Here Today, Gone Sooner Than Ever
IN THE RACE TO RELEVANCE, TODAY’S BRANDS MUST OVERCOME so many hurdles: crowded marketplaces, the pressure to resonate across myriad platforms, and consumers’ short attention spans.
These obstacles impede a brand’s ability to cultivate the most valuable asset it can have: longevity. Yet even those that manage to establish themselves simply don’t last as long as they once did—and neither do the companies that market them. According to the Legacy Lab, a strategy consultancy arm of ad agency Team One (which is a division of the Publicis Groupe), companies that were on the S&P 500 in the 1970s spent an average of nearly 30 years there. For the 2020s, that tenure is projected to be closer to 15 years. Brand longevity isn’t the only reason—but it’s a major factor.
This theme surfaces often in Fast Company’s fall issue—and not just in our annual Brands That Matter feature, where it permeates every word. In “From the Ground Up,” senior writer Ainsley Harris checks in with John Foley, cofounder of Peloton, the once whitehot fitness brand that has gone ice cold. Foley is attempting a comeback with a rug startup, but as you’ll read on page 82, he still has plenty to say about what went wrong for Peloton.
The struggle to achieve brand longevity is also behind another piece by Harris, “The (Near) Death of DTC,” on page 13. She strolls among the walking dead that populate the directto-consumer brandscape: Blue Apron, Allbirds, Casper, Away, Outdoor Voices. These brands still exist, sure, but mostly as shells of their formerly high-flying selves.
And in his Fast Company debut, Casey Newton—who publishes the Platformer newsletter and cohosts the Hard Fork podcast—sits down with Pinterest CEO Bill Ready (page 76) to discuss Pinterest’s evolving brand and survival strategy.
Paradoxically, the same technological and cultural forces that make it so hard for brands to stay relevant can, in certain instances, do the opposite. That’s the story of Rare Beauty, the fast-growing makeup company founded by our cover subject, Selena Gomez. In addition to being the most talked-about brand among beauty influencers and the second favorite of teens (after drugstore staple E.l.f.), it’s got millions of fans who look to it as a model for how to feel confident. Only time will tell if that growth will last. But as Karen Valby reports in her intimate profile of Gomez, “Face Forward” (page 46), Rare Beauty’s connection with its young fans is authentic, and that is how longevity begins.