The emerging marketing choice: fame or respect

Branding, like many aspects of business today, is becoming increasingly extreme. The middle market is becoming the muddle market. To succeed, you need to either think huge or small, or be making the transition to one of these positions. And for more and more marketers, that means making a deliberate choice to pursue a polemic course of action. Fame or respect.

Fame is gigantic, and makes big demands, but what it gives back is can’t-miss footprint, power brands and talked-about presence. Fame is front foot, impressive, embracing. Fame-driven companies often become that way through sheer force of personality and ambition, achieved and maintained by multi-million dollar marketing budgets. The costs, complexities and adaptations required are extraordinary, multi-dimensional and pan-global, but powerful marketing leverage ensures famous companies and their fame-fuelled brands are seen in all the right places and in all the right ways.

Famous companies are household names. They are the A-list of corporate global; master-marketers capable of driving home all the advantages of size, power and presence at the same time as they press the emotional flesh with brands that are very cool and have huge personal appeal. Timberland, Mercedes, Vodafone, Nike, Adidas, Mars, Tag Heuer, Everlast, Michelon and Bvlgari appeal to the individualist/collectivist dichotomy in all of us. And they do what power brands do best. They leverage recognition. Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Cartier, Gucci, Prada and Fendi … the names alone conjure images.

Respect is a very different mindset. It appeals to the exclusion streak. Many of these brands still leverage the power of branding to ensure they are admired and advocated for by those who welcome being “in the know”. But the marketing is much more subtle, and at the same time, the brands themselves can be more obscure, less public, generally requiring far more specialist sector knowledge and understanding to be fully appreciated. They use all this to wonderful effect.

For brands seeking respect, obscurity – the exact opposite of fame - can be a focused part of the integrity equation. There’s a consensus amongst fans (because that’s what respect looks to generate) that these companies and their brands are pure, unfiltered and quality-driven, rather than publicity or results motivated. These are companies that seek to become known as opposed to making themselves known.

Of course, this is not a strategy that can work for everyone. There are whole swathes of the economy where this approach is untenable. But for those looking to build customer bases where those they do business with believe they have emotional ownership of something special, something only a “few of us” know about, building respect rather than a huge pan-global, mainstream-marketed fame could be a strident, controllable and successful option. It’s certainly legitimate – and with every passing day, arguably it is becoming more so.



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