The New Challenges of Brand Management

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The image and meaning a brand conveys have never been entirely within the owner’s control; they have always been in dialogue with the world around them. While marketers painstakingly craft brand messages and creative campaigns intended to appeal to their target customers, it’s the customers who actually make meaning and, consequently, shape a brand’s reputation. In the social media age, that meaning has become ever more freighted with cultural and political implications, not only for brand image but also for customers’ own identities and reputations. This newly mediated discourse between consumers and brands has created new challenges for contemporary brand managers to not merely steward a brand’s communication and intellectual property but also manage the brand’s meaning as consumers themselves shape the meaning of the brand to relate to their own identities.

Historically, brands have been used as a proxy for quality and a basis for differentiation to aid consumption decisions. Merchants used to mark their wares with brands to distinguish them from similar goods offered by others — the origin of the trademark. By the 19th century, European governments had provided businesses with a clear path to legally secure their brand marks and combat imitators. In 1876, the British brewery Bass & Company became the first business to register its mark to become a “legal mark” protected by law; Coca-Cola would follow nine years later. This was the first evolution of brand, from “trademark” to “legal mark.”

As consumers recognized the provenance of products that bore a particular legal mark, they began using these marks as a guide for quality to aid their product selection process. This inspired companies to use suggestive selling techniques to help consumers choose their brands over those of their competitors — what we call brand advertising today. The aim of branding for much of the 20th century was no longer about asserting ownership; instead, marketers endeavored to establish an identifier that assured consumers that the product could be trusted to perform. In 1909, Good Housekeeping magazine underscored this objective when it began to position itself as a trusted guide to the quality of other brands by bestowing its seal of approval on products it tested. Thus, brand evolved from a legal mark to a trust mark — a mechanism that reduced uncertainty for consumers. You know the saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”? That’s the benefit of brand as a trust mark.

From Product Quality to Personal Image

The era of brand as a trust mark centered squarely on identification and functionality. However, by the 1980s an expanding economy had inspired a rise in conspicuous consumption, where materialism, luxury, and visible displays of wealth were prioritized over product performance. This decade gave birth to “yuppies,” the young urban professionals who valued status symbols as indicators of their high-paying careers — a stark contrast to their predecessors, the hippies and the beatniks, who eschewed conspicuous consumption. This cultural shift drove an increase in sales of high-end cars like BMWs and raised the profile and desirability of designer fashion labels, such as Gucci, and luxury watch brands, such as Rolex.

During this period, we witnessed the most marked shift in brand marketing, from making product promises to signifying lifestyles. Campaigns like Grey Poupon’s “Pardon Me” and American Express’s “Don’t Leave Home Without It” presented products as artifacts of prestige, not mere providers of functionality. Apple’s famous “1984” ad didn’t even show its new Macintosh computer but instead communicated the ideals of anticonformity as a signifier of rebellion.

This shift in marketing elevated brands beyond the functional to the emotional, which, thanks to the research of Les Binet and Peter Field, we now know has greater marketing effectiveness. It wasn’t enough to just be recognized or trusted. Marketers wanted their brands to be loved: to evoke stronger emotions within consumers and compel more people to buy. This evolution refashioned brand from a trust mark to what Kevin Roberts, the former CEO of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, termed a “lovemark” in his 2004 book of the same name. Marketers sought not just a sale but a relationship as they encouraged consumers to develop deep, positive feelings for their brands of choice, aiming for long-lasting loyalty and even irrational, emotion-driven consumption.

Our Brands, Their Identities

In today’s hyperconnected world, social networking platforms have become our primary means of learning about news events and keeping track of our social groups. These contemporary town squares serve as a public forum where people can both debate social issues and negotiate consumption decisions. In fact, someone’s take on a political matter might be quickly followed by a post about their new purchase in our newsfeeds. The two have become so intertwined that a brand selection can often be considered a vote cast on a social issue. Your choice to eat at Chick-fil-A may signal disapproval of equal rights for all individuals; your purchase of spices from Penzeys may signal support for a progressive political agenda. These associations are publicly constructed and policed through the same channels where people curate their identities — such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The result of this dynamic is that today’s most powerful and sought-after brands have been situated as the marks that most accurately represent a consumer’s cultural identity. These brands have evolved from lovemarks to identity marks that people use to communicate to the world who they are and to which cultural communities they subscribe.

Brands have leaned into this shift to establish stronger connections with consumers and woo potential buyers who subscribe to similar cultural views. Dove, which challenges traditional beauty standards with its “Real Beauty” campaign, and Always, which combats gender stereotypes through its “#LikeAGirl” campaign, are both examples of brands that identified a point of view beyond their product categories as a way to project ideological meaning and attract like-minded consumers. This symbiotic relationship has increased consumers’ expectations of brands. It’s not enough to trust that your product performs well or that your customers are emotionally connected to the brand; today, that “love” is conditional. Consumers want to know where the brand stands on social issues; they want it to pick a side to ensure that their consumption is congruent with their representation of self. Yesterday’s most sought-after brands were beloved because of what they did for us: They signaled status. Today’s most coveted brands say something about us: They signal identity, and we expect congruence between our identities and our consumption.

