Brandless…we hardly knew ye

You may have heard that the anti-brand Brandless went under a couple of months ago. Here is a eulogy that was published late last week.

Brandless was built on the premise that brands don’t matter. All that matters is the product and the price. Interestingly, all their products were priced at $3.00. They didn’t adjust the price for anything, they just adjusted the size of the product or the portion so that you were buying $3.00 worth of stuff in each unit.

There are some practical reasons why they failed. If you have a family that goes through a lot of peanut butter, there are financial savings and efficiencies to buying in bulk at places like Costco or Sam’s that the Brandless model was not built to accommodate.

Just as importantly, people have an emotional connection to brands and they story they tell. Now, Brandless was very much a brand, despite the name. But it wasn’t a very compelling brand. A brand is not just a product. It is all the meaning and symbolism and emotions and associations that are tied to that product.

It was a confusing message. As a writer in The Drum put it, “Brandless’ failure, in part, resulted from being a brand that pretended not to be a brand – and thereby not seeing the success that comes from having a strong one. It was a case of mixed business messaging. After all, it is impossible to distinguish yourself if your goal is to be indistinguishable.”

The Long Boi Gang

Brands that take their social media presence seriously rather than churning out self-promoting pablum can reap the benefits. Specifically, a strong sense of community can arise among users — even for those brands that on the surface seem pretty mundane. Exhibit A: Slim-Jim.

Slim Jim’s Instagram page had been, like most many brands’ social media accounts, boring and corporate. But the company noticed that one of its loyal consumers, Andy Hines, had his own Instagram called @SlimJimsDoingThings that was funny, meme-driven, and had a much larger following.

So they hired the guy.

Hines immediately transformed Slim Jim ‘s online image. In a year, its follower count grew from 5,000 to 500,000. Hines came up with the term “Long Boi Gang” for consumers who are devoted to Slim-Jim, and the brand has encouraged that sense of community with a limited edition Long Boi Stick and polls that give fans the chance to vote on options for future merchandise.

This story recently turned tragic.  Andy Hines died last month. It appears that the brand has tried to keep going with the same look and tone that Hines brought to the brand.

When do protests work…and when don’t they?

This timely new article from Omar Wasow in the American Political Science Review hints at how the protests in Minnesota may affect public opinion.

Wasow studied how protests during the Civil Rights Movement affected media coverage, elite discourse, public opinion, and voting. This chart from the article summarizes the key points:

The ultimate impact of protests may depend not only on the actions of the protestors, but also the actions of the state (police, military, etc) in response.

When the protests were violent the media tended to use words like “riot,” “disorder,” “night,” and “violence.”  The story became about the violence, not the underlying cause of the anger that sparked the violence, and that drove voters toward what Wasow calls “the dominant group-aligned coalition.”  In other words, violence as a form of protest tended to backfire.

When the protest was non-violent and the state response was non-violent, that sometimes worked in protestors’ favor, but more often the media didn’t afford those protests much coverage and the public paid little attention because mutual non-violence is, unfortunately, boring. There were exceptions to this, such as the March on Washington, but they were, indeed, exceptions.

What worked most effectively in moving public opinion in the protestors’ direction was when the protest was non-violent and the state response was violent. The effect was amplified when there were photographs or video that documented the state’s violence and drove home the message viscerally, such as in Birmingham, Alabama.

Wasow discusses his research in this Twitter thread.

It is unclear what this means for Minnesota. On the surface, Wasow’s research suggests public opinion will move against the protestors. Although America likes the theoretical idea of the right to protest, we don’t like actual protests very much. Martin Luther King is lionized today, but near the time of his death 2/3 of Americans viewed him unfavorably. Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest quickly became less about police brutality and more about the sacredness of the national anthem -- and suddenly the protester became the bad guy.

A confounding factor may be that the triggering event, the killing of George Floyd, was captured on video in clear and dramatic fashion. Perhaps that will make a difference. Plus, this is 2020, not 1968. The media and political landscapes are dramatically different.

Nonetheless, assuming the events of the past week will galvanize Americans for the cause of civil rights seems naïve. It appears unclear how it will all play out.

