How is the brand positioned?
What total marketing have you done to date?
What does the product packaging look like?
What are the key product marketing messages?
Who are your competitors?
They may be hiring you for your digital marketing expertise initially, but if you show the brand that you understand branding, they will see you in a more strategic light and possibly give you other responsibilities or marketing campaigns. You have to know the whole picture of the brand or marketing strategy even if you are only doing SEO, content, analytics and an AdWords campaign. What you create or write has to match the brand “voice” and contribute to the look and feel of the brand. The benefits of doing this are powerful.
THE BENEFITS OF IMC
It’s not just me or my point of view regarding integrated marketing communications. The research now validates the power and synergy of an integrated marketing communications strategy. An IMC approach provides benefits at every level of the company including:
Operational level – reduces transaction costs, interdepartmental conflict, and duplication of effort
Campaign level – creates synergy with the marketing communications mix and provides a higher return on campaign investment vs. the competition
Brand level – provides clarity and consistency to the brand messages to create brand loyal customers
Customer level – positively impacts consumer awareness, customer attitudes, and customer experiences at every touch point
Market level – decreases the rate of defection, increases market position and loyalty, sales, and sales growth
Financial level – increases the ability to achieve higher sales, sales growth, profitability, return on investment (ROI), and return on brand investment (ROBI) vs. the competition
As a marketer, you need to understand the difference between branding and marketing and then employ an integrated marketing communications “mindset” in doing your marketing work. It will set you and the brand apart.
BRAND INSIGHT
As a marketer, you don’t want to judge what is but what could be. If I told you that I wanted to create a company/brand in the taxi marketplace in 2009 but not buy a fleet of taxi’s or hire any drivers, would you have laughed at me? Uber. Let me give you another example. This industry has been around for hundreds of years; however, it started to decline rapidly in the 1980’s. The founders of this brand looked at the industry but more importantly, looked at what customers were doing around gaming, entertainment, and travel. Rather than compete with a traditional “brand” in a declining industry, they re-shaped the product and then created a powerful brand that redefined the industry. Cirque du Soleil was born. First as a small show with no marketing which meant they needed word of mouth from consumers to grow. But the “brand” they created was so powerful that customers not only embraced the “product” but redefined their own idea of what a modern circus was supposed to be. In an industry that was dying, Cirque du Soleil created a multi-billion brand with no real competition.
KEY TAKEAWAY
When you want to create a powerful brand in any industry, even a declining one, listen and watch what customers are doing. Use Blue Ocean Strategy to get you going. Then build a brand that re-defines the industry to better meet or exceed customer expectations. People don’t get into an Uber with a stranger driving based on a breakthrough innovation. They just hate traditional taxi’s.
13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A BRAND PLANNER AND FINAL THOUGHTS.
* * *
The role of branding and marketing has not changed in the past twenty years. What has changed is the marketing mediums and the tools available to marketers. I wish I was active in creating or marketing a brand today. In my career, the idea of creating a brand out of “thin air” would have seemed impossible but now I am seeing hundreds of brands being created that have no physical company or retail space nor will you meet a company employee. Brands like Uber, AirBnb, Amazon, Shopify, DropBox and so on. These are amazing times for marketers who are able to move faster, be more disruptive and opportunistic and seemingly create brands out of thin air. But you can’t be a solid marketer in this new world without really understanding branding. Being a marketer today with no core strategic brand foundation is like giving a child a firehose and asking him to water the house plants. It’s a funny thought but this is what marketers today, without strategic intent or brand knowledge, are actually doing in marketplaces all over the world. In order to better understand branding, you need to create a plan.
YOU NEED A PLAN TO BUILD A BRAND
It can be hard to know where to start when faced with a product, brand or client that needs some strategic brand thinking. In order to help you, I created BrandPlanr, a simple branding tool to help you organize your information with regards to branding a product, service or company. After years of working with brands, I narrowed it down to nine key elements that you need to identify and get answers to in order to begin to create or support the brand. You really can’t do any marketing until you complete some kind of brand analysis and hopefully the BrandPlanr will help you. Working with brands can get very complicated. Managers and clients can be difficult to pin down and this tool will help spark the right conversations. I purposely kept this tool simple to help you get started. Here are the nine key elements:
Brand value: this has to be something uniquely yours that you can defend (i.e. twice the power, waterproof, etc.)
