The Logic Breathing Life into Oreo's New Branding - Grant McCracken

by Grant McCracken??|?? 9:00 AM August 30, 2012

Oreo recently stepped out with a new look. Several new looks, actually. The cookie is pictured sometimes in the shape of Elvis, sometimes with a tread mark in red cr?me in recognition of the Mars Rover landing, and sometimes in colors chosen to acknowledge Bastille day.

This is an excellent way to celebrate Oreo's 100 birthday, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as advertising's equivalent to party balloons. There is a method, perhaps even a genius, to this good humor.

Brand orthodoxy says that the brand should "keep it simple" and repeat itself constantly, like an old vaudevillian who doesn't mind doing his jokes over and over again because, hey, that's what got him here.

But there are new winds blowing in brand land. One of these came in the form of a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which proposed that branding should feel more like a conversation, a give and take between the consumer and the marketer.

This is an important idea because the consumer now appears to believe that the brand should earn its public attention the way all of us must. Say boring, repetitive stuff and you suffer the punishment that every bad conversationalist faces. First, we ignore you. Then, we exclude you.

There's a second metaphor we could use. I like to think of branding as breathing. It is taking in cultural meanings and giving them off. Inhale, exhale ? but in this case the stuff of respiration is not air but culture. Culture in, culture out. (There's no point of joining a conversation unless you've got something to say.)

Oreo turns out to be really respiratory. When it celebrates Elvis, the Mars landings, or Bastille Day, it comes alive to the world around it. Playful, even. After all, who celebrates French holidays? And the brand has recently taken on the image of the Liberty Bell, the Dark Knight, and the Delta Aquarid Meteor Shower. The first is classically American, the second is (was) absolutely of the moment, and the last gloriously obscure. So the brand escapes the solipsism, the self-absorption, the prison house most brands have imposed upon themselves.

Making brands vivid by making them conversational and respiratory is no small shift. It represents something very like a paradigm shift in marketing, setting several additional changes in train. Our brands and our marketing go from canned to complex, from prefabricated to dynamic, from the predictable to the experimental, from safety to risk. The old model of branding could "lock and load" the brand, assuming full control over what it was and the risks it represented. The new brand has to take on risk and the marketer must surrender control. This looks a horrifying until one realizing there is no place of safety. Sticking with the old branding is the path to irrelevance and tedium...and the effective death of the brand.

Hat's off to the creative team responsible for the Oreo work:
Agency: Draftfcb New York
Client: Oreo
Creative Director: Jill Applebaum
Creative Director: Megan Sheehan
Copywriter: Noel Potts
Art Director: Jared Isle
Art Director: Mike Lubrano
Art Director: Jackie Anzaldi
Media Agency: 360i

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_logic_breathing_life_into_oreos_new_branding.html

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