Branding Strategy Insider

Why a Branding Strategy Blog?

At The Blake Project our sole focus is helping organizations create brands that build and sustain trust. Branding Strategy Insider is an extension of our efforts as brand consultants to help marketing oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Show me the Money! This memorable line from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire might just as well be coming from today’s CEO’s and CFO’s: a growing and vocal demand for accountability from the Marketing function.

Big Data Coming – For Better or Worse

Everywhere you go these days, you hear about “big data:” the coming golden age where all problems will be solved by crunching massive amounts of data from the web and every other imaginable source. You would think that the CMO’s ability to, indeed, show them the money, would never be better.

But according to a recent IBM study, “From Stretched to Strengthening,” there is still a yawning gulf between the accountability demands of the CFO and their CMO’s ability to answer them–even with big data. IBM interviewed over 1,700 CMO’s, across 19 industries and 64 countries. CMO’s said that the data explosion, far from being a solution, is one of the top four challenges they face. What was once seen as golden opportunity is becoming a huge problem as the data explosion overwhelms Marketing organizations.

Big Data = Better ROI Measurement

But here’s the paradox. In the same study, almost half of the CMO’s believe that they are insufficiently prepared to provide hard return on marketing investment numbers on their key Marketing programs. Let me say that again: CMO’s are being overwhelmed with data, yet can’t adequately measure the ROI for their Marketing programs. How can that be?

Brand Marketers Must Create Wow Moments

The brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

—John Medina

When Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, the world didn’t just lose one of its great visionaries, but it also lost an astonishing corporate storyteller. His presentations, “Steve-notes” as they were fondly called, had all the elements of a Broadway production, including a cast, drama, heroes, villains, and props. Most brand marketers use presentations to deliver information, often dryly. Steve Jobs gave presentations that informed, educated, and entertained.

The most memorable parts of Jobs’s presentations were what I call wow moments. These wow moments were carefully scripted and exhaustively rehearsed. It took an estimated 450 hours of work and rehearsals to create and deliver the twenty-minute presentation to introduce the Lion operating system in June 2011. Jobs was fanatical about each and every element of the presentation from the lighting to the messages. He knew the content of every slide, every font, and every color that was used on every slide. But nothing was more important in a presentation than the moment when the audience would gasp and say to themselves, I need that!

The Brain Does Not Pay Attention to Boring Things

No matter how sensational you think your product is, nobody is going to care if the message you're using to communicate the product's benefits is dry, confusing, and convoluted. Neuroscientist John Medina taught me that the brain does not pay attention to boring things. It is simply not programmed to grasp abstract concepts.

Instead he recommends creating an emotionally charged event, which is the equivalent of a mental Post-it Note for the brain. Medina says the brain's amygdala is chockful of the neurotransmitter dopamine. So when the brain detects an emotionally charged event (e.g., joy, fear, surprise), the amygdala releases dopamine into the system that greatly aids memory and information processing. Let's recall three of Jobs's emotionally charged events:

Brand Marketing's New Currency

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists at the University of Parma discovered mirror neurons in our premotor cortex that fire when we perform an action and also when we observe others performing the same action. For example, the neurons that fire when we grasp a cup also fire when we see others grasp a cup. By mirroring the activities of others in this way, mirror neurons endow us with a built-in leaning toward empathy, social interaction and altruism.

We don’t always behave well in social settings, but because we are predisposed to social engagement, the rocketing rise of social networks makes sense. If, as some neuroscientists contend, the big ideas that stick are those that match brain structure and function, then social media are here to stay and will prove the naysayers wrong.

The discovery of our innate social faculty adds to our understanding of marketplace transactions. Embedded deep within dollar-and-cents exchanges are social exchanges of interpersonal connections – some good and some bad – that resonate to our very core.

What social networks have done is peel away the part of these exchanges that have always involved relationships. The relationships that matter most are family, and family means kinship. This is the currency of social networks. More and more these days, the currency of kinship must be spent first before any financial value can be realized, and this has big ramifications for growth opportunities in the marketplace ahead. Four warrant special mention.

First, happiness is the new metric of success. Relationships are a primary predictor of life satisfaction, so with the increasing importance of social networks and relationships, happiness will figure more prominently. Though brands like Zappo’s and Coke are touting happiness, it is not something most brands can do. But all brands can audit their consumer touchpoints to ensure that they are not upside down in their kinship accounts. This requires a different view of what relationships are all about.

Brand Strategy: Repositioning Commodities

Even producers in the commodity world of meats and produce have found ways to reposition themselves and thus create a unique selling proposition. Their successful strategies can be summed up in five ways.

1. Identify. Ordinary bananas became better bananas when a small Chiquita label was added to the fruit. Dole did the same for pineapple with the Dole label, as did the lettuce people by putting each head into a clear Foxy lettuce package. Of course, you then have to communicate why people should look for these labels.

2. Personify. The Green Giant character became the difference in a family of vegetables in many forms. Frank Perdue became the tough man behind the tender chicken.

3. Create a new generic.The cantaloupe people wanted to differentiate a special, big cantaloupe. But rather than call them just plain “big,” they introduced a new category called Crenshaw melons. Tyson wanted to sell miniature chickens, which doesn’t sound very appetizing. So it introduced Cornish game hens.

4. Change the name. Sometimes your original name doesn’t sound like it would be something you would want to put in your mouth. Like a Chinese gooseberry. When the name was changed to kiwi fruit, the world suddenly had a new favorite fruit that it wanted to put in its mouth.

Brand Strategy For Startups

A startup business faces many difficult challenges getting off the ground. For many early stage CEO’s assessing their priorities, product development and the seed money to grow are their primary concerns. Few if any are thinking much about brand building–mainly because they believe it to be sophisticated marketing they simply can’t afford.

For startup CEOs, brand building needs to be as important to early success as product development and raising money. You can have the most innovative, groundbreaking product ever conceived, but if you can’t create a strong foundation for communicating that value to the marketplace, chances are the business won’t go far. Developing a strong brand is critical to the early success of startups. 

The Ugly Baby Syndrome
Many startups have a difficult and awkward task of communicating the value of their product/service innovations in ways that matter to investors and potential customers. At the beginning (especially when seeking investment capital) founders have a tendency to believe that everyone will “get the big idea” of their next big thing. As a result, they usually message their value badly at the beginning.

Like any newborn, learning to walk the talk requires falling down and getting up again and again. But the break neck pace of the VC deal making machine is not very forgiving to the stumbles of startup founders not able to tell a compelling story of why their innovation matters to anyone beyond their Mother.

The heart and soul of brand building embodies a relevant and differentiated value proposition. Founders must be able to articulate why their baby matters to some people! Remember, at the beginning nobody cares!

Private Label Brands: The Future Leaders Of Retail?

Consumers are definitely giving retailers permission to grow their private label brands. The real question is will retailers grow private label brand value or simply grow more private labels? In the age of mega-private label brands, this trend is giving national consumer product goods brand managers some added anxiety these days. It also presents some relationship challenges for retailers to grow the value trusted CPG brands bring to their customers.

According to a report published by consulting firm Deloitte, consumer’s perceptions and attitudes toward private label brands are changing significantly; and offers insight into the notion that spending less for private label brands doesn’t mean consumers are settling for less from private label brands. According to the report only one-third of the respondents endorsed the statement “ I often feel that I am sacrificing when I purchase a store brand instead of a national brand”. This is no surprise when one stops to think that many consumers today believe that store brands and national brands are essentially made of the same ingredients. According to the report, 80 percent believe the statement “most store brands are manufactured by the national brands”.

The report further suggests that the current economic climate has made consumers more discerning about the brands they prefer. 75 percent of respondents agreed “ these economic times have made me more aware of which brands I care about and which ones are less important to me”.

Brand Strategy: Set Up A Positive And Attack

What you need to build into a brand is a positive. The purpose of hanging a negative on your competitor is to set up that positive idea. Some years ago, Stolichnaya vodka hung “American made” on its U.S. competitors who were “making believe they were Russian.” It was setting up “the Russian vodka” as its positive idea.

Many years ago, BMW introduced its automobile into the U.S. market by repositioning Mercedes as “the ultimate sitting machine.” This was a set up for its long-term position of being “the ultimate driving machine.” Repositioning Mercedes as a living room on wheels did indeed resonate with people, as at the time Mercedes was indeed manufacturing big limo-type cars. The first BMW was the 3 Series, which was a long way from today’s 7 Series, which is also a “sitting machine.” It’s also the main reason that I’m not a fan of these big gadget-loaded BMWs. They are not driving machines; they are high-tech sitting machines. It’s why you don’t see many of them driving around.

A Missed Positive

Some years ago, I was down in Venezuela working with a big ketchup brand called Pampero. By the time we were called in, Del Monte and Heinz had nudged it from its number one position. Pampero was in a decline. What was needed was a differentiating idea beyond its current claims of “redder” or “better.”

Why was Pampero better?  What did the company do to its tomatoes? After some prodding, what emerged was the fact that Pampero removed the skin so as to enhance the flavor and color. It was something that its big competitors did not do in their manufacturing process.

Are Brand Relationships Like Human Relationships?

I am hearing a lot these days about brand relationships being like human relationships. Maybe it is just me, but I don’t feel that my relationship with brands is the same as the one I have with my fellow humans. I might feel genuine affection for one or two brands, but most are simply familiar solutions to a specific need. Here are some of my thoughts on the topic but I would love to hear yours.

Initially, I thought my concern about anthropomorphizing brands was to do with the intermittent nature of our relationship with many brands. In reality, there are few brands that we think about or interact with on a regular basis, the mobile phone being the most frequent for many of us. Most of the time brands are out of sight and out of (conscious) mind. But then a human relationship can range from fleeting to enduring. And once a relationship is established, we often seem to be able to pick it up again where it left off, even if years have intervened. 

Then I read this in the Wikipedia entry on Interpersonal Relationships:

Interpersonal relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship tend to influence each other, share their thoughts and feelings, and engage in activities together.

Now this seems to address my concerns more closely. To what degree are we interdependent on the brands we use? Are there any brands that you use for which there really is no acceptable substitute? And just how dependent is that brand on you? Would Apple really miss you if you decided another mobile phone better met your needs or desires than the iPhone?

David Ogilvy: The Danger Of Discount Pricing

David Ogilvy, a legend along-side the likes of Rosser Reeves and Bill Bernbach, has some strong words to say about deals and price. They are certainly worth repeating:

• Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.

• The financial rewards do not always come in next quarter’s earnings per share, but come they do. When Philip Morris bought General Foods for five billion dollars, they were buying brands.

• There used to be a prosperous brand of coffee called Chase & Sanborn. Then they started dealing. They became addicted to price-offs. Where is Chase & Sanborn today? Dead as a doornail.

• The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building a favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brand, are the ones who will get the largest share of market at the highest profit.

• The time has come to sound an alarm! To warn what is going to happen to brands if so much is spent on deals that there is no money left to advertise them.

• Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of American life.*

*David Ogilvy, “Fiftieth Anniversary Luncheon Speech,” Advertising Research Foundation, New York City, March 18, 1986.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Reviving A Legacy Brand

Ovaltine is reintroduced with new advertising but the same old orange jar. Sales of the century-old, malt-extract, milk flavoring powder doubled in the first 100 days. Coca-Cola brings back the 40-year-old Fresca brand of citrus soft drinks with a graphics makeover and new flavor combinations.

Can everything old be new again?

