Branding Strategy Insider

The President Barack Obama Brand

As I have often contended, people can be viewed and managed as brands, especially people who have very high public profiles. In October of last year, just before the November elections, we polled Branding Strategy Insider readers on the John McCain and (now) President Barack Obama brands. Just recently, more than 200 days into President Obama’s presidency, we repeated the survey to determine in what ways perceptions of him might have changed in such a short period of time.

Between August 23 and August 27, 102 people responded to the survey or roughly 1% of BSI's daily audience. Those people represent 28 states. 55.9% were male, while 44.1% were female. Ages ranged from less than 18 years old to 74 years old. 55.4% were married. The average household income roughly followed a normal curve but skewed high. The mode was $100,000-$149,999. Political party registration was as follows: 40.0% Democratic, 24.3% Republican, 18.6% Independent, 12.9% none and 4.2% other. Given the respondent mix and the ending sample size, the data is directional but not projectable. The sample size and demographic composition are very similar to that of our previous survey.

We explored 36 personality attributes and 39 issue-related attributes. The personality attributes included those most often associated with strong brands (trustworthy, reliable, etc.) and those most often used in describing political candidates and politicians. The 39 issue-related attributes were taken from the platforms of the five largest political parties. In the previous survey, we explored 27 personality attributes and 35 issue-related attributes.

Here is what we found. First, let’s look at President Barack Obama’s personality.

The Obama Marketing Lesson

Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing.

Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator.

It didn't matter. Barack Obama had a better marketing strategy than either of them. "Change."

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was the master of the "big lie." According to Goebbels, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

The opposite of that strategy is the "big truth." If you tell the truth often enough and keep repeating it, the truth gets bigger and bigger, creating an aura of legitimacy and authenticity.

The Anti-laws Of Luxury Marketing #5

5. Don’t respond to rising demand

The prime objective of traditional marketing is volume growth. It sets its sights at achieving leadership in market share to gain muscle with mass distributors, department stores and superstores, and presents itself as a force to be reckoned with in some of its lines. This ensures wide distribution and broad visibility and provides the justification for a national television advertising campaign. With sufficient volume, the business can work with small margins and still make money. This is the essence of the mass marketing model. Product managers are then judged on just one criterion – growth in annual results. At Ferrero (Kinder, Nutella, Tic Tac) it is not allowed to fall below double figures. The job of each product manager is to increase the penetration be it of Kinder Surprise, be it of Kinder Bueno, and then to push up per capita volume (consumption frequency). If the demand goes up, there have to be supplies to match it – that’s the key to this economic model. Not to satisfy rising demand is to annoy the distributor because unhappy customers will not wait and will always hold it against the company. They will take their revenge by gossiping over dinner about their bad experience with the brand. What an absolute scandal having to wait! Sheer mismanagement!

At Ferrari, production is deliberately kept to fewer than 6,000 vehicles a year – rarity value sells. So long, that is, as the customer understands why the product is rare and is prepared to wait. Rarity can be managed just like the relationship with the clientele; so it is not a matter here of poor sales forecasting but of a deliberate strategy of resisting demand in order to be master of it.

Excerpted from: The Luxury Strategy: Break The Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by JN Kapferer and V. Bastien, in partnership with Kogan Page publishing.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Marketing And Mathematics

March Madness lasts only three weeks, but Metric Madness goes on all year long.

What is Metric Madness? It's the notion you can run anything by the numbers, and it's become the hottest concept in business today.

One scientist recently predicted that the great discoveries of the future will come from finding patterns in vast archives of data. "The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician, not a doctor."

I'm not too sure.

 

Shifting the numbers
Years ago, when I ran a New York advertising agency, our accounting firm showed up every January with the results for the previous year.

"These are your actual numbers," they reported. "Now, what would you like them to be?"

More profits to impress prospective clients, the landlord and employees? No problem, reported the accountants. We'll just shift some of the numbers around.

Less profits to report to the IRS? No problem. We'll do a reverse shift.

But this was nothing compared to what is happening in the business world today.

 

Leading Brands Are Positioned

The weather forecast for the old, traditional ways of advertising is gloomy at best. And nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the recent Atlanta study conduced by Daniel Starch & Staff.

According to Starch, about 25% of those noting a television commercial attributed it to the competition. With virtually no exceptions, high scoring commercials were the brand leaders in their category.

The also-rans didn't fare nearly as well. A David Janssen Excedrin commercial was associated with Anacin twice as often as Excedrin. A Pristeen commercial helped F.D.S., the brand leader, more than it did Pristeen.

This shattering turn of events is certainly "positioning" at work in our over-communicated society. It appears that unless an advertisement is based on a unique idea or position, the message is often put in the mental slot reserved for the leader in the product category.

Clutter is surely part of the reason for the rise of "misidentification." But another, even more important factor is that times have changed. Today, you cannot advertise your product in splendid isolation. Unless your advertising positions your product in relationship to its competition, your advertising is doomed to failure.

I wrote this in 1972 with my former partner Jack Trout. What has changed? Only the names.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Covering Up The Fall Of TV Advertising

 

Last week, Deloitte released a report concluding that 'TV advertising still has the greatest impact on consumers'. This unexpected finding was derived from survey research conducted in July by YouGov on 2100 British consumers - research which, in the opinion of your humble BSI blogger, is absolute and total crap.