Stretching safety

How can a historically safe car be reinvented as a safe and luxurious car? Volvo Car Australia’s Living Seawall campaign did just that, and for its efforts has captured a 2020 WARC Grand Prix Award for Effective Innovation.

The challenge for the brand, as outlined in this WPP version of the case study, is that Volvo is synonymous with safety and the brand was unable to market to premium buyers with a safety message. Safety isn’t a salient motivator for those consumers because they perceive that safety has become a commodity among cars. Even mass-market vehicles are considered quite safe.

Volvo, however, can’t walk away from safety because that is in its DNA.  So how to build that bridge?

A key insight was that luxury and status are no longer just about extravagance. Instead, they can be exemplified by thoughtfulness and intelligence.  Volvo used this insight to find a cultural opportunity.

In Australia, 85% of the population lives near the coast. However, development has eroded huge amounts of natural shoreline. Development along the shoreline has forced the construction of seawalls, which have eliminated many of the native mangrove trees, which in turn has permitted plastics (which used to be filtered by the mangroves) to pollute the shoreline, drift into the water, and kill wildlife.

Volvo developed a thoughtful and intelligent solution to this seemingly intractable problem, employing upcycled plastic to create what it calls a Living Seawall. The wall consists of tiles that mimic the root structure of the mangrove trees and essentially clean the water.

Installed near Sydney Opera House for maximum visibility, and supported by paid and earned media, the wall helped the brand achieve a 113% increase in luxury associations and also sparked a dramatic increase in consideration among luxury buyers. Oh, and sales jumped 38% in Australia.

This is a great example of how a brand can re-frame itself without losing itself, and also for how a brand can embed itself in a broader cultural story.

“In these times,” blah, blah, blah

Brands are still trying to find their COVID voice, so to speak. So many of the ads you see that reference COVID look and sound exactly the same, and this may be a missed opportunity for brands to break the mold and use some (appropriate) humor.

The copy writer Vikki Ross argues that if you are a brand that typically uses a humorous brand voice, you shouldn’t turn away from that now. Not everything has to be serious. She points to Tesco, which has modified its brilliant “Every little helps” tagline to “Because now more than ever, Every little helps,” as an example of a brand that is trying too hard to be serious and, in those efforts has lapsed into being trite and predictable (with ghastly punctuation, to boot).  

This Marketing Week webinar from the business cartoonist Tom Fishburne reminds me of our Matt Hancher’s review of the book, Inside Jokes. Some brands have invited criticism for using humor to make themselves relevant during COVID, but as Fishburne points out the problem is lack of empathy, not the use of humor, per se. He describes four different types of humor, two that are empathetic, two that are not. If you stick to empathetic humor, you should be OK. 

In fact, running the same bland ads with the same visuals of empty streets, mournful piano music, and talk about “These difficult times” is, in a way, demonstrating a lack of empathy because you clearly don’t understand all the nuances of what your consumer may be experiencing.

Fishburne then describes a number of brands that have been successfully using humor. One is a small brand called Emily Crisp, a UK snack maker. They made a big outdoor ad purchase, which was timed to hit just when no one was on the streets. But they didn’t pull the ads. They used humor to make light of their plight. The ads (one of which is pictured above) shows a commonality between the brand and its consumers and has garnered it a huge amount of earned media. 

Here is a collection of COVID-19 ads from Ads of the World. You can judge for yourself which brands are communicating effectively, and which are doing the same old boring thing that most everyone else is doing.

Breaking through the brand purpose clutter

Obviously, there is an inherent societal good that comes from purpose-driven marketing. However, as Byron Sharp and others have argued, there is a lot of justifiable skepticism about brands that wave the flag about their purpose. It is not easy to do it in a way that seems genuine and, from a cold, hard business perspective, it is not easy to do it in a way that provides any kind of competitive advantage.

This WARC article (subscription required) discusses best practice examples of brand purpose in action. The article cites three attributes of a successful brand purpose campaign: be authentic, make it about them, make the world a better place.

