‘Brands need to remember the power of creativity’: Vanella Jackson, Hall & Partners Global CEO
Continuing our ‘20 years of challenger brands’ retrospective, we talk to Vanella Jackson, Global CEO of Hall & Partners, to find out the ways the relationship between brand and consumer has changed in that time. Hall and Partners is a strategic brand consultancy powered by data and insight. Its clients include Uber, American Express, Barclays and British Airways.
How has the behaviour of the large and more established clients you work with changed from 20 years ago?
Today, even the more established brands we work with see themselves as challengers, and that’s really interesting. Everyone is facing the same challenges, aren’t they? Businesses are experiencing constant digital disruption, a need to reinvent their models, and a need to rebuild and connect with consumers in new ways. So, I would say all our clients are getting to a place where they’re needing to adopt more of a challenger mindset.
What does that mean in terms of how that mindset is forcing these established brands to behave?
They’re questioning everything that they may have taken for granted. They’re revisiting some of their assumptions. There was value in history, and now the shift is looking forward and thinking about reinvention and caring less about the past. Unless some of the traditional brands begin to adopt some of those new behaviours and new offerings, then consumers have some good choices with the competitors.
Do you think the speed at which a salient differentiated challenger can deposition the market leader has accelerated? Do you see any evidence of that in your work?
Yes, I think every major brand that we’re working with is paying much closer attention to competitors and how fast they’re innovating. I think every client conversation in the last year has called for closer monitoring of competitors, particularly the smaller new technology brands that are coming up because they have the ability to scale and bite them faster than they would have done in the past. And so, we are building into some of our monitoring early warning signs, ways of spotting new competitors coming up, and then also helping some of the major brands start to develop their own innovation pipeline faster as well. So, they are taking on some of those behaviours of some of those new competitors themselves.
And the question is, do they compete with the main brand? Or do you build new brands that compete more directly with some of those other smaller competitors? That’s something we’re increasingly being asked, and every bank is having that conversation at the moment. All the rules are changing, aren’t they? It used to be that young people will try something new, but now when a new piece of technology comes up, customers generally have become more fickle and more willing to experiment. Challenger brands and digital disruption are raising an expectation that there are always new and interesting products. And so, people are trying more. And the loyalty that we’ve historically thought about brands isn’t as sticky as it once was. We’re being educated to expect innovation all the time by all these brands.
“It’s a fantastic time to be in business if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, a challenger mindset. Change is exciting, isn’t it? ”
The other thing is that the quality of the customer experience is being taught by some of these challenger brands, and people are expecting it everywhere, across all their brand experiences. And that’s where some of these traditional brands are falling behind. So, increasingly we’re finding our customers’ demands are ahead of how fast some clients can respond. It’s a fantastic time to be in business if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, a challenger mindset. Change is exciting, isn’t it? There are huge opportunities for innovation. I think that the big question is what is the role for brand in that, and how is that changing? And what kinds of relationships people want with a brand. Because it isn’t just about the product service experience that can be delivered by the technology. It’s also shifting and changing in what actually is a meaningful relationship with the brand.
Do you think that people are becoming more shallow or more utilitarian in their relationship with the brand because a better experiential offer might be just around the corner?
I don’t, because I think great brands still win. But I think everybody’s getting picky about their own set of brands. So, they’re not universal brands in the same way. So, people might have a portfolio of brands that define them, that inspire them, that they feel a deeper connection with. We’ve been looking at it, and in terms of numbers, it’s around 20. That consumers are really close to and intimate with. Brands that really inspire individuals and express who they are. And that there are deeper relationships. So, when you say is the role of the brand becoming more utilitarian, I don’t think it’s that. I just think that there are deeper relationships with a smaller number of brands now.
In the 90s it seemed there was always one titanic challenger and one incumbent per category. Now it seems like there’s an incumbent and there are five challengers in each category. Is that true? Does your data show that actually there are more challengers per category than there used to be?
So, twenty years ago, you used to think about a market or a category with one dominant brand, the brand leader, and then lots of other brands in and around that. Today, I don’t think you can think about it like that. I don’t think the major brands can rest on their laurels. Because with such a swirl of change and so much coming through, I think everybody in a category needs to think and take on the challenger mindset. And there was more time to cushion a major brand, and for them to feel protected in some way because they’d built up all of this equity. But now, no one’s safe for very long. Brands have to work doubly hard and have to take on some of the behaviours of some of those new competitors emerging.
Why is that historical brand equity not working as well as it used to?
The relationship between brands and customers is changing. Twenty years ago, the brand was telling you everything that they were great about, and it was all about that value equation. But the balance of power has shifted, hasn’t it? And customers know more about what they want and what’s possible than some of these brands have been able to deliver and respond to.
What else has changed in terms of the business landscape for challenger brands over the last 20 years do you think?
There’s been a loss of creativity. Every client is in a race to offer more differentiation. They’re still looking to tell that story through their product and services. And whilst we all know that emotion is a primary driver of behaviour. We’ve seen the evidence. I think we’ve lost sight of the art of building that emotion in traditional advertising. That desire for creativity, for creativity’s sake. Which has value because it builds that emotional equity. I think data-driven decision-making, data-driven targeting and personalisation have led to a very execution-based approach to creativity that has meant that we’ve lost some of the value of big ideas. Every brand is bringing something new to the market and there’s constant news, I feel that how you rise above that noise is increasingly challenging. The power to inspire and connect emotionally needs to be revisited as something that challenger brands need to deliver.
What challenger do you most admire from the last 20 years?
I’m going to pick Airbnb because it just completely turns the hospitality model upside down. It democratises it and helps people become more adventurous in their life. It embraces hospitality, fun, travel, excitement. All the things that we love to do. It created real change, they have a wonderful vision and it’s a wonderful brand.
What are your three areas of opportunity for challengers over the next 4-5 years?
First, brands have to have more courage to stand out and be different. There’s so much more competition, and it’s coming on faster and faster. And every brand needs to find that edge that is their real difference, and be braver in terms of communicating that.
Second, I think when we look back over the last few years, creativity has slipped as a focus and as a way to differentiate. And I think we’ve become a little obsessed with the power to personalise through data and become too focused on the execution. And we’ve forgotten a little about the real power of creativity to genuinely lift people’s emotion and build real relationships. We’ve got to remember the power of creativity.
Finally, when I look at the brands that are really succeeding and the evidence that we see here, it’s the brands that are building really personal and intimate relationships with people. And they do that by inspiring them in some way. Connecting at an emotional level that really defines them. And I think brands, particularly challenger brands, need to be really clear about how they expect to inspire those audiences, and what qualifies them to help people define themselves.