Branding Strategy Insider

Agency Decisions: Good Morale Or Bad Clients?

Bad clients can try your soul. Ever had one? Have one now? There are times when you must persevere for the health of the company. And times when you must resign the account for the health of the company.

In the early 1930's Ray Rubicam found himself at these crossroads. Young & Rubicam served the extremely large Pall Mall account of the American Tobacco Company. The owner of American Tobacco, George Washington Hill (Pictured), was notorious for badgering those who were unfortunate enough to do his advertising. The relationship between George Hill and Young & Rubicam grew so strained that Rubicam decided it would be in the best interest of the agency to forfeit the $3 million account. (Hill wanted Rubicam to replace his creative team) Rarely has the news of a large business loss met with such a sigh of relief at an advertising firm. The $3 million loss was seen as well worth the boost in morale.

While much in advertising is hard to measure, the emotions of your people are quite telling. Is sacrificing morale for business good business?

No.

Put your people first.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

What Is A Brand? We Really Should Know By Now

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t know how to define brand. This applies to people that don’t work in marketing, those that work in marketing and even worse those that work in brand. I think a brand is:

A construct that delivers marketing promises to facilitate the formation of a mutually beneficial and evolving bond between the seller (or corporation) and its stakeholders based on functional and emotional values. 

Sure, it’s a bit complicated and involved. But brands are complicated and involved. It fits. This is how I arrived at this definition….

When defining something it’s important to be clear on what it is and is not. A brand is not a logo.  If you take away the logo there is nothing there. You have no brand. This is a shockingly simple statement yet if I had received £1 for every time I have used that sentence I would be typing this blog from my villa in the Seychelles (as opposed to from a train leaving London!).  Lovely thought….

So what is a brand? It’s lots of things.  Branding Prof Leslie de Chernatony (and colleagues) have developed a helpful model where a brand can be considered from an input, output or evolutionary perspective.

From an input perspective i.e. something the marketer ‘creates’, a brand is:

Choosing A Brand Consultant

Choosing a brand consultant can be tricky. First, you must determine what you are seeking in a brand consultant. Do you want to know how your brand stacks up against competitive alternatives? Are you concerned about an emergent competitor? Has your brand lost its competitive edge? Do you need to reposition your brand? Has your brand’s architecture gotten too complicated? Are you seeking an updated identity? Does your brand need a new tagline? Do you want to create a new marketing campaign? Are you trying to rally employees in support of the brand? Are you trying to create an improved brand building culture within your organization? Do you need to understand your brand’s customers better? Are you looking for ongoing education for your marketers? Be specific and clear about what you are seeking in a brand consultant.

Next, find out what the consultant’s skill sets are. Marketing research? Brand equity measurement? Brand valuation? Marketing strategy formulation? Brand (re)positioning? Brand identity development? Brand plan development? Advertising campaign development? Brand extension? Ask not only for a client list, but also for case studies on the services in which you are most interested. What type of person is the organization mostly comprised of? Brand strategists? Marketing researchers? Graphic artists? Copywriters? Account executives?

And, know this, if the consultant’s tool is primarily a hammer (or copywriting or marketing research) every one of your problems will seem like a nail (or a copy writing exercise or a research exercise) to him or her. People and organizations mostly use the tools with which they are most familiar.

What Is A Brand?

I recently had a conversation with a retired CEO who fancied himself a savvy marketer.  He was recounting how he had participated in a rebranding project for a not-for-profit organization on whose board he served.  He was very proud of this work and went on to tell me how they had carefully chosen the symbol to represent the brand in its logo. When I asked him what his brand’s unique point of difference was, he indicated that it was the unique symbol featured in the logo. When I asked him why people would choose the brand over its competition, he wasn’t sure how to answer. When I asked him what the brand’s promise was, again he wasn’t sure how to answer.

With my constant immersion in branding, I sometimes forget that some people still think that a brand is a logo or an ad campaign and nothing more, even some people who should know better.

A brand is a source of a promise to its customers. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. It does so not only to place itself into the purchase consideration set, but even more importantly, to be the brand chosen from that purchase consideration set.  This is also sometimes referred to as the brand’s unique value proposition. Whether it is called a unique value proposition or a promise of relevant differentiated benefits, it is very important that the promise or proposition be delivered consistently at each point of customer contact, time after time.

Innovation And Organizational Success

The Blake Project designs and delivers one, two and three day brand management workshops globally at your headquarters or the location of your choice. Marketers, and all who shape the brand benefit. By request we have designed the following comprehensive workshop:

Innovation and Organizational Success

A two-day workshop facilitated by Brad VanAuken, Chief Brand Strategist, author of Brand Aid

TARGET AUDIENCE:

• New Product Development Managers
• New Business Development Managers
• Customer Service Managers
• Chief Marketing Officers (CMO)
• Marketing Directors
• Marketing Managers
• Head, Marketing, Marketing Services
• Brand Managers
• Product Managers
• Marketing Officers/Executives
• Advertising Agency Account Executives

WORKSHOP OUTLINE:

• The Importance of Innovation
• New Business Idea Sources

o   Address emerging customer needs

o   Expand business definition

o   Apply new technologies

o   Exploit expanded brand identity

o   Target new customer groups

A Marketer's Guide To Scientific Research Techniques

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”  Mark Twain

Confusion reigns supreme. In the years since Malcolm Gladwell’s international bestseller, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without thinking,” awakened marketers to the importance of tapping into the intuitive, emotional responses of consumers to enjoy more effective marketing campaigns, a wild west of scientific research techniques have emerged.  Claims and counter claims are enough to make one’s head spin, especially marketers, who have better things to do than trying to sort out which research tools to rely on. 

As someone who began to study emotional responses for clients a half decade before most of these neurometric firms were born, please allow me to provide some unvarnished perspective.

Two Key Dimensions - Engagement and Arousal
The first key is that there are two essential dimensions: engagement and arousal (whether emotional responses occur, when, and the intensity of those responses), and valence (the degree to which positive or negative emotions occur). Yes, engagement and arousal help to tell you if your marketing message is breaking through the clutter, driving attention, and creating opportunities for recall.  Tools that measure engagement and arousal and, in fact, specialize in it, include heart rate, sweat gland activity and respiration.

Coffee Category Sees Evolution And Rivalry

A word that comes up fairly regularly when we are talking with brands is “evolution,” as it is an inescapable reality of doing business with changing consumers at the other end of the transaction.

Brands must continually examine how to stay relevant and grow if they are to stay profitable, or even be around to complain about profits. In a recent Time Magazine article on the changing role of Ronald McDonald the clown, this point was emphasized, symbolic of the change in a brand once centered on children that has fundamentally widened its focus. As Ronald is given an office in the brand basement, McDonald’s continues its march into a more mature market, one not all that in love with clowns.

McDonald’s entry into the coffee category has caught serious traction with adults. Though late to the coffee table, an incredible distribution network and getting to a good strategy has to be giving Starbuck’s the jitters, as the McCafes sent revenue growth records in six out of the past seven quarters to a high of $24 billion in sales last year.

However, Starbucks same store sales are up 7% for end of fiscal year 2010, as it continues its bounce back from a tough 2009 when the chain was down 6%. As Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said to the brand’s employees in a year-end message, “We must continue to earn our success every day.”

Brand Research And Consumer Decision-Making

I love solving puzzles and there’s no greater puzzle than understanding how people spend their attention, time and money. The factors that influence an individual’s choices are infinite, and often subtle.

Any parent can tell you that understanding why a teen behaves as they do prepares you to influence their decisions. The same is true of marketers and consumers. For marketers, unraveling the complexities of customer decisions can mean the difference between marketing success and failure. That’s why we try to frame research objectives in terms of understanding consumer choices.

• What is the consideration set?
• What are the decision drivers?
• How do those drivers relate to the person’s core values?
• What advantages (equities) does the brand offer that can be connected with those drivers?

Consumers Are Terrible at Explaining Their Choices
It doesn’t help that consumers are often inarticulate when it comes to analyzing their own decisions. They often find it hard to say why they chose one option over others. When they do provide a rationale, we’ve learned to take what they say with caution -- the consumer may not even be aware of his or her motivations. This is particularly true in low involvement categories where there is little time, money or ego at stake. Most of us can relate to agency CEO Bob Hoffman’s description of his approach to pet food purchasing:

“I have no idea why I buy Jif instead of Skippy. I don’t do taste tests. All I know is that when I’m standing in the peanut butter aisle staring blankly into space, there comes a time when I have to make a decision. And for some reason I usually grab the Jif. If you can help me understand why I buy Chuck Wagon instead of Alpo for my dog, Buddy, I will be most appreciative. From all I can tell, it doesn’t seem to matter much to him. So why does it matter to me? As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure it matters to me. I just do it.”  --- Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian

In these situations, it doesn’t do a lot of good to ask consumers why they behave the way they do. There are many indirect ways to explore decision-making. Traditionally, marketers have used discrete choice modeling, concept tests or conjoint analysis to infer decision drivers.  Today I’d like to focus on two other ways to investigate decision-making: experimentation and laddering.

Brand Naming: Don’t Be Afraid To Use Humor

Would “outlandish” work in your category?

Consider the rough-and-tumble moving industry, where independent carriers are proud of their reputation as tough guys who tackle any challenge. Some of their names push the envelope:

Hernia Movers in Wisconsin. (Tagline: “The potentate of totin’ freight.”) Check them out at www.herniamovers.com

Death Wish Piano Movers in Massachusetts. They tickle the ivories at www.deathwishpiano.com

College Hunks Hauling Junk. Begun as a summer project by two guys looking for a way to make money. It now has 30 owned or franchised locations: 800-586-5872

And then we have the story of George Boudreaux and the envelope he pushed.

Ten Qualities Of World-Class Brands

1. Well-known – without awareness, nothing else counts; a brand can’t be in people’s purchase consideration sets unless they are aware of the brand

2. Relevant – the brand must be perceived to be relevant to people’s hopes, needs and desires

3. Differentiated – to stand out among competitive alternatives, the brand must be unique in ways that matter to customers

4. Customer-Centric – only when the brand knows its customers and their needs well, can it deliver exceptional purchase and usage experiences

5. Trustworthy – this implies being honest and authentic, consistent and predictable, reliable and dependable, and always delivering on its promises