This expectation has caused trouble for some brands whose consumer base is representative of different cultural views. For instance, Bud Light found itself in the crossfire of the culture wars after its partnership with a transgender TikTok influencer erupted in a boycott from consumers with conservative views. To defuse the situation, the company released a statement in which it tried to disassociate itself from any social-issue affiliation and present itself as a beer for everyone. Unfortunately for the brand, this alienated progressive consumers and ultimately resulted in a sales plummet that demoted the long-standing No. 1 beer brand in the U.S. to the No. 3 spot.

As social actors within our collective social groups, we curate our presentation of self to control and manage our public image, and we act based on how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others. Therefore, we adopt the costumes that go with the role we choose to play in the same way that bankers wear suits and construction workers wear Carhartt. The brands with which we adorn ourselves act as badges of identity to outfit our social characters based on how we have collectively assigned meaning to those brands.

When people who subscribe to the same culture act in concert in an effort to promote social solidarity among the group, it’s known as collective effervescence, a term coined by sociologist Emil Durkheim. It’s the influence of “my people” that makes identity marks so powerful. And when our people act, it catalyzes a network effect and we consume in concert — not because of what the product is but because of who we are. Identity influences what we buy, where we go, how we show up in the world, and with whom we choose to congregate. Considering the prolific nature of identity projection through our social networks, brands have become increasingly more critical as a strategy for our own reputation management.

What does it mean for marketers when brand, once a way to convey a product’s real and abstract attributes, is now a signal of identity that must align — or not — with a certain audience? Those who still see brand’s primary role as a catalyst for emotions must recognize that in today’s social landscape, those emotions are culturally mediated based on the ideologies to which consumers subscribe. Brands must conjure emotions not only to incline consumers to make a purchase but also to signal what their communities of consumers stand for — and, often, to communicate their position on a contentious topic. The pervasive, public nature of consumption via social media and its subsequent influence makes this era of brand identity more challenging for marketers — and, at the same time, potentially more rewarding.

Today’s marketers must be intimately aware of the changes in the cultural zeitgeist and courageous enough to weigh in on the discourse; sitting on the sidelines or failing to read the moment can erode a brand’s relevance. Nike was once a company that had a clear ideology and engaged in cultural conversations based on its brand’s voice. Whether it was daring people to “find their greatness” or to “dream crazy” — a campaign that featured the blackballed quarterback Colin Kaepernick — Nike became more than a beloved brand that made sneakers; it was an identity mark for people who saw the world similarly. In fact, when Nike debuted the “Dream Crazy” ad, factions of Nike consumers who disagreed with Kaepernick’s political stance took to their social networking platforms to demonstratively display their disapproval of the partnership by burning their Nike sneakers. Meanwhile, those who agreed with Kaepernick’s on-field protest bought more sneakers.

But Nike’s effort to mount a brand marketing comeback at the Paris Olympics, after what seemed like a few years of silence from the shoemaker, underscores the dynamism of culture and how even the best of us can miss the mark. In its “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” campaign, Nike’s point of view seemed out of sync with the culture of the contemporary athlete. Rather than speaking to the positive, celebratory love of sports and sportsmanship that the Olympics evokes, the ad’s narration put athletic commitment in nihilistic terms: “I have no empathy. I don’t respect you. I have an obsession with power. I think I’m better than everyone else. I have no remorse. I have no sense of compassion. What’s mine is mine. I want to take what’s yours and never give it back.” In a world where NBA players exchange jerseys with their competitors after a game to express their shared admiration for one another, and where a Laotian sprinter gave aid to a South Sudanese runner who fell during the preliminary heat of the women’s 100-meter race during the Games, the ad was jarring and antithetical to today’s sports culture.

To truly engage consumers in a more meaningful way, marketers will have to identify what beliefs their brands stand for, beyond the products themselves, and what that means for consumers today. Liquid Death is a brand that believes in death to the use of plastics, which is why it sells water in recyclable cans. The brand identity is driven by its ideology; it also happens to sell water. And the people who see the world similarly not only consume but also use the brand as a receipt of identity, driving Liquid Death to a $1.2 billion valuation just five years after its founding. It doesn’t focus on value propositions; it operates on ideology and communicates it in ways that are congruent with the way its consumers make meaning.

If brand is a mark that signifies meaning, then the brands with the most meaning — the ones that align with our own cultural identities — will be the most powerful and the most successful.