“Fuck the brands that are fucking the people”

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So American Apparel has been in the news recently as a brand in trouble. Lots of theories abound as to why – from out of control ego and over zealous expansion to lack of innovation and accusations of sleeze and illegal employment.

Arguably, whatever happens – whether it does disappear or re-invent itself – it’s sure to appear in marketing manuals and blogs in the future, and to remain one of the most iconic and controversial brands of this decade.

Here are 5 things I think brands can learn from American Apparel:

1. Context, context, context
Famously Gap and Nike were exposed earlier this decade by failing to fully understand the context of their brands. They had made a fatal distinction between the real world (product manufacture, workers, sourcing) and the brand (marketing, advertising etc) and were to discover that consumers did not make that same distinction. American Apparel was a brand very much born out of, and aware of, the sustainability issues of the category. This awareness of context gave the brand competitive advantage and awareness – would another funky T-shirt company have been as interesting without this context? It helped AA to reframe the competition – everyone else was suddenly ‘the old way’. Indeed the advert that contained the title statement of this blog echoed the frustration of a whole generation at that time that sought an alternative – a brand idea that they could buy into, a way to make a stand against exploitation.

2. Be Fearless
American Apparel had a fearless tone of voice that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the time and capitalised on the very public failings of Gap and Nike. Fearlessness is born out of knowledge; self-knowledge, knowledge of the issues and knowledge of your audience. American Apparel has to be one of the most brilliant and uncompromising arrivals into any market. It had an unapologetic simplistic view of the world – this behaviour is wrong and we won’t stand for it – that people could readily understand. The brand successfully fused transparency about its operations and ethics with a sexy youthful attitude. And it stood out as a consequence. Have the courage of your convictions and people will admire that even if they don’t necessarily agree – as long as you can back it up with actions.

2. Have a point of view
Even if you didn’t know much about American Apparel you probably knew that it stood against the exploitation of workers. A brand that is conceived out of issues and ideals has a point of view where others have a more manufactured brand essence. These brands often become a means to an end, a vehicle for change first and foremost. If American Apparel does have a brand essence rather than purpose then the likelihood is that it followed. So many businesses today don’t offer a point of view on the world or even the issues that face their category. Maybe it’s a fear of putting “head above the parapet”, or a prevailing belief in the wisdom of ‘whispering’, that prevents other companies doing it? In my humble opinion brands having a point of view should be encouraged. The caveat to this statement of course is that having a point of view requires both understanding of the issues and a strategy for having maximum impact.

3. Re-imagine the world
As a non-expert in economics I had never encountered the phrase ‘vertical integration’ before American Apparel came along. It represented a new way of looking at things. This wasn’t just another way to look at a supply chain. To me it felt more like an industrial revolution or movement. It wasn’t just bashing the competition – kicking them when they were down – it was another route in, it presented us with an alternative. Big sexy ads underpinned with ‘Made in Downtown LA’ were amazing. For the first time brand manifesto-style statements about operations co-existed with sexy brand glamour. And it worked, proof that these values could be built into a cool brand seamlessly.

4. Surprise!
The world today abounds with consumer-led brands. They ask you what you want and then they dutifully play that back to you word-for-word. Ad lines from the mouths of babes (or rather Sheila 42 from Essex). In their book Passion Brands Edwards and Day have a neat phrase to describe how consumer-led businesses only ever produce expected results: they say they’ve “blunted their power to surprise”. American Apparel is the antithesis of this. Consumers couldn’t have created this brand or seen it coming. Social issues and social innovation offers brand owners opportunities to surprise and lead the consumer once again showing them better futures. At the time I thought: This is it – a new wave of activist cool brands are going to come flooding in now. And yet since its entry in 2003 how many other big game-changing socially driven brands can you name?

5. Don’t stand still
There are many theories put forward about why American Apparel is apparently in trouble. I’m sure we can also learn more from their mistakes and contradictions. I can’t comment on all of these but I do think that the original point of view, tone of voice and stance on ethics never quite made good the promise. There were actions around immigration rights and some nice use of their iconic T-shirt to support Proposition 8, but I can’t help thinking it could be bigger, have achieved more. Perhaps it never kept momentum going on its ethics after taking the market by storm? For today’s teenagers its ethics may not be as obvious, or perhaps they no longer present a reason to buy or believe or even pay more? As  others have caught up maybe American Apparel simply hasn’t kept one step ahead and continued to surprise and challenge us?

