It happens every time. Economic uncertainty and the specter of inflation makes consumers more cautious with their spending. As the pie shrinks, companies cut their marketing and slash branding investments especially deep. It’s happened five times in the course of my 30-year career in advertising/marketing and it is always followed by long, mostly ignored Forbes articles advising that recessions are actually the best time to invest in your brand because everyone else’s brand has gone quiet.
Company leaders cut their marketing and brand budgets anyway and then wonder why their metrics keep going down.
So I’m going to take an entirely different approach this time and discuss what happens to your brand when you do stop investing in it. Before I do that, however, I’ll first establish what a brand is and how it gets created.
A brand is a pattern that people notice, whether it’s intentional or not
It’s a busy, confusing world out there with too much information coming at us. Which is why our brains are wired to impose order on sensory input. We need the world to make sense, and that’s why our neural pathways are designed to rapidly recognize and categorize information – an ability that’s been essential to our survival for the past 300,000 years. Those early humans who were adept at recognizing patterns could quickly identify threats, locate resources, and navigate social dynamics, which is how they survived, thrived, and reproduced. Together, these factors have shaped the human brain into a powerful pattern-detecting organ, continually seeking structure and meaning in the world around us.
It’s also why we see familiar shapes or faces in random stimuli like clouds, moon craters, Rorschach tests, and Chicken McNuggets (see: pareidolia).
Pattern-noticing is how humans develop relationships
This ability to notice patterns informs our understanding of family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. We seek cues that indicate trustworthiness, but also look for personality traits in people to help us categorize them and decide what role (if any) we want them to play in our lives.
When it comes to companies we consider doing business with, we glean information about them through product experiences, their reputations, their public statements, advertising, and their general conduct in the world. And through this information we develop a perception which then helps us decide what our relationship with them will be.
What personality traits do they project? What role do they seek to play in my life? Where do our values overlap and differ? How do they act in the world? Our pattern-informed perception determines how we perceive them, whether we like them and, ultimately, whether we’ll want to do business with them. Much of this happens subconsciously.
Based on their behavior patterns alone, companies are generally unlikeable
If we removed this notion and practice of branding – the effort companies make to project a personality into the world – and simply judged companies based on their behavior in the marketplace, most companies could be fairly characterized as cold, calculating pragmatists with psychological disorders ranging from narcissistic personality disorder (tech giants) to obsessive-compulsive disorder (banks) to antisocial personality disorder (tobacco and smokestack industries). Think Frank Underwood from House of Cards, Littlefinger from Game of Thrones or Gus Fring from Breaking Bad.
Because despite the fact that they are recognized as people under the law, they are, as we all know, collections of people. Groups. And human groups involved in commerce tend to follow a fairly specific and rigid behavior pattern: risk averse, highly structured, reactive, self-interested, and often (though not always) amoral. In other words, cold, calculating pragmatists. Hence, if you strip away that carefully curated brand character crafted by brand marketers, the pattern you’re left with is wholly unappealing to people, if not repugnant and even a little bit terrifying.
Let’s describe the average corporation as if it were a man
Spencer is a well-dressed, meticulous, profit-driven man whose every decision, big and small, is governed by a strict, data-driven framework. He methodically weighs risks against potential gains, favoring precise, quantifiable outcomes over uncertain or speculative ideas. Highly risk-averse and conservative, he protects his current assets above all else, shunning any gamble that might disrupt his stable environment. His entire approach to life is highly structured and predictable. Operating in an impersonal, almost “soulless” manner, Spencer reacts only to things he can see and understand clearly, adjusting his approaches defensively rather than proactively. In his relentless pursuit of efficiency, ethical or social nuances often take a back seat to the pursuit of measurable profit. For fun, Spencer plays strategy games like chess and solves complex puzzles. He likes to build models and is into competitive speedcubing. Once a year, he donates $100 to the Humane Society.
Does Spencer sound like a guy you’d want to grab a beer with? Are you pumped to chair his fan club? Of course not. But this is roughly the behavior pattern that companies – these hierarchical collections of people – exhibit. See for yourself. Spencer’s profile was created based on the following six standard collections of corporate behaviors:
- Calculative and pragmatic: Corporations are highly rational decision-makers. They measure risks against potential gains, and their actions are guided by rigorous cost–benefit analyses backed by data. This means they’re methodical, preferring strategies with quantifiable outcomes rather than speculative leaps.
- Risk-averse and self-preserving While they might occasionally make a bold move, the average corporation abhors risk. Their internal processes and hierarchies, as well as cultural dynamics, are designed to safeguard assets and current market positions. This risk-averse nature results in conservative behavior—change, if it comes, is incremental rather than revolutionary.
- Bureaucratic and structured As they grow, corporations typically develop detailed procedures, formal hierarchies, and layers of approvals. This bureaucratic structure projects a personality that values order and predictability. Decisions are made within established frameworks, often emphasizing stability over innovation. The status quo becomes highly entrenched and eventually stale.
- Profit-driven and efficiency-obsessed Corporations exist to generate profit (shareholder value), period. This single-minded focus reflects a person obsessed with efficiency and measurable results. They optimize processes relentlessly, sometimes at the expense of broader ethical or social considerations – if those don’t align with financial goals.
- Reactive rather than proactive Be it market trends, regulatory changes, or competitive moves, corporations wait for clear external signals before changing their behavior. Thus, their demeanor is cautious or even defensive. Closed off. Guarded even. They adjust in response to external pressures rather than setting bold new agendas from within.
- Standardized and impersonal The average corporation operates as a collection of standardized procedures and policies. Context is often overlooked. This can make them seem impersonal or “soulless,” as decisions are made based on aggregated data and established protocols rather than individual intuition or emotional nuance. And thanks to AI, they are also increasingly robotic.
Nobody likes Spencer.
Investing in brand is how companies develop better, more likable patterns
Whether well-curated, haphazardly curated or entirely uncurated, the company’s pattern (or brand) is made up of everything the company says, does, and produces. Branding happens whether you manage it or not. So if you want a brand that is likeable, distinctive, and memorable, then everything it says, does, and produces should be guided by a host of foundational constructs and elements.
- Brand personality: The human traits or characteristics associated with the brand, which influence how consumers perceive and relate to it.
- Visual identity: The visual components that represent the brand, such as logos, color schemes, typography, and messaging.
- Verbal identity (aka voice): How the brand expresses itself in words. Otherwise known as a brand voice.
- Brand values: The core principles and beliefs that the brand stands for, guiding its actions and communications.
- Brand promise: The commitment made to consumers about what they can expect from the brand’s products or services.
- Brand story: The narrative the story tells in the marketplace
This is how Spencer becomes likable – the kind of person you’d invite to dinner, grab coffee with, or ask to be a groomsman in your wedding.
Brand development is akin to taking a company into the costume workshop and asking it which character it wants to be and which story it wants to tell. For example, from start to finish, Liquid Death has played a rebellious, edgy, and really pretty funny punker telling a story about “murdering your thirst.” It’s in the logo, the pack, the ads, the website, the delivery trucks, everything. Their brand signal is very strong because they’ve been faithful to their curated pattern every step of the way. And people drink it up.
Clothing brand The Gap, on the other hand, has been all over the place with their pattern and haven’t told an engaging story in years. Decades perhaps. And there’s very little to relate to in the way it projects itself into the world. Digital media brand Yahoo also had this problem when, in 2010, it tried to be seen as everything to everyone and was perceived as nothing for no one. Interestingly, they didn’t invest very much in their brand after 2003 – and when they did, it was a disaster.
By defining the brand character, voice, story, and overall motivation, those who communicate on behalf of the brand can project this revised, likeable, fun, funny, caring, warm version of the company out into the world to counterbalance the colder, more calculating aspects of its behavior: the inconvenient truths hidden in mousetype, exaggerated claims, broken promises, doublespeak, bureaucratic sludge, and, let’s face it, outright lies. It’s really not different from acting, and the whole company can get in on it.
Again, brand exists in the mind of the audience whether you curate it or not. Branding is the practice of curating that unique, human, ownable, and likeable pattern so as to stand out from the crowd, foster stronger relationships with people, and come off as more trustworthy. Companies that don’t invest in it are Spencers. And there are more Spencers out there now than ever before.
Branding has taken a back seat to short-term clicky metrics
I came up during the 1990s – the golden age of branding. By the early 2000s, branding started to look like an expensive, long-term investment with specious return on investment compared to the act of driving traffic, likes, leads, and customers down the “funnel.” Thanks to the Internet, those ROI-forward metrics were easy to track, plug into decks, and parade in front of the board. So many marketing chiefs stopped investing in brand development and management, seriously defunded it, or only made half-hearted attempts to support it. Instead of seeing their brand as fundamental, they started seeing it as a line item on a budget sheet – one with a blurry ROI. So, in typical Spencer fashion, they slashed it.
What many CMOs forgot, or failed to appreciate, is that branding happened anyway because it is the pattern noticing that’s taking place inside the brains of their prospects and customers. And the less they projected the friendly, warm, likeable version of their company, the more they became the default “Spencer” (asshole) version that people generally dislike (even if they do have a good product).
As a result, the banners, emails, landing pages, guides, etc. that they launched like t-shirt cannon projectiles at their audiences, became less and less effective over time. Their baseline metrics would go up and down based on slight tweaks to targeting, design, copy, and tactics, but overall they were low… and going ever-lower. What they’ve failed to recognize is that brand is the helium in their company’s balloon.
(It’s worth noting, by the way, that while consumers notice the patterns that companies exhibit, the companies themselves, and their marketers, often do not see their own patterns because they’re not the ones receiving and processing the information.)
Now is exactly the time to invest in building and managing your brand
It is in these uncertain times when people lean into brands they know and trust. If you invest in a clear, consistent identity – values, tone, visual presence, and story – your brand will become a beacon of reliability in a shifting landscape, helping you stand out from your competitors in a likeable way (during the Great Recession of 2008, brands like Amazon, McDonald’s, and Lego increased marketing spend and gained significant market share as a result) while attracting and retaining more top performing employees (because they respond to brand, too). What feels like a luxury is actually essential, and made even more so by the fact that others are divesting in it.
Who knows, perhaps by projecting that human, likable brand pattern into the marketplace in a consistent way, your company might start to transform into a much more human and likeable place to work. One can hope.
