What is a brand?
What do Democrats have to do with soda, burgers, rental cars, sportsball teams, or SaaS? Let's discuss.
Funny thing happened this week while I was at SEO Week.
I’m your assignment editor now.
While I was shuttling up and down Manhattan, this week I had the extreme pleasure of effectively giving a writing prompt to
. Here’s his original post:
And here’s my comment:
And here is his very thoughtful reply:
I think we’re largely in agreement on the prescription — that Democrats should stop trying to corral each other in (or out) of the party and find all the beautiful ways to be anti-Trump in a period in which Trump’s approvals continue to fall.
I think we probably agree that it doesn’t really matter whether the brand is damaged or non-existent, because the prescription is the same.
But then, I stop myself. Because I think it matters at least a little, especially if we’re going to keep talking about the Democratic brand. Let’s forget what condition the brand is in, for a moment, and consider what kind of brand it is.
I define brands as “a story we all know” about a product/service or company, or even a person, or an institution of some other kind. We may not all tell the story in exactly the same way, but when I hear you tell your version, I recognize it as the brand I know, too.
Using that definition, brands are becoming pretty thin on the ground. Many products or companies bear the aesthetic markers of a brand — they are branded — but we don’t all know the story. We can’t tell each other much about the “brand” beyond, “I saw it on Insta.”
True story: while we were on vacation a couple of months ago, a man at the next table was wearing cool shoes. My husband asked who made these shoes, and the guy said, “You know, I have to admit, I don’t even know, I just saw them on TikTok and they were like $20.”
That was the story. I still don’t know the name of “the brand”. And I haven’t seen them since. In my opinion, that’s not a brand.
But the other thing I encounter quite a bit from people who are not from the marketing world is a shorthand for understanding what brands are, which is way too limited for a good discussion.
The Most-Known Brands: Consumer Packaged Goods
Coke and Pepsi are, when you try to describe them, identical products. Brown, flavored, caffeinated fizzy water. They are identically priced, identically packaged (they come in the same sizes and shapes and packaging materials), and often sold side by side. You like one versus the other because of a combination of social reinforcement, habit, your own taste preferences — and marketing. This is the thing about consumer packaged goods in well-established markets. There is often little meaningful difference between brand A and brand B — except for the story you know. Historically, Coke has been about refreshment, happiness, and tasting good with everything; Pepsi is about value, long-lasting flavor, and youth. But they’re both so well known, when you enter a grocery store, you don’t even have to read the label anymore: blue can = Pepsi; red can = Coke.
Every so often Pepsi puts some budget into The Pepsi Challenge, which has been running since 1975.
They’re not the only brand to try a more pointed, obviously competitive approach. But notice the difference in these two iconic ads below:
The difference between those two ads — Wendy’s famous “Where’s the Beef?” ad (boosted sales 31% the chain said at the time), and the Avis “We Try Harder” campaign1 — and The Pepsi Challenge is that Wendy doesn’t name the competition, and neither does Avis.
In fact, it’s so unusual to call out a competitor by name, the audacity of it did lead to significant growth in market share for Pepsi through the 1970s and into the 1980s. This caused Coca-cola to panic and introduce New Coke, which was a disaster. Coke, for a moment, let Pepsi define its brand, and its brand suffered. It doesn’t do that anymore.
In consumer goods marketing, it’s far more common to see campaigns in the shape of “Named Brand v. Un-named ‘Leading’ Brand.” We leave to the consumers’ imagination what we mean when we say a detergent “gets your whites, whiter and your brights, brighter”. Whiter and brighter than what? Well, you know.
But there are other kinds of brands.
Brands with Fans: Media, Sports & Entertainment
The Yankees and the Mets are both brands. There are stories we all know about each team; there are stories about what it says about you to be a supporter of either team, and some of those stories are flattering, and some of those stories really aren’t. If you’re from New York and you’re into baseball, you probably have to pick a team. Are you a Yankee or a Met?
Some stories we all know about these teams are obvious: the Yankees are a very rich team, and they can often afford to buy the best talent. The Mets are an underdog team, and to love the Mets is to have a broken heart. If you’re a Mets fan you probably hate the Yankees. If you’re a Yankees fan, you probably make fun of the Mets. If you leave New York, you’ll probably still be a fan of your preferred team; even if you adopt your new home town’s team, you probably still root for your original team. And you also probably root for whatever team might be able to keep your enemy team out of the Series.
This is a brand that is grounded in fandom. Fandom is about people, experiences, stories, traditions. It’s something you experience with other people, and it is a part of your identity.
Here’s Wrexham FC fans singing a story about themselves (and their Chester neighbors), while wearing the colors of their team (I picked Wrexham because I’m a fan of the series “Welcome to Wrexham”):
You thought it was just Saas but it’s also a Brand
There are a million kinds of brands, but I want to call attention to one more brand type that likes to use contrast to other brands, implicitly and explicitly, as a marketing approach. And that’s B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) brands.
Here’s Salesforce talking about the competitive advantage of their agentic AI product Agentforce:
This ad works in multiple ways. You, the business decision maker, have competitors. You don’t want to be left behind by your competitor by not using Agentforce. And that means you don’t want to use a tool that isn’t Salesforce. To avoid losing to your competitors, don’t use one of Salesforce’s.
It’s extremely common in SaaS marketing to define the category in such a way that only you are in it. Some SaaS companies will write articles comparing their brand to others in the category; to appear to be fair, they’ll define their competition into very specific niche use cases or audiences — niches that you probably aren’t in. They’ll identify benchmark metrics, and pick the ones they outperform on, and then present their high scores. They’re defining the elements of success that define the category, and showing how much better they are. And while there are some true Salesforce enthusiasts out there, it’s not quite like being a fan of the same sports team your Dad grew up loving, or always reaching for the red can in the cooler.
So again, what kind of brand is a political party?
This is extremely hard to answer — but I’d love to puzzle it out with
about this if he’s up for it. There are (at least) three reasons why this is hard.Is the brand the party, or is the brand the candidate? Seen one way, the party is the brand, and the candidate is the product. The brand and the product aren’t the same thing — the product is an expression of the brand, a way to experience it. If the Democratic party is the brand, then you might want candidates (the products) to stay within brand guidelines. You can define those guidelines narrowly, or broadly, allowing for more or less product variation, more or fewer line extensions and flavors. To do this, whoever leads the party needs to decide what the brand guidelines are, and then enforce them.
Does what kind of brand it is depends on which consumers you ask? There are clearly voters for whom the two parties are parity products that aren’t meaningfully different, so they choose one out of habit unless the habit is interrupted. There are also clearly voters for whom the two parties are competing teams demanding fandom-level identification and loyalty. For other voters, they’ve let one party define the other one as not up to the task, or not really in the democracy category at all. And this is where we have to get back to an underlying question: is the party the brand, or is it the candidate in any given election?
How do candidates align with the ‘story we all know’? If you believe that the Democratic Party stands for people like you, but the candidate in your Congressional district running as Democrat is throwing people like you under the bus, that sends a signal to you about what Democrats are like, in the absence of a strong Democratic brand. It contradicts the story you knew. If you’re a progressive, AOC-loving voter living in Spanberger’s district, does Spanberger complaining about AOC make you more or less likely to vote for her? If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool, Slotkin-style centrist in New Jersey, are you going to vote for Ras Baraka in November if he wins the primary? A lot of this hinges on the story we all know about the party, and how much you identify with the brand, or allow the other side to define the choice.
Again, I don’t necessarily think the answer to the problem (which we still haven’t quite settled on: is the brand damaged or is it ill-defined) is different from “let a thousand flowers bloom”. In fact, that would be my recommendation if I were their brand strategist (if for no other reason than “we ain’t got time for that”).
But I think there are a lot of reasons to think that we should better define “the problem” (and how big or complicated a problem it is) before being certain about the solution.
Coda:
What does “let a thousand flowers bloom” even mean?
My sense when people say this is they simply mean something like, “just be yourselves.” That every Democrat in every race doesn’t need to say the same thing and believe in the same policies and use the same slogans. That the party is a “big tent” and rather than engaging in purity tests, we can just let Abigail Spanberger be Abigail Spanberger, and we can let AOC be AOC, and we can let Gretchen Whitmer do whatever this is:
And I guess we can let Gavin Newsom do whatever this is:
A funny thing, though.
“Let a thousand flowers bloom” is a misquotation of a line from Mao, which he in turn cribbed from other sources. The actual line begins, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”
The invitation to be open in criticism of the government, science, the arts, etc. was met with a lot of skepticism. But eventually Mao and the Party convinced people that criticism was not only encouraged it was expected. As people began to speak out, however, the Party could clearly feel the whole enterprise — designed to not create more diversity of thought but to consolidate opinion around the virtues of Mao’s version of socialism — had gone off the rails. Mao eventually referred to “poisonous weeds” among the “fragrant flowers”, and put out new guidelines for criticism, making it explicit the idea was to create consensus, agreement, conformity.
The phrase reminds me of the way people will say about a rogue cop, that he is just “one bad apple”. But one bad apple spoils the barrel - that’s the saying. My worry about letting a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend is that eventually, we’ll declare some flowers poisonous weeds and then the leaders2 begin the purge.
So maybe a more focused strategy is needed.
But I could be convinced otherwise! Brian - let’s figure this out.
Many people think the Avis campaign is about humility, but I disagree.
Which I imagine are the donors and consultants, but every time you try to find out who the culprits behind Democratic failure are you get the Spider-man Meme.
