What Does it Mean for Toilet Duck?
“I guess I have always felt a little uncomfortable with the elevated status we afford brands nowadays. We talk of trust and love and ideals. Loyalty, passion, faith. Visions, missions, purposes. It sometimes strikes me as faintly bombastic. Brands as Wagnerian heroes. The Emerson, Lake and Palmers of consumption. The high concept action movies of marketing. Roll the credits. Lighters in the air. Cue the helicopters. Cue the smoke machines. Cue Coldplay. Cue Ghandi…
Surely not all soft drinks can save the babies, not all toothpastes can launch a thousand ships. Surely many brands have more modest roles to play in people’s lives. The fleeting glance, the quiet companion, the casual acquaintance. Shouldn’t we of all people be celebrating the inconsequential, the insignificant, the incidental?”
For people of a certain vintage a lot of the current discussion around web3 and what it means for brands will feel incredibly familiar.
Most notably, the word community seems to have crept back into the discussion around brand strategy again…
I’ve talked in the past about important questions planners can ask themselves as they approach their work. It feels timely to suggest another.
When faced with the latest thing in the endless stream of frothy, hyperbolic marketing theory and thinking, I often find it instructive to ask myself this:
What does it mean for Toilet Duck?
This is not a criticism of Toilet Duck. Far from it. Against most measures I’d assume it’s a very successful brand (a quick check of Euromonitor data for the Toilet Care category corroborates this theory).
It fulfils the fundamental tasks that unifies all successful brands. It acts as a badge of origin, a promise of performance and a means of creating reassurance for consumers (Feldwick, 2002, p.5). Blind taste tests show how the the effect of branding “transforms the actual experience of using the product - and thereby adds to its value” (Feldwick, p.7). And whilst I wouldn’t advocate researching bleach via the use of a blind taste test, I would assume that Duck’s customers tend to believe it is more effective vs. a generic alternative. For businesses such as SC Johnson - the owners of Duck - investment in building a brand creates the opportunity to charge a price premium vs. a generic product, as well as reducing sensitivity to price changes in the future.
It is a functional, frequent and low involvement purchase. From the perspective of the consumer, the brand’s key function here is to speed up choice.
Most brands are like Toilet Duck.
Very very few brands are like Nike or Supreme.
Shoppers queue up in their hundreds outside Supreme’s shop on a rainy day in London’s Soho. Some will even be allowed to buy something.
Whilst these brands are fundamentally the same as Toilet Duck in a functional sense, these labels enjoy a slightly enhanced role within the culture of their category. People use them as an external signifier of their own personal values. These brands are used as expression of self. Indeed, the category they operate in is vastly different to that of Toilet Care. By comparison, Apparel is more likely to be higher affinity and higher engagement. But, even within the Apparel category, Nike and Supreme are outliers. People engage with Nike in a way that they don’t with Next, for instance.
These brands are the exception, rather than the rule.
Whilst this might seem like one of my more painfully obvious observations, I think it’s an important one to make. We routinely fall into the trap of using brands which are unrepresentative of the industry at large as proof that the paradigm in marketing and communication is shifting. With the current hype surrounding Web3, NFTs, creators and the like (and associated notions, such as community) it feels like we’re in danger of making a number of the same mistakes that characterised the early days of Web 2. I recently revisited a deck I wrote for a conference in 2013. Surprisingly, I could probably give the same presentation today and it wouldn’t sound too out of date.
Do we really want a replay of the well intentioned, but ultimately awful ideas and campaigns aimed at ‘starting a conversation’ around a product that characterised the late noughties…? Have we really forgotten the tragedy of Scrunch or Fold and Kingsmill Confessions already? Is the collective memory of our industry really so short?
Mark Ritson, speaking at the APG’s conference in 2018, highlighted what the issue is. To paraphrase; our personal opinions about the brands we work on are not just incorrect, they’re dangerous. We conflate the importance of the role the brand plays in our life, with the lack of importance that it plays in the consumer’s. We start to see opportunity that isn’t there, perhaps. To make his point, he shows the difference in media consumption between the industry and the consumer. The gulf between the two groups is stark. We are not the consumer. Our interests are not the same. What we see as important is not what the audience think is important.
We should really know better.
There is a lot of really interesting thinking out in the world about how creators of all types are using new tech to their advantage. How they are mobilising communities and fandoms to great commercial success in the process. Simon Harwood’s recent piece for WARC on designing for community even tries valiantly to acknowledge the fact that low-interest brands will have to work harder than most to cultivate community effects. It still left me asking Why? Why should they bother. Will the effort be worth the reward? People really don’t want to congregate around their soap, their deodorant or toilet cleaner. Many of Harwood’s examples from low-interest brands and categories resemble sponsorships more than anything more ‘community’ led.
The Nikes and Supremes of this world may legitimately be able to take advantage of some of the more cutting edge trends in our industry.
But most cannot and should not. And that’s ok.
Creating a device which removes friction from decision making is incredibly noble, when you think about it.
For some brands it might be absolutely appropriate to adopt what Douglas Holt calls ‘Mindshare Marketing’: A focus on landing consistent emotional and rational benefits and claims over time (Holt, 2010, p.8). For these businesses, when given a choice between focussing energies on deciding the correct level of media investment and deciding what their Metaverse Playbook should be, the discussion around appropriate investment should win out every time.
I am conscious that this sort of thinking may position me as a luddite. I’m keen to stress this isn’t an argument against creativity or attempting to do new things within the marketing plan. All brands need to innovate to stay relevant within the context of the culture around their consumer. But, when so many marketers and their agencies seem to focus more on the fashionable thinking in our industry and less on getting the fundamentals right, this is a reminder (to myself as much as anyone) that the future is unlikely to be dominated by one single theory of how brands will be built.
There will inevitably be a blurry munge of competing tools, ideas, systems and strategies. The trick, as ever, is to choose the best approach for the task at hand - and not just apply the the latest shiny thing that seems to be bubbling away on the internet.
Bibliography
Carroll, J. (2015, March 29). Swimming in the Shallow End. Retrieved April 2022, from Jim Caroll's Blog: https://www.jimcarrollsblog.com/blog/2015/2/25/swimming-in-the-shallow-end
Feldwick, P. (2002). What is Brand Equity, Anyway? London: World Advertising Research Centre.
Holt, D., & Cameron, D. (2010). Cultural Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ritson, M. (2018, October 15). On the Contrary. Retrieved April 2022, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4S5PEm0DDM&t=1174s
