Why brands should slow down and find purpose
A funny thing happened at work earlier this year. Going through some research on the impact of social media on young people we discovered many young people get their cues on how to behave online from brands. And it’ll come as no surprise to anyone in the communications business that some brands are obsessed with understanding and copying the behaviour of youth.
Chris Clarke
The net result of this appears to be a generation of kids growing up in a propaganda world of their own creation, or worse, a kind of kitschiness, where everything appears to be happy and wonderful and above reproach. This is the world of many brands and has it’s root in idea that a brand is the promise of an impossible future. The promise of whiter than white, shiny happy people. Pure propaganda kitsch, as Milan Kundera had it: “the absolute denial of shit.”
This weird loop is a problem. Because in the information age nobody (except maybe the most impressionable young people) really believes the impossible future. Brands now are something more like a promise your company can expect to be held to. If you say Vorsprung durch Technik, use your energy tirelessly to deliver the dream, don’t use it to pretend you’ve done it by cheating emissions tests. This is why purpose is important. It’s an anchor point of meaning in the chaotic flux of the digital information we sift.
We’ve all read about and been mildly concerned by the way in which real activism has been replaced by well-meaning clicktavism. The “green revolution” in Iran in 2011 was great and everything, loads of people turned their Facebook profiles green. But nobody thought long enough about it all to come up with an alternative to the theocratic state, so the status quo more or less prevailed.
If brands stop trying to follow their audiences and instead focus deeply on what they stand for, they can make a real difference in the social space and beyond. It’s an absurdity of recent years that brands have been so focused on commenting on whatever is in the news that with few exceptions they’ve failed to make the news.
Perhaps what brands need to do is the opposite of what they’ve been trying to do. Instead of going faster and faster and trying to attach themselves to more and more digital ephemera, they need to just slow down. Our San Francisco agency hit a home run for Taco Bell by advising them to shut down all their social channels. A drastic act that had the nation asking what had happened as we craftily got them to install Taco Bell’s new app.
It seems pretty clear to me that good storytelling is often about reflection and poise. Good brand building takes time and commitment; it’s not about fads and the desperate clamouring for receding relevance in the face of media proliferation and BuzzFeed tests.
Rather than asking how they can operate at the speed of digital networks brands might benefit from using those networks to spread a considered deeply held set of beliefs.
Food has already been through this counter-revolution, with the slow food movement. Journalism having been commoditised by rolling news and infinite blogs, is now taking the hint. The best and most profitable journalism otherwise known as the Economist is subscription and weekly. Delayed Gratification is a meticulously researched. written and designed quarterly journal whose USP is that it brings you news from three months ago.
As the world speeds up, successful people are slowing down, using mindfulness and meditation to find the space in which to be creative. Wordsworth said great poetry should be “emotions recollected in tranquility”. Perhaps brand recall should come from the same calm place.
Chris Clarke is chief creative officer, international at DigitasLBi. He will be speaking at the DigitasLBi UK NewFront on Friday 16 October. Find out more here.