Brand promise: this is the actual product or service “promise” you are making to current or potential customers (i.e. get your job done faster, etc.)
Brand persona: use this to describe your brand as a person (i.e. an athlete who moves quickly, driven but with integrity and passion, etc.)
Brand position: this is your positioning goal either on a category ladder or in the marketplace (i.e. for people who want to be healthy, Vitamin Water gives you vitamins, etc.)
Brand identity: this is your logo, type face, colors, imagery and graphics
Brand research: complete a brand analysis competitive quadrant to understand where you are placing this product or service in the marketplace
Target segment: these are your target customers, primary and secondary
Customer feeling: this is what people will say about your brand when you are not in the room
Brand marketing: this is the marketing campaign you will put together to launch and build the brand
Like I mentioned before, technology is having a massive impact on today’s era. This is why I created BrandPlanr as a web app for your laptop, tablet or phone giving you maximum flexibility and access.
I know what you are thinking. This seems like such a simple brand planner. In my twenty years of marketing I have never seen anyone use something like this. We either created a $500,000 brand research audit or we creatively “argued” with managers or the client to eventually get to a place where everyone roughly agreed on the brand strategy. Sophisticated brands and corporate identity firms have a strong branding process with several steps to be completed over four-six months. The rest of us now have the BrandPlanr. At the very minimum, it can get people to quickly agree on what has to be answered in order to move forward with a branding strategy. While I have copyrighted and trademarked BrandPlanr, you can access this branding tool at www.bernieschroeder.com.
CURIOSITY, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE
Here is my final advice and parting thoughts in this book that will hopefully have you continue your journey toward becoming a brand expert. I am giving you this advice not because I think I am smarter than you; I just have more curiosity, knowledge and experience. Also, honestly, I want you to be the best possible marketer you can be. Here are my final bits of advice:
Be curious. If you are going to be a good marketer, you have to know what’s going on around you, in the marketplace and across industries. Be more curious on purpose. Walk into stores you have never gone in before, take a different
route to work, attend a trade show event based on a new trend, read more books and acquire more understanding and knowledge of trends.
Have a mentor. My three mentors made my marketing career. I have no clue where I would have ended up without them. Funny thing is, none of them became my long term friends. Good mentors are not necessarily your friends. They are people who care about your professional success, who will have honest and sometimes harsh conversations with you. At other times, they are your best cheerleader. Most importantly, they will allow you to become more strategic as mentors always look at the big picture.
Work for a wizard. If you are in marketing and are not working for an amazing marketer, make a change. The only way you can learn and grow is to work with someone who will give you the benefit of their knowledge, experience and advice in order to hone your skills. If you are working for someone and you have more knowledge and are smarter than them with respect to marketing, you are learning nothing that will make you better.
Understand the why. Understand why you work for the brand or company you do, why you work for your manager and why you actually get up every day. In my career, I did not define what I did everyday as “work.” I loved marketing so much that I just wanted to be better. I wanted to be a brand expert who could walk into a room, understand the situation and lead a team to build something magnificent.
Understand branding. If everyone could be a brand expert easily, everyone would become one. The reality is that it’s hard to rise in marketing to where you become a brand expert. It takes 5-10 years of hard progressive marketing work, a great mentor, a strong amount of curiosity and the ability to constantly challenge yourself to the point of failure.
Be more strategic. Executing on marketing tactics is easy. Create this video, post that tweet, slam that ad into Facebook, etc. But what’s the real goal? Are you trying to drive customer engagement, brand or product awareness, sales, what? Understand the bigger picture. What’s happening in the marketplace, what brand position are you striving for, what trend is fueling your brand’s potential growth, where is the blue ocean?
Build your network. After I interviewed and landed my first marketing job after college, I never submitted my resume for another opportunity again in my entire career. My first mentor counseled me on the power of a network and I built my network relentlessly. After about five years, my name started to appear in news articles, I started speaking at events and the marketing campaigns I was creating were winning awards and growing brands. All my future opportunities came to me through my network as referrals from people that knew me and knew what I was looking for in my career.
