Martin Heaton Martin Heaton

When Brands Go Imperial

What happens when brands are on top of the world and why it can’t last.

Elton John (1970-1975)

Stevie Wonder (1971-1980)

Madonna (1984-1989)

U2 (1987-1991)

Eminem (1999-2002)

Lady Gaga (2008-2011)

Drake (2011-2019? -Fucking forever?)


No, these aren’t wildly inaccurate and premature headstone inscriptions. These dates mark the “imperial phases” of some of the most influential pop icons of recent times. For those not familiar with the concept of an imperial phase, the term was coined by Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys (1987-1988), and describes the period during which an artist is at the absolute tip-top of his/her/their game, dominating culture and rewriting the creative agenda for their category. The flip side of it is, however, that the more the definitive the phase is, the more the artist dooms themselves to be forever measured against it. 

The idea of an imperial phase was laid out by pop music writer Tom Ewing in an excellent Pitchfork article from 2010 (I touched on this in another piece I recently wrote). He described three key identifying attributes:  command, permission, and self-definition. ‘Command’, in the sense of being in the zone, with complete mastery of the mode and medium. ‘Permission’, in the sense of genuine hunger from the public for what you are doing and desire for you to push boundaries. ‘Self-definition’, in that it creates a potentially restrictive and retrospective template for everything that comes afterwards. 

While the concept of the imperial phase is typically associated with a musical artist's career trajectory, I think it’s also a really interesting way to think about a brand’s transient existence within the broader arc of culture.  

If we buy the idea of a brand as a mental construct (I do, it is), then it stands to reason that their meaning and value are amorphous and always prone to flux. In a marketing industry so deeply in thrall to what’s happening RIGHT NOW, Keeping a brand at the forefront of people’s consciousness has become equivalent with keeping it at the leading/bleeding edge of culture. So often, we’re given the nigh-on impossible task of infusing a moribund brand and/or its ho-hum products with the kind of mojo that will see it surfing the zeitgeist indefinitely. But the problem with zeitgeist is that it’s innately ephemeral and fleeting. The reality is that even for brands that succeed in having an imperial phase, they usually only catch one big wave. Like all waves, it has a beginning, a middle, and an inevitable end. And like the ocean, culture is inconceivably massive and does not give one fuck about brands.

So what does a brand in its imperial phase look like?

Given that we’re talking about explicitly commercial entities, it seems instinctive that you’d look at commercial success in the form of market share, growth, stock price—pick your favourite business KPI—as evidence of an imperial phase. But I’d argue that commercial success is a result of being in an imperial phase, not the cause. In most cases (and certainly in the examples I’ll give below), rapid growth was a result of those imperial dynamics. And just like with musical artists, when its imperial phase came to a close, it’s not as though these brands suddenly stopped shifting product. They were/are still massively potent businesses. The question then, as the curtain comes down on the imperial phase, is what to do with its legacy.

The attributes suggested by Tom Ewing feel just as relevant for brands, albeit with a slight shift in emphasis. But—and as painful as it is for me as a strategist to futz with a tidy three-part framework—I think we need to add two more attributes to get the full picture of what an imperial phase for a brand looks like. 

  • Command: the imperial phase is typically announced by some culture-warping event (often a product launch) that forcibly sets the agenda for the category and imbues the brand with a disruptive creative swagger that sees it scoring a string of home runs.

  • Permission: more than just the bland notion of positive brand sentiment, there needs to be a certain hunger for what the brand might do next—and forgiveness (to an extent) if it doesn't quite hit the mark.

  • Gravity: brands in an imperial phase create a kind of cultural distortion field, sucking in everything around them. People want to be near them and bask in their aura. Other (less heretical) brands become more like them in order to remain relevant.

  • Legs: an imperial phase requires sustained creativity. I’m not saying it’s a marathon (see Coca-Cola below), but one-hit wonders don’t count, no matter how big the hit is. It’s how you consistently change the game over time that counts. 

  • Self-definition: the imperial phase represents a brand at its most daring, vivacious, and cool. And while it may go on to rake in boatloads of cash and crush its competition, it will forever yearn to go back to that heady time when it wasn’t just writing its own story, but the world’s too.

Before I dive into some examples, a quick note. Defining when a brand’s imperial phase started and ended—or if indeed it ever had one—is not an exact science. There’s an element of the “you know it when you see it” about it, but then that’s half the fun of it.  These are just a handful of examples. There are probably hundreds. But probably not thousands. And if they seem a bit obvious, that’s sort of the point.



NASA (1958-1972)

Starting with a wildcard, but hear me out. In an era in which it felt like the US was in an existential battle for the rights to the future, it’s hard to overestimate the level of public interest and support NASA had from the general public—reflected by the fact that at its mid-60s peak, NASA’s budget consumed a whopping 4% of the federal budget. NASA was immensely powerful PR for American exceptionalism. No-one (probably) called it a “brand” at the time, but great diligence was put into culturally anchoring its (literal) product launches with some of the most powerful visual (meatball logo, US flag planted on the lunar surface) and verbal (“One small step…”) signifiers of all time.

  • Project Mercury (1958-1963): Huge pressure to regain the initiative form the Soviet Union, culminated in John Glenn’s successful orbital flight, Mercury made NASA and it’s astronaut’s household names.

  • Project Gemini (1961-1966): Carrying on the momentum for Mercury, iconic milestones included the first human spacewalk.

  • Apollo program (1961-1972): The pinnacle of NASA’s imperial phase, this is where NASA claimed the moon for America and established some of the most enduring cultural icons in history.



SONY (1979-early 2000s)

From the late 70s and into the early 2000s, Sony racked up a string of bona fide technological innovations that changed the way in which we created and consumed creative content and took industrial design for consumer products to the next level. Their taglines during that period (The One and Only (1979–1982), It's a Sony (1981–2005)) have a level of swagger that’s not only fitting for a company in its imperial pomp, but that’s also missing from the vague and insecure self help-lite sloganeering of today’s electronics industry (“Imagine the possibilities”, “Empowering us all”, “Different is Better”).

  • Walkman (1979): You can listen to music while walking around? WHAT? There’s no iPod without it.

  • Camcorder (1980s): with the Handycam series, brought the creation and sharing of moving pictures to the masses. There’s no YouTube without it. 

  • Playstation (1994): introduced the idea of gaming for adults. Both its games and their marketing felt like an extension of club culture, with a trippy, kinetic sensibility that pitched gaming to the cool kids, and not just children and nerds.



APPLE (2001-2011)

The only real debate here is when the imperial  phase begins and ends. Does it kick off with the introduction of the iMac? Or does it start with the iPhone? Or the iPod? I’ve heard compelling arguments for all three, but I’m going for the latter. While the iMac introduced the idea of a computer having personality, it was still just a desktop dressed like a candy raver. The iPhone changed the way we live, forever, and spawned the whole ecosystem of products and experiences from which Apple has been sucking the marrow ever since. But the iPod changed our sense of what a small device could be capable of, and paved the way for what was to come. A less seismic start, perhaps, but this is one imperial phase that began with a slower burn. Sadly ended with Steve Jobs’s death.

  • iPod (2001): “1,000 songs in your pocket.” There had been other portable mp3 players, but nothing like this. The perfect fusion of product and marketing and the seed that would bloom into the iPhone.

  • Apple Store (2001): The spatial manifestation of the Apple ethos. Changed the retail environment from a place to buy stuff to a place to experience the brand. (Partly) responsible for the tastefully anaemic aesthetic that has pretty much taken over the world.

  • iPhone (2007): Still the mobile-everything-device that every other mobile-everything-device wants to be.

  • App store (2008): The ecosystem superego to iPhone’s product ego. Discuss.

  • iPad (2010): In retrospect, the sort of wacky idea that you can only pull off in the height of an imperial phase. Done with any less aplomb and goodwill, and you end up with a Zune or Fire Phone.



“But what about…?” I hear you grumble. Time for a quick-fire “did they or did they not have an imperial phase” round:


GOOGLE: Yes.

Google search may be a raging shitshow these days, and the company as a whole is (ironically) in search of an identity (idea: try asking Chat GPT), but there was a time in the 2000s when Google was so good at not being evil that it could do no wrong. Between Search, Gmail, Maps, Apps, Google had built up such a powerful store of goodwill, we could even afford to overlook Google+, arguably the first signs of the sub-dermal insecurity that lurks beneath the skin of almost every tech company. The flipside of that mojo, of course, is hubris, AKA Google Glass. 


FACEBOOK: No.

Yes, they changed the world in a way that felt kind of novel and fun at first—there was a brief time when we were down to play the game, mashing those like and updating our status like the stock market depended on it. But once the core product was out, everything else just felt like interminable tweaking and tinkering—ultimately and inexorably for the worse. While there was (and is) no shortage of people who used Facebook, I’m not convinced that (outside of the greater silicon valley bubble) anyone was ever really that excited about what they might do next—there was never that myspace-level of affection for the brand. Instagram and Whatsapp were smart acquisitions of game-changing platforms, but you can’t buy yourself an imperial phase.


PIXAR: Yes

With Toy Story, Pixar introduced the idea that computer generated animation could have soul. Their product raised the bar for what we thought was possible with pixels, and their culture raised the bar for the business of creativity. But more than that, I’d argue that their lasting innovation—the cultural gravity well that’s the hallmark of an imperial phase—is their perfection of the double-duty story: emotional narratives that speak to kids as effectively as they do to adults, without ever boring or patronising either. I’m going to call their run from Toy Story in 1995 to Wall-E in 2008 their imperial phase—an incredible (wink, wink) run of self-defining creative excellence that they have only sporadically matched since.  


DISNEY: Maybe.

Disney is a bit like Coca-Cola, in that it has been around so long, and been so consistent in the packaging and delivery of its values, that it almost disqualifies itself. For sure, it draws heavily upon Uncle Walt’s folksy fantasy of ersatz Americana, but I’d argue that it’s so successful because it doesn’t let itself be defined by only that. Take a stroll around Disneyland/California Adventure, and you soon realize that it’s as much a museum dedicated to its multiple “golden” eras as anything else. They all coexist as a kind of magpied mythical hotchpotch, threaded together with a vague notion of storytelling or happiness or whatever, all made to work together with brutally exacting executional chops. 

But if you’re twisting my arm, I’d probably go for “renaissance era” Disney (1989-1999).


NIKE: Yes.

Identifying a start date is fairly straightforward here: the signing of Michael Jordan and the creation of the Air Jordan line in 1984. Nike was a success, but it wasn't cool. Adidas was, but more by accident than as a result of any real marketing or product masterstroke. Air Jordan’s blending of performance and style created a global cultural phenomenon that set the template for the relationship between sports, commerce, and culture that still holds today. Fast forward to 1987 and you have the introduction of Air Max. The iconic air bubble’s effectiveness as performance enhancing technology is questionable, but it made streetwear feel like the fucking future and popularized the idea that shoes could have sequels—a lineage that’s still going strong today. And then a year later in 1988, Nike introduced the finest tagline ever inspired by a serial killer’s final words: “Just do it”. You can decide where the imperial phase ends after that, but that's a pretty epic four year run.


ADIDAS: No.

Don’t get me wrong. You’ll find significantly more trefoils than swooshes in my wardrobe. But you’d be hard pressed to identify any specific period in Adidas’s history that fulfills the criteria for an imperial phase. What’s ironic is that their whole “originals” sub-brand defines itself by a semi-mythical time when Adidas ruled the streets. And rule the streets they surely did, at least before Michael Jordan put on the shoe. But that phenomenon was none of their doing. They may have been the first sneaker company to sponsor a musical act, but when 40,000 people start waving their shell toes in the air and singing “My Adidas” at you Square Garden, you just go where the energy already is. 



COCA-COLA: No.

I’m tempted to give Coke an imperial phase, if for nothing else for the zany bravado of putting cocaine in a soda and marketing it as a “temperance drink”.  Add to that their business side innovations in bottling and franchising, remarkably consistent and iconic visual identity, equally iconic bottle, refining the visual language of Santa Claus, gloriously insidious appropriation of the counterculture… and you’ve got a strong case. The problem is, this all happened over a period of a hundred years or so. There’s a reason they’re one of the most valuable brands the world has ever seen. But the problem, ironically, is that they are perhaps too consistent. There’s no one period of innovation that defines them. They’re just sort of there, being good old dependable Coke. Not taking risks (at least not intentionally), with no-one wanting or expecting them to take them. That’s good business, but it’s not imperial.



ANY CAR COMPANIES: mostly no, except for TESLA.

For all of their blather about innovation and the like, the truth of the matter is that cars don’t really change that much, and when they do, they’re really just tweaks to what’s already out there. Game-changing innovation is rare. You could make the case for Ford in the early 1900s for innovation in manufacturing and bringing car ownership to the masses, but it’s hard to know how people felt about Ford as a brand. You could also make a less compelling case for General Motors in the 50s and 60s, as they expanded their line up with whizzy new models—all packed with the latest gadgetry—for every taste and wallet. 

And then there’s Tesla. 

While Toyota broke the ice for hybrid vehicles with the Prius, they still came equipped with the dual stigma of smug liberal elitism and being lame to drive. Tesla flipped that on its head. Yes, they’re not exactly the Model T of EVs when it comes to affordability, but they made them into objects of desire that practically sell themselves. People are genuinely excited to see what they do next (as opposed to the way in which people are genuinely terrified to see what their founder does next). 


McDONALD’S: No.

See Coca-Cola.


BURGER KING: No.

Gimmicks don’t get you an imperial phase. It needs to be more than marketing.


SAMSUNG: No.

Reliable. Competent. Massive. The Coldplay of electronics companies. Lots of people like Coldplay. They never had an imperial phase either.


TIKTOK: No. 

Do something notably different and successful and we’ll revisit. If it still exists in a year’s time.



Some final thoughts:

Imperial phases are like fires. To sustain them, product and marketing need to work in unison. Product lights the spark. Marketing fans the flames. Product adds more fuel. Marketing keeps fanning. Repeat until the oxygen is all used up. They catch quickly and (barring some kind of exceptional intervention) burn out slowly—it’s usually a lot easier to identify when an imperial phase starts than when exactly it ends.

The reality is that a brand’s cultural capital will always dissipate, and there’s generally very little its stewards can do about it. I mean, if Stevie Wonder or Prince couldn’t keep crushing it for more than ten years at a stretch, what hope does even the creme-de-la-creme of marketers have?

But then, does that even matter? There’s nothing to say that long-term success is dependent on having an imperial phase—in fact, it can be quite the double-edged sword. Coke, McDonald’s, Samsung—they’re all doing fine without ever having had one. 

Brands like Nike and Apple, have done a remarkable job of sustaining the legacy of their imperial phases, remaining classy and relevant. On the other hand, there’s more than a hint of Norma Desmond to Elon Musk’s (or to an extent Mark Zuckerburg’s) chafing at the loss of creative license and cool-kid cachet that comes with the passing of an imperial phase, real or imagined. For those that do get their handful of years in the sun, the choice in the end is to either be guided by its light, or sit in its shadow.

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Martin Heaton Martin Heaton

This is Your Brain on Brands

Some thoughts on branding and machine learning that aren’t about an imminent apocalypse, creative or otherwise.

Some thoughts on branding and machine learning that aren’t about an imminent apocalypse, creative or otherwise.

TL;DR: While much of the AI conversation revolves on what it can make and how that might elevate/devastate the creative industries, there’s a lot we can learn from how it learns. Not only can we apply the principles of reinforcement learning to shape people’s expectations of how a brand works, we can also tap into the neurophysiological processes that underpin the act of learning — and the mechanisms behind happiness itself.

1. GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

“If your kid needs a role model and you ain’t it, you’re both fucked.”

― George Carlin

It has been quite the few months in AI. We’ve gone from “OMG, this dufus thinks a computer is alive” to “OMG, a computer is legit trying to destroy this guy’s marriage” quicker than you can look up a stock quote for the Tyrell Corporation.

Among sentient members of the marketing industry, most of the discussion/handwringing has revolved around AI’s potential impacts on how we ideate, create, and continue to pick up a paycheck. In other words, the consequences of what it makes. This is unsurprising — as a creative/knowledge industry, we’re defined by our output. While we put on a brave face and make nice with the robots in case they’re listening, the barely-sub-subtext is the existential threat to our livelihoods and sense of self-worth. And even though the perennially insecure ad industry has a track record of getting worked into a lather about whatever the technological fad du jour is, nobody ever worried that an NFT might make them destitute (although if it did, sympathy is in short supply).

What we tend to talk about less is the part that comes before AI makes anything: how it learns.

This is also not surprising. Machine learning paradigms are kind of technical and a bit abstract. Unless things go seriously off the rails, we tend to leave the question of what goes into the machines to the scientists and engineers. But when those decisions bubble up as a toxic runoff of sexist or racist bias, it becomes painfully clear that the question of how and what we should teach the machines is as much a welfare check on society as anything else.

Ensuring that AI acts in our best interests — the “alignment problem” that gives Brian Christian’s excellent book its title, and which happens to be the inspiration behind these musings — is central to the development of AI systems that are not just highly effective, but safe. “Safe”, as in “won’t cause the end of civilization as we know it”. As Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI puts it, “AI systems are becoming a part of everyday life. The key is to ensure that these machines are aligned with human intentions and values.”

At a high level, marketing is also fundamentally an alignment problem: getting consumers to believe that their best interests are aligned with a business’s best interests. The nature of the beast means that that will never truly be the case, but as ethical capitalists, we do our best to close the gap as responsibly as possible by using people’s interests as the anchor and adjusting towards them, rather than the other way around. But this isn’t a critique of the ethics of post-industrial capitalism.

I want to explore how the same techniques we use to address the alignment problem in AI systems can also be used to address the alignment problem for brands. And the reasons why, as we’ll see, could not be more human.

2. THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER

Before I dive in and inevitably annoy the AI/ML community with my tenuous grasp of machine learning principles, a disclaimer: I am not an expert, nor do I make any claim for the empirical veracity of these thoughts. I just think they’re an interesting analogy for the task of building more valuable and sustainable brands. “All models are wrong, etc.”, apologies in advance.

There are multiple paradigms for machine learning, each of which has their own advantages and disadvantages that make them more or less suitable for different AI systems, depending on what they’re designed to do. I’m going to focus on one of them: reinforcement learning.

For those not familiar with the concept, I’ll start with a simple definition. Reinforcement learning is a form of machine learning in which an agent (the thing you need to do a thing) takes actions in a specific environment in order to maximize its rewards over time.

There are four key components to reinforcement learning:

  1. Agent: the AI that you’re training to achieve a specific goal.

  2. Environment: the space in which the agent performs its action.

  3. Action: the thing that the agent does that creates a change in its environment.

  4. Reward: positive or negative feedback on how successful the action was.

The outcome of this is the value function — an expectation of what is most likely to happen in a given situation — and the policy — the set of rules that dictate what the agent does the next time it finds itself in a similar situation with a similar goal, based on the value function.

Here’s a simple example to get a sense of how it works in practice:

  1. Agent: a robot learning how to kick a ball and score a goal.

  2. Environment: the goal and the area in front of it.

  3. Action: all the different ways of kicking the ball towards the goal.

  4. Reward: positive when the robot scores. Negative when it misses.

As a result, the robot (or at least the program controlling it) assigns a value function to the most advantageous way to kick the ball, and a policy for how it kicks the ball.

This is similar to how humans also learn — not unlike when I take my six year old son to the park for a kickabout. He has learned from trial and error (action and reward) that punting the ball wildly results in a goal much less often than choosing a spot and sweeping it calmly into the back of the net. He has, however, also learned that smacking the ball into the bushes also results in dad having to run a lot, which is hilarious (high value function), and so his policy decision rather depends on whether his objective is to laugh at dad or get an ice cream.

So what does this all have to do with how we “learn” brands?

Think of it like this:

A person wants to do something: wash their clothes, book a vacation, look cool — typically some combination of rational and emotional goals. This is our agent. They are not entirely autonomous, because we want them to achieve that goal in a way that’s as beneficial to us, the brand, as it is to them (if not more so) — the “alignment problem” mentioned earlier. Therefore we create a brand environment that’s full of ways in which to interact with our brand — an ad, a website, social media, an ecomm flow, the helpdesk — and is designed to influence their behaviour. Each interaction — or action — is an opportunity for our agent to learn about our brand. Positive interactions teach that our brand is helpful, simple, playful, kind, daring — whatever value our brand idea is based on. This is our value function. Negative interactions teach the opposite. As a result, we form a policy about how we will interact with it. Believe what it says or not. Buy something from it or not. Use its social capital in order to burnish our own status. In other words, these actions within the brand environment cumulatively shape our expectations, and expectations are key. The value and meaning of a brand is the sum of expectations that people have of it. The artifacts that you put into your brand space (visual, linguistic, experiential) aren’t the brand. They are ways to anchor and influence expectations of the brand. As Marty Neumeier puts it, “A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

When you create any kind of brand artifact, you are essentially creating a way to teach someone about your brand. You can do it well, or you can do it poorly, but in the end, the perception of your brand arises from the accumulation of these interactions. In designing these interactions, you are, in effect, creating a brand curriculum. While a systematic way of thinking about brands has existed since the middle of the last century, it has typically shown up in the form of brand identity systems. These are largely concerned with how the various visual (and increasingly audio) elements of the brand should be expressed in an array of relevant contexts. More recently, the idea of the ‘brand operating system (OS)’ has taken this idea and expanded it to include the underlying conceptual framework or values, beliefs, behaviours, etc. that give a brand its identity. Brand OS and brand curriculum are neatly (and intentionally) complementary ideas. If the operating system in the brand’s internal handbook for the what and how, the curriculum is where that rubber hits the road and begins to change the way people think and feel — “a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it.”

Steve Jobs got this instinctively. From the design of the products, to their packaging and unboxing, to the marketing, to the retail experience, to the customer support experience, touchpoint and interaction was considered, mutually reinforcing, and — most importantly — better than anyone had a right to expect. Few brands can — or probably ever will — match this kind of sustained and comprehensive leveling up of expectations. Peak Apple wrote the script, which means that even now, although every fibre in my body is straining against it, I can’t help but use it as a point of reference.

Pick a DTC brand from the canon and they’re also probably doing a lot of things right (while their stock prices are taking a beating, it’s probably not their brands that are to blame). You can bet their design system will be elegant and tasteful (although exceeding expectations in this department is tough, as what was once playfully contrarian swiftly becomes the playbook). Customer service will probably be chipper. Comms will have a certain cheeky charm. The products themselves will feel good enough and different enough to win you over — at least initially.

This is unsurprising for a couple of reasons. Many of these companies come from the same messianic culture of disruption that Apple did, and so share much the same philosophy of holistic, design-driven brand experience. But even more importantly, if your goal is to convince people to do something familiar in an unfamiliar way (get a subscription for razors, buy eyeglasses online, vacation in a random person’s house), you have a lot of teaching to do to get people over the hump. Any bumps on that hump, and it’s too easy to just say, “fuck it, I’m doing this the usual way.”

This is why consistency is so important. Without it, not only are you failing to create multiplying effect from one artifact (or lesson) to another, by neither reinforcing familiarity with a brand nor connecting the parts in service of a “big idea” that’s more culturally durable, you’re also projecting cognitive dissonance — the conflict that arises when your stated beliefs or values don’t line up with your actions that we humans find so distressing. For a disruptor brand whose very essence is predicated on the idea that this is better than what came before, any interactions that are even a bit worse can quickly become intolerable.

In many ways, this probably all sounds fairly intuitive. Create shitty comms, build shitty products, service them shittily, and people will have low expectations of your brand. Low expectations translate into low brand value. Create great experiences that surprise and delight, and they will view your brand as a source of rewards, and they will seek out more of it. So far, so duh.

But there’s a twist.

3. I WANT YOU TO WANT ME

We humans are continually making predictions about how things are going to work out before we know the actual outcome. As we move forward towards an uncertain end state, we continuously take in new information from our environment, and our predictions become increasingly accurate. For example, a prediction about what the weather is going to be like on Saturday is more likely to be accurate on Friday than it is on the preceding Monday. If we’re meeting friends at a bar, the closer our Uber gets, the more accurate our ETA.

With each new piece of information that we take in (evolving weather patterns, traffic conditions) we compare what we thought the outcome was going to be with what we think it’s going to be now. The gap between each successive guess is the temporal difference. Given that the latter of the two guesses is more likely to be correct, the “error” in our previous estimate is an opportunity to learn and get closer to the truth without having to wait until we get to our destination.

What’s fascinating about this is that temporal difference learning not only works as an approach to reinforcement learning in AI systems, it parallels the way in which humans learn through the process of reward prediction at a neurophysiological level. And it’s the human side I want to focus on — and in particular, the role of dopamine.

TD learning and dopamine function in the brain are intimately linked. Research has shown that when presented with a stimulus that triggers an unexpected reward, our brains will initially release dopamine when presented with the reward, in response to the difference between what we were expecting (nothing), and what we got (something pleasant). But what happens over time is that the dopamine cells start to fire when presented with the stimulus, and not when the reward itself shows up — if it ever does. What’s happening is that dopamine is released when we positively change our expectations of what we think is about to happen — we get a hit when we think things are going to turn out better than expected.

This has some really interesting implications for brands.

Firstly, for brands operating in categories with low expectations (the kind of territory where the DTC brands previously mentioned are often found lurking), exceeding those expectations is not only not hard (conceptually, if not technically), but it’s an effective way to build brand preference at a neurophysiological level. Think of it as a kind of “hedonic capitalism”, in which each transaction that was somehow simpler and more enjoyable than expected — booking a vacation, watching an ad for an insurance company, managing a thermostat — comes with a free dopamine cookie. After a while you come to believe that making things better is simply what this brand does.

Once you’ve been “trained” to know what “better” looks like, it’s not the attainment of the reward that elicits the dopamine response — it’s the expectation of the reward, triggered by a sensory cue. For brands, these cues are analogous (but not exclusively so) to Byron Sharp’s “memory structures”. If brand x has done an effective job of exceeding people’s expectations and making sure that everyone knows about it, when you see their logo, colour palette, or mascot, hear their jingle or sound, or a combination of distinctive brand elements, your brain is going to assume that your state of affairs is about to improve. Research has shown that whether they actually do improve, has no bearing on whether you get that hit or not — at least at first. And while in those experiments, the subjects themselves needed to have first hand knowledge of the reward, that’s not the case in brand building, which is a social process as much as it is a personal one. We’ve reached a point at which the opinions of others are just as — if not more — valid than our own when it comes to the value that we think a brand or its product might bring us. If you needed to have first-hand experience of using a brand’s products to form an expectation of it, Bernard Arnault probably wouldn’t be the world’s richest person.

This is why the most loveable, or at least most charismatic and culturally penetrating versions of brands are formed during the hedonic upswing of their heterostatic phases — dopamine-driven hit makers smashing the status quo. This is as true in the world of art as it is in the world of commerce. The notion of the “imperial phase” in music — as coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys — is a neat analogy. It describes the period in which an artist is at the top of their game, creatively and commercially, and can be defined — as Tom Ewing did — by “command, permission, and self-definition”. ‘Command’, in the sense of being in the zone, with complete mastery of the mode and medium. ‘Permission’, in the sense of genuine hunger from the public in what you are doing and desire for you to push boundaries. ‘Self-definition’, in that everything you do as an artist after this phase will be measured against it. It’s this last factor that creates the catch-22. As Tom Ewing puts it, “An imperial phase sustains a career but also freezes it: Empires decline and the memory of former glories dies hard.” Having an “imperial phase” as a brand is hard enough as it is. Sustaining it is quite another.

Henry Ford’s assertion that, “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do” may be true initially, but in the long term, your brand becomes a reflection of what people expect you are going to do. If nobody has any expectations of you, can you be said to have a brand at all?

4. YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVING FEELING

It’s your brand and what it promises that makes people feel good — call it an “aura” if you’re so inclined. Whether you deliver on that isn’t irrelevant, but that aura certainly does give strong brands a kind of reputational cushion that allows them to coast, and even to fail, that weaker brands don’t have. You could argue that Apple has been coasting ever since the death of Steve Jobs. Since the release of the iPhone and the Apple Store, they have not released any products that have meaningful and surprisingly changed our expectations of how things should be. Not that they’re exactly struggling — it’s also entirely possible that it has been Tim Cook’s masterplan to wean us off of an unsustainable disruption habit all along.

You could also argue that while Meta has made a serious attempt to change our expectations of how the world should work with its foray into the metaverse, but it’s concerted campaign to fritter away any goodwill it might once have had as a brand means that the only sound echoing around the desolate halls of Horizon World is the merciless derision of people that probably once kind of liked Facebook but now revel in its legless flailing. What Meta wants people to do is falling further out of alignment with what an increasing number of people (particularly younger ones) want to do. The brand space they’ve created is defined by artifacts with a dwindling value function that have left people feeling confused, demeaned, and bored — not the hallmarks of a successful curriculum.

No aura is indestructible, no matter how powerful or ubiquitous your brand. Having put what felt like the sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, it once felt like every interaction with Google would make us superhumanly smarter. But as its game-changingly spartan interface loaded up with visual detritus that has nothing to do with a better user experience and everything to do with the business model of “enshittification”, our brains slowly rewired. As Cory Doctorow points out, “Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.”

Google’s iconic primary-coloured logo once elicited a brain tingle of limitless possibility. Access to everything, everywhere, all at once. Now a diminished value function makes it feel like whatever’s about to happen next is going to be a slog. The curriculum is broken. Our dopamine cells are barely twitching, let alone exploding with excitement. How long before our policy changes — especially now that a sexy new paradigm shifter has come along in the shape of ChatGPT?

But even if you are able to continually knock it out of the park of expectations with every campaign, product release, or customer service call, there’s the hedonic treadmill effect, i.e. you can’t keep exceeding people’s expectations forever, because we humans have a stubborn tendency to return to an emotional baseline, no matter what happens to us, positive (winning the lottery) or negative (losing your legs in a car crash). As Brian Christian puts it, “If happiness comes not from things having gone well, not from things being about to go well, but from things going better than expected, then yes, for better or worse, as long as our expectations keep tuning themselves to reality, then a long-term state of being pleasantly surprised should be simply unsustainable.”

This might sound like an invitation to keep expectations low. The problem with that as a workaround is that there’s a distinct correlation between low expectations and a negative sense of well-being. As a brand, you don’t want to train people to think that you suck, just so that you can occasionally surprise them by sucking less than expected.

5. YOU ARE ALWAYS ON MY MIND

I hope the big takeaway here is not that humans are simply robots with credit cards, nor that we ought to treat them as such. On the contrary, it’s the insights we can derive from machine learning — and reinforcement learning in particular — that can help us think about how to influence people’s expectations from brands. And that is key — a brand is the accumulation of expectations that someone has of how it will behave or the value it will provide.

In the words of Jeremy Bullmore, “People build brands as birds build nests, from the scraps and straws they chance upon.” By thinking of this act of bricolage as a curriculum — a cohesive set of cumulative non-linear, multi-channel interactions — we can shape that process and make it more intentional.

There are lots of ways to build a curriculum, whether you’re doing it for a group of students or doing it for a brand. But whatever your philosophy, there’s one thing that holds true: it’s not enough to get people’s attention. It’s what you do with it that counts. Positive learning experiences are the result of positive interactions. My son doesn’t learn by being poked and barked at by his teachers, nor does he learn anything from them mumbling into space as he’s pinging past. But so much of the consumer experience — whether its brand or direct response advertising, identity design, ecomm flows — does exactly one of those things. And when he needs help, if he’s ignored, condescended to, inconvenienced, confused, or bored, he’s not going back to that person. It’s the same for us with brands — unless the alternatives are even worse.

This isn’t to say that every interaction deserves equal weight. That would be unnecessary, impractical, and exhausting for its makers and consumers. But there is no such thing as a neutral interaction. Even something as anodyne as a humble banner ad that barely registers in our consciousness teaches us that the brand that created it doesn’t believe itself worthy of our attention.

By exceeding people’s expectations, we can tap into the part of the brain that creates joy. Not the synthetic version that perches limply atop of corporate brand frameworks. I mean the real organic shit. Pure dopamine that courses through your veins and makes you believe, if only for a beautiful moment, that a brand might somehow, against the odds, actually make the world a better place. And who doesn’t want that?

REFERENCES

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Martin Heaton Martin Heaton

What brands can learn from Woodstock ‘99

How not to torch a brand in 5 easy lessons.

After working for a couple of years as an emergency litter picker at Glastonbury (the things you do for a free ticket), I thought I’d seen the worst of what a festival can throw at you. But holy moly, I’d never seen anything like Woodstock ‘99.

For those not familiar, Woodstock ’99 was supposed to be a contemporary spiritual successor to the original Woodstock festival held in 1969 — the “3 Days of Peace & Music” that became a defining symbol of the 60s. But it didn’t turn out that way.

Woodstock ’99 wasn’t just a proverbial shitshow. It was a literal one. If you’re not familiar with the gory details, check out Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 on Netflix, the documentary that inspired these musings. (There’s another great doc on HBO, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage).

While there are interesting conversations to be had about the weird bro-ragey climate of late 90s culture and the insidious hypocrisy of boomer hippie capitalists, it occurred to me that the festival’s failures can tell us a lot about brands and our relationships with them.

So here’s a highly subjective list of 5 things brands can learn from Woodstock ’99. Crack open a warm $12 bottle of Crystal Geyser, stick in your favourite Korn CD, and enjoy.

1. Your product is your marketing

There’s a telling moment in the documentary when one of the production team recalls suggesting to Michael Lang (organizer of Woodstocks ’69, ’94, and ’99) that the line up they’ve assembled might have a dangerously aggro energy. He, of course, is immediately shut down, the angriest bands in America do their thing, and anarchy ensues. Yes, there were other factors (we’ll come to those), but the lineup was essentially a billboard for a weekend of mayhem. That’s what the frat bros bought, and they made sure to get their money’s worth.

LESSON: Spend more time getting your product right than talking it up. People aren’t stupid. They’ll see it for what it is, no matter what you tell them.

2. When what you say doesn’t match what you do, people will be merciless

While the lineup had a lot to answer for, that alone didn’t cause a riot (I mean, Willie Nelson was also on the ticket). In the end, it was the pile up of thoughtless and exploitative planning decisions — the bleak superfund location, the ubiquitous price gouging, the lack of drinking water, the apocalyptic levels of trash — that offered tangible evidence that despite what they were saying, the organizers really did not give a shit. What really stuck in the collective craw was the hypocrisy of that indifference next to the superficial messages of peace and love. It’s no wonder festival goers re-christened it “END PROFITSTOCK” in six foot high letters across the fences.

LESSON: Don’t create a purpose/practice gap. Perception of your brand is cumulative and is only as good as your weakest links. Sweat the details and make sure your whole brand experience lives up to your stated ambitions.

3. You are not (fully) in control of your brand

The guardians of the spirit of Woodstock (i.e. its brand) believed that it represented something profoundly and immutably idealistic — a celebration of peace, freedom of expression, and brotherly/sisterly communion. And they believed wholeheartedly that everyone else saw it in the same way. After all, if you were there in ’69 (or at least were invested in its lore), how could you not? But the attendees of Woodstock ’99 did not see it that way. They did not share the cultural context. They pared away the tie-die trappings to expose a much more primal vision of the brand. Yes, Woodstock was about freedom, but a much more individualistic and dangerous kind — the freedom to get supremely fucked up with zero consequences.

LESSON: As Marty Neumeier puts it, “A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.” The most you can hope for is to influence people’s opinion of your brand. So be consistent and continually act to reinforce the positioning you aspire to.

4. Don’t be afraid to turn a bug into a feature.

While we tend to think of Woodstock ’69 as the archetypal “free” festival — free love, free food, free music — it was never supposed to be that way. Michael Lang had every intention of making it a commercial success. But when poor planning (see a theme here?) led to the ticketing booths being overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who showed up, the commercial enterprise of Woodstock became “free”, and the legend was born.

LESSON: Be responsive, solve problems with as much energy as you might put into an ad campaign. It’s what people remember. And when you can’t solve your problems, embrace them. Just don’t ignore them — that’s when people get the pitchforks out.

5. People will never forget how you made them feel.*

There’s an interview right at the end of the documentary with a girl of fifteen who has just lived through what you’d think was the most hellish experience of her life so far. But when you look at her grimy face, she’s beaming through her braces. Why? Because, for the first time in her life she’s experienced absolute freedom — and nothing is going to take that away from her. When the interviewer asks her if she’d do it again , she replies “Oh yeah. Definitely. For Sure. No questions asked.” Does this seem contradictory to points 1 to 4? Maybe. But humans are emotionally driven, and emotions are messy, contradictory, and completely dictate the way we perceive and remember experiences. Yes it was the worst. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also the best.

LESSON: Sophisticated brands are built around simple, universal ideas that don’t change. Just ask Jeff Bezos. Fill a powerful emotional gap for people and they’ll forgive you almost anything.

*I’d always assumed that Maya Angelou was the source of this sentiment, oft-used and abused in marketing decks and articles like this one, but the truth is murkier.

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