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The digital age has changed
how brands work

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There’s been a revolution in how brands meet the outside world
www
From a world with a small number of
broadcast media
To a world with a vast number of
increasingly interactive media

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At the same time our culture has become less deferential and more interactive
Culture has also changed.
We live in a culture which is:
Less deferential, often openly sceptical
More interactive and wants to have its say

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The role of a brand used to be to control a one way relationship with the outside world
BRAND
{Previously, One Way}
PRODUCTORGANISATION
{Low Surface Area}
In the old world order things were a bit
more 2 dimensional.
Brands controlled a one way relationship
with consumers through a small number of
touchpoints. The brand was pretty much the
only part of an organisation exposed to the
outside world.

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Today the relationship between brands and consumers is very different
MARKETING
COMMUNICATIONS
BRAND
{Today, Interactive}
{High Surface Area}
Brands today have to be more 3
dimensional. People expect an interactive
relationship across many touchpoints.
Much more of an organisation is exposed to
the outside world.
Brand can no longer simply be tacked on to
the wider organisation. Brands today work
best when they run through all aspects of
what a business does.

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However, most ways of thinking about brands come from the old world
BRAND
PRODUCTORGANISATION
But there’s a problem. The ways we’ve learnt to think about brands comes from the old world.
Our concepts, frameworks and even the words we use carry the implicit assumptions of a
previous era and its founders. Today we need digital age thinking for digital age brands.
Positioning
(Single-minded) Propositions
USPs
The one thing
we want to say
Messaging
Brand models/keys/onions
Reasons
to believe
Ownable
differentiators
Pictured are: John E. Kennedy, Claude Hopkins, Rosser Reeves, Ernest Ditcher, Stephen King & Bill Bernbach

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At Sparkler Strategy, we’ve been thinking
about how we can update the ways we think
about brands.
The things from the previous era that are
still useful, and the areas where we need to
change our thinking altogether.

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Whether brands rooted in the digital or the physical world, they are facing similar challenges
CONTENT
MARKETING
BIG DATA
UI DESIGN
CUSTOMER
JOURNEY
This changing environment doesn’t only affect digital businesses. We’ve noticed that our clients (some
of whom are pictured above) are increasingly facing similar challenges and asking similar questions.

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From our recent strategy work,
we’ve identified five big themes
to do with managing brands of all
kinds in today’s digital age.

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4. Choosing not
owning
3. Making it
happen not
telling people
about it
2. Course
corrections not
step changes
5. Remembering
to smile not just
talking about
the weather
1. Sharp thinking
The five themes

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1. Sharp thinking
In conversations with our clients, we tend to have more conversations about
Byron Sharp than any other brand thinker.
Sharp’s consciously radical take on marketing is really powerful. He’s gleefully
taken a hatchet to some of the woollier concepts in the marketing world. Good
on him.
And yet, in our view at least, Sharp’s approach is not a panacea. It “leaves too
much out and is just too simple on its own”. We need to be careful about
embracing Sharp's world wholesale.

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Both of Sharp’s How Brands Grow books
have been hugely successful. He’s very
salient across all kinds of businesses at the
moment. He has high mental availability.
Sharp has mounted a fearsome and
devastating attack on what he sees as the
illusions and ‘unicorns’ of modern
marketing, everything from loyalty
programmes to customer segmentations
and beyond.
“Most of a brand’s customers think and
care little about the brand”
“Marketing managers work a bit like
medieval doctors”
Byron Sharp’s work has become more and more prominent

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Sharp recommends moving from “a past world view to a new world view”
How Brands Grow, pt1 (2010)
Sharp’s alternative is a world of mass-
targeting, mass-media and “meaningless”
distinctiveness.
To its credit Sharp’s work focuses on how
brands can achieve salience and emotional
responses, rather than attempt to win over
consumers with rational arguments.
However there are also limitations. In some
ways Sharp’s “new world view” can be quite
old fashioned.
Deep
engagement
Positioning
Message
comprehension
Target
segments
Differentiation
USPs
Wide
reach
Salience
Emotional
response
Target the
whole category
Meaningless
distinctiveness
Relevant
associations
{past world view} {new world view}

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“Just too simple on its own”
“[Sharp’s thinking] accounts for an awful lot of what advertising does.
Most work is over-analysed, inconsistent, timid and under-resourced.
….But the theory leaves too much out and is just too simple on its own… It
doesn’t make anyone look clever and so no one usually wants to do it.”
…
Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug, 2015
Sharp has many very good things to say. But there are also lots of areas where the
simplicity on the page sits uncomfortably with the lived reality on the ground.
For example, we’ve always struggled with his idea of “meaningless distinctiveness”. In our
experience, meaning is still critical for brands; even if it is conveyed in emotional and
visual, rather than rational and written, ways.
Paul Feldwick’s analysis feels on the money:

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2. Course corrections not step
changes
The established ways of managing brands are out of sync with today’s culture of
constant, gradual change. Conventional ways of managing brands tend to end
up in risky, difficult and expensive step changes rather than smooth evolutions.
We consistently underestimate the impact of small changes and overestimate
the impact of big changes (as well as the ease with which organisations can
deliver this scale of change).

