Branding Strategy Insider

Marketing To Women

Venus and Mars are not in this galaxy.  Rather, what we’ve got here are a lot of amazingly economically powerful women looking for products and services that meet their criteria. In fact, studies show that women buy or influence the purchase of 80% of all consumer goods in the U.S. Women today are, and likely have been for many years, buying riding lawnmowers, consumer electronics and boats, for example. They make 80% of the home buying decisions in the $180 – $500K price range according to a recent David Power Homes study, and they are likely to play a significant role in a lot of other big ticket purchases (like autos), in addition to the usual purchases of apparel, groceries and so on. Just because women aren’t directly involved in a particular consumer transaction doesn’t mean they aren’t strongly behind the buying decision.

So get out of the orbit where women are confusing and men just don’t understand. The women you’d like to reach are your wives, daughters, mothers and friends; and the common man actually can learn to serve them better.

Two For One
Here’s the deal: Focusing on male consumers, as has been the traditional approach, will deliver a customer experience that is not likely to be up to par with women. So — your effort- to-sale ratio is just a direct one-to-one.

That’s fine, and it has been pretty successful for you so far, but consider the results when you focus on women’s ways of buying:

The Art of the Brand Story

Stories have been around for millennia; probably as long as humans have existed on earth. Some may claim that stories help make the world go around.

Well, stories are no less powerful today than in the past. And with the help of new technologies, stories are hitting the world of brand building in a big way. Viral videos enable rapid transmission of stories that captivate an audience. Ever heard of the ‘Back Dorm Boys’, ‘JuHua Jie Jie’, or ‘Tian Xian Mei Mei’ for example? Each of the four teenagers represented by these names has been viewed by more than one billion consumers. And this exposure was achieved without spending one single dollar. In fact, these self-made web stars, whose escapades they filmed themselves on webcam and published on the net, were not even aware of their fame until Pepsi, Motorola and Sony Ericsson approached each of them with offers of enough money to retire.

These kids communicated their own stories in a way that was irresistible to viewers. Wanting to share the entertainment, the viral links were spread by viewers responding to the characteristic that is shared by the best of those viral videos - an intriguing story.

Now brands have begun to take a page from the story telling tradition themselves, tying their approach into a phenomenon I discuss in my book, BRAND sense: ‘HSP’, the Holistic Selling Proposition, describes a technique which conveys information within a whole context, a technique that enables the world of religion to captivate audiences.

Naming Redundancy and Beyond

Maxi-this. Turbo-that. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing the heavy-duty, 5-star and premium versions of – well, just about everything.

But when a deodorant with the double-whammy moniker UltraMax appeared on the shelf, it became clear that naming had reached another level. To quote Buzz Lightyear in “Toy Story,” names were reaching for infinity – and beyond.

Marketers frequently create “hierarchy” names by adding a simple modifier to the basic product name. Two typical examples: Edge Advanced Shave Gel and Extra Strength Tylenol.

In the new era of shamelessness, too much is not enough. Ultra not adequate? More than the max? Double up your modifiers and you get UltraMax – a name registered for deodorants as well as bleaches, lamps and hand tools.

Oh, there’s more. Magnum XL condoms for the well-endowed. Xtra Supreme, a brand of animal feed. Excelle Elite, bakeware and roasting pans from Wilton Industries. And a pet food with a triple promise – it’s select, super and premium: Nature’s Select Super Premium.

The traditional term for this kind of thing – the use of more words than is needed – would be pleonasm, from Latin and Greek words meaning “excess or redundancy.” Of course, for some marketers, that’s precisely the point – play it again, Sam, and again.

Do Smaller Brands Have Better Marketers?

Management conferences are a wonderful place to learn and network. Rarely does a month go by without a major marketing conference taking place. Each time the organisers exclusively invite powerbrands with multi-million-dollar turnovers. It's a design I find a little troubling.

Organisers appear to be under the impression that the size of a company and the ubiquity of its brand are indicators of brand expertise. No such correlation exists.

It's the dirty secret of branding and one that only becomes apparent after a few years of marketing consulting. Anticipation and enthusiasm overwhelm you the first time you work in the marketing department of a company that owns one or more brands with a powerbrand pedigree. You gaze in awe at the logo as you enter the building. You make a point of telling friends in the pub at the weekend who you are working for.

It's only after a few days of the engagement that the shocking truth dawns on you: despite the big brand and the big budget, these people have absolutely no idea what they are doing with respect to marketing.

This is not to say that every famous brand is being run by marketing morons. Many powerbrands are hotbeds of leading-edge marketing thinking and practice. But equally as many are being run in inept or inefficient ways by unqualified marketers imported from senior positions in sales or engineering. You are as likely to find best marketing practice in a business-to-business software company with 50 employees as you are in any one of the organisations listed in Interbrand's annual survey of the world's most powerful brands.

Why the inconsistency? First, most powerbrands were built many decades ago. Despite the invisible halo that follows a marketer from Coca-Cola around the room, the chances of this individual being a skilled marketer are the same as any random marketing employee. Coke is a magical brand, but the marketing strategies that got it there took place more than half a century ago.

Religion's Marketing Problem

We have a big problem.

The Christmas season's "Peace on earth, good will to man" is not playing well this year. Ironically, the problem that this religious holiday is up against is, of all things, religion. If you doubt this, I point you to a cover story of The Economist entitled "The New Wars Of Religion."

In this article, Philip Jenkins, one of America's top religious scholars, claims that when historians look back on this century, they will probably see religion as "the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty, concepts of nationhood, conflicts and wars." If the first eight years of this century are an indicator, Jenkins is on to something.

What's at the heart of all this is a marketing problem. In the history of mankind, nothing has been sold as aggressively and successfully as religion. But unlike the traditional world of marketing, the "my religion is better than your religion" arguments have taken on an intensity that has often become fatal. And when you consider the weaponry that's available out there, it is all very frightening.

So what's to be done? How can we begin to "unmarket" religion and get back to some "good will"? In my estimation we have to shift the discussion away from negative "better" to a more positive "good will" argument.

Scent Marketing Success: Step 7 of 10

Our series on scent marketing continues with number 7 - Understanding your cost and the Return on Investment

It is important that you understand and define your needs before you even try to run the numbers on your scent marketing efforts.

•    Do you need a signature scent (development cost: $25K - $125K)?
•    How large is the environment you need to deliver the scent in? A point of Sale application requires a different (cheaper, $5 - $50 one time cost per unit) solution than large space scenting via the HVAC system ($100 - $250 per unit per month)
•    How many units would you need to sufficiently deliver scent in one outlet? It is highly recommended that you figure this out before you sign a contract with any equipment manufacturer. The impact on your monthly expense can be dramatic. Multiply that by the number of outlets and you have your monthly “hardware” expense.
•    Probe your supplier for installation requirements and service/support levels. How easy is it to replace the containers for the consumables? Can it be done by store personnel?
•    What is your cost of consumables? Are they included in the monthly rental fee you pay to the equipment manufacturer or do you have scent delivered from a third party?

Answering these questions will help you set up your scent marketing budget. For a large brand the cost will be fairly insignificant, the challenge here will be to create and justify a new budget category. For a smaller enterprise, or if you are trying to promote sales of minor-ticket items, the cost factor may be prohibitive unless you make an effort to find an appropriately low-cost technology solution.

Numbers on the Return of Investment are kept very close by the existing scent marketers and are not publicly available. The Scent Marketing Institute has a database of current initiatives that can be exploited when making the case for a brand extension via scent.

Courtesy of Harald Vogt, Scent Marketing Institute

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Building Your Brand in Difficult Economic Times

Often, brand marketing budgets are the first to be cut in difficult economic times. This means you must increase the efficiency of your spend or suffer reduced brand awareness, preference and loyalty building. Assuming that your spend was already efficient, this means you will likely sacrifice brand equity building until the difficult economic times have passed.

There is something else that you can do in these times. You can create new brand proof points at each point of customer contact. The way to get there is through touchpoint management design. The Blake Project offer’s a one-day workshop in which the participants generate hundreds of ideas for bringing the brand to life at each point of customer contact. The workshop is highly facilitated with numerous ideation techniques interspersed with many creativity exercises. We follow it up with a culling process that identifies those ideas that are very powerful in reinforcing the brand’s promise but also quick, easy and inexpensive to implement. That is, the final output is a handful of ideas (or more) that deliver a high return on investment (ROI).

While marketing communications, if effective, promise relevant differentiated benefits on behalf of the brand, the output of the customer touchpoint design workshop helps your brand actually deliver on its promise at each point of customer contact.  This is important not only in difficult economic times, but all of the time.

The Yuletide Story of Coke, Santa Claus and Perception

Sometime in the fourth century AD, in the Mediterranean port town of Myra, the church bells tolled. Bishop Nicholas was dead. Nicholas had hailed from a rich family, but after joining the church, he used much of his riches to help the poor in his community. And now that community mourned him.

For many centuries, Christian missionaries told the tale of the generous bishop and soon the story came to represent different things in different cultures.

In Germany, St Nicholas and his assistant Ruprecht dispensed presents to children. In Italy, La Belfana, a good witch, who dressed always in black, performed a similar function. In Holland, Sinter-klass gave presents to children who were kind enough to leave hay for his donkey. In Britain, it was Father Christmas. In France, Pere Noel. In the US, Santa Claus.

The individual was always a generous, yuletide figure, but was variously portrayed as being a tall, short, fat, grey-haired, white-haired, dark-featured, man/troll/dwarf/elf.

In Atlanta, in 1924, the Coca-Cola sales and marketing team had a problem.

Sales of Coke had been rocketing over the past 20 years, but these figures exhibited a dramatically uneven pattern. Each summer, US consumers set off for the beach, or to watch a baseball game with a bottle of Coke in hand. But during the winter, sales of Coke were sluggish. The team was desperate to increase the brand's sales and prevent it becoming seen as a seasonal product. Somehow they needed to make Coke a winter drink.

Naming Psychology

Names burrow deep into the human mind. Names are bundles of denotation and connotation. And much more than that, suggests Carol Moog, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and the president of Creative Focus, a consulting firm to advertisers and ad agencies on the communication value and meaning of their messages.

We asked Carol Moog about the meaning of names.

Q: How much of a name’s reception depends on non-verbal factors?

A name without an emotional, non-verbal association is virtually useless – it will not be retained in the mind of the target audience.

There is a symbiotic relationship between a name and its non-verbal correlative. What is evoked emotionally, visually, symbolically, by a particular name? It is on the basis of this cognitive/emotional connection that the most powerful mnemonic device for remembering a person’s name is the deliberate creation of mental pictures relating to it.

The Sears battery brand name DieHard, for instance, is slang for someone who will never give up. A symbiotic relationship is immediately generated, linking the name, its “being” a stubborn, tenacious, “alive” person, and the product.

Q: What happens if a name has no emotional attachment?

BrandQuote - December 14

"The more things you try to become, the more you lose focus, the more difficult it is to differentiate your product. Mark Twain said it best, 'I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.'"

                            - Jack Trout/Mark Twain

Sponsored By: Brand Aid