It was my first chilly autumn evening as a New Yorker and I’d wrangled myself an invitation to the illustrious Hudson Union Society to listen to a celebrity discuss his career and leadership.
It was that night when I got to ask Bob Lutz, “What sells the car — the brand or the car?”
Lutz, who served as EVP and board member of Ford, President and Vice Chairman of Chrysler, and Vice Chairman of GM, seemed genuinely gripped by my question. He talked about the sound of an engine, the distinctly American premise of the open road; he shared a couple of memorable ads and touched on some marketing magic, but he seemed to wind his way back to the car — the car being the thing that sold the car. As the discussion settled into the hallowed walls and stained carpet of The Russian Tea Room, I could feel the question lingered, not entirely sure it had resolved itself.
I’ve since spent a good decade working in the business of brands. In that time, brand purpose became de rigueur. Societal impact and social responsibility got a box in the brief and consumers supposedly started voting with their wallets, interrogating whether the brand did the right thing (by its employees, the environment, and supply chain). Brand narrative became a whole lane and suite of offerings in marketing, advertising, and PR.
Many of the campaigns I worked on were for brands in crowded categories, and we’d often ask whether there was new news or real news driving the brief. Every so often the piece of communications was about legitimate innovation but a lot of the time the marketing centered on our ability to craft a brand story and an ecosystem for that story — one that would reliably resonate with various audiences, across different platforms. We did newsjacking (Yeah. Sorry about that). And we developed brand platforms that put the consumer at the center or deliberately tucked the product into the background, as the vaguely apologetic presenting sponsor of a “much bigger” cultural story.
I don’t regret any of that work or the impact it had but I am starting to see a shift in what’s working, what’s breaking through, and what people are drawn to. And I’m not the only one.
The brilliant Rei Inamoto recently wrote that one of the new rules of advertising was a shift from people story to product story. He writes,
In the Old World, brands used to tell Brand Stories to connect with their audience emotionally. A dozen years ago, as mobile and social media took a strong foothold across the Internet, “brand stories” shifted to “people stories.” Instead of talking about themselves, brands used their power and reach to reflect real people and their stories. That helped them be more authentic and purpose-led.Brand storytelling is shifting again but this time towards product stories.
Now, we can argue that actually in the Old Old World, the product was the story. When categories were smaller, competitors fewer, and choice limited.
Invention was everywhere. America was built on this idea of audacious ideas coming to market and capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff. (Love that line, MIT.)
Cattle were branded so that the provenance of herds crossing the plains could quickly be identified. Coca-Cola figured out their brown bottled drink should also be marked as it was crated across state lines. And whether they were storytellers or snake oil salesmen, those early advertising folk had fodder to ignite the imaginations of onlookers. Invention was what laid the groundwork for exceptionalism. And explaining to people what the thing was — the thing they’d never seen before — well, that was the beginning of the business of creativity.
So back to now. In these crowded categories and cluttered shelves there is still innovation and a lot of it. There is improvement (better for you). And there is radical differentiation. There is product news.
There’s also a good chance the public is suffering from societal issues fatigue. Or people never reeeeally cared about a brand’s stance but surveys were written in a way that effectively convinced industries and marketers that they did.
And finally, I suspect there is just too much content, too many narratives being churned out by humans and machines, creating such a glut of human-centered, cultural chatter that it’s actually causing brand storytelling blindness, if not impatience.
So I’m finding myself firmly in the product story camp. Wanting to work with brands on simply telling and framing what it is that they make and do. And beautifully explaining that what they make and do is either the first, the best, or the most different.
That’s it. That’s the brief.
Graza olive oil has been doing this brilliantly since inception (I often use them as an example in lectures and presentations). They simply put great olive oil in a squeezy plastic bottle that makes you feel cheffy and encourages a ton of usage in the process, breaking with the category of rarefied dark glass and saving liquid gold for special occasions.
The ACLU on the flipside is stuck in brand storytelling and while I love them and respect their mission, their advertising fails to tell you what the ACLU makes or does. I’d argue that’s the single most important hurdle they could overcome — plainly telling especially younger people or non-registered voters what an ACLU is and how it works (hint: it’s not a fight for democracy, a sticker and a T-shirt for your membership donation).
Like all things, the business of creativity is recursive. And I believe we’ve just re-arrived at a new era of product storytelling — a place where your product is your brand. And that’s the kind of brand strategy that will break through.
