July 5, 2011. Got Brand?

Part 2

How to brand. Start with a legitimately great product. The best in the field. Think iPod.

Apple iPod Nano

Get there first and be the category. Think Band-Aid, Jell-O, Kleenex, Xerox.

Band Aid logo

Re-define an existing category.  This is about perception. FedEx defined overnight delivery for itself by being the solution when a package “absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” But Emery Airfreight introduced overnight delivery three decades before FedEx got into the business.

FedEx logo

If you can’t own or re-define a category, own a concept. Volvo is the safe car. Mercedes means prestige and Jeep means off-road. In contrast, Plymouth came to stand for nothing and after 73 years ended on Detroit’s scrap heap.

Focus on the consumer more than the product. To a manufacturer, the product is everything. To a consumer, it’s simply a means to an end.

image of a consumer

Once you’ve defined the brand your product wants to become, the really hard work begins. Because the greatest brand idea is useless unless it’s communicated:

Effectively. So the brand idea is clearly understood and remembered.

Consistently. Mixed messages are confusing and consumers hate being confused.

Pervasively. You’ll build your brand faster if all your marketing is delivering the same message.

Persistently. When your brand message is boring you to death, it’s just beginning to register with the average consumer.


June 6, 2011. GOT BRAND?

Part 1

Amazon currently offers over 3,000 titles on the subject of branding including, probably inevitably, Branding for Dummies. Google offers a hefty 74 million results for a “branding” search.

Branding for Dummies Book Cover

To begin, let’s get the terminology straight.

A brand is not a product. While every brand is associated with a product or service, only a small number of products come to be recognized as brands. A product is something tangible, something you can describe in concrete, objective terms. A brand is something different.

A brand is simply an idea — sometimes random, sometimes a collection of impressions — which a consumer is able to attach to a product name, or group of product names.

Think “Coca Cola”.

Coca Cola Pop Art Poster

A brand is the result of our mental efforts to make some sense of the vast, confusing collection of information around us. Your company should have a mission statement that carefully describes its reason for being. But consumers rarely identify with a company’s mission. For them the issue is much simpler: “What is this, and what can it do for me at what price?”

Not that consumers are the only people you need to consider in building your brand. Your brand speaks to a variety of audiences — all of them vital to your company.

Today, a brand is a necessity. Forget the dim, distant past. Now, a majority of products are bought, not sold. Consumers empowered by information and technology are taking control of the buying process. Instead of used car salesmen we have CarMax. Instead of an audio consultant, we have the big box store. Buyers often arrive armed with specs, two or three possible choices and are simply looking for the best deal. And a strong brand may well get you on that short list.

Why brand? Because a strong brand can reduce a product’s need to rely on price promotions and discounts.

Why brand? Because a strong brand name can justify premium pricing.

Why brand? Because a strong brand can generate incredible loyalty. Think Harley-Davidson.

Man driving a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle

Why brand? Because it is the glue that can hold together all your efforts — from product development to the smallest item in your marketing budget.

­­Why brand? Because in 1920 there were about 80 different makes of automobiles sold in the U.S. Today there are 40 and of the original 80, fewer than 10 survive. A brand is the best defense against competition and the hazards of the marketplace.

Why brand? Because it works.

A few years ago, the President of P&G said: “The difference between the value of P&G’s assets as measured by accounts (about $12 billion at the time) and its market value ($55 billion) is mostly  accounted for by the value of its brands.”

Put another way, the value of P&G’s brands was about three and a half times the value of the company’s physical assets.


May 2, 2011. 50% Click-Through Rates

Though you personally may have never seen one, they do exist. So why are you satisfied with 4%? Maybe because you haven’t realized that you can’t market to online customers the same way you market to offline customers.

A 2010 article in Harvard Business Review states: “To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long term customer relationships.”

The direct response business has realized this for years. It costs a fortune to get a new customer, but only a small fraction to keep an existing one.

How is that accomplished? By creating new influential, rewarding content.

I love content

Content is everything. It’s why people go to your site. Reading or watching it is what they do at your site. Social networks are all about sharing content. Content is what your customers use to make decisions and purchase. The weaker the content, the weaker the sales. And the only way to create a customer for life is to keep turning out content that attracts them. Content they like and trust.

To do this probably means the content producers need to broaden their horizons into fields like psychology, rhetoric, sales theory and creative writing—simply, the art of persuasion.

This may sound more difficult than what you’re doing now—and chances are it is. But no one ever labeled this industry easy. Fortunately there are excellent books out there to help you, as well as courses from universities.

Remember, the day you stop learning about your business is the day you start falling behind.




April 4, 2011. The “X” Factor

We all love advertising because it is sexy. It’s much more fun putting together a storyboard than a spreadsheet. But creativity’s fundamental contribution to meeting business goals is mathematical. Creativity is the only part of the marketing equation that can really be changed. It’s a force multiplier.

We’ve all sat through long meetings built around next year’s marketing plan. It usually goes something like this: the budget is the same or worse yet, less. There is no new super product in the pipeline. There is no way to change manufacturing, the sales force, distribution, pricing or margins. Yet, when you get to the year’s goals, they call for a 15% increase in sales and a 4% increase in net profits.

Now even the most challenged of mathematicians can tell you that those increases are an impossibility unless something in the equation changes. Otherwise, you will get exactly the same or even poorer results.

The only variable that has the power to make things happen is advertising. A great idea costs no more than a mediocre or bad one. Yet, it has the power to actually double or triple results. It’s happened time and time again. FedEx went from sixth place to number one with a highly creative campaign. Wendy’s leapfrogged other restaurant chains on the strength of an elderly woman asking, “Where’s the beef?” “Just do it!” became a part of popular culture.

where's the beef

Nike Just Do It
The point of all this is to recognize, up front in the marketing process, that you can’t expect to get different results doing the same thing. The strength of the creative has to be sufficiently different to achieve new goals.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this simple principle is not only failing marketing, he’s failing Algebra.

In a society that changes its premises of taste more often than reality shows, you can’t stick with the safe B-approach. You have to bring it, and bring it hard. Then watch those goal numbers jump.



March 7, 2011. GUERILLAS IN OUR MIDST

Most marketers are trying as hard as humanly possible to create the elusive, effective “word of mouth” campaign. It’s inexpensive, more believable than traditional print and television, and often results in a super-high attention level. But in the past few years there’s been an almost imperceptible, downplay of these tactics. It’s easy to see what happened. The huge productions of the anti-smoking effort, with hundreds of body bags in the street seem to have inhaled agencies smaller, less spectacular efforts. “We could never pull something like that off,” and other mantras of defeatism turned guerilla efforts into something that seemed to appear in every marketing plan, but never quite made the cut.

So, has guerilla marketing turned into something that’s trivialized or dead? Absolutely not. And marketers that don’t take it seriously are missing a bet.

Folgers street ad

All right, you ask, where are the great guerillas?

How about the National Geographic shark bus that uses an optical illusion to seemingly enter the gaping maw of a great white? Or the promotion of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” with a billboard coming out of New York Bay as if New York City was completely under water?
National Geographic Shark Bus

No one in the Big Apple missed the campaign for HBO’s the “ Sopranos” with arms hanging out of the trunks of taxicabs. Or 3M trying to prove the quality of its security glass by filling a bus shelter with stacks of money. There are huge executions and ones as simple as a headline below your feet at a street corner.

Sopranos guerrilla campaign

3M Money in Glass showing how secure 3M is

With all the play social networking and other technological tools are receiving, it may be difficult to think in the most tactical of marketing efforts. But great guerilla ideas are out there. And perhaps all you need to execute the campaign is a few cans of spray paint.