Marketers don’t manufacture need. Brands are too primal and consumers too smart for that
A parable:
A young man walks into an ice cream store and asks the salesgirl, “Do you have flavour 32?”
She with the pony tail and the freckles and the charm bracelet on her wrist inquires softly “And what flavour is that?” to which he replies, “It’s just the 32nd flavour. It’s the one beyond the 31-derful flavours over at Baskin Robbins.” Reading the moment brilliantly, the ice-cream girl scoops up three arbitrary flavours of ice cream, dusts them with a teaspoon of coloured sprinkles and presents her arrangement to the young man who pays and happily leaves with his 32.
This story may not have happened down at the local ice cream store, but it happens every day in different ways, manifesting evidence of that insatiable vine of longing that wraps itself within each of us – an unconscious sense of lacking from which we desire something better, something more, something that may be a glimpse of an unnamed but perfect happiness.
It is a need that is by turns definite and infinite and it exists long before any of us is ever introduced to a BMW or an iPad, a Coke or a Bud, Mr. Clean or the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Nobody should ever convince us as brand-makers that we “manufacture need.” None of us is that smart or the consumer that malleable.
Our business is better understood as providing form and shape for a raw and undesignated primal yearning that foreshadows our work. We are always entangled with the secret life of the brands in our charge.
In my early copywriting career, I worked for a client whose brand of tea was the top-selling brand in the country. One day he received a remarkable letter. It came from a woman wanting to share how much her recently deceased mother loved the company’s tea and that her last will and testament specified she be buried with a box of the tea and her favourite tea pot. The writer went on to explain that her mother associated the tea with the eagerly anticipated Sundays on which her daughter and grandchildren came to visit. For her, the brand was a vitally precious link to her family in the declining years of her life.
Or course, this was a long way from the brand’s operative strategic platform. Even if our planners had come upon it, an insight such as this would have tread too hard on simple human fragility or asked them to stand too naked in their need.
There are times to accept that despite the attraction of a deeper relevance, it is wiser to leave a brand’s secret life undisturbed (as we did in this case), leaving the true and often touching aspects of a purchase decision well alone or at best, to the shared confession forums of Facebook.
It will sometimes happen that a brand will grant permission for its keepers to freely excavate its deepest resonance. A case in point is Justin Bieber’s intelligently named recent fragrance Girlfriend – an astute recognition of the yearning in his obsessed young female following, their bedrooms a poster gallery of their Justin dreams. Not generic, allusive or pseudo-cool the way most fragrances are named, but directly and unashamedly aware of its audience.
Judging by sales, none of the purchasers seems to be bothered that there are millions of girlfriends buying into the same proposition. So sweetly attuned is the brand’s connection point, that it generates a more than willing suspension of disbelief at the perfume counter.
We work in a world of Harleys living under tarps in suburban garages, never to see the open road. Fender Stratocasters that adorn the corner offices of Wall Street bankers, never to be played. Nike Fuel bands worn by the unathletic, Land Rovers driven by the unadventurous, collections of single-malt scotch in the liquour cabinets of those who never drink. All these and more, prompted by that unquenchable longing in those who bought them.
The path to market success will always have to cross the terrain of the human heart. Not only its well-lit highways, but also the barely illumined side roads that expose the secret lives of the brands we buy.
Ian Mirlin is a writer/thinker and founder of Zero Gravity Thinking