That is all fine and somewhat obvious, but thinking creatively about how your purpose ties to your brand is also critically important. A few of the examples cited include:

• Volvo’s E.V.A. (Equal Vehicles for All) campaign, in which the company shared with the entire auto industry its safety findings about why women are more likely to be injured in an accident. This is very on-brand for Volvo, which is known for safety and which refused to patent its three-point seat belt technology back in 1959.

• The New York Times’ The Truth is Hard campaign, which ties back to the brand’s inherently purposeful roots and is relevant in a climate in which attacks on press freedom are increasing.

• AFLAC’s My Special AFLAC Duck, which provides pediatric cancer patients with a smart-wired stuffed duck that can serve as their companion during chemo treatment.

In these and other cases cited in the article, the brand does much more than just saying, “X% of your purchase goes to this particular cause.” Instead, each brand goes back its roots and cleverly ties its purpose to the brand DNA in a way that only that particular brand could.

Image: Matt Hoffman/Unsplash

Mama

I just discovered this 2015 Longreads article that remains relevant from a linguistic perspective. It is called “The Rise of ‘Mama’” and explores the phenomenon of upper-middle class white women who increasingly refer to themselves as “Mama” rather than “Mom,” “Mother” or “Mommy.”

To summarize the more interesting points:

• As one mother says, “Mommy infantilizes me and mom makes me feel like the mother of a teenager, but mama makes me feel like a pioneer who bakes her own bread wearing an apron and is otherwise capable and timeless.”  In other words, the term “mama” rebrands the role of the mother.

• Paternal units generally don’t care what they are called. “Father” is old-fashioned…but still acceptable. Dad or Daddy are both fine. There is also no term called “fathering” like there is “mothering.” The author argues, “This is because they are often referred to, and therefore considered, as people separate from their relational roles.”

• “Mama” is a term that, in some ways, has been appropriated from African American culture, where it has been a term of respect and reverence for generations.  (In fact, the US Surgeon General recently got in some trouble for using this term to reach out to people of color about the dangers of COVID-19.)

• Ironically, the author suggests that “Mama” may not be a sign of progress, given the increased and impossible pressure women feel to be the “perfect” mother.

 Our clients often discuss the need to understand the meaning of motherhood in society, and this essay raises a number of related topics that still seem relevant today.

Never saw it coming

It is remarkable how little we pay attention.

This ad for the Skoda Fabia, which I discovered during a Marketing Science Institute webinar hosted by Dr. Rima Toure-Tillery of Northwestern’s Kellogg School, serves a dual purpose.

For the brand, it was part of a 20-year campaign to reshape the image of Skoda. For years, its cars were a laughing stock, with a reputation for boring designs and poor quality, but the brand confronted that directly starting in 2001 with its “It’s a Skoda, honest” campaign.  This ad, called “The Attention Test,” continues that reframing, casting the Fabia as a car you just can’t peel your eyes from.

For marketers, it demonstrates how limited consumers’ visual attention is. OZs often conducts ad assessments where important visual details are tucked away in the corners of the ad or outside where the viewer’s eye is naturally led. Consumers tend to completely overlook these things.

I won’t reveal anymore. Just watch the ad.

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash

Sounds like a winner

I am burned out on COVID-19 coverage, so now for something more fun. Sonic branding.

This short article by the consistently wonderful Tom Vanderbilt discusses how sounds are increasingly playing a role in brand experiences. Thanks to engineering, products often are quieter than they used to be, although this isn’t always a positive for a brand. Drivers of high-performance cars want to hear the sound of the roaring engine – so much that carmakers often pipe this sound into the interior artificially through the car’s speakers. Quiet dishwashers are sometimes perceived as less effective than their noisy counterparts.

Ticking car clocks are entirely frivolous, but they say something important to the consumer about quality. The sound a lipstick container makes when you click it open and shut shouldn’t mean anything but it does. Mastercard has joined the ranks of brands that have a sonic identity, which its CMO believes will help it “win minds and hearts.”   

Here are some additional tips and examples that illustrate the value of having a distinct auditory signal that is associated with your brand.

If you want to learn more, this book, a companion to a BBC series, is a broader discussion of how sound and music affect us, as humans.

The simple power of just saying what you mean

The graphic above was posted by one of our favorite Marketing Twitter follows, @Suzannepope. Her point is, obviously, that euphemisms and flabby language are relatively ineffective.

If you want people to do something you should tell them or show them specifically what you want them to do – clearly and unambiguously.  It creates for them a “consumption vision,” which is a mental image of the behavior and its consequences.

By contrast, you can see the approach that some mayors in Italy are taking.  This compilation – and these are real messages from real mayors – shows the difference between milquetoast messages like “Practice Social Distancing” and a more direct approach (“You are not Will Smith in I am Legend. You have to go home.”) 

At this point, a lot of cities and states in the US have legally forbidden people from congregating in public. However, prior to that (at least where we live and probably elsewhere) parking lots outside restaurants and other “non-essential” business were still pretty full. One wonders if more pointed language would have helped keep more people inside more quickly and limited the spread of the virus.

“The Sustainability Liability”

The screenshot above was tweeted this morning by Dr. Rebecca Reczek, Professor of Marketing at Ohio State.

In 2010, she co-authored a paper in the Journal of Marketing, “The Sustainability Liability: Potential Negative Effects of Ethicality on Product Preference.”  The paper concludes that being eco-friendly can be a drawback for certain consumer products.

According to an Implicit Association Test, consumers associate sustainable/green products with gentleness.  Therefore, when you are looking for strength – as in, a cleaning product in the time of coronavirus – you probably are less likely to choose the eco-friendly option.

On the other hand, when you are looking for gentleness-related benefits (a detergent for washing your baby’s blanket, for example) that makes you more likely to choose the more eco-friendly option.

How to bridge the gap?  The paper shows explicit cues about product strength can help. So, if you are making a tire out of recycled rubber (which is one of the hypothetical examples tested in the research) can you say something about recycled rubber’s superior gripping power, or depict it in a way that emphasizes its superior strength?

Want a cup of Wilkins Coffee?

Early in his career, before the Muppets, Jim Henson was hired by Wilkins Coffee to create a series of TV commercials for the Washington DC market.

The resulting 179 ads, featuring the characters Wilkins and Wontkins, were brilliant, and highly successful for the brand. This was the late 1950s, so the ads feature sadistic cartoonish violence that probably would be unacceptable now – characters being shot, blasted with cannons, tumbling out of airplanes, etc. Nonetheless, the campaign illustrates some key points about successful advertising that remain relevant: 

• You can say a lot in a short period of time. These ads are 8 seconds long, with a two-second end card, but each one tells a coherent little story.

• The brand drives the story, which is where many ads fall short. The brand isn’t just slapped on at the end, nor is it a PSA about a particular way of life brought to you by Wilkins Coffee. The story is about Wilkins coffee.

• Recurring creative devices can be memorable. As I argued in this Quirk’s article, recurring characters or tropes can add emotional salience to a campaign and get consumers talking.

There are no product attributes anywhere in the campaign and nothing resembling a rational argument. In many ways instant coffee is instant coffee, so any product-level differences were presumably minor, at best. Nonetheless, this clever campaign really elevated a brand that probably had very little to distinguish it from its competitors.

Robert Wilcox / Unsplash

The N-of-1

We still sometimes get questions from quant-oriented clients about what seem like small sample sizes in our qualitative research. This article describes a relatively new trend in medical research, the N-of-1 trial – or a study of just one person.

These studies are gaining momentum in research on pain, nutrition, and psychology. Many are considered gold standard forms of research.

N-of-1 studies gain their power from collecting many data points from a small number of individuals over a period of time, rather than gathering a few data points from a much larger subset of people. These designs can be especially helpful in medicine when studying rare diseases, where working with large sample sizes is impractical.

In a way, this mirrors what we do in our ZMET research. Rather than skimming the surface with massive numbers of people, we go very deep (essentially getting many more “data points”) with people one-on-one, and then combine those individual N-of-1 studies to reveal a picture of the mind of the market.

Smoking and Sadness

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the link between emotions and addiction, and contains significant implications for substance abuse intervention.

