Branding Strategy Insider

The Cure For Brand Myopia

Earlier this year I decided to ride the London Eye. It was busy - so busy that the line of people queueing to purchase tickets snaked out of the ticketing room and onto the street overlooking the Thames. In an attempt to manage the line, the Eye's management had constructed a queuing system using barriers. Staff informed customers as they joined the queue that to reduce its length, only one member of each family group could stand in line. The rest of the group would have to wait outside for the 25 minutes it was going to take to get to the end of the line and buy tickets.

And that is how I spent part of my weekend - shuffling sadly along airport-style queueing lanes as part of an army of separated fathers, husbands and boyfriends. Occasionally a child or mother would visit the line and enquire on the progress being made. One husband and wife took turns to queue while the other watched over their four children.

Intriguingly, all of this happened in direct association with British Airways, the Eye's sponsor at the time. The BA logo hovered conspicuously overhead throughout this sombre experience. In direct contrast to BA's TV campaign, in which a family is united by the airline, this BA experience was all about separation. While BA's sponsorship of the attraction was an attempt (for the most part successful) to associate its brand with Britain, entertainment and the 21st century, my queuing experience - which took longer than my trip on the Eye - created an entirely different brand experience. It bracketed BA with the inane systems, dislocation and pointlessness I associate with all air travel.

There is a tendency toward brand myopia among brand managers. They see only the big brand strategies they commission and ignore the everyday experiences that actually constitute the brand from a consumer's perspective.

Marketing Mistakes, Marketing Lessons

Long ago and far away, I started my career at General Electric. It was the early 1960s and, in hindsight, it was a wonderful time. Competition, as we know it, just didn't exist.

GE's main full-line competitor was a company called Westinghouse, but by today's standards, it was barely a real one. Westinghouse was a player, but GE actually saw the company more as a necessity. If that competition ever went away, the government would pounce on GE to break its hold on "electricity."

Back then, nobody really worried much about mistakes because CEOs figured they would be able to get any lost business back in the end. (Jack Welch hadn't yet arrived at GE. After he took over, everyone worried a lot more about mistakes.)

What's Changed

Today there are so many competitors that they quickly take your business if you make a mistake. Your chances of getting it back are slim unless someone else in turn makes a mistake. Hoping for competitors to make mistakes is like running a race with the hope that other racers will fall down. It isn't a very smart strategy.

Even worse is the large number of participants in each race. Every category is haunted by what I call the "tyranny of choice." Consumers have so many choices that one false step brings not just one, but an army of competitors to take advantage of your misstep. And what's especially tragic is that you don't get that business back. It's gone. Does General Motors come to mind?

Now let’s take a look at some of the most prevalent blunders in our hypercompetitive world and hint at the lessons they provide.

The "Me-too" Mistake

Many people believe that the basic issue in marketing is convincing the prospect that they have a better product or service. They say to themselves, "We might not be first but we're going to be better."

That may be true, but if you're late into a market space and have to do battle with large, well-established competitors, then your marketing strategy is probably faulty. Me-too just won't cut it.

The 9 Characteristics of a Strong Brand

A strong brand is defined and characterized by the following 9 dimensions:

   1. A brand drives shareholder value
   2. The brand is led by the boardroom and managed by brand marketers with an active buy-in from all stakeholders
   3. The brand is a fully integrated part of the entire organisation aligned around multiple touch points
   4. The brand can be valued in financial terms and must reside on the asset side of the balance sheet
   5. The brand can used as collateral for financial loans and can be bought and sold as an asset
   6. Customers are willing to pay a substantial and consistent price premium for the brand versus a competing product and service
   7. Customers associate themselves strongly with the brand, its attributes, values and personality, and they fully buy into the concept which is often characterized by a very emotional and intangible relationship (higher customer loyalty)
   8. Customers are loyal to the brand and would actively seek it and buy it despite several other reasonable and often cheaper options available (higher customer retention rate)
   9. A brand is a trademark and marquee (logo, shape, colour etc) which is fiercely and pro-actively protected by the company and its legal advisors

Sponsored By: The Blake Project - 2008 Brand Education Seminars

Brands Always Win

Greetings from  Riga where I am running a two-day session on branding for Latvian companies. I arrived to discover that, by way of a very Baltic introduction to the session, the organisers had drafted a delightful parable to explain the importance of branding.

Aleksander lived in Liepaja. One weekend he decided to travel to Riga to find a wife. On Friday night he met a beautiful girl called Alina.

They sat and talked and finally Aleksander asked her to marry him.

"Why should I marry you?", she asked. "Marry me because I am tall, 175cm." Alina thought about this for a while but then she saw another boy on the dance floor. She stood up and began to walk away. "Why will you not marry me?" asked Aleksander. "Because that boy over there is 5cm taller than you so I should marry him instead," she replied as she disappeared.

On Saturday night Aleksander met another wonderful girl called Sandra.

They sat and talked and finally he asked her to marry him.

"Why should I marry you?" Sandra asked. "You should marry me because I am rich, I have 50 Lats in my bank account," said Aleksander. Sandra agreed immediately and off they went for a celebration dinner. After their meal Aleksander received a bill for 45 Lats. As he was paying the bill Sandra began to walk out.

Defying Demographic Segmentation

I started to feel it in late 2006. An inchoate sensation in my knees that gradually moved up my spine as the weeks progressed until it finally started to influence my thought processes.

Looking back on my actions it is clear that my behaviour patterns had begun to radically change long before I actually realised anything was different.

My growing interest in plants and sudden attraction to gardening implements should have tipped me off. Then there were the protracted conversations with colleagues about superannuation and pension plans that were genuinely exciting.

Most telling of all was my increased predilection for real-estate agents' windows. Even when in Tokyo visiting friends last month, I found it impossible not to stop and scan the properties on display, despite the fact that the words and numbers that accompanied each picture were as indecipherable to me as they were irrelevant.

Consumers, you see, don't age. Instead, we leap from one demographic segment to the next. Rather than following the gradual chronology of life, marketers have always clustered us into classic sub-groups.

I have been ageing all the time, but as far as marketers are concerned, whether I am 18 years and two days old or 34 years and 300 days, I am the same man. Until, of course, I cross the threshold into the next market segment, then I change completely.

I turned 35 on December 20, 2006. While it is not a milestone for most cultures, we marketers realise its significance. I left behind the 18- to 34-year-old segment that accounts for 64% of lager consumption, 68% of football attendance and 79% of soft-core pornography. I became a card-carrying member of the 35- to 55- year-old segment that dominates market sectors such as barbecues and erectile dysfunction.

The Essence of Branding Strategy

A branding program is all about differentiating your product or company from the others in your category. And, if you don't have a point of difference, you'd better have a very low price. An example was BMW, which many, many years ago established the powerful position of being the "Ultimate Driving Machine." It has driven that differentiating idea to become one of the world's most successful premium automobiles.

Many companies just don't understand this. All they promote are meaningless slogans. Michael Porter said it very well: "Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value. The essence of strategy is in the activities--choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. Otherwise, a strategy is nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition.”

Sponsored By: Brand Aid 

Co-opetition Strategy

This competitive strategy recognizes the value of viewing the marketplace not as a “zero sum game” in which your gain is always someone else’s loss but rather as a place in which value can be created by discovering mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations that would traditionally have been considered competitors. This approach recognizes that organizations become stronger the more value-generating relationships that they forge. We believed in and extensively practiced this approach during my tenure at e-Learning provider Element K.

•    We provided our content/courses to Learning Management System vendors. 
•    We offered our Learning Management System to organizations that want to host other companies’ content. 
•    We actually private labeled our entire e-Learning solution to organizations that wanted to compete with Element K in the e-Learning space. 
•    We provided referrals to online degree granting schools in return to their referrals to us for continuing education.

And the list could go on and on. Suffice it to say that most of our competitors were also our business partners in one-way or another. This approach offers numerous advantages for the company that pursues it:
•    Value-added exchange of information (latest product/service features, competitive information, industry trends, etc.)
•    A cooperative relationship with your competitors
•    More business referrals
•    The ability to provide products and services and gain business that would have been difficult to accomplish alone
•    More exposure to more deal flows
•    A greater exposure of your brand in the marketplace (leading to greater brand awareness)
•    The ability to focus on building your organization’s unique core competencies

Attributes of a Great Brand

Today I am sharing some of the questions and answers from a 1998 interview I gave regarding the attributes of a great brand. I hope you recognize them in your brand.

Q: How important is the name of a brand?

Most great brands have  good names.  Their names verbally connect to their positioning strategies.

Cottonelle.  It's not cotton, but it's cottony and soft.

Dial.  Round-the-clock protection.

Taster's Choice.  Tastes and smells like the ground roast coffee.

Toys R Us.  What else is there to say?

And one of my favorites:  Roach Motel.  Roaches check in, but they don't check out.

If you can take your concept and your name and put them together as a memory device, you can do very well.

Sometimes the name and position are all in one.  DieHard batteries.  The name says it all.

Q: Does a great brand have to be first in its category?

Many of them are.  While the business world buzzes about quality, the real success stories tend to be the ones that are first.

McDonald's became the first high-speed hamburger.  Coke can lay claim to being the "real thing" because they were indeed the founder of colas.  The first champagne, Dom Perignon.  It's also the most-recognized name in champagnes.  The Club for cars is a modern-day first that started a whole new category.

Now the trick here is to be first with a good idea, not a dumb idea.  Frosty Paws was the first ice cream for dogs.  They claim, "It's not ice cream, but your dog will think it is."  Now how much does my dog know about ice cream?  Not much.  Bad ideas don't become great brands.

The Business Impact of Strong Brands

What is the business impact of strong brands?  Why are strong brands so important?

•    Brands deliver the following key benefits to organizations:
-    Increased revenues and market share
-    Decreased price sensitivity (or the ability to charge price premiums to consumers and the trade)
-    Increased customer loyalty
-    For manufacturers, additional leverage over retailers
-    Increased profitability
-    Increased stock price and shareholder value
-    Increased clarity of vision
-    Increased ability to mobilize an organization’s people and focus its activities
-    Ability to attract and retain high quality employees
-    A strong, well-positioned brand extends the life of your organization indefinitely by providing independence from a particular product category, increasing flexibility for future growth (through extension), and therefore, increasing the ability to expand into new product and service categories and alter the product and service mix to keep up with marketplace demands.  Without a strong brand, your organization’s life span will be tied to the life span of the products it manufactures or the services it provides. 

Brand Positioning: Key Questions

To apply positioning thinking to your own company's situation, here are six key questions to ask yourself:

1. What position, if any do we already own in the prospect's mind?

Get the answer to this question from the marketplace, not the marketing manager. If this requires a few dollars for research, so be it. Spend the money. It's better to know exactly what you're up against now than to discover it later when nothing can be done about it.

2. What position do we want to own?

Here is where you bring out your crystal ball and try to figure out the best position to own from a long-term point of view.

3. What companies must be outgunned if we are to establish that position?

If your proposed position calls for a head-to-head approach against a marketing leader, forget it. It's better to go around an obstacle rather than over it. Back up. Try to select a position that no one else has a firm grip on.

4. Do we have enough marketing money to occupy and hold the position?

A big obstacle to successful positioning is attempting to achieve the impossible. It takes money to build a share of mind. It takes money to establish a position. It takes money to hold a position once you've established it.

The noise level today is fierce. There are just too many "me-too" products and too many "me-too" companies vying for the mind of the prospect. Getting noticed is getting tougher.