Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brands, Creative Development, Creativity, Differentiation, Distinction, ECommerce, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Perspective, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning, Point Of View, R/GA
When I worked at R/GA, they got very excited about D2C brands.
Part of this is because they got a lot of business from brands who wanted their help to design the infrastructure for their D2C ambitions. Part of it was because they loved to talk about transformation and saw this as a major shift in brand development. And part of it is because a lot of their work – especially with NIKE – revolved around this type of thinking.
[Though I did laugh when a couple of their senior people in NY tried to convince me ‘Fuel Band’ was more valuable and important to NIKE than ‘Just Do It’ … and hated the fact I refused to buy their logic]
Look, I really liked R/GA – specifically the first year I was there – but I always felt the whole D2C approach was flawed. Didn’t have to be, but the way people/brands/companies saw it, made it that way.
When I at Wieden, P&G asked our opinion on the Amazon dash button.
They were massively excited by it as they saw it as a way to drive sales while being able to massively cut their marketing costs.
For those who don’t know what the dash button was, it was a piece of tech – connected to a specific item – that allowed customers to order from Amazon at the press of a button.
So if you spotted you were running out of washing powder, you could press the dash and within a day or so, you would get a new box delivered.
All good in theory except the only real winner would be Amazon.
And we told them that. Because the moment you let your brand become a commodity, your value is destroyed as is all the work you’ve put in to get into that position.
But that didn’t stop every man and their dog seemingly bang on about the virtues of D2C.
Nor did that make companies who had previously talked about the importance of brand, jump on the bandwagon.
And while some went on to achieve great success with this strategy – albeit, having to spend millions on building the brand value of their D2C org – the vast majority crashed and burned after, at best, a small moment in the spotlight.
That’s not to say new ideas are wrong – far from it – it’s to say that too much of the industry, despite what they may claim, are obsessed with the quick wins and short-term gains.
Worse, the reason for this is often less commercial and more egotistical.
A desperate need to look like they’re ‘in the know’ to those around them. A desire to be part of the cultural clique rather than risk being left behind by those who are skeptical, cynical or closed-minded.
I get it … no one wants to look slow or old or out-of-date and everyone wants a shot to elevate themselves up in collapsed time.
But as much as new ideas require a leap of faith – and that leap often takes a degree of courage – when it also requires you to let go of all you know and believe, then it says more about what you want to be than who you are.
Now of course, we all have our egos and ambitions – and that’s natural – but when your strategy to get where you want to go is chasing trends rather than following your values, that’s when you can find yourself in a whole heap of trouble.
Because following the pack without objectivity, values or context doesn’t make you an entrepreneur – it makes you an ambulance chaser – and once you have that reputation, you end up doing to yourself what D2C did to many companies … and that’s a position no one who claims to be ‘an expert in brands and brand building’ should ever find themselves in.