DNA and Environment - A Brand Story

Recently a group of woodcutters working in India’s Katarniya Ghat forest range spotted a naked 12-year-old girl playing with a troop if monkeys as if she was one of them. The workers alerted the police who fought with the monkeys to capture the girl. After they successfully got her in their car the screaming, screeching monkeys chased them down the road.

Doctors examined the girl who often dropped to all fours, moved around like an animal and ate food directly off the ground as her troop friends would. The doctor's observation was that she had been raised by the troop from an early age and spent many formative years learning their behavior and customs. The age old argument of whether we are shaped by our DNA or our environment was on display, and environment won. 

Brands too are shaped by their DNA and changed by the environment. Last week Pepsi was forced to pull their much-touted ad depicting a model (Kendall Jenner) leaving a shoot to join a protest march. The ad very much reflected Pepsi’s brand DNA of living in the moment and the new generation. But no sooner was the ad launched when howls of protest screamed across social media. Many felt the ad trivialized social activism, that Pepsi was demeaning the importance of BlackLives Matter and the resistance that has quickly evolved since Trump was elected. So large was the outcry that Pepsi pulled the ad; another win for the environment. 

Technology brands are also shaped by environmental shifts. Years ago I was leading public relations for CacheFlow (now Blue Coat Systems) and promoting its unique caching technology to business and technology influencers The brand promise was that CacheFlow sped the internet by allowing web objects to be stored closer to the end use than the host server. Today a fast internet is as common and as easily found as a beer in a brewery. But in those days It could take minutes for AOL to download, rather than seconds. There was a need for speed if the promise of the internet was to come to fruition

CacheFlow met that need, yet after just two years the demands of the internet had evolved. In response, CacheFlow rebranded as Blue Coat with a focus on security and speeding applications across the internet. Same technological DNA, but reengineered to meet environmental needs that evolved fairly quickly. The first was a greater need for security, followed by the explosion of apps flowing across public and private networks.

This was a remarkable realization of the company’s DNA, their brand story and how they could control their narrative by reading the tea leaves of environmental change. 

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