The Post-Truth Business summary

Brands haven’t escaped the growth of distrust in established institutions. For example, in 2017, when the French media company, Havas Group, surveyed 300,000 consumers in 20 countries, it found that a majority believed that some 60 percent of the content produced by companies was poor or irrelevant. 

Advertisers themselves don’t fare much better when it comes to trust. According to the Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, nurses and doctors are the most trusted professions. At the other end of the scale? Representatives of the advertising industry. 

We live in an age of “infosmog.” From the moment we wake up to the last time we check our phones or turn off the TV before bed, thousands of ads, social media posts and news stories, both fake and real, compete for our attention. 

This is the attention economy – a fiercely competitive market in which brands attempt to outshout their rivals in a bid to get us to notice their messages. The result? A chaotic jumble of data that most consumers just can’t cope with, and the increasing popularity of ad blockers designed to silence this cacophony. 

Online shopping was a game-changer for brick-and-mortar stores. Now that it’s possible to buy pretty much anything from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, stores have to offer their customers something they can’t get online. Increasingly, that means giving them meaningful and memorable experiences. 

Take the French fashion label Sézane. The company has a tiny marketing budget and relies on its fanatically loyal fanbase posting images of its clothes on social media. Its stores are meanwhile designed as “lifestyle showrooms.” These immaculately curated spaces resemble apartments and allow consumers to browse products in an intimate living environment. 

In 2017, the media company, Havas, presented consumers with a list of familiar brands and asked which ones they cared about. As it turns out, most consumers wouldn’t mind if a whopping 74 percent of these brands disappeared entirely. Stats like these underscore a widespread problem for marketers: with so much competition out there, lots of people feel little loyalty to seemingly interchangeable brands. 

People, however, don’t want to be mindless consumers. That makes sense – after all, we all hanker for a sense of belonging, and there’s no reason that shouldn’t also apply to what we buy. We seek meaning and purpose in our consumer choices and identify with brands that reflect our values. 

In 2017, Pepsi released a glitzy short-film commercial featuring American model Kendall Jenner. In it, Jenner spontaneously walks off the set of a photoshoot to join a protest in the street. She mingles with the crowd and hugs demonstrators before grabbing a can of cold Pepsi and presenting it to a scowling police officer, who, predictably enough, smiles in response. 

It was a disaster. Within hours, millions of outraged viewers had taken to social media to declare the ad an epic #fail. They ridiculed the typecast millennial protestors, the ludicrous banners featuring slogans like “join the conversation” and, most of all, the inappropriateness of a soda company attempting to piggyback on recent protests in the US against police violence and the Trump administration. A day later, Pepsi withdrew the ad.