Branding Strategy Insider

The Poisoning of the Calvin Klein Brand

After heady success in the 70s and 80s, the fashion brand fell victim to the dark side of licensing.

It began, as it does with so many brands, with a hefty slice of luck. Thirty nine-years ago, Mildred Custin, a fashion buyer from famed department store Bonwit Teller, got out of a hotel lift on the wrong floor and found herself in a small design studio.

Her confusion quickly changed to astonishment as she surveyed the coats and suits being created by the young designer from the Bronx working there. Before leaving, Custin placed an order for $50,000-worth of merchandise. Calvin Klein was on his way.

The brand's fame grew quickly among the New York elite. Calvin Klein's couture line for women established the brand as one of the hottest names in American fashion. By the late 70s, the brand's prominence had attracted a raft of licensees.

Licensing is an invisible world to most consumers, who believe that if a garment carries Calvin Klein's name on the label, it must be made by his company. In reality, only a tiny proportion of the products that carried the logo during the 80s and 90s was actually produced by Calvin Klein. Instead, most of the brand's sales came from licensed arrangements for coats, accessories, watches and jewellery, hosiery, swimwear, and fragrances.

The Brand Identity Checklist

What will our checklist reveal about your brand identity standards and systems? Simply answer yes or no to the following:

•    As St. James Associates says, some brands are “all symbols but no soul.”  First and foremost, does your brand have a soul?               
•    Is your brand’s name proprietary?  Does it differentiate the brand instead of just describing its products and services?               
•    Is your brand’s name suggestive of a key differentiating benefit, but not too narrow so as to decrease the brand’s ability to claim new benefits in the future?               
•    Do consumers like your brand’s name? Is it memorable?               
•    Do you avoid generic sub-brand names?               
•    Do you have comprehensive brand identity standards and systems that address all uses of your brand’s identity elements?               
•    Are those standards and systems actively in use?               
•    Are they available in manuals, on CDs, and through your Intranet?               
•    Are all business units and sub-brands subject to those standards, with none outside the jurisdiction of the standards?               
•    At a minimum, does the system include standards for the visual identifier, color, typography, backgrounds, contrast, staging area, relative size, positioning, key applications, and unacceptable uses?   

Scent Marketing Success: Step 3 of 10

Continuing our series on scent marketing we come to number 3 - designing the perfect scent.

Creating the appropriate scent requires profound olfactory knowledge and sophisticated technology. Both can be found at big flavor and fragrance houses of which there are about 5 in the world. However, some of the smaller scent industry players are suited to meet your demands in smaller quantities as well.
Early in the process you will be asked for a “fragrance brief”, so be prepared to explain your brand properties and values as well as your target demographics. A talented perfumer will be able to translate those into a scent and present you with a selection of creative ideas in sample form. These “Signature Scents” will become your brand’s property and can cost anywhere between $25,000 and $100,000. They are the more expensive alternative to “library scents” that are already developed and waiting for the right customer in the scent manufacturer’s archives.

Most scents (with Chanel No 5 having been the first in the 1920’s) are a synthetic representation of reality.  There is simply not enough natural vanilla, rose and lavender available to satisfy market needs at an affordable rate. By no means are synthetic scents less realistic than natural ones or even dangerous. Natural scents are available but their cost/benefit ratio is still unclear.

Cooked food scents (so called “savory” scents) are the most difficult to produce since the perfumer not only needs to have access to flavors but in many cases also has to consider the effect of heat on the “real” scent of, say, coffee, baked bread, barbecue sauce or a steak.

The New Immutable Law of Marketing

I have been sifting through my interview files. Today I am sharing some of the questions and my answers from a 2006 interview with Ned Roberto and Ardy Roberto of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Q: If you had to rewrite, add or take out anything from the book, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, what would that be?

I would only add one law. It would be called "The Law of Involvement. Top management must be involved to achieve success." All too often, top management is not involved with marketing strategy. David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett Packard, once said, "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people."

Q: Which global brand today would you think has the most challenging job in terms of positioning?

General Motors has the most challenging job. They have to clearly reposition all their brands, which have for many years looked alike and have been priced alike.

Q: How do you think Sony's Walkman, the brand that took advantage of the "Law of the first," can reclaim the No. 1 position versus Apple's iPod? Or is that even possible given all of Sony's woes and distractions?

Media Planning Insight

It is best to leave media planning to media planning professionals. The following are some of the things that they will consider when they develop a media plan for you:

•    Reach (percentage of people – or target audience – exposed)
•    Frequency (number of times, on average, a person is exposed)
•    Impressions (the number of times the target market comes in contact with a media vehicle)
•    CPM (cost per thousand exposures) – measures efficiency
•    CPMTM (cost per thousand target market exposures) – measures effective efficiency
•    Identifying the most appropriate media vehicles (audience fit with target market, environmental fit with advertising message)
•    For instance, websites and trade shows provide a high capacity to process information when customer information needs are high, while short TV spots are best used when information processing needs are lower.
•    Some media are more appropriate when the purchase decision is based primarily on facts while others are more appropriate when feelings and emotions are the key influencers.
•    Evaluating vehicle effectiveness (clutter, distractions)
•    Adjusting potential exposures to actual exposures (for television, it has been found to vary from 50% to 70%)
•    Developing a media strategy and schedule that maximizes advertising response (against the advertising objective)

When we conducted laddering* research at Hallmark, we discovered that most product and brand benefits ultimately supported the underlying need to preserve self-esteem. Different benefits may have followed different paths to that end, but ultimately, the need that they fulfilled was the same fundamental one – to preserve self-esteem. Some emotional end benefits that we explored:

Great Moments in Advertising: First Newspaper Ad

"At Oyster-bay on Long-Island in the Province of N.York, There is a very good Fulling-Mill, to be Let or Sold, as also a Plantation, having on it a large new Brick house, and another good house by it for a Kitchin & work house, with a Barn, Stable, etc. a young Orchard, and 20 Acres clear Land. The Mill is to be Let with or without the Plantation: Enquire of Mr. William Bradford Printer in N.York, and know further."

