It was the best briefing I’d been in. A CPG company, with scores of MBA grads on the team, clicking through a deck that charted the company’s resilient growth, formidable household penetration, and enviable year-over-year same-store sales. At the time everyone was reading Byron Sharp’s challenge to loyalty and talking about downaging across their portfolios to reach to their future consumer. And this product seemed to be an albeit milquetoast mainstay in homes across the nation, partly because of its pricepoint and partly because there was an intrenched “zombie” restocking behavior that would be passed down from couples to their children, to their friends, and their children — seemingly without the intervention of marketers figuring out what shade of pink and what typeface was cool these days.
As we sat in the floor-to-ceiling glass office on a campus of a healthy business with happy employees and happier shareholders, I couldn’t help but ask why they were seeking an agency’s help. I should note at this point that I don’t make a habit of talking myself out of a job but two and a half hours into this briefing, I was wondering if we’d just come for the snacks and seltzer.
It was then that the brand manager closed his laptop and uttered the words that made me gulp so hard on that grapefruit seltzer my whole body ached as it traveled down my esophagus: “We’re a strong business, in search of our soul.”
The soul of a company. Of a product. Best. Brief. Ever.
I could see my counterparts champing at the bit to “sell in” a purpose workshop; we would find a societal issue that was connected to the product and its users, perhaps unearth it through studying the company’s history. We would delve into the lives of the product’s most extreme or fringe users to find their pain points in life and give the product a role to play in solving that problem… all perfectly noble and it would help get the company to stand for something. But that wasn’t necessarily going to get to their soul.
It was a logical leap to go from the soul of the company to the brand. The figment that existed in its customers’ minds. The intangible assets that sat on the balance sheet. The way the brand looked, felt, was experienced. Perhaps that was the work to be done.
We were operating in an environment where DTC brands were deities with devastatingly cool semiotics and coherent brand narratives, founder stories, online communities and content subscribers. They had edgy copy on their subway advertising, they were experimenting with dynamic pricing. OMG they were friending you on social and getting into witty banter with other brands. If the packaging hadn’t been done by Red Antler, it was by an agency who wanted to be Red Antler. Ohhh! they were BRANDS. Real brands. They had souls.
We could do a subversive repack. No, wait. A stunt. We should change the logo. Make it modern. Way more cool. Hire a pop star to be the new creative director. That’s what the successful brands were doing. We’d do a collab with Supreme. There were rounds of presentations. Ideas from the media agency to get into gaming because that was where all the brands were, right? Or the kids… Who can say, just gamify it. (Shudder.)
Well, we didn’t do any of that. In hindsight, if they had, they could have lost their way, cost them their business, and lost their soul altogether.
We did other things to understand people’s relationship with the product. A good old-fashioned AAU (attitudes, awareness, and usage study). We learned what were “weights” and “wings” in their consumers’ lives. We ran risk simulators around the brand’s reputation. We had conversations about the company’s origins. We did scenario planning — we talked about what would happen if the product disappeared overnight: Who would suffer? Who would lose out? Would they be missed? By whom and for how long? The company did a lot that we — the agency — shouldn’t and didn’t take any credit for whatsoever. And over the years, the product has stayed, as far as I can see from earnings, a strong business. It still sits on the shelves of most guest rooms and in almost half of every American household.
I was reading earlier this week about the number of DTC brands that got acquired by private equity companies, the ones that shuttered their storefronts, or just got eaten alive by competitors willing to spend more on advertising and do more to protect margins than many of those exciting players ever could. So many of those brands just faded, fell out of fashion, or simply didn’t have a strong business after all. They lost their way.
What’s become clear over the last few years is that it’s remarkably easy to lose your business. Your brand is more porous than ever. There are as many marketing experts as there are pop psychologists on TikTok, telling you to pour money into articulating your “why.” And don’t get me wrong. I love those workshops. I think some of that stuff is super important and will give brands a way of standing out and standing for…
And yet I go back to that best briefing ever. And those words that felt like the most exciting marketing and branding exercise of our careers. And I think of the smart people who questioned this quest for the soul, who went about the business of the business, kept the supply chain ticking along, the buyers happy, the customers with their reliably good-enough bottles of product that always looked the same, the employees in jobs, the brand reputation in check, the product in the news when there was actual news and out of the news when the competitor was being dragged into a dust-up in the pages of the Journal.
The more I reflect on the companies that have lost their way and lost their business, the more I see that as seductive a proposition as it was, the soul of that company — that stable, strong, consistent, slightly dull company — was not actually something they needed to go in search of.
