Imperfectly appealing: the self-ironising brand

Lifting a spoon of yoghurt to her lips with pleasure, Nicole Scherzinger tumbles from a picnic table, an ordered chaos of picnicware around her. Her hair is messy, but in a nice way. On her dainty nose, a dab of Müller Püd chocolate dessert so perfectly circular as to appear to have been mechanically impressed or made by a Renaissance draughtsman. She laughs at herself, everyone laughs too – oh what a time was had.

 

On one level this is an ad (like so many) so extrovert in its attempt to bring the celeb- ambassador down a peg or two as to border, seemingly, on ritual humiliation. But, of course, this is not true indignity. It is a manicured indignity that is both effortlessly glamorous and endearingly normal. It’s a dynamic mix of the sublime and the ridiculous in a Soft Power age in which relatability betokens legitimacy and characterises modern leadership in all domains.

 

Barack Obama, for example, had a viral hit in February by releasing mock fly-on-the-wall footage of what, so the fantasy goes, happens in the Oval Office when nobody is watching. He dribbles an imaginary basketball, tries on sunglasses, goofs around with his phone camera. For the Snapchat generation, the Sword of State is the selfie stick.
 

For big brands, to come across as ordinary is often now a good thing, and to be flawed is only to seem more human. Clumsiness can be forgiven, even worked to the brand advantage, when acknowledged at the perfect pitch of wry good-humour. This is managed imperfection: the self-deprecation so artfully applied as to only make yourself look better; the irony so sharp as to carve out and engage a knowing in-crowd; the self-awareness so honest as to deflect any possibility of criticism.

 

It is vulgar now for a brand to put its good points front-and-centre, and folly to expect consumers to talk them up. The change in attitude can be seen in how brands behave on online networks. Social media was once imagined as a perfect spot to fish for positive customer testimonials (“Tell us what you love most about us!”). But sincerity makes risky strategy.
 

High-profile brands have by now had their fingers bitten many times. Brand hashtags are all too liable to fall victim to ‘hijacking’ from internet users, be they activists, pranksters or the generally mischievous. #McDstories, #ILoveWalgreens, #WaitroseReasons, #AskJPM… campaigns now consigned to infamy and the annals of Buzzfeed. But they teach us an important lesson: the consumer-cynic will proactively undermine brand self-aggrandisement at every turn.

 

Self-deprecating tactics need not be strictly defensive; they can build brand capital by tacitly reinforcing key messages and asserting core competencies. Self-mockery done right is never self-harming, but quietly self-applauding.
 

This summer, Protein World stirred controversy with heavily Photoshopped, provocative posters asking commuters on London’s Underground if they were ‘beach body ready’. It felt, to many, very much like a blast from a less enlightened past.
 

Carlsberg promptly responded on social media by dressing a lager bottle in tiny bikini-bottoms and asking: “Are you beer body ready?”
 

Through gentle self-mockery, Carlsberg asserts its core brand values: unpretentious, non-idealistic, lighthearted fun. Its strengths are represented as weaknesses, but so subtly as to frustrate all possible accusations of false modesty.
 

Gap asked us in a celebrated campaign last year to ‘Dress normal’; Carlsberg asks us to drink it.
 

Many brands use irony to distance themselves from historic business practices, and pave the way for self-reinvention. RadioShack playfully alluded to the accusation that the electronics retailer’s heyday of success was in the 1980s with a kitsch Super Bowl 2014 commercial featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan, Kid’n’Play and ALF. Virgin America spoofed an entire industry last year with the creation of ‘BLAH Airlines’, parodying everything wrong with service on economy flights under the slogan ‘You will get there’. In doing so, Virgin America demonstrated that it understands consumer frustrations and set itself apart from the rest.

 

As more brand functions migrate online, it has never been more challenging, and crucial, to maintain warmth and personality. This kind of humour relies on, and is a natural product of, the informal nature of much communication on the ‘warming web’.

 

And while ludicrous overstatement might be forgivable in the idealistic young startup company, or the Kanye West Glastonbury set, the mission of big multinationals over the coming years will be to drop the theatrics and persuade the consumer that behind the brand curtain are, simply, a set of normal people, good-humoured, self-effacing, charmingly conscious of their foibles. The call of the self-ironising brand is: ‘Speak normal.

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Read more from Melanie Howard in our Clubhouse.