Control and success are not necessarily the same thing

Glenn Engler has been talking to a few of us about an interesting NY times article that also got the attention of other marketing blogs.  Its all about Scion missing its mark on targeting the youth market (average age of actual purchasers is more forty-something than twenty-something).

Reading this immediately made me think of Alex Wipperfurth's thesis in his excellent book Brand Hijack.

The reason I think this is relevant here is that Scion is, arguably, a brand that set out to be ‘hijacked’ by consumers. The way it turned out, they might have gotten hijacked by a group that was a little different from who they intended. While this might mean that they failed, this is not necessarily the case. Here is what Wipperfurth has to say about consumer targeting and brand hijacks:

Consumers of hijacked brands are looking for meaningful connections to the product. This connection is established through a common value system rather than a common demographic denominator, or even a psychographic one [my italics]. Consumers establish a community around a brand because they believe the brand believes in them. Marketers therefore need to humanize their targeting exercises. After all, you can’t collaborate with a statistic. You can’t co-create your brand with a “twenty-one to thirty-five year old suburban college educated professional”, but you can collaborate with a group of people that share a set of values.

Furthermore it is hard to define an audience for hijacked brands, especially through traditional segmentation techniques. Take the Coachella music festival for instance. How could you possibly segment that market? How does a sixteen year old raver kid fit into the same segment as the forty-year old music lover dying to see the pixies reunion one last time? Not by fitting them into any of our pre-existing “target audience” boxes. The lesson here: don’t define your audience, create them.

Obviously, not every brand will be a ‘hijacked brand’, but Scion almost certainly is (or at least, wants to be). Furthermore, all brands can learn from brands with a strong peer-to-peer dynamic behind them. I believe this stuff will be increasingly relevant to all brands, even big ‘scale’ brands.

My parting thought is this: imprecise demographic targeting may be a defining feature of a brand hijack. The marketer is not in control, s(he) is just a facilitator. As Wipperfurth says in his Brand Hijack Manifesto:

Let go of the fallacy that your brand belongs to you. It belongs to the market.

It does belong to the market. Marketers need to let go of the fallacy that they are in control. That means letting go of the myth that your simplifying constructs (such as demographic targeting) have their own reality. They are mental constructs, not reality and when reality does not conform to our constructs, it is our constructs which must change.

Comments

[Dino Cattaneo]

The Scion example is not by any chance a new phenomenon in the automotive industry. I remember from the case of the Mazda Miata, designed as a roadster for women, and ending up as the acceptable roadster for middle aged family men who wanted a second car (it was cheap enough to be affordable and not powerful enough to scare the wife).

[Simon Pearce]

Jeff, Aye, there's the rub! It's hard to convince people to change their ways. You need to give them a reason to do things differently, a reason to listen. I think it has to start with senior management, but often these issues are too 'granular' for senior management to get excited about. It's that old conundrum: feels tactical, so people ignore it, but in fact, it is strategic! A steady drumbeat of provocative, client-facing articles should help.

[Jeff Flemings]

I agree with this logic because I've seen its successful application in market.

The challenge is - this involves a profound shift in how marketers think about their brands (indeed, it references an even larger and scarier idea, surrendering control at work).

Clients will need to "buy" this in order for agencies to be able to do this kind of marketing - but how do we convince them?