I for one will be watching with interest to see what happens next – and if not them then who?

Things that make you go hmmm

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Three days ago Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a now legendary article by University of Michigan’s Business School’s associate professor of strategy, Professor Karnani, entitled ‘The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility’.

Once you get past the unnecessarily inflammatory title, the article proposes that CSR only stacks up when it makes commercial sense. He also challenged: “The idea that companies have a duty to address social ills is not just flawed. It also makes it more likely that we’ll ignore the real solution to these problems.” There are other vagaries within said article, and I may be missing something (and as I write this I know I’ll be put right very soon), but as I understand it that’s the thrust of the piece.

The article has caused an enormous uproar within the CSR community. You wouldn’t believe the resources that many have been able to dedicate to putting Prof. Karnani right on his seemingly erroneous views. It’s been a reaction of Copernican proportions (over 180,000 Google-listed comments this week) to an apparently heretical utterance, whose utterer must now be damned for eternity.

But the headline here isn’t the content of Karnani’s article. It’s the CSR community’s response, which suggests a lack of openness to explore how to move things forward. Yes, some of Karnani’s viewpoint derives from thinking that was around more than a decade ago. But some of it is useful, if challenging, and speaks of the need and opportunity for sustainability strategy to be more fully embraced in core business strategy. And that’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it?

Longtime USA Today editor and BCLC commentator Jack Curry defended the WSJ editorial decision to push this article: “The unexpected, the thing that makes you go “Hmmmm”, that’s news. And the way the Journal played up that story certainly indicates they thought they had something unexpected. That professor from Michigan, he was biting the dog. So in a way, it’s comforting that the story was given so much play.”

Well, it certainly evoked a reaction. It’s just unfortunate it wasn’t a more mature one. If the CSR movement’s interpretation of responsibility isn’t the same as all others’ (especially those who can differentiate the civil foundation from the strategic frontier), it should find a positive way to move the debate forward – maybe one that can produce the same level of interest as Karnani’s.

Photo by Flickr user mullica used under a Creative Commons licence

Business growth requires imagination

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I read a quote today via Booz&Co that I found very exciting for a Monday morning and it really got me thinking. It came from economist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling who says, “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”

This is our challenge.  This is the challenge facing companies in today’s economy if they want to continue to grow.  As crazy as it sounds it can be done, but it requires a very different and structured kind of idea generation and innovation process to those many companies use. One that takes us all beyond our current knowledge and pre-conceived thinking into totally new territories for the brand. That’s where adding social context to the company’s activities and products can release a whole new area of opportunity. GE’s Ecomagination platform, for example, has generated sales of $18 billion last year from the sale of more than 90 products.

How many of us have been into brand innovation workshops and guessed or known the outcome before they started? Most, I’m guessing. How many of us have been in workshops and seen the same old ideas resurface time and again? You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re based around a tenuous insight, an imagined eating occasion or perceived consumer need. The same idea is probably sitting gathering dust not only in their own store cupboard but in their competitors’ too – and it didn’t gain traction or support for a good reason.

Finding tomorrow’s great ideas means reaching beyond where we have already been and beyond our comfort zone. It means developing new bigger social insights and a new set of rigorous processes including a far more collaborative client consultancy approach from the outset.

It also means admitting at the outset that we don’t already have the answer, and that’s fine!

Brands must have social licence to operate

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A really interesting point came out of Deloitte survey on business and sustainability http://bit.ly/aFAZvk about social being a new frontier for competitive advantage. This is something that we’ve been pushing for some time and something that we absolutely believe to be true. Big social ideas can provide a real and lasting competitive advantage if done right and by that I mean not only carefully but also brand and idea led.

It seems that when companies open up their sustainability agenda internally most peoples’ take out is that it is about environmental issues and answers. This is where you then see goals and claims around reducing environmental impact and even products with small environmental innovation. However, it seems to us that in most cases this will be table stakes and the far bigger prize is in connecting brands with social issues. This is a great way to engage people and communities around the brand and if done well gives you licence to have conversations not just about your product but suddenly about bigger issues that people really care about. 

What’s interesting is that Deloitte talk about brands or companies having a ’social licence to operate’. I like this phrase because to me it can capture both the legal and consumer requirement. Consumers decide whether a brand has licence to operate in a certain category and grant it based on brand equity. Something in the DNA of a brand allows them to operate there, for example, Tesco into banking makes sense with ‘every little bit helps’.

When it comes to social issues the brand must have some degree of social equity in order to be accepted and for the idea to work. Our social equity index provides some insights and opportunities for brands to get social. Pepsi for example has always been the ‘choice of a new generation’. Until now you could argue that that was a fairly meaningless strapline with no real substance or truth? The Pespi Refresh platform has actually substanciated that thought and given Pepsi a great platform to engage a new generation by talking about the things that matter to them. 

Finally, the study revealed that 51% of respondents said the activities of marketing teams were most affected (by sustainability within the business), the highest score overall. To my mind it also reveals the big gap that still exists between marketing functions and the sustainability agenda of the business. Marketing has to really fully understand and own this agenda because it’s one area where there are still huge opportunities to generate that elusive competitive advantage.

Giving brands the kiss of life

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Interesting article in Marketing Week on brand strategy and giving brands the kiss of life. They rightly argue that saving a brand can be a cheaper and more successful strategy than building a new one from scratch, but businesses still face a tough choice deciding which ones to keep.

We differ from other strategy or innovation consultancies because we use purpose and big social ideas as the basis for bringing brands back to life. Identifying that what was great about a brand that is equally relevant today involves a reassessment of it’s role and purpose for today. Not only does purpose reconnect brands with the corporate agenda and business but also with the world because it sets them in a far bigger context than the supermarket shelf.

Look at the recent re-launch of Soda Stream. It will eventually be positioned as an environmentally friendly option as the bottles, which are used to create fizzy drinks, can be re-used and last two to three years. “The environment wasn’t a big thing in the Seventies and Eighties, so in a way SodaStream has become more relevant now than it was in its heyday,” says Fiona Hope Marketing Director. So what is the brand purpose? Fizzy drinks are fun for families but on the downside they have huge environmental impacts. It creates moments of family fizz without fallout. Real life sparkle?

To help us identify possible ways or re-igniting purpose we use our propriatary tool to track the brand’s social equity and identify opportunity areas of interest. But social equity alone is not enough to re-ignite a brand this is where purpose comes in to play. Real success is purpose underpinned with innovation and great big social ideas. A brand with high social equity and high brand energy achieves what we call ’social energy’ and this has the power to force reappraisal. Brands with social energy are exciting and moving in the marketplace but with purpose, brands like Toyota, M&S, Coop, Innocent.

There are so many great brands out there that have slightly lost their way or become ‘irrelevant’ but which have within them and their business the seeds of their own recovery. You only have to look at how Coop’s purpose resulted in a 38% jump in new current accounts as consumers deserted the bigger banks in droves in the wake of the financial crisis. It gained 140,000 new customers, taking the total to 1.2 million, and doubled its share of the current account market to 4%. Purpose is something people can get behind both internally and externally. Consider M&S and how Plan A has arguably taken them from dusty old retailer to retailer of the future. How far can purpose force a re-appraisal? Could it help us to stop viewing Kraft as a huge corporate manufacturing ‘convenience’ foods and context them instead in the need to cut down on waste. They are the ultimate ‘make do and mend’ brand. Just as they liberated housewives in 1950’s America their purpose could once again be ignited against wastefulness.

Purpose isn’t positioning. It is not about looking at what others are saying and taking an opposing position. It’s about being true to the company values and vision. It’s about context – how is the brand connected to the world how is it improving quality of life? And, it’s about business and product innovation – what is it that the world needs that we are uniquely able to provide. Brand re-invention isn’t about a quick short term trend that you can hook into it’s about looking to the future and the potential role your brand plays in it.

Being able to re-ignite purpose can be the difference between a brand that deserves saving and one that doesn’t.

The opportunity for a brand reset

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Ernst & Young have released a new paper entitled “Lessons from change: seeds of transformation in the consumer products industry”. The consultancy, which 2,700 interviews among its clients across the globe for the paper, found that a “fundamental change” is underway in almost every segment.

They very clearly identify the need to embed sustainability into business saying that although it might have received less focus during the recession it’s far from a universal trend. Companies will need to embed sustainability as a core part of their strategy in all areas, including product design, core manufacturing and supply chain processes or broader corporate responsibility issues.

Most interesting to me was a phrase coined by Unilever’s Marvinder Singh Banga. He notes that “the global recession will bring many resets.”. What a great way to explain the need to think again and think differently about new challenges and even more so the big opportunities. At GoodBrand we’ve always been big believers in sustainable innovation to re-shape not only companies but markets. Re-setting is the first stage – it’s a purge of all current thinking and learning – all of which belong to the old way and old world. We’d go one step further and say that it’s more than simply re-setting to where we started. We have to get good at re-thinking and re-creating. We need to unlearn old perceived wisdoms about product, category consumers and begin again. This kind of thinking brings about true differentiation. That’s why we champion new processes, insights, ideas to drive businesses forward and fuel growth.

Richard Murray of Williams Murray Hamm used to say ‘If you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always got’. Well we can’t afford to get what we’ve always got. We don’t need another flavour of Kit Kat we need something awe inspiring.

Together we can re-imagine the role of brands in the context of the world and our future. So come on marketeers after 3. Press the re-set button.

Brands can create cultures of change

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At GoodBrand & Company our vision is of brands competing for creative consumption. We think brands can and will represent models which deliver net positive outcomes for all stakeholders.

As well as this we have a strongly held belief that social insight can lead to brand propositions which are greatly differentiated within given sectors, and have greater efficacy with respective audiences.

Even more than that, those brand propositions will provide businesses with the organising principle which sets the course for innovation and growth, influences culture and employees’ everyday decisions, and sets out the promise a company makes to its customers.

Whatever you think of the business of selling fizzy pop to kids, you have to acknowledge the example of change culture that Pepsi’s created, don’t you?

No S************* please we’re British

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The UK is arguably the most sophisticated ethical consumer market in the world. Sustainability marketing spend per capita here far outstrips that of the next closest markets.

And yet the buying public doesn’t get the *S* word. A recent survey showed consumers are split over the definition of sustainability, with 44% associating it with the environment, 44% aligning it with financial security, and a further 12% unable to define what the term means at all.

A major new study on sustainability from UNEP identifies that one of the biggest barriers to people achieving more sustainable lifestyles may be how we celebrate and communicate these ideas. It correctly highlights that “people will only change their lifestyles in exchange for a better one”.

The fact is sustainability isn’t sexy and desirable, let alone properly understood. And our consumer culture has trained us to only aspire to things that are. So making the sustainability of the products we consume desirable becomes critical.

At GoodBrand & Company we spend lots of time advising our clients not to assume to use the *S* word. Consumers aspire to quality, seek out value, bet on innovation; They don’t crave sustainability.

Right now we’re going through an awkward transition, a handing over of the batton from the CSR to the brand marketing department. The former’s corporate report-speak doesn’t fit comfortably into the latter’s consumer-focused sell.

Brand owners have yet to get to grips with the infinite feature-benefits proffered by the ’sustainable frontier’. Tomorrow’s successful brands will integrate sustainability by aligning unique business strategy with consumer insight. In the meantime talking generically about sustainability won’t wash.

The few fleeting glimpses we see of brands getting it right are tantalising and exciting though. They’re the ones you didn’t even notice as sustainability messages, because the word wasn’t mentioned.. The brand just talked about another sexy facet of its quality, its value or its innovation.

Improving marketing

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Here’s the modern marketing conundrum: On the one hand it has become ridiculously sophisticated, and perhaps even over-engineered, -segmented and -specialised. And yet at the same time it’s ridiculed and its status with the consumer and rest of the business has never been lower.

Perhaps over successive decades it’s gradually lost real significance, has been chipped away and has become separated from the business. Gradually pieces of the strategic marketing role have been landgrabbed by CSR department, corporate affairs, HR and even finance.

Technology means that interested consumers can often hold more information than the marketeer about their company finance and reputational issues.

Marketing has almost become a dirty word, not just with consumers but with marketeers themselves. In one meeting I was at recently a marketing client used the term ‘too marketing’ – meant in this case as a derogatory statement implying that there was no evident truth to the idea or the campaign. Marketing has also become synoymous with the veneer that brands employ to hide dirty truths about themselves and the company behind them, or to fool us into thinking they are something they’re not.

And finally as if this wasn’t enough it also obviously suffers from the backlash against consumerism. Nowhere better summed up than by Jonathon Porritt: “The cumulative impact of billions of corporate dollars spent marketing their products, year after year after year, stimulating, reinforcing and exacerbating people’s consumerist fantasies, is almost wholly pernicious.”

Ask people randomly what the definition of marketing is and you’ll get a variety of sales, communication or even getting people to buy stuff the don’t need or want. As the business environment gets tougher it’s even harder to persuade business people that marketing is worthwhile. Marketing is struggling to justify its role and position at the top table.

But marketing is not just about offering more choice than is needed and persuading people to consume more. It also offers us a salvation and, in doing so, a way to be seen as value-creating again. To dispute the claim that marketeers ‘don’t understand other parts of the business’.

Marketeers of the future will excel by taking a stand – and more importantly an interest – in business. We have to avoid thinking myopically about category and promotion and think big about the context of this business in the world, and therefore the potential significance of marketing. The only way that marketing will succeed is in connecting business with a higher purpose, thereby creating enchanced value.

The definition of marketing needs to evolve from being language wholly associated with transactional elements, to take into account its new role in society and peoples lives as well as business.

Try this: Introducing new, improving marketing. All the consumer insight that you are used to but now with added strategic function. Not only does marketing stimulate and fulfil consumer demand, it helps broker change in people’s lives and in society as a whole. New marketing has the power and desire to turn consumption into a creative act.

We’re not talking about just another smoothie here folks. Finally it is something that the world needs.

Is insight outdated?

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Being ‘consumer centric’ and ‘insight led’ is everything these days. Unilever’s director of global marketing strategy was quoted this week “What differentiates world-class companies is a genuine culture of insightfulness.”

But when business and marketing people talk about insight, what actually do we mean? Or think we mean? Or think we want?

Every year over $30bn is spent globally on market research. That’s a considerable amount of money spent on getting data about consumers’ awareness, attitudes, lifestyle, usage, needs mapping, advertising response, market segmentation, competitive analysis, pricing dynamics, shopper experience, and increasingly now real-time monitoring of popular opinion in social media.

But how much of that data actually represents fresh, meaningful, actionable insight? Almost exclusively market research focuses on analysing people as consumers. Marketing became so self-obsessed it forgot that consumers, markets, business, they’re all social constructs. But it’s seemingly not yet world-aware enough to consider gaining wider insight about people and society from social science.

Two weeks ago the great and the good of the international social science community convened in Gothenberg for the 17th International Sociological Association Congress. The final plenary session focused on critical questions facing the discipline of sociology today. For instance, among other things, the implications of the fact that sustainability requires that new relations be intentionally established between society and nature. There’s quite a lot just in that thought…

Actually since the early 80s sociologists have had lots of interesting things to say about the implications of sustainability on society. In 1987, for instance, Prof. Michael Redclift (King’s College, University of London) published findings of extensive ‘market research’ into global public opinion on the trade-off between environmental protection and commercial growth, and the implications on consumer lifestyles.

More than two decades later we’re relying on focus groups conducted in airless rooms with artless questions being posed about artificial attitudes towards Brand X’s ‘exciting new sustainability concept’. Might not sociological research, and probably psychological too, provide something a bit more ‘consumer centric’ and ‘insight led’ than that?

A recent Accenture survey of marketing executives in the States and UK found that 70% have difficulty capturing the attention of consumers with their marketing campaigns. Well guys, here’s a chance to try something new. Maybe just $1m of that $30bn..?