Branded Blog

Apparently “April showers bring May flowers” is a well known expression in the Northern hemisphere, and seems to indicate that they are more aware of the treachery of April than I have been. April, in a word, “sucked”, and I’m boycotting it – hence the date on this post! It wasn’t pretty. I won’t bore you with a full list of the ills attributable to this fickle month, but I do want to tell you about the end of my love affair with my car.

The Audi (my second A3, demonstrating how deep my passion for it has run) has, in retrospect, probably never loved me as much as I have loved her.  I bought her new, oohed and aahed a lot about, kept her clean and shiny in Jozi and had her carefully serviced and tended by only the Audi experts everytime something went wrong or she needed a service or a little TLC. Sadly, she didn’t return the favour. The last of her sulky performances happened mid April. I left CT early on a Friday morning (a feat which many of you know is, in itself, impressive – early mornings not being my forte generally) and was happily on my way to a full day of meetings with a wonderful client in the Ceres valley when the Audi suddenly let go and floated to a stately stop – I even had time to pull over to the side of the road before she stopped which is a very good thing because when she stopped, she did so with meaning. She wasn’t going anywhere very soon, and neither was I.

So there I was, stopped on the side of Slanghoek pass road, surrounded by some of the most gorgeous mountains and vineyards in the world and not appreciating a second of it. Instead I was praising the advent of cell-phones and simultaneously doing my best Sandton impersonation while the lady from the AA call centre interrogated me: “I don’t know what happened, it just stopped and now it won’t start at all.  Yes, I had enough petrol. No, I don’t know what exact road I’m on, the signboards don’t have road numbers on. No, I’m not on the N1 anymore….”. Sigh. The AA call centre was not overwhelming in their helpfulness. But luckily for me I was in farming country and the Farmer network had been activated by said fabulous farming client in Ceres so while I was still battling the AA on the phone a white bakkie with a dog on the back and two smiling, broad-handed farmers from nearby farms pulled up to tell me they’d come to tow me somewhere cause someone had phoned someone and it just wasn’t good for me to stand out here on the side of the road… So they took over, figured out the towing stuff (I had no clue and I’d had the car for 6 years!), and soon they deposited me at the local mechanics Garage in Rawsonville, and smilingly went on their way – helping others out being simply part of their day. Happily for me I was no longer stranded on a small back road. Unhappily the mechanic, also a generous soft-spoken country man, declared that the cam belt on the Audi had snapped and my immediate future looked expensive. Very expensive. And all this happened about 450km before her next service was due (scheduled to be done by Audi, naturally) – a standard service in which they replace, you guessed it, the cam belt.

Much driving and car swapping and patience from the Barefoot man later, I went to Ceres (3 hours late for my first meeting), and finally got home at 9pm that night. Wine was required.

The next few weeks brought horrendous quotes from the Audi dealership – made more painful since my motor-plan had previously expired without so much as a reminder from Audi, so all this was coming straight from my pocket – and various alternate options until I had spent the equivalent of an island holidays’ money on the Audi and finally got her back in full functioning form again.

But this was my last straw with her, I’m afraid. And not only is the blue A3 now being traded in, the Audi halo has slipped and I have taken leave of my Audi brand association too. Sad, but true.

What has been far more interesting than all the money and technical stuff is the emotional journey of understanding what I had attached to the car and the brand, and why it took so long and so many issues to finally make me call it quits.

My first Audi I bought because an ex, who was extremely informed and passionate about cars, had introduced me to them. So the first brand recommendation was from a trusted peer expert – one of the most powerful of forces in the marketing world.

In support of that endorsement, my first silver A3 was a dream – nothing ever went wrong and she loved me back. So positive product experience reinforced my brand attachment.

And thirdly in this dangerous brand affinity trinity was the aura of the brand. Not only was it an extremely aspirational brand that tapped into all my premium dreams and stylistic yearnings, it also had some of the best messaging I’ve seen on a car brand. Who doesn’t recognise “Vorsprung durch Technik”?  But the one that really did it for me was a TV ad specific to the A3. It featured a very suave dreadlocked & suited young man walking through a world enhanced and embellished by gorgeous post-production animation and embodying the spirit (and target market philosophy) of the A3 in a beautiful monologue that included (in my humble opinion) the single best line of scripting from an advert ever:

“… I live by Gandhi, and learn by Google…”.

Breath-taking copy-writing based on divinely inspired consumer insight – the holy grail of advertising! Why I love communications. And why I was hooked – I was one of the first A3 girls, and I loved it!

And so, coming back to present day reality, it took a great deal of real unhappiness, much time, expense and inconvenience to overcome that passionate brand attachment. But it did, eventually, happen.

And now I feel kind of released in a way. In some ways the Audi was the last pillar of a previous identity I’d built over ten years in Joburg, and now I’m happy to make new choices and allow some new options in.

And in this I am completely in line with a strong trend in premium consumer thinking: consumers have in the past 5 years or so, started taking ownership of their choices and options again. Brands are still creating products and messages, but consumers are now more informed (learn by Google, remember…), more conscious, and more circumspect than we have been before.  And this is a good thing.

As consumers we no longer accept everything a brand says at face value, we do a little digging and we share what we learn & experience on FaceBook. Or Twitter. Or we write a blog. Ahem.

And we still appreciate brands for the value they offer, for the inspiration they give us, and for the contribution they make towards the image each of us builds for ourselves over time – however much some may deny this – because brands are part of the way we communicate who we are to others. Subtly or not, we buy into brands for the values they embody and at some level we decide whether those values are things we would like people to associate with us or not. We choose brands, in part, to be specific building blocks in our message about ourselves to the world.

We no longer have communities in size or nature which allow for conversations around an evening fire where we can communicate who we are or what we do, so brands, adverts, cell-phones and social media have evolved to fill some of that gap in our speedy, high volume world.

And I for one am a flag-raising member of the new norms of branding where as a brand you need to stand firm on your truth. You need to own what you do and who you are proudly and base your brand on that, not on some fairy-tale that you think consumers might like. Brands these days need to be transparent, truthful and real. Not to mention humble.  Otherwise complex consumers will, like me, simply fall out of love with you again.

And when they do they will either find a replacement branded building block for that need and value, or create their own.

Yesterday, for example, the barefoot man and I celebrated two years since we met (1 May, technically, but what’s a few days between friends) not by buying anything branded or expensive, but by getting tattoos. His third, my first. And no, we did not get matching tattoos. We each got one that we have built a long relationship with and that is part of that message we are creating around and on our lives.

He got a Southern Cross on his right calf, I got a word on my left forearm. Hope. The quintessential human emotion. The thing with feathers.

He found direction when we met, it seems. And I found inspiration.

So now I have my own small slice of personal branding on show for the world, something I’ve chosen and something I value. And from now on it’s only going to get harder to make a brand worth adding in to my unique mix of choices and symbols. I am a tough consumer to please, and most of us are these days, so as a brand you have be real and work hard and maybe that will be enough to win my branded affection again. And maybe not.

After all, with Gandhi and Google in my repertoire, I’m the new normal.