Branding Strategy Insider

Of Memory and Marketplace Experiences

“A great story is never fully predictable through foresight - but it’s projectable through hindsight.”
                                        -  Peter Guber

Late Saturday afternoon in December.  Cleveland airport.  D Concourse. One hour and ten minutes between flights.  Hungry.  Thirsty.  Tired.  One, full-service restaurant.  Under staffed and bursting at the seams with harried travelers.  A single, recently vacated and unsightly table. The opening scene of another unpredictable marketplace story, and the impetus for this post.

All marketplace experiences, like the one above, are by their nature unique to the individual and inherently unpredictable.  Try as you may, you simply can not foretell the future. You can’t stage it for your customers, nor can they orchestrate it for themselves.  There are simply too many variables.  But you can understand how people construct stories through hindsight; how they organize their thoughts to create memories.  And then, you may be able to help them create a story worth remembering, or even one worthy of remark.

The Mind as Producer and Director
We don’t store a continuous, unedited, uncut version of the world around us.  The mind doesn’t record each and every detail of our experiences.  Rather, it automatically trims life into smaller, more manageable and meaningful scenes. It then edits and stores those scenes, and later retrieves them in a form something like a highlight film or movie trailer; one created by us and from our particular point of view.  And that final version of our story, that ultimate experience, is the one that matters to us most of all. Have you ever been engrossed in a movie, when suddenly, the screen goes black? I’m referring to a glitch, not the final episode of The Sopranos. Now, despite the popular notion that the disruption “knocked you out of your suspension of disbelief,” you never really stopped believing that you were in a movie theatre watching a movie.  What it did was temporarily upset your movie watching experience.  The important question is, How did it affect your ultimate experience? The version that you created after the fact and stored in your mind.

BrandQuote

“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”

                           - A rephrasing of Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

 

 

Of Beer and Brand Extension

The simple bottom line in marketing is that a brand that's many things can't be one thing. No one category has ignored this all but immutable law as religiously as the beer business.

Consider Miller beer. What started out in 1978 as a classic pilsner has become a portfolio of beers. Each brand in the portfolio suffers from a bad case of line extension. If you want a Miller beer, the next question will be "which one?" Do you want Miller Lite, Miller Lite Ice, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Genuine Draft Lite, Miller High Life, Miller High Life Lite or Miller High Life Ice?

Oh forget it, I'll have a Budweiser.

They also own the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company. The last time I checked, it has the same problem-- you have to figure out whether you want a Leinenkugel's Original Premium, Leinenkugel's Light, Leinenkugel's Northwoods Lager, Leinenkugel's Genuine Bock (seasonal), Leinenkugel's Red Lager, Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss, Leinenkugel's Berry Weiss (seasonal), Leinenkugel's Hefeweizen (draft only) or Leinenkugel's Creamy Dark.

Oh forget it, I'll have a Corona.

For years, I've been writing about the problems of line extension. Let’s review the bidding.

The Brand Positioning Workshop

 
Certainly we spend a fair amount of time on Branding Strategy Insider (and at The Blake Project) focusing on brand positioning. It's one of our favorite topics. A question about our brand consulting process inspired today's post on how we position brands. Simply put, we call this exercise The Brand Positioning Workshop. This highly facilitated, day long, workshop is designed to gain complete consensus among your organization’s management team and marketing leadership on the brand’s target customers, essence, promise, personality and archetype. A compliment to our two-day and B2B brand positioning workshops, this workshop integrates insights about the elements that most often differentiate business to consumer companies from each other.

We work with you to develop your B2C brand’s position in its current marketplaces, while designing flexibility for its future growth. This includes identifying, analyzing and selecting the brand’s target audiences, competitive frame of reference and key customer benefits (functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive). The workshop focuses on developing the brand’s essence, promise and personality. We also ensure that your brand has chosen the most powerful benefits to own and that it has developed the proof points and “reasons to believe” for those benefits.

We believe that the primary brand benefit should deliver against these objectives:

•    The benefit is extremely important to your target audience(s).
•    Your organization has unique, sustainable competencies (and strategic intent) in delivering against the benefit.
•    Your competitors are not delivering against the benefit (nor would it be easy for them to do so in the future).
•    Any benefit chosen must be unique, compelling, motivating, understandable and believable.

We generally plan for attendance by 6 to 10 key organization stakeholders, including the organization’s leadership.

Loving A Brand?

Not too long ago I read an article about Procter & Gamble's attempt to "stake out the emotional high ground" for their Tide detergent. Trying to establish an emotional connection with customers is showing up more and more in agency presentations. An agency CEO (Also a guest author on Branding Strategy Insider) even wrote a book on the subject, entitled Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands.

I don't want to throw cold water on all this emotion and love, but I have some questions about this kind of activity.

First, who gets emotional about detergent, toothpaste or, for that matter, most of the products out there? If you look at the success of Wal-Mart Stores, you can safely conclude that the only thing people really get emotional about is price.

Second, can emotion be a differentiating idea? And what's to prevent a competitor from trying to be just as emotional as you are? Consider the credit card wars. Visa built its brand around the concept of "Everywhere you want to be." They took ownership of the "everywhere" or acceptance attribute. This is the number-one attribute of credit cards.

The Most Persuasive Words in English

What are the most powerful marketing words in the English language? Since the early 60's researches in advertising and academia have presented various findings. All agree the power lies in ten to twelve words. Here are the results chronologically:

1961: You, Easy, Money, Save, Love, New, Discovery, Results, Proven, and Guarantee

Source: [Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), Nov. 1, 1963, p. 4;  Lowell (Mass.) Sun, Nov. 4, 1963, p. 5; Northwest Arkansas Times, Nov. 7, 1963, p. 4; etc.]

1970: The 12 most persuasive words in the English language are: you, money, save, new, results, health, easy, safety, love, discovery, proven and guarantee. According to the claim of researchers in the Yale psychology department.

Source: [Fresno (Calif.) Bee Republican, Jan. 20, 1970, p. 7; Yuma (Ariz.) Daily Sun, Jan. 20, 1970, p. B6; Burlington (N.C.) Daily Times-News, Jan. 20, 1970, p. 6A; etc.]

Here's an Associated Press item from January 1972, in which the list takes on significance by being quoted from the Canadian Consumer Magazine:

Great Moments in Advertising: The First Jingle

The jingle had no definitive debut: its infiltration of the radio was more of an evolutionary process than a sudden innovation. Product advertisements with a musical tilt can be traced back to 1923, around the same time commercial radio came to the public. However, if one entity has the best claim to the first jingle it’s General Mills, who aired the world’s first singing commercial. The seminal radio bite, entitled "Have You Tried Wheaties?", was first released on the Christmas Eve of 1926. It featured four male singers, who were eventually christened "The Wheaties Quartet", singing the following lines:

Have you tried Wheaties?
They’re whole wheat with all of the bran.
Won’t you try Wheaties?
For wheat is the best food of man.

While the lyrics may appear hokey to modern day society, the advertisement was an absolute sensation to consumers at the time. In fact, it was such a success that it served to save the otherwise failing brand of cereal. In 1929, General Mills was seriously considering dropping Wheaties on the basis of poor sales. However, advertising manager Sam Gale pointed out that an astounding 30,000 of the 53,000 cases of cereal that General Mills sold were in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the only location where “Have You Tried Wheaties?” was being aired at the time. Encouraged by the incredible results of this new method of advertising, General Mills changed tactics entirely. Instead of dropping the cereal, it purchased nationwide commercial time for the advertisement. The resultant climb in sales single-handedly saved the now über-popular cereal.

