Source: https://www.today.com/food/domino-s-funding-pothole-repair-protect-your-pizza-t130833

Brands aren’t heroes. They don’t wear tights and capes. They don’t rescue women and children from runaway trains. They don’t fight the good fight. People don’t line the streets and salute them as they parade by. Yet there exists a litany of essays and other industry commentary suggesting they are heroic, kind, just, and any other number of aspirational human traits. Brent Coker’s September article published by Harvard Business Review is the most recent I’ve read and will here serve as a proxy for critique. It represents fantasy at best and marketing malpractice at worst.

In the beginning

To begin, Coker’s summary states that “Brands can create meaningful awareness by embodying heroic qualities—acting as guardians against injustice, prioritizing others’ needs selflessly, and serving as mentors and role models,” and “As brands increasingly take on roles akin to social activists, their power and responsibility to contribute positively to society become paramount, shifting from traditional CSR to authentic societal betterment.”

The suggestion that people somehow anthropomorphize brands—that is, think of them as heroes, caregivers, activists, or any other number of human archetypes—isn’t a new idea. But it is one that’s pretty easily refuted by a review of existing commentary and scholarship.

Take for instance Les Binet and Sarah Carter’s observation that,

“Words like ‘love,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘loyalty’ litter social media briefs and brand plans. It’s not enough for people to buy our products: we want ‘relationships’ with them. A lot of this talk is metaphorical. But too many people take the relationship analogy literally. That’s not just nonsense. It’s dangerous nonsense.”

Another oft-cited observation from former Mars Global CMO Bruce McColl is that

“(M)ost people out there buying our brands don’t love us…(I)t’s hard enough to have relationships with real people…in your life; your family and friends. How much time do you have to really connect with them? To ask consumers on mass to have that kind of relationship with brands is one step too far.”

And Byron Sharp, who has produced some of the most influential marketing scholarship of the last two decades, has refuted the idea of taking too literally the idea of a brand being an actual hero, writing

Brands should be good corporate citizens, but the idea of turning them into saints is nuts. It’s also unimaginative. These are the sort of marketing campaigns that high school students come up with for their term papers. Showing the brand saving the world is sweet, but naive, and hardly original.

Arguably, there are people who work in marketing who actually do love brands and think about them as if they’re heroes; brands do, after all, pay the bills and put food on the table for some of us. But outside of the industry, nobody cares much or thinks much about the vast majority of brands. People don’t need their face wash, candy bar, or car to be their knight in shining armor. Both common sense and available research make this readily apparent. Unfortunately, what should be settled law in our field is instead willfully disregarded or ignored altogether.

Brand devotees

Certainly there are some brands that inspire devotion—and maybe even beliefs of heroism—among a subset of their most frequent buyers or those who wish they had the means to be buyers of out-of-reach luxury items. But these consumers are the exception to most of a brand’s buyers and represent little to no opportunity for meaningful business growth.

Binet and Carter noted that,

“Contrary to marketing’s relationship desires, most of us want brands to make our lives a bit easier. Then get out of the way. Few people want real, human relationships with brands. When they do, they’re usually seen as immature (teenagers obsessing over pop stars) or weird (people with Harley-Davisson tattoos).”

Further, Sharp has extensively written and spoken about the dangers of brands focusing their communication too narrowly on their most devoted fans and users, pointing out that growth lies largely in building mental availability among occasional users and non-brand category users.

Some context around those impressions numbers

As evidence of the power of brand-as-hero, Coker cited a Domino’s pizza campaign he described as a “runaway success” that received “more than 1 billion media impressions in its first eight months alone.”

Though 1 billion impressions is exponentially more than most brand-created social media content gets, it’s far less impressive in the context of Dominos’ overall marketing budget. The company’s 2023 Annual Report noted that, “Over the past five years, our U.S. franchise and Company-owned stores have invested an estimated $2.7 billion in national, co-operative and local advertising. Our international franchisees also invest significant amounts in advertising efforts in their markets.” At a $5 CPM, those billion impressions represent about $5 million of social media (Meta or YouTube) value—less than 1% of Dominos’ annual marketing spend. Viral heroic pothole videos are way sexier than a media plan full of paid ads, but publicity stunts simply won’t get the job done for a company that needs to reach nearly every US household at effective frequency most weeks of the year to remain salient.

But what about all those awards?

Coker wrote that he “studied more than 150 award-winning campaigns from the Cannes Lions (the preeminent marketing awards for “viral” marketing campaigns) between 2018 and 2023”…and “found that most of the winning campaigns followed a hero’s arc.”

It’s not surprising or insightful when the product-as-hero trope appears in a significant proportion of this group of ads because it would show up as a significant proportion of any group of sampled ads. After all, product-as-hero has been among the most-used narrative devices in advertisements throughout the industry’s history because it’s simple for audiences to understood and simple for creatives to write. With the proliferation of cause marketing campaigns in recent years, it’s only logical that brand heroes have been showing up frequently.