The research suggests that self-reported sadness is linked to both higher rates of smoking and smoking relapses. In one of the studies, participants saw videos designed to evoke sadness, disgust, or no emotional at all. People who saw the sad video were more impatient to smoke and also inhaled more smoke with each puff.

The lead researcher, Charles Dorison from Harvard, says, “The conventional wisdom in the field was that any type of negative feelings, whether it's anger, disgust, stress, sadness, fear, or shame, would make individuals more likely to use an addictive drug. Our work suggests that the reality is much more nuanced…We find that sadness appears to be an especially potent trigger of addictive substance abuse.”

Nearly 500,000 people in the US, alone, die each year from smoking-related illnesses. Perhaps this work suggests emotion-based interventions designed to moderate feelings of sadness or to provide alternative ways of working through sadness could be a step toward changing smokers’ behavior. It may also open the doors for similar research into other forms of addiction or undesirable behavior.

Rental glamour

In this Q&A, Wharton Professor of Marketing Cait Lamberton discusses the psychological pros and cons of rental clothing, which is disrupting the retail fashion industry.

Services such as Rent the Runway provide access to different outfits every month. Lamberton believes the popularity of such services may be driven by the ubiquity of cameras and the corresponding popularity of social media. (You don’t want to be seen in the same outfit in every photo on Instagram.)

Lamberton describes the effect of renting vs. buying clothing in various ways:

• Ownership provides a sense of control. Renting provides a sense of exploration because you are essentially wearing the clothing that you aspire to

• That kind of aspiration may not be psychologically healthy, because it can be a constant reminder that you can’t afford to buy these clothes for yourself

• Men seem to embrace the rental clothing concept less eagerly than women because men tend to value the control that comes with ownership

• Women seem to enjoy the sense of community that comes with renting – for example Rent the Runway lets you easily form an online community with the dozens of other people who may have worn the same dress.

• This trend does not mean the death of traditional retail fashion. Online shopping and brick-and-mortar stores still offer an experience that many consumers cherish.

• Will rental clothing spiral out of control? Is it psychologically healthy for someone to wear 365 different outfits in a year?

Is there something weird, also, about the “contagion” effect of wearing other people’s clothes on a routine basis? This Q&A reminds me of a study that suggested people refused to wear a sweater that purportedly belonged to a serial killer because of the “contamination” that could occur, as if his serial-killerness could be passed along through his clothing. On the other hand, people were eager to hold a fountain pen that supposedly belonged to Albert Einstein, possibly because believed his genius could be metaphorically “passed along” by touching something he touched.

Credit: Aarón Blanco Tejedor

A gut-wrenching study reveals an agonizing truth

Acetaminophen does a lot of wonderful things but it also may turn you heartless.

Not only does that medication reduce pain, but it also reduces one’s empathy for the pain of others.  And by pain of others, we are referring to both physical pain and emotional pain (like seeing someone who has just lost a parent, been rejected from a college, or been socially ostracized.)

We often use metaphors of pain when talking about emotional distress (e.g. “That was a crushing blow” or “I hurt for her,” or “I was heartbroken.”). This research suggests an embodied connection between those metaphors and our sense of physical pain.

Obviously, this study underscores the power and relevance of metaphors. Furthermore, what are the marketing implications of this? For example, all else being equal, are people less likely to donate to charity in winter months, when they are more likely to be taking Tylenol for a cold?  

Innovation and Loss

Over the holidays, I stumbled onto a book and a podcast that have implications for how we think about the resistance people have to innovations.

Companies frequently study consumer perceptions of innovations – new products, new categories, even new packaging and logos would fit the definition for our purposes here. In that research, companies want to know how people feel about the new thing. However, it equally important (maybe more important) to understand how people feel about the old thing. And that may be especially critical when understanding the feelings of those who are slower to adopt.

This episode of the excellent NPR podcast, Throughline, is ostensibly about AI. But it also explores the history of coffee, which was feared and resisted in Europe because of its ties to Islamic culture. It also discusses the tractor, which farmers and others fought for years because it made the horse obsolete, cost jobs, and made it easier to farm large tracts of land.  

Are We There Yet by Dan Albert  traces the past and future of the automobile. The author speculates that self-driving cars may be further in the distance than we think, in part because of the emotional, hands-on connection that people have with their vehicles – and this may be especially true among men, many of whom associate driving with masculinity.

How people feel about the new thing is inevitably colored by how they feel about the old thing. In theory, I might like the idea of self-driving cars, but if adopting them unconsciously compromises my masculinity I may be slow to warm to them. If I am a physician, I may be slow to adopt a highly effective new form of treatment if I feel the old and more challenging way of treating a disease state made me feel like a smart doctor who could solve intractable problems.

So, in research, a key to understanding why people are slow to adopt new things is the idea of loss. Although I might recognize at a conscious level that the new thing is great – what am I losing by adopting it and how does that affect my self-image and view of the world?

Greta image compliance

You may know about the theory of eye image compliance. If you see a piece of paper with a pair of eyes on it is posted above the coffee machine at work, you are more likely to pay the requisite 50 cents for your cup of coffee rather than just walking away like a common coffee thief. In sum, people become more aware of their behavior when they feel they are being “watched” – even if they aren’t literally being watched.

Now, there is Greta image compliance.

A new trend in offices in Israel involves posting a scowling image of climate activist Greta Thunberg next to the plastic cups and single use utensils in order to encourage more environmentally-friendly choices. Her image is now showing up, often in hilarious ways, next to elevators, paper towel dispensers, and copy machines.

On one hand, this could be seen as trivializing an important issue; however, although its effect has not been formally studied yet, one can see how this light-hearted approach could be more effective than soberly asking people to “think twice” about their behavior or giving them a bunch of facts about how bad plastic is for the environment.

Number 84? “It’s Hard to Swag That”

Thanks to OZ’s Jake Wax for sharing this article about the psychology of how receivers select their uniform numbers in the NFL.

The league used to have a rule that all receivers must have uniform numbers between 80 and 89. However, one player challenged this rule and the league let him get away with it – non only that, they eventually changed the rule so that all receivers could wear numbers between 10 and 19.

Receivers are among the fastest players on the field and many of them are tall and lean. So, now, the majority of young receivers choose numbers between 10 and 19 because it makes them look faster, slimmer, and more agile and therefore they believe it helps them establish their personal brand.  As one receiver states, “Eighty numbers just don’t look good to me. It’s hard for you to swag that. A few people can swag it out but with my body type a teen number looks better.”

The article contains insight from a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, who agrees that, although there is no research on it, the shape of the number “1” vs. the number “8” would suggest that the players’ perception is probably correct, that they probably do look faster and quicker wearing number 11 or 13 rather than 83 or 88.

The article goes on to speculate how numbers can affect people who play other positions, as well. Quarterbacks used to traditionally wear numbers between 10 and 19, but in recent years single-digit numbers have become popular for that position because (ironically, given the impact of numbers between 10 and 19 on receivers) double-digit numbers are believed to suggest that a quarterback is less athletic than if he is wearing a number between 1 and 9.

This reminds us somewhat of the “Bouba vs. Kiki” test and would make for a good Implicit Association Test by some aspiring grad student somewhere.

The myth of comfort food

Something to keep in mind at this time of year – there is no such thing as comfort food.

A research study that appears in Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association suggests that the benefits of what many of us attribute to “comfort food” are really benefits that occur naturally via the passage of time.

In the study, participants were shown videos that conveyed sadness or other negative moods.  Whether the respondents ate comfort food, non-comfort food, or nothing at all had no impact on how quickly they bounced back emotionally.  Nor does eating “comfort food” have any buffering effect on negative moods that are induced later.

 If you want to feel better after a bad day, just wait. It is the passage of time that helps, not anything specific that we eat. Maybe not even anything specific that we do.

I don’t think this necessarily suggests that some foods aren’t more meaningful or emotionally beneficial to us than others. Eating turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving probably brought back fond childhood memories in a way that eating a box of granola bars for dinner would not have, and one would surmise there is some emotional benefit to that, right? However, that might not necessarily mean those food would help you recover more quickly from a bad day.