinctiveness vs differentiation debate has always puzzled me. Why can’t we just choose to recognize and agree that it’s a specious argument to begin with, because all companies must mind both aspects while also cautioning that ... it depends:
- some companies can have more of one than the other (if you are a consumer brand and/or on a supermarket shelf you have more exposure territories than if you are a software company)
- some industries need to rely on / can exploit one or the other to differing degrees (it’s difficult to be different if you make cereals, in which case you better push on being distinctive - in whatever ways you can).
You know a highly valuable thing that Marketing Minds should offer? A four-quadrant chart of sort showing which type of companies/industries can/should have which balance of Different and Distinctive (now - THAT would show that they really understand ‘Brand’) - while putting their business skills to bear in also considering the cost vs return of each. I’d be relatively easy to do given the massive data points that exist, and it’d put this old and tired debate to rest once and for all. Y’know, such ‘chart’ would be similar to the one we’d done at Interbrand showing the Role of Brand in different industries ranging from Perfumes to Bulk Chemicals: logical, valuable, based on granular hard data, becoming a staple of the discipline, never to be argued again.
All in all, imho on both disagreements Byron Sharp’s view of Brand is … questionable. Sorry to say that about a global authority of such high repute, but that’s what I see from where I sit after forty years in Branding - hey, to each his lane.
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WHAT THEY AGREED ON
1. Mental availability is the main driver of brand growth >> this is intended as a brand coming up in the consumer mind at the point of purchase. I agree, not because I’m a marketing expert but because I’m human like you, and you, and you, and we are all also consumers and live that reality every single day of our lives, and so we just know it to be true. I appreciate that Marketing considers, applies, and codifies human nature to business, thank you, valuable and usable, but I’m tired of hearing it presented over and over as ever-new science. And I was surprised that apparently the two gurus didn’t discuss how ‘mental availability’ is impacted by AI and its independent search/review/select dynamics - I’ll see if they did once I can access the session recording.
2. Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs / brand codes) matter most and should not be changed too often.
and
3. Campaigns should run for years, not be replaced every 30–40 days.
I grouped these two as they conceptually belong together, while of course differing in nature. This is about repetition at large, how Memorability and Familiarity work in human beings, and as it relates to the outcome of what I call continuity of impressions (within which you can also employ/force the less valuable ‘consistency’). We all know it and we’ve always known all about it, but there’s a whole crowd that keeps marveling at and insightfully comment on the recognition of a tarp-covered logo, at the power of meaningless-per-se swooshes or triple stripes, at the appeal of a light blue color, and at the memorability of a tudum sound - while some also adding idiocies (sorry for the slur, couldn’t help it) like “if you cover your logo, would people know what it is?).
DBAs, and repeated messaging*, were true and valuable since forever, and that will never change. And it is DECADES of good old Corporate Identity that built the recognition of a tarped-over shape - or where did you think it came from? I’d have stood up in that theatre once again, and educately ask “excuse me, but why are you even discussing this?” And so, stop ‘wisely articulating’ it, you are discovering hot water - just celebrate, and promote, that simple and unassailable truth and align the work to it.
(*why do you think that 30% of the US thinks that the 2020 election was rigged?)
4. Sophisticated mass marketing is clearly superior to narrow, rigid segmentation (the 95/5 rule: 95% of people is out-of-market at any given time and only 5% is actively buying). I’m no marketing expert, as I said, and I’ll trust the data if they say so. But I’ll repeat what I said above: because I’m human like you, and you, and you, and we are all also consumers and live that reality every single day of our lives, we know it. It’s obviousness codified into truth by data, genuine respect and thank you — make it an axiom already and stop the constant ‘wisely articulating’ it as an ever-new insight.
5. Brand Purpose is, in most cases, a waste of time and money >> consumers don’t buy soap or software because the company wants to save the world.
