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← Back to IdeasShadows, Mirrors, and Icons: Reflections on Modern Brand Building
This piece was originally published by WARC
Here’s a stat that will make any marketer wonder what this is all for: Nearly three quarters of all the brands in the world could disappear overnight and most consumers wouldn’t really care. They’d just find a replacement. A similar thing goes for all the work we do itself: 85% of ads have zero positive impact on brand health.
If marketing’s purpose is to build brands with the strength to deliver lasting competitive and economic advantage for their owners, the hard truth is that most marketing seems to be failing in this mission.
What’s even more troubling is that the situation is getting worse.
The Shifting Truth of Difference and Relevance
Every successful brand occupies a prominent place in the collective memory, which makes it more likely to be front-of-mind in buying situations, a higher recommendation probability, and helps it exert greater pricing power.
Securing this prominence has always required brands to be simultaneously different and relevant. The challenge for today’s generation of marketers is that there have been significant changes in why and how people attribute difference and relevance.
Difference has become progressively less about how a brand performs or how it is made and more about perceptions of why it exists, what it believes and how it expresses itself.
At the same time, Relevance is now principally attributed to how well a brand is seen to fit a person’s social values and cultural viewpoint. Fulfilling a functional need remains important, but it’s no longer the dominant factor.
While marketers are conscious of these shifts, many are drawing the wrong conclusions – resulting in marketing that’s inadequate for one of two diametrically opposed reasons.
“Mirror Brands” and “Shadow Brands”
The rise of social media (and the vociferous proponents riding on its tail) has led to a school of marketing that desperately tries to win people’s attention at the expense of earning the right to be part of their lives. This is behavior exemplified by Mirror Brands – those that simply mirror whatever’s currently hot in popular culture. Pursuing virality for its own sake, they grasp at fads and mistake memes for memories.
The example ad absurdum would be the well-known American deodorant brand that created a new product tied to a cryptocurrency – which was itself inspired by a meme featuring a dog – and launched its campaign on a day of celebration for that cryptocurrency.
By forcing the impression of difference, some Mirror Brands can flare brightly. However, the absence of deep-seated relevance means they’re likely to fizzle out quickly. Look, for instance, at Liquid Death, withdrawn from the UK market after less than two years, or PRIME energy drinks, now filling a discount bin in a retailer near you.
The other misstep is marketing that focuses bluntly on visibility but fails to drive emotional or cultural connection – this is what Shadow Brands do. Consumers are aware of Shadow Brands’ presence, but they’re not clear on its definition or the substance it brings.
Shadow Brands aren’t irrelevant, but they can be easy to ignore. Without a lack of meaningful difference, they cannot gain traction in fast, hyper-competitive markets. Sadly, this is a large and growing group. It includes many faded legacy brands as well as the high percentage of DTC brands that are struggling after promising starts.
Raising Marketing’s Sights
To be more than Mirrors or Shadows, brands need to create enduring memories around the things people love and love to share. That’s much easier said than done. It requires full-blooded commitment to:
- Taking a point-of-view that is both meaningful and uncommon.
- Adding value with every expression and every experience.
- Showing up in imaginative, inspiring ways that become part of the zeitgeist.
Cadbury India presents an excellent example. Building on the help it gave to small retailers during the pandemic, the company has used machine learning to create ads for thousands of local businesses. Each features Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan and – strictly in a supporting role – Cadbury Celebrations. By siding with customers in such a public way, the brand stands for generosity with a clear commercial purpose.
With Foodmarks, Coca-Cola is employing different means to the same end. Continuing the “Recipe for Magic” campaign, which celebrates the joyous human connections that shared meals can bring, Foodmarks are immersive experiences inspired by cultural events, movies and must-see destinations. Inextricably attaching the notion of an ice-cold Coke to perfect meals and moments, that way the brand is driving itself deep into people’s memory structures.
Both Cadbury and Coca-Cola demonstrate how culture can be shaped rather than simply mirrored. It takes bold, brave thinking…but the rewards are huge. Brands that consistently deliver at this level elevate themselves above their peer group, transcend their category and weave themselves into the tapestry of people’s lives.
They become Icons.
The Hallmarks of an "Icon Brand"
Icon Brands have a compelling point-of-view; a passion for adding value; and a knack for showing up in inspiring ways. Perhaps above all, Icon Brands are eternally restless. They’re constantly looking towards a future state and apply their dynamism to the consumer’s advantage.
This restlessness has empowered them to make a series of vital transitions:
By successfully navigating these four shifts, brands like Coca-Cola and Cadbury have retained – in fact, have sharpened – their iconic status while other well-known names have receded into the shadows.
How to Build an "Icon Brand"
Icons aren’t made overnight. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”, for instance, has been a work-in-progress since 2004. There is, however, an accelerant.
The concept of integrated communications – the yoking together of multiple channels to create better-rounded, more powerful brand identities – has served marketers well for decades. While the core principles remain relevant, they’re no longer sufficient. Radical changes to the landscape mean both thinking and practice must evolve. The necessary step forward is Interrelated Marketing.
Brands can no longer win ascendancy through one-way communication alone. They must enroll the public – individually and en masse – as agents to act on their behalf. Brands that master the intricate interplay that exists between earned, owned, and paid media create a flywheel that propels them towards Icon status.
Interrelated Marketing delivers this outcome by conjoining the key drivers of success for modern brands:
- Unlocking cultural relevance via compelling narratives at the intersection of a cultural tension and truth about the brand that shape the discourse AND resonates with key audiences.
- Earning reputation in public by capitalizing the influence of individuals and institutions in authentic ways that cultivate positive, lasting renown.
- Designing relationships through personalized experiences and value exchanges that customers can share with the brand.
- Driving desired response by satisfying an identified consumer preference with an effective prompt (i.e. a call to action)
Many brands (and indeed many agencies) treat these four R’s — Relevance, Reputation, Relationship and Response — independently. But the magic happens when they are harnessed to a common purpose. That is the end-product of Interrelated Marketing: a connected ecosystem of expressions and experiences, where every piece of content, every social post, every event and every initiative builds seamlessly upon the last.
Putting Interrelated Marketing to Work
Interrelated Marketing is much more than a theoretical construct. As L’Oréal’s 2024 campaign for skincare brand CeraVe shows, it’s an actionable playbook.
The Super Bowl is America’s biggest stage. But when advertisers use it as a platform for one-way communication, with big-budget commercials featuring celebrities whose connection to the brand is often tenuous, they leave meat on the bone. CeraVe showed how to truly use the platform to its potential, creating an immersive, two-way experience.
CeraVe recruited Michael Cera – for obvious reasons, the internet had speculated for years that the Canadian actor was somehow connected to the brand – and set about meticulously crafting a three-stage strategy. The campaign started by planting fake news: that Cera really was the mastermind behind the brand. The company and its partners went all-in, creating the iamcerave.com website, staging paparazzi shoots, arranging for Cera to be interviewed by influencers, even running a TV ad. The response was exactly as desired, with thousands of people eagerly spreading the rumour online.
Stage 2 saw Cera and CeraVe fight a loud and very public battle for ownership of the brand. As claim and counterclaim flew, the media, skincare experts, influencers and the population at large joined in. The climactic third stage – what L’Oréal calls the ‘reso-lotion’ – was the Super Bowl spot itself, with the actor’s assertions being emphatically debunked by a boardroom of dermatologists.
This is Interrelated Marketing at its best. CeraVe became a leader in culture by being ‘in’ social media rather than just on it. It sparked 1:1 relationships at scale by inviting people to be part of the narrative and giving them something to play with. It turned brand trust into brand love by putting CeraVe’s reputation to the test in the most public way possible. And it achieved all this via a Borderless Idea, the kind of creative thinking that transcended the ‘borders’ so often created by siloed departments, self-interested marketing disciplines and divisive minds.
The acid-test, of course, is whether it worked. You be the judge. I suspect most marketers would be content with 32 billion earned impressions, over 2,000 press mentions, a 2,200% uplift in brand searches and a 25% increase in portfolio sales.
The Unreasonable Impact® of Icons
We started with an important reminder: marketing’s primary purpose is to build brands with the strength to deliver lasting competitive and economic advantage.
Despite what some ‘experts’ would have you believe, this requires setting the bar higher than simply mirroring an audience’s social media feeds or buying visibility by the yard. Instead, the goal must be to earn a prominent, persistent place in people’s memories by having a positive effect on their lives. This is how brands achieve iconic status.
It's a prize worth fighting for. Icons deliver Unreasonable Impact® for their owners via increased penetration; deeper, stickier customer relationships; enhanced pricing power; broader moats; and more powerful market momentum. The bottom-line is the bottom-line: financial returns that are exponentially greater than the costs of creation and delivery.
For organiations ambitious to make this jump, Interrelated Marketing provides the right model. As always, execution needs to be perfect - but the strategic drivers are clear. Every idea, every action, every behaviour should demonstrate an obsessive focus on unlocking cultural relevance, earning reputation in public, designing 1:1 relationships and driving the desired response.
Brands that succeed in conjoining these four drivers, with the right kind of creativity, will create an impact that is unreasonably greater than the sum of the parts and eventually will win not just a larger share of the market but a greater share of the future.