Branding Strategy Insider

Time for an Almighty Rebrand

I found myself in a rather unusual position last weekend - on a pew in a church in Glasgow. One of my oldest friends was having his first born christened. He had managed, with the convincing promise of a post-ceremonial drinking session, to convince me to attend the event. So there I sat. In the back row. Dreading everything that the next hour promised to deliver.

To my surprise, however, the priest gave an extremely interesting and contemporary sermon. He talked about a Tom Cruise movie, post-modern philosophy and, of course, God. Despite, or indeed perhaps because of, his eloquence I began to consider all the factors that have deterred me and the majority of the British public from attending church regularly. This is, after all, a marketing problem: why don't people consume God?

We live in a society that has never needed God more. We are confused, unhappy, depressed, lacking spirituality, and lonely. Aside from previous world wars, the demand for God has presumably never been higher.

Despite this a recent survey estimated that the church's market share in the UK is only 7.5% of the population, and falling. The problem must therefore exist on the supply side. During the communion I worked out some marketing recommendations to solve the problem.

Rebuilding Brand America

Just as businesses rely on their brand recognition and public perception to help improve commercial success, a country’s reputation and global image is a reflection of the strength of its “brand.” 

In recent years, while other countries brands have drastically improved, America’s brand has declined. A recent study shows America’s brand index as ranking 7th among all other major, developed nations. In order to improve its global brand recognition, what America needs is an objective audit of “brand America” and new focus on reestablishing the authenticity of the American Promise.

Following the widely accepted principles of what makes a brand strong, brand America must adhere to the same foundational pillars: being relevant and meaningful to a strategic target audience; being competitive and as attractive a solution to meeting the need as alternative options; and being authentic while delivering the expectation set.

A Brand Must be Relevant
The relevancy of brand America is without question. The promise of brand America speaks loudly to the human desire for exerting some control over personal destiny. 

Since its inception, the brand America promise has been the opportunity for the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Brand America has come to represent a location where anybody has the chance to self-manage his or her destiny, and in the process be rewarded for both hard work and the courage to take smart risks. There are countless examples of entrepreneurs achieving remarkable success based on ingenuity, passion and effort.

“Rags to riches” is the cliché most commonly used to describe the success of Americans, and has served to inspire people around the world to change their destiny. It promises life in America will provide the opportunity needed to achieve their full personal potential.

12 Causes of Bad Brand Advertising

The following will likely result in bad brand advertising:

1.    Design by committee
2.   Opinionated reviewers and approvers who don’t understand marketing
3.    Writing ads that appeal to you rather than the target consumer
4.    Using flowery language that sounds good but that means nothing.  (This is a common ailment of neophyte copywriters.  Substance is good.  Using an economy of words is good.  Simple, persuasive copy is good.  Fluff and filler are bad.)
5.   Squeezing as many features and benefits into the ad as possible (unsophisticated advertising clients often request this)
6.    Revising an emotional or metaphorical ad to make it more literal (another common ailment of unsophisticated advertising clients)
7.    Focusing on reach versus frequency.
8.    Assuming that business-to-business advertising is significantly different from consumer advertising (“It needs to be factual and informative, not emotional.”).  Don’t forget, business decision-makers are people too.  And people are ruled as much by their hearts as by their heads.  Harding’s 1996 study of buyers in ten corporations demonstrated that corporate buyers overwhelmingly rely on personal and emotional reasons over rational ones in their purchase choice.
9.    Jingles.  Unless they are very, very good (and most are not very, very good), they will distract from the brand message. 
10.    Celebrity endorsements tend not to be believable
11.    Making claims that your brand can’t support

And, while this may not result in bad advertising, for consistency’s sake, the following is not a good idea:
12.    A new marketing manager, feeling the need to “make his or her mark” on the brand, hires a new advertising agency and creates a totally new advertising campaign (whether the old campaign was working or not)

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Beware of CEO Brand Damage

Not long ago I read a splendid article on the use of employees in field marketing, which concluded that employees were an excellent way to communicate brand values. Unfortunately, even when the entire workforce has been carefully selected and schooled in the brand, all the good work can be undone by a single employee: the chief executive.

Matthew Barrett, chief executive of Barclays, provided a classic illustration of this a few years back. Questioned by George Mudie MP about his personal finances, Barrett replied: "I do not borrow on credit cards. It is too expensive. I have four young children. I give them advice not to pile up debts on their credit cards."

Some have compared this gaffe to that of former jeweller Gerald Ratner because both chief executives drew attention to the poor quality of their products. In less than 20 seconds Barrett achieved something his major competitors, working for several years with multi-million-pound marketing budgets, had failed to do. His comments ensured that every newspaper printed a table revealing that Barclaycard's credit charges exceed those of almost every other competitor in the market.

But Barrett surpassed Ratner in his impact on the brand. Ratner's was a cheap, disposable jewellery brand with little or no brand equity.

At Barclays, Simon Guliford and his team had been working for several years to position the brand as 'fluent in finance'. Of all the positioning statements in all the world, Barrett had to walk into that one. Millions of pounds had been spent building the positioning that Barclays uses its expertise to do the best job for its customers in a fluent, professional and caring way. Overnight, a single individual speaking off the cuff severely damaged Barclays' most valuable strategic advantage.

Successful Advertising Approaches

Today's topic - the many keys to successful advertising based on research for my book Brand Aid.

Effective general ad techniques:

•    A good ad will always dramatize your brand’s most important benefit.
•    Simpler ads are usually more powerful. 
•    Create copy in smaller chunks – sentences, paragraphs, etc.   
•    Natural and “real life” writing or dialog
•    Subtly tapping into peoples’ fears and anxieties

Here are some print advertising techniques that have proven to be effective:

•    Try to evoke the reader’s curiosity. Begin by asking a provocative question and/or feature an image that piques the reader’s curiosity.
•    Put quotes around your headlines.
•    Romance/dramatize your product or service.
•    Try to trigger multiple senses – use words that help people feel, hear, smell and taste your product
•    Tell a story.
•    Communicate “news.”
•    Provide information that is useful to the reader.
•    Always write in the present tense.
•    Be as specific as possible.
•    Include customer testimonials (they should seem natural, not scripted or polished).
•    Know how readers read (from right to left top to bottom in the U.S.) and place your headlines, illustrations, captions and copy accordingly.
•    Use white space to focus the reader’s attention on something important
•    In his book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams indicates that savvy photographers and graphic artists have known for some time that there is a spot on a piece of artwork to which the eye is irresistibly drawn, roughly between the middle and upper right corner of the artwork.
•    Use words that sell: at last, now, new, introducing, announcing, finally, limited, save, free, win, easy, guarantee, breakthrough, wanted, etc.  (Keep in mind that as consumers become more sophisticated and savvy, there may be instances where these words might be cliché or overused and, thus, may not be as effective.)

What the 1929 Wall Street Crash Teaches Marketers

It was quite the Thursday on Wall Street. A weak president, under-regulated credit markets, and investor greed finally began to take their full toll on share prices, and after years of unprecedented growth, the markets fell by more than 6% in a single day.

As the US' economic woes began to affect the British market, the Labour government tried to take a leadership position in Europe, with apparently little success. Shares continued to plummet, and the world stood on the edge of a massive recession.

It sounds like last week, but these events happened 80 years ago. The weak US president was not George W Bush but Herbert Hoover, and the British Labour government of the time was not headed by Gordon Brown, but by Ramsay MacDonald.

The parallels between the Octobers of 1929 and 2008 are astonishing. Once again, brand managers and marketers can do little more than wait, worry and hope that their organisation will survive the inevitable turmoil ahead. But maybe this year's parallels with 1929 can offer us insight into how brands can survive, or even prosper, in the drastic economic conditions ahead.

Marketers Must Deter Corporate Arrogance

As I look back, the news that Sony would axe 20,000 employees as part of a three-year restructuring plan came as no surprise.

2003 had been a horrendous year for the Japanese powerbrand. Poor performance was the recurring theme across its music division, movie studio, audio-visual products and market-leading PlayStation brand, resulting in record losses and an imploding share price.

Sony's troubles were in direct contrast to many of its rivals. Samsung, LG and Matsushita all had reported increased sales and improved profitability.

So how did an apparently dominant market leader's fortunes become reversed in such an extreme manner in such a short space of time? And how is it possible that smaller, typically less successful competitors were suddenly able to seize the market initiative? The answer lies in the very strength that made the apparent decline of Sony so surprising. Sony was suffering from a corporate disease formerly known as Levi's Syndrome, Marks & Spencer's Condition and the IBM Ailment. The symptoms are always the same: take a ridiculously successful company, flushed with a host of marketing triumphs, a long-established track record of sales growth.

Then add a tiny dash of that fatal ingredient: complacency.

Dissecting Market Segmentation

"Everyone from Australia is stupid."

It's a glaring statement and it's wrong. It is incorrect because it assumes that everyone in Australia is stupid. It makes a further assumption: that everyone in Australia is exactly the same. Obviously nobody, in their right mind, would ever utter or accept such a statement.

Yet when we turn to market segmentation, most companies make these kinds of idiotic assumptions on a daily basis. Market segmentation is one of the fundamental components in a strong marketing strategy. Most companies accept the fact that different people want different things and that, therefore, they should have different segments in their marketing plan.

The problem becomes apparent when we explore the criteria that most companies use to segment their market. Take a look at the names of the different segments in your company's market-segmentation pie chart. Chances are you will discover segments that are divided by age, by gender, by social class or, if you work in B2B, by turnover and SIC code. Dividing up the market by a combination of these factors is simple, cheap and it looks effective. Unfortunately, it rarely works.

You do not segment a market because the people in the segments are different.

Financial Implications of Brand Consolidation

The financial community has always had an interest in anything that is undervalued, ostensibly because there is no faster way to make money than by buying an undervalued entity and then selling it on at its true value.

The 1980s was the decade of brand extension. Fuelled by the theories of brand gurus such as David Aaker and Kevin Keller, firms were encouraged to stretch their strongest brands into as many categories as possible.

Not surprisingly, the 1990s became the decade of brand consolidation.

Many firms discovered that the combination of global markets and multiple brand extensions created a confusing matrix of hundreds of different brands.

Worse still, many companies discovered that their major competitors in a market were actually other brands that they owned. As a result, companies such as Akzo Nobel and Unilever embarked upon massive phases of brand consolidation, winnowing them down to a more simple and efficient brand architecture.

The questions facing any potential brand consolidator underpin the need for efficient systems for valuing brands. Which brands should be eliminated?

How should they be eliminated? How much should we expect to sell them for? Companies can fall foul of the brand valuation process. For example, it has been said that when Allied Domecq sold Plymouth Gin to a consortium of private investors including John Murphy, the founder of Interbrand, it undersold it. The new owner turned the brand round and made a packet when selling it on.

Evaluating Print Advertising Effectiveness

When evaluating the potential effectiveness of different print campaign ideas, I use the following questions:

•    Does the headline immediately “grab” the reader? (In advertising guru David Ogilvy’s book Ogilvy on Advertising, Ogilvy states that five times as many people read headlines as read body copy.)  Ideally, the headline is nine words or less.
•    Does the headline promise an important benefit? (Ogilvy also states in Ogilvy on Advertising that ads with headlines that promise benefits are read by four times more people than those that don’t.)
•    Is the body copy long enough to provide the reader with useful information and ample proof points for your brand’s promise?  Long copy is more effective than short copy.  This is particularly true for business-to-business advertising.  (Alternatively, Roper Starch Worldwide, which maintains a database of more than 2,000,000 print ads, has found that excessive copy reduces the effectiveness of ads and recommends keeping ad copy to 50 words or less. With whole generations having now grown up on “sound bytes” of information, some cohort groups will respond better to shorter copy.)
•    Increasing white space around the ad or the headline increases the ad’s effectiveness.

Print Advertising offers several benefits: good reach and frequency, can handle complicated propositions, reaches consumers in a receptive context and can be very targeted.

In the days ahead I will share my thoughts on other advertising vehicles here on BSI.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid