Branding Strategy Insider

Brands Must Have A Meaningful Difference

For many years, a smooth green stone has sat on my desk. It’s a piece of serpentine that I was given when as a small child, I visited an artist’s workshop in Scotland. Truthfully, it’s a pretty unremarkable rock, and I doubt that anyone else would find it interesting, but it means something to me.

You may have some trinket or memento on your desk as well—something that doesn’t have any practical purpose and appears insignificant to others, but is meaningful to you. Your unique history with the object makes it special.

I think the fact that we can form such attachments with relatively inconsequential objects illustrates a too-often-overlooked concept that is important for brands and brand marketing: the concept of meaningful difference. A presentation I saw recently, created by agency BBH, proclaimed that the “classic” communications model, under which communication that is relevant, different, and motivating leads to behavioral change, has given way to the “insight” model, in which changes in behavior are effected by communication that is simply relevant and motivating.

“We have forgotten the power of difference,” the BBH asserts. I am afraid that they are right—and that this amnesia applies to both communication and branding. Many marketers today do value relevance to the exclusion of difference—and to the detriment of their brands.

Brand Strategy And The Power Of Design

Design is an essential thinking skill that must be mastered as a strategic business imperative throughout the entire enterprise. Design is not merely a decorative act.

Everywhere one looks in the marketplace there is revolution and disintegration. Wave after wave of technological change and ubiquitous choice comes upon us more rapidly, engulfing us, confusing us more profoundly. Brand marketers are struggling to keep pace with disruptive forces that are reshaping the manner in which they innovate new value in this so-called new economy.

Globalization has still to prove itself globally useful amidst a world experiencing the dynamic tension of growing consumption and dwindling supply. The new workplace has seen its own revolution. People no longer rely on the old paradigms of security within the corporation as out-sourced manufacturing, customer service, and even out-sourced innovation mark the end of an era of status quo–especially in the US. Ironically, the nature of this paradigm shift has un-hinged our own intuitive human connections even as we become more and more digitally connected in the social web.

Many brand marketers have been unprepared to re-think the structures of their enterprises and flow with the changing times, while new, more agile competitors are doing it for them. Brand strategy is no longer about differentiating brands within a category, but rather designing a whole new category your brand can own.

Brand Strategy: Rethinking Brand Differentiation

The ultimate goal of any brand effort is differentiation. Setting your product apart from its competitors is an essential first step toward creating preference and loyalty. According to research firm, Millward Brown, “Brands that are perceived as being different have a much higher potential for growth than do other brands.” Consequently, identifying and communicating meaningful points of difference has become the focus of much strategic branding work.  

Yet we wonder if consumers are listening? Do they even care about our carefully crafted ‘points of difference’ and ‘reasons to believe’?  Harvard professor, Youngme Moon, observes in her book “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd”, that corporations have become experts at augmentation and replication, but aren’t that good at creating meaningful differences. She provocatively writes:

“If aliens were to visit a grocery store or a drugstore in this country they would have to conclude that we are a people hooked on the pleasures of picking needles out of haystacks.”

The Case of Diamond Shreddies

In 2006, a clever Canadian campaign for “New Diamond Shreddies” turned the mirror back on marketers’ often inane attempts at creating differences. The joke is that the only difference is that the shape is no longer a square, it is a ‘diamond’, (“kind of like the difference between a 6 and a 9”), and therefore tastes better. The satire is carried off brilliantly with focus group testimonials and commercials touting the advantages of a diamond shape over a square.

Urban legend says this campaign was created by an intern at Ogilvy. If that is true, it’s a case of the newbie pointing out the emperor’s lack of clothes. How many of us are guilty of seizing upon some meaningless, but exclusive product point of difference as the supposed basis of brand preference?

The Future Belongs To Brands That Build Great Value

Strategically based design is how you bake in experiences people really care about. A well-designed customer experience is the main event in defining how worthy your proposition is of the love (devotion) customers bestow on your brand.  Think of it this way, if your brand were no longer in existence, would it matter to anyone?

It is no longer enough to “exceed customer expectations” with product / service, quality and price. In the idea economy, those attributes are now the ante. To thrive in this new epoch we find ourselves in, enlightened marketers are shifting their focus from counting transactions to creating scintillating, dramatic, novel, relevant, transformative customer experiences.

More than facts, process management and functional product or service attributes, value creation is a designed based discipline of creating an episode, an encounter, an adventure, a perception, and a sense that there is greater use value in the experience than in the goods themselves. In leading companies, design is a strategic business imperative, not a decorative act. More than designing artifacts, innovation-driven companies use design as an integrated discipline for creating experiences people love. Experiences are somewhat metaphysical. Enlightened marketers know this, and design the experience to be emotionally rich. Harley Davidson does not sell motorcycles, Starbucks does not sell coffee, and Herman Miller does not sell office chairs.

Too Many Brands Make Hollow Claims

Increasingly, I have encountered brands that make the following types of claims:

• We are the quality leader in the X category,
• We are the innovation leader in the Y category,
• We are the service leader in the Z category, or worst of all,
• We are the leader in the XYZ category.
  

Is quality important? Yes. Is Innovation important? Absolutely.

Is service important? Of course. Is it desirable to be the industry leader? Sure. However, in more and more categories, as I perform brand audits, I find that large numbers of companies in many categories make these claims, so much so that the claims have become hollow. “Leader” means top, #1, not one of many striving to be top, #1. Don’t claim an aspiration unless you can uniquely deliver on that aspiration.

Differentiation Takes Place In The Mind

While the mind may still be a mystery, we know one thing about it that is for certain—it’s under attack. Most Western societies have become totally ‘‘overcommunicated.’’ The explosion of media forms, and the ensuing increase in the volume of communications, has dramatically affected the way people either take in or ignore the information offered to them.

Overcommunication has changed the whole game of communicating with and influencing people. What was overload in the 1970s turned into megaload by the turn of the century.

Here are some statistics to illustrate the problem:

*More information has been produced in the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000.
*The total of all printed knowledge doubles every four or five years.
*One weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.
*More than 4,000 books are published around the world every day.
*The average white-collar worker uses 70 kilograms of copy paper a year—twice the amount consumed 10 years ago.

Electronic Bombardment
And what about the electronic side of our overcommunicated society?

The Decline of Differentiation

Differentiation, of course, exists, but does so on the basis of a product or service actually owning values — real or perceived, rational or emotional — and occupying a real place in the consumers’ minds — beyond the consumers just being aware of them. And the degree to which they possess these values and have meaning in the consumers’ minds (beyond primacy of product) determines whether they have differentiated themselves. But fewer and fewer products and services are able to demonstrate any degree of actual differentiation.

To prove this, Brand Keys (a New York-based loyalty and engagement research consultancy) conducted an analysis of 1,847 products and services in 75 categories via their Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Using a combination of psychological inquiry and factor regression, and causal path analyses, the customer assessments of the products and services, predictive of how positively or negatively consumers will act toward the products, identified a continuum along which all products and services could be placed depending on their degree of differentiation. As you migrate from left to right, you go from no (or low) differentiation to extremely high differentiation.

On average, the study found that only 21% of all the products and services examined had any points of differentiation that were meaningful to the consumers. This is nearly 10% less than a benchmark study that was conducted in 2003.

One Minute Distinct, The Next Generic

I spent last weekend visiting friends in Holland and headed home on Sunday evening from Schiphol Airport. ING has heavily branded itself throughout and the connecting 'jetbridge' that links the departure terminal to the aircraft was one long ad for the firm. 'Let's talk about your future' exclaimed the ads, as I headed for the plane.

I boarded my British Airways flight and dropped gratefully into my seat. Within seconds I was offered a drink and a steaming towel. Having foregone lunch to make the plane, I delved into my bag to find the sandwich I had hurriedly purchased in the airport. It was from a Dutch company called Sanday's Bakeries and the packaging was strangely familiar. In a tight, clean typeface it proclaimed 'All handmade naturally' and continued with the confirmation that each sandwich was 'made in our own kitchen, every day, fresh'. It ended with the handwritten signature of Sanday's boss.

The use of packaging to make clear statements of intent, the emphasis on quality and the handwritten signature of the chief executive are all hallmarks of Pret A Manger. When Pret entered the snack business 20 years ago, the standard approach to packaging was mass-produced and generic - just like the food. Pret's distinctive packaging was an effective way to signal its differentiation and communicate its brand equity. What was all this doing on a very average Dutch sandwich?

The answer is as old as marketing itself. Occasionally a great marketer consults a brand's positioning and then breaks the rules of standard marketing practice. They invent a new way of doing things. In Pret's case, its resolute focus on its core brand values of quality, freshness and being handmade led it to a very different kind of packaging. But last year's brand-specific innovation is this year's industry standard. Pret's success has meant many of its radical approaches have been copied by rivals and gradually subsumed into the standard way most sandwich chains do business. Where once there was brand-based differentiation, now there is just generic parity.