Maslow and brands

Those among you who’ve been following this newsletter for a while know it’s more of a brainstorming exercise than a “grownup” marketing initiative. I often use these emails to chip away at rough concepts until they start to make sense—or until they fade away in the endless void of things that sound very exciting in my head but utterly idiotic when I spell them out loud.

So, when Phillip at Future Commerce told me he wanted to talk about cultural brands, something in my head went ‘click.’ Inspired by Liquid Death’s shenanigans, I had written about the concept before—and used very similar vocabulary to how Phillip ultimately approached the guide (see issue #15, Media x commerce, and issue #20, Rise of the cultural brand).

In The Cultural Footprint of Brands (if you missed it, now’s your chance to catch up!), Phillip further elaborated on some of these thoughts, establishing a more detailed taxonomy and offering some real-world case studies that validated my early thinking.

But like all good pieces, the guide also gave rise to a bunch of new questions, most of which I’m still thinking about. One question is, what does it look like to lean too heavily into one of the four brand archetypes it identifies? What are the consequences of doing that, and how quickly do they materialize?

Frankly, I don’t know if I have the perfect answer yet. But in the spirit of this newsletter, let’s try to answer that together—shall we?

First, let’s recap and expand on Future Commerce’s original piece.

The guide outlines four types of brands: Ingredient, Modernist, Generational, and Cultural. You can refer to the guide for their definitions. Below, I’m including some notes on how I have been thinking about them:

• Ingredient brands lean into product: they build and sell the best possible thing and care little about anything else. That’s why they are invisible to the consumer, even though they are often essential. See: Gore-Tex.
• Modernist brands lean into distribution: they find and exploit the best arbitrage opportunities. They don’t make money by making things but rather by moving things. See: most “pure-play” DTC brands.
• Generational brands lean into relevance: they capture and build their universe (product, communication, culture) around the zeitgeist. They are hip, cool, hot, “of the moment,” however you want to call them. See: Estrid.
• Cultural brands lean into purpose: they are not just influenced by the culture—they are the culture. They have large legacies to capitalize on, and yet they are constantly shifting and evolving with the times. They exist as a function of themselves. See: Nike (no link needed, I hope?).

Now, these are all powerful levers, but they must be balanced exceptionally well. Bad things happen when only one of them is executed, or when brands take them to an extreme and build their whole identity around them.

In fact, each lever corresponds to a very particular type of dysfunction, one that throws brands off balance and makes them much more vulnerable to external threats—or, in the worst-case scenario, completely negates their competitive advantage. Let’s take a look at each of them.

First of all, you can over-index on product. This is the “build a great product, and customers will come” strategy. It’s most often seen in tech startups, because technical founders would rather create things than sell them, but it’s not unheard of in the realm of retail and consumer brands.

AeroPress, born from the genius of serial inventor Alan Adler, is one such example: before being acquired by Tiny, the brand mostly relied on word-of-mouth. Tiny infused AeroPress (pun possibly intended) with a much-needed dose of thoughtfulness around marketing and distribution.

The danger in over-indexing on product is, hopefully, pretty obvious: despite what founders like to think, very few brands today can gain any meaningful traction through product quality alone. The reason is that most modern brands are just a fresh spin on an existing concept. It takes a significant marketing push to get consumers to discover, understand, and buy into the brand’s narrative and value proposition.

Secondly, you can over-index on distribution. If you’ve been in the DTC space for a while, you’ll be familiar with Casper’s debacle. Once one of the hottest startups in the space, Casper became a shell of itself once the industry realized that they were selling the same mattresses as everyone else, just with a much more profitable distribution model (back then, that is).

Unfortunately, this only works as long as your arbitrage game keeps you afloat. Once it goes away—which it inevitably does as the space gets saturated—you’re left with a pretty website and some less-than-flattering media coverage.

For Casper, as for most DTC brands of the first generation, the arbitrage strategy consisted of SEO-optimized landing pages, a heavy reliance on performance marketing, and free product returns. When BOFU-centric performance marketing became unsustainable, DTC became one of many sales channels, and consumers woke up to the reality of the product’s quality, Casper’s competitive advantage vanished.

Thirdly, you can over-index on relevance. By their very nature, certain brands are born and designed to capture a social, cultural, or political moment. They certainly find strength in their relevance, but at the same time, they could not (and should not) exist out of that context.

If relevance is all you have, chances are you’re building a brand that will crumble, or at the very least squeak, under the pressure of time. Similar to what happens with arbitrage opportunities, you will be at the constant mercy of category dynamics and consumer taste.

Victoria’s Secret might be a prime case study here. Their pivot from sexiness to inclusivity was a spectacular failure—one that alienated their established customers without doing anything to redefine the brand’s image. Ultimately, it resulted in a swift and embarrassing 180°.

Finally, you can over-index on purpose. There’s a fine line between standing for something and being out of touch with the laws of the Consumerverse, and every once in a while, a brand will fall on the wrong side of it.

Sometimes, this is the result of various washings gone wrong (see the previous point for an example). More often, though, these are genuine yet exaggerated attempts at infusing a consumer brand with a greater mission. This is how the purpose of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise became “fighting food waste,” or how Danone deprioritized growth for sustainability. Both strategies led to the ousting of the brands’ respective CEOs.

Purpose (which does not need to be related to ESG matters, necessarily) provides brands with a North Star, helps them stay relevant as the surrounding context evolves, and creates a long-lasting legacy. But for purpose to work, it needs to be activated in a way that resonates with the consumer—it can’t just be willed into existence.

To recap: to build a successful, long-lasting consumer brand, founders and executives need to work on all four levers—product, distribution, relevance, and purpose—and in this exact order, with few exceptions.

That’s why I’m referring to this as Maslow’s hierarchy of brand needs: just like self-fulfillment means very little if you’re not putting food on the table, the noblest brand purpose in the world is useless if it’s not relevant for the consumer, or if it’s not sustained by a thoughtful distribution strategy, or if the brand’s products are crap.

Orchestrating this dance requires an immense amount of attention, and it should be the CEO’s #1 priority at any respectable consumer company.

In the short term, a misstep translates into a loss of brand equity and shareholder interest.

In the long term, it may very well mean oblivion.