Catalyst

New generations.

New economies.

New expectations.

New normals.

New behaviors.

New movements.

New alliances.

Amid all this change, brands are struggling for relevance and resonance. In fact, most of the half a million brands that are on the market today were never built to withstand the daily tsunami of irresistible chaos.

The majority of today's brands were created during a time when media consumption was passive, shopping was done in person, and society still shared some common ground. Brands used to be fixed, contained within stable product categories, and constrained by strict executional guidelines.

Until recently, a brand manager's primary job was to create a colorful plumage around their products and craft messages that would 'sell people' with persuasive selling points. Back then, it was OK for brands to be thin—recognizable and trusted, certainly. But not really very useful to anyone.

Today, the dominance of thin brands is under threat from the daily barrage of disruptive newness. Thin brands have begun to lose their mojo as the digital revolution has made media interactive, shopping virtual, and modern culture chaotic and noisy, primarily because they were never originally designed to deliver anything of real value to people.

After two years of researching the decline of hundreds of brands, it’s clear that a great majority of these thin brands are still obsessed with promising value to people. It’s still what most advertising agencies think they’ve been hired to do. To borrow a phrase from NYU’s Prof. G, the advertising industrial complex is failing its brands. And, as a result, our bands are now failing us.

What's going on?

Most people don’t see thin brands as valuable in their lives. In fact, we can see this failure of thin brands everywhere:

Declining brand loyalty: According to a recent McKinsey report, customer churn rates have been increasing across many industries, indicating that consumers are becoming less inclined to prioritize brand loyalty in their purchasing decisions and have a reduced attachment to specific brands.
Increasing price sensitivity: According to Deloitte research, price was the most important factor in 90% of consumers' purchasing decisions, surpassing brand loyalty.
Private label growth: Private label brands, also known as store brands or generic brands, are gaining popularity. According to a study conducted by the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA), sales of private label brands will grow by 2.8% in 2020, outpacing the rate of growth of national brands.
Social media influence: Social media has transformed the way consumers engage with brands. Online platforms have given ordinary consumers a megaphone to share their opinions and experiences openly, shaping others' brand perceptions. Because of this transparency, brands are finding it more difficult to maintain brand value and control their image.

As the value of thin brands plummets for consumers, their value for businesses also wanes. According to our observations, the decline in brand perceived value is primarily due to the fact that brands are no longer the powerful growth engines that they once were.

It's become prohibitively expensive to buy enough attention to sustain interest in otherwise thin, boring brands. Making questionable claims about product quality and service superiority simply doesn't attract as many new customers as it used to. Even pouring money into paid search and influencer campaigns can’t keep thin brands off life support.

Thin brands can still grow, but only if you have enough money to keep pushing them with paid media. But unless you're Nike or a multinational packaged goods conglomerate, you won't have that kind of cash.

Here are some clear signs that your brand is too thin -

It’s just one of many players in the category

It has an undifferentiated offering

It’s customers cross-shop numerous other brands

It’s been experiencing low or no growth

It has low margins and needs to be constantly supported by promotions

It has a low share of search

It’s almost entirely dependent on advertising for growth

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a piece about the death of brands. It’s about the death of thin brands.

Thin brands promise value to people. Thick brands create value for them.

The strongest brands in the world don’t simply promise value to people but actually create value for them. Owners of thick brands wrap their products in layers of intelligence, inspiration, energy, and experiences that create tangible value for their customers.

Thick brands understand that modern life is becoming increasingly unpredictable for people. Which is why, when the shit hits the fan (which it inevitably always does), thick brands take steps to help their customers react, adapt, and evolve.

During COVID, big box retailers thickened up their brands by offering contactless payment and curb-side pickup. Drug stores strengthened their brands by providing customers with free virus testing and vaccinations. Leading beauty brands thickened their brands by distributing ‘how-to’ tutorials on social media.

Thick brands invest in frictionless digital interfaces that increase utility for customers.

