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The Controversy of Brands

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Latest reporters' blogs, Jim Prior July 30th, 2008 by Jim Prior

It’s an ordinary weekday night. You’re at home, watching TV. For 30 minutes you watch and listen while people shout fight, get drunk, talk about sex, destroy families and glamorise crime. A typical episode of EastEnders.

You switch channel and witness a woman mildly slap her husband for leaving the toilet seat up. The scene quickly changes and you realise, unambiguously, that it’s an ad for MFI. The whole thing lasts 30 seconds and is funny, clever, and quite obviously not intended to imply anything other than that the stuff at MFI makes you feel at home.

Yet, whilst EastEnders picks up the Soap of the Year award for the umpteenth time, the MFI ad gets banned by the Advertising Standards Authority. It was ruled that the ad, “gave the impression that aggression and violence enabled people in everyday life to get their own way”.

If there are going to be such rules for advertisers, then surely the same rules should apply to programme makers too. Why is it that brand owners and advertisers are forced to draw the short straw?

The problem for brands is that they are controversial things in themselves. Brands, as a notion within the context of business, only exist because of competition – to differentiate between rival offers and they compete for our attentions in an aggressive way. They publicly make claims about their advantages and dispute those of others, muddying the waters that separate them .

The public, of course, instinctively know all this. Their perception is that a brand’s stance is taken not for the benefit of its market but for the benefit of itself. And this is why they are so wary of them.

But for many businesses, the inherent controversy of brands can be turned to distinct advantage. Controversy is the name of the marketing game, it’s just a question of degrees.

Ryanair chooses to be controversial because it highlights the difference in attitude between itself and other airlines. That difference in attitude is the thing that has allowed it to make an economic model that has revolutionised the short haul flight business. Controversy, to Ryanair, is authentic. Drawing attention to it in advertising may prove a timely and compelling reminder to those people.

In MFI’s case the picture is different. More people complained to the ASA about the MFI ads than about Ryanair which, at first, is surprising because the ads themselves seem a lot tamer in nature. But I suspect that the issue here lies in the inauthentic relationship between MFI and hard-hitting controversy. MFI is a mainstream brand, it does not seek to, nor need to, polarise opinions and I suspect the complaints came because of the inappropriateness of the fit.

For a brand considering a controversial approach to marketing, my advice would be this: make it authentic. If it fits with the things that define who you are and what you do, then go for it. If upsetting some people might cause the people you really care about to feel even better about you, then throw caution to the wind and be brave.