Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Strategy: Marketing’s North Star

Procter & Gamble conceived the business strategy of “Brand Management”. Brand management focused attention on product specialization and differentiation instead of business function. By distinguishing the qualities of each brand from all other P&G brands, each would avoid competing with one another by targeting different consumer markets with a different set of benefits. This was especially important in product categories where the company manufactured several competing brands, like laundry detergent.

Over the years, P&G and the companies that embraced the brand management concept became extremely successful. In the early 1940s, Ted Bates & Company decided to conduct an extensive research study to find out why and reverse engineer the success of these brands. The company researched “successful advertising campaigns,” to see whether they could identify a pattern. What they found was that the most successful brands—those that both lead their category and produced the highest ROI—used what they (Rosser Reeves) termed the Unique Selling Proposition or “USP.” 

The concept of “USP” has three guiding principles:

• The proposition must be clearly stated to the consumer: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
• The proposition itself must be unique. It must express a specific benefit that competitors do not, will not, or cannot offer.
• The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product.

Brand positioning

In the late 60’s and early 70’s, the concept of “brand” began to take on new meaning, including the larger concept of image and values. Al Ries and Jack Trout captured this evolution in their Harvard Business Review article and later authored a book by the same title: POSITIONING: The battle for your mind. Their concept stated that it was not product superiority that mattered, but rather consumers’ perception of a given brand that paved the road to success. This concept was dubbed “brand positioning” and to this day it remains the standard for developing successful brands.

Brand Positioning Elements Defined

The brand position or brand positioning is how the brand is perceived in the context of competitive alternatives. As brand consultants, when we develop brand positioning statements for clients, we include a target customer definition, brand essence, brand promise, brand archetype and brand personality, giving the intended brand position/positioning (as opposed to the actual brand position in the mind of the customer) greater depth.

The unique value proposition and brand promise are similar. They both focus on the one or two key points of difference between the brand in question and other brands. Typically, these points of difference are brand benefits, benefits that are relevant, unique, compelling and believable for the brand in question. Brands typically focus on only one or two benefits and research has shown that people can’t link more than that number of benefits to a given brand in their minds. The first or most important benefit is sometimes referred to as the primary brand benefit. The unique value proposition for Volvo is “safety.” As a brand promise, it could be expressed as “Only Volvo assures a safe ride to parents who care about their children’s safety.”

Brand essence is the “heart and soul” of the brand, its timeless quality, expressed as “adjective, adjective, noun.” Some people refer to the brand essence as the brand mantra, while for others, the brand’s mantra is synonymous with the brand’s tagline or slogan.

Disney’s brand essence: Fun family entertainment

Nike’s brand essence: Authentic athletic performance

Starbuck’s brand essence: Rewarding everyday moments

What Is A Brand? We Really Should Know By Now

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t know how to define brand. This applies to people that don’t work in marketing, those that work in marketing and even worse those that work in brand. I think a brand is:

A construct that delivers marketing promises to facilitate the formation of a mutually beneficial and evolving bond between the seller (or corporation) and its stakeholders based on functional and emotional values. 

Sure, it’s a bit complicated and involved. But brands are complicated and involved. It fits. This is how I arrived at this definition….

When defining something it’s important to be clear on what it is and is not. A brand is not a logo.  If you take away the logo there is nothing there. You have no brand. This is a shockingly simple statement yet if I had received £1 for every time I have used that sentence I would be typing this blog from my villa in the Seychelles (as opposed to from a train leaving London!).  Lovely thought….

So what is a brand? It’s lots of things.  Branding Prof Leslie de Chernatony (and colleagues) have developed a helpful model where a brand can be considered from an input, output or evolutionary perspective.

From an input perspective i.e. something the marketer ‘creates’, a brand is:

What Is A Brand?

I recently had a conversation with a retired CEO who fancied himself a savvy marketer.  He was recounting how he had participated in a rebranding project for a not-for-profit organization on whose board he served.  He was very proud of this work and went on to tell me how they had carefully chosen the symbol to represent the brand in its logo. When I asked him what his brand’s unique point of difference was, he indicated that it was the unique symbol featured in the logo. When I asked him why people would choose the brand over its competition, he wasn’t sure how to answer. When I asked him what the brand’s promise was, again he wasn’t sure how to answer.

With my constant immersion in branding, I sometimes forget that some people still think that a brand is a logo or an ad campaign and nothing more, even some people who should know better.

A brand is a source of a promise to its customers. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. It does so not only to place itself into the purchase consideration set, but even more importantly, to be the brand chosen from that purchase consideration set.  This is also sometimes referred to as the brand’s unique value proposition. Whether it is called a unique value proposition or a promise of relevant differentiated benefits, it is very important that the promise or proposition be delivered consistently at each point of customer contact, time after time.

Complex Language Weakening Brands

"Call the law enforcement officers. We're being robbed."

Not a likely scenario. What the average person is much more apt to say is: "Call the cops. We're being robbed."

Unfortunately, marketing people are not average persons. Marketing people are much more likely to elevate their languages until, in some cases, they lose their meanings.

A few years back a senior marketing person at United Parcel Service asked me what I thought of the company's trademark.

I like it, I said, but what UPS really needs is a motivating idea or rallying cry, something like: UPS delivers more parcels to more people in more places than any other company in the world.

UPS, he said, is not in the parcel delivery business.

Huh. That came as a big surprise to me. We're a customer and I always thought that UPS was in the parcel delivery business.

No. UPS is in the logistics business.

He wasn't joking. At the time UPS was in the process of repainting some 88,000 vehicles with its new theme: Synchronizing the World of Commerce.

A serious impediment to communications is this constant upgrading of the language. No aspect of life is left untouched by the upgrade police. Not only does a term have to be politically correct, it has to be as long and as complicated as possible.

Branding Anything and Everything

I have long contended that almost everything is branded and many things can and should be managed as brands. Brands have identities, including personalities. Further, brands usually possess certain values and they usually make promises to their customers. There are usually a few key things commonly associated with each brand in people’s minds. Given that definition of brands, let us explore various entities in several different categories to determine which ones seem to possess the qualities of brands.

Municipalities:
•    Las Vegas
•    Dubai
•    Singapore
•    Paris
•    New York
•    Santa Fe

Musical groups/Entertainers:
•    Grateful Dead
•    Michael Jackson
•    Johnny Cash
•    Sigur Ros
•    Eminem
•    Phish

Building a Brand vs. Building a Business

Are you building a business? Or are you building a brand? Silly questions, you might be thinking. Naturally, you are trying to do both.

But that might be a mistake.

What's good for the business is not necessarily good for the brand. And vice versa.

What's a brand anyway? It's a word that stands for something in the mind of prospects. That definition, by the way, is at odds with conventional thinking.

Most managers equate a brand with its celebrity index. The more famous the brand, the more powerful it is. "Making our brand name well-known" seems to be the conventional approach to brand building.

Chevrolet is one of the world's best-known automobile brands, but how valuable is the Chevrolet brand? Not very.

Chevrolet doesn't make Interbrand's list of the 100 most-valuable global brands. Chevrolet, like many other exceptionally well-known names, isn't worth much because it doesn't stand for anything.

It's not just Chevrolet. The U.S. automobile industry markets 14 vehicle brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, GMC, Hummer, Jeep, Lincoln, Mercury, Pontiac, Saab and Saturn.

I would guess that every one of these brands (with the exception of GMC) is exceptionally well-known with a recognition score in excess of 90%.

Except for a house, an automobile is the most expensive product a person might buy in his or her lifetime. In addition, an automobile has enormous street visibility. These factors combine to give automotive brands a huge advantage in the battle for the consumer's mind.

It's not surprising that 11 automobile brands made Interbrand's most valuable list. But just one of those 11 brands was an American brand. (Ford at No. 49.) The other 10 were European and Asian brands. Why? The European and Asian brands stood for something.

The Metrics of Brand Equity

There are several stakeholders concerned with brand equity, such as the firm, the customer, the distribution channels, media and other stakeholders like the financial markets and analysts, depending on the type of company ownership. But ultimately it is the customer who is the most critical component in defining brand equity as it is his/her choices that determine the success or failure of the company and the brand.

Customer knowledge about the brand, the perceived differences and its effects on purchase behavior and decisions lies at the heart of brand equity. The knowledge and associations attached to the brand result in choices which have a direct impact on the brand's financial performance and shareholder value.

Brand equity is the combined measure of brand strength and consists of three sets of metrics: knowledge, preference and financial. Each of the measures under these three metrics is critical and the boardroom must ensure that the brand portfolio scores high in each of these parameters to optimize the financial outcome from strong brands.

Knowledge metrics measures a brand's awareness and associations through the many stages of recognition, aided, unaided and top of mind recall. Similarly the functional and emotional associations of a brand are important drivers of brand equity. It is crucial for brands to score high on both awareness and association attributes to establish and sustain their presence in the market place.

The New Positioning

This week I came across a 1997 interview I gave to Bob Lammons. The more things change the more they stay the same...

Q: What's the battlefield look like to you these days?

"Well, there's good news and bad news on the battle front. The good news is that, because of all the downsizing and re-engineering we've gone through in recent years, U.S. companies have learned how to handle global competition very well. The bad news is it is still amazingly competitive out there -- kill or be killed."

Q: In The New Positioning, you talk about the explosion of information in business today, and our inability to handle it. Isn't it good to have lots of information?

"Not really. Many people have so much information these days it paralyzes them. The Internet has made things worse, because it's full of non-edited information. I call it 'non-information.' It's a vast wasteland of unfiltered facts, pseudo-facts and non-facts, and the mind doesn't know what to do with all this data."

Q: You quote experts like Edward de Bono and Jack Welch on the "lost art of thinking." Does this result from information overload?

"To some extent, yes. The thing I find dramatically missing in business today is common sense. Many managers are so concerned about losing their jobs, they spend a disproportionate amount of time collecting and generating data to back up whatever decisions are ultimately made. "

Q: How can business-to-business communicators benefit from this insight?

The Law Of Leadership

It's better to be first than it is to be better.

Many people believe that the basic issue in marketing is convincing prospects that you have a better product or service.

Not true. If you have a small market share and you have to do battle with larger, better-financed competitors, then your marketing strategy was probably faulty in the first place. You violated the first law of marketing.

The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It's the law of leadership: It's better to be first than it is to be better. It's much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one that did get there first.

You can demonstrate the law of leadership by asking yourself two questions:

1) What's the name of the first person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo? Charles Lindbergh, right?

2) What's the name of the second person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo? Not so easy to answer, is it?

The second person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo was Bert Hinkler. Bert was a better pilot than Charlie-he flew faster, he consumed less fuel. Yet who has ever heard of Bert Hinkler? (He left home and Mrs. Hinkler hasn't heard from him since.)

In spite of the evident superiority of the Lindbergh approach, most companies go the Bert Hinkler route. They wait until a market develops. Then they jump in with a better product, often with their corporate name attached. In today's competitive environment, a me-too product with a line extension name has little hope of becoming a big, profitable brand.