Brands and Bullshit

by Bernhard Schroeder

  While every organization’s brand decision tree is different, the fundamental questions that any brand decision making tree should answer should include the following:

  Is the product or service unique?

  Does the product or service enhance or support the master brand?

  Does it strengthen master brand equity?

  Would it weaken our master brand?

  Is it strategically important for the growth of the company in the future?

  Is there a high level of risk associated with the new product or service?

  These are some of the questions that you need to answer before you get an itch to create a “logo” for a new brand product or service. Remember, a logo is a graphic representation of your company or brand. This is only one small part of your brand strategy. You could even argue it’s the least important part of your brand strategy. Before you move into the logo identity design phase, be sure to identify your brand positioning and value proposition. If you’re having a difficult time defining those two things, then you may have just saved yourself, and your designer, a lot of time and money.

  DESIGN AND USE OF A BRAND DECISION TREE

  In order to better understand the creation and use of a brand decision tree, I have created one for you. I will use the fictitious company name and brand “Newco” as I construct the decision tree. Let’s assume we are either going to create or acquire a new product line. As you can see from the brand decision tree example below, there are a set of simple but important questions, that when answered, lead to a suggested brand recommendation. Let’s review a simple brand decision tree:

  BRAND DECISION TREE

  While this is a very simple brand decision tree, you can look at the example and start to understand the clinical approach and why this methodology could be a very powerful tool when making decisions about branding. Imagine you are working with a brand that makes market leading oatmeal and has a great brand reputation built over 50 years. The company executives tell you they want to move into the “juice or yogurt” categories by either acquiring companies or creating new product lines. What is your branding recommendation? Would their brand be believable in those categories? Do you need to create or buy new brands? You can’t make this kind of decision based on intuition or gut feeling. You better do a clinical brand tree analysis that everyone can understand and clearly see the pros and cons of every branding option. See the example of a branding tree we used in our agency.

  BRAND DECISION TREE

  In all my years of doing branding work, most marketers I meet do not really understand branding at a deep strategic level. No Millennial digital marketer I have ever met has convinced me they could walk into a $3 billion brand and understand what to do from a strategic perspective. Harsh comment from me but I am speaking from experience. They may understand brandings’ purpose and role but they don’t know how to do it. If you are a digital marketer today and you wonder why you are not getting invited to the “big party” dance for major brands or large agencies, they just don’t see you as a strategic marketer. The good news is that you can learn exactly what it takes to become a branding expert and understanding brand architecture and utilizing brand decision trees will help you immensely. If nothing else, it helps you to understand the kind of simple questions you should be asking in strategic brand meetings.

  BRAND INSIGHT

  This company was once the undisputed leader in smartphones. It’s early rise and secure solutions were industry leading. And its brand name was very powerful in several customer segments. But eventually it started to fail. So what happened? The reason they failed provides a prime example of an incumbent business being disrupted by sprightlier newcomers. Success for this brand bred three interrelated negatives: conservatism, complacency and arrogance. The senior executives remarked when asked about the initial Apple iPhone introduction in 2007, “It wasn’t secure, it had rapid battery drain and a lousy “digital” keyboard. “It’s OK, we’ll be fine.” The lesson learned? Brands live and die by their customers and when BlackBerry did not evolve to meet customer demands and expectations of smartphones, the marketplace continued to grow as BlackBerry failed.

  KEY TAKEAWAY

  If you are fortunate enough to be a brand that is a market leader, you better pay attention to your competition and focus on delivering value to your current, and more importantly, your future customers. Because if you don’t another brand will be happy to take your customers. And, no matter your success, never be arrogant. It only works in Quentin Tarantino movies.

  8

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ART OF POSITIONING A BRAND.

  * * *

  Many people have different interpretations about what brand positioning means. It’s one of those concepts that is hard to pin down, yet at the same time is so important to the success of your brand. Positioning is at the heart of your brand strategy. It’s essentially the summation of everything your brand is about. Marty Neumeier who wrote the Brand Gap says that a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is. They being the customer. This is a concept most marketers can’t get their head around. Think about it this way, when you think of a car rental company, what brand pops into your head? Hertz? Enterprise? Budget? Today, it might even be Uber. These brands popping into your head for almost any product or service are not an accident. They were placed there by the brand we associate with or through our experiences. Pretty mystical, eh? Actually, it’s not mysterious; it’s more of a science. So let me try and explain it to you.

  Your brand positioning is built from what you know to be true about your customer. It takes the benefits of your product or service that you’ve outlined and makes them meaningful to customers. In its simplest of forms, positioning is the mental space you want to occupy in your customer’s mind. It’s the first thing you want your customer to think about when they hear your brand name. You say “smart hydration”, your customer says, “SmartWater.” In good brand positioning, you want to add emotion into the product benefit mix because you want your customer to “feel” something. How you build an emotional connection with your customer is the key to being a powerful brand. But that emotional bond should be reflected in the positioning statement for the business. Positioning is more about emotions and less about the facts. That’s why marketers, who think a claim about their product or service is a positioning statement, really miss the boat. The same goes for a description of your type of business. There’s no emotion in that and yet it’s emotions that differentiate a brand. Nike does not position or create emotion around a product feature, they say, “Just do it.”

  I remember when we created our own agency, CKS|Partners. As a team we were working on how we wanted to position our “integrated marketing agency, looking for the emotional benefit that we could offer to our clients. We finally landed on “our integrated brand marketing expertise will make your brand more powerful and get you promoted” as our positioning. We never used it as a tagline, but more as a positioning statement for how we would serve up what we offered clients. Our actual positioning words to the customer were, “CKS|Partners helps build powerful brands through an integrated marketing discipline.” Again we never had a tagline. But all of our branding and marketing was done to reinforce and convey the emotional benefit of our positioning. We had to have our clients believe that the synergy of integrated marketing would do more for less money and that we would create a more powerful marketing campaign based on brand strategy. And that success would get them promoted. It must have worked because in less than six years, we became the leading integrated marketing agency in the world with $1.2 billion in revenue, 10,000 employees and offices in 30 countries.

  Once it’s nailed, your brand’s positioning becomes the basis for building the brand experience across the entire marketing plan. The key is to make sure the actual brand experience delivers on what was intended in the positioning. You need to find the right brand positioning that helps create the emotional benefit that you o
ffer your customer. Think about how you want your customer to feel about you, every time they think about your brand.

  WHY IS BRAND POSITIONING IMPORTANT?

  Brands that are well positioned occupy particular niches in consumers’ minds. They are similar to and different from competing brands in certain reliably identifiable ways. The most successful brands in this regard keep up with competitors by creating points of parity in those areas where competitors are trying to find an advantage while at the same time creating points of difference to achieve advantages over competitors in some other areas. The Mercedes-Benz and Apple brands, for example, hold clear advantages in product design and performance and match competitors level of product innovation and service. Ritz Carlton and Nordstrom lead their respective packs in customer service and hold their own in quality. Levi’s and Harley-Davidson excel at providing compelling user and usage imagery while offering adequate or even strong performance of their products.

  Visa is a particularly good example of a brand whose managers understand the power of brand positioning. In the 1970s and 1980s, American Express maintained the high-profile brand in the credit card market through a series of highly effective marketing programs. Trumpeting that “membership has its privileges,” American Express came to signify status, prestige and quality. In response, Visa introduced the Gold and the Platinum cards and launched an aggressive marketing campaign to build up the status of its cards to match the American Express cards. It also developed an extensive merchant delivery system to differentiate itself on the basis of superior convenience and accessibility. Its ad campaigns showcased desirable locations such as famous restaurants, resorts and events that did not accept American Express while proclaiming, “Visa. It’s everywhere you want to be.” The aspirational message cleverly reinforced both accessibility and prestige and helped Visa stake out a formidable position for its brand. Visa became the consumer card of choice for family and personal shopping, for personal travel and entertainment, and even for international travel, a former American Express stronghold. Of course, branding isn’t static, and brand positioning is even more difficult when a brand spans many product categories. The mix of points of parity and point of difference that works for a brand in one category may not be quite right for the same brand in another category. In the end, customers get to decide but you can help.

  DEFINING THE CONCEPT OF “POSITIONING” IN MARKETING

  The term “positioning” really came to life in an article on the subject published by Jack Trout in 1969. In 1972, AI Ries and Jack Trout published a series of articles on the topic in Advertising Age. But it was Ries and Trout’s 1981 bestselling book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which firmly established and popularized the concept in the advertising world. The breakthrough part of Ries and Trout’s conceptualization is that “a positioning” exists only in the mind of the customer. Ries and Trout felt that, in an era of information overload, which at the time was driven by continuous streams of advertising messages, the consumer would only be able to accept and absorb those messages consistent with prior knowledge or experience. Positioning would help the advertiser break through the message clutter. So, good positioning presents a simplified message consistent with what the consumer already believes by focusing on the perceptions of the consumer, rather than on the reality of the product.

  The idea that consumer perceptions are critical to the success of a product changed the very basis on which new products could be developed. In their 1987 article entitled “Psychological Meaning of Products and Product Positioning,” Friedmann and Lessig, two university marketing professors, argued that products can engender important psychological meaning to customers, and that these psychological meanings can be both complementary and convergent from differentiation strategies based only on rational product attributes.

  The concept of positioning has been embraced by the marketing expert mainstream, with the vast majority of marketers using the term as part of their professional lexicon. The term “positioning” has evolved (or devolved, depending on one’s point of view) generally to describe any number of techniques by which marketers try to create an image or identity for a product, brand, or company in the mind of a target audience.

  Popular tools to assess brand positioning include graphical perceptual mapping, market surveys, and certain statistical techniques. Marketing strategists have layered, expanded, and refined elements in the concept of “positioning.” Researchers have created a plethora of techniques to measure “positioning.” Yet, in the end what matters is how potential buyers perceive the product as it is expressed relative to the position of competition. Today, however, the digital marketing community seems to have lost the simple importance of the original “positioning” philosophy. In the digital marketing age of “implement fast, ask questions later” marketing, this is a mistake. Another key concept of positioning, category ladders, is a key component of brand positioning.

  EXPERT POSITIONING: CHOOSE YOUR LADDER WISELY

  Earlier in this chapter, I talked about what pops into your mind when I referenced car rental companies. Usually it’s three to four brands and that’s not an accident. You see, as humans, we tend to categorize products and brands neatly in our mind into categories. It just helps us organize what we believe. We also utilize a “ladder” in each one of our categories. So, understand that these “category ladders” are in everyone’s mind for every product category. Well, if your brand can’t get into the top three or four for each category ladder in your customers mind, then you have a problem. You do have a couple of choices: Come up with a brand strategy and positioning that gets you in the top three (Visa versus American Express example) or create a new category ladder. I will explain more about category ladders in the next chapter.

  Here is the key question you need to ask yourself about your brand: Which category ladder are you going to own in the mind of your prospect? You want to be the first brand someone thinks of on your category ladder. This is what leading brands do on purpose. Dominos was able to do it by being the first pizza delivery place that guaranteed pizza delivery in 30 minutes or less. Not better pizza, just pizza delivered hot and fresh in less than 30 minutes.

  But if another company already owns the top rung of your category ladder, unless you are a strong number two, you should create a new ladder so that you can be first on that ladder. FedEx choose to create a category to be first in. And that category was overnight delivery. They came out with their marketing of “guaranteed when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight, it’s Federal Express.” They created the category of overnight delivery and they own that category in the customers mind. If you want something to be delivered overnight you think Federal Express because you know it’s going to get there. That is the category that they chose to create and own. They took a ladder that was in somebody’s mind about package delivery service and they actually created another ladder in that same category of overnight delivery service and they positioned themselves on the top rung of that overnight delivery ladder. That was decades ago and they still own that today. That is a great example of how you choose your ladder.

  The same thing can happen to you with your brand. You can look at your brands marketplace and see where there might be a hole or a gap in that market. Even if there are four dozen other competitors in your market, there is an opportunity for you to position yourself as the expert in a category. Create an entirely new category ladder in the mind of the prospect and position yourself on the top rung of that ladder, just like Federal Express did with overnight delivery. Specifically focusing on their one message, and hammering it into our minds until we remembered FedEx without fail. And you can do the exact same thing. It’s taking a category ladder and in a sense, dividing it down into a smaller and smaller niche, if you will. Do this well and you can own a category in the mind of your prospect. You just have to understand how the prospect thinks, what they need and how can you solve that problem or opportunity.

  What d
id Apple do in 2007 when they were predominantly known as a computer company? They came out with a new ladder when they launched the iPhone. They’re not really a phone company, they’re a computer company. The “cellphone” ladder was already occupied. So Apple created (or at least refined) the “smartphone” ladder and made the iPhone the gold standard for smartphones. So now the iPhone is incredibly popular. Apple owns significant market share today because they understood how to do great branding and good marketing. Their marketers understood how to position the iPhone uniquely and differently so Apple was not fighting the same battle as most other companies. Even though Samsung is a formidable competitor, iPhones still cost more than Galaxy’s. Arguably, all the other companies are still playing catch-up with Apple. Every category has a ladder in the mind of the prospect. You must think in terms of those categories, those ladders in the mind, because that’s where the marketing battle is won or lost.

  To create a new category ladder, you must position yourself for what you do and for what is unique about your brand. Then, focus your marketing on that. The customer is thinking specifically about their needs and about who can best solve their needs. They are looking for an expert or a leader. And when you have positioned yourself properly by choosing your ladder carefully, YOUR BRAND becomes that expert in their mind.

  This has to be done methodically, and you have to be able to choose the ladder that relates to who you are and what your business is all about. That’s exactly what Federal Express did. They chose a ladder, they chose the word “overnight,” and they dominated that ladder. That’s exactly what you can do in your brand marketing. It can be done. It’s not that difficult. It just takes deep thinking and strategic planning and solid execution over a certain period of time. You need to look at your competition, know how the customer thinks, and make your choice carefully. There is always an opportunity for you to break out of the category mold and create your own category ladder. Your goal should be to own the top position on a ladder.