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 to help marketing oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands.

Getting Into the Mind of the Consumer

The easiest way of getting into someone's mind is to be first. It is very easy to remember who is first, and much more difficult to remember who is second. Even if the second entrant offers a better product, the first mover has a large advantage that can make up for other shortcomings.

However, all is not lost for products that are not the first. By being the first to claim a unique position in the mind the consumer, a firm effectively can cut through the noise level of other products. For example, Miller Lite was not the first light beer, but it was the first to be positioned as a light beer, complete with a name to support that position. Similarly, Lowenbrau was the most popular German beer sold in America, but Beck's Beer successfully carved a unique position using the advertising,

    "You've tasted the German beer that's the most popular in America. Now taste the German beer that's the most popular in Germany."

Consumers rank brands in their minds. If a brand is not number one, then to be successful it somehow must relate itself to the number one brand. A campaign that pretends that the market leader does not exist is likely to fail. Avis tried unsuccessfully for years to win customers, pretending that the number one Hertz did not exist. Finally, it began using the line,

    "Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder."

After launching the campaign, Avis quickly became profitable. Whether Avis actually tried harder was not particularly relevant to their success. Rather, consumers finally were able to relate Avis to Hertz, which was number one in their minds.

Killer Competition: Will Your Brand Survive?

In the beginning, choice was not a problem. When our earliest ancestor wondered "What's for dinner?" the answer wasn't very complicated. It was whatever animal in the neighborhood he could run down, kill, and drag back to the cave. Today you walk into a cavernous supermarket and gaze out over a sea of different types and cuts of meats that someone else has run down, killed, dressed, and packaged for you.

Your problem is no longer catching it. Your problem is to try to figure out what to buy of the hundreds of different packages staring back at you in the case. Red meat? White meat? The other white meat? Make-believe meat?  But that's only the beginning. Now you have to figure out what part of the animal you want. Loin? Chops? Ribs? Legs? Rump? And what do you bring home for those family members who don't eat meat?

An Explosion of Choice

What has changed in business over recent decades is the amazing proliferation of product choices in just about every category. It's been estimated that there are 1 million SKUs (standard stocking units) out there in America. An average supermarket has 40,000 SKUs. Now for the stunner. An average family gets 80 to 85 percent of its needs from 150 SKUs. That means there's a good chance we'll ignore 39,850 items in that store.

Buying a car in the 1950s meant a choice between a model from GM, Ford, Chrysler, or American Motors. Today you have your pick of cars, from GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Fiat, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Renault, Suzuki, Daihatsu, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Daiwa, Mazda, Isuzu, Kia, and Volvo. There were 140 motor vehicle models available in the early 1970s. There are 260 today. Even in as thin a market as $175,000 Ferrari-type sports cars there is growing competition. You have Lamborghini, a new Bentley sports car, Aston Martin, and a new Mercedes called the Vision SLR.  And the choice of tires for these cars is even worse. It used to be Goodyear, Firestone, General, and Sears. Today you have the likes of Goodyear, Bridgestone, Cordovan, Michelin, Cooper, Day-ton, Firestone, Kelly, Dunlop, Sears, Multi-Mile, Pirelli, General, Armstrong, Sentry, Uniroyal, and twenty-two other brands.

The big difference is that what used to be national markets with local companies competing for business has become a global market with everyone competing for everyone's business everywhere.

China's Big Brand

According to that notable macro-economist Frank Zappa, you aren't a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It also helps if you have a decent football team and some nuclear weapons, he added, but at the very least you needed a beer.

Perhaps Western thinkers have exaggerated the influence of Mao on China and in doing so overlooked the influence of Zappa. For it is indeed a beer brand, Tsingtao, that will usher in the new era of Chinese capitalism.

Tsingtao is more than merely a good beer to accompany your spicy dumplings.

It is quite simply the most important brand on the planet because it is the only great Chinese brand.

China and branding are the sexiest concepts in modern business. At the moment, however, the two have almost nothing to do with each other. The growth in China's economic power, its developing infrastructure and the rise of its production capabilities are now widely known.

However, among the hyperbole, mind-boggling market sizes and extrapolation effects, there is a glaring weakness in the nation's business model. For all their economic scale and prodigious production, the Chinese have not got a clue about marketing; 50 years of communism is not the best preparation for brand-building.

