Branding Strategy Insider

Establishing a 'Branded Language'

Disney, Kellogg's, and Gillette are three completely different brands with one commonality. Over the past decade, they've established a branded language, whether they know it or not. In my latest book, we found 74 percent of today's consumers associate the word "crunch" with Kellogg's. Another 59 percent consider  the word "masculine" and Gillette as one and the same. Americans formed the strongest association of masculinity to Gillette, by an astounding 84 percent.

Disney scored higher in purloined language than any other brand. This brand welcomes you to its kingdom of fantasy, dreams, promises, and magic. If you've stayed at a Disney resort, taken a Disney cruise, or eaten in a Disney restaurant, it doesn't take long to hear "cast members" greeting guests with, "Have a magical day!"

For over half a century, Disney has consistently built its brand on a foundation much larger than its logo. A substantial chunk relies on songs and voiceovers that almost always include Disney-branded words. Associating words with brands comes at no extra cost. Disney's manages to "own" six of them: "dreams," "creativity, "fantasy," "smiles," "magic," and "generation."

Our BRAND sense study shows over 80 percent of the world's population directly associates these generic words with Disney.

Recession Marketing

A few years ago I was working for one of the major wine brands and analysing the Japanese market which, as always, was proving fascinatingly difficult to understand. The more I looked at the data, the more unlikely the story became: throughout the 90s, a time of unprecedented economic woe in Japan, the consumption of high-end wines increased dramatically.

My French boss was greatly amused with my confusion and eventually took me aside. 'Listen Mark,' he said. 'Let me explain. If you are on a plane, and the plane is about to crash, you don't drink piss.'

Perhaps not the most elegant of explanations, but one that has stayed with me, and one that should be top of mind as we enter 2008. Marketers with long memories or a keen grasp of macro-economics already sense that there is more in the New Year's air than the cold wind from the Continent.

Repositioning The Competition

This is a post about a very powerful marketing strategy that has fallen into disuse. Why? I have no idea, unless it's about creative people thinking that it's not creative. It's called "repositioning the competition" and I, along with my ex-partner Al Ries, wrote about it in a book called, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind.

In simple terms, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out. "The world is round," said Christopher Columbus. "No, it's not," said the public, "it's flat."

To convince the public otherwise, 15th century scientists first had to prove the world wasn't flat. One of their more convincing arguments was the fact that sailors at sea were first able to observe the tops of the masts of an approaching ship, then the sails, then the hull. If the world were flat, they would see the whole ship at once.

All the mathematical arguments in the world weren't as effective as a simple observation the public should verify themselves. Once an old idea is overturned, selling the new idea is often ludicrously simple. As a matter of fact, people will often actively search for a new idea to fill the void.

Never be afraid of conflict either. The crux of a repositioning program is undercutting an existing concept, product, or person. Conflict, even personal conflict, can build a reputation overnight. Where would Sam Ervin have been without Richard Nixon?

Internal Brand Building: Overcoming Obstacles

We have conducted numerous “Internal Brand Building” workshops in the last few years.  The following are approaches that people in various organizations have found to be effective in overcoming some of the obstacles encountered in creating brand-building organizations:

Issue: How do you get corporate officers to support brand management initiatives when they don’t understand the value of brand management or marketing?

Ideas:

•    Influence the leaders with books and speakers.
•    Enlist the help of credible outside brand experts to spend some time with the corporate officer group.
•    Provide case studies of how brand management has worked in comparable companies and industries.
•    Symbolically “clean house” in the marketing department. Hire some new high profile marketers with a history of success.
•    Understand operating units’ objectives.  Help units achieve their objectives through brand-enhancing initiatives.  That is, tie what you do to others’ objectives.
•    Invite senior executives to help you solve brand management problems.  Appeal to their egos and their propensity to mentor.  (They will be much more bought in to the solution if they helped craft it.)
•    Build momentum for brand building initiatives from a grass-roots groundswell.  This requires intensive communication and education.  Start by identifying and influencing brand advocates throughout the organization.
•    Work with HR to integrate a brand-building module into a variety of employee classes.
•    To instill confidence, the marketing leaders should be optimistic, using words and phrases such as “control,” “promising opportunity,” “return,” etc.**

Issue: How do you get corporate officers to act as brand champions when they are accountable for other corporate priorities?

Turn Customers Into Marketers

P2P marketing is hardly a new phenomenon, however it is a phenomena that is about to be leveraged to unprecedented heights using our next generation of kids. During my "BRANDchild" research, one of the brands that impressed me most was U.S.-based Jones Soda. The product itself is hardly different from any other soda. What distinguishes it from the pack is it's created a persona that draws kids to it like a magnet.

Jones Soda identified an alternative distribution strategy. Instead of going the supermarket-drugstore route, it placed the product in clothing stores, primarily in skate and surf shops. These are not usually associated with drink sales. The unique move gained the attention and respect of a young audience.

But Jones Soda went a step further, introducing personalized labels. By logging onto its Web site, tweens could design their own labels and potentially see them on bottles. Thousands of labels have been produced, all gloriously created by the user group.

Where's the P2P element? It became clear when personalized labels were introduced. Unique talent emerged from individual surfers, skaters, cyclists, and wake boarders. Jones Soda began to sponsor these emerging riders. Not stopping there, it began producing a merchandising line around the individuals, turning its own customers into brands and brand advocates simultaneously.

Brand Survival Techniques

As international financial uncertainty continues, so does the test of branding.

I’m sure you’d agree with me that the easiest strategy for securing a couple more customers is to reduce the price of your product or service. But, needless to say, this is also a strategy, which will damage your brand, weakening it in the eyes of consumers. As soon as the economy starts looking up, your discounted brand will be cast aside in favour of those perceived to be market-leaders. Your competitors will generate customer loyalty and you’ll lose the custom you thought you’d harnessed.

So, no matter how tempting the price-reducing strategy might seem, don’t adopt it. The world of branding offers you a lot of other survival strategies, based both on rationality and emotion. Here are a couple of hints to help you generate sales in the hard times and to even bond your brand more strongly to your customers.

1. Offer more value for the same price.

We see this technique in action every day. It isn’t perceived as a price reduction, rather as adding customer value. For example, Pepsi might offer 25% more cola in its already gigantic bottles for the usual price. Interestingly, and this is a fact, consumption increases. And consumer perception doesn’t ascribe a price reduction, and consequential downgrading of the brand, to the offer. Instead, customers perceive the offer as being a nice gesture on the brand’s part.

Brand Building: Resisting 'Sameness'

Ever heard of a brand that rejects customers? Probably not. Brands are uniformly desperate to attract them. So why would a brand take the opposite approach?

Some years ago, I developed the concept for the Pepsi Web site's relaunch. I was challenged by the big question, how do you create a Web site for promoting sticky soda? The site had to be cool and relevant; it had to make visitors drink more soda than they already did. Given Pepsi's prominence, the task might appear easy. Yet without abusing the usual solutions, such as games, screensavers, and music news, it wasn't. Those hackneyed techniques were, even back then, so overdone they weren't suited to brand building unless the brand was in the gaming or music industries.

The solution was extracted from a simple proposition: Kids love challenges. It became the basis for a highly unusual approach that aimed to reject Pepsi site visitors rather than embrace them.

To enter the site, visitors were required to pass an intelligence test. If their answers weren't clever enough, quick enough, or simply correct, the site rejected them. If visitors succeeded in getting in, there were prizes. First prize was... a trip into outer space! Yes, a real one, shared by six lucky people.
The assignment taught me reverse marketing isn't such a bad thing. Thousands of kids tried to enter the site every day. And thousands of rejected visitors spread rumours about "backdoors" into the site that allowed users to bypass the test.

Building Brands & Building Traffic

Some years ago, an Australian takeout pizza place used the Internet in an attempt to boost sales. Traffic was slow. Hardly anyone visited the site. The need for an increase in traffic was urgent. If traditional online media planning had been used, banners and links would have been purchased and the URL added to the shop's phone-book entry. It might even have invested in some traditional ads.

The pizza place went a different route. Instead of spreading money between off- and online ads, it spent the entire budget on radio. The spots were simple but extremely effective. So effective, the restaurant's increased business caused most of the local competition to shut down.

How did they do it?

Instead of offering discounts or merely promoting its URL, the pizza place's radio ads asked listeners to tear out all the pizza-restaurant pages from their yellow pages and bring them in. In return for the pages, customers received a free pizza of their choice and a sticker with the restaurant's URL.

Very clever!

Because the contact information for all the other pizza joints in town disappeared from customers' primary reference source, only one set of contact details was left in households that complied: the URL for the restaurant that dreamed up the promotion. That single outlet is now a franchise.

Creating traffic is not necessarily a matter of buying ads or taking a traditional approach.

Contextual Branding

When I first surfed the Net, some ten years ago, I clicked on every banner ad that came before me. I reckon this was, not so much because I was in desperate need for home loan advice, fly fishing equipment or wedding dresses, but because I was curious to see what a banner ad was all about. I can promise you, I'm not curious any longer!

But I am still curious about ads that appear in logical contexts. In these cases, the advertising message makes sense and, piquing my curiosity because of this fact, encourages me to revert to my earlier discovery-oriented behaviour.

I wonder if I'm the only user in the world behaving like this. Hard to tell because, according to Digitas, less than 1% of larger sites compile meaningful profiles on their customers. And, as a result of this lack of consumer behaviour data, even fewer manage to situate their messages in within appropriate, interest-compelling contexts.

You might have occasion to claim that a great offer on a respected brand compels consumer attention. But the reality is that such opportunities are rare. In fact, according to another study conducted by AC Nielsen in Northern Europe, less than 0.05% of banner ads' messages are blessed with the uniqueness that harnesses the attention of consumers beyond the ads' main target groups.

Maybe m-commerce will solve this problem: the Japanese I-Mode phones tell you that a friend is in your vicinity and about to pass by, and can then offer an online coupon which you redeem by taking the passing friend to a nearby coffee shop; a bookstore will inform you that the book you've been searching for is available in-store, at the very minute you're passing by the shop. But even though technology like this in Europe and Japan is miles ahead of that in the USA, the fact is that m-commerce represented less than 0.002% of the e-commerce that took place over the last year.

This fact leads me back to the premise which prompted this post: the urgent need for a revision of the way we serve our message, the timing of the message and … you guessed it — context.

Contextual Branding is simple. It's about how, when and where you serve your message to achieve the best possible result.

Branding: Solution vs. Direction

When problems arise, whether they are in marketing, politics or life, everyone looks for a solution. We have all been programmed to solve problems with solutions.

Interestingly, my many years of being in the problem solving business has led me to believe that often, looking for a solution is a fool’s errand. There is no easy solution for complex problems. What there is, is a direction. The reason is that often there are too many variables in a situation. Unlike solving a mathematical problem, you are often dealing with the human condition, which certainly adds a level of complexity that would drive a mathematician to drink. There’s competition, or personal agendas or disruptive technology or, in diplomacy, country interest.

A longer-term direction is a lot more flexible as it gives you some maneuvering room to deal with change and unpredictable events. Often just knowing where you are going is the best you can do in a difficult situation. It also is the essence of a good strategy.

Let me explain this process in two examples. One is a business problem and the other is a diplomatic problem. Both are very complex and very serious. And both are very similar.

The first is General Motors. As you’ve read, there is no easy solution for a company that has steadily lost market share for over twenty years. The result: too many plants, too many people, too many retirees with high health care costs and brands that have lost their meaning with years of making them look alike, sound alike and pricing them alike. This situation can only be resolved with a direction and that direction is obvious. GM has to reposition all its brands so that the marketplace will know the difference between Saturn, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac. In other words, if BMW stands for driving, Volvo stands for safety and Toyota stands for reliability, what do GMs brands stand for? In many ways it is what Alfred Sloan did when he put GM on a successful run to achieving almost half of the U.S. car market.

Getting this done won’t be easy, as each brand must be given a unique position, styling and pricing and then each must stand on their own. In other words, you’re talking about major surgery and, if necessary, cutting out a brand that has no natural place to go in a world of killer competition. Doing this in the short term will not be possible. It will be a long, step-by-step journey. But, at least you will know where you are going. It is a clear direction.

The second example is the mother of all problems. It’s called Iraq. You might say that Iraq isn’t a marketing problem. I beg to differ.