Branding Strategy Insider

Beware of Commodifying Promotions

There are two kinds of brand management: intentional branding and holistic branding. Intentional branding is all about what brand managers intend to do with the brand. Usually, this involves a list of the traditional activities associated with branding - everything from logo design to integrated marketing communications.

Then there is holistic branding, which goes beyond the intentions of the branding team and adopts the consumer's viewpoint. Holistic branding considers every possible interaction, intended or not, that consumers have with the brand.

Too often a brand manager's myopic focus on intentional branding comes at the expense of the holistic perspective. Take one effort from Cadbury's Dairy Milk.

From an intentional viewpoint, Cadbury embarked on an ambitious £20m campaign that focused on the centenary celebrations of the brand, using television, print, radio, online and in-store activity. The campaign was based around the aspirational message 'You dream it, we make it' and it emphasised the rich, smooth qualities of the chocolate bars.

From  the holistic view many consumers of Dairy Milk had a single recurring brand experience that was anything but aspirational.

The Free Market's Colorful Evolution

Free markets tend to evolve and mutate in quite remarkable ways. The more marketers attempt to restrict distribution, the more markets develop alternative channels.

Perfume is perhaps the best illustration of how manufacturers attempt to limit distribution to particular retailers. This is partly motivated by the need for a consistent price and also because perfume brands are uniquely vulnerable to being presented in the wrong kinds of retail settings.

As a result, however, the three shades of the market have emerged in perfume distribution: white, grey and black.

The white market is the approved market. For the manufacturer, this is the ideal distributor and hopefully the sole source of the product for consumers. For perfume, Selfridges is a white market. It has a tremendous retail brand that co-brands the perfumes. It rarely runs price promotions and when it does it is usually with the distributor's consent. Best of all, Selfridges has the space and setting to present each perfume in its ideal context: on its own island within the store populated by highly trained and motivated sales staff. Selfridges, like all white markets, is awarded a host of manufacturer-bestowed benefits such as in-store ad displays and exclusive promotional items such as towels or make-up bags.

Marketing: Too Many are Failing the Practical

I was once hired by a multi-national to spend two days training their senior managers in marketing. The client had a reputation for having outstanding employees and the biographies of the course participants were very impressive. While none of the group had any direct experience in marketing, their seniority and qualifications were excellent.

By the end of the first day I was struggling. We had reviewed examples of good and bad marketing practice and looked at a whole raft of case studies and concluded with what I hoped would be a triumphant revelation: marketing is all about finding out who your customers are, discovering what they want and then making sure they get it.

The problem for the group was that this sounded extremely obvious. Worse still, it appeared a relatively simple goal to achieve. Over dinner on that first evening one participant even wondered aloud how it was possible to spend four years studying for a PhD in Marketing if the subject was so simple.

I failed. I failed so badly that as I flew home at the end of the course I even wondered to myself whether marketing really was that difficult after all. The following week, however, I took a consulting job with a client that, like the majority of British businesses, had no idea about marketing. It had a tremendous advertising campaign (and budget to boot) and a swanky new logo, but failed all my revelatory tests of marketing competence. The client had very little idea who its customers were, certainly no clue as to what these mysterious individuals wanted and consequently, despite healthy sales figures, no real idea what value it was providing.

Marketing is a simple subject. Listen to your customers and do something about it is hardly a complex mantra. Yet this simplicity masks a complex practical challenge.

B2B Marketing Budget Distribution

How are business to business organizations distributing their marketing budgets?

•    Trade magazines 23%
•    Trade Shows 18%
•    Direct Mail 10%
•    Promotion/Market Support 9%
•    Dealer/Distributor Materials 5%
•    General magazine advertising 6%
•    Internet/electronic media 9%
•    Directories 5%
•    Telemarketing/Telecommunications 3%
•    Publicity/Public Relations 7%
•    Market Research 4%
•    Other 1%

Total 100%

(Source: Cahners Advertising Research Reports)

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Interactive Marketing: A Friend of Brands?

