#debranding

The sales of most brands will decline at some stage. This can be due to factors such as technological advances, trends, innovation or changing consumer tastes.

So You Think You Are Ready for Debranding?

Back when I was in high school and there were a few surviving dinosaurs among the emerging human population, one of the most popular annual events was the Battle of the Bands. While it wasn’t a dance per se, it was a social mixer on a grand scale, and it pitted local garage bands against one another to determine a fan favorite by the end of the night.

Thinking back on it, I don’t recall any of those bands I saw ever broke out of the high school circuit. I sure hope they were able to get day jobs.

Today, though, there is a very different battle being fought, a battle of the debrands. It’s a contest to see which brand can debrand itself the most, still retain relevance, and gain customer votes of confidence and sales. It’s all about blending, in which major national brands--or whatever they want to be called--strive to bring the customer into the equation.

The idea is to remove former branding complexities, and overlay onto consumers, becoming part of their lives. It’s like placing a transparent layer onto another image in Photoshop to create a new composite image.

In terms of formula, it goes like this: Blend = Brand ± Transparency ± Framing ± Bespoke ± Blur

It’s all about customizing the experience as much as possible for consumers, fitting into their sitz im leben. The trend toward simpler transparent logos and packaging are part and parcel of this trend, with adverts often relying on new framing techniques to allow consumers to insert themselves into the picture.

Personalization, or bespoke, leverages the audience-of-one concept. It goes much farther than Coke’s noble effort in recent years with the hundreds of bottles and cans with common names printed on them, even though that pushed the needle in the right direction. I may not be Michael or Jennifer, but I got the message.

In more practical terms, it is evidenced in suggestion engines generating ideas that are aimed directly at us, and only us. Those suggestions that Netflix hurls at you every time you login are there by design, but they will be different for each user, as they are based on prior viewing history.

Some may argue that personalization is intrusive and that it violates privacy, but it is the most efficient form of advertising there is. The opposite is mass communication, which involves throwing money at a population rather than specific individuals or groups. Furthermore, for the consumer it means having to plow through a mountain of ads that have no meaning to them. I’ll take personalization, thank you.

Finally, the trend is away from celebrity endorsers, which certainly had their time in the annals of marketing history. Their replacements? Much less expensive influencers who blend in among us, who are actually far more like us than the celebrities we always doubted actually used the product.

If this sounds like it is a more organic form of marketing, you would be right. It dethrones efforts of the past and brings them down to where the customers are. It makes the product very real to users. The new emphasis is not to elevate away from people, but rather to walk among us. This is a battle I like watching play out.

And that is music to my ears.

Dr “Turn It Up“ Gerlich

Debranding Is the New Branding // Bloomberg Opinion