The advertisement above appeared in the Boston News-Letter of May 8, 1704. Twenty-five years later Benjamin Franklin would begin publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette which included pages of ‘New Advertisements’. 

And the beat goes on…

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

The Ball of Brand Confusion

“Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.”
                                       - Albert Einstein

We are presently witnessing an unprecedented drive for perfection in the field of marketing. Each and every day a  plethora of new emails, articles, case studies and blogs promise to help us optimize everything from search engine rankings and viral video awareness to ad campaign engagement and direct mail response rates. Business books are popping up like weeds in a field (more than twenty new titles each day) expounding on how to be authentic, influence through social networks, create compelling blogs, spread sticky messages, and tell persuasive stories. There’s only one problem: Trying to perfect this growing assortment of marketing means is causing brand confusion, and thus a negative effect on the enterprise ends.

The end, the goal, of any organization, of any brand, is to create customers (or clients, users, members, donors, fans, etc.), and you accomplish that goal by continually innovating to add value to their lives. Everything the organization invests in, and works on, should be laser focused to that end.  That may sound ridiculously evident, but I can assure you that it’s not. For example, ZenithOptimed predicts that worldwide advertising expenditures will grow by a little over 6% this year to a whopping $473 billion!  That’s not to say that all advertising is valueless in the eyes of customers. But I can assure you that most of that $473 billion is worse than valueless; it’s a drain on people’s time, attention, and sensibilities.

The Invisible Cognitive Force
So why do they persist?  Why do marketers continue to fritter away their organizations’ valuable time, attention and money trying to keep up with, and optimize, activities that most customers find little, if any, value in? And I’m not referring simply to advertising: I’d toss most direct mail, sales calls, brochures, “branding” projects, and pr in the heap as well. What keeps people grounded to their outdated mode of thinking about marketing and branding; thinking that creates nothing but inertia, waste and confusion?  I believe that I may have finally figured it out, and it’s so simple that it makes me wonder why I didn’t pick it up sooner.

What the Google Brand Teaches Us

On the search engine's 10th anniversary, we can learn from its innovative branding techniques.

Happy Birthday, Google. It's been a decade since Sergei Brin and Larry Page set up Google Inc. in a California garage. The two founders had big plans for their company back in 1998, but even they would have been stunned to learn that 10 years later Google would become the biggest brand in the world.

Marketing students in the 80s learned their brand management from Coke, and Apple taught the key branding lessons in the 90s, so it's no surprise that Google provides the best branding lessons of this decade. Here are 10 of the most important, to celebrate Google's triumphant anniversary.

One: don't be too keen on market research. Google's initial success was driven by technology, innovation and the drive of two brilliant founders. Too many great brands have been ruined by a premature desire to meet consumer needs. Great brands usually begin with personal inspiration and only later worry about the satisfaction of others.

Two: who needs advertising? Google was built without any ads. Instead, it used two cheaper and far more effective brand building tools: viral marketing and public relations. Now 99% of its revenue derives from ads.

Three: burn your positioning triangles and concentric circles. The positioning-by-numbers approach damages, rather than focuses, a brand. Google grew without wheels or pyramids, creating its own shortlist of principles to guide its actions.

Four: branding is about change, not consistency. From its sparse home page to a logo that adapts to reflect world events, Google broke the traditional rules of branding to deliver on its promise to consumers.

Five: most of your future business will come from brand extensions. Google looked at long-established brands and realised early on that today's unlikely brand extensions are tomorrow's cash cows. It has been actively creating extensions, from Google Mail to Google Maps, to ensure that, while search is its origin, it is far from being its only future.

Branding: Just Ask...

Richard, a Marketing VP in San Diego asks:

"What are your thoughts on when a brand name like Xerox becomes the generic term for photocopying?"

Richard, thanks for asking. That a brand name becomes the category descriptor is a double edged sword. While it is flattering that the brand has such a presence in the market that it becomes the name for the category, this also makes its name much more difficult to protect legally. Also, the brand's points of difference disappear as the category becomes synonymous with the brand. The way to address this is to always say "Kleenex branded facial tissue," "Xerox branded copiers," "Band-Aid branded adhesive bandages," etc. Question 14 in appendix C in Brad's book Brand Aid lists many brands that have become category generic descriptors.

Have a question related to branding? Just Ask…

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Bubbly Market is One Big Paradox

Is there anything more paradoxical than Champagne? Often mistaken as a product or category, Champagne is neither.

It is a region from which a combination of grapes, usually chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, are blended. Despite representing one of the world's most luxurious wines, it comes from an austere region of Northern France where vines struggle in the cold climate. Many of us would have difficulty naming half a dozen brands of Champagne, yet there are more than 15,000 separate producers.

Perhaps most paradoxical of all, despite the downturn in the global consumption of French wines, Champagne has never been more popular. In 2007 sales surged by 10% and Brits drank about one bottle in every eight. It was in the fall of 06' that provided a stark reminder of the continued success and beguiling nature of this wonderful drink.

At the top end, Pernod Ricard was unveiling the world's most expensive champagne. The addition to its Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque range would sell for EUR1000 (about £670). Chairman Patrick Ricard informed shareholders that the champagne would be made in 'very limited quantities' and marketed only in China, Russia and the US. While the company would realise fabulous margins, this was very much a brand move and not one driven by the bottom line.