While the Chinese are making and consuming an increasing proportion of the world's consumer goods, they are doing so using other countries' brands.

Brand Name Overload

Twenty-eight years ago, in a book entitled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, I wrote: "The single most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product."

By now, the world seems to agree.

A booklet from Johnson & Johnson says: "Our company's name and trademarks are by far our most valuable assets."

The former chairman of Quaker Oats says: "If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar--and I would fare better than you."

A former commissioner of the Patent and Trademark Office said that a trademark is "frequently a more valuable asset of a business than all other assets combined."

A survey of 400 companies by our naming partner Steve Rivkin shows that, compared to three years ago, marketers are introducing more names, trying more ways to nail down a name and finding it more difficult to get the job done.

The availability of names is today's No. 1 problem. Communications overload is strangling the world of names too.

There are about 2.5 million registered trademarks in the United States--and at least 3 million more in the rest of the world. Last year, more than 500,000 new names were registered around the world. A standard dictionary has about 100,000 entries. We're running out of words to use for names. So, how hard is it to come up with a good name for a product? Here's how hard. A number of years ago, the industrial products sector of Kimberly-Clark actually trademarked the name "Brand X."

How hard is it to name your company?

Positioning A Follower

Second-place companies often are late because they have chosen to spend valuable time improving their product before launching it. As my former partner Al Ries and I wrote in Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, it is better to be first and establish leadership.

If a product is not going to be first, it then must find an unoccupied position in which it can be first. At a time when larger cars were popular, Volkswagen introduced the Beetle with the slogan "Think small." Volkswagen was not the first small car, but they were the first to claim that position in the mind of the consumer.

Other positions that firms successfully have claimed include:

•    age (Geritol)

•    high price (Mobil 1 synthetic engine lubricant)

•    gender (Virginia Slims)

•    time of day (Nyquil night-time cold remedy)

•    place of distribution (L'eggs in supermarkets)

•    quantity (Schaefer - "the one beer to have when you're having more than one.")

It most likely is a mistake to build a brand by trying to appeal to everyone. There are too many brands that already have claimed a position and have become entrenched leaders in their positions. A product that seeks to be everything to everyone will end up being nothing to everyone.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Agency Leadership Advice

Nine years ago, when I knew I was going to become CEO of this company, I spent three days with its legendary founder, David Ogilvy, at his château in France. It was March, it was cold and rainy, and we spent the entire time indoors talking about the business. At one point I asked him a question point-blank: David, if you were going to say one thing to me, what would it be? He didn’t hesitate in his response. No matter how much time you spend thinking about, worrying about, focusing on, questioning the value of, and evaluating people, it won’t be enough, he said. People are the only thing that matters, and the only thing you should think about, because when that part is right, everything else works.

I spend part of every single day hearing David speak that advice, and as a result, I devote a huge amount of time to asking myself: Am I doing enough? Who at Ogilvy do I have to worry about? Who needs another challenge? Who seems a little stale? Who needs a new view on life or a new country to run? David’s advice drives not only how I think about and mentor people but also how I form business strategy and make critical decisions.

In 1991, we got fired by American Express. They took away the big, sexy stuff—the brand work, most of the television—and gave it to another agency, leaving us with the little co-op stuff, the joint promotions with service establishments. American Express had been with us since the early sixties, and at one point they were our largest client.

But, as David Ogilvy noted when he phoned me at home that Saturday to tell me, the truth is that clients come and go: You’ll always win another one, and another will go away.

Snapple: Branding Lessons for All

Almost 40 years after Cadbury and Schweppes joined forces, the two are once again going their separate ways. Cadbury plc made its modest debut as a pure confectionery manufacturer on the FTSE last week. This week sees its former beverage business listed in New York as DPSG - Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

Students of brand management will no doubt be familiar with one of the key brands in the DPSG portfolio - Snapple. To study Snapple is to study the very history of modern consumer branding.

It begins with founders, in this case, three entrepreneurs working in a natural food store in the East Village of New York City in 1972. They spotted that shoppers were looking for more natural products and set up a business selling natural juices and iced teas.

As with most founders, there was a distinct absence of market research, positioning or any long-term marketing strategy. Snapple grew organically via a network of corner stores. The key lesson Snapple teaches us is to let founders be founders and not be too quick to apply the artificial laws of marketing to a brand that is still led by them.

