Branding Strategy Insider

Why a Branding Strategy Blog?

At The Blake Project our sole focus is helping organizations create brands that build and sustain trust. Branding Strategy Insider is an extension of our efforts as brand consultants to help marketing oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands.

The One Brand Strategy

Today on Branding Strategy Insider, another question from the BSI Emailbag. Jackie, a Director of Coprporate Marketing in St. Louis, Missouri writes:

"My company is about $100 million in annual revenue. We offer business services. We are a back office that pays telecom, utility and freight invoices and in the process provides added value in expense management, business analytics and payment services. We struggle with brand identity. In each area, we have a different “branded” Web portal where clients go to view reports and in some cases manage workflow. Can a company of our size (with little dollars devoted to branding) successfully promote multiple “brands”?  Should all of our branding center around the main brand?" 

Jackie, you are right to point out that a smaller company with limited resources for branding cannot support multiple brands well. Look at Nestle, P&G, Kraft and the other 'house of brands' companies pictured, they have had tremendous success with a multiple brand strategy, though it is only successful when there is a high level of investment to maintain it. It would be better for you to focus on one brand. I would choose a brand that had some meaning across all of your product categories and uses. I would also craft a tagline that alludes to the benefits offered by your brand. Regarding your brand’s Internet presence, I would focus on one website, with separate navigation (and pages, if necessary) for different customer groups with different needs. Your marketing dollars will go further if you are only supporting one brand. And, brand awareness, a key driver of customer brand insistence, should increase.

Thanks for your question Jackie. Do you have a question related to branding? Just Ask…

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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Behavior Is The New “B” Word In Marketing

The words “brand” and “branding” have become so ubiquitous in our jargon that they are becoming meaningless. Within your organization I’ll bet it’s a fair statement to say you’ve heard these words thrown around recklessly from time to time. You probably wondered privately “does branding really matter?”

At the risk of overly simplifying, let’s use the word “identity” in place of branding for this discussion. I think it’s a far better word with more relevant meaning. Organizations, products and services all have an identity. It’s through your identity that you build a relationship in the minds of customers by defining who and what your value proposition represents. But this is only half the equation - the more purposeful component to identity building is the ability to influence customer behavior to purchase. Endless logos and ad making will not get you there.

Nobody wants more branding

The inherent value your product or service brings to the marketplace is the sum total what it represents in the minds and physical experiences of customers. All the perceptions and real interactions people have with what you bring the marketplace forms your identity (a.k.a.brand). Customers decide what this means to them, not you. Customers determine the hierarchy of competing identities in a category. To influence purchase behavior your identity must matter to people. The trouble nowadays is customers aren’t paying much attention, and worse, they don’t believe or remember branding messages anyway. As a result, even the most memorable branding falls short of influencing customer behaviors. Couple that with the changing forces of our digital age, search technology, and how we are all instantly connected, and you can understand why traditional expectations of image and awareness in marketing are falling short in the eyes of the metrics obsessed. You can’t expect to influence behavior when customers are busy avoiding your branding at every turn. Nobody out there wants more branding.

The Temptation To Copy What Works

Developing a new or refreshed corporate or brand identity is often a response to change. Many factors will drive that change - new management, mergers, acquisitions, product development, or a competitor’s threat to a core business. Most change within organizations (or individuals for that matter) is usually driven by external influences (fear) and rarely is initiated through forethought (innovation).

Seemingly in every industry category, offerings are increasingly becoming commodities and perceived by customers as less differentiated and less valuable. Naturally it’s tempting to respond to this by changing something. It’s only logical to assume that maybe you can duplicate success by copying the attributes, features or capabilities of what is working for others. The sobering truth is this tactic will not sustain real growth, nor add more value to customers; it only increases the sameness and adds to the clutter.

We adapt by copying others.

Social observer and author, Mark Earls demonstrates the simple fact that humans have largely evolved by copying others. For thousands of years, humans have adapted through a “do what works” mentality. In fact, Earls points out “copying is our species’ number one learning and adaptive strategy.” The temptation to copy other’s success is, well -- tempting. Here’s why:

It’s easier and less risky to copy what works than to create more value.

Humans have naturally sought the safety and security of the known, and avoided the risk of the unknown. When it comes to building an identity, product development, and marketing, the majority of change today is really just copied from what came before, or from what’s currently influencing the behaviors of the status quo. The pressure to sell more stuff seems to trump creating more value through serving people better.

As a result, products have more features on features, there are more flashy logos, more marketing.  Seemingly, the more that changes, or gets copied, the more organizations and brands become the same - the result is more commodization with eroded brand equity.

An Open Letter To Marketers

Dear Marketers:

I’m much smarter than your marketing gives me credit for. I don’t like to be sold...I don’t care about your advertising, your free samples, your promotions, your special offers. I don’t like to be told what’s cool, new, improved, last-longer, smells better, tastes better, or is less filling...I don’t care about your brand, it doesn’t matter to me. I avoid your interruptions to my busy day whenever and wherever I can...I don’t have time to pay attention to your sales pitch...You are white noise to me and I have tuned you out. If you want to be a part of my life, here’s what you’ll need to do:

Be honest with me

Keep your promises

Treat me with respect

Provide me with more use value than you take from me in cash value

Teach me better ways to grow and expand my life experience

Help make my day-to-day easier, lighter, more relaxed and enjoyable

Help me to experience greater connection to what’s important to me

Do these things for me and you will win my trust and devotion. Then I will gladly welcome you into my life, and share the value of our relationship with others who are important to me.

Sincerely,

A. Consumer

Sponsored By: The Two-Day Brand Positioning Workshop

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Marketers Must Change Their Focus To Connections

The arc of the Internet is misunderstood. From its early description as the Information Superhighway to its current utility for seemingly limitless search, most pundits have characterized – even lauded – the Internet as a transformative portal to information and data. This is true as far as it goes. But this is far from the true essence of the Internet.

The Internet is about connections, not information, and this has been the case from the start. Certainly, people use the Internet for news, information and entertainment, but even more they have flocked to the Internet to strengthen and forge connections with others. The content – news, information and entertainment – is not merely content; it is something people share that binds them together in tighter, more meaningful bonds. It's the creation of these bonds that marketers need to better understand. To get there, let's look back.

The precursor to the Internet was the now-famous ARPANET that was begun not as urban legend has it to geographically distribute data and control systems to survive a nuclear attack, but rather to link up widely distributed networks and computers so that they could be uniformly, and thus more easily, accessed. Hence, the neologism Internet, short for “internetwork.”

Better access to information was central to the thinking behind the early Internet, but more telling about what is central to the Internet are the ARPANET recollections of Robert W. Taylor, the so-called father of the Internet. It is worth quoting at length from an interview he did with reporter John Markoff for The New York Times in 1999. When asked what he ‘discovered’ using early versions of ARPANET, Taylor replied:

Social Media Marketing Is An Oxymoron

The number one topic and trend many CMO’s are integrating into their marketing mix is the use of social media. Marketers are trying to figure out how to get their brands invited to the social conversation, so they can do more marketing. In my view, social media marketing is an oxymoron.

Marketing is not exactly a “social” activity. Often, it’s a rude interruption. Regardless, the term “social media marketing” is now firmly established in our current marketing lexicon. Many marketers continue to struggle with determining which discipline owns the social media effort within their organizations. Is it in the domain of advertising, PR, HR, IT? Social media, for all the attention it receives, is still largely a jump ball. The new breed of folks who will drive, create and maintain marketing communication content through all the social media platforms are still unformed and mainly siloed. Who ever owns the social media initiatives, the big job is to get the marketer embedded in the “social”, and once there, pile on the  “marketing”. The truth is consumers are not listening. Here’s why:

There is no place for marketing in social media.

Think about being at a party having an enjoyable conversation with someone of like mind, then some annoying person interrupts your conversation to tell you how great they are and why you should engage with them. This is basically what most “social media marketing” really is.  People hate being interrupted.

Most marketers now hire some form of “digital” advertising agency to provide the expertise to execute marketing campaigns in the social media space. Here’s what most marketers and their agencies do not get – digital advertising is still advertising!  Advertising is an interruption. More so within the context of our user controlled, crowd-sourcing social web. The social web is a real live conversation. It’s not a media pipe that marketers can own to shove messages through.

Consumer Engagement: The New Rules Are Here

As a marketer you invest precious resources (time, money and talent) toward achieving your business goals – namely getting people to engage with your brand and creating more revenue! The rules have changed and many marketers are being left behind.

What’s interesting is most of the tactics marketers employ today are no longer working like they used to, yet executives keep demanding more ROI. Surely by now we can all agree the marketing game has radically changed and so should the obsessive expectations about marketing ROI. Marketing is no longer about creating demand measured in sales, but building relationships measured in trust. The more important and transcendent ROI we need to be measuring is the quality of lasting relationships rather than the quantity of consumptive sales.

At best, today’s consumers ignore marketing, worse they loathe it.

This should be no big surprise to anyone charged with building the value of a brand. Consumers are inundated with over 3,000 marketing messages a day. Despite this, marketers keep churning out advertising nobody cares about.  But the real problem isn’t that people abhor advertising, or that tons of money is wasted on marketing that is poorly targeted, ineffective, and just plain annoying. The real issue is consumers have changed!

Consumers now have the power to determine and control what they allow into their heads.

Technology has finally shifted the power from the marketer to the consumer. Now consumers have the tools to opt-out and bar any further interruptions from marketers.  There’s no going back to the old ways of doing things. Consumers now enjoy the ability to consume only the content they want and enjoy (sans the embedded marketing messages) and frequently use these same new tools to boycott or disparage any brand they find lacking in their trust.

The End Of Brand Arrogance

Marketers are now on the far side of the inflection point where pushing products people no longer want has been replaced by business models that engage people with offerings that inspire. Indeed the walls of corporate marketing dominance have come tumbling down, replaced by the powerful voice of the tribe expressed through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and a growing host of social media sites driven by the newly empowered consumer.

For many marketers, these are fascinating and turbulent times indeed. We are now in a world where consumers have witnessed the bankruptcy of the largest automotive and financial brands, the disintegration of BP’s brand equity and reputation and the demise of Kodak. The days of brand arrogance towards consumers are at long last finally over.

Surely as a marketer you would agree the most fundamental and important element in branding is people. As marketers, you spend all your time, energy and money discovering ways to connect your brand with people. More than ever, the consumer landscape in which your brand lives or dies has become one gigantic slush pile. If you don’t make this connection, you’re brand will quickly fade into this abyss.

The New Rules
Consumers who yearn for authenticity and demand transparency are now writing the new rules for brand engagement. To play this new game, marketers will have to learn how to close the gap between their logical, metrics obsessed corporate cultures and the emotional world of consumers. Brand building is now, more than ever, about bridging this gap through rich emotional connection.

Effective Product Packaging Strategy

Successful packaging sells. Any company that invests millions of dollars in product development, consumer research, and marketing expects a return on that investment. The shelf is where that happens.

Product packaging is an integral component of the shopping experience. For many people shopping/buying is as much or more an emotional experience as it is a function of picking up stuff they need. With 80% of purchase decisions being made at shelf, the product’s presentation is the only form of marketing seen by 100% of the folks who reach for it and drop the product into their shopping cart.  Advertising can’t claim that. As a marketer, no one is more sensitive and aware than you of the daunting task to create successful packaging in an over-crowded-with-abundant choice retail environment.

The design of your packaging determines if your product will make it into the shopping cart or not. In every product category, from elegant wine and spirits, perfumes and apparel to laundry soap and toilet paper, successful packaging design is about connecting emotionally. If the product packaging doesn’t reach out and instantly connect with the consumer, it’s game over.

Packaging that sells is friendly to the mind and connected to the heart of the shopper. In other words your packaging must be designed to be imminently “shopable”.

Awareness + Emotion In A Nano-second

The mind filters things out with amazing speed and effectiveness. Think about times when you were shopping looking for something specific, or times when something caught your briefest attention. Your mind is constantly filtering out stuff  underneath your conscious awareness while you are consciously searching for another thing. Yet when something catches your attention, to hold it long enough for your brain to register, it has to connect with your heart. You have to experience an emotion in order to continue to hold your attention for longer than a nano second. As marketers, that’s all the time the packaging has to make a sale and win at shelf.

Brand Strategy Workshop For Startups

A startup business faces many difficult challenges getting off the ground. For many early stage CEO’s assessing their priorities, product development and the seed money to grow are their primary concerns. Few if any are thinking much about the critical importance of brand building.

For startup CEOs, brand building needs to be as important to early business success as product development and raising money. You can have the most innovative, groundbreaking product ever conceived, but if you can’t create a strong foundation for communicating that value to investors and the marketplace, chances are the business venture won’t go far.

You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Everyone has heard that statement before. But for startup brands the statement holds even more significance. Whatever startup brands are doing, chances are they’re doing it for the first time. The first presentation to an investor, customer or important employee must be simple, clear and compelling -- there are no second chances.

