
If you’re looking for what’s wrong with legacy brands, look no further than body hair. In 2018, Billie, a direct-to-consumer brand, launched Project Body Hair to spotlight women’s razor ads that show airbrushed legs and not a follicle of hair. Billie wanted women to throw out sham standards of beauty dictated by brand managers and to celebrate every twist and curl.
Brands such as Billie have altered the nature of branding. Unfettered by legacy messaging, and unburdened by the incumbency of customers, they go for relevance, especially among younger consumers. They reject static, monochromatic standardsnamely white, heterosexual and colonial. Beauty is now freedom, with all its quirks and caprices. Brands don’t always get to make the rules anymore.
This subversion of authority doesn’t favor legacy heavyweights. Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, told me that legacy brands are adept at building products around which they wrap a brand; brand management then kicks in to drive awareness, trial and loyalty. The d-to-c insurgents, however, each build a brand from within, and often from a place of empathy and personal pain. Around this personality, they assemble a tribe, united in their belief in how the product or service connects them to their individual lives and to their communities.
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