The Association of National Advertisers held their annual conference recently. Speaker after speaker addressed the growing popularity of what is known as behavioral targeting as opposed to basing pitches on consumer attitudes, opinions or perceptions.
The ability of the Internet to monitor what consumers are doing by tracking what Web sites they visit is fueling interest in what many call understanding our customer better. I call it getting totally confused by your customers. The result, according to one speaker, will be different messages in different media for different customers. While admitting it will be terribly complex, they feel that this is the way it will be. I say many will be led by all this into the abyss of blurred brands and hopeless confusion from which they may never recover.
Anheuser-Bush dived in by studying “use occasions.” Then they launched an ambitious online project that offered entertainment programming named Bud.TV. It turned out to be a bust, so the “content is being rethought.” But here’s my favorite line from their presentation. “The programming had nothing to do with our brands.” I say then, what’s the purpose of all this money and effort?
While these marketing folks are trying to figure out how to be everything for everybody, category after category is sliding into commodotization. While recently working on an updated revision of “Differentiate or Die“, I came across some extensive research on this subject conducted by a research company called Brand Keys. Here are the highlights:
–Degree of differentiation differed by category. In the “Bar Soap” category, for example, 100% of the brands differentiated themselves. Fifty percent of “Credit Card” offerings were found to stand for something in the minds of the consumers. But “Banks,” “Motor Oil” and 20 other categories–nearly a third of all the categories examined–did not have any differentiated brands. The products and services were “known,” but not known for anything in particular.
–To better explain this, take the category of banks. They produce one meaningless slogan after another. How about these: “Where money lives.” Or, “Embracing ingenuity.” Or, “The clean Swiss bank.” Or, “Here today. Here tomorrow.” Slogans like these and endless mergers have commoditized the category.
–On the other hand, take a category such as automotive. This has a reasonable number such as 38%. This means that you have a fair number of differentiated brands such as Toyota (Reliability), BMW (Driving), Volvo (Safety), Mercedes (Engineering) or Ferrari (Speed). It also means that you have a large number of “place holders” with little differentiation. Think General Motors or Ford Motor.
–Of the 75 categories measured, 20 had 0% differentiation–100 brand names that were so badly blurred as to not stand for anything different. Some 28 categories had less than 30% of the brands differentiated. In other words, two-thirds of these categories were not well differentiated or on their way to being commoditized.
So against that backdrop, you want advertising that isn’t based on why your brand is different but how people use it at different times. Or worse than that, let’s just put out our brand name and let our customers figure out what it’s about and when to use it while we keep track. What they perceive just isn’t that important. If they think we are all similar, so be it.
Ladies and gentlemen, that kind of thinking is the road to rack and ruin. Welcome to the abyss.
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