It seems that on a weekly basis, some major brand takes an action that sparks great outrage, especially on social networks. Sometimes the offense is so substantial it becomes global news like dragging a bloodied passenger off a major airline. But often the offense is less apparent – fashion ads that may not seem diverse enough, a beauty campaign that is misinterpreted to have racist overtones. The fickleness of outrage should have brands worried in a polarized information climate that rarely rewards contextualizing or critical thinking.

The emotion of outrage is complex and has three components: 1) It’s negative; 2) It’s strong and powerful (highly charged); 3) It occurs when people experience a violation of a moral boundary. But, as we have shown, there are many cases where people are looking for reasons to be offended, often on behalf of others! For them, no moral boundary has been crossed. Hilton Barbour has coined the term “Outrage Orchestra” to refer to these highly vocal groups that have been weaponized by social networks and stand ready to pounce on any brand mistake or gaffe.

Expressing outrage over something that one does not feel has two social benefits. First, it shows affiliation. It’s also a signal to others. James Bartholomew calls this virtue signaling. He says, “One of the crucial aspects of virtue signaling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous. It does not involve delivering lunches to elderly neighbors or staying together with a spouse for the sake of the children. It takes no effort or sacrifice at all.” Social platforms are perfectly suited for this.

Just last week, Nivea was forced to pull their “White is Purity” ad. Observing the crisis that recently befell United Airlines, Shareen Pathak at Digiday remarked, “For United, like most brands operating today, [mitigating the crisis] means an internal reshuffle: Bring your policy, counsel and marketing teams into one place. If not, you’ll have an existential crisis to show for it. And as we know, brands don’t exactly operate in a nimble way. Neither are employees always incentivized to collaborate.” The deep and fundamental transformation happening to brands extends to all a brand’s internal organizations.

A culture of outrage has changed the rules for brands. While it’s relatively easy to pull an ad campaign (even costs associated with Pepsi’s controversial campaign wouldn’t show as more than a rounding error on quarterly earnings), several percentage points on the stock price is harder to explain away. Nell Minnow, Vice-Chair of Corporate Governance at ValueEdge advisors, thinks companies, which are particularly vulnerable to social controversies, should outline such risks and response strategies in financial filings. “They need to let their investors know that they’re prepared to deal with it promptly and effectively to prevent a material deterioration of the stock price. It’s very much like cyberattacks — it’s a relatively recent phenomenon that every company has to be prepared to deal with.”

Brands are built and managed by people, therefore human error is always a possibility. Thankfully, there are ways for brands to mitigate gaffes and outrage; here are four of them.

1. Start performing audience ethnography to understand pains, motivations, and state of mind. Then marry this research to current trends to forecast topics that may be sensitive. Use this ongoing collection and analysis to inform how you craft the story you want to tell as well as to highlight possible situations that may easily be misunderstood. Pepsi, Nivea and Beach Body could have avoided controversy had they invested in cultural and contextual data.

2. Race, Gender, Social Class and Patriotism are four topics (there are more) which need to be considered carefully. For brands that already trade in these topics, a familiarity of position among consumers should provide relative stability in a charged social climate. We don’t question Patagonia’s all-in advocacy for the environment as it is a core component of their brand purpose. But if a brand hasn’t waded into these topics, it needs to get clear on why it has suddenly decided to incorporate these storylines, because consumers will ask, likely with skepticism.

3. Virtue hustling from brands has got to stop. Consumers don’t want to hear it, and the message may be too far out for them to make the connection between the virtue and the brand as they know it. Audi made a double faux-pas when they dabbled in gender and used it to virtue signal. Both backfired. Not only did the girl-power story seem a reach, they had no women on their board of directors. There are plenty of brands who live their values without needing to tell the world how great they are. “Doing the right thing” can no longer be used as a marketing tactic.

4. It’s time to get serious about cross-functional agile teams. If brands want to master the post-PR world, then the silos and behaviors that limit timely and responsive dialog must come down. It was reported that some of the delay in United’s response was due to HR needing to approve messages. This sort of rigidity is no longer viable.

The reality is, many people are deluged with information. A lot of this information reveals parts of our society that can be improved. But the information overload often leads to what psychologists call ‘narcotizing dysfunction’ wherein all the chattering and commentary over an issue substitutes for real action. Smart brands will work to channel this energy into meaningful action and in the process provide new opportunities for growing customer love.

Don’t Let The Future Leave Your Brand Behind. Join Us At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event. May 1st – 3rd, 2017 West Hollywood, California

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Many say we Danes are one of the world’s happiest nations. So what’s our secret? Living life the Danish way, of course: enjoying a work-life balance, nature and craft and spending time together feeling hygge. Or, could it be that we brew the best beer in the world? Probably.

