Part 3: Interrelated Marketing, The Accelerant to Icon Status.
Icons Aren't Built Overnight, But There is an Accelerant
In Parts 1 and 2, we established the crisis facing modern brands and explored what separates Icon Brands from Mirror Brands (chasing virality) and Shadow Brands (visible but forgettable).
Icons aren't made overnight. Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" has been a work-in-progress since 2004. But there is an accelerant that speeds the journey from forgettable to iconic.
The concept of integrated communications—yoking together multiple channels to create better-rounded, more powerful brand identities—has served marketers well for decades. While the core principles remain relevant, they're no longer sufficient.
The necessary step forward is Interrelated Marketing.
What is Interrelated Marketing?
Brands can no longer win ascendancy through one-way communication alone. They must enroll the public—individually and en masse—as agents to act on their behalf.
Brands that master the intricate interplay between earned, owned, and paid media create a flywheel that propels them towards Icon status.
Interrelated Marketing delivers this outcome by conjoining four key drivers of success for modern brands.
The Four R's of Interrelated Marketing
1. Unlocking Cultural RELEVANCE
Creating compelling narratives at the intersection of a cultural tension and truth about the brand that shape the discourse AND resonate with key audiences.
This isn't about jumping on trending topics. It's about identifying genuine cultural tensions where your brand has both permission and perspective to contribute meaningfully.
2. Earning REPUTATION in Public
Capitalizing the influence of individuals and institutions in authentic ways that cultivate positive, lasting renown.
This goes beyond influencer marketing. It's about enlisting credible voices—from domain experts to everyday customers—who can vouch for your brand in ways paid advertising never could.
3. Designing RELATIONSHIPS
Creating personalized experiences and value exchanges that customers can share with the brand.
Not transactional loyalty programs, but genuine relationship-building that gives customers reasons to deepen their connection over time.
4. Driving Desired RESPONSE
Satisfying an identified consumer preference with an effective prompt (a call to action).
The moment when interest converts to action. But unlike traditional direct response, this conversion feels natural because it's been earned through the previous three R's.
Why Most Brands Fail at this
Many brands (and indeed many agencies) treat these four R's independently. The social team works on relevance. The PR team works on reputation. The CRM team works on relationships. The performance marketing team works on response.
But the magic happens when they are harnessed to a common purpose.
That is the end-product of Interrelated Marketing: a connected ecosystem of expressions and experiences, where every piece of content, every social post, every event and every initiative builds seamlessly upon the last.
Interrelated Marketing in Action: CeraVe's Super Bowl Masterclass
The Super Bowl is America's biggest stage. But when advertisers use it as a platform for one-way communication, with big-budget commercials featuring celebrities whose connection to the brand is often tenuous, they leave meat on the bone.
CeraVe showed how to truly use the platform to its potential, creating an immersive, two-way experience that perfectly demonstrates Interrelated Marketing.
Stage 1: Unlock Cultural Relevance (Plant the Seeds)
CeraVe recruited Michael Cera—for obvious reasons, the internet had speculated for years that the Canadian actor was somehow connected to the brand.
They started by planting fake news: that Cera really was the mastermind behind the brand. The company went all-in, creating the iamcerave.com website, staging paparazzi shoots, arranging for Cera to be interviewed by influencers, even running a TV ad.
The relevance play: They tapped into existing internet culture (the Michael Cera/CeraVe speculation) and amplified it, making the brand central to an ongoing cultural conversation.
The response was exactly as desired, with thousands of people eagerly spreading the rumor online.
Stage 2: Earn Reputation in Public (Fuel the Fire)
Cera and CeraVe fought a loud and very public battle for ownership of the brand. As claim and counterclaim flew, the media, skincare experts, influencers, and the population at large joined in.
The reputation play: By enlisting media outlets, dermatologists, and influencers as participants in the narrative, CeraVe turned skepticism into curiosity. Each new voice added credibility and extended reach organically.
Stage 3: Design Relationships + Drive Response (The Resolution)
The climactic third stage was the Super Bowl spot itself, with the actor's assertions being emphatically debunked by a boardroom of dermatologists.
The relationship + response play: The campaign invited people into a story where they felt like insiders. Those who'd followed along had an "aha!" moment during the Super Bowl spot. Those who hadn't were intrigued enough to learn more. Both groups felt connected to the brand in a way that traditional advertising never achieves.
The Results Speak for Themselves
This is Interrelated Marketing at its best. CeraVe became a leader in culture by being "in" social media rather than just on it. It sparked one-to-one relationships at scale by inviting people to be part of the narrative and giving them something to play with. It turned brand trust into brand love by putting CeraVe's reputation to the test in the most public way possible.
The numbers:
32 billion earned impressions
Over 2,000 press mentions
2,200% uplift in brand searches
25% increase in portfolio sales
This campaign achieved all this via what we call a "Borderless Idea"—creative thinking that transcended the "borders" often created by siloed departments, self-interested marketing disciplines, and divisive minds.
How to Apply Interrelated Marketing to Your Brand
The CeraVe example might feel out of reach for smaller brands, but the principles scale.
Start by asking four questions:
1. Where can we unlock cultural relevance? What cultural tensions exist where our brand has genuine permission and perspective to contribute? Not every trending topic is your opportunity. Find the intersections where your brand truth meets cultural need.
2. How can we earn reputation in public? Who are the credible voices that could vouch for us in ways paid advertising cannot? These might be domain experts, satisfied customers, or influential community members. The key: authenticity over reach.
3. How can we design relationships? What personalized experiences or value exchanges can we create that give customers reasons to deepen their connection over time? Think beyond transactions to genuine relationship-building.
4. How can we drive desired response? What's the natural next step we want people to take, and how can we make that step feel earned rather than forced? The best calls to action don't feel like sales pitches—they feel like natural progressions.
The Connected Ecosystem
The real power of Interrelated Marketing emerges when these four elements work together, each amplifying the others.
Cultural relevance creates the attention. Earned reputation creates the credibility. Designed relationships create the affinity. And effective response mechanisms convert that affinity into business outcomes.
When these elements exist in isolation, you get incremental improvements. When they work as an interconnected system, you get exponential impact.
The Path Forward: From Mirror or Shadow to Icon
Marketing's primary purpose is to build brands with the strength to deliver lasting competitive and economic advantage.
Despite what some "experts" would have you believe, this requires setting the bar higher than simply mirroring an audience's social media feeds or buying visibility by the yard.
The goal must be to earn a prominent, persistent place in people's memories by having a positive effect on their lives. This is how brands achieve iconic status.
For organizations ambitious to make this jump, Interrelated Marketing provides the right model. As always, execution needs to be perfect—but the strategic drivers are clear.
Every idea, every action, every behavior should demonstrate an obsessive focus on:
Unlocking cultural relevance
Earning reputation in public
Designing one-to-one relationships
Driving the desired response
Brands that succeed in conjoining these four drivers, with the right kind of creativity, will create an impact that is unreasonably greater than the sum of the parts.
Eventually, they will win not just a larger share of the market but a greater share of the future.
The Question Remains
The question isn't whether your brand can afford to pursue Icon status through Interrelated Marketing.
It's whether you can afford not to.
In a world where 75% of brands could disappear tomorrow without consequence, the only sustainable strategy is to become one of the 25% that people genuinely care about.
That journey starts with an honest assessment: Are you a Mirror Brand? A Shadow Brand? Or are you on the path to becoming an Icon?
The answer to that question will determine whether your brand thrives in the decades ahead—or fades into irrelevance.
End of Series
