The Great Brand Identity Crisis: Coming in 2022
If 2020 was a time when it became untenable for any marketer to avoid the deeply polarizing issues that upended life around the globe, from racial justice to sustainability to politics, 2021 forced a grand level of clarification about what a brand ultimately means.
Marketers felt the force of consumers’ explicit demands to take declarative stands on the issues they care about. Consumers’ identities were more tightly entwined with deep-seated political views. Brand affinity could no longer be driven by pure product preference. Everything from shampoo to coffee to car purchases reflected a deeper meaning.
There’s no going back for brands or consumers at this point; brand choice and personal choice are inseparable. In 2022, the challenges of communicating a brand’s value, identity and purpose will fully come to light as the shocks of the past two years settle into a “new normal.”
“There is no doubt that the role of the corporate brand took on new meaning in the past 18 months,” says Daniel Binns, CEO North America and global director of partnerships for Interbrand. “No longer could companies sit on the sidelines of social, political and cultural issues, and a broader set of stakeholders, from employees to customers to end users, demanded they speak up.”
With some companies wielding greater communications and monetary power than many sovereign nations, the expectations of their corporate behavior and contributions to the world have never been greater. It’s an uncomfortable place for even the largest brands. By definition, taking sides means leaving someone upset and on the outside—and brand stewards are loathe to accept even a single consumer’s rejection.
Meet the CMO+
In 2022, the evolving role of the CMO is something to watch. The “CMO+” phenomenon means that a brand’s marketing head will take on more responsibilities as C-suite roles converge. For decades, everyone from marketers to agencies to platforms has been calling for silos between sales channels to come down. Well, that can only happen when the person steering the brand’s messaging embodies that unified stance. “We’re increasingly seeing the CMO role morph into hybrid ‘chief marketing and communications officers,'” Heide Palermo, vp, head of community at Adweek and editor of Inside the Brand, has noted to me. Expect to witness more roles for chief marketing and customer experience officers as well. It’s a reflection of how marketing as a function is starting to own much more internally, from managing insights to product development.
It all demands a degree of authenticity in a brand’s voice, which many leaders have not honed sufficiently. That’s because brands have not spent the time to truly understand who they are and what they stand for in this much broader context.
“Welcome to the exploding world of ‘corporate purpose’—the why behind the what,” Binns says. “We saw hundreds of companies launch new purposes in this last year attempting to define their role in a massively changing world. Along with that came new aspects of their brand identity to signal the change to the outside world. But the struggle companies have is not defining their purpose, but living up to it.”
A new era of brand purpose
At the end of 2021, Facebook metamorphosed into Meta as it grappled with regulatory and consumer backlash amid continued controversy over its use of consumer data. Facebook, though, is truly an outlier whose experience has little relevance for most other brands.
The real test for brands can be found in the examples of comparatively less significant marketers. Take the divergent experiences of Motorola and Airbnb.
While sales of its smartphones have been on the rise, Motorola has found it difficult to lock in younger consumers who are open to alternatives to Samsung and Apple, which respectively represented 20.3% and 15% of smartphone sales in Q1 of 2021, according to research from Gartner. Motorola’s image is largely wrapped up in being the “low-cost alternative”—and affordability doesn’t stir hearts. Brand affinity requires signs of principles and purpose.
So, Motorola looked for subtle ways to bring a greater sense of emotional attachment, adding support for the pre-colonial Amazon languages of Kaingang and Nheengatu in Android 11 phones. It’s the kind of move that can open a minefield of reactions. It can be interpreted as an opportunistic co-opting of the sympathies of earnest people calling attention to the plight of those historically impacted by colonization. Potential backlash aside, such gestures could also fall flat in the face of indifference from most smartphone shoppers.
But if handled with subtlety, Motorola’s addition of Indigenous language accessibility can be reasonably viewed as a small, respectful appeal to people concerned with addressing global issues such as the deleterious effects of colonialism on native peoples. Motorola was careful to avoid appearing exploitative; there were no “too on the nose” portraits of tribal representatives with the company’s new Edge smartphones, for example.
Did it work? Too soon to tell. Wait for Q3 2022, when we’ll be able to compare this past year’s sales. After all, if brand purpose ultimately doesn’t deliver a tangible benefit, marketers might well go back to paying lip service to consumers’ larger interests. Igniting a spark in consumer attitudes takes more than a single branding campaign. If you see Motorola finding new ways to continue a conversation about support of Indigenous people, it might suggest that the way it communicates is finding some traction.
“Brand identity is consumer identity. Consumers are thinking even more about how brands are part of their identity. 2021 has shown us that it’s even more important than ever that brands really, really show up with a set of values and beliefs. Those values and beliefs are a magnet that draws them to people who share similar values and beliefs.”