Evolution is the driver of change. We have prospered as has no other species, yet our accelerated development has its price in the anchors that
drag behind us. We still have, for example, the famed ‘fight or flight’ reaction that primes us for ferocious physical action whenever we are surprised, annoyed or frightened. Our primitive emotions are still strong current realities for us, and we are at the beck and call of a subconscious that prods us into strange and unpredictable behaviour, from the mad dash in the days before Christmas or the backlash of betrayed consumers (names like Ratner and Hoover come to mind).
Further than this, we are social beings who have found that, for survival and growth, togetherness beats aloneness hands down. The price of this is conformance to social norms, and the threat of exclusion has become a potent weapon. Let us consider these two issues, of evolution and society, and how they relate to brands.
Evolution
Despite the fact that 72 per cent of people in the United States do not believe in evolution (including Presidents Reagan and George W Bush), it has been proven as a powerful force that is at the root of much change. According to neuroscientist William Calvin (1997), there are six elements in the evolutionary process – all of which have implications for brands: 1. There is a pattern
In animals and people, the root patterns are in the DNA helices that we pass to our children. This principle was taken further by Richard Dawkins when he described the ‘meme’. A meme is a single idea or thought that spreads in genetic ways. Memes are themselves memes. This notion has since blossomed into the entire discipline of memetics, including its own journal (at jom-emit.cfpm.org). The now-traditional search of Google offers a mere 40,500 pages on the subject.
Brands are patterns, too. They are also memes, containing specific and differentiated ideas about companies as well as their people, products and services. ‘Bentley’, for example, says ‘refined power’. When I go to a Bentley showroom I expect refined service. ‘Wal-Mart’ says ‘cheerful low cost’ and, whether visiting Asda in the UK or one of the many US stores, I do not expect their people to be wearing Armani suits, but I do expect them to give friendly advice.
2. The pattern gets copied
With ideas, copying occurs when other people learn of the idea. Memes thus act as ‘thought viruses’ with the more powerful memes, such as those that appeal to common interests and fundamental needs, spreading further and faster. Thus news of wars and deadly diseases spreads like wildfire, whilst the invention of a new type of house-brick raises few eyebrows outside of the builder’s yard.
Brands get copied in the memetic sense. As we communicate the brand and people tell one another about it, it spreads through the populations of both carriers and targets. Brand managers should thus think closely about the impact of their brands on common needs and interests, as well as the ease with which the message can be passed on to others.
3. Variations occur in the patterns
As genes evolve they do experiments and mutate into different forms. Nature’s experiments are random and incremental. Small genetic modifications occur at a balanced rate that protects the population at large from damaging distortion whilst giving different genetic make- ups a chance of making the big time of widespread copying.
This happens with ideas too. When you tell them to other people, or even recall past thoughts, the received thoughts may be subtly or somewhat different from the original ideas. Brands fall into this category. Like Chinese whispers, each transmission goes through an interpretation process (perception of actual experience) that leads to a stream of mutation. A well-designed brand message and strategy are so clear that this distortion is minimized.
An implication for brands is that close attention should be paid to the cognitive and social processes of people who perceive and retransmit the brand message. Accidental distortion can cause great damage (and, occasionally, great assistance) to the brand.
4. There is competition
Ideas fight both one another and established concepts for the prize of development and use (only 1 in 56 new product ideas actually succeed). Good ideas spread more rapidly as they are told and retold. Ideas that are weak or difficult to understand are given less consider- ation. Brands compete for mind space more than billboard space, and a well-positioned brand will establish a differentiated and defensible hill in the minds of its targets.
5. There is a complex environment
The business environment in which brands operate is indeed complex, as is the internal territory of the minds of the target popu- lation. A well-designed and managed brand will naturally navigate these muddy waters. Further, a well-designed organization, although complex, will naturally support and align with the brand itself.
Biologist Ross Ashby defined the ‘Law of Requisite Variety’ in 1956, when he showed how, for a species to survive in a given ecology, it requires to have at least the complexity of its competitors in order to counter all of their attacks. The same is true of businesses and brands. A brand requires sufficient complexity to survive in its environment. A part of that complexity is to maintain the apparent simplicity of a clear message whilst maintaining the underlying capability both to fend off attacks and to provide for complex needs. New Labour in the UK did remarkably well in grabbing a wide central political territory with a fresh, open and youthful image that pushed the previously powerful Conservatives into a perceived dour corner of ageing corruption.
6. Successful variants get varied more
When an animal mutates successfully, evolution seems to pay particular attention to it, performing additional experiments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, humans are the most rapidly evolving species. Out of interest, the second most evolved group are birds: the dominion of the air has given them a huge advantage in reaching food and trav- elling distances with which other species cannot compete.
Brands also come and go, and smart companies pay close attention to the success of their brands. Brand variants do have a limit, and brand extension (dilution) can weaken the original memes. With care, however, in-brand variation can be used to create the commercial equivalent of ecological space-packing, filling the shelves with different variants of the base brand (how many variants of Colgate are there?).
The implications for brands are several. First, as people, societies and ideas evolve, then brands must change with them. A brand that once allied itself with the greatness of the British Empire would be seen as jingoistic and distasteful. Robertson’s jams had a ‘golliwog’ as a brand icon that was hugely successful, but social and political-correctness pressures caused
them to remove it from their corporate identity. Secondly, the brand itself may play the lead role as it evolves, perhaps with the evolution of its masters, such as where the personal growth of Richard Branson led to the increase in social responsibility associated with the Virgin brand.
Brands may also evolve as their parents change. Mergers, acquisitions and divestitures lead to the combination and splitting of people, ideas and brands. Brands can fade or die out this way. Beecham’s was a ‘family’ pharmaceutical with its famed and quirky ‘powders’. It then became the B of SKB and has since faded below even this as Glaxo stole its place in the more recent GSK. In the way that there is now a discipline of evolutionary genetics, so also is there interest in the notions of ‘brand genetics’.
Brands have life cycles even though they are often much longer than product life cycles. Brands are born and they die. Even the whole disci- pline of brand management can be viewed in this way. In the post-Klein era, there are claims of the death of brand, but such bold statements are somewhat exaggerated. The Economist also tried this back in 1992 and ‘Marlboro’ Day’ in April 1993 almost proved the case, but journalistic fervour is no replacement for reality. True, short-sighted companies do cut back on managing brands but, like the dotcom claim that strategy was dead, such prophetic statements are blind and suicidal. Brands have always been and always will be an integral part of our human context. Brands are created from the perception that your customers and other stakeholders have of you. To leave these perceptions to chance is to leave the future of your company to the fickle hand of unmanaged fate. Always remember that there is no such thing as an unmanaged brand: if you do not do it, the market or your competitors will do it for you!
Society
Evolution has made us complex social beings in which there are two competing forces. First, we are descended from primates who lived in tribes and lived on readily available fruits and berries. We can observe the apes today as they leisurely move in large groups from tree to tree. They have strict hierarchies and clear social rules. Any ape that tries to jump the pecking order is asking for a beating or worse. The second force comes from the period when we left the forests, shed our hair and started walking upright. As hunters, we still lived in tribes, but the males now had
to go out and hunt for meals, taking great risks and using thoughtful wiles to trap their faster and fiercer prey. Females, meanwhile, stayed at home to tend the slow-growing family.
We are thus driven by both hierarchy and loose, but intense, collabo- ration. We eat both in the primate sweet snacking and the carnivorous hot gorge. We both pair-bond and opportunistically mate with the partners of absent colleagues.
This social complexity is both a minefield and a goldfield for brands. The complex social rules and behavioural patterns are all pathways that brands must tread. As with the Bible or the Koran, you can use social rules to argue for or against pretty much anything, although the degree of your success can be highly context-dependent. To weave the brand into the fabric of social networks means socializing the brand, creating it as an integral element of how things happen. This can be seen especially in lifestyle brands, and particularly those targeting the young. Marketing methods themselves have been branded to suit, such as ‘permission marketing’ and ‘guerrilla marketing’, and authors such as Seth Godin have built their personal brand on a basic understanding of anthropological forces. There are arguments, with some but not total validity, that refer to the ‘brand resistance’ of Generation Y (10- to 25-year-olds). These would argue that, because of the huge volume of ‘messages’ delivered to this group every day of their life, coupled with the range of products available, they have become inured to our brand communications and are less brand loyal. Importantly, the argument runs that they want to be ‘individuals’, which would preclude anything that resembles ‘uniform’. I said there was some validity in this argument and there is. Certainly, and thankfully, there is a growing awareness of the damage that major corporations can wreak if they continue as in the past and ignore the wider global tapestry of which they are an integral user and creator. They do not want to put up with this and wish to see change, and this is good. But for those with a responsibility also to create wealth (as distinct from value, which is equally important and linked) we cannot ignore the subliminal drivers that come from way back in our genetic make-up that tell us some of this argument doesn’t work. Tell me, what is a bare midriff, low-cut trousers and tank-top if not part of today’s Generation Y ‘uniform’?! Parents may ponder when they last managed to escape buying their son or daughter those vastly more expensive Nike/Gap trainers or cargo pants because he or she ‘couldn’t be seen dead in those’. Let us not forget or ignore the most basic and strong
anthropological drivers of our brand management in our rush to fix the future, as much as it really does need to be ‘fixed’.
Societies themselves are now demanding that corporate governance systems have the transparency that permits evaluation of a company’s (brand) performance on more than the ‘old economy’ accountants’ and analysts’ favourite quarterly earnings! Total corporate responsibility (TBCR) has moved into the boardroom and will, of necessity, become a key strategic thread to be woven into the patchwork quilt that is the brand as presented to all its stakeholders. The Enron, Worldcom, Andersen and other collapses that gave birth to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in the United States in 2002 caused a watershed in corporate governance that has changed both the manner in which companies must manage their brand, and the leeway that society will permit corporations in their selfish pursuit of profit and power. Corporate citizenship is now more powerful at shaping company perceptions and reputations than either brand quality or business fundamentals – we must deal with it.
To manage brands is thus to manage society, which of course we can never do. At least we can never do it completely, yet if we can capture a moment it is surprising the catalytic changes we can make. Linux and the open software movement thus challenged the might of Microsoft. Akio Morito defied research to launch the Sony Walkman, and Nokia/Motorola and others destroyed our public ‘privacy’ for ever with the ubiquitous mobile phone. And when Martin Luther King had his dream, he encapsu- lated the aspirations of black America and spread his brand around the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you and your organization made a simi- larly outstanding contribution to the world?