This rubs me the wrong way to no end, because it’s such a misreading of the issue to begin with - upon which then specious opinions are built. Purpose means ‘why I exist’, and on that basis there is no such thing as Brand Purpose: the BRAND does not have a Purpose, the COMPANY has a Purpose / a reason to exist. And so, certainly Saving the World is not why I buy a soap (UNLESS THAT is my Positioning: that’s why I may buy a Patagonia jacket). But a Corporate Purpose (if genuinely felt and believed, and intelligently implemented where and when it matters) is ABSOLUTELY NOT a waste of time and money and will inform a ton of operational aspects of the business.
Again, if I were sitting in that theater with hundreds of smart people and two gurus debating this issue, I would stand up and shout the short rationale above - and then say “so, Mr Ritson and Mr Sharp, what you are debating starts with the wrong basis because it misuses the terms, and goes downhill from there into utter thin and superficial nonsense. Can you please stop?”.
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All in all, the marketing science has two or three decades under its belt of what they say it’s ‘evidence-backed’. If so, then why we keep discussing certain things? Got nothing new to offer? And why wouldn’t anyone in Marketing run Marketing on that basis and those things become ‘professional normalcy’, which you can then put in every Marketing Course in every school?
I can’t wait to have access to the session and will write again if need be, but from what I’ve seen so far this whole Ritson & Sharp session didn’t seem to be about real Marketing. Rather, it sounds like a mix of marketing talking points with a dose of advertising theory and some ‘branding’ thrown in - all to, apparently, thunderous applause.
I am not a Marketing-hater brand consultant, and I love Mark Ritson and in fact modeled my online course on his miniMBAs (and he was kind enough to yell at me in a DM for something - I thanked him, as he was right). I do want/need/respect the true Marketing Science and its directional/operational power and its creativity. I do/want/respect Mats Georgson’s definition of Marketing being “the commercial system that shapes demand, choice, value, availability, and memory”, (although I’d have something to say or add about Brand’s role in some of those aspects); I do want/need/respect Erich Joachimsthaler’s Interaction Field; and I do want/need/respect David Martin’s Connected Strategies, among other illustrious thinkings.
But for many things in Marketing and from Marketing practitioners I’d also love to hear three things:
- “there are some universal tenets in the human being and in the marketplace, and we pressure tested them: we confirm that they are indeed true and we put precise numerical values to it (such, say, the 95-to-5% ratio)”. And so, Marketing discipline: identify a number of obvious and/or already-proven tenets and just cast them in stone - to be touched only if they have a reason to change; and keep exploring, crafting, debating, and constantly advance new non-tenets things - which indeed one day may become new tenets.
- “Branding is indispensable in turbocharging Marketing, as without it Marketing would be limited to bank on accurate structural facts, valuable proposition clarity, wise budget allocations, and the (limited meaningfulness) of creative messages and promotions”.
- “the skills required by Brand Strategy are parallel to, partially overlapping with, but not the same as the ones required by Marketing, and we shouldn’t expect a good marketing mind to be a good branding mind - A T A L L”
What I reject and am tired of is the continuing presenting those obvious and/or already-proven tenets as genius insights and revelations of some sort - over and over and over, plus throwing ‘Brand’ around willy-nilly and superficially. It’s insufferable and it hurts the discipline’s credibility (you think there’s an underlying reason for the London Tube poster about Marketing last week?), and so do marketers who have never done a single branding program in their lives but speak authoritatively about Branding (especially when they use it as a verb - which in and of itself is the best proof that they just don’t get what it really is).
And one last thought if I may, as to why Marketing started to get into Branding so decisively in the past ~twenty years? It’s because they, silently and very often begrudgingly, intimately realized how indispensable Brand is / can be to Marketing - but they can’t say it too loud as it’d impair the scientific claims they make about the Marketing discipline - keep Brand at bay seems to be the unspoken mantra.
I could write more, but ... the soup is getting cold (“la minestra si fredda”, my favored Leonardo reference - look it up).
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