Branding Strategy Insider

Children vs. Obesity: Ban Ads or Tax Junk Food?

Recent research has shown that British (and American) children are getting fatter, suggested there is a link between childhood obesity and a slew of adult ailments, and revealed that 95% of food ads aimed at children promote brands that contain unhealthy levels of fat, salt and sugar.

Therefore, argue a number of food lobbying groups, by restricting unhealthy foods advertising to children we will reduce their consumption and thus improve the health of future generations.

Heady stuff. Charlie Powell from Sustain, an alliance of campaigners for better food, claims: "Advertising is designed to exploit children's vulnerabilities." Meanwhile, Kath Dalmeny from the Food Commission says: "Junk food advertisers know that children are especially susceptible to marketing messages. They target children as young as two with toys, cartoon characters, gimmicky packaging and interactive web sites to ensure they pester their parents for the products."

Darren Neville, editor of Consumer Policy Review, claims that children are "bombarded with marketing and advertising for what are often unhealthy foods".

We should take these arguments with a large pinch of (metaphorical) salt.

iTunes Brand Unstoppable?

I love Italians because they have better words than us. Not just better-sounding words, but just generally better words. Let me give you an example. The Italian word for positioning statement is posizionamento. How much cooler is that?

Here is another example. My favourite word is sprezzatura. It means making difficult things look easy. It's an awesome word that does not even have an English equivalent. But if it did, it would be a word commonly associated with iTunes. In April 2003, Apple launched its incredibly successful music-download site and made it all look so easy. So much so, that a host of idiotic competitors have gone charging after it ever since, only to fall flat on their red faces.

For four entertaining years, a cavalcade of big brands has been blowing millions creating 'rivals to iTunes', launched with all the sound and fury 'big marketing' can muster, but fizzling and dying a few embarrassing months later with a three-line press release.

Barely six months after iTunes came Dell. The computer brand produced a very uninspiring music-player and partnered with Musicmatch for two years before an almost total lack of customers persuaded it to get out of the MP3 player business before it had ever really got into it.

Next came Coca-Cola's mycokemusic. In the UK, the Coke site actually preceded iTunes and offered British punters 250,000 songs with individual tracks costing from 80p. By 2006, Coke realised that if you can't beat them, join them. It closed the site and started to partner with iTunes.

Don't Confuse the Value of Customers and Sales

I recently met up with an old friend, Simon, a sales director. We had dinner near my flat and then I walked him to the nearest tube station, London Bridge.

Literally next door to the station is The London Dungeon. The Dungeon is remarkable not because of its assortment of grotesque waxworks in various states of dismemberment, but because of the queue that often stretches up the road from the entrance for more than 100 metres.

When Simon caught sight of this long line of customers he became excited.

So much so that as we were saying our farewells, he gestured to it and said: "That, my friend, is great marketing. You should write one of your blogs about the London Dungeon." His comment really hit home, because for the past two years I have continually encountered that queue and thought one thing: that Dungeon really needs someone to sort that out; it's got a problem with its marketing.

As a salesperson, Simon thinks marketing is all about a long line of customers waiting to pay and a turnstile continually turning: ker-ching, ker-ching, ker-ching.

As a marketer, I see that same long line of people, but my eye wanders to the people at the back of the line. I notice that some of these customers, faced with a wait of an hour or more, decide not to bother and walk away.

Obama, McCain: A Political Brand Analysis

With less than 7 critical days before the November 4th U.S. Presidential Election, we turn to some of the world's savviest marketers - our readership, to help secure a better understanding of each candidate's brand.

Purpose
This brief survey is designed to identify the dimensions and qualities of the John McCain and Barack Obama brands. It will explore how different customer segments perceive each of these two presidential candidates differently. It will also explore the alignment of these candidates with the qualities that are most important to the people registered with the parties that they represent.

Neutrality
This survey is not supported by any political party or interest group. It was created by our chief brand strategist Brad VanAuken, author of Brand Aid, for the sole purpose of exploring the presidential candidate brands. Individual responses will remain confidential. All responses will be explored at a group level (men versus women, Democrats versus Republicans, etc.).

