Do you know what’s funny? When you try your hand at brand humor or humorous advertising but it lands with all the grace of a herd of wildebeests. Oof. But it’s not all bad gnus. (Womp.) With a few pointers, you can break out with more mirthful marketing—whether that’s funny copywriting, playful brand storytelling or funny ads—and there’s good reason to. You won’t just crack your audience up by using humor effectively; you’ll crack open more engagement, conversions, recall, brand equity and more, and this applies to both B2C to B2B.

(One brand is laughing all the way to the bank with conversions leaping to nearly 200% when they used humor in copywriting. We’ll get to that in a minute.) But first…why did humor even evolve in humans?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Humanity

“Homo sapiens” is Latin for “wise man.” But maybe “wise guy” is a better fit. Because, from snickering at the back of the cave to snickering in the back of a movie theater, we’ve been finding things funny for a long time—like 35,000 years now. (Talk about a running joke!)

And while scientists still haven’t completely figured out the biological imperative for humor (and its attendant physiological response: laughter), they have some compelling theories. These are mostly around humor as a kind of social glue, from facilitating bonding to masking nervousness to dampening aggression to showing superiority to attracting partners. Laughter itself seems to have evolved from heavier breathing during play like play fighting or tickling.

Another intriguing theory is that humor enhances cognitive strategies by revealing incongruities. The idea is that our brains constantly make assumptions about what we’ll experience next or who other humans might be—and reward us with amusement when we realize our assumptions weren’t correct. It’s a little nuanced but still rooted in social connection.

Strike Paydirt When You Strike Them as Funny

That social connection is the true power of using humor effectively in marketing, verbal branding, or advertising; it links your humanity to your audience. It helps you find common ground, surprise and delight, diffuse tension and be relatable to your key customers or stakeholders.

But that’s not all. Being funny can lead to serious business results, improving everything from purchase intent, evaluation, and recall (turns out, people remember funny sentences more), to reach, engagement, and brand advocacy.

Take Wendy’s, for example. They’ve been roasting people on social media so hilariously that people now volunteer to get sent up in a #NationalRoastDay tweet. It’s a badge of honor at this point, and a great example of humor amping engagement and affinity.

“You won’t just crack your audience up by using humor effectively; you’ll crack open more engagement, conversions, recall, brand equity and more.”

Or consider Dollar Shave Club. That one funny breakout video? It cost only about $4,500—but generated more than 11 million views and massive media coverage. It also works for brands like Manly Bands, a wedding ring retailer who saw conversions jump to 93% (the conversion rate for one ring in particular increased to almost 200%!) when they traded boring for funny in their brand copywriting. And there are all kinds of success stories of using humor in advertising, from underwear to underarms.

But Don’t Save All Your Chuckles for Consumer Brands

B2B audiences would love more pop in their procurement—in fact, one Google study found B2B buyers are more emotionally connected to their vendors than consumers are to theirs, and nearly 50% likelier to buy when there’s a personal, emotional connection.

And again, funny campaigns boost recall, persistent behaviors and engagement for these buyers, too. But there’s another reason to dust off your comedic chops: not a lot of B2B brands are doing it, creating a massive opportunity to differentiate on top of all those other benefits.

Who could forget MailChimp’s FailChips? Or LinkedIn’s ridiculously relatable gifs for marketers? What about iStock by Getty’s hilarious take on over-posed stock images? Adobe Marketing Cloud even found a way to send up the mean streets of pay-per-click advertising.

What’s So Funny, Anyway?

It mostly comes down to incongruity. It’s about an unexpected reversal or left turn, usually near the end of a sentence, like, “I’m sorry I’m late. I got here as soon as I felt like it.” Ba-dum tss!

But there’s an art to using humor in marketing and branding. Done wrong, humor can distract from your message, weaken your credibility, and alienate or, worse, offend your audiences. This usually happens when:

• Making fun of a specific group of people
• Being ham-handed with a sensitive topic
• Cracking a joke at an inopportune time (like a natural disaster or PR crisis)
• Using a kind of humor that’s at complete odds with your brand
• Attempting to wield humor without truly understanding its subtext (something you’ll find out fast if you get it wrong)

Three Principles to Land Your Punchline

With a few pointers, you can reap the benefits of using humor in content marketing, from emphasizing brand or product benefits to enhancing brand storytelling to building emotional connections, to engendering support (and funds) for societal issues, to generating explosive engagement on social.

1. Know Your Audience, Industry and Topic

It’s pretty table stakes for general branding and marketing but glossing over this can really kill your comedic campaign. You need to truly understand the personas in your target audience segments before you try to roll out a humorous ad or funny product video.

And you’ll want to go beyond typical demographics and go deep into psychographic segmentation to uncover things like beliefs, values, personality traits, lifestyles and hobbies so you can tailor your humor accordingly. There are two reasons: 1) you need to know what your audience responds to and 2) how not to alienate them. Zoomer humor, for example, is incredibly nuanced and increasingly meta-ironic or post-ironic—use either incorrectly at your peril.

So, find out what makes your audience tick. Are they impassioned social activists that appreciate pot-shots at the status quo? Stressed-out shoppers with a penchant for sarcasm? Extremely online intellectuals who like a bit of irony? Stay-at-home parents, who prefer deadpan to dad jokes? Knowing their likely personality profile will help you figure out what they might find funny, how far you can take it and what they could find offensive.

You also have to know your brand’s unique value proposition, product benefit, service offering, customer pain points, any product or brand weaknesses, and the context in which you operate—and know it inside and out—to know what’s funny about it. Try brainstorming your brand’s attributes, benefits, product use cases, industry quirks, even your product weaknesses—and then see if you can make unexpected and comical connections between them and your audience, competitors, recent trends, adjacent industries—get creative! You can use any of these elements to craft chuckle-worthy content.

Canned Laughter? No, Cannes Lions.

For instance, Zendesk, a customer service software provider, used a common customer service pain point—annoying support agent calls—as the basis for their funny “Sh*t Support Agents Say” video.

Love Cheetos but not orange-stained fingers? Same. But you can even poke fun at your own product limitations like these. In fact, doing so won Cheetos a 2021 Cannes Lion for their digital, social and out-of-home campaign that was based on exactly that: the (now iconic?) orange powder stain. You could say they created campaign success that was hard to…touch.

Even if you represent a more typically “dry” industry like materials engineering or healthcare, you can still generate solid results with humorous campaigns. In one study, a funny and a non-funny healthcare ad went head to head in a split test—and the funny one won, increasing time spent, credibility and message recall, no joke.

2. Know Your Form of Funny

But which kind of humor will work best for your brand? Because there are different ways to be funny in marketing—to different effects. Let’s take a look at some of them, with examples.

Light Humor – Sometimes a chuckle is just as good as a guffaw when it comes to making an emotional connection and delighting your audience. Light humor is more about being playful in your tone as opposed to landing a zinger of a punchline, like Bank of America’s “Can’t Stop Banking” video that poked gentle fun at the phenomenon of being on our phones.

Deadpan – Using deadpan humor can create a doozy of an impact. It’s a dry-wit display of emotional neutrality, usually contrasting a highly emotional moment—like Allstate’s Mayhem campaign (unleashing untold mayhem for competitors trying to keep up, no doubt). That Dollar Shave Club video mentioned earlier? Also deadpan.

Observational – This is when you make fun of a recent trend, larger human condition or current event. It’s delivered as a kind of conspiratorial, winking aside that tells the audience you get it, you relate and you’re both on the inside of that joke, whether it’s Apple poking fun at “the whole work-from-home thing” or Wendy’s roasting women’s razor maker Gillette Venus with their cheeky tweet, “You’re going to love our new pink straw. It’s an extra $2.50.” Pow! Take that, pink tax!

Absurdist or Surreal (and sometimes even downright impenetrable) – This humor is about being completely illogical to make people laugh and, generally, the weirder the funnier. It works as a foil to common, everyday situations where no one expects you to go off the rails (incongruity, remember?). Think: Skittles’ exhorting you to “Contract the rainbow!” or the Old Spice guy instructing you to, “Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like” before suddenly being on a horse.

Irreverent – A close cousin of the absurd is irreverent humor. This kind of funny lacks even a smidge of decorum or seriousness, instead favoring a brash, #nofilter and deliciously disrespectful breed of comedy designed to get attention and make you remember it, damn it. It’s about being bold and unflinchingly funny, like the consumer budgeting app, Cleo, which tells you, “If you don’t love Cleo, it’s probably you.” Or Manscaped, a men’s grooming brand that sells “tools for the family jewels.”

3. Know Your Moment

We haven’t even scratched the surface of all the ways you can be funny. But there are just too many kinds of humor to mention—which makes for a great segue into the problem of too much humor (see what I did there?). And, incredible, I know, but there really is a limit to making people laugh, as I’ve proven (that was meta-irony, by the way).

Indeed, one Twitter study found that 50% of people surveyed think that over-reliance on humor comes off as outdated. So it’s important to find moments for strategic levity, such as a singular campaign or a single asset like a video, banner ad or landing page—or even just a single component of those assets, like a hilarious headline, asinine aside, cheeky CTA or funny footnote. You can even have just an amusing brand name without the rest of your content is particularly comical. Remember, your mission is to surprise and delight—and you can’t do that if every line is a zinger.

Even if your verbal branding strategy is based on a uniquely hilarious brand voice, be judicious in its expression and the frequency of the funny so you don’t lose focus, attention, credibility…or your audience. Video is an ideal place to start. In fact, funny videos are the likeliest to go viral, like when Match.com had hellishly good fun with their “When Satan Met 2020” video (absurdist meets observational for those following along)—and generated some heavenly results, like 6.7 million views.

