MEASURE YOUR BRAND VIA A REPORT CARD
It’s easy as a marketer to “fall in love” with your own branding and marketing. We have a tendency to believe in what we create. However, take a step back and evaluate your brand and marketing efforts “before” you launch. Take a critical look at what you are about to unleash. Rate your brand efforts on a scale of one to ten (one being extremely poor and ten being extremely good) for each characteristic below. Better yet, have other marketers outside your company rate your branding efforts. Then create a bar chart (visuals are always better than numbers) that reflects the scores. Use the bar chart to generate discussion among all those individuals who participate in the management of your brands. Looking at the results in that manner should help you identify areas that need improvement, recognize areas in which you excel, and learn more about how your particular brand is configured.
It can also be helpful to create a report card and chart for competitors’ brands simply by rating those brands based on your own perceptions, both as a competitor and as a consumer. As an outsider, you may know more about how their brands are received in the marketplace than they do. Keep that in mind as you evaluate your own brand. Try to look at it through the eyes of consumers rather than through your own knowledge of the brand budgets, teams, and time spent on various initiatives.
The brand excels at delivering the benefits customers truly desire.
The brand is/has stayed relevant.
The pricing strategy is based on consumers’ perceptions of value.
The brand is properly positioned in the marketplace.
The brand messaging is consistent across all marketing platforms.
The brand portfolio and hierarchy make sense.
The brand coordinates a full repertoire of marketing activities to build equity.
The brand’s managers understand what the brand means to consumers.
The brand is given proper support, and that support is sustained over the long run.
The company monitors all sources of brand equity.
Most marketers will never do a brand report card. That’s because most marketers do not understand branding, or worse, do not want to be held accountable for their marketing efforts if things don’t turn out well. If you are doing marketing for your brand or your clients, you better live to the mantra that John Wilson, one of the co-founders of Stance, lives by: Freedom and accountability. Earn the freedom to do great marketing work but then accept the accountability for whatever happens. Good or bad.
So, take the effort to learn and understand what it takes to actually deliver on branding as a marketer. Regardless of your brand strategy, understand that it must resonate with your target audience and make them feel that you have the only solution in the marketplace for them and that there is no easy substitute for your product or service. If you don’t do that, you will be the preverbal “hamster on the wheel”, running all the time but never going anywhere with your brand as competitors just pick away at your market share.
BRAND INSIGHT
This company has been around for more than 100 years. In that time it has thrived and grown and it is now a household name. It crafted its brand with authenticity and originality. One of the key attributes in its product was “rocky mountain spring water.” Well, the leaders at this brand wanted to leverage the growing bottled water trend in the early 1990’s so they created a new product, Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water... by Coors. Instead of creating an associated or standalone brand, they branded it with the Coors logo. That was a huge mistake. Customers were confused and actually thought that it was an alcoholic drink. It failed and Coors pulled it from the market. But the water marketplace continued to grow. In 2015, bottled water sales in just the USA topped $14.2 billion.
KEY TAKEAWAY
If you build a good brand, you will have some permission to introduce other related products. If people don’t believe you have the brand permission to introduce a certain product, then you don’t. The solution? Create a new brand and enter a growing marketplace with all the distribution and financial resources of the core brand. You can then build a new brand while preserving the core brand.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
BRAND ARCHITECTURE AND DECISION TREES.
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If you are under the age of 35 and are a digital marketer, do you ever feel you just don’t get the respect you deserve especially as you move upstream and work with larger brands? In those moments, do you ever feel like the actor Joe Pesci in the movie Good Fellas when he is in the midst of a heated conversation with a fellow gangster and utters the memorable line,” You think I’m funny? I’m funny how, I mean funny, like I’m a clown?” As a digital marketer, you probably don’t know what you don’t know about brand architecture and decision trees. Brands and clients want people that can push or guide them strategically. If you are not strategic, then you won’t get the respect you feel you deserve. Well, there is good news. When I started my marketing career, I did not understand brand architecture or decision trees at all. I did not understand branding. I just assumed marketing naturally worked its way out. That could not be further from the truth.
The whole concept of brand management is that the company and its executives are in total control of their brand(s) and, to some degree, get to architect, design and implement their brands into the marketplace. Brands are placed into every marketplace by design or default. Let me give you a simple example of brand architecture so that you understand what I am talking about. Let’s take General Motors, the automotive company and one of their products:
Master brand: General Motors
Sub brand: Chevrolet
Model brand: Corvette
Product brand: Grand Sport
In this simple example, this is the brand architecture and related hierarchy. Every brand has some form of brand hierarchy. The more you understand this, the more you start to become a more strategic marketer when it comes to branding. Why? Because this simple explanation does not even begin to scratch the surface of branding. When you mix in disrupted industries, changing marketplaces, varied population segments and competitors, all of sudden it can get really complicated.
