Brand Blindness: A tragic disease impacting the best brands in the world

With the advancing tide of social engagement sweeping through Madison Avenue, Main Street and Wall Street, there is a rise of a particularly destructive disease, Brand Blindness.  Brand Blindness occurs when brand blindly leverage these low cost, broad reach platforms to drive the wrong message to the wrong audience for the wrong offering.  I recently received an email from Samsung offering an enticing dorm bundle for their back to school promotion.  Given the ad, you would like I was a 19 year old college bound woman rather than an over forty male that hasn’t lived in a dorm for almost 20 years.

I’m sure you all have received posts like this and not just the endless spam for little blue pills, but ads from reputable Global 1000 companies that show how little they know of our habits, interest, or context.  When our daughters will just born, I bought a box of Pampers baby diapers from Amazon.com.  Price was good, usage at home was high, everyone wins, right?  Except for the next six years I got ads from Amazon for diapers.  Not bigger diapers, the same size diapers, for six years…

The brands are blind to context, blind to who we are and what it means to live our lives.  Most companies have spent millions trying to create recommendation engines that tell what offer retailers should shove in our face next, predictive analytics to determine which path through the maze of offers and coupons is mostly likely to get us to buy, endless scenarios of A-B testing, all devoid of context.  A-B testing does not help find C.  Recommendation engines are based on what others bought not what consumers enjoy.  And predictive analytics can only optimize the road most traveled.

This Brand Blindness hit AXE Body spray in a big way in early 2012.  They had just launched their unisex scent (odor) Anarchy with a huge ad splash, interactive web comic on YouTube, and met with one of the worst launches that year.  Argus Insights was doing a social campaign best practices project with Butler, Stern, Shine and Partners where AXE and Old Spice were one of the brand pairs we were studying.  AXE stuck in our study of over 10 brand pairs in that it had the highest percentage of negative mentions, including twitter memes like “Dear Axe Body Spray, Please put a suggested serving size on your bottle. Sincerely, Choking Girls Everywhere.”

AXE launched the Anarchy the way they had launched all of their other products, videos of attractive women losing it over hopeful young men just after drenching themselves in product.  Now, they were launching a product targeted at the 50% of the population missing from their sales but using an approach and brand story proven to annoy the target.  Blind as a bat with it’s ears plugged…

Brand Blindness is effecting us all.  We’re working on a cure at Argus Insights so that branding/product disasters like this do not continue to bleed resources from companies or drive increased distance between brands and their consumers.  Help is on the way.