Democratize, don't dilute.
The author wearing the same Patagonia jacket in two very different settings
We live in democratized times. By that, I mean that more people have more access to more things than ever before. That’s not to say inequity doesn’t exist—far from it—but for those who do have access, that access is undeniably greater than ever before. “Access to what?” you may ask. Well, I’m talking about access to things previously thought to be unreachable. In this age of AI tools and simplified online products, ordinary people can increasingly do tasks previously reserved for professionals on the same tool that professionals use:
GoPros allow us to film a cinema-quality video of our dog jumping into the pool, just as well as they work to document a squirrel suit-wearing BASE jumper proximity flying in a remote alpine valley.
Squarespace allows even the least tech-savvy among us to design a beautiful website while also providing professional web designers with a simple platform to deliver their outputs in a way that their clients can take and run with.
Patagonia puffies are just as valuable for tech workers riding MUNI buses in foggy San Francisco as they are to elite rock climbers battling hard routes on Yosemite’s El Cap.
You get the picture. These brands have dual audiences – they are relevant to two utterly different groups for equally valid reasons. To keep things simple and to satisfy my insatiable urge for acronym creation (IUFAC), I’ll call them DABs (Dual Audience Brands). While having two very different audiences certainly has implications from a product perspective, I have been struck by the challenges that it presents for marketers. How does one brand something that hardcore users love for its deep technical capabilities while also capturing the (likely larger, but potentially lower margin) audience of laypeople who love it for other reasons? More notably, how does one capture both audiences without alienating either? Assuming a limited budget and the inability to target and message to only one audience at a time (a reality I find most clients face), we are left with a conundrum: ensuring that the right audience receives the right message. We want to be two things to two people, but we only have one brand. And we can’t mess this up.
I’ve encountered this challenge several times in my career, but the earliest example is Quiksilver. You remember Quiksilver, the mountain and the wave – the iconic Australian-born surf brand whose logo adorned the nose of Kelly Slater’s boards for decades. By the time I arrived at “Quik” in the early 2010s, the brand was suffering deeply and rapidly losing revenue due to what my coworkers referred to as the “Wal-Mart Effect.” Fast Fashion brands like H&M were growing at an astronomical pace, and rather than doubling down on its roots, Quiksilver began selling cheap clothing in big-box retailers like Ross, Costco, Walmart, and others throughout the country and the world. Despite the brand’s origins as a titan of the surf industry since the late 1960s and its employee base comprising passionate lovers of the sport and lifestyle, decisions were made to expand its reach, with the hope that mass appeal would stave off mounting losses.
People everywhere, even a couple of thousand miles from the nearest ocean, appreciate the surf lifestyle and what it stands for. What they don’t appreciate, however, is paying a premium price to dress the part. When Quiksilver went mass market, the brand quickly lost credibility among its core constituents – people who actually surf. Suddenly, your Uncle Joe from Nebraska was wearing the same shirt as you. And for an industry that trades on cool factor, that was not a winning proposition. As one industry insider stated in OC Weekly’s article on the company’s collapse,
“There’s nothing worse when you’re supposed to be a core brand than to go to Costco and see Quiksilver on one table and containers of mayonnaise next to it,” scoffs a former professional surfer who asked that his name not be used to avoid jeopardizing industry ties. “Pretty soon, you’ve got 70-year-olds walking around in Quiksilver because their wives bought them shirts for $11 each.”
This quote illustrates how core customers perceived the erosion of the brand. Take it not as an indictment of older customers, but an illustration of how off-brand distribution can break the “cool” and "counter culture" narrative.
While many factors contribute to the rapid decline of a $2.5 billion company, the departure from its true identity undeniably played a key role. In 2014, Quiksilver’s sales dropped 13%, leading to a net loss of $309.4 million (Apparel News). Quiksilver could not escape the riptide that is fast fashion and quickly sank to the bottom, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2015. As someone who loved the brand, I was personally devastated by this decline. And I’m eager to help the great brands of the modern day avoid the same fate.
So, in this increasingly democratized world, what can we learn from this? I have three key principles that I believe all DABs can and should embrace:
1. Keep the core close.
The core is called the core for a reason. It’s the heart and soul of your company, your most loyal and passionate customers. Your brand should be built to ensure that key power users and product enthusiasts are always included and feel heard. Bear in mind that the fact that core users love you can often be the most compelling message to the layperson. If Tommy Caldwell wears this jacket while climbing the Dawn Wall, surely it’s good enough for your car camping trip in Big Sur, right?
One critical reality in keeping the core close is not diminishing what they do. Yes, design tools have become easier to use – but that does not make everyone a professional designer. The fastest way to anger the core is to suggest that the gap between them and the layperson has been eliminated by your product or, even more infuriatingly, by AI. This message is something I see many marketers leaning into in this age of AI, and I think it’s a perilous path that can lead to the alienation of the core. As brand builders, we cannot forget to water the roots as we try to expand the branches of the tree.
2. The power is in the pair.
One of the greatest mistakes a DAB can make is to promise too much. “Our software makes everyone a professional _____.” Not only does this anger the core (see point #1), but it also misleads the layperson. Unless the tool truly eliminates the need for professionals in the space (in which case, you don’t have a core/pro audience), you should very delicately walk the line of promising grandeur. Perhaps one day, your layperson coding tool will completely replace the need for engineers, but if it’s now just a band-aid solution that allows non-technical folks to fix minor issues, then you must be honest about that.
That being said, rather than overpromising, you could connect your two audiences. Admittedly, this point could require product changes, but it is one of those “hiding in plain sight” opportunities that almost every DAB has. You have a broad, layperson audience of people interested in doing something, and you also have a narrow, core audience of people who are experts in doing that thing. You can likely pair these two together by allowing the core to offer its services, advice, and so on to the layperson audience.
An incredible example of this dynamic is Canva. For those unfamiliar, Canva is a web-based tool that enables ordinary people to create beautiful designs. Be it a birthday card, a resume, or a high-stakes corporate presentation – anyone can make something visually stunning on Canva. Rather than allowing that breakthrough product offering to destroy the livelihoods of professional designers, Canva has allowed them to thrive. They have built a marketplace into their platform where “Canva Creators” can sell templates, designs, and ideas for laypeople to buy. Canva has thereby won the hearts of both the core and mass audience in one fell swoop – the DAB double whammy (DABDW). Many DABs have similar opportunities to create symbiotic relationships between their seemingly distinct user groups and, from a brand perspective, doing so dramatically simplifies the task at hand.
3. Find the common love.
Ultimately, we need to appeal to both of our target audiences. They may be with us for different reasons, and they may even use our products in different ways, but there is always an opportunity to delve deeper into what makes your brand unique and find common ground, common love, that will appeal to both audiences. It is this point of overlap that marketers should seek out and lift up.
Some examples, you say? Here’s what I mean:
Squarespace champions the power of a website, however big your business is.
Patagonia champions a love of being outside, whatever form that may take.
Quiksilver should have championed what surfing stands for without losing what made them unique.
Picture the Venn Diagram of your dual audiences’ interests, beliefs, loves, etc., and find where the overlap is. That’s your sweet spot, and that’s where the most significant opportunity for success as a DAB lies.
If I were a betting man, I would put all my chips on the trend of democratization and simplification of tools rapidly accelerating. Tech is getting too good, AI is getting too smart, and younger generations are too tech-native for it not to be.
As marketers, we must, therefore, do the seemingly impossible – build a brand that can be two things to two very different groups of people at once. Let us ensure that, in our efforts to democratize, we fight firmly against the forces of dilution.