Branding Strategy Insider

Religion's Marketing Problem

We have a big problem.

The Christmas season's "Peace on earth, good will to man" is not playing well this year. Ironically, the problem that this religious holiday is up against is, of all things, religion. If you doubt this, I point you to a cover story of The Economist entitled "The New Wars Of Religion."

In this article, Philip Jenkins, one of America's top religious scholars, claims that when historians look back on this century, they will probably see religion as "the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty, concepts of nationhood, conflicts and wars." If the first eight years of this century are an indicator, Jenkins is on to something.

What's at the heart of all this is a marketing problem. In the history of mankind, nothing has been sold as aggressively and successfully as religion. But unlike the traditional world of marketing, the "my religion is better than your religion" arguments have taken on an intensity that has often become fatal. And when you consider the weaponry that's available out there, it is all very frightening.

So what's to be done? How can we begin to "unmarket" religion and get back to some "good will"? In my estimation we have to shift the discussion away from negative "better" to a more positive "good will" argument.

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.

The Yuletide Story of Coke, Santa Claus and Perception

Sometime in the fourth century AD, in the Mediterranean port town of Myra, the church bells tolled. Bishop Nicholas was dead. Nicholas had hailed from a rich family, but after joining the church, he used much of his riches to help the poor in his community. And now that community mourned him.

For many centuries, Christian missionaries told the tale of the generous bishop and soon the story came to represent different things in different cultures.

In Germany, St Nicholas and his assistant Ruprecht dispensed presents to children. In Italy, La Belfana, a good witch, who dressed always in black, performed a similar function. In Holland, Sinter-klass gave presents to children who were kind enough to leave hay for his donkey. In Britain, it was Father Christmas. In France, Pere Noel. In the US, Santa Claus.

The individual was always a generous, yuletide figure, but was variously portrayed as being a tall, short, fat, grey-haired, white-haired, dark-featured, man/troll/dwarf/elf.

In Atlanta, in 1924, the Coca-Cola sales and marketing team had a problem.

Sales of Coke had been rocketing over the past 20 years, but these figures exhibited a dramatically uneven pattern. Each summer, US consumers set off for the beach, or to watch a baseball game with a bottle of Coke in hand. But during the winter, sales of Coke were sluggish. The team was desperate to increase the brand's sales and prevent it becoming seen as a seasonal product. Somehow they needed to make Coke a winter drink.

Why Women Are The Superior Marketing Sex

When I teach the brand management elective to MBA students, we explore case studies of companies getting it right and wrong. One of the most common observations that keeps coming up has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with gender. In a remarkable number of case studies, female marketers seem to outperform their male counterparts. It has become almost a running joke in some of my classes: senior male marketer produces an average or horrible marketing result; female marketer repeatedly seems to deliver a superior approach.

It might be something you have noticed, too. Chances are that the most senior and best-paid member of your marketing team is a man, but it's equally likely that the best marketer in your team is actually a woman. If I list the top 10 marketers that I have been lucky enough to work with in the past 10 years of my consulting career, women outnumber men, even though the vast majority of my clients were male.

Why are women apparently the superior marketing sex? It's easy to use the offensive stereotypical explanations: women like softer subjects such as marketing and are good at design and packaging. Fortunately, recent advances in our knowledge of the differences between male and female brain functions now provide a far more robust explanation for their superiority in this arena. To put it bluntly, women have a massive genetic advantage when it comes to marketing: their brains are better designed for it.

Women's brains are built for empathy
Imagine walking into a laboratory - in front of you are two human brains, one male, one female. It would not be hard to identify which is which. The male brain on the table is about 10% larger than the female brain and has 5% more brain cells. That sounds like good news for men, but in terms of pound-for-pound processing, the female brain more than makes up for its disparity in size in other ways.

Advertising Age's Marketing 50 Awards 2008

Earlier this month Advertising Age announced their selection for the Top 50 marketing ideas of 2008 and the marketers behind them. This February they will be honored in New York. Congratulations to this years nominees…

•    AmEx Members Project
     Belinda Lang, American Express Co.
•    Bakugan Battle Brawlers
     Ronnen Harary, Spin Master Ltd.
•    "The Biggest Loser" Product Line
     Mark Koops, Reveille
•    Blu-Ray
     Chris Fawcett, Sony Electronics Home Product Division
•    Bounty 
     Brad Schwan, Procter & Gamble Co.
•    Campbell's low-sodium soups
     Lisa Walker, Campbell Soup Co.
•    Carol's Daughter
     Steve Stoute, Carol's Daughter
•    CTS
     John Howell, General 5Motors Corp.
•    Coors Banquet
     Andy England, MillerCoors
•    Dunkin' Donuts coffee
     Audra Schlegel, Procter & Gamble Co.

Wall Street: Address for Marketing Problems

In 2005 Krispy Kreme completed its meteoric rise with an ignominious crash. The reason? Reportedly because of  "egregious" accounting to satisfy Wall Street's hunger for growth. Yet another example of what can happen to a brand that is being driven by the stock price instead of the marketplace.

Here's the now all too familiar problem. Wall Street often creates an environment that encourages bad, sometimes irrevocable, things to happen. In a way, it sets up a greenhouse for trouble, and like a greenhouse, it's all about encouraging things to "grow." The well-known economist Milton Friedman put it perfectly when he said, "We don't have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow." That desire for growth is at the heart of what can go wrong for many companies. Growth is the by-product of doing things right. But in itself, it is not a worthy goal. In fact, growth is the culprit behind impossible goals.

CEOs pursue growth to ensure their tenures and increase their take-home pay. Wall Street brokers pursue growth to ensure their reputations and increase their take-home pay.

But is it all necessary? Not really. When you consider that people do damaging things to force unnecessary growth, you can say that it's a crime against the brand. A true story illustrates how the desire for growth is at the root of evil doings.

I was brought in to evaluate the business plans for a large, multi-brand drug company. In turn, the brand managers stood up and presented their next-year's plans. In the course of a presentation, a young executive warned of aggressive new competition in his category that would definitely change the balance of power. But when it came to a sales projection, there was a predicted 15% increase. Instantly, I questioned how this could be with the new competition.

His answer was they were going to do some short-term maneuvering and line extension. Long-term, wouldn't this hurt the brand? Well, yes. Then why do it? Because his boss made him put in the increase, and I would have to talk with him.

One week later, the boss admitted the problem, but said his boss needed the increase because of, you guessed it, Wall Street.

The Right Brands Will Die

There was a fascinating moment of business drama last week in Washington, DC. Three of the most important chief executives on the planet met leaders from the US Senate and House to plead for extra public funds. General Motors' chief executive Rick Wagoner, Chrysler's Robert Nardelli and Ford's Alan Mulally testified at a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing to ask for an additional $25bn handout to keep their brands alive.

It was always going to be a difficult day, but the tone was set early by Democratic representative Gary Ackerman, who told the executives there was 'delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, DC and people coming off them with tin cups in their hands'. Fellow Democrat Brad Sherman continued. 'I'm going to ask the three executives here to raise their hand if they flew here commercial,' he said. The three chiefs blinked but made no gesture. 'Second, 'I'm going ask you to raise your hand if you're planning to sell your jet... and fly back commercial.' Again, there was no response. 'Let the record show no hands went up,' concluded Sherman.

There are more than 20 non-stop flights from Detroit to DC with tickets starting at $200 for the two-hour trip. And yet these cash-strapped chiefs who came to communicate the dire straits their respective brands were in, opted to spend in the region of $20,000 each and use their private executive jets instead. It was a strange moment, yet one typical of the public-private shenanigans taking place worldwide.

Formerly proud capitalists are looking at 2009 with a mix of fear and desperation and turning in increasing numbers to government sources for help. The problem is these huge private institutions have enjoyed periods of unparalleled success, which has created a disgracefully indulgent operating model that contradicts directly with the premise of being given public funds.

Listen to Consumers, Not Marketing Gurus

A variety of newspapers and trade magazines run a piece themed 'Campaign of the Week'.

The format is probably familiar to you. A senior marketer names their favourite advertising campaign of the moment and explains why it works as a piece of marketing communications.

For example, I recently read a marketing director extol the virtues of the latest campaign for Levi's. She was taken with the "incredibly haunting quality of the ad, noted that it "held my attention for the whole minute and concluded that the campaign would "engage people with the brand on an altogether different level than in previous campaigns".

A marketer in another article found the ads for X-Box "clearly adult in tone and "deeply disturbing".

The problem with these reviews is that they display a fundamental ignorance of the prime directive of marketing. The first stage in becoming a good marketer is to appreciate the difference between being a producer of products and a consumer of products. As a marketer your job is centered on connecting the latter to the former.

When marketers forget this essential dichotomy and start reviewing ads, products and prices as if they were consumers, they become marketing gurus, and there is no place for gurus in marketing. It is simply impossible to step into the shoes of a consumer for a few moments to review the quality of a marketing output.

Obama, McCain: Political Brand Analysis Results

Brands are positioned in the minds of their target audiences. While brand managers (in this case, political strategists) can work hard to influence how those brands (theirs and their competitor’s) are perceived, ultimately brands are what the target audiences think they are. The most important benefits for a brand to “own” are those that are extremely compelling to their target audiences, especially if the brand in question (in this case, a presidential candidate) can uniquely own those benefits. With this in mind, we created a survey to understand what was most important to American citizens when selecting a president. We then asked how well John McCain and Barack Obama delivered against these benefits. By comparing the most compelling benefits to the perception of each presidential candidate we are able to determine who is best positioned to be elected president.

Between October 28 and October 31, we surveyed readers here on Branding Strategy Insider regarding the McCain and Obama brands. 100 people responded to the survey. Those people represent 29 states and DC, with a heavier mix from NY, CA and FL. 59.6% were male, while 40.4% were female. Ages ranged from 18 years old to 74 years old. 61.2% were married. The average household income skewed high. The mode was $100,000-$149,999. Political party registration was as follows: 35.4% Democratic, 21.2% Republican, 21.2% none, 18.2% Independent, 4% other. Given the respondent mix and the ending sample size, the data is directional but not projectable.

We explored 27 personality attributes and 35 platform issues. The personality attributes included those most often associated with strong brands (trustworthy, reliable, etc.) and those most often used by the candidates in describing themselves and each other. The 35 platform issues were taken from the platforms of the five largest political parties.

We first wanted to understand which personality attributes and platform issues were the most desired in selecting a president. They are as follows: (Please note: you can click to enlarge all tables)

Related to that, we wanted to understand the least desirable attributes. They are as follows:

Children vs. Obesity: Ban Ads or Tax Junk Food?

Recent research has shown that British (and American) children are getting fatter, suggested there is a link between childhood obesity and a slew of adult ailments, and revealed that 95% of food ads aimed at children promote brands that contain unhealthy levels of fat, salt and sugar.

Therefore, argue a number of food lobbying groups, by restricting unhealthy foods advertising to children we will reduce their consumption and thus improve the health of future generations.

Heady stuff. Charlie Powell from Sustain, an alliance of campaigners for better food, claims: "Advertising is designed to exploit children's vulnerabilities." Meanwhile, Kath Dalmeny from the Food Commission says: "Junk food advertisers know that children are especially susceptible to marketing messages. They target children as young as two with toys, cartoon characters, gimmicky packaging and interactive web sites to ensure they pester their parents for the products."

Darren Neville, editor of Consumer Policy Review, claims that children are "bombarded with marketing and advertising for what are often unhealthy foods".

We should take these arguments with a large pinch of (metaphorical) salt.