Communist brand ideals lose appeal

Quiz marketers about the links between politics and brands and very soon they begin to squirm. Like death, it’s something you don’t talk about. It’s time we did, however, because these links are changing, with potentially far-reaching implications for brand managers.

Ever since the year dot, brands – and marketing – have carried an ideological aura. In the great battle against Communism brands came to symbolise ideals such as democracy, equality and freedom of choice. Brands like Coca-Cola even became icons of a whole way of life. When Andy Warhol tried to explain what was “great” about the US, for example, he said it was “the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.”

“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too,” he wrote in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking… Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it and you know it.”

Likewise, writing in a preface to Hugh Davidson’s book Offensive Marketing ten years ago, Heinz chief executive Tony O’Reilly waxed lyrical about marketing’s intrinsically democratic nature. Secret and universal suffrage works both in politics and in the market: via the ballot box and millions of anonymous transactions which reveal the consumer’s choice. The only difference is that “supermarkets are a better model of the democratic process in action than Congress or the Houses of Parliament”.

Just one problem. It’s a flawed parallel. Democracies and markets work in totally different ways. As Charles Handy recently pointed out, the one works through “voice”, the other through “exit” – the choice to buy or not to buy.

Once, this distinction didn’t matter. But, increasingly, it’s becoming a strategic issue. Like it or not, if you had to place Coke or Heinz Baked Beans in one of the four boxes of the chart the best position would be in the bottom right: Communist. Their vision may be egalitarian (everyone can have access to this quality, everyone can afford this price) but they are the creation of a producer-led, top-down, mass-market, economic system and mindset.

A few modern brands may fit the bottom left-hand corner. They are the designer labels and fashion brands which stand for individualism, exclusivity and elitism and which succeed by attracting slavish followers who publicly display their adulation of the leader’s brilliance (as long as he or she is in power).

But neither model really seems to fit the times any more as, in response to a whole range of factors, marketers shift to voice-based strategies. In media and marketing communications the big buzzword nowadays is interactivity. The explosion in the number of customer care lines is a clear attempt to replace exit with voice. So are marketers’ active efforts to solicit disgruntled customers’ complaints.

Meanwhile, gurus like Regis McKenna are preaching the virtues of customer involvement. If you involve them in the process of new product development they are much more likely to embrace the new concept, he argues. “Dialogue will become the way companies build brands,” he declared in a recent Harvard Business Review article.

What’s really tilting the balance, however, is the rise of loyalty and relationship marketing. It means that increasingly, unlike the ballot box, the consumer’s vote is neither secret nor universal. It’s not secret because marketers are learning how to capture oodles of information from each sales transaction, including voter/purchaser identities.

It’s not universal because marketers are learning how to use that data to identify which voters/purchasers are really valuable to them and which aren’t – and they are rewarding the valuable ones accordingly. This is Pareto principle marketing at work. Concentrate on the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent of your profits. Give them 80 per cent of the votes – and give the rest the minimal recognition they commercially deserve.

If this sort of relationship between brands and consumers really kicks in (at the moment a lot of it remains rhetoric), branding’s’ old “Communist” all-consumers-are-equal model will be replaced by one which mimics one of today’s most successful institutions: the plc, the property-owning democracy where the more you own, the higher your commercial value, the more votes you get. And hard luck to the rest.

Managing the shift from brand Communism to a property-owning democracy may be more difficult than it appears at first sight. Consumers who are used to being treated equally may get shirty if they find some people getting preferential treatment, so increasingly brands will need to choose consciously which side of the ideological divide to be on. Yet how many marketers are playing with “voice” marketing without realising its implications? Is a new customer careline seen as just another small string to a big brand’s bow? Or the start of a journey to a different type of brand management that needs different skills, attitudes and cultures?

Many marketers naively believe consumers will jump at the chance to become involved. Yet many democratic organisations find it’s a constant struggle to stimulate interest and involvement. Loyalty marketers are discovering the same thing: some can’t even persuade customers to redeem their hard-earned points.

And being granted voice without say (ie real influence) can be insulting. As McKenna points out, “access raises the stakes in the company’s relationship with its customers. Shattered expectations will do more harm to the relationship than not providing access at all.”

Finally, and most fundamentally, the trajectory from brand Communism to a property-owning democracy implies that brands’ traditional ideological symbolic role is shifting. But to what? This could trigger just the sort of deep undercurrent in consumer attitudes that has a habit of sneaking up on marketers’ best laid plans – and scuppering them.