Orville who is your very best friend?

No brand is an island. It never was and it never will be. But in the past, in the bad old days where the model was interruption and media was used merely as a holding pen (the first part of the Trap and Trip model) brands were defined in opposition to each other.

People bought you because you washed whiter, lasted longer or felt a little bit posher (more upmarket for you non-British folks) than that other guy. You were chosen in opposition to the brand leader / cheaper alternative – which is why taste tests and having Danny Baker show up on your doorstep asking whether your knickers were really as stain free as you might get them with Daz worked.

In ye olden days brands had CLAIMS at their core

But the model is changing. We’re moving from having a unique selling proposition (USP) to a Genuine Reason for Existance (GRE). People aren’t asking WHAT your brand does – they’re asking WHY you started it in the first place.

These days brands have a CAUSE at their core.

That’s a fundamental shift –

FROM ‡ ‘WHAT it does’ (and the manufacturing / marketing version of the question ‘WHAT it does BETTER’)

<- TO ‘WHY it exists’ and the brand / marketing version of the question WHY its existence matters to you

My hypothesis (and I hope that it’s right) is that as brands continue to abandon manufacturing claims and embrace instead their reason for existence the way in which brands relate to each other will also change.

Just as we moved from a model about interruption and into one about engagement so too are brands moving – from a model about opposition to one about collaboration.

One of the questions that we should be asking when we’re thinking about our brands is this – who should our brand be playing with?

Because the way that your brand shows that it’s relevant in the world isn’t by going all Maximus on our asses and destroying the opposition, it’s by finding like minded brands and creating something unique with them.

Sounds like utopia, doesn’t it? Brands being about collaboration and creation, eschewing argument and destruction, having a social purpose at their core – involving the people that love them to most in achieving that social purpose. It should because it could be.

I’m going to go into examples that I’ve loved (and a model that looks at kinds of collaboration) in the next post here but until then just ask yourself ‘Does my brand have more friends than enemies?’ ‘Does my brand spend more time trying to create something than it does trying to destroy something?’ ‘Does my brands have a cause or a claim at its core?’