As the publisher of BrandlandUSA, Garland Pollard is an expert on America’s legacy brands. A native of Virginia Beach, VA, he is active in historic building preservation efforts – and in a sense, his study of the value and tradition of “old brands” serves that same purpose for marketers and brand-builders.

We asked him about the lore of old brand names – and what they mean for today’s marketers.

Q: What are some notable brand names that are coming back to life?

Recently I’ve written about Hyatt bringing back its storied Hyatt House name, as a re-branding of its Hyatt Summerfield Suites extended stay properties. A Hyatt House was the place to stay in the 1970s – a smart, slick, modern hotel.

And it appears Nissan is driving the Datsun name out of the brand graveyard. Datsun will reappear in emerging markets such as Indonesia, India and Russia as an entry-level economy brand. It’s another example of how companies can re-use their brand names a few decades down the line.

Brand Strategy: Repositioning A Competitor

There are times, though rare, that a repositioning the competition strategy is not to hang a negative on them, but simply to put your lead competitor in its place—or, shall I say, in second place? This was the case in a project we did for the producers of Spanish olive oil.

Few people know that Spain is truly the dominant producer of olive oil. It generally produces more  than half the world’s olive oil. Italy, the number two producer, has only half Spain’s production. In fact, Spain outproduces all other countries combined.

But there is a big problem: while Spain is the dominant leader in olive oil production, many people  perceive Italy as the  king. Because of that, Spain makes most of the oil, while Italian companies make most of the money with their olive oil brands. How do they do it? They buy their olive oil from  Spain, put it in their cans and bottles, and ship it off as Italian olive oil. What should Spain do? That was a question we were asked by the Spanish producers. Our answer came in three steps.

Step 1 was to clearly reposition Spain as “the world’s number one producer of olive oil.” This little-known fact had to be put into the minds of the customers and prospects for olive oil. Spain’s production credentials were an important part  of the message. Outproducing all competitors combined is a great story. But Italy was already in people’s minds, so a way had to be found to reposition it as a producer that used Spanish olive oil.

Low Price Strategy: High Risk For Brands

Price is often the enemy of brand differentiation. By definition, being different should be worth something. It’s the reason that supports the case for paying a little more for a product or service, or at least the same amount.

But when price becomes the focus of a message or a company’s marketing activities, you are beginning to undermine your chances to be perceived as being unique. What you’re doing is making price the main consideration in picking you over your competition. That’s not a healthy way to go.

Few companies find happiness with this approach, for the simple reason that every one of your competitors has access to a pencil. And with it, each of them can mark down its prices any time it wants  to. And there goes your advantage.

As Harvard’s Michael Porter says, cutting prices is usually insanity if the competition can go as low as you can.

The Case Of Cheaper Carrots
To support Porter’s premise, we point you to a start-up company that came up with  a unique packaging system for baby carrots. It was one that  produced a decided price advantage over the two big suppliers that were already in the business.

The Power Of Brands Lies In Shared Values

Brands, just like people, have values - bedrock principals they stand for and hold near and dear to the heart. These principals form the reason brands exist. Brand values influence two important business assets - relationships and reputation. Relationships are built on trust and reputation is built on delivering on your promise.  

In our over-crowded, me-too marketplace, points of difference that are function and feature based are no longer sustainable. Consumers today are tuning out marketing and tuning in to those brands that represent shared values. Forward thinking marketers recognize their brand building initiatives must focus on relationships and reputation.

Nothing else really matters.

Connections begin with respect and empathy
Brands aren’t human, they have no consciousness, brands are not things, nor do they do anything. Brands are nothing more than a shared idea of value– mirrors of our interactions and transactions with each other. Of course, it’s fashionable and fun to talk about brand in the parlance of our industry, brand managers and brand consultants love jargon and thinking models that they can write on a white board.

At the end of the day, we’re still talking about an idea of value in the mind. And one idea human beings value is connection to other humans and being part of the tribe. When people share values they’re more likely to hang with their like-minded mates. And so it is with brands. The power of brands lies in shared connections based in shared values.

Consumer Behavior: Spenders By Nature

Consumers want to believe again. So help them.

People are tired of doing without. The term being bandied about right now by market observers is “frugality fatigue,” meaning the pent-up desire among hard-pressed, anxious consumers to pick up their buying. Obviously, some consumers remain too distressed for their spending to rebound. But most people feel hopeful about renewing their engagement with shopping.

Lots of signs point in this direction. Discretionary purchasing is up. Name brands and non-discounted fashions are doing better. High-end personal care products are growing. People are planning to dine out more, and when they do they are going to higher-priced restaurants, ordering appetizers again and spending more than they budgeted. More people are planning to spend their tax refunds instead of using them to pay off debts.

As we’ve counseled all along, there is no “new normal of frugality” setting in as the recession recedes.  Instead, as the economy is showing signs of strength, so is consumer spending.

This is to be expected. Americans are spenders not savers. It’s a myth that we’re thrifty; we’re not. We spend, and have always spent. We are unique in this way. This is not true in other developed markets. Brits and Europeans are savers not spenders. Sheldon Garon’s recent economic history, Beyond Our Means, shows that this difference is rooted in distinctive 19^th century social contexts of moral suasion and political and charitable institutions.

People can’t spend if they don’t have cash or credit, which is where many consumers still find themselves nowadays. But in America, once people feel flush again, they spend. As Garon makes clear, this is cultural.

4 Do's And 1 Don't For Smarter Brand Naming

1. Do go for quantity. Nine of any ten names generated (by any method or means) fail to get through an availability screening. And this is not a new problem. When the Coca-Cola Company introduced its first diet drink way back in 1963, an IBM Model 1401 computer was programmed to disgorge every four-letter combination containing a vowel. Out came 250,000 combinations. Then 600 names were examined as possibilities. But only 24, a mere four percent, had no conflict with existing trademarks. One of them, Tabb, was shortened to Tab.

2. Do look within. Sometimes good naming is more common sense than courage. Anheuser-Busch decided to spin off as an independent company the large commercial baking company (Campbell Taggart Inc.) it had acquired. Seeking a more expressive name, management selected one of their regional bread brands, redesigned it, and elevated it to the corporate name: Earthgrains Company.

3. Do remember that less is usually more. Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was a curious and cumbersome name. Seven-Up was better. Dr. Richardson's Croup and Pneumonia CureSalve was going nowhere until it became Vicks VapoRub.

4. Do embrace emotion. Reason alone does not a great name make. Sears could have named its car battery "Reliable." (Practical, logical and very ho-hum). Now consider the actual choice, the evocative and emotionally-charged DieHard. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter acknowledged this right-brain aspect of brand naming when he wrote, "The protection of trademarks is the law's recognition of the psychological function of symbols. If it is true that we live by symbols, it is no less true that we purchase goods by them."

5. Don't be overly obvious. Sterling is a lovely word, especially in the United Kingdom where it defines the basic British monetary unit and has come to mean "of the highest quality." But it is so obvious a choice that more than 700 U.K. companies have the word "Sterling" in their name.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Steve Rivkin

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Customer Based Brand Positioning

The competition-based perspective of brand positioning emphasizes distinguishing a brand from competing brands on benefits important to customers. By contrast, the customer-based perspective focuses on how consumption of the brand and the category is relevant to customers' lives. Adopting a customer-based approach requires uncovering the abstract meanings associated with consumption of a particular brand or the general category. We refer to these as brand essence and category essence, respectively.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: John Wiley & Sons, excerpted from Kellogg on Marketing, 2nd Edition by Alice M. Tybout (editor), Bobby J. Calder (editor), Phillip Kotler (foreword by) (c) 2010 by The Kellogg School of Marketing.  

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Aligning Brand Personality And Brand Values

Today on Branding Strategy Insider, another question from the BSI Emailbag. Fauziah, a senior brand marketer in Kuala Lumpur, Malysia asks: 

“We are in the process of developing the corporate brand and parallel to that is the development of the employer brand. A list of the brand personality and the brand values have been developed separately for the corporate brand and the employer brand. My question: Is it appropriate for the brand personality (corporate and employer brand) to be the same and/or similar to the brand values.”

Thank you for asking this question, Fauziah. Yes, there should be a correspondence between the core values of the organization (or the corporate culture) and the personality of the corporate brand. That is, the core values of the organization should reinforce (or at least not be in conflict with) the intended brand personality. For instance, it is very difficult for a brand to be perceived as compassionate if the corporate culture is ruthless. And if "responsiveness" is an intended brand personality attribute, it would be advantageous for "responsiveness" to be a core value of the organization. And how can a brand be perceived to be innovative unless it is the result of an innovative organization? It would be much more difficult for Southwest Airlines to be a fun airline to fly if it didn't hire employees who are fun and who are encouraged to have fun in what they do. So yes, by all means make sure your employer brand aligns with your corporate brand on values and personality attributes.

Have a question related to branding? Just Ask…

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

U.S. Political Party Brand Analysis Proves Revealing

Given that we are in a U.S. presidential election year, we thought it would be interesting to explore the Democratic and Republican parties as brands. In particular, we wanted to understand how different types of people perceived the Democratic and Republican parties differently. We fielded our survey here on Branding Strategy Insider and elesewhere online using social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) between October 15, 2011 and April 1, 2012. 324 people started the survey and, of that number, 253 people (78.1%) completed the survey. The respondents were diverse across age, gender, household income, state of residence and political and religious affinities.

So, what did we find? First, perceptions of the Democratic and Republican parties were quite different from one another, in many ways almost opposite. And, regardless of background, most people had fairly similar perceptions of the two parties. The primary perceptions of the Democratic Party are diverse, compassionate, giving, determined and kind. The primary perceptions of the Republican Party are business friendly, determined, driven, entrepreneurial and decisive. The biggest differences between the two parties were on these attributes: business friendly (Republican) and diverse, compassionate and giving (Democratic). At an overview level, Democrats are perceived to be diverse, compassionate and giving but not very decisive, effective, entrepreneurial or business friendly. Republicans, on the other hand, are perceived to be business friendly, determined, driven and entrepreneurial but not very kind, giving, trustworthy, compassionate, collaborative, easy to work with, easygoing, selfless or diverse.

It’s Time To Redefine Market Research

In fields as diverse as medicine, physics, and archaeology, researchers are gods. From their tireless curiosity and investigation stem breakthrough cures and innovations, and answers to ‘big’ questions like where we come from and the possibilities of where we can go.

Yet in the context of brands and marketing, this idolatry is decaying. Market researchers are increasingly viewed as backwards-looking, closed-minded number crunchers. The heroes of business are those who dismiss data and the consumer, and instead rely on their instincts to create the future. Market research is, in short, the antithesis of innovation.

But it need not be so. Even as budgets are shrinking, market research remains a multi-billion industry, and corporations big and small continue to rely on data-driven insights to control risk and make decisions. What is required, then, is a fundamental shift in how we define and execute market research.

Steve Jobs is the poster child of research-less progress. What many don’t realize, however, is that for all of his talk about ‘skating to where the puck is going’ and ‘consumers not knowing what they want’, Jobs was a researcher – an excellent one, in fact. But like everything he created, his research was baffling in its simplicity. The Apple iPod, for example, was a product of research, rooted in two observations Jobs made about the world around him:

• Everybody on this planet expresses themselves through music
• None of the available portable music players are good enough

That’s it. No million-dollar, 500-page data dumps. No concept testing. No consumer permission metrics. Just a spirit of inquiry and empathy that compelled Jobs to perpetually ask: “How can I make people’s lives better?”

Branding And The Increasing Power Of Apps

As far into the future as it’s possible to see, branding is all about apps.

So if that’s true – and more anon – then what is a brand? A brand is a value proposition. It is what people expect to get when they buy a product or a service. It is not the payoff per se but the promise of a certain benefit, whether tangible or intangible, material or experiential, pocketbook-friendly or premium-priced, immediate or forthcoming, fleeting or enduring – and a benefit that people expect to be worth the price.

A brand and branding are not the same. Branding is the strategy marketers use to build a brand.  Branding sets expectations about the value proposition that is a brand. Apps can be brands, but most brands are not apps, and never will be. Not so for branding, however.

The strategic trajectory of branding since WW2 begins with information as the overarching focus during a period of mushrooming consumption when space-age innovations were flooding the marketplace with fantastical new things for consumers to master. Not that branding of this period wholly subordinated amusement to facts and figures, but entertainment surged to prominence in branding once prosperity soared, unleashing leisurely indulgences. Entertainment reached its acme in the form of experiential marketing, although at the same time, mounting clutter gave rise to early stirrings of marketing resistance. Engagement became the new emphasis in branding as brand marketers sought to bring smarter, savvier, choosier shoppers into the fold through individualized customization and consumer control. But with the rise of social technologies, brands have lost priority with consumers. What people want are social relationships not brand relationships – people-to-people interactions not brands-to-consumers engagement. This is where apps come into play.

Brand Positioning Statement Analysis

Judging the adequacy of a brand positioning statement is necessarily a subjective exercise. However, common problems can be avoided if your brand positioning statement passes the following tests:

• Is the statement as compelling if you substitute a competitors' brand for your brand? Leading brands may succeed in adopting positions that might also be credibly claimed by followers, but the resources of the leader allow it to sustain the position. Follower brands should reconsider the competitive set or the claimed point of difference if the claim is not unique to the brand.
• Does reading the statement provide a clear understanding of who should buy the brand, when that person is likely to buy it, and what would motivate purchase? If not, the aspect of the statement that is vague should be made more specific.
• Is it clear why the target customer should consider the brand to be a compelling way to achieve some important goal? If not, the linkage between the brand's point of difference and the target's goals requires modification.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: John Wiley & Sons, excerpted from Kellogg on Marketing, 2nd Edition by Alice M. Tybout (editor), Bobby J. Calder (editor), Phillip Kotler (foreword by) (c) 2010 by The Kellogg School of Marketing.  

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Brand Extension: Friend And Foe Of Strong Brands

Brand extension is the way to get the best financial return out of a strong brand. By extending a known and much loved brand into new countries and categories, the brand owner reduces risk and maximizes the return on their investment. But extension is not without risks of its own. These days I can’t help wondering if many brands are extended too far, too fast.

Extension into new product categories poses an interesting challenge for a strong brand. There needs to be a good fit between what the brand stands for and what people look for from the new product category. But the fit between the brand and the category does not need to be based on a direct application of the brand’s functional credentials. The fit can be more conceptual. Sometimes this makes for giant leaps into categories not remotely connected to the brand’s origins.

A recent example that comes to mind is the Dirty Jobs heavy duty cleaning products spawned by the “Dirty Jobs" show on the Discovery Channel cable network. In each program, the show’s host, Mike Rowe, explores a dirty job, and attempts to complete the same task as the people whose job it really is. The fit between the well-known TV show and a line of cleaning products makes good sense. After all, Mike doesn’t just get dirty he has to clean up somehow.

A similar “leap of faith” extension would be Wolverine World Wide’s Cat Footwear, the global footwear licensee of Caterpillar® Inc. There is no real functional connection between giant, yellow, earthmoving equipment and footwear, but the connection is there. From durability to traction the benefits of machines and boots have a lot in common. The conceptual linkage has allowed a small collection of work boots to grow into a wide range of casual footwear selling in more than 150 countries worldwide.

Brand Positioning Statement Example: Zipcar

When Zipcar was introduced to the market, a competition-based perspective was adopted. The positioning emphasized the superiority of the service in relation to the competitive alternative of owning one's own car. This approach is captured in the following positioning statement:

To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers [target], when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car [competitive frame], you save money while reducing your carbon footprint [points of difference].

Once Zipcar was established as an alternative to owning a car, greater emphasis could be given to how Zipcar helped the targeted customer achieve his or her goals. This might have been done by laddering up from the points of difference to a brand essence of being a "responsible choice" for transportation and linking to the target's goal of demonstrating a commitment to protecting the environment. This more customer-based approach is illustrated below:

To urban-dwelling, educated, techno-savvy consumers who worry about the environment that future generations will inherit [target and insight], when you use Zipcar car-sharing service you make a responsible choice [brand essence] and demonstrate your commitment to protecting the environment [target's goal].

The positioning of a new brand often evolves from a competition-based approach to one that places greater emphasis on customers' goals as knowledge of the brand increases. Once a brand is well-established, a single statement, such as the one below, may serve to capture elements of both competition-focused and customer-focused positioning:

When The Value Of Marketing Is Questioned

Today on Branding Strategy Insider, another question from the BSI Emailbag. Rachael, a brand marketer in Dallas, Texas asks: 

“The 130-employee B2B company I work for recently created virtual "think-tank centers" (four to date) that serve different industry sectors. Each carries its own identity under the parent umbrella, and I've ensured that the parent-child relationship of the brands is cohesive. Here's the issue: I am the only marketing manager on staff; I have no support team; and my annual marketing budget is small (<150k). With such limited resources, I simply cannot do any of the brands justice. 

I have approached the executive team several times over the last year to make the case for added headcount and budget, and have gotten nowhere. Beyond that, I have asked them to prioritize; something they've been unable/unwilling to do. The company has an Old Boys Club mentality and an overall lack of appreciation for marketing and branding. Advice?”

Rachael, thank you for asking this question. I am certain there are many others who are dealing with similar issues in their organizations. In fact, I have consulted for many technology-related firms run by scientists and engineers. Certainly most of my college classmates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were future scientists and engineers. I have found that many scientists, engineers and finance and operations professionals view marketing as a soft skill that lacks the rigor of other disciplines and that it deserves less attention and investment. In fact, when I was the marketing vice president at Element K, our finance vice president told me to my face (shortly after my arrival there from Hallmark) that he thought marketing was "overhead" that should be managed to reduce costs because it "added no value." 

Brand Positioning Statement Mandates

The specific format used when writing a brand positioning statement may vary from company to company. However, in one way or another, a brand positioning statement should answer the following four questions.

1. Who is the target for brand use?

Brand positioning begins with a clear understanding of the targeted customers. It is useful to describe these customers in terms of their current usage patterns, demographic characteristics, and general goals. Insight into the target's goals is especially important because purchase decisions are rarely motivated by a desire for a brand per se. Rather, there is a belief that having the brand will facilitate achieving some more fundamental goal that is important to the target.

2. Why should the brand be considered (i.e., to what category does the brand belong and what goal does it allow the target to achieve)?

As noted earlier, this question is often answered by invoking membership in a particular category. Such an approach is particularly appropriate when launching a new product, because it links the new product to familiar products and thereby facilitates understanding. As customers' knowledge of the brand grows, the competitive frame may evolve to span several product categories and be defined by usage occasions or users. For example, Ariel, a nonalcoholic wine, might define its competitive set in terms of products that are consumed when both sociability and clear thinking are requisite. Competition might include bottled water and soft drinks, as well as other nonalcoholic wines. Similarly, Waterman pens might be positioned as heirlooms that can be passed on to the next generation, thereby competing with antique furniture and jewelry.

3. Why should the brand be chosen over other alternatives in the competitive set?