Being Iconic

The Brand Ecosystem Model is Compass and Nail’s framework for consumer, brand relationship building. It is based on the fact that human beings are hardwired for empathy, driven by values, beliefs, and a need for sociability—the need to be in relationship with others. I’ve used this behavioral science to build profitable, scaling businesses that create positive social and environmental impact by connecting the ethical underpinnings of brands to the end user experience. This is squarely in contrast to the self-interest driven marketing campaigns that engage competitive-minded, manipulative, and narcissistic techniques to get consumers to transact. The premise here is to offer an alternative, an opportunity to extricate ourselves from, and even replace this outmoded Mad Men approach with transparent, empathetic, service-oriented businesses that form deep, meaningful relationships with like-minded constituencies.

In a 2003 interview, David Foster Wallace laments how the marketing industry is geared to exploit the impulsive desires of the individual.

“There is a particular ethos in American Culture that very much appeals to people as individuals, that is, that you don’t have to be devoted or subservient to anything else, that there is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness, that you are the most important thing and what you want is the most important thing and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. It is a bit crude to say it that way, but in fact it’s something of the ideology here. It’s certainly the ideology that is perpetrated by television, advertising, and entertainment. And the economy thrives on it. This is one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement. And, in some ways it works very well. In other ways, it doesn’t work all that well, because it seems as if there are whole other parts of me that need to worry about things larger than me that don’t get nourished in that system. To obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me some kind of slavery.”

— David Foster Wallace, 2003 Interview  

Twenty years later the industry has been emboldened with technology, now armed with the ability to interact immediately and intimately, becoming even more attuned to the impulsive desires of the individual. The result among marketers is an obsession with ever more granular trigger data. Driven by Machine Learning and AI, stacked on the Customer Data Platform, this obsession powers, influences, and usurps the thinking and the behavior of marketing, branding, and especially ecommerce management. The thinking relegated to the tool and the optimization of the metrics associated with the tool. The organization as a whole transfixed with what might be the best tool and the means to optimize its performance. What then is increasingly well understood is a measure of relativity, but not a measure of cause. If ‘x’ number of customers respond positively, meaning take the action the marketer hopes, in many cases making a transaction, but also maybe signing up for an email, or clicking on a promotion, then the game is afoot to see if ‘x’ number of customers can be increased by some increment by employing the tool. How fast and at what increment can the application of data, via machine learning, or AI, inform the next moment, the next promotion, the next bit of content delivered to the fingertips of the consumer to entice them into gratifying (scratching) whatever impulse (itch) is present. This an insidious spiral that runs counter to everything we know about how customers form lasting bonds with brands.

“Our attention has been hijacked, and it has primarily been hijacked by advertising business models that are not driven to make us more wise.”

— Evan Williams, Twitter Cofounder speaking at Wisdom 2.0

Iconic brands provide meaning to consumers that transcends short-term gratification. Winning the data driven impulse purchase game is fine, except it leaves a gap in understanding of potential greater meaning shared between the consumer and the brand, and by extension the longer-term satisfaction realized by the consumer, which is where profitability and scale truly reside. Meaning is personal. Re-enter David Foster Wallace.

“I am going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”

— Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College

We all get to choose what we think about, what we value, believe, what motivates us, and what inspires us, and what gives meaning to our lives. It is personal. Brands also get to choose what to think about, or more accurately those people running brands get to choose. Iconic brands tend to choose substantive things. Steve Jobs is maybe not so famously credited with wanting to put the power of information in the hands of the people, but that was the initial spark. It isn’t the current opinion about what makes Apple great today, but it’s the foundational element of what made the brand we know today possible in the first place. Patagonia made the Planet its only shareholder. goop is in the midst of defining beauty as something more than skin deep. These ideas are meaningful. If we agree, these ideas have meaning for us. We get to choose. We also get to choose to associate with the brands that stand for the ideas we agree with, with the brands that manifest these ideas, and operate based on these ideas, or types of ideas. Overly simplistically, this is how they provide meaning for us, by acting on ideas. 

Brands that choose not to think about the bigger ideas or substantive things, but are merely in the business of optimizing a transactional moment, no matter how good they get at doing so, are not the businesses, not the brands that engender a following. These are brands that consumers may engage in occasionally, but those same customers don’t form a connection with them. They don’t love them, they don’t follow them, and they don’t support them, argue for them, defend them, or celebrate them. And, over time, they don’t buy from them. Fans of Apple, Patagonia, and goop love these brands. Literally, their brains light up in the exact same way as one’s brain reacts to a beloved family member, child, or spouse. I posit this is worth thinking about.