Progression vs Perfection
Shift happens
From the roaring ’20s to the roar of 2020, the landscape of brand marketing has always been in a state of perpetual change—and now, the biggest change/challenge facing brands is how we gain or lose trust with our community.
Brands had a simple job to do in the early 20th century—convey the quality of the product. Early advertising relied on a simple system of consistency and authority (helped by ubiquitous distribution) to convey trust.
As products became more complicated and competition increased, brand storytelling arrived to help add another dimension. Brands invented spokespeople to humanize the message. The main goal with all of this was to connect with the consumer, explain the rational benefits and convey product details.
But mid-century, our media landscape changed—simple product storytelling wasn’t enough for the modern consumer. Brand expression needed to fit the new mediums as technology evolved across TV screens, billboards, radio and print. During this era, real manifestations of brand personalities started to come to life. Marketing tried to appeal to our emotions, versus our functional needs. The brand mascot evolved from an idealized illustration in the previous decades to something more human, but still a hyper-romantic version of reality.
Over time, a new tactic evolved creating another, deeper way to connect: connect the brand story to the real stories of real heroes and celebrities. Major brands started to capitalize on this new trend and put inspirational people at the top of their marketing pedestals. These stars became aspirational icons, and in some cases, like Michael Jordan, they became their own brand.
The benefit of brands pairing with major celebrities was that it created an immediate recognition through affiliation, and an emotional connection. But over time, for the everyday folks they were trying to reach, these stars seemed unattainable and unrelatable.
Two major shifts in the last decade has dramatically changed the way we connect to brands: social media, and manufacturing becoming easier to manage. The rise of the direct-to-consumer brand exploded. This allowed entrepreneurial people to identify a need gap, create a product and distribute the messaging with relative ease.
Both of those shifts helped this new wave of brands bypass a lot of hurdles. Most of these challenger brands didn’t come out of the gate trying to emulate their bigger competitors. Many of them relied on real people or the founder’s story as the face of the brand, or leveraged customer service as their strategic advantage. These more realistic connections with brands changed our expectations. Today, we want a transparent look into a company’s practices and products. We want good service and communication in our relationships. This new wave of post-social DTC brands has built that trust on being real. Now is the time to be real and stop worrying about being perfect.
You may have noticed humans are acting more human these days. The pandemic has changed our standards for content, but increased our need for emotional connection. We’re all experiencing something together, riding the rollercoaster of anxiousness, uncertainty, nostalgia and longing to connect with something real. We’re expressing our feelings in real time. Younger consumers have been raised this way on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. Their expectations are more informal than ever, because they acknowledge that even if the quality is lower, the content can still touch us if it’s real and honest.
Even if the benchmarks for production quality have changed, we don’t take things at face value. Some people will still judge a book by its cover, but others want to know where the book was published, what percentage of post-consumer recycled waste is in the paper content, where the paper came from and what kind of ink went through the printing press. Corporate transparency is a mandatory, along with supply chain and corporate social standards. Community values and company values need to line up more than ever, and you can’t make those connections with a facade in your marketing. Brands will increasingly be judged more on their actions and the inspiration they provide in the long term for upholding those convictions.
2020 BRAND TRUST TO DO LIST:
Customer service needs to be empathetic and personal.
Social media needs to reinforce community values.
Content should capture a feeling, not feel overproduced.
Writing should be in a human, conversational voice.
Design should be simple and approachable.
And most importantly, take a step in the right direction for social change. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or overly strategized, or even pretty, it just needs to be a step in the right direction, and people will acknowledge it. Take the NFL team formerly known as the Washington Redskins as an example. They finally recognized that their name was derogatory and disparaging to Native Americans and took a step with a temporary rebrand to the Washington Football Team. It was long overdue, and they can do more to acknowledge their past and reconcile the implications of their former name, but they took a step. That step isn’t perfect, and it’s not pretty, but it was the right thing to do.
To connect better with customers, brands need to lower their guard and be more personal. Being more human in marketing means making mistakes, acknowledging those mistakes both internally and externally, and doing something about it. Our evolving need for trust today can be met by being transparent, relatable and authentic.
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Written by Mike Schwoebel, Creative Director at Nemo Design
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