UNDERSTANDING BRAND ARCHITECTURE TODAY
A better understanding and more expansive view of brand architecture is needed today, especially for digital marketers. Brand experts and authors such as David Aaker and Kevin Lane Keller put the topic of brand architecture on the map and gave us useful language and frameworks for organizing brands in their books on branding. The most widely used of these terms include “house of brands” (e.g. Proctor and Gamble (P & G) with their many product brands that have little to no linkage to the corporate brand) and “branded house” (e.g. General Electric (GE) with their diversified businesses all falling under the GE master brand. While helpful in establishing approaches toward architecting portfolios of brands, these early definitions fall short of addressing the issues today’s companies face. In my marketing career working with companies like Apple, Visa, American Express, etc. on key branding decisions, I have found that as soon as brand architecture issues are raised, the dialogue quickly moves into directions ranging from extremely strategic (how do I organize my go-to-market businesses?) to extremely tactical (what should I name product / service X?). If brand architecture is a structure for organizing brands in a portfolio to achieve some benefit for a company, then both the very strategic and very tactical elements should be considered. Extending to more strategic decisions “what to brand vs. what not to brand” is a key question all organizations and marketers must ask before defining their brand architecture, as the answer has significant implications relative to resources and go-to-market strategies.
Let me give you another example that might make all of this make sense. You are the chief marketing officer at Kellogg’s in the year 2000. You have been watching and researching the market and notice changing habits in the consumer marketplace. People are eating healthier. At the time, Kellogg’s i
s making cereal for mostly children, lots of sugars, not necessarily healthy. Then the CEO walks into your office and says, “We just bought Kashi.” So as the head of marketing, what do you do? Here are some of your branding options:
Create a healthy line of Kellogg’s adult cereal?
Change the name of Kashi to Kellogg’s?
Endorse the Kashi brand with Kellogg’s ownership?
Leave Kashi as a standalone brand and fund its growth?
Now, are you beginning to see the key importance of understanding branding, brand architecture and even brand portfolio management? Let’s review brand portfolio management and then I will tell you what Kellogg’s did and why.
BRAND PORTFOLIO STRATEGY QUESTIONS
As you move up in your career of marketing or start to really grow your strategic marketing expertise, you really need to understand branding, brand architecture and how all of that relates to marketing. With respect to the Kellogg’s example, you could ask yourself these questions:
What specifically is the brand charged with doing for the Company? What objectives should be set for the brand from a volume and financial perspective? What role does/should the brand serve from a channel perspective? What are the optimal pricing structures and price points for the brand? What sort of price differential should exist between it and its most direct competitors? What sort of promotional support should the brand receive?
BRAND PORTFOLIO STRATEGY
How should the brand be positioned to the consumer, taking into consideration its strategic role within the portfolio, consumer wants/needs, and its current equities? What is (or should be) its unique point of difference?
What is the brand’s contribution to the Master Brand proposition? To what extent does it help the Company deliver on its brand promises? Does the brand help the Company reinforce desirable equities?
What is the optimal relationship between the product brand and the Company brand? Should there be an explicit relationship between it and other brands within the brand portfolio? If yes, what is the best way to establish this linkage?
What is the brand’s “bounds of extendibility?” From a category perspective, where can the brand credibly go today, or in the near term or intermediate future? What should be considered off-limits for the brand?
I worked with Kellogg’s early in my marketing career and had no clue about branding or brand architecture. However, with my mentors and my increased role in strategic marketing, I became a brand expert after about seven years. A brand expert has the capability of walking into any conference room for any company, and while he/she does not yet have the answers, they absolutely know the right questions to ask.
Now, with respect to the Kellogg’s example above, what would you do? Do you create a line of healthy adult cereal by Kellogg’s? No, for two reasons. Kashi is a highly respected brand already focused on healthy adult cereal. And Kellogg’s has a reputation of sugar based cereal for children. If Kellogg’s introduced a line of cereal like this, it would not be believable and would actually hurt the Kellogg’s brand. You don’t change the brand Kashi to Kellogg’s for the same reasons. Do you endorse the Kellogg’s brand name to Kashi (e.g. Kashi, a Kellogg’s Company)? What value would that create? Not much. While the Kellogg’s brand is valuable, not so much as it relates to healthy cereal. So, you chose the last branding option. Leave Kashi as a free standing brand that you will grow with all the financial and distribution resources of Kellogg’s. That is what Kellogg’s did and they almost screwed that up. For a period of time they moved Kashi employees to Battle Creek, Michigan from California and sales fell almost 30 percent. Kellogg’s tried to force its conservative brand management and culture on a brand that was more free-spirited and open. Almost killed it. Luckily, a few years ago, Kellogg’s realized its mistake and moved Kashi back to Southern California and they seem to be flourishing again. The key lesson is to understand that the consumer gets to decide what you do with a brand so make the right decision with your target audience in mind. Ignore them at your peril.
