Brands and Bullshit

by Bernhard Schroeder

  When you don’t really understand the value or the creation of branding, you tend to do what you know, which is tactical product marketing. The only problem with that is that you will probably never construct the marketing needed to create a customer “feeling” which results in the customer viewing your product or service as valuable... until something better comes along. Let me give you an example. When GoPro launched, they did excellent product marketing and leveraged the customer’s passion to create movies and photos and share them in social media. GoPro also benefited from the rapid and explosive growth in social media as a trend. So for almost 15 years, GoPro (founded in 2002) just kept improving the same core product, more or less, and never focused on diversifying the product line (strategy) or really building their brand value (i.e. software, helpful platform, etc.) So, where is GoPro today? Struggling. Not sure if they will survive. Quite frankly, do you love your GoPro?

  Over time, brands that focus on the customer and stay relevant as a brand, meaning they continue to create a customer feeling that is uniquely positive, will thrive and continue to be leaders. Companies that focus on building great products but not great brands will face competition over time and ultimately struggle in the marketplace. They tend to focus on short terms results and do not take the long term view. Brands, not products, rule the marketplace.

  WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU SPECIFICALLY IN THIS BOOK?

  Look, I am not bashing millennial marketers or entrepreneurs who are in rapidly growing companies. On the contrary, I want to help. I have been fortunate in my career to work with some amazing creatives, marketers and clients to create and grow some amazing brands. And while there are quite a few books on marketing strategy and branding, they are not complete, are one dimensional, lack detailed examples and don’t deliver key insights from someone who has been there. If you asked me today, how many different books would you have to read to get a good understanding of marketing strategy and branding, I would be giving you a list of ten books to read. Instead of giving you that list, I am going to give you this one book. I will give you all of the insights and learnings that I have accumulated from all the great brands that I have worked with in the past. You will get the following: An easy to understand overview of branding, ten brand building strategies, how branding trees, category ladders and repositioning works and a better understanding of the critical nature of brand positioning. In addition, I will explain how the four P’s of marketing have changed and how you need to leverage an integrated brand marketing approach and how trends are shifting marketplace landscapes. I will also introduce tools like Blue Ocean strategy which can help you guide your brand or your clients brand to a better marketplace.

  Finally, throughout the book, at the end of each chapter, I will share with you my insights about several brands, why they succeeded or failed based on their branding and marketing strategies. All to help you better understand branding so that you can be more successful in your career. If you are ready to take this journey, then be my apprentice and I will be your Merlin. Then perhaps one day, with much work and practice, you will be someone’s Merlin. If you really want to master branding, and not be in a place where you are relying on bullshit, then read on.

  1

  CHAPTER ONE

  CUSTOMERS CAN FEEL BUT MARKETERS NEED TO SEE.

  * * *

  As a marketer today, your “marketing world” may be predominately digital with little exposure to marketing strategy or branding. You may be ten years into your career or you just entered the marketing world via online marketing and never had any strategic mentorship or training. As such, your marketing perspective and experience may be very tactical. Build a website. Run an AdWords campaign. Get that content up in social media. Run a contest or a promotion. All just digital marketing tactics. Have you ever taken the time to really get to know your potential end customer? Understand this: You are not the customer.

  You can’t assume you know what a customer wants or needs just because you are doing the marketing to attract that customer. Why do so many marketers assume they know what a customer wants or needs—even when those marketers themselves do not fit the target segment profile? And even if you do fit the target segment profile, don’t assume you are the customer or know more than they do. You don’t. You want to know why? You are not the customer. Ever meet a 45-year-old marketer who is marketing products for 18- to 25-year-old customers? Or the reverse? And, if you did, did you ever wonder what he or she was thinking?

  Here is some advice for marketers: never assume you know your potential customer. Ever. That realization will force you to do several things:

  Always be researching the marketplace and trends

  Base your decisions about customers on as many facts as possible

  Surround yourself with other people who might have customer insights

  Relentlessly visit or understand the customer environment

  Many digital marketers and company executives speak as though they are customer experts—yet where did they get that expertise? Do they have deep mentorship training on strategy and branding? Better yet, when did they transform themselves into the target customer?

  Here is what you should do to learn more about your potential customers. Ask these types of questions:

  What are the customers’ ages, incomes, and sexes?

  Where do they live?

  What do they live in?

  What kind of music do they listen to?

  What kind of car do they drive? Lease or own?

  Where do they shop for clothes?

  What kind of food do they buy?

  How do they use technology in their lives?

  I could go on, but you get the point. You need to understand your customers. You can’t assume that you know everything—or even anything — about them. You can’t pretend that you are in the mindset of your customer. So, how do you find out more about your current or potential customers?

  OBSERVATION LABS AND WALKING THE AISLES

  What is the floor made of in an Apple Store? What color is it? Millions of people have walked into and on the floor in an Apple store yet cannot answer those two questions. Why? Often, as we move through life, we see but we do not observe. And to be a better marketer, you must learn to observe what goes on all around you. I spent 20 years in a marketing career working with some of the best brands in the world. My curiosity on “observing” in addition to reading marketing research reports came about because of my lack of understanding about my client’s customers. So, I spent my entire career obsessing about learning more about potential customers than the competition or even my clients. And what I learned is that what you “see” is better than any research report.

  Observational research or lab, ethnography, or, in plain English, “watching people do stuff,” seems to make so much common sense but quite a few marketers just don’t use it. You would think the largest brands in the world would use this everyday but they don’t. Certainly, compared to traditional focus groups, mini-groups, or one-on-one interviews, observational research accounts for a pitiably small portion of most research budgets. Yogi Berra’s famous line that “You can observe a lot just by watching” is widely acknowledged, but observation remains the most under-utilized qualitative technique in marketing research. One of the reasons seems to be that many clients (and researchers) just don’t know how to get value out of simple observation. I have based my career on finding “customer truth” and I hunted it maniacally. What better “truth” than simply observing what is really happening?

  The good news about conducting, designing or implementing an observation lab is that they are inexpensive, easy to do and anyone with the right mindset can do them. First, it’s not about what you believe or know. It’s not about your opinion. It’s about getting answers to the types of questions listed below. Pretend you are the VP of Marketing for Whole Foods, perhaps a competitor, maybe even someone on their marketing agency team. We all know this grocery marketplace is becoming more competitive
. What could be done differently? What could increase customer satisfaction or sales? How do we boost employee morale? Imagine you were visiting a Whole Foods grocery store in the next few hours. One that you have been in 20 times before. This time, for the first time, you go to observe and answer these simple questions:

  What do you see?

  What do you smell?

  What do you hear?

  What are people doing?

  What is the “mood” of the place?

  Who is in the place?

  What is the purpose of the place?

  What color is the floor? The walls?

  What does this place make you “feel?

  What are you noticing for the first time?

  What is missing?

  Is this place busy? If so, why? If not, why?

  What are the descriptive words you would associate with this place?

  For every observation lab, you could have an endless list of questions. Keep the questions simple and limit your questions to fewer than twenty. It’s okay if you have an objective in mind but you need to keep your mind “open” or you will not really observe, you will just see what you want or expect to see. Here is the good news. If you have an open mind you will observe way more than you ever did before. Hopefully, all your senses, not just your eyes will be engaged.

  Learning from watching is, in fact, hard. Since observation skills don’t get sharpened up in real life the way questioning skills do, you need to train yourself to see, learn, and think when you watch people do what they do. It takes some practice, and some discipline. The one thing I have learned is to look for the ordinary, not the extraordinary.

  When you first do an observation lab, people look like they aren’t “doing” anything! They’re just going about their business, and nothing that they’re doing looks surprising. They’re walking around at the mall, moving in and out of retail stores, buying their lunch in the food court. They’re waiting for their cars to be serviced. Don’t become alarmed. Slow down and just start taking real or mental notes of what you do see and hear even if nothing seems out of the ordinary. For example, when my students at San Diego State University did an observation lab at the campus bookstore, they thought “what would we really learn?” But they noticed simple things... like how people were queuing up in line across a main throughway to get to the main cash register or why certain products were not offered for sale or that there was a typo on a merchandising display. And so on. Ultimately they recorded 65 observations and based on a review, offered ten recommendations that we forwarded to the bookstore manager. He asked how we came up with five of the recommendations, which he said he would implement. We told him we spent 45 minutes in the bookstore and just observed.

  Here are some simple guidelines that will help you with your own observation lab.

  “ORDINARY” IS WHAT YOU’RE THERE TO OBSERVE. Don’t go looking for something extraordinary. What you’re really looking for are the insights hidden in “ordinary.” Nothing people do is “natural”. You may watch people walking into a retail environment. They’ll walk in, look around to get their bearings, walk over to a display or proceed down an aisle, maybe pick up an item or two or compare prices. “Of course,” you’ll say to yourself, “that’s just what I’d do in their shoes. It’s just common sense.” Observing what they really do is simply the first “truth” about what they really do. That’s it.

  WHATEVER YOU SAW COULD HAVE HAPPENED DIFFERENTLY. The retail store shoppers could have taken more time to get their bearings, or less time. They might have gone down a different aisle. They might have picked up more items, or not as many. They might have sought help from an employee. They might have, but they didn’t. What they did needs to be explained. Start noticing the regularities: do most people need a period of time to get their bearings when they come into the store? Where are they when they do this? Where do they look? What do they see there? Is there something about the store environment that makes them do things the way they’re doing them? Is the way they’re behaving the optimum way you want your customers to behave? Look at the “rule breakers.” Who are they? What regularities are they defying? Once you recognize that everything people do is the result of something, you can begin looking for that something. Maybe it’s something about them. Or the people they’re with. Or the environment they’re in. Find the simple something that makes people do what they do.

  BECOME THE MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS. Take the most obvious thing you’ve observed. Maybe you were watching people wait to have their cars repaired, and they “didn’t do anything.” Maybe they actually fell asleep in the waiting area. Maybe they spent the whole time looking bored. Maybe they were on their smartphones. Ask yourself why they were so bored - and remember that boredom isn’t natural. Humans are the most curious creatures on earth. The service waiting room had a TV, lots of magazines, today’s newspaper, some sales material and several new car displays. Why didn’t they get interested in any of that? Were they interested in anything? Not really - they’d get up, check on the progress of their cars, then sit down again. But maybe that’s it: all they were interested in was their cars. They wanted to “see” what was happening with their cars! And that’s all they wanted to see. How’s that for obvious? What if your dealership had a second floor waiting room with a full wall of glass showing off the entire repair area? Would being able to see their cars being repaired make people less anxious and more satisfied?

  SWEAT ALL THE LITTLE DETAILS. Take good notes. Make short movies. Think about where people walk, stand, sit, and look. For how long. Doing what. With whom. Note every little activity. Here’s an example: Several years ago we were observing people using a newly designed gasoline pump. One of the first “pay at the pump” designs, it allowed drivers to insert a credit or ATM card so they could pay without having to walk to the cashier’s station. We noticed a number of motorists driving up to the pump, getting out and looking at it, then climbing back into their cars, apparently searching for something. They’d get back out of the car, go back to the pump, and read the directions - which seemed to present some difficulty. At a certain point we began walking up to people and asked them what they were doing: “Looking for my reading glasses.” In the haste to install the new pumps and print some simple directions, little attention was paid to the size and clarity of the typeface for the directions, which the energy company did not think people would need anyway. But since this was something new, they thought providing directions would be helpful. Would have been if it was easier to read. Better yet, why not design the pump interface so simply, you did not need directions.

  THE “WHOLE ACTIVITY” IS THE KEY. Think of all of the customer’s activities as concentric rings of context. Stopping for gas takes place inside the “driving somewhere” ring, which takes place inside the “going home from work” ring, and so forth. Most research projects involve single activity units like pumping gas, or kitchen cleanup, or visiting a fast-food drive-thru; but these aren’t generally the whole activities. The whole activity is a set of behaviors that includes these small units plus at least one layer of context. It’s “what’s going on” from the consumer point of view, and it may be very different from what you think is actually happening. To get clues about a whole activity, look at how people enter the activity you’re trying to observe, and how they exit. What’s going on just before and just afterward? How do they get to the point you’re interested in? What and who do they bring with them? Are they happy, sad or hurried? How do they leave? What do they take with them and what do they leave behind? If the concentric rings of customer activity are like a big multi-ringed bull’s-eye, let the arrow find the target and not the other way around. You can do the same thing with an ecommerce brand if you “watch” visitor traffic in real time as they make their way through the website.

  THE MOST OBVIOUS THINGS ARE OBVIOUS. The problem is that they are obvious in hindsight, and the context doesn’t appear until it appears in a real observation. Want to hedge your observation
bet? Marry your observation even more by watching and talking. My own feeling is that the deepest understanding of people comes from combining an analysis of what people do with an analysis of what people have to say. You can observe people all day long and you will get some insights. But combine observation with engaging with customers and asking them simple, non-leading questions. Why are you here today? Did you drive by yourself? Which route did you take? What are you shopping for today? Was there something you did not find? I have said it before and I will say it again. “Customers may not always be right but they are never wrong.” Getting more insights from customers will help you with your product or brand strategy.

  HOW DO YOU OBSERVE A DIGITAL BRAND?

  If you are a digital marketer today, you probably are thinking that you can’t do an observation lab on a “digital” company. Maybe you can. When we did all the initial branding and marketing for Amazon, we initially had no clue about what Amazon’s brand promise should be, how that would come alive and how we could make the customers feel something powerful for an online only brand. So we spent time trying to understand who would be an influencer in the buying and recommending of books. That led us to about 1.3 million people in just New York, LA and San Francisco who were high income and thought leaders when it came to purchasing, consuming and recommending written content. Next we focused on the creation of the Amazon brand and how they would keep their brand promise. In order to do that we had to create a brand “persona” as if the brand were human. That led us to asking the question, “Who delights us?” For us it was boutique hotel concierges. So, we went and studied them more closely. Here is what we learned: