When Brands Go Imperial
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.