Incentive
Anyone who takes the survey will have the opportunity to win one of the following: a copy of Brand Aid, an Amazon.com gift certificate or a Starbucks gift card through a random drawing.

The average time to take the survey is less than 10 minutes. Please click here and help us make a difference.

We will report the results and the winners here on Branding Strategy Insider prior to election day.

Thanks in advance.

Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

A Study in Hollow Brand Values

One would expect that an annual marketing budget of more than a billion dollars would buy you a very well-positioned corporate brand. But that has not been the case for Pfizer.

This decade, the world's biggest pharmaceutical corporation launched some very successful drugs, including Lipitor and Viagra. But when it comes to its own corporate brand Pfizer is, like many multinationals, a mess of generic and insipid brand values.

All the usual suspects are there: integrity, innovation, customer focus, respect for people, community, teamwork, performance, leadership and, of course, quality. It is a roll-call of the generic from a corporation that sees branding as a superficial patina and not the fundamental core of its business.

Does it matter? With profits on average in the billions does it even need brand values at the core of its business?

We might get a different perspective from the people of Kano in Nigeria.

In the mid-nineties, with a meningitis epidemic raging in the region, a team of Pfizer researchers travelled to the city in what the company claims was a philanthropic mission. The team arrived with large quantities of Trovan, an experimental and, at that time unapproved, drug.

The 9 Characteristics of a Strong Brand

A strong brand is defined and characterized by the following 9 dimensions:

   1. A brand drives shareholder value
   2. The brand is led by the boardroom and managed by brand marketers with an active buy-in from all stakeholders
   3. The brand is a fully integrated part of the entire organisation aligned around multiple touch points
   4. The brand can be valued in financial terms and must reside on the asset side of the balance sheet
   5. The brand can used as collateral for financial loans and can be bought and sold as an asset
   6. Customers are willing to pay a substantial and consistent price premium for the brand versus a competing product and service
   7. Customers associate themselves strongly with the brand, its attributes, values and personality, and they fully buy into the concept which is often characterized by a very emotional and intangible relationship (higher customer loyalty)
   8. Customers are loyal to the brand and would actively seek it and buy it despite several other reasonable and often cheaper options available (higher customer retention rate)
   9. A brand is a trademark and marquee (logo, shape, colour etc) which is fiercely and pro-actively protected by the company and its legal advisors

Sponsored By: The Blake Project - 2008 Brand Education Seminars

Brand Archaeology: The Power in Your Past

Whenever I flick through my old vacation pictures, I tend to recall past holidays as being much better than they sometimes were. The break I had in Bermuda that was packed with disasters; or the holiday in Cebu where nothing seemed to go right…I remember them all as being perfectly pleasant. It’s amazing how ten years or so can affect your perceptions.

Our memories can recall branding in the same positive light.

Recollections of the past become impressions of happy times, and advertising forms part of the panoply of experience. Jingles, advertising images, television commercials feature in our associative memory as effectively as remembered aromas. So evocative are these memories that you shouldn’t discard your brand’s past when building its future, offline or online.

Burberry’s comeback almost a decade ago didn’t happen by chance. It was the result of a well-calculated review of the brand’s, and its customers’, pasts. Burberry’s identity once rested on its signature red, camel, black and white ‘Burberry Check’, which the company introduced in the 1920s and registered as a trademark. By now, Burberry has been around for over 150 years and the accumulated effect of product consistency has established, in the consumer’s mind, a collection of ‘links’ or, what I refer to as ‘smashable’ brand components: brand signals which, just like the original Coca-Cola bottle, are synonymous with a brand. If one of those distinctive Coca-Cola were smashed into thousands of pieces, the brand would still be revealed in just one shard of glass.

Burberry built its new branding on a century-and-a-half of ‘smashable’ devices.  Long-recognized styling, consistent materials (Did you know that Thomas Burberry invented gabardine?), even the Royal Warrants that denote Burberry as ‘weatherproofers’ ‘by appointment’ to Her Majesty the Queen, all contribute to the our perception of the brand and the brand’s total image. The brand has plugged into its heritage and built on this brand equity, and in doing so has enhanced its authenticity in the consumer’s mind. I call this strategy ‘brand archaeology’.

Scent Marketing Success: Step 4 of 10

Continuing our series on scent marketing we come to number 4 - understanding the rules and regulations of scent marketing.

For over 30 years, the manufacturing process for flavors and fragrances has been guided by the Fragrance & Flavor industry’s instruments of self-regulation. Those are:

•    RIFM (Research Institute for Fragrance Materials, Inc.) which evaluates the safety of fragrance ingredients and where all of the reputable fragrance manufacturers and consumer goods companies that sell scented and flavored products are members.

•    IFRA (International Fragrance Association) issues standards based on the conclusion of RIFM’s work that can restrict or completely ban the use of a certain ingredient.  Those standards are distributed within IFRA’s membership, among major customer associations in the U.S., Europe and Asia as well as other stakeholders and published on the organization’s public web site.

Any marketer and brand owner would be well advised to work with a manufacturer that belongs to those organizations. While membership has a price (an average of $100K/year) it also buys the peace of mind (and the paperwork and documentation that comes with it) that an unrecognized company in China or Eastern Europe would not be able to provide.

James Bond Brand Shaken by Product Placement

That wonderful biennial branding event known as a Bond movie is upon us again, and we will have to endure a cavalcade of mundane brands engaged in a series of inappropriate product placements, demeaning the film.

Far more entertaining is to watch these brands disguise the amounts paid to Eon Productions, which makes the Bond films, while simultaneously attempting to construct an authentic and exclusive connection between their brand and James Bond.

The mission is impossible. The real Bond, conjured up by author Ian Fleming in the 50s, was the opposite of today's superficial consumer. He was a connoisseur. That might sound like he would take photos of his bottle of Bollinger with his new Sony Ericsson cameraphone, but the reality is, and was, very different.

For starters, connoisseurs don't have routines. Their tastes are too wide and rich to be sated by consuming the same stuff all the time. In Bond's first outing, in the book Casino Royale, he consumes an Americano, a cognac and water, a Martini, several bottles of vintage Champagne and some brandy. The idea of sticking to one drink - even for one evening - would bore him to tears.

Bond is also no brand loyalist. Like all connoisseurs, he varies his brand of choice depending on the mood, the company and the occasion. The brazen manner in which Bollinger has paid for the right to claim Bond as brand-loyal smacks of everything that is wrong about product placement.

Overcoming Common Brand Problems - 40

As we round out our list of the 40 Most Common Brand Problems we see one that the human resources department is called on to avoid...

Common Brand Problem Number 40: Since branding has become widely known and embraced, I increasingly encounter people who can talk the talk, follow the steps in the brand management process and generally take a number of actions on behalf of the brand. What I often find missing though is a true deep-down understanding of what makes the customer tick and a passion for exceeding customer expectations in unique and compelling ways. That is, I see allot of people going through the motions without the depth of insight and the passion for excellence and differentiation. People often think that a new logo, tagline and brand style guide will “do the trick.” Usually, these are not based on deep customer insight and a carefully crafted compelling point of difference. And just as often, business managers are not willing or able to make the changes necessary to actually interact with the customer differently based upon the new brand promise.

Analysis: The art and science of branding is much more difficult than it first appears to be. While many people are labeled brand managers, only a small fraction of them have what it takes to really build strong brands: the research tool set, the deep understanding of human motivation, the intuition, the analytical rigor and the driving passion and savvy to influence the entire organization. Organizations should be much more careful in selecting their brand managers. Good ones are very hard to find and worth every penny you pay them. Mediocre ones are ubiquitous and often not worth the price.

Key Point: I would recommend behavioral interviewing as one of the most effective ways to assess skills and abilities. Ask the brand manager candidates to walk you through specific case studies from their past work experiences. Probe on challenges and how they overcame them, consumer insights that led to breakthroughs, significant accomplishments and stories of how they persuaded others to join them in championing the brand.

Click here to explore the other 39 most common brand problems in our countdown.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid