Prologue

This is the first of a four part series on the awkward situations that brands encounter. The new digital marketing environment creates many problems and challenges for today’s marketers — some of which are self-imposed. Our use of folkloric metaphors -a deep and abiding reservoir- helps define such situations in ways we can quickly relate to.

Is Your Brand Stuck Like Rapunzel?

We all know the story of the girl who attracts the boy because of her beautiful tresses and nearly loses him following the ultimate bad hair day. It is a teen romance. It is also an incarceration story: “a tower stood in a forest that had neither a door nor a stairway, but only a tiny little window at the very top.” It is part of a genre of folk tale called maiden in the tower.

A less familiar but telling example comes from Turkey, where legend speaks of a sultan whose daughter lived under a curse; namely, that she would die by snakebite on her 18th birthday. The over-zealous parent imprisons her in a tower in an attempt to ensure her safety. Unfortunately, an asp in her birthday fruit basket proves fatal.

Such stories combine three common elements (Jailer, Prisoner, Prison) and a common theme: young lady is removed from the hoi polloi by over-protective parent figure and shut away for her own good.

Rapunzel Brands have the same problem.

1. The Jailer, by analogy, is the marketing executive who puts the brand on a pedestal so as to earn our respect and admiration. The team has worked long and hard; they’ve invested considerable sums to raise the brand to where it is and do not want the competition to get too close. Problem is: the consumer ends up being kept at a distance too.
2. The Prisoner did not set out to be isolated in this way. But the wireless phone company that boasts the biggest network; the pharmaceutical brand that demands our respect because it’s the longest lasting; the technology company that craves our respect because it has the fastest upload have become trapped not so much by the superlatives but by the ensuing remoteness; the detachment that dulls us to them. A Rapunzel Brand is so proud of its functional claim that it forgets to maintain emotional rapport with its user base; with its base users so to speak.
3. The Prison is not of brick and mortar but it does lock in the incumbent. By owning the high ground, any departure looks like a climb down. We are all familiar with the case of Kodak: not so long ago it sold 9 out of 10 rolls of film in the US only to be beset by not one revolution but two; as photography went digital and then mobile. Perhaps not stuck up but certainly stuck.

Think about it. Is the shadow of Rapunzel’s tower pointing a finger in your direction? Are you failing to connect with your target audience? Are your attempts at social marketing just not very sociable: falling short of rich engagement? In this regard, too many brands fail to take into account what the customer wants from the dialogue and charge ahead with scattered, disconnected results.

The message to Rapunzel Brands is to come back down to earth.