Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Building: The Advantage of Easier

Is “easier” better for your brand? Consider this excerpt from the article “Easy = True” by Drake Bennett: 

"Imagine that your stockbroker…who’s always giving you stock tips–called and told you that he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window.

The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce. This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.”

If making it easier to pronounce the name of a company can influence stock market performance for the better, can making your marketing “easier” for consumers build your brand and Marketing ROI?

Cognitive Fluency

A relatively new topic of research in the world of psychology these days is “cognitive fluency.” It’s the study of how the ease or difficulty in thinking about and understanding a topic influences our attitudes and preferences toward it. As a research topic, psychologists are learning that cognitive fluency affects our thinking in subtle, yet important ways. Many of which are very relevant for communicating with consumers.

Understanding Consumer Identity

Finally, marketers are acknowledging the necessity of listening to consumers - aka "people" - and brands are adjusting to the social networked environment by opening conversations. Market researchers cannot ignore these developments since they dictate the necessity of understanding peoples' identities, not only their interests.

We Are People, Not Data Points - See Us Live

Times of societal stress demand that marketers comprehend the authentic experience of individuals' personal worlds, which includes one sillogical preferences, innocent desires, messy assumptions, and untested deductions. The key to making a successful transition will be found in focusing on the changing ethos; in short, taking note of what tongues are saying.

This emotional-cognitive progression is ceaselessly informed by the development of one's self-identity, which underlies their unconscious purchase calculus. Understanding this process entails a shift in perspective from seeing consumers as data points to valuing consumers as people. Traditional attitude and usage studies, surveys and focus groups, are not adequate to the task.

The Emotional Connection Workshop

The Blake Project offers a unique workshop that is designed to dial up your customers’ emotional connection to your brand.  Here’s how it works. First, we talk with your customers to understand what emotional connection currently exists and to what degree and then we gain your consensus on what types of emotional connection you would like to increase. Next, we lead you in a series of ideation sessions in which we design sources of increased emotional connection against your objectives. Finally, we prioritize the ideas generated in the ideation sessions and pull it all together in a written report of recommended actions.

In the research, we seek to understand how your brand connects with its customers and with which customer attitudes and values it is best aligned. We will conduct this exploration by customer segment if required. In our consensus building session with you, we also probe to understand by what values your organization strives to live and with what personality attributes. The ideation sessions are highly facilitated. They include a broad array of creativity exercises and ideation techniques and are always energizing for its participants.

We will often organize the sessions by customer touch point and will explore how different behaviors, processes and senses could affect your customers’ emotional connection to your brand. We apply a specific set of evaluation criteria to the ideas generated at the ideation sessions to insure that the ones you choose have the highest impact and ROI possible.

Democracy is a Poor Man’s Marketing

With two weeks to go before the British general election, the media seems to have gone politically bonkers. You can’t turn a page or switch on the TV without an immediate update on the upcoming election. Marketers are not exempt from all this either.

We suddenly seem obsessed with the different marketing strategies being applied by the three major political parties. The Lib Dems have gone guerrilla. Labour is relying on user-generated content. And the Tories are using traditional, above-the-line media.

It’s all very odd because, when you step back from all the rhetoric and look hard at the big parties, it’s clear that by any decent marketing standard, all three are hopelessly inept. Just because there is a ton of money, acres of media coverage and huge national importance associated with the upcoming election does not necessarily mean that the marketing strategies involved are actually any good.

Take the three brands on offer to the electorate, for example. Are they really differentiated in any meaningful way? If you jotted down all the major policy differences between the three parties, what would you write?

Compare that to our world of marketing. A decent marketer will always distinguish their brand from the other major competitors. It’s basic stuff. You may not love Tesco, Waitrose or Marks & Spencer - but you know what they stand for and how they differ from each other.

Top Green Brands Shine On Earth Day

Forty years after the first Earth Day, greater pressure is being applied to brands to address environmental problems along with the problems of dirty clothes, financial services, technology, and convenient, quick-serve meals.

Yes, more consumers hear the phrases "fuel-efficient," "organic,""energy-efficient," "natural," "green," and "sustainable" more these days, consumers are on to all that. They want brands to walk-the-talk, and "green" has become the cost-of-entry in many categories, making larger and larger contributions to brand engagement and loyalty.

Driving "Green" Growth

A review of category loyalty drivers in our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index shows that how consumers define "green" varies significantly from category-to-category. And as more people become more aware of the dangers of ignoring the environment, and as brands have actually sought to establish standards, the definitions and expectations applied to brands have evolved.

Marketing And Happiness

Happiness is a hot topic these days. Scholars have recently noted some non-intuitive dynamics as to what makes people happy, and, of course, Americans are always in the pursuit of happiness.

Marketers rarely, if ever, talk about happiness directly, but in designing digital offerings that promise an "experience," or when focused on building customer relationships, the covert subtext of most advertising should be the creation of the feeling of happiness.

Must-Have vs. Want

A complication usually arises, though, when advertising creative meets the CMO's meat-grinder that tends to delimit brand into tomorrow's sales' numbers. Perhaps one way out of this dilemma is for marketers to note the difference - emotionally, experientially and cognitively - between consumers' must-ing and wanting.

Marketing To Men

Men are, well, men. They live in the 'now.' They are concrete thinkers that like to consummate, finish. A male axiom is "complete what you set out to do." Men are interested in power and in looking good, even more than being good. In short, that's the nature of beauty for the beast.

You cannot market to men the same way you market to women. It's not a simple transformation of changing colors, fonts or packaging. Men and women are different biologically, psychologically and socially.

Of course, when it comes to attractiveness, both sexes want to garner attention, but each for different reasons. For men, looking good is looking strong, confident, authoritative, adventurous - a standout. Men concentrate on looks to the extent that it signals something about what they do, have done or can do. Regardless of how much a woman wants to attract in the contest of beauty and brains, their focus is on hope and details, and they concentrate on how appearance reflects their inner be-ing.

Consider four fundamental gender differences and their impact on marketing:

The Importance of Brand Positioning Research

We conduct one-day workshops in which we facilitate leadership team consensus on brand positioning.  In those workshops, the participants agree to target customer definitions and priorities and the brand’s essence, promise and personality. We strongly recommend conducting brand positioning research prior to the workshop. Why? It is important to…

1. Understand what your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are from your customers’ perspectives
2. Know how your customers perceive your brand vis-à-vis competitive brands
3. Understand which benefits are the most important to your customers and which of those benefits your brand could uniquely “own” in your customers’ minds
4. Know which benefits are believable for your brand
5. Understand how different customer groups perceive your brand’s product/service categories (and the brands within them) differently

Most product categories are mature with (a) numerous competitors and (b) most of the viable brand positions taken. It is not a trivial exercise to position brands within those categories. It requires significant and nuanced customer insight informed by well thought through research. The days of choosing brand positions such as the following are long since past:

Twitter Brand Raises Questions

I started as a professor in the late 90s. I was young, inexperienced and terrified of the MBAs I was now paid to teach. So when the dotcom revolution started, I watched as my best students at London Business School rejected enormous starting salaries from McKinsey and Deutsche Bank in favour of working for start-ups I had never heard of.

The whole thing seemed totally mad, but I held my tongue and assumed they knew something that I did not. It was only after the dotcom bubble burst and so many of my former students had lost their jobs, savings and several years on the career ladder that I realised I should have said something.

A decade later, and we are off again with Twitter. The privately held company received a new round of investment last fall, believed to be $100m, which values the business at a whopping $1bn (£624m). That makes Twitter roughly as valuable as WH Smith - which provides an excellent point of comparison.

Identity Crisis - Brand vs. User?

Everyone knows there's a critical difference between Brand imagery and User imagery. A brand's personality tells a story about the product. It tells its target market what to expect. It suggests heritage, quality, flavor, status, effectiveness, attractiveness, service, value, when to use it, where to use it, how to use it, etc. Potent brands create rich pictures in the eye of the consumer.

User imagery, on the other hand, generally refers to one of two possibilities.

For many products, User Imagery often represents the ego ideal of interested people - who I want to appear to be because I use your product; vs. the "shadow" or "not me" among those who reject the product - it's who I don't want to be associated with and therefore would not want to use the product. Often, User Imagery projective questions are used as a way to keep participants honest in their reactions to product. So, for example, if a respondent says she probably will buy a product, but the user imagery is of a "not me" person, it becomes obvious that she was only being polite in her response to the purchase interest question and is not really interested. Car owner imagery is often expressed as this ego ideal or shadow. As discussed later, see the difference between the BMW driver vs. the Mercedes driver.

Other times, user imagery refers to a more realistic depiction of the actual consumer. We have an example of that below in the cough medicine story.