Is Your Brand a Fading Icon?

At the end of a recent NYT article about RadioShack was a quote that caught my eye. The head of a turnaround advisory firm, insisting that the RadioShack brand would live on even if the company went under, said:

You could poll any American and they’ve probably heard of RadioShack. That’s worth something to someone.

In fact, with RadioShack teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the vast awareness that its brand enjoys may be its most valuable asset. The brand is an icon, and that is worth something, but it is apparently not worth enough to keep the company from going under.

In the world of story, there is a difference between an icon and a real character. An icon reminds you of a story you’ve already heard while a character plays a role in a story that is still unfolding. Betty Crocker provides a great example of both. In 1945, Fortune named her the second most popular woman in America–after Eleanor Roosevelt–even though Betty Crocker was entirely fictional. She had a popular network radio show, her cookbooks were a staple in kitchens across the country, and people sought her advice on domestic problems well beyond the kitchen. She was the Martha Stewart of her time. Over the next few decades, however, General Mills made a series of adjustments to her image and persona, presumably in the interest of keeping her contemporary and “relevant.” Betty Crocker slowly lost that first-person connection with her audience. Today, for most people, she is little more than a signature and a red spoon.

For a brand, evoking nostalgia is a lot better than evoking indifference, but it is not equity. To get from icon to equity, there has to be an authentic story that the audience is eager to hear. An icon is, by definition, frozen in time. Turning an icon back into an engaging character is a tough, strategic undertaking. Figuring out which aspects of the brand are assets and which are liabilities is often surprisingly difficult.

When I think about RadioShack or Betty Crocker or lots of other iconic brands for that matter, it brings to mind something the M&M’s marketing director told me when M&M’s faced this problem in the mid-1990s. “Our brand awareness,” he said, “is a mile wide and half an inch deep.” Everybody was familiar with the brand–and the characters–but nobody cared. In advertising, the characters begged people to love the brand by telling them that the product was delicious, candy-coated chocolate. No conflict, no story, just product attributes that the audience already knew, rendered forgettable by fifty years of broadcasting the same information. When a new agency took over the account in 1995 and introduced serious storytelling (as evidenced by the conflict in almost every frame), it was like rain on a drought-starved field. Within three years the characters had eclipsed Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse in Q-Score ratings, and the topline had grown from around $500 million to over $750 million.

A decade ago, Old Spice was another poster child for iconic brands frozen in time. Even though Old Spice was the clear category leader, it was dragging its iconic status behind it like an anchor: everybody’s grandfather’s aftershave. Every aspect of the branding felt iconic–and tired: the scrimshaw bottle, the sailing ship, the old-fashioned logo, even the word old itself. In the end, the introduction of an effective challenger with a compelling offer–Axe, selling sex in a can to 14-year-old boys–forced Old Spice to rediscover its own story. Once the brand understood that its story was about experience (as in, “experience makes the man”), it was easy to see how each of the iconic elements of the brand could be used to help make that story clearer and more compelling.

A lot of valuable brand assets get marginalized when marketers misunderstand story. In the case of M&M’s, when the new agency creatives first pitched the account, they ignored the characters altogether. Only at the insistence of M&M’s head of marketing (the now-CEO, Paul Michaels) did the agency turned its prodigious storytelling skills to exploiting the iconic status of the characters. And Old Spice was in the process of trashing all the most iconic elements of its brand because the brand team was confusing cultural currency with relevance (“What kid aspires to ride around on a schooner?”).

Which brings me back to RadioShack. Without a firm handle on its story, RadioShack will continue to fail at reengaging its audience. Like Old Spice a decade ago, RadioShack is iconic because, during the years when it was building its near-universal awareness, the brand meant something that was deeply relevant to its audience. Articulating that meaning and consciously using it as an organizing principle for everything you do is the essence of story strategy and the best medicine for reviving a fading icon.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (Brands)

I recently read an essay in The New Yorker by John Suroweiki about the decline of brands. He led with the story of Lululemon, whose “cultlike following” made the brand seem more like a celebrity than a business–until quite recently, when a quick succession of negative news, some of it self-inflicted, deflated the value of the brand dramatically–kind of like Tiger Woods driving his Cadillac into a fire hydrant at 2:00 in the morning.

Clearly, transparency has made the world of marketing more volatile, which was Suroweiki’s point. In this regard, the rapid rise and fall of brands is simply more anecdotal evidence of the accelerating pace of change in modern life. From a marketer’s point of view, however, the really interesting question is this: What kind of news triggers the unraveling of brand value? And can some news make a brand more resilient rather than more fragile?

