According to Harvard professor, Youngme Moon, hostile brands are “brands that play hard to get.” The antithesis of “feel good brands,” hostile brands defiantly demand a decision – love me or leave me.

Success through Alienation

It sounds risky, yet the number of successful brands that practice at least elements of hostile marketing is astonishing.

• Consider Harley Davidson and its not for everyone noisome bikes and in-your-face attitudes.
• Red Bull is unapologetic about its bad boy ingredients and underground marketing emphasizing extreme sports.

According to Moon, these brands, as well as MINI-Cooper, Marmite, Hollister, Benetton, and many others resemble the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” in that you are invited to go someplace else if you don’t like the way you’re treated. Today more brands are activating a hostile brand strategy.

• Lululemon is quirky and not afraid to show it. The firm deliberately plans for popular items to run short to ensure customers will buy at full prices. It also encourages store personel to eavesdrop on customers.
• Domino’s Pizza announced via an ad campaign it will say “No!” to customers who want to add or remove toppings from items in it artisan pizza line.

These brands are unashamed of their product shortcomings, often evasive with their distribution and likely to shun welcoming promotions in favor of “messages that are likely to repulse as much as they attract.” In the words of Moon:

“No matter the stratagem, hostile brands erect barriers to consumption, barriers that could in many ways be considered tests of our affiliation.”

If you’re inventing or transforming a brand, somewhere in the process you’ll be working with a Designer or Design Firm who will be tasked with bringing your “brand strategy” to life through sounds, words, pictures, physical environments and emotional experiences.

Brand Design is a highly specialized expertise. I prefer to think of brand design as the equivalent of a musical score around a film. One’s no good without the other. 

Brand Design still struggles to break free from its down stream “implementer” role in strategic brand development. Brand Designers are not typically seated at the strategy table early in the brand development process. Many marketers view brand design as the fun and gooey, superficial decoration part of the brand development process – something next on the to-do list after the research and positioning work is complete, the tagline has been written and now the logo needs a “treatment”.

Marketers (and those who cling to big data) are prone to view brand design more narrowly than they should. I would like to suggest the lens be opened to a much broader view of the significance of brand design to marketplace success.

For enlightened, savvy marketers of emerging, next generation brands this is not the case. There have been too many success stories in the marketplace to ignore the fact design is the last great differentiator, and brand design has contributed billions of dollars of market capitalization to those brand owners that “get it”.

Of all the various professional disciplines involved in strategic brand development, brand designers usually make the best brand strategists. Here’s why:

Great brands are about ideas and meanings not just products.

No one understands the power of ideas to transform perception and behaviors better than brand designers. Brand designers create the entire emotional relationship customers have with a brand. They are the choreographers of customer experience.  If you want your brand to matter, you’ll have to design the customer experience accordingly at every touch point. It’s not marketing and it’s not decoration, design is the difference between market leaders and market followers.

A while back, I talked to Chris Stutzman, VP, Principal Analyst
of the CMO Practice for Marketers and Agencies at Forrester. The company had
conducted a survey about how engagement with brands might be changing, and
Chris wanted to gather opinions on what the findings meant for the future of
brands.

Chris proposed that branding is the ongoing quest for relevance.
He suggested that the classic model of branding involved marketing activity to
create equity and drive willingness to buy, pay a premium or buy more, i.e. buy
a new line extension. Chris suggested that in the classic model of
marketing, equity is a function of relevance, differentiation, credibility and
projected leadership (he spoke mostly about share of mind).

He then suggested that Forrester’s research had identified a new
need, one I would describe as the need to “level up” in gaming parlance. Chris
suggested consumers are holding brands to a higher standard today. With lots of
good quality brands and plenty of copycats, people are spoilt for choice. So
brands need to create demand based on additional factors. He identified four:

1. Societal contribution, e.g. as detailed in Jim Stengel’s Grow.

2. Pride, e.g. not just a signal of status, but the feelings enjoyed by the user.
For example, one person I  spoke to
recently told me that they feel “righteous” when they drive their Toyota
Prius.

3. Special experience, e.g. Amex or Red Bull hosting exclusive events
for customers and consumers

4. Indispensable value, e.g. enhancing the value
of the offering to a “must have”. (He did not give an example, but I would
assume that the Apple ecosystem of iPod + iTunes would fit)

You can read more about Chris’s viewpoint here.
Subsequent to our conversation, a few more thoughts occurred to me as I
discussed these ideas with colleagues: