• by Sarah Mahoney , Yesterday

Experts on lame corporate apologies have been busy lately. First, Target pushed a children’s Halloween costume that many -- OK, most -- people viewed as racist. Then Callaway Golf approved and ran an ad with partner Good Good Golf, showing the Good Good founder knocking a woman golfer to the ground. Target said it was “deeply sorry,” and pulled the costume, acknowledging it was “hurtful” to Black shoppers and employees. Callaway and Good Good each pointed fingers at the other, but Front Office Sports reports that at least three marketing people are departing as a result.

Are these events evidence that golfers are generally misogynists and Target is racist, as critics have long claimed? Maybe, but Julie Reeves, vice president and analyst at Gartner, sees a more mundane reason: Marketing organizations have lost the thread on brand governance, particularly when it comes to understanding brand personality. She tells Marketing Daily what’s going wrong.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marketing Daily: Let’s start with the obvious. How on earth did these ads get approved -- and by such large marketing organizations?

Julie Reeves: There are two critical parts of brand strategy. One is the positioning statement, which defines what the brand says. Then there is its personality, which is how the brand says it. That formalized personality statement is really important when reviewing any type of creative. It gives language and license for anyone in the room to question if something is off-brand. Otherwise, content gets evaluated only on whether it's on-message, which I would say is only half the story.

With Callaway, let’s suppose the idea was to show that people are so passionate about their golf clubs that they don’t want to share with others. So I imagine someone who reviewed it thought the strategy behind the creative idea might have been fine -- showing that kind of passion. But the execution was very inconsistent with the brand's character.

Marketing Daily: We see this happen often on social media, with many brands just copying what they think is a millennial or Gen Z tone of voice or sense of humor, and as viewers, we know it’s off-brand. But other than wasting marketing money, those missteps are relatively harmless. But shoving a woman to the ground? That’s not just wrong, tonally. It’s  literally criminal.

Reeves: Brands will always need to find ways to stand out. Social media has been a channel where a lot of brands choose to push boundaries, to some degree. That’s exactly why brand personality is so important -- it formalizes how far brands can go, and tries to understand how people perceive us. G

olfers become attached to high-performance equipment and can be fiercely protective of it. There are multiple ways in which this type of strategy can be brought to life creatively -- but not this way. Violence against women is always going to be wrong. The guardrails that should be in place for every brand just weren’t there.

And that’s a lesson for CMOs everywhere: All creative work really needs to be evaluated not just against the positioning, but also against the personality. That’s the final filter.

Marketing Daily: Callaway just announced a $1 million donation for domestic-violence awareness, to try and buy its way out of this doghouse. Now, how about the Target error? That’s an especially bad one, since there's already a strong boycott against the company for its decision to dismantle its diversity programs. Something like this really underscores that “They just don’t respect Black people” sentiment.

Target produces so much content and makes so many merchandising decisions, no one expects that the CMO is approving everything. But again, how could something this offensive get approved?

Reeves: It's about empowering teams across the organization to know what's appropriate for the brand. A clear brand personality can be used by people at every level: Does this fit our brand personality? Would our brand behave this way? Would our customers recognize us? Is this who we want to say we are?

Marketing Daily: Do you think we’ll see more mistakes like these?

Reeves: Yes, it’s going to continue to be a problem because of AI. About 82% of business leaders believe that their company's identity -- including its brand  -- will need to change significantly to keep pace with AI's impact on markets. And it matters even as marketers create content at greater scale. T

he more content a company produces, the more it needs a reliable way to determine what is truly “on brand.” Positioning provides the direction. Personality provides the filter. Without it, teams will support work that is increasingly out of character.