Sources: Ask the Expert, General Mills

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Brand Endurance: Hello Kitty

Created by Sanrio Ltd, founded in 1960 by Shintaro Tsuji, Hello Kitty is one of the truly phenomenal brands to emerge from Japan. For over three decades, this simple mouth-less cat of sparse lines and a bow has mesmerized children, youngsters and grown ups alike across Asia, Europe and the Americas. In the US alone, Hello Kitty has expanded into 4000 stores nation wide with more than 200 Sanrio specific shops. Created as a gift item to be exchanged between families, Hello Kitty now adorns more than 22.000 products across categories and contributes more than half of Sanrio's USD 1 billion annual sales.

Much has been discussed about the endurance of this iconic brand over the decades. So popular is Hello Kitty that Taiwan's second largest airlines, Eva Air, decided in October 2005 to use the Hello Kitty brand on flight routes between Taipei, Tokyo and Fukuoka. By paying Sanrio a franchisee fee, Eva Air has dedicated an entire Airbus A300-200 to the Hello Kitty brand and its cutie-like universe. Everything from the aircrafts exterior, boarding passes, flight crew uniforms and the interior are held in the Hello Kitty theme. The special Hello Kitty plane is booked more than 90% on average - a healthy occupancy rate for an airline.

A range of Hello Kitty duty-free goods are available and hugely popular with the fans of the brand. This demonstrates the enormous popularity that Hello Kitty enjoys even after decades of existence.

There are many reasons for Hello Kitty's popularity. Unlike many of the Disney characters and other popular cartoons that emote and develop a distinct personality, Hello Kitty is a rather boring cartoon figure. It does not even have a mouth to talk. Hello Kitty's Zen-like calmness and faceless expression are the major reasons for its appeal across age groups and markets.

The House of Brands

Prince once sang that there were 23 positions in a one-night stand. Handily, there are about the same number of options in the brand relationship spectrum. The spectrum was invented in 2000 by David Aaker and colleague Erich Joachimsthaler to describe the relationships between brands in a portfolio.

The spectrum begins far left with a single 'branded house' in which a company such as McKinsey creates a single brand for all its operations. It concludes, far right, with a 'house of brands' in which a company, such as Procter & Gamble, opts for a holding company comprising a series of apparently unconnected brands.

Brand architecture is a fascinating area of brand management, and the past few weeks have seen a number of interesting architectural alterations taking place.

First, Tesco finally opened its US operation, using an entirely new approach to brand architecture. In the past, it has maintained its branded house approach in which all its products were clearly associated within the singular brand equity of Tesco. It is a classic retail strategy born of the need to be as economic as possible and enabling a singular focus on everything from research, to communications, to recruitment.

But Tesco's adventure in the US has resulted in a remarkable shift.

5 Best-Ever Super Bowl Ads

It is exciting times for NFL fans, especially if you are like me - a New England Patriots fan. Now 13-0 the Patriots are well into their pursuit of a perfect season. It is exciting times for advertisers as well as Super Bowl 2008 has proven to be surprisingly popular. Bucking the trend of recent years more than 90% of spots have been sold at record prices of up to $2.7m. So what else will make history this year? The Patriots? Your Spot? Both? As we close in on kickoff let's look at the Top 5 Super Bowl ads according to Peter Hartlaub of MSNBC (and most of the world)...

- Apple '1984' (1984). A jogger representing Apple throws a sledgehammer into a Big Brother image representing IBM.

- Coke 'Mean Joe Greene' (1979). A kid offers his Coca-Cola to battle-weary Pittsburgh Steelers player Mean Joe Greene - who softens up enough to toss him his jersey as a reward.

- E*Trade 'Monkey' (2000). Two dim-witted guys and a monkey clap to some music in a garage, followed by the line: 'Well, we just wasted 2m bucks. What are you doing with your money?'

- Reebok 'Terry Tate: Office Linebacker'(2003). To boost productivity, a chief executive recruits a linebacker from Reebok.

- Monster.com 'When I Grow Up ...' (1999). A group of kids stare at the camera and declare their desire to 'be a yes man' and 'claw my way up to middle management'.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid