Meaning Inflation

When it comes to brands, meaning is a currency. And, like currency, meaning is subject to inflationary pressure.

You can see it plainly in the drinks category, where the premiumization trend accelerated an already crowded field of brands leaning on the same craft, founder, and provenance stories, toward a place where everyone was essentially saying the same thing. As a result, it all lost any semblance of meaning.

When every competitor in a category mints the same story, each unit of that story buys less.

Those who worship at the altar of How Brands Grow will tell you this is why brands should focus on meaningless distinctiveness. Brand assets exist to be recognized, not understood. Your colors, your wax seal, your bottle shape… their job is to trigger the brand in memory at the moment of purchase, and loading them up with meaning just limits what they can do and how long they can do it.

There's a lot to agree with there. Buyers are promiscuous. Particularly so in FMCG. Most people carry a repertoire of brands in their minds, make purchase decisions quickly, and do so at shelf. Recognition is the price of entry, and the brand that comes to mind first wins far more often than any of us would like to admit.

One counterpoint to meaningless distinctiveness is that salience says nothing of price. Mental and physical availability are volume theories. They tell you why big brands sell more units. They have almost nothing to say about why someone pays $45 for one bourbon and $30 for another with comparable shelf presence and recognition.

Today, the drinks business is retreating from premiumization, focusing on volume plays instead. In this economy, who has the money for a $50+ bottle of bourbon, right? We overcooked it. Let's change course.

But another argument might be that people stopped paying premium prices for drinks at almost exactly the same moment the premium stories all became painfully samey. What's truly premium about a whiskey if it's effectively telling the same story as the next one that also claims to be premium?

So, if you're selling toilet paper, I'm on team meaningless distinctiveness, but if you're operating in a space with considered purchases, or where culture, identity and status have a role to play - I'm not sure that How Brands Grow, and the work of Ehrenberg-Bass or Byron Sharp travel so well. And, they still don't explain why people are willing to pay more for one bottle of booze, rather than another.

Think about a brand of bourbon with a red wax seal on a distinctive looking bottle.

A specific and well-known brand likely comes to mind.

You don't have to be a branding expert to infer what that wax seal was originally meant to communicate, though I'll leave it to you to determine whether or not you feel like it means anything today.

If your answer was "not much," that's meaning inflation at work.

A brand holding a famous-but-emptied asset faces a fork in the road: Do you double down on the asset as a pure identifier and run the Sharp / Ehrenberg-Bass playbook? Or, do you try to refill that asset with meaning?

There's no right or wrong answer here, which is why the debate for and against meaningless distinctiveness is such an enduring one. It's a matter of strategy, and where any given brand finds itself. But, where you absolutely don't want to be is somewhere in the middle: spending against a story that has become devalued.

A well-designed brand tracker should help you catch this drift. And to be fair, the good ones already measure meaning and differentiation at the brand level. But trackers measure endorsement of attributes that come with their own frame, and most critically: that are rooted in today's assumptions. In these trackers, meaning inflation shows up as your competitors' scores converging on yours rather than your scores falling - which can make it hard to take action against before the shift is well underway and you're already behind.

In other words, the instrument can tell you your score on "authentic."

But it can't tell you that "authentic" stopped being worth anything, or that the meaning buyers now care about is something the questionnaire has no language for.

That new language, and the early signals of meaning inflation will always show up at the edges first, and in the counter-narratives that gradually emerge in any given space.

So, by all means. Run your brand tracker. They're important, and the firms that specialize in them are efficient at conducting them. But don't forget about the evolving context that those trackers operate within.

Meaning inflation is invisible day-to-day but obvious in retrospect.

It's important to know if cues trigger recognition of your brand, and to know what your brand is associated with. Those triggers matter.

Just don't lose sight of what those triggers are worth.