This must be something very familiar to all consumers: brand advertising that claim to bring “joy” to our lives and makes us feel “confident” about ourselves by simply using their products.
This focus on the emotional benefits and building of emotional bond with the consumer felt novel when brands first adopted it – moving away from functional benefits only, into something more ‘touchy-feely’. But when every brand out there makes you feel “confident about yourself”, they risk falling into the functional/emotional benefit trap and become the same vague brand that wants to own the same emotional territory as many others.
Arguably, brands become iconic and have a cult status not only because they managed to differentiate and own one particular emotion before another, but also because these brands ride on cultural waves and trends and consumers truly identify with these brands to make them a success.
If we look at Apple, the most iconic brand to date I dare say, it is easy to believe that they are successful because they owned “cool” mindshare. But that would be naïve – many brands positioned themselves as cool long before Apple did. What Apple did differently was to position itself as the underdog against a homogeneous computing environment of IBMs (in the 80s) and Microsoft Windows (90s and early 00s). Apple rode the emerging wave of rebellion against big, faceless corporations, as the hippies moving out of college and into the working world.
Mini Cooper in the 21st century further extended a cult status associated with its predecessor. This is not a simple “re-launch a popular model of yesteryear and it will be a sure hit thing”. Looking cultural movements, the world is indeed going through a sort of nostalgia counterculture, and we see a new generation revisiting icons of the past.
Aside from riding this wave, Mini also understood that consumers in urban cities today feel like just another face in the crowd, where everybody else is a PMET (professional/manager/executive/technician), buys clothes from the same mass produced labels, listens to similar songs… and as humans, they want to be noticed, be seen and be different. Hence by allowing the consumer to customize and personalize their Mini, they are giving consumers the opportunity to show their personality, and be a distinct face in the crowd.
Apple and Mini Cooper do not try to capture emotional territories but carefully ride cultural trends that other brands do not yet see and understand. This is how some brands become cult, not by being yet another cool brand that “makes you happy and enables you to be confident and be yourself”, but by understanding the emerging culture of the day and branding themselves accordingly.
[first published on flamingosingapore.com]
