Branding Strategy Insider

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.

Know When To Euthanize Your Brand

James Robertson launched his family jam business in 1864, after his wife, Marion, began making marmalade at their local shop in Paisley, England. Jams and mincemeat followed, and Robertson's became the leading brand of British preserves for most of the 20th century. Premier Foods acquired the Robertson's brand last year when it swallowed up RHM. This week Premier announced its new strategy for its prized jam acquisition in 2009 - kill it. Quick.

By the end of next year, Robertson's will have disappeared forever from British tables. Cue an avalanche of media stories about the fall of another great British institution, letters to the Daily Mail about the end of society as we know it, and a long line of generic brand consultants, shaking their heads and offering insight on where it all went wrong and how the brand could – and should – have been saved.

Don Williams, chief executive of brand ID consultants Pi Global, was especially emotional, telling The Grocer, 'The decline of Robertson's has been a particularly sad affair. This once-great, iconic British brand has, in my view, been systematically dismantled.'

You need a new dance, Don - the music has changed. Ten years ago, the Robertson's story might have been one of strategic error, but the world of branding is changing faster than many industry experts can keep up with.

Test Your Brand

We subject each of our client’s brands to a very simple test. (The test is simple but what it measures is seldom easy to achieve.) I call it the CUB test. “C” stands for compelling, “U” stands for unique and “B” stands for believable.  That is, the most effective brands almost always promise compelling, unique and believable benefits to their target customers.

C = Compelling
U = Unique
B = Believable

You can test this by asking the following three questions about each current or potential brand promise:

COMPELLING: How important is [brand promise] when selecting a [category name] brand?
UNIQUE: (Ask this question for each competitive brand.) How well does this brand deliver on [brand promise]?
BELIEVABLE: (Ask this question for your brand.) How well does this brand deliver on [brand promise]?

A brand will not succeed if its promise is not important, compelling or purchase motivating. Nor will it succeed if the promise is not believable for your brand. And, the promise will not differentiate your brand if it is not unique to your brand.

When we are asked to help reposition a brand, we evaluate each potential brand promise against the CUB criteria. We almost always select the promise that has the highest CUB score.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

One Fighter Brand Strategy That Just Might Work

The marketer who is bored with the world's 4th largest retailer is bored with life. If you have been into a Tesco store recently, you will already have seen a new line gracing its aisles. The 'discount brands at Tesco' range has been hailed by chief executive Terry Leahy as the biggest change in the brand's offering in more than a decade.

The range includes 34 brands across 400 categories. Among them are Country Barn cornflakes, Mermaid Buy fish fingers, Gold Sun vitamins and Shanghai Garden sauces. According to commercial director Richard Brasher, Tesco has seen 'an opportunity between the various levels to make sure there is a different proposition for consumers'.

In the 'good, better, best' own-label triptych that Tesco made famous, the discount range is priced above its Value line, but below branded offerings.

The products look more Aldi than Tesco. The German retailer has traditionally avoided using its own brand name on any of its products, instead using a house of brands architecture featuring two-dimensional brand names such as Tundra Bleach and Golden Nectar Honey, which it invents with the help of the major manufacturers who supply the products.

This approach is typical in Germany, where the name of the store is rarely used on private-label goods. The array of brand names also helps foster the illusion of choice in a store that usually contains fewer than 1000 stock-keeping units, of which 95% are Aldi own labels.

Tesco's traditional approach has been very different from Aldi's. Like most British retailers, it has used a branded house architecture, using the Tesco name on everything from its Value line to its Finest offering. However, the supermarket's latest line is clearly a fighter brand range designed specific-ally to replicate and compete with Aldi.

The Brand Proficiency Indicator

It is extremely difficult to identify which companies are good at branding. One common mistake is to assume that the ownership of strong brands indicates equally strong brand management. In reality, the two very rarely go hand in hand. Take Coca-Cola. While Coke is unquestionably a power brand, the brand strategies implemented by Coca-Cola marketers have often seemed frighteningly inept.

