Welcome to the Creative Age: Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing by Mark Earls

Author:Mark Earls [Mark Earls]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-03T13:33:00+00:00

Problem 3: the brand ties you to the past

This is the biggest problem for us: the biggest reason why Creative Age Thinkers need to abandon much - if not all - of the brand language to move forward. A lot of the lovely stuff in the brand box is the result of stuff that has happened in the past. As Judy Lannon, one of the people who did most to popularize the notion of the `consumers' brand' put it: `The brand is the result of a complex set of interactions and satisfactions'.22 (my italics)

And yet our brand language and brand thinking presents the brand as an eternal, unchanging thing. We talk of brand essences (unchanging), brand values (abiding), brand architecture (surely built to last). We worry about consistency of appearance and message - not just in the present but in the future, too.

We construe future action from the past. One of my least favourite assignments was to write a 60-page rule-book for a key Unilever brand based on the learning from 20 years. Never again.

We think that brands lie outside time. That our job is to protect the valuable thing. To keep to the timeless path of truth. This is of course made harder by the fact that many companies think or at least act as if the brand is on the balance sheet as an `equity'. A good manager (or at least, one who seeks advancement) wouldn't put the factory at risk, would he?

Moreover, brands can and do change both in value and in what they mean according to both the context and what they do. So let's not get stuck in the past. As any bookie will admit, the past is at best only a moderate guide to the future. Our job as Creative Age pioneers is to invent the future, not recycle the past.

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