Brand Hypocrisy

VOL. 0003 – FLORIDA, MONDAY, AUG 22, 2022

Juan F. Arjona Harry

President & CEO Strategee

Communicating brand values, values through the brand or business values entails an enormous commitment to their visible, observable and verifiable compliance by the community that the brand itself has created or the audiences to which it is directed.

Society lives, feeds itself and transforms itself, evolving in a constant dynamic through a cultural process based on its own values, customs and mechanisms of formation and reproduction of society itself, which serve so that brands little by little -with a correct interpretation , emission of messages and feedback-, are aligned with the same society where they live. Society compares, verifies, evaluates, interprets and concludes about brands. Thus, a concept or perception of them is formed.

Some brands understand this dynamic phenomenon and with their messages, their presentation in society, their executions and product and/or service interaction with the consumer, they carve out a path and trace a distinguishable behavior that is assimilated by society itself, resulting in positive evaluations towards them. In the end, it is the great objective of any CMO.

However, other brands -for various reasons- do not obtain this alignment, presenting confusing messages between communication and execution, between presentation in society and experience with the product or provision of the service in its purchase or consumption, leading to complex processes of adverse feelings towards them, and in the end, in negative evaluations. This typifies what is called Brand Hypocrisy.

Next, the findings of various studies that allow identifying the origin that models the Brand Hypocrisy can be evidenced.

1. Social hypocrisy: here are those brands that support causes or initiatives solely for strategic purposes, but when comparing their actions within their management or within their own companies, it can be shown that they do not fully practice what they are supporting. communicationally. It often happens with the inclusive character towards certain social causes such as inclusion with the LGBTIQ+ community, also with brands that promote diversity and inclusion and gender equity, not to mention those that promote inclusion with disabilities. It also tends to appear on occasions with those brands that proclaim reductions in the carbon footprint and in their production or servuction processes they do not observe or practice it; moreover, they do not have a defined and structured program for it; or having it, they incur in practices that invalidate the objective communicated to the company.

2. Hypocrisy of the message: here are those brands that, through the indiscriminate use of images, elaborate photos or videos, try to present an image that does not really exist or is far from what it really is. With some frequency we find unreal photos of beaches, images of moments with the brand that are not real, videos or images of product tests whose result differs from what is really achievable. Under this modality there are many examples of brands that are presented with exaggerated attributes or that do not obey reality.

3. Hypocrisy of the mission: here we find brands that, in the course of their consumption action or in their experience, lead to negative consequences for the consumer, their well-being or adverse projection as a society. In the United States Congress, the objections presented to social networks are recurrent, which in their dark side end up defining attitudes, behaviors or social movements, adverse to the consumer or society itself. We also find brands whose purchase -generally their consumption- ends up affecting the state of health, vitality or balance in the life of those who consume them. Some medications or supplements can be found on the market that ultimately end up in non-beneficial consumption for the consumer's life. Likewise, some practices foreseen and indicated by the brands that derive in affectations to the health or well-being of those who follow them.

4. Hypocrisy of the image: here we find brands that "promise a lot and do little"; These are the brands that live only by attracting consumers to their purchase and consumption, but when verifying what was promised, the consumer can compare what they promised with reality, but in the end they did not comply. We can see some brands in the airline industry, in the detergent industry, in all those brands of consumer solutions -both in products and in services- that over-promise, generating an expectation that will always be greater than performance, affecting their own image before the market.

The previous modalities of Brand Hypocrisy generally trigger a negative word of mouth communication -Word of Mouth- whose consequences are quite hard to bear and very complex to stop and modify. The damage is already done.

With an orthodox branding plan and a millimetric execution in the innovation of products and services together with a policy of corporate transparency, at Strategee we contribute to the construction of our clients' brands supported by adjusted consumer and competition studies, which allow us to maintain the line ethics and at the same time compete with products and services designed for the needs of consumers, doing so with surprise and challenge to competitors.