Sharp has been specifically critical of Cannes and its affinity for cause marketing in recent years. In comments from 2017, he asserted that such campaigns have enjoyed an unfair advantage with judges because practitioners have fallen in love with the idea that they’re contributing to the common good instead of just being common salespeople and even suggested that “festival organisers have allowed their awards to be corrupted – they need to fix this or the awards will lose their value.”

The problem(s) with cause marketing

And speaking of cause marketing (or purpose marketing or corporate social responsibility, or whatever we’re calling it this week), Coker cites an Edelman survey that reported “just 63% of consumers trust brands to do what is right, 46% say brands are not doing enough to address issues like climate change, yet 59% of consumers will pay more if the brand does good in the world.”

When given the opportunity to signal virtue on a survey, most consumers are enthusiastic to do so. But when taking the opportunity to purchase clothing, home goods, or any number of other items from socially responsible companies, they spend billions on fast fashion and throwaway decorations on Temu and Shein instead. Intelligent marketers pay attention to what consumers do, not what they say.

Marketing Week’s Mark Ritson highlighted the economic reality of focusing advertising investment on promoting purpose, noting

“You will recall the last decade of purpose wank had incorrectly portrayed every socio-cultural purpose as also being fiscally positive, claiming that not only are you doing the right thing, you will also make more money doing it…That’s total pants of course. For the most part, taking a stand for others, animals, the planet or any other socio-cultural cause is much more likely to cost you money than make it.”

In a cautionary tale of cause marketing, Coker highlighted Bud Light’s disastrous association with influencer Dylan Mulvaney but asserted that Bud Light’s marketing team failed not because it waded into a contentious social issue but because it “failed to stand up to transphobic bullying against (Dylan) Mulvaney” and that the brand’s “half-hearted approach failed to convey the full effort needed for hero status.”

Bud Light didn’t lose $1 billion in sales because it failed to be a hero. Its business suffered because it failed to understand its customers and stay disciplined enough not to chase flashy trends that were incapable of improving its core business to begin with.

So what’s a brand to do?

Marketing teams and their agencies must stop conflating the narrative tools used to develop advertising—including the brand-as-hero trope—with the ability of brands to be actual embodiments of human archetypes. Further, they need to remember the miniscule role that brands play in the lives of their users. Doing so may prevent them from foolishly operating from a brand-centric view of the universe.

Marketers need to focus on effectiveness principles—like consistency, owning a range of distinctive assets, arousing affect, and employing narrative structure, among others—when creating strategic communication campaigns. Employing such practices has been shown to reliably build memory of the brand and brand sales over time.

At the end of his article, Coker asserted that

 The distinction between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and branding is increasingly blurred. Brands, often equipped with resources and persuasive power surpassing those of many activist groups and even governments, are uniquely positioned to address social and environmental issues. Yet this power comes with a responsibility to act not out of self-interest, but with genuine intent to contribute positively to society. In other words: to be a hero.

This is, of course, nonsense. Corporations, even well-meaning ones, cannot invest the tremendous amount of capital necessary to fix large-scale environmental problems and can’t enact legislation to address social ones. Nor would their investors allow them to at the expense of delivering returns. Suggesting otherwise does little more than perpetuate the myths around corporate efficiency and effectiveness versus government inefficiency and incapability.

If companies actually want to contribute to environmental sustainability and social progress, perhaps they should just get out of government influence altogether and pay their taxes. By annually spending billions of dollars on lobbying to create loopholes for their harmful activities and avoid taxation, US companies (including the aforementioned Anheuser-Busch) have contributed to the rampant dysfunction of a political system that can’t carry out the will of the majority on social issues (e.g., 63% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all/most cases according to Pew; 64% strongly favor or favor laws and policies that protect transgender citizens from job, housing, and public space discrimination Pew) or pass laws that aim to protect the planet.

Your brand isn’t a hero. No amount of marketing speak is going to change that.

References

Binet, L., & Carter, S. (2018). How not to plan: 66 ways to screw it up. Leicester, UK: Matador.

Coker, B. (2024, September 11). Make your marketing a force for good. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2024/09/make-your-marketing-a-force-for-good

Mortiner, N. (2015, July 1). Mars global CMO: Expecting brand love ‘a step too far’ for consumers. The Drum. Retrieved from https://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/07/01/mars-global-cmo-expecting-brand-love-step-too-far-consumers

Pew Research Center. (2024). Public opinion on abortion. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/

Pew Research Center. (2022). Americans’ complex views on gender identity and transgender issues. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/

Ritson, M. (2024, July 17). Brand purpose doesn’t require a commercial excuse. Marketing Week. Retrieved from https://www.marketingweek.com/ritson-brand-purpose-commercial-excuse/

Sharp, B. (2017). No wonder marketers aren’t respected—even marketers hate marketers it seems. Retrieved from https://byronsharp.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/no-wonder-marketers-arent-respected-even-marketers-hate-marketers-it-seems/