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Change in the digital age happens differently
Change happens differently in the digital age. In today’s culture, change is constant, gradual
and incremental.
Ours is a world of social media feeds, beta versions, big data and marginal gains. Progress in
the digital age comes from continual small advances.
“We've got this saying:
performance by the
aggregation of
marginal gains‘
…
Dave Brailsford- Team Sky Principal

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Yet as organisations we still mostly deal in step changes
As businesses we tend to stick to what works
until it’s broken. We wait for a problem to be
big enough to be ‘worth fixing’ and then start a
big process that effectively has to recommend a
major change to justify its existence.
Or we just get bored- we think that dramatic
changes are the shortcut to dramatic growth.
However, dramatic change is very hard to pull
off successfully. Very often dramatic change
creates dramatic headaches.

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Small changes can have big impact; dramatic changes take huge effort to cut through
It’s easy to under-estimate the impact of
small changes. A seemingly innocuous pack
redesign for Tropicana led to a big drop in
sales.
Big changes are hard and expensive. Axe
continued with a strong, if quite 90s, view of
masculinity for over 20 years. They are now in
the difficult (and costly) process of updating the
brand with a more modern view of the world.
Tropicana pack re-design
20% sales drop in one month
Axe re-positioning, from The Axe Effect to
Find Your Magic

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Occasional
branching off, 1
Occasional
branching off, 2
Longitudinal insight engines
Longitudinal insight engines
Regular check-ins
We find the best results come from course corrections rather than occasional big set pieces
Sparkler Live Strategy model
We’ve developed an approach called Live Strategy, which aims to make strategy something
which happens continually & gradually, and doesn’t require a big pool of time & money every 3
or 4 years.

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3. Making it happen not telling
people about it
Too often our ways of thinking about brands carry the implicit assumptions that
advertising is the end-goal of a brand process and the solution to most/all of a
brand’s problem.
In the digital age we need to keep an open mind about how to make a brand
happen, and avoid pre-supposing that we should tell people about it.

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Purpose beats positioning
“In the case of positioning you would ask ‘How can
we tell people about our new positioning?’ (Now) the
key question you need to ask is ‘How can we take this
mission out into the world? How can we make it
happen?’”
…
{Huib Van Bockel (Red Bull), The Social Brand, 2014}
Our clients increasingly want to make the shift from brand positioning to brand purpose.
That’s great. The sentiment behind purpose feels much more contemporary and in sync with
the changing relationship between consumers and brands.
But brand purpose should be more than a change of word on a brand model. It’s a
fundamental change in mindset. It’s easy to forget that.

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Purpose is not just positioning with a new name; it’s a whole new approach
Adapted from Grow by Jim Stengel
We find that brand purpose only really works
with big, broad insights. Most often wide-
raging and category generic thoughts.
This can be hard when we’re used to finely
crafted positioning statements filled with
clever bits of language. Purpose can feel
broad, basic and undifferentiated.
But its precisely this breadth that gives the
clarity to a whole organisation and creates the
space for creativity that allows a brand to
successfully go out in to the world and make it
happen.
Under Armour: To make all
athletes better
IBM: To build a smarter planet
Starbucks: To create human
connections

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Under Armour is an example of brand purpose at its best
“To work here you have to love the brand. You have to really love it: what it stands for, what
the company values, the way it does things.
We have a culture of people who feel like they own the company, whether they have equity
or not. When they leave at night, they turn the lights off. Not because it’s a rule, but because
they want to. They feel like this is their company. People get that – and it inspires them. ”
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{Kevin Plank, CEO, Under Amour}

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4. Choosing not owning
Traditional ways of doing brand can get us tied in knots. We create barriers for
ourselves that don’t always need to be there.
We’ve been taught that a good process results in a new argument for a brand’s
superiority. And that this idea should be differentiating, ownable and backed up
with reasons to believe. But, as Byron Sharp would remind us, the outside world
isn’t looking for tightly constructed arguments nor persuasive messages.
If an idea fits, then we should feel free to choose it- whether or not we can
claim to rightfully own it.

