Total Eclipse of the Brand: If you disappeared tomorrow, what would people miss?

Timothy Leonard, Brandon's Head of Strategy, on how an eclipse that hid 90% of the sun revealed the real test for a brand: what would people really miss if it faded completely?

Wednesday evening I stood outside with the kids to watch an eclipse we couldn't look at.

No glasses. So instead of watching the sun, we watched everything else. The light went thin, like someone had pulled a filter it. Shadows got stranger. The air cooled. The birds shut up. For 15 minutes the whole place felt kinda wrong in a way none of us could have described if you'd asked us to point at the cause.

We never saw the thing that was happening. We only saw what it did to everything around it.

I've been turning this thought in my mind, because it's a useful test for brands, and an uncomfortable one.

Most brands spend their lives being looked at directly. Impressions, reach, share of voice. All of it measures visibility, how much of you people saw. Almost none of it measures the thing that actually matters, which is what your absence would do to the room.

So: if your brand went dark tomorrow, not slowly but overnight, what would people miss?

Be strict about the answer. Not what would they lose, the function, the price, the shelf space. Someone else will fill that gap the next day. What would they miss? What would feel wrong in a way they couldn't quite articulate? What would go quiet?

For a lot of brands, the honest answer is “nothing much”. And that's worth knowing, because it means you're not a brand, you're a supplier of a product with a logo. Your pricing power is borrowed, and your customers are on loan. It doesn't feel like that from the inside, because from the inside you're surrounded by people who think about you all day.

Here's the part that actually unsettled me, though. At maximum, the moon covered around 90% of the sun. Ninety percent. And if I hadn't known it was happening, I'd have looked up and thought, “odd sort of evening”. Still daylight. Still perfectly functional. You can lose almost everything and have it register as nothing more than a slightly strange atmosphere.

That's how brand decline actually works. Not a cliff to fall off of. A dimming that stays comfortably within the range of normal, bit by bit, until someone finally asks why the numbers stopped moving and the honest answer is that nobody's felt anything about you for three years.

The brands worth having are the ones that change the light in the room. You don't need to be stared at. You need to be the reason things feel the way they do, so that if you went, people would notice the temperature drop before they worked out why.

If you can't answer what people would miss, that's not a communications problem. That's the brief.

The next eclipse like this one won't be visible from here until 2081. Most brands don't get that long to become worth missing.