1. Remember Your Roots Strong brands come from people, places and times, and they remember it whether they are luxury brands or not. Brands too often forget about or ignore their origins, and marketers in the English-speaking world are the guiltiest of it.
It’s tempting to think of consumers in binary terms in relation to the brands you are responsible for: in, or out; buying, or not buying; loyal, or not loyal. But for many brands, the status of an individual can be more complex. At any given point in time, people can take on other roles in relation to your brand, and in relation to your competitors’ brands, that nevertheless have a direct influence on your competitiveness.
At the start of 2015, Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer revealed that the speed of innovation was greatly out of step with consumers’ ability to process the information. Even more poignant was a self-diagnostic of sorts for marketers in which consumers indicated they believed innovative products were being rushed into market without adequate testing and evaluation when in fact, many brands had met minimum standards required by local laws.
The aspiration drive that has dominated how marketers think and what they strive to achieve in building a brand’s mythology is increasingly being seen by consumers as unattainable and fake. Buyers are drawing a line under what they perceive to be airbrushed brands. And the push-back is manifest in everything from the acceptance of imperfect food to the increased use of plus-size models on fashion house runways.
As Subway’s Jared Fogle joins the pantheon of brand endorsers who’ve been dropped in a hurry for either real or alleged off-brand activities, it’s worth revisiting the risks and benefits of endorsement strategy.
