Brand vitality in times of stress

Michael Hedges January 8, 2009 Follow on Twitter

In the convergence of economics and consumer behavior conventional wisdom holds that strong brands drive out weak ones as stressed consumers choose the known over the unknown. Comfort food is in. Peruvian-Thai fusion cuisine is out. Media brand managers need to adjust.

Typical recession behaviors might be compared to stews; lots of potatoes and beans to cover up the lack of meat. Plus, stews are warm. Salads, on the other hand, are cold. In recessions consumers gravitate toward warm and substantial media brands and away from new, different and experimental. What a difference from the good times before the hedge fund managers got caught and Gazprom cut off the gas.

Comfort media will not only survive in times of economic downturn, it will thrive. It isn’t simply that people gravitate toward ‘feel good’ content and avoid anything challenging. If anything, times of stress cause a bit of re-ordering. The public will demand of media high social currency. In times of stress nobody wants to feel disconnected and media brands that leverage a high social currency will be in demand.

For a large swath of traditional media this poses a problem. Newspapers – in the developed West – are rapidly losing the social currency on which they’ve leveraged loyal readers for subscriptions and ad revenue. TV channels and networks are losing social currency to the programs they distribute. Radio amassed social currency by approaching listeners as participants only to risk it all by replacing ‘voices’ with non-stop machine-driven music.  

And the winner is Facebook. Ignoring, for a minute, that social networking websites make no money, they have set the benchmark – for the public – for social currency. This capacity for interactivity – even if never used – harkens back to the very earliest media form; minstrels live theater and football games. Nothing beats the interactivity of cheers, applause or throwing rotten tomatoes.

The Web’s rapid rise as medium of choice for millions has led to new thinking about media and media brands. Current economics notwithstanding, the new thinking is all about amassing and satisfying users. Business models just get in the way.

The Web’s social currency also leverages another significant user benefit on the rise during times of stress: FREE. People will pay for what they need but those needs are reassessed in times of stress. Free newspapers are popular with folks riding the bus to work in the morning who have 15 minutes. Radio has always been perceived as free to access, license fee tax notwithstanding. Television is becoming less and less free. Cable fees, sat-card charges and the license fee tax add up. Satellite radio and TV via the mobile phone were dreamed up accountants not folks who understand consumers.

Even before the stress of current economics took hold of every breath, conventional wisdom among big media operators has held that consolidation in every possible dimension solves every possible branding issue. To be sure, consumer choice is based on fuzzy criteria, which only becomes fuzzier as the ‘shelf-space’ expands. But consumers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to make their choices rather independently of the media operators’ business models. Grant Goddard, one of the most astute and articulate analysts of UK media, recently posted on his blog (read it here) the most recent in a long string of branding errors, many likely to be fatal.

He writes:

“If I were to buy a grocery store in Dunstable, and then I buy a similar store in Luton, and suddenly hang an identical sign on the front of both of them that says “Global Supermarket”, it does not automatically put me in the same league as Tesco, Asda or Sainsbury. Surely, the way a local shop can thrive commercially is by striving to perfectly complement the offerings of the big supermarkets, not by trying to emulate them. As a consumer, if I want Asda, I will go to Asda. If I want Radio Two, I will go to Radio Two, not jumped-up, local-ish, quasi-national Heart FM.”

Fuzziness kills a brand faster than toxic content. A fuzzy brand has no social currency because consumers (listeners, viewers, readers, surfers) can’t make a relationship with its message. It doesn’t ‘feel good’ because consumers don’t feel anything.

When advertisers and sponsors are looking for media to connect better with consumers, that’s a hard sell. Media outlets that thrive – economic downturn and thereafter – put their consumers first in the business model. For the money part, hire better sales people. When times are tight, add beans not bean counters.