Branding Strategy Insider

Saving the CMO

Chief Marketing Officers have a shorter tenure than NFL Coaches. In fact, as you can see by the chart, they barely get beyond two years before they are gone.

Average number of months at a position.

CEO………….44
CFO………….39
CIO…………..36
CMO………….26

As Business Week commented in a recent article on the subject, “The job is radioactive.” The problem as layed out in the article quoted a well known search company as stating that 70% of the companies don’t know what they’re looking for when they recruit a CMO.

Jeff Jones, who was the chief marketer at Gap for two years reported that he discussed 22 CMO positions over a five month period. Not one, he says, spelled out coherently for what he could be accountable for.

It’s gotten so bad that Advertising Age editorialized “Perhaps we should just call for the end of the CMO position”. They went on, “Put the job out of its misery. It isn’t really working anyway, is it?”

Protecting Your Brand: Trade Dress

Trade dress is a second form of legal protection for a brand - Trademarks being the first.  Trade dress is a brand’s distinctive aesthetic design features (package or product design).  To be protectable, trade dress must be non-functional and distinctive (or, have acquired a “secondary meaning,” that is, source identifying characteristics).  The more non-functional differentiating features one can build into a product and its packaging, the more likely it will be that infringement can be proved.

It is easy for a competitor to say, “I developed this very similar product independently” when it is fairly generic (such as a birthday card with a floral design the says simply “happy birthday”).  It is more difficult to convince a courtroom of that when your product has many of the same random non-functional elements as a competitor’s products (a line of cards of an unusual size that open from the top with rounded edges printed on green tinted recycled paper, all at 99 cents and all addressing the theme of friendship).  For a competitor to develop a similar line of cards with similar features independently is highly unlikely. It points to copying.

To protect its trademarks and trade dress, a company must constantly be watchful for and strenuously defend against infringement.  For instance, Apple has filed several lawsuits to defend its iMac against knock-offs. Trademark rights can be enforced through lawsuits at a state or federal level. Proving infringement requires proof that the infringer had second use of the mark and that the second user’s mark is confusingly similar to the senior party’s mark.

David Ogilvy Campaign Commandments

* What you say is more important than how you say it.

* Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop.

* Give the facts. The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.

* You cannot bore people into buying. We make advertisements that people want to read. You can't save souls in an empty church.

* Be well-mannered, but don't clown.

* Make your advertising contemporary.

* Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot write them.

* If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling. Sterling Getchel's famous advertisement for Plymouth ("Look at All Three") appeared only once, and was succeeded by a series of inferior variations which were quickly forgotten. But the Sherwin Cody School of English ran the same advertisement ("Do You Make These Mistakes in English?") for forty-two years, changing only the type face and the color of Mr. Cody's beard.

Branding and Trademark Law

While the best defense against copycat competitors is to stay ahead of them with a continuous stream of innovative, highly differentiated, and superior products and services, it is equally important to seek as much legal protection as possible for your brand.

Trademark Law
As a brand steward, you must be aware of the laws under which legal protection is available.  First, trademark law protects a brand’s identity.  That is, it protects names, titles, taglines, slogans, logos, other designs, product shapes, sounds, smells, colors or any other features that distinguish one source of products or services from another. Trademarks that protect services are often called service marks (“SM”).  There are also “collective membership marks” (Boy Scouts of America) and “certification marks” (UL approved).

Trademarks, like brands, build in strength over time.  The test for trademark infringement is “confusing similarity.”  Put another way, if the average consumer believes both products to have come from the same source, there is infringement. Obviously, the more a consumer is familiar with a particular brand, the more defendable its mark.  That’s why it behooves a company to do the following:

•choose a distinctive mark, including a “coined” name. (brand names range from generic and descriptive to suggestive and arbitrary or fanciful (“coined”).  Obviously it takes longer to build meaning for “coined” names, but they are also more distinctive and easiest to protect legally.  Kodak, Xerox, and Exxon fall in that category.  Suggestive marks are the next most protectable.  Examples include Coppertone, Duracell, and Lestoil.  Even common words can be used as trademarks as long as they are not used descriptively.  These common words/phrases are also suggestive marks: Amazon (big), Road Runner (fast) and Apple (different, offbeat).  Descriptive marks are not protectable unless the brand creates a secondary meaning for the word.  Examples include Weight Watchers, Rollerblade, and Wite-out.  Generic marks, such as Shredded Wheat and Super Glue, are not protectable at all.)

Product Creation: Sacrifice To Win

For many years, I've been writing about sacrifice. In other words, to get something, you have to give something up. Trying to be everything for everybody undermines a clear perception of what makes you special or different. If Volvo is to preempt "safety," they can't be a convertible or a fancy-looking car that tries to compete with BMW and Mercedes. And they have to innovate new safety ideas.

Convergence is the opposite of sacrifice, as it is all about products that do more. And it's hard to avoid predictions about converging products in the worlds of computing, communications, consumer electronics, entertainment and publishing.

These predictions go way back. A July 18, 1993, front-page story in Newsday predicted that convergence will cause the eventual demise of videotapes, video stores, newspapers, TV channels, telephone operators, the Yellow Pages, mail-order catalogs, college textbooks, library card catalogs, beepers, VCRs, checkbooks and cassette players.

(We suspect you've noticed that many things expected to go away are still alive and well. So much for that prediction.)

More recent predictions have telephones, video, and the Internet all converging at our television sets. Even the cartoonists are getting into the act. Our favorite has a gentleman with his large-screen Sony on his shoulder saying hello into it.

If you study history, convergence rarely happens. Products that do more than they should are quick to die.

Great Brands Can Afford Elitist Touch

David Gilmour felt the warm South Pacific breeze caress his shoulders as he followed through with the five-iron. He watched his ball sail into a bright-blue sky and then land with a bounce onto the green of the second hole. It was 1992 and Gilmour had more than a great tee shot to feel good about. His luxurious eco-resort on a private island in the Fiji islands, The Wakaya Club, had become an international success in little under a year.

Another golfer caught his eye and Gilmour watched as the man took a long drink from a European bottled-water brand. How bizarre, he thought, to come to a place like Fiji, where the water is famously pure, and choose to drink a European brand instead of the better and more available local stuff. Inspired, Gilmour founded a production company and signed a 99-year deal with the Fijian government to tap an ancient aquifer on the main island of Viti Levu. He called his brand Fiji Water.

Gilmour made sure that his product was right. He had already made a fortune from gold mining, and when he found the Viti Levu aquifer he realised he had struck it rich again. The aquifer is enormous, measuring more than 17 miles wide and 400 feet deep. The water within it fell to earth as rain more than 450 years ago, ensuring that it predates the industrial revolution and all its polluting effects. Great brands start with quality, authenticity and a great story.

Divorcing Unsuitable Customers

Jerome Hatt was a very modern man for the 17th century. When he earned his diploma in brewing and coopery he wasted no time opening a small brewery in the Brasserie du Canon, just a few steps from the cathedral in Strasbourg.

It was a superior position in what was, at that time, one of the more elegant towns in France. The town was also part of Alsace, an area rapidly emerging as the premier region in France for beer. By 1850, Hatt's brewery had grown and relocated to the nearby town of Kronenbourg.

The company began to distinguish itself by using only Strisselspalt hops - the 'caviar of hops' - to ensure a superior taste and aroma for its beer. Growth continued into the 20th century and in 1947 the decision was made to rename the brewery in honour of its home town of Kronenbourg.

While other French breweries continued to produce big bottles of affordable but bland beer, Kronenbourg differentiated itself in the post-Second World War era by offering premium Bierre d'Alsace in smaller bottles at higher prices. It invested heavily in advertising and the brand became the most prestigious and popular beer in France.

Brand Work is No Job for Ad Agencies

The world of marketing has evolved, and today the companies that supply marketing communications and brand strategy are very different. There was a time when ad agencies were also the chief brand builders for their clients. It was called the 20th century. But that era is over and even big and brilliant agencies are no longer qualified to work on brand strategy.

Ad agencies should do what it says on their tin - be agents for the creation of advertising - and accept that the strategy work that feeds their creativity will be devised elsewhere and without their involvement.

As brand has become more central to the success of most major clients, it has moved further away from the core competencies of advertising agencies.

Niall FitzGerald identified this separation while he was chief executive officer at Unilever. Eleven years ago, he gave the keynote speech to the European Association of Advertising Agencies and noted the 'alarming discrepancy developing between what our brands are going to need and what contemporary agencies are good at'. His prediction has proved to be accurate.

Today, brand strategy requires a fundamental knowledge of business operations, finances, employees and internal culture - subjects most ad agencies, which often struggle even to understand how their clients make money, are ignorant of.

The Philosophy of Marketing

The marketing concept is a philosophy. It makes the customer, and the satisfaction of his or her needs, the focal point of all business activities. It is driven by senior managers, passionate about delighting their customers.

Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.

                                                                           - Peter Drucker

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Does Sex In Advertising Work?

This question has advocates on either side. Many people, especially professors and scholars, regard the selling power of sex in advertising as dubious at best. On the other hand, many consumers and professionals are very aware that sex is an effective selling tool.

Why might scholars negate the power of sex in advertising? For one, academic research fails to support much of a selling advantage for sex in advertising. But we must remember that experiments, some of which I’ve conducted, may not provide a realistic picture because researcher constructed ads are shown only once to lots of different people in an artificial environment. In the real world, professionally produced ads are seen many times primarily by the people that advertisers want to target.

The question is not, “Does it work?”, but “How does it work and in what situations?” As many people think, sex is used to grab a viewer’s attention. But sex influences people in additional ways. Consider a portion of a recent essay I contributed to Dr. Carol Pardun’s forthcoming book. It describes a few of the ways that sex can influence viewers.