Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Design: A Penis For London's Olympic Games?

They’ve done it again! Three years after the 2012 logo united England in disappointment, Locog – the organisers of the London Olympics – delivered another body blow for British design.

Wenlock, the mascot for the Olympic Games, was unveiled alongside Mandeville, the Para-Olympic mascot. With the usual Locog flair for impending disaster, the superficial elements were all stage-managed perfectly: a London schoolyard filled with happy, multicultural children playing harmoniously together against the backdrop of a graffiti rainbow. Suddenly, horrifically, they were joined by a man dressed as a large, white phallus who proceeded to frolic with the children in a quite alarming manner.

It was an indelible image. As a voiceover explained that the figure with the helmet-like head, single eye and dual appendages around his base was Wenlock, I was struck with a single, horrifying realisation: yes, but he looks like a penis.

Brand Building: The Advantage of Easier

Is “easier” better for your brand? Consider this excerpt from the article “Easy = True” by Drake Bennett: 

"Imagine that your stockbroker…who’s always giving you stock tips–called and told you that he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window.

The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce. This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.”

If making it easier to pronounce the name of a company can influence stock market performance for the better, can making your marketing “easier” for consumers build your brand and Marketing ROI?

Cognitive Fluency

A relatively new topic of research in the world of psychology these days is “cognitive fluency.” It’s the study of how the ease or difficulty in thinking about and understanding a topic influences our attitudes and preferences toward it. As a research topic, psychologists are learning that cognitive fluency affects our thinking in subtle, yet important ways. Many of which are very relevant for communicating with consumers.

Top Green Brands Shine On Earth Day

Forty years after the first Earth Day, greater pressure is being applied to brands to address environmental problems along with the problems of dirty clothes, financial services, technology, and convenient, quick-serve meals.

Yes, more consumers hear the phrases "fuel-efficient," "organic,""energy-efficient," "natural," "green," and "sustainable" more these days, consumers are on to all that. They want brands to walk-the-talk, and "green" has become the cost-of-entry in many categories, making larger and larger contributions to brand engagement and loyalty.

Driving "Green" Growth

A review of category loyalty drivers in our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index shows that how consumers define "green" varies significantly from category-to-category. And as more people become more aware of the dangers of ignoring the environment, and as brands have actually sought to establish standards, the definitions and expectations applied to brands have evolved.

6 Required Skills To Be A Great Marketer

 
Let's start with a basic but key criterion. Marketers have to be comfortable spending time with and listening to consumers. A significant proportion of marketers cannot find the time or the humility to spend time in the market. They are happy briefing research agencies and reviewing the results, but miss the fundamental starting point for any great marketer: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or 'important' you consider yourself.

Next, behavioural segmentation. Too many marketers think segments are people who have similar demographic characteristics. Rubbish. Segments are groups of consumers who want the same things - the fact that they might share an age range, gender or postcode is relevant only after we first use our market research to show specific clusters of shared needs. Segments built from survey data, with good behavioural names and a tight portrait to capture their identity, is a hallmark of a good marketer. The usual '18-35 male' crap indicates the opposite. 

Then comes targeting. A good marketer has made the leap of faith and accepted that fewer target consumers will deliver a better overall result. Usually, that means stepping back from the segmentation and only going after 10% or 20% of the potential market. Tight target segments mean the marketing has a chance to succeed. Too many marketers lose faith at this stage and end up targeting pretty much everyone.

Tiger Woods: Rehabilitating A Human Brand

 

It's been announced that Tiger Woods will be sitting down in Florida tomorrow with "friends, colleagues and close associates," not, as some might think to make additional apologies for his off-the-course activities, but to launch a new, 2010 version of Tiger Woods.

Think of it as this year's Human Brand re-launch, a re-introduction into the marketplace of an actual human being who represents 100% of the values, imbued meaning, and differentiation in the category in which they compete. The operative phrase being in the category in which they compete. And make no mistake about it, no matter what you've read or heard about hotel bedrooms, the category in which Tiger's human brandness resounds is still golf.

But Human Brands - Tiger Woods IS still a Human Brand no matter what you think of his record for fidelity whether coasting along or under assault, do better in the milieu that represents their values and skills best. Closure and contrition is come to against a background that resonates with the Human Brand's skill set. Kitchens for Martha Stewart, construction sites (highest floor possible, please) for Mr. Trump. Places they can be themselves or, more accurately, be the brand they are. For Woods, the setting is a golf course.

The golf course was the one place (aside from sponsorship and promotional and advertising venues that showed Tiger playing golf) that Tiger captivated the world, until the world was captivated by the stories of how he cheated on his wife. Think of it as his outdoor rehab facility, very effective for refurbishing images and mending marketing fences.

The Fall Of The Purchase Funnel

Once upon a time people lived in a state of positive expectations. There were relatively few products, great demand and most products enjoyed high brand differentiation. This was circa 1960, when most marketing models in use today were developed, like the purchase funnel, which measures advertising effectiveness.

The world has since changed dramatically. And, despite the rise of digital and the economic downturn, most old marketing axioms are still operative, miring marketers in an approach designed for a bygone era.

Take the relationship between supply and demand - its reversed. Today demand is scarce, supply plentiful. Second, over the past half-century we have learned so much about how people engage with brands.

We now understand that people are not two-dimensional datum to be manipulated by coupons or the latest hot-button offer. Current anthropological, linguistic and neuro-scientific evidence demonstrates that humans attach to things (product, person or idea) through a process of identification that coalesces longings at the personal, social levels.

Leading Brands And Being First In The Mind

 
Marketing people spend 95 percent of their time on brand maintenance when the real opportunities lie in brand creation.

Look what the iPod has done for Apple Computer. In the first quarter of 2005, Apple sold 5.3 million iPods. This year alone, iPod sales should reach $5 billion. The iPod brand dominates its market segment, accounting for 91 percent of all MP3 players with disk drives.

How do you create a brand like the iPod? It’s simple and at the same time difficult.

You become the first brand in a new category. No other strategy is as effective as this fundamental law of brand creation. Be first.

Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable brand, was the first cola.

McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food company, was the first hamburger chain.

Nescafe, the world’s largest-selling coffee, was the first instant coffee.

Yet where in the lexicon of marketing is the idea of being first ever mentioned? I have read every issue of Advertising Age since 1952 and except in the articles written by my daughter, myself or my former partner Jack Trout, I have never read an article about the importance of being first. 

Quite the contrary. The emphasis is always on creativity, research, sales promotion, media spending and especially ‘the big idea.’ Or perhaps the fad of the moment, be it the Internet, one-to-one marketing or the latest fad, branded entertainment.

Klein's Anti-Branding View Remains Baseless

 
When Naomi Klein wrote her book No Logo ten years ago, I refused to waste my time making a comment because it was so void of value for the reader that it would die a natural death. I believed the minor sensation it created was mostly on college campuses and in the offices of a few business executives.

Ten years later, however, Naomi Klein seems poised for a victory lap. For the life of me, I do not see the appeal of her philosophy as she looks at the world through smog covered glasses. She has a distinctly old Soviet dreary point of view since she lives in a world where everything is painted gray. Still, she makes a living dishing out her

glum perceptions to willing recipients. This time I say, "Enough!"

I've worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, but I've never seen one that plots hatred like Klein portrays in her books. Do companies make mistakes? Absolutely. Are there greedy executives? Without a doubt. There always have been and always will be villains in business and politics. It is human nature. Does the system need to be destroyed to create the grim, undifferentiated, life in the Klein gulag? No.

Klein's writings are in many ways offensive and without any constructive value. She talks about her research for No Logo, which included, "reading soul-destroying books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values...." Soul-destroying is a pretty damning accusation without a word of definition. I've written four books on brand building, and I wonder how many souls I destroyed vs. how many souls I helped. She makes ridiculous accusations that an "...increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces - schools, museums, parks...." I guess the bad corporations just forced themselves upon these parks, breaking into them and plastering their billboards on every tree. Get real.

Google and the Value of Branding

So Google’s potential withdrawal from China clearly allows them to play the moral high card and exhibit adherence to their brand values – epitomized by their motto “Do no evil.”  Despite the significant business implications, they prioritized safeguarding the information and trust they’ve garnered from users around the world – and we applaud them for it.

But, as we all know Google’s footprint in the Chinese market was still nascent with local Chinese search brands like Baidu, Youku and Sogou established as the dominant players. Still with its proven tenacity and continuous innovation, Google would have undoubtedly expanded that footprint and still may.

Whatever the rationale, Google’s stance raises the bigger question – what will other global companies in the massive Chinese market be willing to sacrifice for the sake of business over brand value? At least 34 other technology companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Symantec and Yahoo are all believed to have been targeted as well. We are still awaiting responses by most of these companies, who are looking into the allegations – although Microsoft, a common victim of global cyber-attacks, has stated that for now it’s still business as usual in China.

 

So has the brand gauntlet been thrown?

Brands and the Ladder of Life

One of the typical questions marketing people ask themselves is, What’s the lifetime value of a customer?

Presumably a company benefits by keeping its customers satisfied over an extended period of time. Nice idea in theory, but this kind of thinking often leads a company down the wrong path.

Take Saturn, for example. Here was a brand built on the ultimate in customer satisfaction. Comfortable showrooms, no high-pressure sales people, no haggling over prices. ‘A different kind of company. A different kind of car.’

The first Saturn model, the S series, was wildly successful. For a number of years, the average Saturn dealer sold more cars than the average dealer of any other brand. (In 1996, for example, the average Saturn dealer sold 776 cars versus 684 for Honda and 606 for Toyota. The average Chevrolet/Geo dealer that year sold only 237 cars.)

But what would happen when a Saturn customer got older and made more money? The S series, after all, was a relatively inexpensive compact car. No problem, decided Saturn management, We’ll take care of our customers by introducing the L series, a larger, more expensive car. ‘The next big thing from Saturn.’

Not a good move. Sales of the S series fell because the model was ‘long in the tooth.’ Sales of the L series suffered because prospective customers thought ‘it was a little too expensive for a Saturn.’