Brand Building

Marketing directors are driven today not by the need to build a brand, but by the need to develop their market, launch new extensions or initiatives.

Brand Building
It Was a Response to a New Era of Business Strategy Gone were the long corporate planning cycles and in their place came big ambitions and rapid change. Marketing directors are driven today not by the need to build a brand, but by the need to develop their market, launch new extensions or initiatives. An old-fashioned brand repositioning, with its five-year time horizon, is too slow compared with the rate of change in the strategy and business model. Brands needed to be faster and looser.

I’m not saying brands shouldn’t use advertising. I am saying they should beware the old advertising models, which are about fixing the image and positioning of your business to some enduring promise. What if you had made a “brand ad” about IBM ten years ago – would it still have any relevance now? In contrast, IBM’s media-neutral e-Business idea (which also made for reasonable ads) was flexible enough to carry the company through an era when it bought PwC Consulting and sold off its PC manufacturing – from boxes to advice.

But even a general commitment to the way the world is going can be too definite. I was in the middle of putting together a review for BT of its advertising strategies – many of which had been about its commitment to new wave telecommunications such as broadband – when its chairman made a speech in the City about how its new strategy was about going “back to core telephony”. At times like this you realise that branding needs to be more of a marriage with consumers – taking all new developments in your stride – and less a once-and-for-all statement of what you are about.

It Was a Response to a Need for Cultural Leadership
It is easy to overstate how settled life was in the old days and how fast it is changing now. We have not lived through the upheaval of a world war. But we have lived through the end of the job for life and the birth of the internet and we have entered a condition of uncertainty (which may or may not be a phase) that social sciences call postmodernism.

The result is that we live with a basic uncertainty about how to lead our lives: what to wear, what to eat, how to communicate and have relationships, how to get on in life. Self-help media content, which supplies ready answers, has been booming. And the role of brands has shifted, from reflect- ing a stable, static social order to helping establish new customs. One business leader who saw this was Nobuyuki Idei, the CEO of Sony in the late 1990s:

We are committed to creating new lifestyles and providing new forms of enjoyment to people in the network centric society of the 21st century.7 This is a call for cultural innovation, rather than just product innovation. And it is ideas, not technologies, which usually create new lifestyles: easyJet rather than Concorde. Here are just a few examples of the sorts of thing I understand to be new lifestyle ideas – some owned by brands, others freestanding (but no less influential on brand fortunes): text messaging Channel 4 cricket organic Big Brother one-a-day health drinks Harry Potter PlayStation camera phones downloadable music iPod Harley Owners Group Friends Reunited eBay Google Sudoku Make Poverty History wristbands the gym male grooming alternative medicine internet banking Starbucks.

As with new media and new marketing strategies, new lifestyle formats have often provided inspiration for other new possibilities. Yesterday I read about a new vibrator (sex toy) called Je Joue, which has (ringtone-style) downloadable rhythms!

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To appreciate what is new in brand marketing, we need to stop and consider the classic approach to developing and promoting brands.

1.2 The Old School
While marketing practices and media options have changed radically in the last ten years, the theory of brands (and perhaps more importantly, the processes by which marketing communications are developed and evaluated) proved more resistant to change.

When conventional companies attempt new sorts of marketing they often try to justify and track their plans using the old model. A major cultural sponsorship will be measured by how many seconds of airtime it buys for the logo. A CRM programme will be tracked through direct response measures. A buzz marketing campaign will be measured by direct sales uplift among the population in which the idea was seeded. And all of these initiatives will often be assessed through brand image tracking: measuring awareness, positive brand associations and perceived benefits.

Of course it is natural that companies should want marketing investments to be accountable. But they are measuring all these new forms of marketing as if they were advertising or direct mail. They are potentially making much greater contributions in other areas than “image”, but if you don’t track the real effects you will not see them.

Often the most old-fashioned element in marketing plans is the (implicit) definition of what a brand is. The classical idea of this was expressed, by Professor Doyle, as follows:

S = P × D × AV

Strong brand = product benefits × distinct identity × added values8

A brand marketing programme would thus be aimed at: Communicating a distinctive product benefit or set of benefits (USP). Communicating a distinctive identity: name, logo, look and feel, personality. Communicating distinctive emotional brand values.

That’s a lot of communication – especially if you do not operate in a market where customers are intrinsically fascinated by what brands have to say. But it is such a familiar model, and fits so well with the way that we are used to planning our marketing programmes, that many readers will probably be wondering: what is wrong with that?

The problem is that, while it fits the old way of marketing, it shortchanges brands stretching into new media and business models. It also ignores the pressure on brands to adopt a more authentic approach than “selling” your USP, identity or image.

Why would new media require a new brand theory? Surely they are just new ways of building the same old strong brands? Actually no, the old formula for strong brands was adapted to advertising (and similar) media. It was not a theory of brands so much as a theory of brand advertising. That is why it does not generalise; and why, to some extent, it always shortchanged brands. If you look at the history of the ideas behind each term in this formula, then you find each was developed by ad agencies (or similar) in order to justify their approach.

The first term of the equation – a distinctive proposition or benefit – has a long history (as does a recognition of the need to cut through the clutter of other advertising):

Whatever is common is despised. Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. (Samuel Johnson, 1759)

Without the need to advertise their wares, no producer would necessarily have noticed this need for “promises” about particular features over others. People who produced chairs may have never stopped to wonder whether it was more important to claim traditional designs, quality construction, comfort, durability, association with landed gentry or with the merchant middle class. They would simply make chairs, in a way that was handed down through apprenticeships. The chairs were then placed in shops for sale. Many manufacturer companies still have this producer mentality today. If you ask an engineer why a new car is good they will point to 101 advanced features. And if you look at the process by which people choose cars, you find they will generally research options on their short list in great detail, in order to answer the question: “Is this the right car for me?” So we can already see that the idea of having just one key benefit is neither a reflection of how products are invented nor really a reflection of how people choose, buy and appreciate them. It is mainly a requirement of a certain type of “hard sell” advertising.

In his book Reality in Advertising,10 Rosser Reeves introduced the term unique selling proposition, defining it in the following way: 1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the customer: “buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.” 2. The proposition itself must be unique – something that competitors do not, or will not, offer. 3. The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product.

Rosser Reeves was very clever to brand this as the USP. But the advertising business has a short memory, and there was little that Reeves said that had not been said 40 years earlier in 1923 by Claude C. Hopkins, who worked in advertising as a copywriter at the start of the twentieth century and established a method he called scientific advertising:

The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based upon fixed principles and is reasonably exact.11 What Hopkins had figured out was that by using up to 20 different versions of the same ad, you could work out which headlines attracted the most coupon responses. This kind of optimisation approach is still used today, not only to test copy, but different media weights and combinations. Direct Line grabbed 40% of the insurance market using an ad campaign that was finetuned in this way.

Hopkins was clearer than Reeves on the fact that the writer does not know enough people to judge (or guess) which headlines might work best. But with Reeves, he assumed that the way to sell a product was to headline its most attractive quality:

The product has many features. It fosters beauty. It prevents disease. It aids daintiness and cleanliness. We learn to exactness which quality most of our readers seek.

The product that Hopkins had in mind (that promotes beauty, prevents disease and makes you clean and dainty) must have been Palmolive Soap, a client of his. Hopkins also described competitive strategy between brands in military terms and articulated an early version of the concept of positioning:

The maker may say that he has no distinctions. He is making a good product, but much like others. He deserves a share of the trade, but he has nothing exclusive to offer. However there is nearly always something impressive that others have not told. We must discover it. We must have a seeming advantage.

It was quite a realisation to have made over 80 years ago. It also arguably contained some seeds of destruction – being a model of marketing communications based on brands with seeming advantages (i.e. rather than real ones!).

The second term of Professor Doyle’s equation is identity. It is design companies who use this concept most, to the extent that they sometimes seem to assume that a brand is only an identity and aesthetics is the whole of the subject. Design was a part of what Doyle meant, although he also included the notion of awareness under this heading. It is not just about having a distinctive design. It is about people having a distinct idea of you in mind.

A number of successful historical advertising campaigns took their brand identity and plastered it everywhere: Coca-Cola with 10 million square miles of signage in the USA by the end of the nineteenth century; the 1970s classic Benson & Hedges surreal art posters; mobile operator O2, which seems set on “owning blue” (in contrast to competitor Orange?). Some have argued that being seen as the most famous, first, biggest or otherwise leading brand is the key factor in brand acceptance and success. Advertising luminary Dave Trott (writer of classic ad lines like “Ariston – and on – and on” and “Hello Tosh got a Toshiba?”) made a career out of the notion of making the brand name famous. However, I would tend to side with advertising researcher Mike Hall, who pointed out that there are limits to the power of brand fame, his example being that everybody has heard of Ford, but how many want to drive one?

David Ogilvy is credited with introducing the concepts of brand image and personality in 1955: Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace . . . Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.14 Brand image is an umbrella term for the emotional added values, which form the third part of Doyle’s classical formula for a brand. It is this term that has dominated discussions of brands for the last 50 years. It is no coincidence that the medium that dominated over those last 50 years was television advertising. Television advertising very often uses a personality device: a famous spokesperson, actor or sports star; or a fictional character like Ogilvy’s “Man in the Eyepatch” for Hathaway shirts – devices that added personality.

Television – according to psychoanalytic media theory – seems to work through identification (you put yourself in the place of the people on screen and feel things vicariously through this process). The result in the case of TV advertising is supposed to be that you associate those feelings with that brand; although many ads are remembered in vivid detail, without people remembering who they were for. And there have been many “great ads” for what people know are rubbish products. Part of the reason this classical model has been broken is that people have become more discerning over time, less likely to take advertising at face value.

A recent casualty appears to be Stella Artois beer, which is in serious decline at the moment. This was the leading premium lager brand in the UK with a whopping 40% market share. However, prominent competitors like Heineken have shifted to importing their beer from the country of origin. And proper continental lager is much more widely known and available. Stella projects a Euro cinema (advertising and sponsorship) image, yet it is brewed in the grey industrial town of Newport, Wales. Not that Leuven in Belgium is necessarily a nicer town, but it is at least where the image emanates from. And for whatever reason, beer brewed outside the UK does seem to taste better.

There is no doubt that people do buy certain brands for reasons like personality, image and added values, in fashion, cars, newspapers, perfumes and so on. But that is not to say that they buy the idea that an image advertisement will turn a Ford into an Aston Martin. And there is less reason to assume that a theory of identity-confirming purchases describes why people buy certain brands of fast-moving consumer goods. And less reason still to assume that it might apply to knowledge markets where we find many of the world’s strongest brands – eBay, Google and so on – which do not have much of an “image”.

To summarise: each of the terms (in the definition of brand as S = P × D × AV) derives from explanations offered by leading professionals in agencies, based on: how advertising (TV and print) and design (packaging and logo) seemed to work; their typical client at the time: fast-moving consumer goods and “badge” brands like cars, cigarettes and perfumes; back in the days when people seemed mostly to like and accept advertising.

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