Mads Mikkelsen stars as a “modern day Danish philosopher” in this new ad that positions Carlsberg as an icon of Danish lifestyle.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Fold7, London
Chief creative: Ryan Newey
Executive creative director: Simon Learman
Creative team: Lucy Aston, and Ben Ducker
Group account director: Lara Woods
Account manager: Jamie Herman
Agency producers: Imogen Bell, and Felicity Cruickshank
Media: OMD
Director: Martin Krejci
Production company: Stink Films
Producer: Charlotte Woodhead
Editor: Tim Allen
Grade: Jean-Clément Soret
Post-production: MPC
Audio Post-production: Factory

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–

The more your brand enables, entices, and enriches customers, evoking their positive emotions and building their trust, love, and respect, the more highly admired it will be. An admired brand offers the greatest opportunity for enduring and profitable growth. When your brand is seen as lacking in even one of the three components of brand admiration, it will not be regarded as strongly admired. Apple sets the standard for brand admiration. It is clearly one of the most successful brands in recent history and it has become an admired brand by providing benefits that enable, entice, and enrich customers.

First, Apple is a clear leader in providing enablement benefits. Its technology, while not simple, makes learning and using Apple products easy. Its famous one-touch solution and intuitive interface took what was otherwise an intimidating product category and made it user friendly. Apple products “speak” to one another by virtue of their common operating system, making it easy for consumers to move seamlessly from one Apple product (e.g., a Mac) to another (e.g., an iPhone).

Second, Apple products are different from other technological products in their enticement benefits—specifically, through their design. Indeed, for Steve Jobs visual design elements were on equal footing with technological advances in product development. The design of the buttons and screen and even the partially bitten apple logo itself makes customers gravitate toward Apple’s products. The visual simplicity and clean lines of Apple retail stores make for a warm and inviting environment where customers can play with any Apple product on the market.

Finally, Apple offers strong enrichment benefits. It speaks to consumers’ sense of self, asking them to Think different. Apple products were a status marker at one time, with people defining themselves as Mac, rather than PC, users. Users saw themselves as cool, and they felt proud of being Apple fans. Mac users felt more open minded, younger, and hipper. Apple’s Think different campaign showcased iconoclastic thinkers (e.g., Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali, and John Lennon). It inspired consumers to think that they, too, could one day change the world. No other products have become so embedded and respected in every aspect of our daily lives as have Apple products.

Nonadmired Brands

Customers consider nonadmired brands differently. These brands might be called decent, noble, boring, confusing, faddish, pompous, or even despised. These brands are lacking in their ability to offer one or more of the enablement, enticement, and enrichment benefits. They just can’t command the trust, love, and respect that admired brands do. Despised brands are the opposite of admired ones. Customers aren’t just indifferent to them; they actively avoid them or speak poorly of them. We’re not suggesting that a brand that’s not admired can’t be pro table. Even a despised brand can be profitable in the short term with great manufacturing and other operational efficiencies, particularly if customers have no other choice but to buy it. But it’s unlikely to survive the test of time, grow into new markets, and have strong equity unless it delivers on the things that are important to customers and make them happy.

Key Takeaways

1. Across highly diverse industries, admired brands are similar in their ability to provide enabling, enticing, and enriching benefits that yield positive customer emotions and build brand trust, love, and esteem.
2. Such brands have been able to build, strengthen, and leverage their admiration over the long term by their continual efforts to best themselves and their competitors in the benefits (and hence value) they provide to customers.
3. Benefits that enable customers to solve their problems and conserve their scarce resources leave customers feeling 
empowered, in control, secure, confident, and relieved. Customers trust brands that they can consistently rely on to solve their problems and conserve their resources.

Benefits that entice customers stimulate their senses, their minds, and/or their hearts. The brand’s benefits leave customers feeling gratified, engaged, entertained, upbeat, and/or warmhearted. The more the brand provides these benefits, the more customers will come to love the brand.

Benefits that enrich customers respect their beliefs and hopes for a better future. They can also symbolize aspects of who one is, the status or respect one commands from others, and the groups of which one is a part. The brand’s benefits make customers feel inspired, proud, connected, validated, and influential. Customers respect brands whose beliefs and hopes are congruent with their own. They respect brands that help them connect with others who support them.

Brands that have emphasized these benefits relentlessly over time have managed to thrive over decades, generations, and even a century or more.

What About Your Brand?

1. Is your brand focused on a specific type of benefit, or on enablement, enticement, and enrichment benefits? How well is it performing on each benefit type? If you think it’s difficult to differentiate your brand from others, take heed of the lessons from brands such as Nike and Caterpillar.
2. If your brand is fully differentiated from competing brands, does this differentiation have anything to do with types of benefits and the emotions that result from their provision? How would your brand stack up relative to competitors if you tried to differentiate it with the 3Es in mind? (
Enablement Benefits, Enticement Benefits, Enrichment Benefits)
3. How would customers describe your brand? Is it admired? Is it faddish? Is it decent?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: C. Whan Park, Deborah MacInnis and Andreas Eisingerich, excerpted from their book, Brand Admiration with permission from Wiley Publishing.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

In this episode of the Unconventionals podcast, host Mike O’Toole sits down with Linda Boff, GE’s Chief Marketing Officer, to talk marketing and brand; learn where GE is placing its bets in social platforms, content marketing, and brand strategy.

By Alex Parkinson The Excellence in New Communications (EINC) Awards ceremony, presented by the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR), will be held on Monday, May 22, 2017 in New York City. Join us for this free event and help us celebrate those companies that are showing leadership in the use […]

In this episode of The Unconventionals, host Mike O’Toole talks with Organovo CEO Keith Murphy about bioprinting and its big implications for human health.

Rohit Parbhakar, head of digital marketing and technologies at McKesson, developed a recipe for transforming McKesson’s marketing team and shared his insights on how other brands can do the same.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Publicis Italia/Milano
CEO Publicis Italia: Bruno Bertelli
Executive Creative Director Publicis Italia: Cristiana Boccassini
Art Director: Alessandro Candito, Maxime Damo
Copywriter: Lina Akbarzadeh, Paolo Bartalucci
Creative Directors: Alessandro Candito, Paolo Bartalucci, Geert De Rocker, Tom Berth
Digital Creative Director: Azeglio Bozzardi, Martino Lapini
Account Team: Barbara Pusca, Filippo D’Andrea, Florence De Lophem e Roberta Scotti
Social Media Team: Diletta Sala e Arya Alfieri
Strategic Planner: Guglielmo Pezzino
TV producer: Luana Strafile e Matilde Bonanni
Production company: H+
Executive Producer: Stella Orsini
Directors and editors: Murphy
Centro Media: MediaCom
Marketing Manager: Matteo Cattaneo

Transactional brands offer the right product at the right price at the right time. They launch ad campaigns that capture the audience’s attention. People pay a fair price, they are not particularly loyal, and the relationship is completely rational.

Emotional brands, on the other hand, create irrational relationships—irrational in the most positive ways. They generate irrational enthusiasm. They charge irrational prices. They have customers who ignore the competition. They have evangelists who proselytize with clothing, online reviews and impassioned conversations around the dinner table.

The best way to understand the power of an emotional relationship is to simply look at someone you love, like your children. Sure, your kids are extremely cute.  But nobody gets more pleasure out of their photos and their videos than you.

The relationship that you have with your children is not rational, it’s emotional, and that’s a beautiful thing. They look better to you than to anybody else. They’re cuter to you than to anybody else. They’re funnier and smarter and more entertaining to you than to anybody else. That’s the power brands have when they shift from a rational, transactional relationship to an emotional relationship.

You know who some of these brands are: SoulCycle, Apple, Patagonia, Under Armour. At this point you may be sick of hearing about them. But irrational brands are popping up in the most surprising of categories.

Brand Example One: Yeti

Take Yeti coolers, for example. They charge $650 for a cooler. Sure, they make a much better cooler than the competition, but they charge ten times as much as needed for a decent product. It’s not just that their customers happily pay this amount; they consider it a point of pride. As crazy as this sounds for a company that makes coolers, Yeti is a full-blown lifestyle brand. Those who can’t afford a Yeti cooler will proudly purchase a Yeti hat.

While rational brands purchase 30-second interruptions and hope to God that somebody actually watches one, Yeti has a series of videos that extoll the virtues of outdoor adventures ranging from kayaking to fly fishing. They’ve been watched and shared millions of times over. Rather than simply sell products on the Yeti website, they use it as a storytelling platform. The site has dozens of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever seen.

In the videos, the Yeti brand is almost invisible. In one video about a death-defying all-night kayaking trip called the Texas Water Safari, they feature everyday people who push themselves to the breaking point for the sake of winning a patch that has no financial value and no bragging rights outside of a small group of fellow competitors. The video is absolutely mesmerizing. With small cameras mounted on the kayaks, Yeti captures the thrill and danger of the event. It’s unlike anything most people have seen before. It captures viewer’s attention for a full 7 minutes.

By comparison, the typical interaction with a digital ad lasts 1.6 seconds. The only time the Yeti brand is clearly displayed is at the very end of the video on the hat of a competitor who passes out in the grass after the event. The product placement is fun, authentic and completely frictionless.

What Yeti proves is that removing friction is not only about taking away problems in the interactions that a brand has with its audience. It’s about providing value throughout the entirety of the journey that people go through in life.

