Brands are a language, says Neil Stewart, and affinity marketing is the new accent
If marketing is about being in tune with the beliefs and desires of the market, or what is currently fashionable, then it is probably not surprising that marketing has its own trends - and at the outset of the 21st century the shift in attention has certainly been toward affinity marketing or co-branding programmes.
Of course, the diverse types of marketing activities being grouped together to form the new category of affinity marketing are not, in themselves, new. What is new is the shift in focus to mutually beneficial co-branding programmes - sometimes even between competitors, such as Borders, a 'traditional' bookshop chain, successfully teaming with Amazon.com. From a corporate perspective, this shift in attention has been driven by business benefits including reduced costs, shorter time scales and greater return on investment. But from a market perspective, rather less is known about why such programmes have become so successful and fashionable.
This necessitates a better understanding of how brands function in contemporary society - a post Naomi Klein 'No Logo' society in which our confidence in corporations may have been shaken but the prevalence of brands is as evident as ever.
In the post-modern absence of meta-narratives, the blurring of national boundaries, the lack of trust in government, the ineffectiveness of institutions and, ironically, the recent decline in confidence in corporations, brands have become an increasingly important way through which people navigate the world. The significance of brands becoming a part of everyday language is that brands are a language. Put simply, that means people use brands as a form of communication (and in a world overburdened with information, a particularly efficient form of communication too).
Here, it is necessary to define what we mean by the term 'brand'. Corporations see brands as intellectual property, placing an emphasis on the proprietary name, logo and trademark, signifying certain values and associations that differentiate the brands within their own portfolio as well as from competitors. But from a market perspective "a brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer" and, as such, people see brands as a way of communicating their opinions and identity, and therefore defining their subjectivity.
The difference between these two definitions is significant: The first treats brands as absolute entities, the second recognises that brands are relative entities. And since brands are used as a language, it is notably reminiscent of Ferdinand de Saussure's shift in understanding how language itself works. Overthrowing the historical and rationalist approach to language (ie a naming process attaching words to things / concepts), he identified the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, how meaning is relative rather than absolute, and that words cannot be considered in isolation from the social and cultural conventions that give them their currency.
Put simply, words don't have universal true meanings (eg cat equals four legged mammal with fur...) but are relative and used to differentiate (eg cat is merely different to dog).
As the father of linguistics and structuralism, Saussure's model of language became the model for theorising social and cultural life in the 1960s and 70s, so it should not be surprising that it also relates to brands.
This is the language of brands today even if this is better understood unconsciously by consumers than consciously by corporations: People do not interpret Nike to mean 'Greek winged goddess of victory' nor even the ability to 'Just do it'; the name and swoosh marks are 'floating signifiers' that people use to differentiate or relate themselves - not just the product - to others. In building their individual brand repertoire, 'meaning' is created in the relation between brands far more than what any one brand 'represents'.
Consequently, it may be said that affinity marketing merely recognises and replicates the code of the consumer. More specifically, as identified at the outset, it is one particular strain of this code that has come to the fore, namely where there is mutual benefit to the brands concerned.
To date, many of the activities now being grouped together under affinity marketing have been entirely parasitic - the transfer of goodwill or credibility from one brand to another, the access to an existing channel of distribution, and so forth. Such benefits often come at a price. What is new is not so much the shift from semantics to semiotics outlined above, but the shift from parasitic to symbiotic relationships between brands. Symbiotic relationships occur naturally in nature, often between creatures that would otherwise be 'competitors' if not predators. For example the prairie dog and rattlesnake that sleep together - the snake gains warmth from the mammal, while the prairie dog gains protection all night.
This humble example characterises the new field of Brand Symbiotics. Two very different sectors (prairie dogs and rattlesnakes) gain very different benefits (warmth and protection) from a very different relationship (sleeping together). Symbiotic relationships are common in nature and deliver mutual benefit. At first they were an unusual response to given circumstances, but placed in the theory and code of evolution they become completely understandable and less surprising.
Brand symbiotic relationships are increasingly common in our culture and also deliver mutual benefit. At first they were an unusual response to given circumstances, but placed in the theory and code of language they become completely understandable and less surprising.
However, from a corporate perspective, this calls for a radical rethink about how brands work in society (focus groups aimed at establishing 'associations' and 'meaning' are redundant). And if a brand is merely "a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer", where such perceptions are differential and relational, then we are not actually putting brands together, we are putting groups of consumers together - groups that may also be different and related.
As it is only after putting the groups together that the real benefits emerge, this is very different from the conventions of traditional marketing.
© Gulf Marketing Review 2004
