Likeability Matters

One of the reasons big brands love television advertising is that it allows them to partake in image advertising at scale.

Image advertising, for the uninitiated, are the ads you remember from childhood, the big budget, big message ads that become pop culture references. (Just Do It. The Ultimate Driving Machine. Think Different.)

They rarely sell a specific product, but rather, an image of the brand as cool, likable, friendly, trustworthy and a host of other positive attributes.

If done correctly, the TV commercials are the linchpin of a broader branding effort that includes packaging, signage, retail stores and the actual product or service itself.

It’s easy to dismiss the ultimate value of branding, because it’s difficult to measure the actual impact. How much does 30 years of Just Do It ads actually influence someone’s decision to buy Nike running shoes? Does anyone pick up AirPods because they want to think different?

In most cases the consumer themselves would be hard-pressed to tell you.

Crisis Management

And then one day all those years of image advertising actually matter and brands that have invested in it are glad they did.

Take Southwest Airlines.

From the in-flight experience with rapping flight attendants to decades worth of big budget image ads, they’ve established themselves as a consumer favorite, which is even more impressive given consumer’s overall dislike of airlines and the flying experience in general.

For the past 50 or so years, Southwest’s image campaign has helped their business build up a loyal fan base. Which was a very nice thing to have until this past Christmas, when it became a massively crucial thing to have.

As in had another, less beloved airline fucked up to the degree Southwest had, they’d be filing Chapter 11 right now. Whereas Southwest seems to be poised to bounce right back because all those years of advertising created a legion of Southwest fans who were willing to give them a second chance.

A similar dynamic seems to be playing out with Apple in The Battle Against Big Tech.

Since its inception, the brand has relied heavily on image advertising and image in general—Apple ads, Apple stores and Apple packaging all have a similarly clean look and the vibe has always been decidedly cool yet accessible.

Hence the legion of Apple FanFolk who swarm to their defense in online fora and who happily buy everything the brand puts out, even if that sometimes means camping out in front of an Apple store overnight.

Which is why when the IAB’s David Cohen attacked Apple for being a pawn of “privacy extremists” TPTB pretty much shrugged.

Apple’s FanFolk fervently believe that Apple is concerned about their privacy and thus no one in Washington seems to want to take on the beloved brand and its legion of fans.

Compare that with Google, which has made some half-hearted attempts at branding over the years, even running a few Super Bowl ads, but nothing that really sticks beyond the seasonal-themed illustrations on the home page.

As a result, there’s no shortage of people who are willing to believe that Google is capable of great evil, which in turn gives Washington permission to start looking for ways to slap them around, secure in the knowledge that there will be no legion of Google FanFolk willing to swarm to their defense.

It’s almost as if Google has been swallowing their own Kool-Aid about the power of only reaching targeted audiences, mostly through SEO and targeted keywords.

That, and they’ve never really “had” to advertise.

“Google” is a verb and has been one for the past decade and then some.

YouTube pretty much runs on its own gas too—it has no real competition and has broad global reach. Mention that if someone is described as a “YouTuber” and you don’t need to explain further.

The Google Drive suite of products (Docs, Sheets, Slides) has also been well received and actually put an end to Microsoft’s dominance of the office-software market.

So not a bad place to be, though I can't help but think about where they would be now if only they’d invested heavily in the sort of branding Apple had. If there were legions of Google-heads out there defending them and if, as a result, lawmakers were more hesitant about going after them because consumers believed whatever they were saying about privacy.

Which is the thing about branding and paying attention to how you are perceived. 

It is, in many ways, a defensive measure or a form of protective gear. Something that only really becomes relevant when things go wrong and you need consumers to be willing to always think the best of you, to be able to forgive and forget and to readily come to your defense, both online and in the real world.

That is admittedly not an easy situation to contemplate when everything is going smoothly—it’s hard to imagine yourself ever getting into that sort of sticky situation.

But it matters.

Branding matters and likeability matters.

Especially now when social media can amplify all those negative voices. 

Not to mention all the positive ones.