Marketing teams have become exceptionally sophisticated at acquiring traffic. Media efficiency improves each year. Creative testing is constant. Audience targeting continues to evolve. But an overlooked constraint often sits immediately after the click.
Today, heritage brands occupy a difficult position. Squeezed between private label that sets value and insurgent brands that speak to values. Having worked on several, I have found that they often take the same approach of maximizing margins, targeting younger consumers, and launching line extensions and PPA.
When an iconic brand begins to fade, the decline is rarely dramatic. In iconic brands, financial performance often lags changes in cultural relevance and brand meaning. Revenue may hold steady. Market share may appear stable. Awareness remains high. Yet competitors begin shaping the future while the incumbent defends the past. For leadership teams, restoring an iconic brand is not a communications exercise. It is a strategic mandate.
Brands that lead today do three things exceptionally well. They create an emotional advantage that customers cannot get elsewhere. They establish a distinctive advantage that customers recognize as meaningfully different. They build a connective advantage that keeps the brand relevant over time. These are not communications outcomes. They are strategic decisions.
Last week, I discussed the new brick-and-mortar Amazon entry: a big box store with a large helping of Amazon logistics, data mining, and merchandise expertise. As part of that Amazon discussion, two brand stumbling blocks came under scrutiny. One: Amazon’s continued lack of understanding of customers in brick-and-mortar grocery stores. Two, Amazon’s lack of designing and articulating brand-relevant differentiation.
