Modern Brands Play Offense.
How to apply the Amazon “Day One” philosophy to go long — and win.
Brands tend to operate out of fear of losing — losing market share; losing shelf space; losing customers. They play defense. Ask any incumbent or “legacy” brand, and they will likely be able to name a competitor that didn’t exist five years ago who is eating at their profits. Thanks to technology, it’s easier to enter a market than ever before; advertising is cheaper, retailers are looking for new options, and e-commerce is leveling the playing field. So what’s a legacy brand to do to win against brands that seem to be playing not only at another level, but a different game?
Good teams may wind up having a great season or two, but great organizations win way more over the long run.
This happens in business, too. People tend to conflate “brands” and “companies”. Brands are a company asset; and brands don’t make decisions, companies do. A brand can only be as healthy — or as modern — as the company is. Everyone — especially agencies — think they have brands figured out. But those solutions fall down when they actually have to be implemented by companies. We’re emerging from an era where leading brands and companies have been the same leading brands and companies for decades. But now, everyone is vulnerable.
These days, it seems the only thing constant is change. But instead of changing, most companies dig in their heels and spend valuable time, resources, energy, and money on preserving their status quo. As NYU Professor Clay Shirky famously says, “Institutions tend to preserve the problems that they are the solution for”. Brands’ natural reaction to adversity is to defend their turf. But what if the ground and ground rules are changing beneath them?
While a defensive position may ward off an oncoming charge from a competitor, it will generally not only fail as a growth strategy, but will likely portend a shrinking market share. Too often, brands feel obligated to play defense because they are threatened by upstarts in their category nipping at their heels and biting off chunks of shelf space. But new competitors don’t win because they are more aggressive, they gain ground because they are unencumbered by legacy ways of doing business, and are generally more nimble companies. It doesn’t make it any easier (or “more fair”) when some of these newer competitors are funded to grow market share, not profitability.
Newer, fast-growing brands have smaller organizations, and cultures where marketing and storytelling is baked into their culture. They know who they are, and they know who their customers really are. Larger, legacy organizations have trouble integrating marketing and storytelling into their culture, because their culture has become about hitting quarterly sales targets and projections, rather than focusing on the long game. They no longer know who they or their customers really are, only what their targets are.
Brands and companies of all types must be committed to evolving the way they do business to make change work for them; and the only way to truly grow in uncertain times is to play offense. Winning brands play offense. They own their future by preventing the future from being something that happens to them.
For modern brands, winning isn’t just about quarterly sales, it’s about category leadership. It isn’t just about capturing more market share, it’s about capturing and holding the market’s attention. It isn’t just about being first to market, it’s about being first to identify new markets. They excel at making the future an asset.
As Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2017 shareholder letter:
I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.
I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?
After spending 20+ years working with companies in many different business situations, I’ve narrowed down the key traits that companies (and their brands) must exhibit to thrive in these modern times.
Customer-Centricity
Most successful modern companies are relentlessly customer-centric and people-first. They think of their brands as user-experience (UX), which means the brand is the brand no matter where someone is on their decision journey, or where the advertising falls within the funnel. The website, the app, the confirmation email, the product, the customer support, everything is designed and optimized for the best possible experience — not for the shelf.
Bezos on this:
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you canbe technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessivecustomer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when theydon’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to inventon their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns outthey wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and doubledown when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.
Self-Awareness
Any brand’s aspiration should not be confused with actual perception. No matter how badly a brand wants to be seen as premium, if consumers don’t see it or its products that way, it will not succeed.
Products themselves, by nature, are not very differentiated. A brand’s role is now to not only provide differentiation in terms of look and feel, but also in terms of consumer experience. That may be what the brand ultimately is — a combination of their personality, and the experience of shopping for, acquiring, getting, and using its products.
All this talk about “authenticity” over the years has been misconstrued by brands, teaching them how to speak, when what companies really should have been learning is how to behave.
Brands are not who they say they are. They aren’t evenwho they are perceived to be. They are who their companies are, for better or worse. Brands can only be as good as their organizations empower them to be.
Hybridization & Diversification
Creative is media and media is creative. The only reason why they are handled by separate agencies is because that’s how the advertising industrial complex evolved, enabling holding companies to work with as many competing clients as possible. Modern brands know that the various ways people consume their media dictates how their message is delivered — not just where. The best advertising (like a good comedian) has as much to do with delivery as with its message.
But we live in an age where audience is a commodity. If you want to find a lot of female consumers between the ages of 25–34 with a household income of $100k+ and love to watch The Bachelor but only on DVR, you can. But it means increasingly leaning on the Facebook/Google duopoly for your media.
Any modern brand (and their respective company) should be busy building out their own proprietary data platforms, their own communications and media channels, and reducing their reliance on existing players, be they Facebook & Google, or any of the open media exchanges. If you know the value of your data, you know what you should be paying to reach new audiences and you can choose the best from what’s around, regardless of who is trying to sell it to you (even if it is Facebook or Google — or Amazon).
Receptivity
Modern brands & companies are open to their adjacent possibilities. This notion is explored in detail by Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, and by Jason Silva in this trippy video:
For example, even though Airbnb started out as a way to monetize people’s homes, their brand has evolved into one about the experiences you can unlock when you live like a local. Openness to that option has helped made Airbnb who they are. Most legacy brands would fear something that took them anywhere other than the status quo, but modern brands are always looking for the adjacent possible.
Dollar Shave Club, for example, was never just about the razors. From the beginning, founder Michael Dubin wanted to “own the bathroom”. Their expansion into other products was a result of planning to explore adjacent possibilities from day one; that’s how a “day 1 company” operates.
Speed
In the same shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos wrote:
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business — plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too.
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
The bigger the organizations are, the slower they move and the more primitively they behave, with every instinct geared towards self-preservation in the face of annihilation (or at least, disruption). Modern organizations — and hence, modern brands — move and learn fast. They are quick to recognize losses, but also quick to double-down on successes. They also know that when part of their business shrinks, it may be because it has to; which is why they should always be exploring their adjacent possibilities (see above).
The main takeaway here is that your brand can’t change unless your organization does. But change is hard. Unless your organization is willing to embrace the necessary steps required to change, your brands’ success will be artificially limited. The mentality you have on offense is very different than the one you have when you’re playing defense; you have swagger, you take more chances that pay off, the game slows down for you. As John Madden famously said, “the only thing the prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.” A brand that plays offense while its organization plays defense will be at odds with itself. But an organization that empowers its brands to play offense will be the kind of company that wins over the long run.
For as Herm Edwards famously said, “you play to win the game.”
Just remember, Herm also coached the Jets.
PS: As an example of all of this, check out how AirBnB, one of those “modern brands” is looking at the way it’s thinking thinking about advertising — and agencies.