Yeti makes coolers that are certified grizzly bear–proof. Seriously, there’s an organization called the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, and it endorsed them. That’s clearly a piece of friction for those who are camping and fishing in very specific areas. But the greater piece of friction is that people desperately want to be inspired.

Yeti fans don’t just watch the videos to be entertained. They are thought-provoking. They are motivating. They help Yeti fans envision a better version of themselves, one that is more active. More adventurous. More fun.

Brand Example Two: Rapha

Rapha is another brand with seemingly irrational behavior that is creating irrational results. They charge more than $200 for a cycling jersey. That’s four times as much as most other jerseys. Rapha customers don’t just happily buy the jerseys. They flaunt them. The brand is a badge. It’s a source of pride.

Yes, they create very high-quality clothing and gear, but their customer loyalty is driven by something much bigger. Rapha focuses on enriching the cycling community. Rapha fans are not just looking for a great ride. They want to be part of a group of passionate, likeminded individuals.

The need for belonging is one of the most basic of all human instincts. Rapha customers don’t just want to ride their bikes. They want to share stories and experiences. They want to push and be pushed to greater levels of performance. They have an insatiable need to be immersed in cycling culture.

So Rapha retail stores don’t just sell products; they serve food and drinks and provide communal tables where riders can meet and greet each other. They are places where riders can tell tall tales and feel, innately, like they belong. Rapha helps riders get more out of cycling than simply exercise or transportation.

But the true beauty of Rapha’s ethos can be found in the little ways they fight friction.

For example, they realized that many of their shoppers take a bike to the store, and most of these bikes are expensive. So they’ve built bike racks inside the store rather than out front. That type of behavior at face value is irrational.

Their location in New York City is one of the most expensive retail locations on the planet. And yet they’re using space to give people a place to put their bikes rather than using it to sell products. It’s unprecedented and absolutely not needed. But it shows a deep rooted understanding of the audience. It demonstrates respect. It builds trust.

It’s easy to dismiss the lessons of Yeti and Rapha because they compete in the outdoor category. There will always be something implicitly cool about outdoor adventure. But emotional brands can be built in the most unlikely of places.

Brand Example Three: USAA

USAA is a financial services firm for military personnel and their families. The friction that USAA removes is that people want more control and earning power from their personal finances, but ironically, most financial services do the exact opposite. USAA, on the other hand, makes transparency and control key performance indicators.

Recently I received a call from USAA. To be honest, I was barely paying attention. I was just listening to make sure I didn’t miss a payment. Since it was USAA, I was willing to semi-listen.

After a few minutes, I realized something and interrupted. “Wait, are you calling to tell me you are giving me money back?” I asked. “Yes, sir” was the reply in a sweet Southern drawl. Apparently, I had two different products with some crossover. They realized I didn’t need them both, adjusted my account, and gave me money back. The total was $176. That’s not chump change, but it’s not life changing either. What was changed, however, was my permanent perception of the company. As I go through the stages of life, I will consider and trust USAA before any other financial services company.

That doesn’t make me unique. 92 percent of USAA members plan to stay for life. That’s an insanely high number, particularly given that loyalty is often the most important predictor of business success.

Loyalty isn’t simply a goal for USAA. They structure every aspect of their business to build loyalty through empowerment. One quarter of its annual hires served in the military or come from a military family. They offer free financial advice to those being deployed or returning to civilian life. Their Educational Foundation conducts close to 850 financial management presentations annually to 50,000 attendees in the military community.

Despite the fact that USAA is fundamentally smaller than the competition, they’ve been leading innovators. They created an app that enables members to make deposits simply by taking a photo of a check. While this technology is commonplace now, USAA owns the patent. They developed it so that overseas military personnel could remove the friction of depositing checks from the opposite side of the world. That’s not just technology. That’s empathy, empowerment and respect.

Looking back on the last 100 years of advertising literature, most people consider brands a promise or a story. That’s insufficient. Ultimately, brands are a shortcut. Consumers are now bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day. That’s more than any human being can manage. They need shortcuts. They need brands they can relate to. Brands that inspire them.

So Yeti’s videos about outdoor adventurers, Rapha’s indoor bike rack and USAA’s customer service may not seem like much. But they help turn those brands into shortcuts. The audience knows that if the brand understands them at a fundamental level, then it’s a brand they can have a relationship with. It’s a brand they can fall in love with.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg, excerpted from their new book Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption, published by powerHouse Books

Don’t Let The Future Leave Your Brand Behind. Join Us At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event. May 1st – 3rd, 2017 West Hollywood, California

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

From evolving public opinion to product versatility and a buyer demographic flush with cash, there are plenty of reasons advertisers need to start taking the cannabis market more seriously.