Thick brands facilitate mutually beneficial value exchange by leveraging customers’ behavioral data in ways that enable them to navigate frictionlessly to the solutions they’re looking for.

Thick brands also enable people to customize their own solutions while also connecting them to creators, curators, and communities of passion.

How can you tell if your brand is thick?

It’s seen as genuinely unique and distinctive

It’s evokes positive emotions and inspires positive actions

It attracts interest from tastemakers in culture

It actively contributes to vibrant social conversations

It’s seen as a visionary leader in its industry

It gathers an energized and loyal fan base around it

It commands a price premium in its category

It involves its customers in innovation and content creation

It shows up for people where they live

It solves customers’ pain points but also their passion points

It helps customers express their identity

Here are a couple examples of how thick brands are investing in innovation and experiences to stay ahead of competitors and create meaningful interactions with customers.

Nike's Nike Run Club and Nike Training App provide users with guided runs, coaching tips, personalized challenges, and regularly updated audio content to keep things feeling fresh. These apps also seamlessly integrate with most major fitness tracking devices and social media platforms, creating a strong digital ecosystem that boosts the perception of the brand’s value for customers.

Starbucks mobile app allows customers to order ahead, pay digitally, and earn rewards. The app also incorporates features like personalized recommendations and the ability to locate nearby stores.

Amazon’s OneClick ordering enables personalized recommendations and fast delivery options and has completely revolutionized online shopping for all other e-commerce platforms.

Thin brands sell. Thick brands serve.

Thick brands are built to serve customers by:

Building meaning for people

Creating experiences and meaningful interactions

Facilitating a mutual value-exchange

Helping create lifelong relationships

Resonating in the culture that shapes people’s lives

Adjusting to changing times and to new challenges

Sephora’s Virtual Artist app uses AR technology to allow customers to try on makeup virtually. And its Beauty Insider program offers personalized product recommendations, exclusive offers, and a seamless online shopping experience, creating an engaging and personalized experience for customers.

Domino's Pizza's online ordering platform and mobile app provide real-time order tracking and customized pizza creation. Its AnyWare digital service enables customers to order pizza through a wide variety of digital platforms, such as smart TVs, smartwatches, and voice-activated devices.

Tesla’s vehicles feature advanced infotainment systems and over-the-air updates to install new features such as autonomous driving and advanced safety capabilities, ensuring that a customer’s vehicle is always state-of-the-art.

How to build a thick brand

The first step in building a thick brand is to define every marketing challenge in consumer terms. Or, more precisely, in human terms. And this means understanding the jobs that people want done but can’t find another brand to help with.

Functional Jobs - makes my life easier, cheaper and faster

Emotional Jobs - helps me to feel better about myself and the life I live

Communal Jobs - connects me to others who share my passions

Cultural Jobs - connects me to what’s interesting in the world around me

When we take on these important jobs, we don't just promise value to customers, we actually create value for them. And the more value we create for customers, the thicker it becomes and the more valuable it becomes to its owner.

A Thick Brand Playbook

Over the past five years, we’ve developed a simple, scalable, and replicable playbook for building thick brands.

Thick brands create value through a holistic system that harnesses four key forces: ethos, expression, experience, and energy.

Ethos: building thick brands starts with defining the ethos at the heart of the brand: the beliefs, aspirations, authority, and authenticity that underpin its value proposition and brand promise.

By embodying culturally resonant values, thick brands differentiate themselves, harness the zeitgeist, and catalyze customer evangelism. Patagonia, TOMS Shoes, and Ben & Jerry's are all classic thick-brands with a culturally resonant ethos at their core.

Fashion brand Telfar is a more contemporary example of a thick brand that’s currently catching the eye due to its unconventional ethos. Telfar is winning the hearts of a new generation of fashion fans who want premium products that are stylish, socially responsible, and affordable. Telfar’s stated mission is to bring accessibility, inclusivity, community, and sustainability to fashion, and that’s where the brand’s thickness originates.

Expression: the visual, verbal, and behavioral language that brings its ethos to life wherever a thick brand connects with consumers.

