There’s this cartoon that did the rounds around New Year’s Day, a few weeks back, featuring these two aliens looking down at earth and feeling bemused by all the celebrations.
“What are they celebrating?” asks one alien.
“Their planet just completed another revolution around the sun,” replies the second alien, making the first one shake his head in disbelief.
I was reminded of this in the context of looking at what new normal the world of marketing and brands might be confronting at the turn of the year/decade. The cartoon ended up telling me that there really is nothing new to be dramatically excited about, that all we have done is completed another revolution around the sun. But then the word revolution means not just tumultuous upheaval but also coming full circle, once more. We’ve been breathlessly telling ourselves that digital and data have revolutionized the planet and intelligent life as we know it; that the world of brands is now like it was never before: unprecedented.
But brands that have sustainably and profitably scaled, endured, become folklore, have accumulated all kinds of capital — cultural, social, even financial. The only kind of capital they no longer need? Venture. Now, I’m not here to knock on venture-capital funded unicorns. But even the hardiest backers of such mythical creatures will tell you that creating sustainably and profitably scaled, enduring, cultural icons out of businesses requires something that no venture capital fund has — the ability to build bridges of trust, aspiration and intangible value with people, who may or may never become your customers. At scale. Over time.
Are we obsessed with change?
Technology can take the subjectivity and inconsistency out of business operations, but it can never take the irrationality out of humans. What it comes down to is that, every person seems to have been created with Schrödinger's Principle — s/he may or may not be interested in your brand at any point in time, but what s/he definitely cares about is their own self-interest, and whether a brand appeals to that self-interest or not. Technology, especially in the Age of Moment Marketing, may move at dizzying speeds, but people act according to the Law of Inertia, with self-interest being the propelling or stopping force
As the legendary Bill Bernbach timelessly noted 60 odd years back, industry is obsessed with change whereas people are fixed in their notions of the driving emotions — love, passion, joy, grief, anger, envy, sorrow, aspiration, communality, peace, hatred, among them. The reality at the end of this last planetary revolution is that we are once again where we need to be, where we started. The source of financial capital may have shifted over time, but the source of social and cultural capital remains with the people.
Trump’s fourth P backfires
If businesses want to sustainably and profitably scale and endure in the hearts of people, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to turn it back to the basics of brand-building. Like the journey that unicorns traverse going from zero to a billion dollars, it only takes a few years to create a culture icon out of brands; provided it is interesting and relevant. And patient.
For those who may want to point to the brand called Donald Trump being interesting and relevant too, think about the now non-negotiable 3P outcomes of the triple bottomline that most businesses have to deliver: people (always first), profit and the planet. Trump thought he could add a fourth P — pissing off practically all the people on the planet, and profit from it. But as we have now seen, it’s not exactly enduring, even if it appealed to the self-interest of a large mass of people. The consequences of his ‘brand strategy’ are that he may well lose his billionaire status.
Which brings me to my concluding point: if a unicorn wants to turn into the proverbial ‘lambi race ka ghoda’, then the best way to create a new brand revolution is to be mindful of the old brand revolution.
(The author is CEO, dentsu Solutions, India. Views expressed are his own)
