What happens when brands cross the line

Brands must understand the category they belong to, failing which they face irrelevance

Cringe-worthy, insensitive, trivialising an important issue — these were just some of the criticisms that brought down a recent Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner and dealt a body blow to the brand’s image. What was it about this commercial that generated so much discussion? And what lay behind the apparent miscalculation by a brand whose advertising has long been hailed as effective?

It is not just a bad script or a wrong reading of prevailing popular sentiments, the root cause is deeper. It is a classic case of brand ‘over reach’. Marketers tend to over estimate a brand’s significance in the consumers’ lives, because despite the focus on the consumer right through the brand design process, from purpose to positioning to execution, not enough attention goes into the category-consumer intersection. To be truly mindful of the purpose of a brand and its relation to life at large, marketers first must understand the purpose of the category in which the brand intends to operate. Without understanding the true meaning of the category, in the social, cultural and personal context, a brand cannot hope to forge meaningful relationships with different stakeholders. 

Every category has an essence. A brand that is not only mindful of this category essence but also manages to harness it, can not only avoid the pitfalls of overreach and pretentiousness but can even use this appreciation to fuel its own unique growth path. The fundamental essence of colas or carbonated soft drinks is about sharing good times with friends. It is not about effecting social change or creating impact that lasts beyond the good times! To position a brand in this category as an enabler of anything more than good mood and happiness in the context of socialising, comes across as embarrassing pretence at best or insensitive at worst. This is not a moral judgement or a debate of whether a cola brand is superficial or not. It is simply about the fundamental fit of a brand with the meaning the category purports to hold for the society in that point of time. 

The Heineken ad aired shortly after the Pepsi one underscores the importance of a brand heeding the category essence. Here too the brand was tapping into the current zeitgeist of increasing polarisation among the body polity but the brand role in the advert was not just about leveraging closeness. It was capitalising on the ritual meaning of the beer category, a drink that mates or strangers can share to talk things over. 

Category essence is not immutable over time. As society and technology evolve, consumer habits and expectations change and slowly but surely the logic, that underpins the meaning a category has in our lives, can morph. Understanding this evolution can enable a brand to direct its innovation pipeline and/or reposition its meaning. 

In conclusion, marketers ignore the essence of categories their brands choose to play in at their own peril. Brands risk being dismissed as pretenders if they attempt to appropriate meanings much bigger than their category essence. Worse still, brands can render themselves increasingly irrelevant if they do not track the direction that the category river is taking over time. The result: a shipwreck of the proportions of Nokia, a brand which ignored the technology tide that had evolved to the point when connections meant not just connecting people to each other but connecting the individual to many and to the world, all through that one mobile device!  

The author is brand strategist and consultant with Healthy Marketing