Olipop is a new-to-market soda with a whimsical, Wes Anderson-inspired design system that contributes greatly to increasing the brand's thickness. Olipop's brand expression appears to have struck a chord with the creators who evangelize the brand on TikTok. Influencers have praised the brand for its artful use of muted colors, playful typography, and pared-back graphics, pointing to these elements as a genuine expression of Olipop's claim to be a different kind of soda (albeit one that also makes delicious cocktails).

Experiences: the ecosystem of interfaces, products, and services that help customers extract the maximum value from every interaction with the brand

Chanel's Atelier Beauté in NYC's Soho neighborhood is a great example of a brand that’s deploying immersive experiences to create thickness. Taking cues from the hospitality industry rather than retail, guests are greeted by a host who helps them check-in online in the studio. Customers are welcome to stay as long as they want, trying out different cosmetic effects and experiences through self-guided interactive screens, real products, and makeup experts.

Energy: the conversations that the brand contributes to the wilder cultural discourse, beyond the claims it makes about product quality and category use-cases.

Mattel’s collaboration with Warner Bros. for the new Barbie movie is perhaps the best example of a company that’s thickening its brand through positive cultural energy. Each of the many Barbies that are featured in the upcoming film has a notable job or achievement, such as being president, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, or a diplomat, underscoring the brand’s belief that today’s young girls can and should aspire to play more important and influential roles in society.

A few last thoughts about thick brands

We've been thrilled with the enthusiasm with which our insights have been received since we began highlighting the scourge of thin brands among marketers. But we’ve also received some pushback from marketers about why ‘thin versus thick’ doesn’t apply to their particular brand.

Our brand competes in B2B category and our customers don’t care if we have an inspiring ethos or offer immersive experiences
Our brand health data shows that our brand is still seen as the leader in its category - thickening our brand would be an unnecessary waste of resources at this time
We could never persuade our CFO to give us a budget to invest in cultural energy campaigns; how would we even measure their effect?
Other people in our company, outside of marketing, are in-charge of experience innovation
Our customers are only interested in how we can save them time and money; they won’t get the value of a paid-membership program with value-added benefits
We’re only one brand in a huge conglomerate - we wouldn’t be able to operate by a different playbook to the other brands in our stable
We’re not Nike/Apple/Google

These reactions are all understandable; the thinking around thick brands is still relatively new. And while there’s a growing body of empirical support for our ideas coming from consultants like Forrester and from industry groups such as the IPA and the Cannes Effectiveness Awards, more rigorous analysis definitely needs to be done to prove out the ROI of thick brands.

But before we dismiss this thinking as too fringy, it's worth asking ourselves an obvious question. Since when were the most conservative and risk-averse people in business to be found in the marketing department? Is our thick brand thinking really such a radical departure from modern brand-building wisdom?

One only needs to look at how Glossier has been able to gain such huge popularity with Millennial women by reimagining the role of their customers as collaborators in the company's innovation efforts. Or how Away has single-handedly brought back a sense of adventure to the luggage category. Or how Chobani is outgrowing every other yogurt brand through a sincere commitment to social impact. Or even how Outdoor Voices actively encourages their customers to share their outdoor experiences as a way of promoting a more active lifestyle.

It’s been said that marketers are hard-coded to steal ideas that have worked elsewhere in culture. All we’re suggesting is that we open our minds to the idea that these highly successful thick brands might be onto something.

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We're Catalyst, and we bring together a lean but highly experienced team of anthropologists, culturalists, and brand strategists to crack the code that thick brands need to create real value for their customers.

Our work runs the full spectrum of brand innovation, from the creation of new brands to sparking growth in stagnant brands to the transformation of thin brands that are struggling to compete in today’s experience economy.

Our core artifacts include brand audits, audience personas, and customer journeys, as well as future-visioning, brand playbooks, ecosystems, and membership platforms.

With over three decades of experience advising CMOs, CXOs, and founders, we’re on a mission to rid the world of thin brands and fill it with thick ones.

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