Abstract

Branding is critical to disruptive innovation and social purpose programs, both strategic arenas of contemporary and future concern. Despite the progress that has been made in the last three decades, establishing branding as an imperative for business strategy, the strategic relevance and practical impact of branding for these strategic arenas is often still underappreciated, underevaluated and underused in practice. In this commentary, I explain why branding is critical for the success of disruptive innovations and societal programs while arguing that branding academics and practitioners must remain or again become more outspoken advocates of branding. We need to communicate the conceptual and practical power of branding to the thought leaders outside of marketing, many of whom are academics in other fields, and we ought to do more to convince executives and practitioners of the mission-critical role of branding beyond marketing.

Introduction

Disruptive innovation has been one of the most influential strategic concepts of the last three decades. The basic idea—the only way to grow is to create new subcategories that reflect new and relevant customer “must haves.” Instead of making other brands less preferred, winning is making competition less relevant or totally irrelevant because they lack visibility and credibility within the newly defined subcategory. The key to strategy, then, is to become the leader of the new subcategory and manage it to success.

One objective in this article is to detail why branding is critical to disruptive innovation; it enables disruptive initiatives to live, to gain traction, to thrive, and to impact. The argument draws on my book Owning Game-Changing Subcategories (Aaker 2020). A second objective is to explore a hypothesis that in this important strategic arena, branding is too often underused, misused, or even missing. It may seem obvious that branding concepts and tools are needed in order to succeed. However, that is not always the case for many of the leading thought leaders, at least in the form of the books and articles that came to my attention. Further, when getting into the practice of organizations whether they be disruptive innovation start-ups or a program within a large firm, there was too often a lack of appreciation for and understanding of branding. A third objective is to suggest that the same phenomenon might be occurring in another strategic arena for nearly every business, how to use its resources to effectively address societal social challenges. The discussion is based on my book The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding.

Social purpose and programs

A similar argument could be made in another area of strategic importance, the efforts of firms to step up and address the serious, sometimes scary, challenges facing society such as global warming, resource conservation, inequality, and personal health. Their efforts too often are composed of grants, volunteering programs and energy goals that are unbranded, perceived to be similar to the efforts of other firms, and hard to communicate to employees or customers.

The solution as explicated in The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding (Aaker 2022) is to introduce two brands into the process. The first are signature social programs, programs that address societal needs or problems that touch people emotionally, are credible, have real impact, represent a long-term commitment; and are branded. These signature programs, which can be internal or external nonprofits, are likely to impact society challenges because they are focused, have a long-term horizon, and are guided and motivated by a brand. A brand also makes communication more effective by representing what the program is and by providing a memory structure that allows the brand to live and evolve.