Thinking About Brands and Brand Equity

Joshua, thanks for bringing the 50% drop to my attention. Among my peers, Chick Fil-A has actually skyrocketed in popularity and I have been getting all these e-mails from them about defending Chrisitianity from Satan by eating a chicken sandwich on August 1.

So thanks for bringing the 50% drop to my attention. It made me feel like the liberal academic at an Ivy League school who remarked that she couldn't possibly understand how Nixon won because all of her friends voted for McGovern.

On a side note, do you think executives of public companies should ever speak out about a personal belief that happens to be unpopular with the general citizenry? Obviously, Chick Fil-A is a privately held company and they can make whatever trade-offs between money and their own moral agenda that they desire, but what about for publicly traded stocks? If I'm the CEO of Procter & Gamble, should I have any business telling people how I feel about the healthcare ruling, abortion, gay rights, the constitutionality of flag-burning, etc.? I'm curious about your opinion because I know Buffett remarked that he didn't put his citizenship in a blind trust when he became CEO of Berkshire, but I'm wondering how you feel about the advisability of that. After all, CEOs of publicly traded companies are speaking from a platform that will affect the profitability enjoyed by other shareholders who may not share the same views.

"unpopular with the general citizenry"?!!

You do know that gay "marriage" has an oh-for-thirty-one track record, right?

Just because something is popular doesn't make it politically correct. And, although I personally disagree with re-writing the dictionary because some minority group feels left out, even I recognize that elections are not necessarily indicative of general public opinion. Elections are driven by engagement, and often times a lack of engagement from the majority is enough to allow the vocal minority to win an election.

I work in the firearms industry. If you asked all 300+ million Americans whether "assault weapons" should be legal for civilian ownership, you'd probably find that a majority would say they should be outlawed. Yet there is currently no (federal) ban on these weapons. Why? Because the people who think they should be legal are more likely to be politically active, to give more money to political campaigns and non-profits, and to be willing to be single-issue voters.

Scott,

Not to hijack the conversation the rest of you are having, but on a side-note, do you have any thoughts on the findings that show the younger generation generally more supportive of gun rights? I'm curious as to what you see from your vantage point in the industry.

Looking at the other societal trends, I think there is a strong case to be made that pro-life causes are winning because of the rise of the sonogram and the psychology that entails. I think there is a strong case to be made that marriage equality is a major winning point in my generation because the Internet and other forms of communication connected minorities (even if you are talking about 3%, that is 1 in 33 people, which is a hell of a lot of folks) in a way that empowered them, while simultaneously making other people realize they were surrounded by gay people, removing the moral disapprobation. However, on the gun right issue, I'm stuck. I can find no major macroeconomic or sociological change that would explain the rise in pro-gun rights. What do you think is behind it? Especially in sub-groups, such as African Americans, which suddenly saw a huge surge, percentage speaking, in recreational non-violent gun ownership?

If it risks hijacking the thread, feel free to send your thoughts to me, if you have the time, via the contact form. I'd appreciate if you can shed any light on what is going on here. A friend of my family has been a big shareholder in Sturm, Ruger for decades. In the past two years, that change has helped explain, in part, a 500% to 600% gain in his position. I'm trying to understand the factors that drive demand on the consumer side.

I'd like to hear Scott's take on this too, but here's a list of possible factors:
- Whether or not Obama gets re-elected
- People freaking out over 2012 and other doomsday scenarios
- Violent crimes seeming much "closer to home" because of social media. Now we hear live updates throughout the day from all angles, rather than just on the 6 o'clock news.
- The continuing rise of video gaming (I guess you could call it the "Modern Warfare Effect")

I'm just one data point, but in my case: my town was a direct hit in the April 2011 tornado outbreak. To me, natural disasters and terrorist attacks are very real possibilities. I'm not even a gun enthusiast, but I'd still want an assault rifle if it came down to defending my family from rapists and looters.

... that third point, the ubiquity of media and the belief that crime rates are actually rising when they have fallen considerably since the early 1990s ... that is fascinating. You might be on to something there!!! I need to look into this ...

Yes, the crime rates have been falling as more guns get in the hands of law-abiding citizens, and as more States have implemented Concealed Carry..

I don't think the media coverage was all that different 10 years ago than it is now. But if you look at the period from 1998-2003, firearm background checks were almost perfectly flat overall.

the tl;dr version that I just sent to Joshua was basically that firearm background checks have been increasing steadily since Call of Duty 1 was released, which was followed in short order by the expiration of the federal Assault Weapons Ban. This coincided with sudden cooperation by gun makers with video game producers that allowed them to use basically real gun models for the first time, which led young people to develop emotional attachments with certain models before ever touching them or walking into a gun shop - and for the first time since 1994, they could go to a shop and buy (basically) the real thing, instead of a neutered "ban compliant" variation. A German gun maker Heckler & Koch actually paid the TV series "24" to arm the protagonist with their most popular model handgun, the USP, when they first realized this back then.

PM sent

Not particularly related to the topic of conversation in which you and the other commentators are engaged, but on a public policy note, you are making the "mean vs. median" mistake in statistics. You sometimes see this crop up in everything from gun rights to abortion.

In other words, your statement is true. However, it is not entirely consequential because almost all of those 31 cases happened in 2004 or prior. The average college freshman was in 4th grade at the time. I, a near-30-year old who is now rich, successful, and running my own companies, was still living in a college dorm room! YouTube hadn't even been invented, yet. The iPhone hadn't been invented. You look at the typical high school student today, they were in preschool or kindergarten when those bans were put on the books. For most young voters and will-be-voters-in-the-next-few-years, you're talking about events that are ancient history, just like the Civil War or Hitler's invasion of Poland would be in a textbook.

(Frankly, by all accounts I can find, 2016 is the point of no return on this particular topic, demographically speaking. There was a transition period, if I recall, that famed statistician Nate Silver predicted a few years ago, that would begin in 2012 when the typical young person would begin revolting at anyone who they believed was "bigoted" toward same-sex couples. You are seeing that now. From a sociological model, it's no different than the major national brands back in the 1960's who took positions against desegregation. At some point, the backlash makes resistance irrational because society won't tolerate what it considers something fundamentally opposed to its basic morality, in this case, the concept of equality.)

To get around that analysis problem, you would need to look at breakdowns within median age groups. The most recent data comes from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which does an excellent job tracking public polling on gun rights, abortion and pro-life beliefs, gay marriage, religious beliefs, and a host of other moral and ethical considerations in a society, cross referenced by age, race, denomination affiliation, political party, education, income, gender, and geography. I read thousands of pages of their reports each year and highly recommend their work. On this topic, the most recent data came out in April of 2012 and you can see a visual representation of approval rates by age.

What is particularly fascinating is that the support in marriage equality is skyrocketing alongside support for gun rights and pro-life anti-abortion laws. The old social paradigms don't apply to this generation. Their (er ... my, since I am in the 30-and-under group) "right" and "left" are vastly different than the ancient Kennedy vs. Nixon divide. Bluntly, the typical young person today is likely to be pro-life, for marriage equality, and generally pro-gun rights. It's a mix that would have been unfathomable to the party establishments only a few short decades ago but I think there is a strong argument that the rise of the Internet has resulted in a significant libertarian streak that results in individuals of disperate groups being empowered and forming sub-cultures that is, frankly, far too long of a discussion to get into in the comments sections and not at all related to the mathematics we are focusing on right now.

I think you will find that as the youth age, they will turn from gay "marriage" as they do from most liberal ideas. The reason is simple, and liberal hate it -- the pre-frontal cortex becomes fully developed. The development of the pre-frontal cortex precisely matches the likelihood of one's being conservative. In old age, the pre-frontal cortex deteriorates, and one becomes more liberal again.

Were that true, I'd be the first to argue it as a social model. However, it cannot be true because the facts show quite the opposite. Look at the link to the Pew Data I referenced earlier. We have several generations of social attitudes on the matter being tracked, going back to the 1980's. All age groups, including the elderly, have been steadily increasing in support for marriage equality over the past 10 to 20 years. If your thesis were true, there would be an increase in support among the youth, followed by a permanent tapering town as one ages. There is not. Instead, older Americans retain these beliefs, and often bring their family and friends along with them, resulting in support for marriage equality significantly increasing among all age brackets over the past 10 to 20 years. There will always be a holdouts (e.g., 1 out of 4 people 65 years or older in the United States thinks inter-racial marriage is immoral) but, no. Yes, older Americans still support is less often than younger Americans, by a wide margin, but absolute support among the elderly is several times higher than it was when even I was in college.

We cannot rationally conclude that it is a temporal age distortion due to biology. It just isn't supported. Social demographic changes do not revert. Once women had the right to vote, people didn't become more conservative in their old age and seek to turn it back. The same for Jews being given access to jobs, or African Americans and desegregation.

What you say about pre-frontal cortex development is true, especially regarding reckless behavior (e.g., binge drinking and sexual promiscuity) in men, who often don't see full development for long-range planning until 21 or 22 years old. However, it has never held in social-demographic changes. The data just doesn't show that. It unimpeachably argues the exact opposite, to be frank.

You're taking ONE position only. Look at the aggregate.

Anyway, you are conflating liberal positions with racist positions. Different beasts.

I have and it doesn't hold. Here is a decent explanation from Discovery as to the reasons it is a myth people get more conservative as they grow older. It just doesn't happen. It's an urban legend. There is no conclusive evidence to back it up, either in voting records or in personal behavior. Reference Link.

I don't think we are really talking about racism or marriage per se, do you? I think the real issue is the social ramifications of holdings beliefs in a society in which a significant portion of the population no longer finds those beliefs valid, and the implications that has on personal well-being, both in terms of legal liberties and economic opportunities. In that light, it doesn't matter if racism or marriage or any other issue is comparable, only that the trajectory of social change they follow is similar, which leads to a better understanding of the phenomenon.

Read the article you reference -- it's talking about getting more liberal after 60, which is just what I said. The prefrontal cortex deteriorates after middle age.

That's completely bunk for more reasons than I want to go into--let alone cheeky to imply that whatever you mean by "Conservative" is the only orientation of a neurologically healthy human being. It is far more likely that people become more "family values" oriented as they settle down and have children or become less interested in paying taxes as they become more materially established. The closest thing I have seen to a biological theory of political orientation was a hypothetical difference in breeding strategies that was used to explain a constellation of differences between marijuana prohibition supporters and opponents.

P.P.S. I really should not be posting this, and I will most likely delete in shortly, but this falls into the "it's Friday and it's my blog" category ... though it is technically Tuesday now. When writing the Chick-fil-A article, I found this in my research and I laughed so hard I was almost crying. It's completely inappropriate but it's just too absurd not to share ... Here is the link ...

It's interesting that a few lines out of several hundred resulted in the most comments. That is proof that brand equity is both powerful, and can be damaged or put at risk.

Your questions really are much bigger, philosophical problems, which are the ones I like. It would be better to bump it up to a mail bag question, though that really isn't fair to the dozens of people I've been working on responses to for awhile ... then again, it's my blog and this has now piqued my interest. Yeah, I'll turn it into a mail bag question and post it sometime in the next few days. Who knows? Maybe tonight. I have an article I promised a trade publication that I need to have edited before sending out tomorrow at midnight but, I'll think about it and get back to you.

I just posted my response. I couldn't work so I thought I'd go over my take on the issue. It's long. At the very least, I recommend the Colbert segment embedded video at the bottom. My new favorite phrase is "lesbian fantasy snack", which refers to the KFC double down. If nothing else, writing that response was worth it for discovering that brief clip of him explaining why it is so tempting.

I would not worry about it -- the "Buzz" and "Attention" parts of that perception index amount to questions such as, "Have you heard anything negative about the company?"

That matters in the food industry, though. Ever notice that in the year following the September 11th attacks, virtually all Coca-Cola ads disappeared relative to their usual ad exposure? They have one of the most valuable brands in the world and they are wise enough to know the psychology of only having a name associated with good memories and good experiences. You do not want a negative voice or feeling, no matter how small, in the back of the consumer's mind at the point of purchase.

Coming soon, a tax break for having a Bar/Bat Mitzvah. All religions will demand a Bar/Bat Mitzvah.