LEFT OR RIGHT? BRAND DECISION MAKING
By now, you should be starting to understand that if you want to build your marketing career, you better become a branding expert. What’s the difference between a really good marketing person and a brand expert? Millions. When our agency was asked to review a brand or create a new brand, we got paid millions just to do the brand analysis and provide strategic recommendations. The reason is that for some companies, billions was at stake. A wrong decision could cost a company billions in lost revenue or it could kill an entire division of the company. So, you need to make your brand decisions with a good brand analysis, review the brand architecture, understand the competition and most importantly, understand the customer.
To continue your learning about branding, let me share with you some companies and their branding decisions.
COCA COLA: ENTER NEW MARKETS. As soda sales started to decline and consumers were drinking healthier alternatives like water, Coca Cola was faced with making an important decision. That decision was spurred by the launch of Aquafina by rival Pepsi. In short order Coca Cola decided to create a new water brand, not related to the Coca Cola brand. Using filtered tap water, they created Dasani and built the brand with their resources. Later they also bought Vitamin Water. Cocoa Cola’s brand did not have the consumer or brand permission to create Coca Cola water. Consumers would simply not have believed in it. Most consumers don’t know that Coca Cola owns Dasani and Vitamin Water.
STARBUCKS: ADD MORE VALUE. As Starbucks created their brand around being the “third place” to hang out, after home and work, they played close attention to changing consumer needs. As they noticed more people drinking tea, they bought Tazo. Then they noticed people drinking tea but not at Starbucks. So they bought Tevana, a brand that sold tea but also had its own stores. Today Tevana has grown to a large tea house brand and Tazo is still doing fine as a tea brand. For both brands, they pretty much standalone with their own branding. If you search closely, you will see they are both owned by Starbucks. Starbucks did such a great job branding itself around coffee, they did not believe they could create a tea brand.
PROCTOR AND GAMBLE: OWN THE SHELF. P & G made a strategic decision years ago that would drive its “house of brands” strategy. That is, they wanted to build a dominant company but not a dominate brand. They wanted the ability to create multiple brands for the “shelf” in the store aisle and did not really care which one you bought as long as you bought one of their brands. That is why today, they own Tide, Ariel and Gain laundry detergents. It’s why they own Crest and Oral-B. Most consumers do not know that one company owns these brands and perhaps that does not matter as long as the product brand is awesome. With this strategy they can build or buy brands into infinity to meet changing consumer demands.
APPLE: EXPERTISE WITHOUT RISK. I will be honest with you. I still don’t understand the acquisition of Beats by Apple. To me, and a lot of critics, the Beats headphones were more of a fashion statement than a technically advanced set of headphones. I think Apple is a smart company so they must have acquired the company to get the founders and perhaps something else. Anyway, if you look at Beats today, it does not carry any Apple branding. That is because Apple wanted to minimize its risk associated with the acquisition. If Beats failed or the founders did something untoward, nothing would reflect back on the Apple brand.
BUDWEISER: CRAFT NEW BRANDS. What do you do if you’re the “king of beers” and people stop buying your product? What if your brand is associated with an older target segment? If you are Budweiser, you leverage a growing trend by buying craft beer companies. And Budweiser has been doing just that for more than 20 years. As regular beer sales continue to decline, big beer brands have only two choices. Create a craft beer brand or buy one. In Budweiser’s case, it’s actually cheaper to buy the rising craft brands. They are in fact creating, just like P & G, a “house of craft brands” that will be attractive to a variety of craft beer drinkers.
Widmer, RedHook, Goose Island and Kona Brewing, to name a few, are all owned by Budweiser. With the rise of craft beer into the foreseeable future, it is really the only strategy that Budweiser has as its core brand becomes less relevant.
BRAND DECISIONS DO GROW ON TREES
The first time I saw a brand decision tree, I was amazed that some critical brand decisions could be explored via a decision making tree. The really powerful benefits of a brand decision tree, other than making good informed decisions, are the following: it creates a visual diagram of possible choices, eliminates random barnstorming opinions, clearly lays out the pros and cons of each option, can be easily customized and almost clinically presents you with the best option in your branding strategy. In a few pages, I will show you an example of a brand decision tree we used to use at our agency.
These decision trees typically deal with branding issues such as:
How should we name a new product or service?
Should we keep an acquisition’s brand identity?
Should we endorse a company or offering with our parent name?
Should we have a separate logo?
How should we identify a joint venture or other similar arrangement?
Decision trees help to remove some of the subjectivity. Particularly with naming and other brand identity issues, there are often conflicting points of view within an organization. Typically, a corporate brand manager might want to reduce the number of brands and logos being used throughout the company while a particular product manager might want a cool, new brand for his or her new offering. With a decision tree, the brand manager can say “sure you can have a cool brand name,” but first make a business case by answering the questions in the brand decision tree. Brand decision trees provide a streamlined process to help make strategic decisions, which have an impact on your brand. However, the reality is that they’re only useful when management mandates their use, builds them into internal processes and rewards successful applications.
Brands and Bullshit Page 10