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Choosing not owning
“Brands don’t need to worry about having a persuasive
message. Too often they produce advertising filled with
persuasive arguments about trivial benefits that are
rejected, misunderstood or ignored by viewers.
Buying a brand for the first time doesn’t require a major
conversion, just a little salience”
…
{Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, 2010 and 2015}
Traditional brand theories tend to focus on owning a differentiated benefit. But often this
means that we end up focusing on aspects of a brand that are small and unique, rather than
the big things that really matter to the outside world.
Our experience is that we need to worry less about owning a differentiated concept and more
about delivering big category benefits in unique ways.

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Alcohol is a category deeply involved in owning
“Ever since the first drop of whisky fell
from our stills on Christmas Day 1887,
Glenfiddich have celebrated those who
do things differently.”
Alcohol is an interesting category.
Perhaps because so many of the brands have
long, interesting histories, perhaps because
we’ve been taught that old alcohol is good
alcohol, the drinks category is full of mythic
histories and stories of maverick founders. The
tendency is to stake a claim to a cultural world
rooted in the brand’s past.
Provenance, heritage and authenticity are the
category defaults. And yet brands who try to
sound authentic often end up sounding
anything but.

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Take Hendrick’s. The brand has helped drive the global
boom in gin. Hendrick’s brand of twisted Victoriana has
been one of the biggest factors in its success but it is an
entirely invented world.
While alcohol defaults to stories of authenticity,
provenance and heritage, the Hendrick’s brand has none of
those things. Unlike its competitors, Hendrick’s has no
claim on this Victorian world (it was launched in 2001).
Hendrick’s success came from identifying a fundamental
truth about gin (British eccentricity) and simply choosing to
adopt it. They have taken this world unencumbered by
whether they had any rights to it or any reasons to believe.
The curious rise of Hendrick’s gin

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5. Remembering to smile when
talking about the weather
Perceptions of brands and their equity result more from the style with which
they are executed that the content of their ‘message’.
Yet most approaches to brand treat questions of style as an afterthought, and
instead focus on the rational argument or message. We need to treat style as
seriously as we treat substance.

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Style is as important as substance
“It is the tone of voice, the detail of the execution, the connotative
use of language, all things that conventional advertising theory has
treated as peripheral, that are in fact most important.
An uncomfortable fact for most organisations.”
…
Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug, 2015
Most approaches to brands are specifically designed to focus on things like propositions,
messages, the thing we want to say- and so these processes tend to become about
constructing rational , written/verbal arguments for a brand.
The problem is that most impact and most meaning that people take away from brand
activations come not from the content of a rational argument but from style and feel.

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4. Remembering to smile when asking about the weatherRemembering to smile when talking about the weather
It’s like small talk. The topic is mostly incidental- the
weather, the weekend, holiday plans...
It’s not what we say but how we do it that counts. It’s about
building rapport. There’s no point in asking about the
weather if you forget to smile.
Psychologist Paul Watzalwick’s showed that relationships
are primarily influenced not by the rational content of what
we say, but by the less precise, more gestural
communication around it.
In his words, small talk is actually saying “we are not
enemies”.

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Smiling in the digital age
Brands exist to enrich and differentiate the experience of consuming a product, but often in
today’s world it’s easy for the emotional sense of the brand to become a bit separated from the
product. It’s interesting to look at how different brands have responded to this challenge.
The Amazon product, the slick
machine, is the brand. Its
breadth and functional
excellence is the brand’s equity.
Challenge: the brand is respected
and used rather than loved.
Challenge: justifying the use of
conventional media.
Facebook have used advertising
to help define the brand, and
give it meaning beyond being a
neutral platform for UGC.
“Advertising is the price you
pay for having an unremarkable
product”- Jeff Bezos
Tesla does no advertising, but has
instead built a strong social
media and PR presence around
the brand and its CEO.
Challenge: maintaining presence
and salience

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Summary

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4. Choosing not
owning
3. Making it happen
not telling people
about it
2. Course corrections
not step changes
5. Remembering to
smile when talking
about the weather
1. Sharp thinking
Some of the old filters
for judging brand ideas
just aren’t that helpful
any more.
We need to worry less
about owning a
differentiated concept.
And more about
delivering big benefits
in unique ways.
Making it happen is a
much more
contemporary thought
than telling people
about something.
But, purpose is not
positioning by a
different name.
We also need a shift in
mindset and approach.
It’s hard, time-
consuming and
expensive for brands
to make big step
changes.
We need to develop
our brands in time
with the culture
around them.
We live in a world that
increasingly
communicates in ways
that are bitesize, visual
and rooted in emotion
(rather than
rationality).
We need to focus as
much on style as we
do on substance.
Sharp’s emphasis on
salience and
emotional (rather
than rational)
response is really
strong.
His disregard for
meaning, we find
much less helpful.

35.
58-60 Berners Street,
London
W1T 3NQ
T: 020 7079 9555
www.sparkler.co.uk
Edward Greggs
Head of Sparkler Strategy
ed@sparkler.co.uk