One of the things that bothers me about brands is how much they talk about wanting differentiation and yet they do all they can to ignore one of the easiest and most powerful ways of doing it.
Standing for something.
It feels that more and more brands are favouring a positioning of blandom – probably because they feel this minimises the risk of alienating potential customers – however the irony of this ‘strategy’ is that by standing for nothing, they are opening the door for their competition to come in and steal their share, either through doing something with meaning or fighting on price. promotion or distribution.
While I appreciate there are many highly profitable brands out there that have no clear or consise positioning, I still believe brands that ‘stand for something’ are in a stronger position for growth than those who are ‘designed and managed by committee’ – though obviously that is dependent on the other critical factors being executed properly.
The reason this has come up is that a couple of weeks ago my wife and I were at a gig where a bunch of pensioners played a bunch of jazz greats.
One of the songs they played was the Sinatra classic, ‘My Way’ and she said that if that song was written today, it would probably be called ‘Our Way’ for the reasons I’ve blathered on about above.
I disagreed with her, because I still think ‘Our Way’ is still too pragmatic for many brands tastes and felt ‘Whatever Way You Want Is What We Want To Do’ would be more in line with current attitudes – which leads to my question, what other classic song titles would be affected by the emergence of ‘political correct and unifying’ brand attitudes?
Over to you …