Brands Have to Eat the Elephant or Leave the Room

For brands, an elephant in the room isn’t something to ignore. From product challenges to brand weaknesses or unreachable audiences, there is more than value in addressing the challenges facing your brand directly, there’s an inherent risk in not doing it. An elephant in a marketer’s room needs to be eaten or the brand needs to head in the opposite direction. However, simply ignoring it isn’t an option. ?

The risk of ignoring the elephant isn’t new – one only needs to look at why water brand Dasani doesn’t exist in the UK . Launching in 2004, the brand used bottled tap water which cost 3p for the brand to bottle before retailing it for 95p at the time. It’s business model was strangely familiar to an episode of the UK show ‘Only Fools and Horses’ where the protagonist sold tap water as spring water. The elephant in the room was over-priced tap water and the brand didn’t have an answer to it. Once higher levels of bromate, an allowed but potentially cancer-causing substance were also found – the brand left the UK and shelved European expansion plans.

While elephants have long brand memories, the risk of ignoring them is increasing for modern brands. We live in a world of bigger and more frequent elephants in our brand’s home. Whereas more top-down advertising and monolithic media allowed for control of the message, the last 20 years have brought fragmentation and a shift towards socially built brands. This creates numerous opportunities for growth, but it also means the crowd can very quickly let the emperor know about the state of his or her clothes. Advertising is increasingly a truth accelerant.

Eating the Elephant

For brands with a risk or weakness, the first port of call is how to address it. How can you eat the elephant in room by either reframing it or calling it out? Brands have a long history of reframing weaknesses into strengths, but this shouldn’t be taken lightly. Survivor bias is alive and well in brand case studies and for every success story, there are many that were metaphorically trampled mid attempt.

Brands such as Guinness, making a virtue out of having to wait for a slower pour relative to other beers, is one of the most famous cases of a reframed weakness. Science has shown that the perfect Guinness takes 119.3 seconds to serve , vs. some lagers which operate as fast as an F1 Pitcrew. Over the brand’s storied history, it’s acknowledged this in advertising and multiple brand platforms from ‘Good Things Come to Those Who Wait’ through to ‘Made of More’.

Similarly, Weetabix took perceptions of being boring in the early 2000s and highlighted versatility, with a Weetabix week campaign which showed the variety of different ways it can be eaten.

Retailer ALDI addressed perceptions of cheapness directly through comparison ads with bigger private brands, showing their similarities on many things aside from price in their ‘Like Brands, Only Cheaper ’ work.

Natural retailer Abel & Cole acknowledged the inconvenience of their more experience vs. other food retailers by highlighting it’s the cost of being more ethical. Stella Artois famously fought price perceptions and negative audience perceptions simultaneously with its ‘Reassuringly expensive’ line.

Turning negative elements of a product or service into a badge of honor has been a tactic for many – shifting from reframing to owning and engaging directly with a risk. McDonald’s around the world have launched campaigns to address concerns around the provenance of their food, such as McDonald’s Canada’s ‘Our Food. Your Questions’ campaign. Liquid Death took customer complaints about their product and made a heavy metal album out of them.

Most famously, Irish airline Ryanair addresses claims of bad service directly, using social channels to directly acknowledge a normally implicit tradeoff between service and cost. They know the deal and you do too, cheap airfare entails certain sacrifices to the overall experience.

The elephant a brand faces might not even be a product or brand weakness. Instead, it can be external limitations, from culture or media. From broadcasting standards to social media, directly acknowledging and using limitations in the world can be a foil. For years, domain registrar GoDaddy relied on ‘banned’ Super Bowl ads to drive interest. The banning of content such as female nipples on Instagram was a boon to not just Only Fans, but MACMA’s campaign using Man boobs to demonstrate how to effectively check for female breast cancer.

When to Find a New Room?

Reframing and overcoming weaknesses and risks is the inspiring part of marketing, but as we mentioned before – it is much riskier than the industry acknowledges. At some point, discretion is the better part of brand valor. So, when do brands decide to step back from the elephant and move house instead?

There must be a consideration of the cost of eating an elephant and the returns gained from it. Even if you can successfully reframe a weakness, it isn’t going to work for everyone. No brand, no matter how mass appeals to everyone – but those with repurposed flaws become especially divisive. Forays into healthier eating from McDonald’s Salads to Burger King ‘Satisfries’ show the challenges in believably tacking perceptual issues.

As research last year showed, consumers’ world view significantly affects what they want from brands and how they approach them. Reframing a weakness at scale takes an already tricky issue of wide relevance and complicates it further. From lack of belief in the way it’s been reframed, to weakened brand relevance, marketers need to decide if the cost is worth the benefit. ?

They must also be realistic about their brands – reframing or addressing based on what consumers want, not how an organization feels. Between internal culture and limitations from finance and legal, there often isn’t enough capability to address what is needed. By the time many go to eat the elephant, the appetite simply isn't there.

If there isn’t, then simply acknowledging and focusing elsewhere may be needed. If you can’t solve a weakness, you can at least make a game plan to avoid it and address as required. Plans to limit competitors exploiting the damage mean that while you’ve left the metaphorical room with the elephant, your ownership of the house can still be considered in how you act. You know your weakness may limit growth opportunities, audiences or communications angles, but it will force innovation within what is left to achieve objectives.

Pulling the Trunk from Time to Time

While going elsewhere may not seem attractive to marketers who can’t address an issue directly, they can take solace in the fact that things change. Elephants that may be inedible for brands one day can land on the menu with market, culture or consumer shifts. Alternatively, fixes for specific issues may become invalid. The best way to deal with an elephant in the room is to check on it regularly.

In a world of more frequent consumer interaction for brands and greater speed to mockup and prototype products or campaigns – there is an opportunity to consistently test how to best address an issue.

Brands can avoid the risk of simply asking consumers how they would behave. ?Asking drinkers if they want to wait 2 minutes for a Guinness seems as if it would have doomed the brand’s solution before it started. Instead, they can test actual behavioral responses. ?Ronald McDonald may have asked people what they wanted and heard salads because he’s unhealthy. However, if he had the ability to make them more tangible to respondents, he might have found that what they really want is a burger from him without the guilt. An elephant can look different from different perspectives.

Overall, marketing is about challenges and solutions. It focuses on overcoming barriers to create change and growth. However, brands must recognize that not every elephant is the same and they must realistically consider taking a seat at the table as much as walking out.