PODCASTS / E132
December 15, 2024
Red Bull. Geico. Dr. Squatch Soap. Liquid Death. These are not the only insurgent brands that used entertainment AS their marketing strategy. But they are well known examples.
These brands get enormous amounts of attention, because, they each took a unique approach to communicating via entertainment specific audiences.
Entertainment travels farther and louder than ‘advertising.’ Entertainment brings consumers back to categories they drifted away from or causes them to shift fast from competing brands with little ‘wow’ factor in modern media culture. Entertainment plants brand seeds in the minds of future consumers who actually reject you now.
Yet, even as examples of entertaining as the superior communications strategy mount and mount, most brands simply tout ‘attributes’ and highly rational reasons for purchase in their communications, including on social platforms where you have more cultural permission to get wild.
For many Phase 1 consumer brands set up by amateurs, their social posts seem like they were copied from their retailer sell sheets.
Will you, new person, tell your retailer to stock us?
Excuse me, do I work for you?
Um…
The desperate prioritization of retail purchase orders overtakes the basic logic of consumer marketing…which is to engage ordinary people.
Not only do most emerging consumer brands offer no entertainment, they have no hope of bringing this approach into their company either.
Why?
It’s not because of their category.
If you can make canned water or bar soap or shitty car insurance a site of cultural entertainment, you can do it for anything.
I think it really comes down to the internal culture of the company itself and what it prioritizes. And this is where we need to get brutally honest about median startup culture.
Brands that entertain focus on the end consumer above all else.
They are NOT ideological, even if they have a mission/purpose.
Their internal cultures tend to be fun as well, not church-like.
Not all of them even have a sacred mission at their core, but they do tend NOT to take themselves too seriously.
They are extroverted internally, not a great place for quiet academic types.
They devise entertainment that befits the cultural scope of their core products’ key outcomes.
Red Bull pioneered extreme athletic stunts as a nonstop attention getter to live out the key outcome of the energy drink.
With unusual amounts of capital to play with, they even created their own cable TV channel which has now morphed into an omni-platform streaming universe of crazy sh*t. All of this started from River Float contests they pioneered in Europe for the same entertaining reason.
Make the people happy, and they’ll remember who sponsored the fun.
Entertaining does not preclude having a strong product innovation either. But, you’ll use your innovation capabilities differently. As in the nonstop, LTO and media-partnered soap bars that Dr. Squatch keeps creating.
Expecting some wacky new bar is part of being a Dr. Squatch consumer at this point.
Brands that entertain embed creativity in their marketing departments from the top down, even if they outsource the work (like Geico). The founders and marketers in charge are natural storytellers.
AND they insist on making an intervention into popular culture through their brands. This may not be conscious, as it is for Mike Cessario, but I’ve found it palpable when I work with folks like this.
Even the former Bain consultants at Dr. Squatch have the gift of discernment.
Although Liquid Death’s founder, Mike Cessario, likes to tell us he deliberately chose bottled water, a category where more than half the volume is sold on the basis of price alone, so he could build an entertainment brand that happened to sell water.
To me, this is itself clever storytelling, most likely sprinkled with ex post facto rationalizing B.S.
Liquid Death launched, after all, at a premium price. Why? It uses Austrian mineral water (still!) at a great COGS.Why? And it uses aluminum cans as a design trick and statement designed to tap into a growing trend away from plastic…in a category that is part-for-whole emblematic of our modern plastic waste lifestyle. Why?
Why all this highly intentional product design, when he could have just branded some shitty, thin plastic bottles with a cheap wrapper?
Well, from the outside, it seems pretty clear that Mike was designing a lifestyle symbol whose tangible qualities were critical to the entire impact he was trying to have. And that lifestyle was a punk rock version of the modern, in-your-face bro culture.
The product design was critical, not just the gruesome cartoons that kicked off the first orders.
And lifestyle product design can absolutely command a modest price premium in today’s market.
I say all of this because, there is NO reason that a serious product innovator can not create a brand that entertains. It’s just really unlikely, because most founders are pretty serious innovators…and they’re not focused at all on anything as unserious as…entertainment.
This is ironic and unfortunate, because entertainment can also be serious and dramatic.
It does not have to be goofy, like Geico, or, “bro” like Dr. Squatch or “offensive punkass” like Liquid Death. Those are just entertainment options.
It probably does have to be humorous (or terrifying) in order to have real memorable impact on message-saturated consumers.
But it could also be Oscar-worthy dramatic…if your thing. Patagonia’s marketing is deadly serious and entertaining. For those who worship the natural world like me.
Any product line that is positioned as a lifestyle symbol can be the basis for a brand that entertains intensely. It could be a highly aspirational lifestyle. Who cares? But the brand has to have a focus on a tight consumer audience initially, one whose ‘vibe’ as Gen Z says extends well beyond its network…
And, to work, it probably will turn off lots of folks or misfire.
So, if category or innovation is not necessarily a barrier to brand-as-entertainment, why is it so rare?
Most marketers and founders aren’t actually that inclined to taking this kind of creative risk. They just want to make their invention relatively successful.
They’re focused on their product, not the end consumer.
That’s perhaps THE major reason. A lack of end consumer obsession and empathy.
And the internal culture is not focused on the end consumer either. It is focused on finance, business objectives, politics, B.S.
If you want a brand that entertains you have to be obsessed with an audience you imagine yourself entertaining. It’s kind of obvious.
This audience could be the result of some counterintuitive fan research. Dr. Squatch, for example, had a goofy Sasquatch brand identity for natural soap to appeal to young men like the founder for years before it broke out…but..the core audience was actually blue collar young men who wanted soap that cleaned better. And that offered manly scents, not ‘male scents’ designed by female marketers at Dove soap.
Look, Dr. Squatch was founded by a young MBA who was personally into cold-pressed natural soap. He switched the gender frame and made it fun. I’m not saying women aren’t fun, but switching the frame to younger men made it a lot easier to embrace a brand anchored in what their lead agency at the time calls “edutainment.”
But there’s no reason you can’t build an entertaining brand for ANY audience…it’s a matter of passionate focus on the consumer.
And most early-stage consumer brands aren’t that focused on the consumer.
They’re focused on their business model, profits, politics, bullshit basically.
You do not need a brand that entertains to Ride the Ramp.
But, it makes it vastly easier.
Yet, it’s not just a marketing team choice. It’s a choice that has to change your entire corporate culture.