Pay attention to trends. Clients can pay you $100,000 to execute a marketing campaign. Or they can pay you $10,000,000 to craft a brand strategy. Most times clients will ask you to take their brand to a place in the marketplace where they can thrive. How will you know where that is? Paying close attention to top trends might allow you to intersect certain trends or connect some dots to determine where markets or customers are going. If you get good at that, you will be very valuable.
Develop your gut instinct. A gut instinct is critical to a marketer. There will be times when you evaluate all the information you have and it will not point clearly one way or the other. Then you need to decide. How will you do that? A gut instinct is not a guess. It’s a “feeling” that based on knowledge, experience, skills, similar but different situations that will help you decide what to do when someone needs to decide. Practice on smaller decisions in your career before you attempt to make bets on big decisions.
Enjoy the journey. Early in my career, I worked crazy hours and I loved it. But I also got tired and started to realize I needed to do a good job on “today” as tomorrow would always be there. With that attitude, I went from worrying about how to sell another Mercedes to sleeping like a baby. This mental shift lowered my stress and allowed me to understand that I needed to have “fun” in my career. I learned that I could work hard and play hard and enjoy life. The same goes for you. You need to enjoy the ride.
Here are some books you should read for a variety of reasons. They are in no special order. But they all have some knowledge you need to acquire in your journey of becoming a marketing or brand expert.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by AI Reis and Jack Trout
Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy
Spin Selling, by Neil Rackham
Brand Gap, by Marty Neumeier
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore
How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
Where the Suckers Moon, by Randall Rothenberg
As a marketer, you owe it to yourself to never stop learning. And if you are going to become a brand expert, then put in the time and learn your craft. Trust your instinct and trust yourself to be great. Remember to enjoy the ride.
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
- MARK TWAIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Bernhard Schroeder brings over 20 years of branding, marketing and entrepreneurial experience, both as a senior partner in a global integrated marketing agency and as a former chief marketing officer on the client side. Today, Bernhard is a Director at the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University, where he oversees all of the Center’s undergraduate and graduate experiential programs. In 2017, San Diego State University was named the National Model Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Program for 2017 by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Past rankings include 18th on FORBES most entrepreneurial universities list. He has worked with hundreds of start-ups in the San Diego area, on and off the campus.
He is a strategic adviser/mentor to several start-ups and is quoted frequently in both local and national media and has spoken at TEDx events. He also teaches several entrepreneurship courses (Creativity and Innovation, Entrepreneurship Fundamentals, Business Model/Plan Development for Entrepreneurs) within the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University.
Since moving to San Diego in 1997, he has specialized in working with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in either growth or turnaround opportunities, with several companies ranging from $40 million to $250 million. Prior to moving to San Diego, Bernhard was a senior partner in the world’s largest integrated marketing communications agency, CKS Partners, which in 1998 had offices in over 30 countries, more than 10,000 employees, and over $1 billion in revenue. He had joined CKS in 1991, when the firm had only 16 employees and just $1.7 million in revenue. He opened the first out-of-state agency office for CKS in 1993 in Portland, Oregon, and working with the other partners, grew the firm to almost $40 million in revenue by 1995, and led CKS to a successful initial public offering that same year. Bernhard has marketing, operational, and entrepreneurship experience working with Fortune 100 firms like Apple, Nike, General Motors, American Express, Mercedes Benz, and Kellogg’s, as well as start-up companies. He was involved in the initial branding and marketing launches for online companies like Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Corbis, and ESPN SportsZone. The agency worked with many key brands like Levi’s, Audi, Williams Sonoma, McDonalds, United Airlines, eBay, Pixar, Timberland, Harley Davidson, Microsoft, and Visa.
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
In addition to Brands and Bulls**t, Bernhard Schroeder has written two other thought provoking books on entrepreneurship and creativity.
This book is written for the person who feels they should be an entrepreneur but don’t know how to get started. Schroeder demystifies entrepreneruship and breaks it down into several easy to get started steps. Full of insights and learnings to help you get started now!
The world rewards and provides opportunities to people who can creatively solve problems. The good news? We are all creative. Learn how to get your creativity back and flowing on purpo
se with this powerful book and build the career you deserve.
Brands and Bullshit Page 17