A+b+c> 3a or 3b or 3c. It is the formula that explains why integrated marketing is such an important concept. Rather than spend their total budget on advertising, for example, marketers should spread it across a range of channels that can include advertising, but also comprise tools such as product placement, PR and interactive media. The synergies, 360-degree impact and disparate strengths of each channel ensure a better return on investment.

Consider the US launch of Chevrolet’s 2007 Tahoe. Rather than the traditional advertising-heavy launch, Chevy's ad agency Campbell-Ewald created a highly integrated campaign.

First came product placement - the Tahoe was the featured challenge on the opening episode of the fifth series of NBC's The Apprentice. After the show, the interactive kicked in at Chevyapprentice.com - a site where visitors could complete their own apprentice challenge by creating a 30-second execution for the Tahoe using Chevy-supplied clips, soundtracks and their own text. During the four-week competition, public relations would then promote the site through traditional media, while viral communications would allow users to display their self-created ads online.

Marketers, however, have a passive view of interactivity. In our trade, interactive means visiting a web page or responding to marketing in an active, but intended, manner. We rarely use the term interactive in its true form; where two equal parties meet, share viewpoints and engage.

Interactive marketing is an oxymoron. The first half of the concept stands for equality and discourse, the second for control and monologue.

Chevy's Tahoe campaign turned out to be a perfect illustration of the paradoxical perils of interactive marketing.

From Commodity to Brand and Back Again

When I teach a class on brand management I always begin with a continuum.

It's a continuum that starts with the most generic of generic forms - the commodity - and ends with that most unique and specific of things - a brand.

It's a great way to generate a strategic understanding of brand management for two reasons. First, it underlines the fact that brands are not born as brands, they are born as commodities. For example, more than a century ago, John Pemberton set out to create a tonic, not a global brand named Coca-Cola. And in 1962, when Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight each chipped in $550 to set up Nike, their goal was to make running shoes for athletes, not create a global leisure brand empire.

Historians and publicists try to rewrite brand history to show that a founder had a brand vision and foolproof marketing foresight. The reality is usually much less strategic or visionary. Over extended periods of time, a new commodity becomes associated with certain positive thoughts.

These associations are often unintended but they come to define the product and move it gradually toward branded status.

Associations can come from the product's performance, its originator, famous consumers, a single moment in history, or a century's worth of varied cultural associations. Anthropologist Grant McCracken called branding a 'diecasting mechanism', where a product was painted with the colours of particular cultural associations.

Target Marketing and Greater Profitability

When I talk to marketing managers, their market segmentation study is usually one of the greatest sources of professional satisfaction. But my next question usually brings the conversation to a standstill.

'And which of these segments are you targeting?' I enquire.

At this point the marketing manager looks down at the segments, looks back up at me, looks back at the segments and finally says: 'Well, er, all of them.'

Unfortunately, most marketers operate under the fallacy that the bigger the potential pool of customers they target (namely, all of them and any others who happen to cross their path mid-execution), the bigger the resulting market will be.

This is nonsense. While sales managers think that the more targets there are, the better, marketers realise that all customers are not created equal, and that a key challenge in marketing is identifying which customers are more equal than others.

There are several reasons why you should target only a select group of the segments in your market. First, because you can concentrate your resources on one group rather than spreading them too thinly.

Brand Marketing Integration

When integrating your brand marketing efforts, here are some mechanisms you may find useful:

•    A well-communicated brand positioning statement including the target customer and the brand essence, promise, and personality
•    Conducting a brand positioning workshop with organization senior managers if necessary to build consensus
•    A brand marketing visionary at the top of at least the marketing organization (Marketing VP or Chief Marketing Officer), or better yet (from a marketer’s perspective) – the enterprise.
•    As broad a span of control as possible for the chief marketing officer (encompassing as many of the disciplines listed above as possible) and frequent forums for him or her to communicate marketing issues and initiatives with other senior leaders of the organization
•    Specific brand management and marketing objectives (long term and short term)
•    A brand marketing plan
•    Integrating brand plans with organization strategic plans
•    Product, program and segment marketing plans (driven by or at least congruent with brand marketing plans)
•    Marketing budgets allocated by market segment and sub-discipline (with 10-20% of the overall budget held by the chief marketing for unforeseen opportunities)
•    Integrated media plans