You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
One of my favorite marketing stories to tell is about how when I was working at an agency early in my career we were doing research for one of the big consumer electronics companies. Specifically, we were testing a new commercial another agency had put together. The commercial was “edgy” (it had snowboarders!) and got high marks by all the random consumers who got pulled into a room in the mall to watch it. That is, until they were asked the last question: “What brand was it for?” To which they all replied with the company’s biggest competitor. The moral is simple, after all that time and money, a commercial had effectively been made for another company. (One of the most well-known stories of this is the famous ad with a gorilla tossing around soft-sided luggage which was for … American Tourister.)
In Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow he talks a lot about ownable brand assets. These are the colors, iconography, and, increasingly, aesthetics that consumers associate with a single brand. The examples are endless: Tiffany’s has blue, Hermès orange, and UPS brown. Starbucks has the mermaid, Pepsi’s yin-yang, and McDonald’s golden arches. Coca-Cola has red, Spencerian script, polar bears, and Santa Claus (seriously, click through on that last one, it’s pretty amazing). There’s some evidence that the more unique assets a brand owns, the more valuable it is.
Sharp has made it pretty deep into the marketing world, particularly with consumer packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble. Lots of them have taken his advice (and consulting hours) and applied it to how they approach building their brands, particularly media buying (MOAR REACH). But what I found especially interesting about the Tide Super Bowl takeover is that they took things one step further, finding a way to apply Sharp's principles to both the media and creative execution. The media part is simple: According to Sharp (and lots of research AND COMMON SENSE), big brands need to be bought by lots of people and, for that to happen, they need to reach lots of casual buyers who may or may not be in the market to buy them. For all the talk about the death of TV advertising (which is hugely overstated), the Super Bowl is an incredibly unique media opportunity. Not only is it a gigantic audience, but it's also the only time and place they're actually excited to see ads. On the creative side what Tide did was pretty obvious (they did explain it after all), but definitely not simple to pull off (imagine convincing a client you're going to spend $16 million worth of airtime doing nothing original). They used the visual language of advertising, especially Super Bowl advertising, and found a way to link it all back to the brand. The value wasn't really in the ad itself, but that you were watching every other ad looking for the tropes (and clean shirts of course). If the main goal of advertising is to create and own "brand assets", Tide went above and beyond by reinforcing their own and finding a way to effectively hijack everyone else's. What's more, by splitting things up across the game in the way they did, they made it so you could never watch too many commercials without being reminded that they might be a Tide ad. Outside of Tide, every other commercial felt pretty unremarkable to me (other than the Dodge/MLK thing, of course). That's partially because it's very hard to be unexpected when another company has already predicted your behavior, and partially because most of the themes brands are experimenting with around are the same ones they were playing with last year. For all the talk about the speed of change, brands, especially the big ones, are moving slow as they try to find a safe space in our ever-more polarized world. I suspect the transition will continue to take time. Until then, we'll almost definitely get more ads like the one from Toyota, which put a Jew, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist in a car together with the tag line "We're all one team." Your strategy's showing. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrGu6H8t2gU[/embed]