You Don’t Need a Ladder to Reach Funnier Heights…or Do You?

And, as we’ve seen, funny videos don’t just work for industries like online dating, which, okay, some might say is low-hanging fruit. Murphy Ladder isn’t an overtly funny brand…all the time. But they found a way (not to mention the most irresistibly irreverent actor) to make a product video literally hit you in the face with funny instead of beating you over the head with bland brand messaging.

Speaking of brand messaging, again—you can build an entire verbal brand strategy around humor. You’ve seen all the great reasons to do so. But before you do, you’ll need to apply rigor and a methodical approach (seriously, get downright pedantic) to defining your brand of humor, its expression, the principles underpinning it, and its guidelines, so your brand copywriters and communicators know exactly how to be funny while being firmly on-brand and on-strategy.

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Many of us have been living in a world that feels a bit like Microsoft’s metaverse for the past two years. From Outlook and Teams to LinkedIn and Xbox, Microsoft has built a growing network of digital experiences that keep many of us in its ecosystem throughout much of daily life.

While the experiences don’t yet connect to form the fully immersive digital world deemed a “metaverse” it’s clear they are well-positioned to become a key player. Recently, this ecosystem got a monumental reinforcement in the form of the biggest acquisition in the company’s history: A near $70B acquisition of Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world. Through this move, the embattled Activision Blizzard will receive a lifeline from Microsoft in exchange for the developer’s hits, including “Call of Duty,” “World of Warcraft” and “Candy Crush.”

Microsoft is not the first tech firm to make a significant move toward the metaverse, with digital players increasingly positioning for this future. From Facebook rebranding their parent company to Meta, to Snap acquiring a host of augmented reality companies, many digital companies see the metaverse as the next frontier.

These companies are recognizing the significant shift in how consumers are engaging with digital platforms and are placing huge value on the impact these platforms can have with Gen Z and beyond. But with the metaverse arms race accelerating and the benefits of digital engagements clear, how can brands win in these new worlds as they continue to develop?

Brands Building Digital DNA

As the metaverse continues to unfold, brands shouldn’t wait to start engaging. Early adopters will earn an advantage by diving in with the platforms today, building native credibility in a market skeptical of brands, while gaining a competitive edge on brands that are slower to adopt this next frontier.

Brands that wait until the platform reaches consumer saturation will not drive incremental benefit beyond that of an additional ad channel – the opportunity in the metaverse is much more significant. There is no better way to prepare your brand for the future than to jump in now and refine your digital strategy and presence as you go.

To help with this transition, Prophet has identified three key brand strategy questions to consider:

How Can Your Brand Meet a Need in Consumers’ Digital Lives?

Brands entering these virtual worlds shed their physical limitations and have an opportunity to rethink the value they provide to their consumers. The companies that win in this space are the ones that create experiences to meet a need within this digital ecosystem while reinforcing the brand equity strengths carried through from the physical world.

Nike was able to answer this question in preparation for the introduction of NIKELAND on Roblox, clearly identifying that they would be able to support consumers in digitally expressing themselves, both in lifestyle and clothing.

How Might Your Brand Come to Life Within a New Digital Environment?

The metaverse creates immersive opportunities for brands to build relationships in real-time, beyond the bounds of the sequential conversations that dominate social media. In the metaverse, brands must be wholly authentic and dynamically engaging – and the ones able to strategically translate their voice, imagery and experiences into this context will earn new levels of consumer favor.

While AI-based conversational technology is yet to be widely utilized by brands, we can look to advanced virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Samsung’s Bixby for inspiration on how brands will soon be capable of continuous, real-time conversations with consumers. These dynamic and infinite touchpoints will demand continuous on-strategy voice and tone to build brands within these new platforms.

Ultimately, How is Your Brand Going to Commercialize the Metaverse?

Commercialization in these digital spaces goes beyond anything possible today. It’s more than just selling products – digital engagements provide an unparalleled opportunity for collaborations and completely immersive branded experiences on platforms where creators have the most power.

As augmented reality blurs the lines between reality and technology, brands will have unprecedented context for consumers’ daily lives and will need to commercialize themselves in ways that feel authentic and value-added. When brands overstep their bounds or present themselves in overly commercialized or sales-focused contexts, consumers will perceive the integrations as creepy and reject the offerings entirely.

“The companies that win in this space are the ones that create experiences to meet a need within this digital ecosystem while reinforcing the brand equity strengths carried through from the physical world.”

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Mark your calendars, brand watchers. We are getting ready to release our seventh edition of the Prophet Brand Relevance Index®, and it’s full of surprises. Without giving too much away, we can tell you that we have 96 new brands in the study this year, many of which landed in our top 50 brands. And as we’ve seen in previous years, relevance continues to be a key driver of growth – with the top brands outpacing the average growth rate in the S&P 500.

The new crop of winners shows that while relevance has always been a moving target, two years of seismic shifts in consumer behavior have solidified the way people adopt and abandon brands. And these changes go far beyond the obvious. Of course, digital matters more than ever. And we can see brands that have made intelligent moves to meet these cultural moments are those making the biggest gains.

For the second year in a row, that’s meant honoring how much time people are spending at home. It’s not just where the heart is—it is where the head is, where the body is, where everything is. And so, it is no surprise that every single brand in our top twenty-five represents an aspect of our home life. And a number of brands in the top 50 show that as the pandemic evolves and confidence builds, people are itching to come out of hibernation.

But more importantly, our brand thought leaders discovered that new patterns of relevance are emerging. The team includes:

• Scott Davis, chief growth officer
• Marisa Mulvihill, partner, global head of brand & activation
• Christine Brandt Jones, senior partner, global insights
• Chris Burzminski, associate partner

“We’ve found that the four components underpinning our relevance research are as meaningful as ever,” says Mulvihill. “Brands still derive their relevance from customer obsession, ruthless pragmatism, pervasive innovation and distinctive inspiration. Yet as we continue to refine the science of relevance and interpret post-pandemic changes, these components express themselves in new ways.” Based on responses from 13,500+ U.S. consumers, we looked at 293 brands in 27 categories. We’ve discovered that brands are finding success in our new normal by connecting with us through three distinct avenues.

Brands that solve life’s frustrating problems are leading the first path to relevance. These ruthlessly pragmatic, pervasively innovative brands stand out by fueling the current need for self-reliance and DIY confidence. As we recalibrate our routines through this increasingly digital life, we choose only the best support staff. We want appliances, products and services that are smart enough to enable a new reality spent mostly at home.

“Brands that solve life’s frustrating problems are leading the first path to relevance.”

Others win us over almost by magic, increasing relevance by speaking more to people’s hearts than their heads. Customer obsessed and distinctively inspired, these are the names that turn customers into fans, loyalists and collectors. Devotion and demand like this are born from experiences that make people feel good about themselves, whether by providing easy access to escape or luxury that makes us feel alive and special.

Then there are those relentlessly relevant all-stars that somehow do both, hitting us simultaneously in the head and the heart. It’s because they are easily personalized, making us feel like they actually know us. They connect us to our families, work and the world. They help us discover communities of others who share the same passions. They fill our intimate spaces with stories and sounds from the outside. They help us fulfill our goals to find happiness and strength. These are the brands brightening the world, every single day.

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Get ready, brand strategists – 2022 is going to be your year. The last 18 months have been packed with plot twists, creating new opportunities for better brand activations and experiences. And it’s not just the progression of the pandemic, supply-chain challenges, rising inflation or ever-more-digital consumers that’s caused this shift.

It’s that authenticity matters more as people struggle to absorb all those changes. They’re switching buying behaviors and brands at an unprecedented level. One recent study finds that 75% of consumers have shopped in a new way, with 36% trying a new brand.

To keep customers and attract new ones, companies need to prove they support the greater good in a way that’s unique to their brand. That’s terrible news for brands not actively building and delivering against an authentic purpose that consumers can believe and relate to. But this approach offers wide-open growth avenues for those that can find better ways to connect with customers. We expect the savviest brands to lean hard into these five trends in 2022:

Brand Spending Makes a Comeback

Companies are increasingly aware that they can’t earn customer loyalty without a clear brand identity. There’s just too much noise in the market, and too many options for consumers to choose from.

Clear communication about what a company stands for requires investing in a well-defined brand identity and awareness. How can companies expect to make connections if their target audience is unclear about what they are? We expect to see a greater focus on brand with more dollars shifting –often from the demanding budget – into brand building. Additional resources will allow marketers to ensure brand efforts are clear, inspirational and delivered with energy.

We even think brand and demand may stop fighting and find love, as the two resolve tensions and work together in harmony. CMOs will develop integrated models where brand –the long-term efforts to drive awareness –and demand – which seeks to get audiences to act immediately – are synchronized with shared agendas and intertwined goals.

Got Purpose? Prove it, and Make Sure it Benefits the Planet

For years, we’ve known that consumers are increasingly choosing brands with a higher-order purpose – they want to buy from companies that make a difference in the world. This year, they’ll expect brands to put their money where their mouth is. They’ll want action, like Lush leaving social media because it’s become toxic for their customers, or Nike, investing tens of millions in countering systemic racism.

Sustainability and environmental concerns are especially important. Too often, companies isolate ESG and DEI policies, but they need to become central to brand purpose – a golden thread that winds through every aspect of the organization. ESG and DEI aren’t just about mitigating risks. These efforts add value to everything the company does.

“To keep customers and attract new ones, companies need to prove they support the greater good in a way that’s unique to their brand.”

Whether companies like it or not, protecting the planet is the No. 1 concern for both Gen Z and millennial audiences. Led by firebrands like 18-year-old environmentalist Greta Thunberg and 21-year-old gun-control activist David Hogg many see themselves as warriors acting to protect the planet. These young consumers can spot green or virtue-washing efforts from miles away and will punish companies that get it wrong.

All Digital? Nope. Never

Once upon a time, the business world envied those digitally native direct-to-consumer brands and the way they dinged the dinosaurs who shopped in brick-and-mortar stores. But with the defeat of Casper in the public markets, it’s clear omnichannel rules, and those D2C darlings have stampeded toward the mall. Warby Parker, Glossier, Allbirds and Wayfair are all proving that ­humans like to look, touch and feel what they’re buying.

Led by companies like Apple, Lululemon, Nike and Samsung, this trend toward experiential retail is already strong and will continue to grow. Levi Strauss & Co., for example, is opening 100 new stores this year, and Lego intends to open 174 new locations.

While people know they don’t need actual stores to transact, they do need them for experiences – especially as consumers long for post-pandemic connections. People have spent the last 18 months re-evaluating many priorities. They’ve learned that they love digital for cutting down on the drudgery in their lives, like grocery shopping and banking, so they can focus on the experiences that mean the most to them.

They do, however, want to experience products before purchasing, especially in certain categories, and we expect to see more brands open physical spaces.

The Decline of the Mega Brand

After decades of consolidation, conglomerates are starting to see the benefits of breaking up. With a CEO openly mocking the myth of synergy, GE is leading the way, followed by Johnson & Johnson and Toshiba Corp. More will follow as companies increasingly challenge the belief that one brand can work in many markets, and that bigger is always better.

Companies are asking themselves the hard questions: Can we continue to use a single brand, expecting it to be equally meaningful among different verticals, markets and customers? Is that one brand universally credible? And if not, when is time to switch that strategy?

Facebook’s recent decision to become Meta, illustrates another facet of this trend: More brands may increase a company’s agility, allowing it to pivot in more precise (and perhaps even more affordable) ways.

Midlife Crises Spark Unicorn Reinvention

Remember all those companies we admired back when BlackBerry dominated the market? Twitter (founded in 2006), Airbnb (2008), Pinterest (2009) and Instagram (2010) are all middle-aged now. No longer the cool kids, they need a refresher course in disruption. As they revisit purpose, they need to better understand empowered consumers and find new growth channels. How and where can they innovate as they face younger rivals?

To keep up, they’ll need creative Web 3.0 pivots. We’re already used to watching elderly unicorns struggle. Google used its transition to Alphabet to age gracefully, but once-huge tech brands, such as Jawbone, GoPro and Groupon, have languished from lost relevance. We expect plenty of big news and at least a few missteps as these almost-old digital natives reinvent themselves.

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With rising customer expectations, companies across industries are investing in innovative experiences, digital marketing capabilities, and organizational change to attract and retain talent. But with fast-moving timelines and competing demands, they can’t always invest in storytelling, a key component in influencing and driving change.

Verbal branding—or the strategic deployment of language through tools like voice, messaging, content strategy and copy—plays a key role in optimizing the return on these investments, ensuring companies make thoughtful choices about their communications in these high-impact moments.

In this article, we offer three imperatives for organizations to consider when using their verbal branding to differentiate, deliver their promise, and win in the market.

Meet Customers’ Expectations for Personalized, Connected Communications

More and more, customers expect a consistent experience across channels – from mentioning a brand on Twitter to calling customer service. They expect their interactions to be seamless, with one channel easily picking up a conversation started in another (for example, starting in a chatbot and following up by phone—these two interactions use different systems but are ideally connected by a centralized customer data platform to create a unified customer picture). In short, customers want brands to recognize them as the same person across different channels and interactions.

While these channels and interactions have different formats, functions and requirements, they need to feel creatively and strategically cohesive. The implication for brands is ensuring that all these channels—whether automated or human-enabled—are on-voice and on-message.

But cohesive doesn’t necessarily mean uniform. The best service interactions modulate based on user sentiment. They can sense excitement, frustration, confusion, and adapt as needed. This can be achieved through both human and digital capability.

For example, it can be as simple as empowering call center reps with cues on how to identify customer archetypes based on emotion and providing discrete service journeys and scripts for them. This is particularly important for industries that customers approach with sensitivity or trepidation, such as financial services or healthcare.

“Verbal branding plays a key role in optimizing the return on these investments, ensuring companies make thoughtful choices about their communications in these high-impact moments.”

At the same time, brands using natural language processing tools, such as in-chatbot experiences, can similarly “train” their Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool to not only identify the customer’s desired “job to be done,” but to detect underlying emotion and adapt responses accordingly. For example, a chatbot that can sense a customer’s frustration about a delayed order, offer sympathy and quickly route them to live chat support, can help repair the customer’s brand perception in a tenuous moment.

Invest in Innovation—and its Expression

While many companies prioritize investing in new products and experiences, sometimes they don’t consider the importance of the words used to guide their audiences through them.

Rather than viewing product and expression as separate steps in the process, they should be developed in tandem as complementary assets, working together to shape how customers interact with and perceive the brand. Effective verbal expression (in this case, UX writing) bridges the gap between the layout and usability of the product.

Regardless of how brilliantly developed the product is, without clear and engaging written cues, the audience (customers or employees) may struggle to use or navigate it. More broadly, however, approaching innovation solely through a product lens misses an opportunity to embody the brand’s verbal identity. Effective copy can help a brand make a human connection with users that’s often not possible through design alone.

Brands should develop on-voice UX writing that has clear user goals in mind and reflects the likely emotional mindset of customers at various stages of their journey. Using this approach, copy can help drive self-progression or clarify complex topics in an engaging, on-brand manner—without disrupting the experience.

Brands that harness the strategic prowess of UX writing will excel at forming closer bonds with customers over brands who merely prioritize function in their innovations.

Use Storytelling to Galvanize Employees Around a Shared Vision, Meet Mandates and Drive Retention

The “Big Quit” is upon us. In an increasingly competitive talent market following a year that has upended what work looks like, employee expectations are rapidly changing. To meet this upheaval, impactful verbal expression can play a vital role in shaping experiences that respond to employee needs and catapult desired organizational change.

From crafting a meaningful shared vision to galvanizing employee sentiment, retaining key talent and attracting prospective candidates, transformational organization change requires a comprehensive accompanying voice and messaging strategy.

For example, how might we excite employees about new innovations? Inspire employees to care about new internal initiatives? Bring new hires into the corporate culture and values? Present a compelling case for change?

Like customers, employees are not a monolith. Different customer segments have different needs and respond to different ways of messaging. Companies with robust customer segmentation strategies can take the same approach with their employees, creating targeted messaging to meet specific employee audience group needs.

Taking a strategic messaging approach allows brands to connect external brand ambition to internal employee communication and experience, ultimately aligning the organization behind shared ambition, values, and purpose.

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Just a year ago, I talked about how 2020 was unprecedented for so many reasons. And 2021 seems to be a “rinse and repeat” of the same themes, relative to the brands that showed up to surprise and delight us, as well those that failed or disappointed us. Once again, I turned to my 500 Prophet colleagues around the globe to help decide which brands won and which lost.

There was a lot to chew on. In a year when Square turned into a Block, Facebook became Meta and the Cleveland Indians transformed into the Guardians, the debates got intense.

For instance, last year’s clear-cut winner, Peloton, got votes on both sides. Is it a winner because people still love it? Or a loser since it just slashed its annual sales forecast by $1 billion, as more consumers head back to the gym? Zoom, another of last year’s winners, continues to be as integral to people’s workday as that second cup of coffee–and is on its way to becoming a leading tech sector brand.

Many mentioned the streaming wars, which rose to a whole new level. There’s the introduction of Paramount Plus. HBO Max is taking a gamble, streaming new theatrical releases, like “The Many Saints of Newark.” And then there’s Netflix, which may have seen new subscriptions levels drop but also saw “Squid Games” become the most popular show in its history, pulling in an astonishing 1.65 billion hours of viewing in just 28 days.

Some of our favorite ‘new’ everyday brands went public, including Sweetgreen, Roblox, ZipRecruiter and Instacart, while many crypto brands saw their market value aspire toward FANG territory, only to correct themselves dramatically.  Every year, we think we’ve reached the apex of DTC brands, only to have us see another set of stellar performers. This year, those stars include Away, the ever-expanding Bombas, weight loss king Noom and the “lit” cosmetic world of ColourPop and Glossier.

And while everyone wants to pounce on Facebook renaming itself as Meta (and this would be an easy one to put on our brand loser list) as a colossal misstep, we do think the jury’s still out and want to revisit this a year from now. It’s a strategy that’s worked well for Alphabet and Google and, if they pull off the idea of taking us all into the next digital era, exploring augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies, while working deeply on the many issues facing the brand, this could be a different story a year from now

“Every year, we think we’ve reached the apex of DTC brands, only to have us see another set of stellar performers.”

We also took a close look at the sports betting business. While it’s currently dominated by FanDuel, followed by DraftKings, newcomer Caesars Sportsbook is also making a splash, vowing to spend $1 billion to build its fan base. That includes a deal putting its logo on the jerseys of the NHL’s Washington Capitals. Speaking of sports, we still embrace our love/hate relationship with Tom Brady as both the GOAT/Sports Illustrated Person of the Year, as well as becoming an increasingly influential commercial representative…see his star turn in Hertz’s new Tesla ads.

Finally, we still love our LEGO as it continues to lead the way in reducing gender bias and increasing inclusive play. We also love Target for putting the permanent kibosh on Black Friday, starting on Thanksgiving. Rarely do airlines get a mention, but three cheers to United Airlines for becoming the first to make vaccines mandatory, the first to fly passengers using 100% sustainable aviation fuel and the first to ensure that 50% of its flight school students are women or people of color. We also have to give kudos to Sesame Street, one of my favorite clients from a few decades ago, in continuing to give us all timely lessons on how to deal with racial challenges, inclusivity, diversity and empathy. It’s a brand that is as ageless as it is wise.

Now that we are done with the warmup act, let’s get into the winners and losers for 2021.

The Brand Winners

Moderna and Pfizer

It’s no surprise that Merriam-Webster named “vaccination” as the word of the year, injecting people everywhere with much-needed hope. Moderna and Pfizer top our list. (Johnson & Johnson misses, both because it was later for approval and because while its one-dose advantage could have been a game-changer, it suffered by being perceived as less effective.) With more than 8 billion jabs given, experts say vaccines are still our best shot at stemming the ongoing global health crisis and these two brands continue to lead the charge.

TikTok

TikTok is now so much more than the 1 billion monthly users who vibe with its dance challenges or laugh with its happy pranksters or wiseass dachshunds. TikTok directly influences all forms of entertainment, all forms of business and pretty much everything in between. Just a few years removed from Lil Nas X and his Old Town Road becoming the O.G. for viral musical successes, TikTok creators used Adele’s Easy On Me in almost one million videos in the first month after its release, helping it go viral on the app alone. To say that TikTok has become the No. 1 global influencing platform would be the understatement of the year.

Feeding America

I’ve never put a nonprofit on the list of winners. But Feeding America continues to astound us with its rapid growth, canny corporate partnerships and ability to connect people even in these divisive times. It’s grim, but the U.S. is finally hunger woke, recognizing that 38 million people, including 12 million children, are food insecure. Feeding America’s brand makes it easier to help and, potentially, see an end to hunger at some point in our lifetime.

Tesla (again)

In a year when many automakers saw sales decline due to supply-chain shortages, Tesla sales hit new records. And with revenues and profits that are beating analysts’ expectations, its soaring market value shows just how deeply people love the house that Elon built. Even more amazing? While Tesla’s cars still rank nearly last in reliability surveys, it sped past Mercedes-Benz to become the third most popular luxury ride in the U.S. (Lookout, Lexus and BMW. It’s gaining.)

Athleta

Think of it as the anti-Nike, with the determination to move in on Lululemon and the athleisure market. This Gap-owned retailer welcomed high-profile athletes like runner Allyson Felix and gymnast Simone Biles, who publicly broke with Nike over its treatment of women athletes. And, with the Power of She campaign, it’s winning with teens–and well on its way to becoming a $2 billion brand by 2023.

Taylor Swift

Demonstrating that she’s one of the best marketers in the business, the singer struck back against the music machine by re-engineering 2012’s “Red” album, igniting her fan base and winning new admirers. The centerpiece is a 10-minute version of the heartbreaking “All Too Well,” which became the longest song ever to reach Billboard’s No. 1. (Adios, “American Pie.”) We’ll just quote Ms. Magazine here on Swift’s feminist tour de force: “Taylor Swift didn’t just re-record an album—she reclaimed her humanity.”

Bitcoin

Yes, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have fallen sharply recently, wiping out almost $500 million worth of value from the overall crypto market in just a few days. But cryptocurrency still had a breakout year, moving towards the mainstream. Celebrity endorsers are all in, with Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen telling us, “I’m getting into crypto with FTX. You in?” And Matt Damon is representing crypto.com, which is also the new name of the Staples Center. Like electric cars and Tesla, Bitcoin still dominates any conversation about crypto.

The Brand Losers

Instagram

Some of the most disturbing allegations from Facebook whistleblowing centered on Instagram. Turns out the company has known for some time how toxic the platform can be to the teens who love it, with 32% of teens saying that when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Concealing that, in our book, is downright shameful. With just over a billion active users, it’s not going away anytime soon. The reports are damning enough that Lush, the body care products company, recently shut down its social media accounts, saying they risk customers’ mental health.

Billionaires in Space

I’m as eager as the next person to boldly go where no human has gone before, but companies like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin show they’ve got the wrong stuff. At a time when tension between the haves the have-nots keep growing, especially within Bezos Amazon world, these ego-boosting launches are about little more than celebs in space.

Chevrolet

We’ve always wanted to love the Chevrolet Bolt. Not only is it the second-best-selling EV brand in the U.S., but it also beat No. 1 Tesla with a genuinely mass-market EV. And its vow to be all-electric by 2035 got our attention. Then came the massive recalls for defective batteries, with severe design concerns that shut production down for weeks. Then Bolt owners got more bad news when GM advised them to park at least 50 feet away from other cars to reduce the risk that a spontaneous fire could spread.

Robinhood

Robinhood started as an exciting brand, promising to democratize investing. With no fees, it’s tempted 19 million new investors into the stock market, gathering $95 billion in assets under custody. But with the GameStop frenzy, it closed trading, earning the enmity of both regulators and the Reddit bros that are its customer base, with a backlash that’s still generating contempt. The move was anything but customer-centric and now the brand is paying for it.

Casper

For years, branding experts (even us, sometimes) loved the way Casper, a DTC upstart, vowed to “own” sleep, with showrooms offering complimentary naps and ancillary products. But a year after its disastrous public offering and mounting losses, it’s gone private again. Besides illustrating its operational immaturity and brand braggadocio, it underscores the DTC dilemma. Acquiring new customers is expensive. And really, people don’t buy new mattresses all that often.

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Delivering “impact” has taken on extraordinary new meaning in the last two years. Across the world, consumers, employees, and other key stakeholders became focused on how brands deliver impact through ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) practices with 2 in 3 consumers willing to pay more for products and services from brands that are committed to making a positive social impact. As a result, the challenge for brands has shifted from talking the talk to walking the walk.

It has become clear simply articulating and communicating purpose is not enough to drive meaningful value. Case in point: according to a global survey of 474 executives conducted by Harvard Business Review, 90% of executives said their organization understands the importance of purpose, but only 46% said it informs strategic and operational decisions.

To create value, we believe purpose must act as the North Star across the organization. At the epicenter of all activity, purpose has the power to drive business transformation including new business models, product and service design, employee engagement and more. Specifically, organizations that tie their ESG strategy to purpose—and thus, business and brand strategy—shift away from risk mitigation towards value-additive action better integrated with the business.

Today, ESG strategies are too often isolated from the business and either focused purely on hitting rating agency benchmarks or generating positive publicity. Using purpose to drive a linkage across the business, brand and ESG strategy prevents risks associated with virtue washing and ultimately drives competitive advance with differentiated value propositions.

How to Activate ESG to Create Value

So how does a company tie its ESG strategy to its purpose? First, it must build a statement of intent, defining specific plans to deliver its purpose to its community and society at large. For example, ING Bank demonstrates its purpose, “empower people to stay a step ahead in life and in business,” with a slightly more specific ESG strategy aimed at “helping customers and society stay a step ahead of the challenges they’re facing.” By honing its ESG strategy on the “challenges they’re facing,” ING is able to define how it fulfills its purpose in the communities it operates with.

“2 in 3 consumers willing to pay more for products and services from brands that are committed to making a positive social impact.”

While an ESG strategy states how the purpose will come to life, related impact areas allow the organization to focus on its activation efforts. An organization’s impact areas are thematic areas the organization will execute against to bring the ESG strategy to life.

To define these impact areas, organizations should consider four lenses while remaining focused and meaningful in their efforts and, without spreading themselves too thin. Impact areas must be:

1. Specific:

Do impact areas clearly align with the organization’s core business offers and enable necessary choices and tradeoffs? P&G manufactures thousands of products that consumers use in their everyday lives. Because the production, distribution, and waste of these products can contribute negatively to the effects of climate change, P&G has focused one impact area on packaging sustainability, committing to 100% recyclable or reusable packaging by 2030.

2. Ownable:

Do impact areas build from strengths and competencies the organization has today to ensure it can have a unique and material impact in the market? BlackRock’s purpose is to “help more people experience financial well-being,” resulting in an embedded focus on long-term financial sustainability across the business. In pursuing this focus, Blackrock saw an opportunity to focus on impact, setting out to build a new platform to invest in mission-oriented businesses. In 2019, the new platform launched, leveraging existing scale and expertise to strengthen Blackrock’s position while bolstering its intention to make a long-term impact.

3. Applicable:

Are the impact areas appealing and applicable to the organization’s colleagues, customers and communities? The aviation industry accounts for roughly 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Delta Air Lines’ carbon footprint is its largest environmental impact, with 98% of emissions coming from its aircraft. In 2020, Delta focused on carbon neutrality, with the goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral airline globally.

4. Measurable:

Are the impact areas conducive to being objectively measured? ABInBev, the world’s largest brewer, embarked on a goal to ensure 100% of its communities in high-stress areas have measurably improved water availability and quality by 2025. Within its breweries, teams leverage internal systems to monitor water use on a routine basis and develop bespoke tools to review operations on a quarterly basis.

“We aim to lead a corporate shift toward measurability and accountability, ensuring that our local investments and programs translate into lasting impacts on water quality and availability for our communities and our operations around the world,” states ABInBev’s stewardship campaign.

Making an Impact in All Directions

The need to connect ESG to purpose has never been more urgent. In 2020, almost 60% of Americans said they would “choose, avoid, or boycott a brand based on its stand on societal issues,” compared to only 47% in 2017. And more than half (53%) of consumers who are disappointed with a brand’s words or actions on a social issue complain about it.

Companies that build their ESG strategies and related impact areas to deliver on their purpose will create memorable, human-centered experiences that allow customers, employees, and other stakeholders to grasp the power of the organization’s efforts. Capturing impact through signature stories creates memorable, human-centered stories for customers, employees and other stakeholders to grab onto as examples of the impact of your ESG impact areas.

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