The next era for Snapple began in 1987 with the arrival of a professional marketer in Carl Gilman. He avoided making any gut decisions, instead conducting research. He then grew the brand slowly, but deliberately. Thanks to the business-school case studies written about Gilman and his decisions, he has now taught a generation of MBAs how to manage a brand: start with research, define a clear positioning, and break the rules by being true to your brand.

Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness

When evaluating the potential effectiveness of different campaign ideas, I use the following questions:

•    Does the ad clearly identify your brand?  Does it do so immediately and throughout the ad?
•    Does the ad clearly and forcefully communicate your brand’s unique promise?
•    Does the ad feature a tag line that reinforces the brand’s promise?
•    Are the ad’s tone, voice, and style true to your brand’s essence and personality?
•    Does the ad reinforce your brand’s identity?
•    Does the ad connect with the reader on an emotional level?  Does it win the reader’s heart or capture his or her imagination?
•    Is there something about the ad that makes the reader admire the brand?
•    Is your ad significantly different from that of your competitors?  Does it look and feel different from anything else featured in the same media?
•    Does the ad reinforce the positive value and values of your brand?
•    Does the ad seem truly inspired?
•    Is your ad so powerful that it has the potential to keep your competitors awake at night worrying about your brand?
•    Is the ad persuasive?
•    Could no competitor make the same claim?  If you inserted a competitor’s logo in the ad, would it make no sense or be unbelievable?
•    Does the ad lead the reader/viewer to believe that he or she will be better off in some way for having interacted with your brand?  Does it create a more favorably perceived end-state for him or her?  Does it leave a vivid picture in his or her mind?

Sponsored By: Internal Brand Education Workshops

Sorry Marketers, You Can't Go Up

Zale's, the king of middle-market jewelry, tried to sell more expensive jewelry. They had little success.

Wrangler, a brand that sells $15 dollar jeans at Wal-Mart, tried to sell $190 jeans at Barney's. They had little success.

Wal-Mart launched a marketing effort to sell more higher-priced merchandise as a way to get business from Target. They will have little success.

What these companies fail to understand is that it is exceptionally difficult to take a well-established brand up in price or value. The automobile people have a long history of failure in this regard.

Years ago, Cadillac tried to take a $50,000 Allante against Mercedes. They had little success.

More recently, Volkswagen tried to sell a $60,000 Phaeton against Mercedes and BMW. They had no success.

Cadillac’s only hope of competing with the super-premium cars is with a different brand. If they had dusted off an old, classic brand, called it LaSalle, and reintroduced it as America's first super-premium car, they might have had a better chance of success. But of course, they would have probably upset a large number of Cadillac dealers who want to continue to offer General Motor's top-of-the-line automobile.

As for Volkswagen, they already own the Audi brand. So why try and compete with them?

What all these companies fail to understand is that it is not what you want to do, it is what your customers will let you do. But even more importantly, it's what their perceptions will let you do.

The Future of Consumer Behavior

A typical 21-year-old has played 5,000 hours of computer games, exchanged 25,000 emails, SMSs and chat messages, has used a cellphone some 10,000 times and spent 3,500 hours online. Surprised? Well that’s your future consumer.

When I conducted the ‘BRANDchild’ research for my book of same name – the world’s largest study on kids and their relationship with brands - one of the results which took me most by surprise was the number of channels kids are able to handle at the same time. Where adults are able to manage 1.7 media channels at the same time, say, watching TV and reading a magazine, kids can give attention to an astounding 5.4 channels at the same time. To illustrate this multi-tasking, they can watch TV, send SMS messages, surf the net, chat on MSN, listen to music and even devote 0.4 of their simultaneous communications repertoire to homework.

But even more surprisingly, when I recently repeated the study, three years on, not only had the number of channels kids handled at once increased by 0.2, but adult capacity for dealing with multiple channels had increased by close to 0.1. It seems, therefore, that the ever-evolving media environment is not only influencing the younger generation. It is affecting us all and we are all making adaptations to it. This leads to this question: what behavioral changes will we see in future generations vis-à-vis communications strategies and media use?

The answer is straightforward. A lot. But here are two key developments you can expect to deal with in handling future generations of consumer behavior:

Why Brands are at a Premium

Sometimes big brands surprise you. Take Burger King, for example - its sudden aspiration for luxury led it to declare plans to launch the world's most expensive burger, featuring Kobe beef and an £85 price tag, as recently revealed in Marketing.

Burger fans aren't the only ones treating themselves to a slice of luxury. Despite pet numbers being almost flat in the UK in 2008, the pet care and pet food categories continue to show robust growth as owners treat their pets like humans. High-priced, luxury pet foods have driven up prices, even if the amounts being bought remain the same.

It is part of the ongoing trend known as premiumisation. Yes, it's an ugly word, but so are most of the key concepts in marketing. Think how stupid we marketers sound when talking about positioning, segmentation or portfolio management. Premiumisation is the topic of the year and marketers need to grasp its significant strategic opportunities.

The concept of premiumisation originated in the drinks business about five years ago. It refers to the practice of introducing a brand or repositioning an existing one as premium or luxury in a mature category. Diageo, for example, has a series of brands such as Tanqueray Ten and Don Julio Tequila designed to premiumise their offering in some of their biggest categories. The term is so well entrenched in the wine and spirits business it even recruits premiumisation executives. Smirnoff, for example, is currently seeking a premiumisation manager, who will work under the premiumisation director, to drive Smirnoff Black into a premium position in the vodka category.

There are many reasons for the sudden rise of premiumisation.

Is Brand Positioning Still Relevant?

M. Anand from Businessworld, India's leading business publication interviewed me in 2005 on the relevance of positioning in a changing world. Here's the conversation that transpired...

•   Is positioning still relevant 35 years after you first wrote about it?

It is more relevant now. The original body of work on positioning was made on the premise that the United States was an over-communicated market. There was too much noise and lots of competition for the mind. The mind was the battleground. Then, the question was how do we get into the consumers’ mind in an over-communicated society. Little did we know that it is going to become an even more over-communicated world. In fact, we thought over-communicated was nothing. Now, you have the Internet, satellites etc.. All that has made positioning an even bigger deal. That is why the book continues to sell even now.

•   Many contemporary marketers believe that positioning is now outdated. In fact, McDonald’s chief global marketing officer Larry light said: “Identifying one brand position, communicating it in a repetitive manner is old-fashioned, out of date, out of touch.” What is your response?

I had a big fight with Larry light and I wrote several counter articles. Larry Light doesn’t know what he is talking about. He has jumped up and said positioning is obsolete. The problem with Larry light is that he has not been able to understand positioning. He never has. I know Larry. And I told Larry that he has not been able to do a good job of positioning accounts. So I told him here is your deal: “if you want the answer to what you are, I will give it to you.” I said, in essence, here is your (McDonald’s) positioning. You are the ‘world’s favorite place to eat’. That’s your concept. That is it. That is a leadership position. And that’s a very powerful idea. And I published that idea. But I know he won’t use it because I wrote it. That’s why I gave it to him. I think Larry has no clue to what positioning is all about.

•  But other voices like The Economist (in its April 2, 2005 issue) has argued that positioning is not working with sophisticated and knowledgeable consumers. It is argued that consumers now buy on research and personal value, not on how companies seek to ‘position’.

Inside Bait and Switch Advertising

According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Bait advertising is an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell. Its purpose is to switch consumers from buying the advertised merchandise, in order to sell something else, usually at a higher price or on a basis more advantageous to the advertiser. The primary aim of a bait advertisement is to obtain leads as to persons interested in buying merchandise of the type so advertised.

No advertisement containing an offer to sell a product should be published when the offer is not a bona fide effort to sell the advertised product.

Initial offer

    (a) No statement or illustration should be used in any advertisement which creates a false impression of the grade, quality, make, value, currency of model, size, color, usability, or origin of the product offered, or which may otherwise misrepresent the product in such a manner that later, on disclosure of the true facts, the purchaser may be switched from the advertised product to another.

    (b) Even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception.

Of Branding and the Parent Company

How does a Tyco or a United Technologies or even a General Electric get investors excited about a company that's in multiple businesses? The answer: with great difficulty.

The inherent problem with these kinds of programs is that you have to advertise a client with multiple personalities. And it's exceptionally difficult for an analyst to get his or her head around these types of  companies. How do I evaluate all these different businesses and assign a buy, a hold or even a sell recommendation? How does an investor do the same? You might like one personality but dislike the others. It's all very confusing.