Many marketers look at market share or, God forbid, ad campaigns to ascertain a company's brand expertise. In truth, there are a multitude of more accurate indicators of brand proficiency, and at the top of my list is a brand revitalisation strategy. On that basis, Smarties are in very safe hands at Nestle Rowntree, which in 2005 announced that it was changing the iconic design of the chocolate brand. After 68 years, the cylindrical Smarties tube with the coloured plastic disc as a stopper was to be replaced by a 'hexatube' with a cardboard flip-top lid.

Customers were outraged by the proposed change, and the media fanned the flames gleefully. Once again, sinister 'marketing men' have, it was claimed, struck down a much-loved part of British culture. Words such as 'scandalous', 'disgraceful' and 'immoral' were being used in online discussion groups. Yet despite this reaction, Smarties had never been better managed.

Many brands struggle to maintain their relevance in the market. This is particularly true of successful brands that become convinced the original strategies that established them should remain sacrosanct. The innovation and creativity that initially propelled the brand to the apex of the market are gradually eroded and replaced by a conservative strategic culture in which every significant branding decision is preserved in aspic.

The brand in question does not immediately lose either sales or share.

Country of Origin: A Brands Best Friend?

A multiple choice question: is Land Rover British, German or American? Or none of the above? That’s right - it’s Chinese. The Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) recently acquired the brand and the rights to all its past models for US$140 million.

The acquisition sends a clear signal that cultural links between brands and the countries that produced them are in jeopardy. Consider IBM’s ThinkPad or Miller Lite. These two American brand icons are owned by the Chinese and South Africans. The Swiss Toblerone is no longer Swiss. In fact the heritage of many brands is changing shape as ownership alters across national borders.

But how does this affect the brand? I’ll tell you more about that soon, but first let me ask you this: does the notion that ThinkPad and Land Rover are Chinese cause you to rethink your ideas about brands’ quality and authenticity? Would you think twice about buying a Toblerone because it no longer comes from the land of chocolate? My guess is that you answered ‘no’ to these questions.

The fact is that ‘country of origin’ has a strong influence on a brand during its birth and childhood. Then, once the image of the country has been embedded into the brand’s personality, fashioning its identity and influencing its consumer’s perceptions, it seems to leave its stamp on the brand for good. At least the numbers available from brands which have ‘changed nationality’ indicate this to be so. Leveraging the power of a country in brand-building seems most effective at the beginning of the brand story. As the brand matures, it gathers other material that contributes to its identity – reputation, financial record, management personalities, and so on, are all elements that are likely to help the brand’s image alter in later life.

And what does this mean for your brand? Should you leverage your native country as a branding statement? And, if so, how? It’s not an easy path to forge and one which you should treat with care because it isn’t necessarily all good.

Brand Archaeology: The Power in Your Past

Whenever I flick through my old vacation pictures, I tend to recall past holidays as being much better than they sometimes were. The break I had in Bermuda that was packed with disasters; or the holiday in Cebu where nothing seemed to go right…I remember them all as being perfectly pleasant. It’s amazing how ten years or so can affect your perceptions.

Our memories can recall branding in the same positive light.

Recollections of the past become impressions of happy times, and advertising forms part of the panoply of experience. Jingles, advertising images, television commercials feature in our associative memory as effectively as remembered aromas. So evocative are these memories that you shouldn’t discard your brand’s past when building its future, offline or online.

Burberry’s comeback almost a decade ago didn’t happen by chance. It was the result of a well-calculated review of the brand’s, and its customers’, pasts. Burberry’s identity once rested on its signature red, camel, black and white ‘Burberry Check’, which the company introduced in the 1920s and registered as a trademark. By now, Burberry has been around for over 150 years and the accumulated effect of product consistency has established, in the consumer’s mind, a collection of ‘links’ or, what I refer to as ‘smashable’ brand components: brand signals which, just like the original Coca-Cola bottle, are synonymous with a brand. If one of those distinctive Coca-Cola were smashed into thousands of pieces, the brand would still be revealed in just one shard of glass.

Burberry built its new branding on a century-and-a-half of ‘smashable’ devices.  Long-recognized styling, consistent materials (Did you know that Thomas Burberry invented gabardine?), even the Royal Warrants that denote Burberry as ‘weatherproofers’ ‘by appointment’ to Her Majesty the Queen, all contribute to the our perception of the brand and the brand’s total image. The brand has plugged into its heritage and built on this brand equity, and in doing so has enhanced its authenticity in the consumer’s mind. I call this strategy ‘brand archaeology’.

Preparing for the Brand Power Shift

No longer is the brand manual the holy grail for marketers. I wonder if you can even remember what your brand manual looks like. You probably haven’t looked at it in years. After all, the days of being able to explain your brand in terms of the brand manual’s pages and pages of detail are long gone, and so is the manual’s capacity for predicting the brand’s behavior in future years.

In today’s world the consumer is in charge of your brand – not you. The reality is that, since the appearance of the Internet, the power in the brand game has shifted. In the old days, the marketer was in full control of the brand. Now the majority of brand impressions are initiated and promulgated by the consumer. It’s like the consumer has become the brand master, leaving the marketer to merely fuel the game, rather than play it. In a trend I predicted almost five years ago, and which in my book BRAND sense I call the MSP or Me Selling Proposition, the consumer is in charge of ‘their’ brand.

So what do you do to survive in a world in which, five years from now, we’ll probably find that almost every successful marketing activity is created and driven by the consumer? Well, what you do is prepare – now! Here are three pieces of advice which may help you prepare your organization for having the consumer behind the brand steering wheel.

The first and most important factor in preparing for this power shift is to address your organization’s decision-making processes. Your company will need to acknowledge that it can no longer be on top of every piece of your brand’s communication about your brand. And this acceptance will need to be at board level. You must persuade the board to begin developing marketing and communication materials which will be carried by the consumer and which, in fifty percent of cases, are likely to change the way you intended to represent the brand. Because this will be happen.

Customization: Building A Brand Advantage

First came Nike iD, a customization concept that enabled consumers to design their own pair of Nike shoes. Then Jones Soda offered a customization platform: bottles became vehicles for consumers’ customized labels, Jones Soda even guaranteeing brand fans that their bottles would be distributed in stores. Shortly thereafter, Build-A-Bear broke new ground in the teddy bear game inviting kids to use their imaginations and construct their own bears. Imagine the LEGO factory enabling kids to design their own LEGO sets. Consider Mercedes-Benz’s design-your-own-car option and, of course, the hundreds of clothing web sites that offer consumers the chance to design their ideal streetwear. These consumer lures have all been exercised in parallel with the online world to which the very concept of customization is fundamental and in which the potential for customization has yet to be fully exploited.

Once we’ve had the chance to pick and choose, to become kings and queens of our own brand universes, product functions and designs, there’s no turning back. In the future we will be able to customize every consumer item we use. The days of Henry Ford’s manufacturing mantra —  “You can have it in any color you want as long as it's black” — are, even now, long gone. The question thus arises, what’s the role of the brand? Is it at all possible to build a brand if its products can be customized by its consumers?

The answer is simple: the role of the brand is to remain instantly recognizable, even without its logo.

Co-Branding's Greatest Love Story?

Penguin and Match.com's dating site for book-lovers is a marketer's dream...

He saw her first. Glancing up from his laptop, he found himself utterly spellbound at the sight of the deliciously beautiful, very proper, 40-something woman on the other side of the room.

She sensed the strong, predatory, glance. Glancing icily from over the top of her orange-covered book, she prepared to look disapprovingly at her crude observer. But when she met the gaze of the young, raven-haired man with the computer, she found herself, to her surprise, blushing.

He closed his laptop sharply and stood up. She realised, with a start, that he was approaching her. Secretly thrilled, she waited for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she meekly looked up from her book into his deep, green eyes.

'I am fresh to the old country,' he said with a deep American baritone. 'And I know you don't do this kind of thing often.' He smiled. 'But I just had to head over and make you a proposal that I think you will find mighty agreeable.'

Breathlessly she exclaimed: 'I assure you, I have never been approached in this manner before.' But, oh, the longing... What could this vibrant American have in view? Her mind raced with passionate speculation.

He smiled at her again. 'My name is Match.com.' Suddenly, the handsome American's proposal began to make sense. 'Oh, I see... ' she beamed. 'My name is Penguin. Penguin Books.'

It may sound like bad fiction, but it's a real story of successful partnership, and one every good marketer should study carefully.