Can Big Brands Adapt to Marketing with Meaning?

Thanks to Seth Godin and New York Magazine, over the weekend I discovered the Lululemon brand of yoga clothing and accessories. It’s a remarkable business that seems to be sweeping the nation and broadening interest in a 2,000-year exercise ritual. One of Lululemon’s main marketing strategies is to host free, public yoga sessions weekly, such as the photo above in New York City’s Bryant Park. It’s a terrific example of Marketing with Meaning, but this case study and Seth’s post suggest to me that the evolution to this new marketing model might favor new brands over the old.

Traditional, interruptive, impression-based marketing is one of those existing models that a lot of big brands have gotten very good at mastering. They can tweak that commercial to perfection, squeeze out more efficiency in a media buy, and even find new ways to gauge consumer reaction to an ad (such as brain scanning) and new places to put an ad (airplane trays, anyone?). But those skills are all spent in polishing a model that has decreasing marginal returns—and with the revolution in consumer power and media options, these actions might be leading to decreasing returns, or at least widening opportunity costs from not embracing meaningful marketing.

Lululemon went from zero to a $1 billion market cap thanks to marketing with meaning. But it did so because it had zero to start with. This challenge forced Lululemon to think differently from the start. But big brands have the disadvantage of lots of money and existing equity. This mirrors the evolution of life on earth—the specialties that made plants and animals successful in one era can become weaknesses when the climate shifts.

Time will tell which brands are able to make the leap. I believe thousands of small brands will rise from the chaos, and a good number of big brands that quickly admit the challenges and commit to a new path will make the journey as well.

Read more on the Marketing With Meaning blog.