Let's start with the method. YouGov asked consumers to think about different forms of advertising they had seen or heard, and indicate which 'impacted' them the most. In my opinion, asking consumers to self-report complicated issues such as the persuasive impact of communications is ridiculously invalid.

It's not that consumers lie when asked a question like this - rather, they simply do not know the answer. Self-reporting data has been proven to be invalid for questions as basic as estimating a consumer's household income. It is therefore unlikely that any of the consumers in the YouGov sample had the faintest clue which advertising medium truly had the most 'impact' on them. They provided an answer, but the answer was bogus.

Viral Brand Crisis And Strategy

On the morning of April 15, 2009, everything looked bright for Domino’s Pizza. The company’s share price had risen overnight, the group’s expansion plan was on track, and the brand was as strong as ever. 

But at 3:32 pm that very afternoon, the first text messages began beeping their arrival on the CEO’s mobile phone. They kept coming – one after the next, after the next. The phone’s inbox maxed out.  The voicemail message light was blinking in overdrive, and soon filled to capacity.

Every CEO’s Nightmare
This was fast turning into every CEO’s biggest nightmare – in just eight hours Domino’s Pizza had become a ticking brand bomb. It seemed that two employees in Conover, North Carolina had been larking about in a Domino’s Pizza kitchen. They pelted one another with dough. They stuck it up their noses, and then blew it across uncooked sandwiches.  To add insult to injury, they presumably then served the food to customers.  It was an unsavoury sight, to say the least.  What’s more, they videoed their shenanigans, and loaded the footage onto YouTube for all the world to see.

With the help of Twitter, millions of viewers were drawn to the YouTube clip – knocking Susan Boyle’s unlikely Britain’s Got Talent performance off its perch. It was a disaster. Domino’s Pizza was struck down by a potentially fatal viral blow, the brand was now on everyone’s lips, and the taste was bitter.  A negative viral experience on the internet, on a grand scale, had left Domino’s Pizza seriously wounded.

Brand Analysis: President Barack Obama

After more than 200 days in office we are interested in learning how President Barack Obama's brand has changed since we first surveyed you, our readers about it just prior to the November 2008 elections. Branding Strategy Insider is not affiliated with any political party or interest group and we will not share the results with anyone but the readership of BSI.

We are conducting the survey primarily to determine how personal brands of high profile people such as President Barack Obama change over shorter periods of time. We will compare the results of this survey to the one we conducted last October and will report on the dimensions that changed most dramatically over the 200 + days and those that have not changed much at all. We hope you will participate in this survey. It is shorter than the previous one (as we eliminated all of the questions related to John McCain) and it should take no more than 10 minutes of your time. We will report the results next week here on BSI.

*Update: The results of this survey are available here.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

The Anti-laws Of Luxury Marketing #4

4. Keep non-enthusiasts out

In traditional marketing there is this obsession with poaching clients from other brands: sales growth is management’s principal measure of success and of the performance of its managers. This leads companies to come up with new products that will help extend market penetration and thus steal a march on competitive brands. To increase the relevance of the brand – the number of people who would say that the brand was of interest to them – it is necessary to avoid being too exclusive or too different.

When it comes to luxury, trying to make a brand more relevant is to dilute its value, because not only does the brand lose some of its unique features, but also its wider availability erodes the dream potential among the elite, among leaders of opinion. BMW is typical of a brand that is able to grow without cutting back on its rugged features, which are in any event highly exclusive. The Bavarian management has calculated that BMW’s target accounts for 20 percent of the premium segment of the population – only one person in five.

This means that 80 per cent are not at all attracted by BMW’s values. The brand has preferred to exclude these 80 percent and base its growth on its true target, those who wholeheartedly share its values. Brand growth is achieved by penetrating new countries, not new customer segments. In order to grow, the BMW Group preferred to buy two other brands which on their own, like BMW, define a segment – Mini and Rolls-Royce; having taken good care to keep Rolls-Royce’s identity separate from BMW’s.

Excerpted from: The Luxury Strategy: Break The Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by JN Kapferer and V. Bastien, in partnership with Kogan Page publishing.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

The Return Of Levi's 501 Brand

My wife looked at me. 'I don't know why you have a long face,' she said. 'Do some kind of analysis or something.' With that she was back inside the changing room and I was left on my own again in fashion purgatory.

Bitter experience had taught me that, had I wandered off, it would have been at the precise moment that I was summoned to provide an opinion or a different size. So I stood and sulked.

Then I saw him. The epitome of teenage angst. Pierced, pointy and filled with the unmissable insolence that only erupts in the final stage of adolescence. As he passed I noticed, with an odd flash of recognition, what he was about to try on. As unmistakable as they were unlikely, my youthful friend was carry­ing a pair of Levi's 501s.

For men of a certain age, 501 jeans retain a special place in our collective fashion consciousness. A quarter of a century ago, 501s were the height of cool. They were Eddie Kidd with a quiff, Nick Kamen in his boxers. They were male sexuality set to a Motown beat. If there was a secret combination that unlocked the 80s for teenage boys, it was the numbers five, zero and one.