This is an old problem that has led corporate America to act like an accordion. First, they expand and acquire a lot of diverse businesses. Diversification is good, but then they realize not only that it is hard to manage all these different businesses and competitors, but that Wall Street doesn't understand them. So they contract and sell off all their acquisitions. Focus is good. Wall Street gets it--at least for awhile.

The standard reason for all these marketing-the-stock activities is "to create a brand for the parent company." Another favorite is expressing a need “to educate the public investors and analysts about our far reaching operations." Well, history has pretty much proved that these types of multimillion-dollar programs rarely live up to expectations.

Scent Delivery Sense

In my previous posts I shared why you should use scent in your marketing efforts and how to find and make the right fragrance to represent your brand. Today my focus is on scent delivery.

About 10 years ago, the first commercial scent delivery systems entered the market - for use at the point of sale. What better way to identify a fragrance in a cluttered environment (such as a “Parfumerie” in Europe or a department store in the U.S.) than pushing a button and having an “intimate” scent experience that would not involve a sharp-dressed associate ambushing the consumer as she enters the floor or testers on shelves that get messy or are stolen altogether within a week.

The technology most frequently used (by companies such as the now defunct aerome GmbH from Germany) is “dry air delivery”, meaning that purified air is run over or through a scented substance, picks up the fragrance and delivers it via a whiff of scented air to the potential shopper. No residue, no liquid, no alcohol, no cooling sensation on the skin. However, like so may good ideas that sound like a no-brainer it was way ahead of its time at the point of sale. With a few installations, too far spread out geographically, it attracted interest but never turned a profit.

As early as 1993, Dr. Alan Hirsch conducted experiments in casinos where he found out that revenue from slot machines went up by 45% as soon as scent was introduced in the environment. This confirmed that a scent’s properties such as its influence on the perception of time and the benefit of gamblers feeling “well” had substantial commercial value. Today, not a single casino in Las Vegas and elsewhere is without a signature scent.

Brand Extension: Today's Default Strategy

When I'm not modelling the very latest sartorial gentlemen's fashion for you among the posts of Branding Strategy Insider, my day job involves teaching MBAs about branding.

One of the great things about a classroom full of 30-something MBA students, as opposed to undergraduates, is that the professor often learns just as much from the students as they learn from him, which is a polite way of saying that, occasionally, a student will pick a fight with you in class and make you look like a twit.

That is exactly what happened to me last week. I kicked off my class on brand extensions by defining the topic, 'what happens when an organisation spots a rare opportunity to leverage their brand equity in a new category?'

Despite this apparently innocuous definition, I was instantly aware of an arm flailing vigorously in the back row. Professors develop an almost preternatural ability to sense classroom danger and I turned to acknowledge the question with a growing feeling of doom.

My questioner was as polite as she was concise. 'Is brand extension really such an occasional move?' she asked. 'Surely, these days it's a given that if you have a strong brand, you will extend it?'

I gulped. She had a point. Traditionally, most part-brands were built in one category and any expansion of their brand architecture was limited to sub-brands within that same category. Therefore, car firms simply made cars and pen companies stuck to pens.

The Trouble With 'BIG'

Some years ago, I wrote a book titled Big Brands. Big Trouble. One chapter was "The Bigger They Are, the Harder to Manage."

When you start to study the subject of getting big, you can quickly come up with a stunning amount of research and analysis that seriously questions whether bigger is better. By the time I was finished, I began to wonder what in the world these CEOs were thinking about as they got trapped in the land of mergermania.

In a detailed study, two economists produced a 400-page analysis that confronts the quintessential myth of corporate culture: that industrial giants in an organizational bigness are the handmaidens of economic efficiency. In a 1986 book entitled , Bigness Complex, they argue that the preoccupation with bigness is at the heart of the United States' economic decline.

A little hindsight shows that they miscalled our "economic decline." Quite the opposite occurred as we roared off into an amazing economic expansion. They also missed that these big companies have been falling apart on their own, and we don't need any government policy to keep bad bigness things from happening. And they missed the small company explosion in high-tech land that helped propel our expansion.

After an intense amount of original and observed research, the authors concluded that conglomerate bigness seldom enhances, and more typically undermines, efficiency in production.

Brand Management: The Hilfiger Lessons

It has been quite a decade for Tommy Hilfiger. During the 90s, it seemed his brand could do no wrong. The business experienced meteoric growth and, by 2000, was generating $2bn in worldwide sales.

But then came the new century, and Hilfiger struggled to maintain the momentum. Tommy would learn some of the key lessons of brand management the hard way.

First, growth and success are the two biggest enemies of all strong brands.

Hilfiger's global sales grew tenfold during the 90s. On a Powerpoint slide to investors, this looks fantastic. But, internally, this kind of growth is a major challenge. It is a classic conundrum for most niche brands that experience market success. Their scale increases, they lose focus and, eventually, all the elements that made the brand successful are lost.

Second, watch out for retail 'partners'.

Hilfiger, like most fashion brands, relies both on its own outlets and selling through major department stores. The latter are not necessarily motivated to protect and care for brand equity over the long haul. Hilfiger experienced first-hand the classic one-two-three of retail sales. 'The problem was the department stores in the US,' he said. 'First of all they copy you, then they under-price you and then they discount the brand. They don't take care of your shop areas in stores.'

Brand Marketing Integration

When integrating your brand marketing efforts, here are some mechanisms you may find useful:

•    A well-communicated brand positioning statement including the target customer and the brand essence, promise, and personality
•    Conducting a brand positioning workshop with organization senior managers if necessary to build consensus
•    A brand marketing visionary at the top of at least the marketing organization (Marketing VP or Chief Marketing Officer), or better yet (from a marketer’s perspective) – the enterprise.
•    As broad a span of control as possible for the chief marketing officer (encompassing as many of the disciplines listed above as possible) and frequent forums for him or her to communicate marketing issues and initiatives with other senior leaders of the organization
•    Specific brand management and marketing objectives (long term and short term)
•    A brand marketing plan
•    Integrating brand plans with organization strategic plans
•    Product, program and segment marketing plans (driven by or at least congruent with brand marketing plans)
•    Marketing budgets allocated by market segment and sub-discipline (with 10-20% of the overall budget held by the chief marketing for unforeseen opportunities)
•    Integrated media plans

BrandQuote - April 26

"… at the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about [a] man, you can touch him at the core of his being."

   -Bill Bernbach, in a speech to the American Association of Advertising
    Agencies, 1980

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Beware of Brand Schizophrenia

Powerful brands have distinct personalities: Duracell’s batteries last a long time. Volvos are safe in a crash. But even dominant brands can fade if they fall prey to multiple personality disorder.

Consider General Motors. What’s the difference between a Chevrolet, a Pontiac and a Buick? The company has woken up to the problem in recent times; In 2005 GM announced it would narrow its selection of cars. But this belated effort to bring the automaker’s brand schizophrenia under control is too little too late.

General Motors mucked up its brands over decades of endless line extensions. But Mercedes Benz has done it in less than one decade. Once upon a time, it was a high-quality, highly engineered, prestigious car. But now, if you wander into a dealership in Europe, you’re faced with the following lineup: A-Class, B-Class, C-Class, E-Class, S-Class, CLK, CLS, CL, SLK, SL, M-Class and G-Class. The prices range from 20,000 to 200,000 euros. The result is that in Europe, Mercedes Benz is not listed as the top brand. The Audi A8, BMW, Maserati and Jaguar have taken over this position.

The GM and Mercedes stories are not unique. Once a company abandons its brands' distinctive personalities or positions, it's just a matter of time before confused customers start to drift away. In 1985, Coca-Cola infamously introduced an identity-blurring new brand, New Coke. A massive consumer backlash ensued, and the company quickly reinstated its familiar Classic Coke.

You’d think Coca-Cola would have learned from that experience the importance of having a unique product personality.

Top Brands Illustrate Marketing Power

It is time to stop speculating about brand equity and turn, instead, to the ice-cold empiricism of financial brand values. Monday saw the annual publication of the BrandZ Top 100 brands from Millward Brown Optimor and, as usual, there were a host of winners and losers.

The first slice of good news was domestic (FYI - I'm based in London). Although only six British brands made the Top 100 list, they grew their value at an average rate of 33% - significantly higher than the 21% average of the Top 100 as a whole. Vodafone led the British contingent growing in brand value by a whopping 75% to $37bn (£18.7bn). But the BrandZ data that drives the Top 100 also recorded a slowing in Vodafone's brand momentum, suggesting that the good times may not continue.

Another big winner this year was McDonald's. The world's eighth-biggest brand recorded a 49% rise in value to $49.5bn. Impressively, it also recorded a brand momentum score of seven, suggesting its gamble to divest the other brands in its portfolio and focus on its main cash cow appears to be paying off. I must now eat humble pie and accept that you can revitalise burgers and fries in the 21st century.

I did get one prediction right this year, though. Robert Polet, who took over as chief executive of Gucci Group after two decades working for Unilever, is just as good as I told you he was. His main brand, Gucci, increased in value by 43%, and with a brand momentum score of 10, it seems Polet's revolution will continue to deliver results.

Brand values can go down as well as up.

Welcome Jack Trout

It's been a year in the making and today I'm very pleased to share with you our partnership with brand strategy pioneer Jack Trout. As most of you know, Jack is the acclaimed author of many marketing classics including: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Differentiate or Die, Big Brands. Big Trouble, A Genie's Wisdom, Trout on Strategy and others.

As a consultant he has guided such companies as AT&T, IBM, Burger King, Merrill Lynch, Xerox, Merck, Lotus, Ericsson, Tetra Pak, Repsol, Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, Southwest Airlines and several other Fortune 500 companies. Recently, he consulted with the State Department on how to better sell America.

Recognized as one the world's foremost marketing strategists, Jack is the originator of Positioning and other important concepts in marketing strategy. He has over 40 years of experience in advertising and marketing and is a boardroom advisor to some of the world's largest corporations. Jack has gained an international reputation as a consultant, writer, speaker, and proponent of leading-edge marketing strategies.

With The Blake Project, Jack will lend his expertise in the delivery of brand strategy and brand education.

Welcome Jack, we're excited to work with you.

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Creating the Signature Scent

Creating a “signature” scent for a brand’s scent marketing purposes is not much different from translating the persona of a celebrity or the ideas of a designer into a fragrance. In the “fine fragrance” (the perfumes and eau de toilettes) category alone, 1,000+ new scents are launched worldwide every year. It requires a lot of creativity and even more marketing dollars to bring - and keep - them on the consumer’s radar screen. Often times, fragrance launches are a very public affair, comparable to the premiere of a future blockbuster movie. And, like the movies, they often fizzle and disappear as quickly as they came…

As a brand owner taking the leap of faith into scent marketing, you want to do it right. So you hire a scent marketing consultant and she will help you develop a “fragrance brief”. It describes in detail what you want your brand to smell like and draws from inspirations such as brand image, corporate identity, core values, in-store design, color schemes, customer demographics and preferences, sometimes even the owners’ personal taste.

If you were in the fine fragrance business (like Estee Lauder or COTY) your consultant would take the brief to a number of fragrance manufacturers, most of which you probably never heard of; Givaudan, IFF, Firmenich, Symrise, Taksasgo to name the five largest. With an extensive staff of in-house perfumers they translate your “fragrance brief” into a scent and present you with the results. You narrow them down, maybe run some market research, make some modifications, shoot a beautiful ad campaign and you’re off to the store shelves. The “creative”, the perfumer’s work, by the way, you would get for free. It’s a well-oiled machine, which in the end produces large amounts of “juice”, fragrances often described as “emotions in a bottle”. And those manufacturers who didn’t win the brief will try again (and win) next time.

But since you are an airline, a consumer electronics brand or a car manufacturer, those traditional rules and processes do not apply.

Brand Equity Can Taint Perceptions

A couple of years ago I was invited to make a series for the BBC about brands. In one episode we went to a London pub to recruit brand-loyal drinkers in a London pub who claimed that they drank only one particular beer.

Invariably these drinkers cited the taste of their chosen beer brand as the reason for their loyalty, and when asked if they could identify their choice without the aid of the logo, each was certain they could.

We took these drinkers to the corner of the pub, where we had set up a blind-taste test. Three pints of beer marked A, B and C were set out on a table and the drinker was given one minute to identify their favoured brand from two imposters.

What the drinker did not know was that not only were all three beers identical, but they were all from a rival brand to the one they usually drank.

Facing the Discounter Dilemma

Emma Smith (not her real name) is the UK marketing manager for a well-known perfume brand. The brand has been on the market for eight years - an eternity in the fast-moving, constantly changing world of fragrances.

Each year it becomes harder for Emma to reach the aggressive sales targets that he