Volume 004: Peloton & the McKinsey blues get dead personal.
1. 21st century Ryan Reynolds schools 1950’s Peloton.
Tl;dr: Ryan Reynolds & team are very good at this. Peloton isn’t, doesn’t understand its own brand.
Just when I thought the Peloton story had played out, Ryan Reynolds did this—a brilliant piece of rapid-response advertising. But the real story isn’t about no good, very bad ads and their responses, it’s that Peloton doesn’t understand its own brand, the same way Facebook, Uber, and so many other tech companies don’t understand theirs.
These are product companies, not marketing companies. They create great products, but they’re not very good at branding. They obsess over controlling the product experience, yet pay scant attention to the meaning people imbue the experience with. This is why they don’t understand it when people point out how ham-fisted their advertising is compared to their product. (Hint: telling people they misinterpreted your intentions isn’t a good look)
While short-term sales will likely go up as the criticism increases the reach and salience of the ad, the long-term prognosis for the brand is bad unless they can fix this problem. They need to become a more brand-aware culture, which starts with a more than cursory approach to understanding their customers.
2. Pantone kindly tells us the color to avoid next year.
Tl;dr: Boring blue is 2020 color of the year. Don’t do it.
After a brief three-year flirtation with bright, poppy colors, the color experts over at Pantone just named boring blue their color of the year for 2020. Unless you’re IBM, please don’t take this as branding advice.
Seriously. Specific colors become associated with specific brands. That’s why you’d be daft to launch a red cola to compete with Coke, a magenta cell network to compete with T-Mobile, or an orange travel site to compete with Kayak.
So, back to boring blue. A depressing number of brands are already blue. So if you want to fit in, go blue. If you don’t want anyone to notice you, go blue. And if you want people to mistake you for IBM, go blue.
But if you’d rather stand out, please use a different color.
3. Luxury brands for the CEO lose their luster.
Tl;dr: McKinsey & Goldman go greedy, risk much.
Over many years, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs elevated themselves to the rarefied status of luxury brands for the CEO. Carefully crafting a mystique of excellence, managing scarcity, and successfully embodying the adage that if you have to ask, you can’t afford them. Now they’re putting it all at risk in the pursuit of growth.
It might sound extreme, but there’s a chance McKinsey becomes the next Arthur Anderson if they don’t sort themselves out. After a decade of unprecedented growth, the scandals and legal problems are piling up. With discretion being McKinsey’s single most defining characteristic, they’re at considerable risk.
Goldman Sachs has a different problem. They’re commoditizing themselves chasing the retail frontier. As they’re beginning to find out, even with a DJ CEO, it’s very hard to stretch from exclusive advisor to the C-Suite to lender to the masses. At minimum they need a new brand architecture designed to sustain luxury status with the CEO while building a separate brand for the rest of us.
4. Personalized marketing is dead; it doesn’t realize it yet.
Tl;dr: The personalization promise isn’t paying off, marketers will probably get rid of it.
Last week, Gartner estimated that 80% of marketers will abandon marketing personalization over the next five years. Weaknesses in achieving meaningful ROI combined with the costs of gathering and accurately maintaining data mean marketers increasingly decide it’s simply not worth it.
Which is a big deal. For years, the promise of a “one-on-one” relationship attained holy grail like status among marketers. But like the holy grail, the benefits have proven elusive and consumers mostly didn’t want it anyway.
As Bob Hoffman recently pointed out, brands are not built in private. They rely upon a shared understanding and fame that personalization just can’t deliver.