Brand value is entirely a function of the relationship between a brand and its audience. The whole idea of loyalty beyond reason is that a customer feels connected to a brand in ways that eclipse the actual features and benefits of a product. That relationship between a brand and a customer is not like a relationship between two people. The brand is, at best, a useful fiction. And the other party to the relationship is not a single individual but many thousands or millions or, in some cases, hundreds of millions of potential customers. In my experience, when a brand is successful, its relationship with any one customer is more like the relationship between a celebrity and a fan.

The analogy is not perfect, but it is helpful. When I feel a connection with an actor, a singer, an athlete, a politician or a celebrity CEO, I understand that in some ways the story I have bought into has been crafted and polished. I know that there is some blending of reality and fiction in what I see, but if the story rings true, I suspend my disbelief and allow myself to feel connected anyway. Then I sit back and watch for the surprises.

The element of surprise is vitally important, because a relationship cannot stay fresh if it coasts along for years in a completely expected way. Consistency doesn’t hurt, but consistency alone can’t keep the spark alive in any relationship. In my relationship with a brand, however, just as in a relationship with a celebrity, there are two kinds of surprises: surprises that delight me because they confirm my faith in the story while deepening it and surprises that betray the story by revealing the lie in it.

Think about the difference between Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber. Both started as teen idols, but Justin Timberlake has continually surprised his audience in ways that suggest he is more than meets the eye. He collaborated with more seasoned musicians, deepening his musical style. He proved he had both a sense of humor about himself and solid comedic chops on Saturday Night Live. He displayed unexpected acting ability and versatility in feature films including The Social Network, Friends with Benefits and Inside Llewyn Davis. And he raised so much money for charitable causes that he was named the most high-impact celebrity for charity in a survey by The Daily Beast. Justin Bieber, on the other hand, has surprised us at every turn with his ability to live down to our worst expectations–claiming Anne Frank as a “Belieber,” egging his neighbor’s home, hiring a swagger coach and, most recently, getting arrested for drag racing drunk.

On the brand side, Nike is rich with examples of both good and bad surprises. Sport is the world Nike lives in, and the brand has always been most engaging when it has smashed together the two deepest story themes in the world of sport: triumph of the human spirit versus victory at all cost. Both themes are about winning, but winning has a very different quality depending on which lens you are looking through.

If Nike is at its best when these two themes collide in an interesting way, then the surprise that most deeply betrayed that story was the news about Nike’s offshore labor practices that surfaced in the early 1990s. The company clearly thought it was living in a victory-at-all-cost story about how to win in a viciously competitive business environment. But all over the world, members of Nike’s audience raised their hands to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What about the human spirit of the guy making my shoes?” The controversy undermined the Nike brand and knocked the company off its game for years.

On the other hand, an example of the good kind of surprise is Nike’s habit of standing by its celebrity athletes when they exhibit a variety of all-too-human weaknesses and failings. It is clearly possible for an athlete to go too far–Lance Armstrong, for example–to the point where he betrays the idea of sport itself. But there are many more athletes whom Nike has continued to support long after their other sponsors have abandoned them. To me, that is an acknowledgement that it wouldn’t be victory at all cost if there were not a heavy cost, and it wouldn’t be triumph of the human spirit if it did not entail overcoming some serious human weaknesses.

In the way it handles its relationship with its athletes, Nike seems to put its brand on the line in order to live up to its own story. That is not to say that all the other sponsors of, say, Tiger Woods, should have been more loyal as we all watched Tiger wrestle with his own demons. Triumph of the human spirit versus victory at all cost does not drive the story of Accenture, AT&T, Gatorade, General Motors or TAG Heuer. On the other hand, that all these brands felt compelled to drop Tiger Woods immediately on the news of his very human failings and that their dropping him seemed to cost them very little in terms of brand equity suggests that the relationship between Tiger and each of those brands was fairly shallow to begin with. Which only demonstrates that it’s not much of a story if it doesn’t cost you something to tell it.

Lululemon, to the extent that its world overlaps that of Nike, was clearly playing on the triumph-of-the-human-spirit side of the story. That energy was at odds with the high cost of the clothes and the elite, club-like culture of the brand. A deeper sense of meaning might have provided more of an anchor for the brand; without it, the story always seemed pretty fragile. And so it proved to be.

If you have any thoughts about resilient brands and fragile brands, I’d love to hear them.

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