Developing a strong brand is critical to the early success of startups and emerging companies.

A workshop designed to build an advantage

Over the course of this one-day workshop you’ll build a strategic foundation for marketing success in your early stage business through focus in four critical areas:

Brand Education: What To Learn First

Today on Branding Strategy Insider, another question from the BSI Emailbag. Gabriella, an instructor of marketing and branding in New York, New York writes: 

"I am an instructor of marketing and branding at the Art Institute of New York City. We are revising our curriculum for our fashion merchandising department courses. We are considering some of our students' comments that they' d like to take the branding course first before the marketing course. Some instructors like myself feel that learning marketing comes first, then they can study branding, PR, etc. Other instructors seem to think that that is the traditional approach and that today, branding has become its own entity, and functions separately from marketing. Perhaps they are confusing corporate branding with product branding that can go on at the same time? Would you kindly clarify so we can better tweak our curriculum if necessary."

Gabriella, that is a very interesting question. Historically, brand management was taught as one element of marketing. I have told people that if marketing and brand management were two sets, they would largely overlap but each would include some things that were not in the other’s set. As one who sees things through a brand management lens, I like to look at marketing as just one piece (a very important one, albeit) of brand management versus the other way around. In brand management, one starts with customer and competitive research to not only understand customer wants and needs, but more importantly to understand customer values and customer emotional responses to various value propositions.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Show me the Money! This memorable line from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire might just as well be coming from today’s CEO’s and CFO’s: a growing and vocal demand for accountability from the Marketing function.

Big Data Coming – For Better or Worse

Everywhere you go these days, you hear about “big data:” the coming golden age where all problems will be solved by crunching massive amounts of data from the web and every other imaginable source. You would think that the CMO’s ability to, indeed, show them the money, would never be better.

But according to a recent IBM study, “From Stretched to Strengthening,” there is still a yawning gulf between the accountability demands of the CFO and their CMO’s ability to answer them–even with big data. IBM interviewed over 1,700 CMO’s, across 19 industries and 64 countries. CMO’s said that the data explosion, far from being a solution, is one of the top four challenges they face. What was once seen as golden opportunity is becoming a huge problem as the data explosion overwhelms Marketing organizations.

Big Data = Better ROI Measurement

But here’s the paradox. In the same study, almost half of the CMO’s believe that they are insufficiently prepared to provide hard return on marketing investment numbers on their key Marketing programs. Let me say that again: CMO’s are being overwhelmed with data, yet can’t adequately measure the ROI for their Marketing programs. How can that be?

Brand Marketers Must Create Wow Moments

The brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

—John Medina

When Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, the world didn’t just lose one of its great visionaries, but it also lost an astonishing corporate storyteller. His presentations, “Steve-notes” as they were fondly called, had all the elements of a Broadway production, including a cast, drama, heroes, villains, and props. Most brand marketers use presentations to deliver information, often dryly. Steve Jobs gave presentations that informed, educated, and entertained.

The most memorable parts of Jobs’s presentations were what I call wow moments. These wow moments were carefully scripted and exhaustively rehearsed. It took an estimated 450 hours of work and rehearsals to create and deliver the twenty-minute presentation to introduce the Lion operating system in June 2011. Jobs was fanatical about each and every element of the presentation from the lighting to the messages. He knew the content of every slide, every font, and every color that was used on every slide. But nothing was more important in a presentation than the moment when the audience would gasp and say to themselves, I need that!

The Brain Does Not Pay Attention to Boring Things

No matter how sensational you think your product is, nobody is going to care if the message you're using to communicate the product's benefits is dry, confusing, and convoluted. Neuroscientist John Medina taught me that the brain does not pay attention to boring things. It is simply not programmed to grasp abstract concepts.

Instead he recommends creating an emotionally charged event, which is the equivalent of a mental Post-it Note for the brain. Medina says the brain's amygdala is chockful of the neurotransmitter dopamine. So when the brain detects an emotionally charged event (e.g., joy, fear, surprise), the amygdala releases dopamine into the system that greatly aids memory and information processing. Let's recall three of Jobs's emotionally charged events:

Brand Marketing's New Currency

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists at the University of Parma discovered mirror neurons in our premotor cortex that fire when we perform an action and also when we observe others performing the same action. For example, the neurons that fire when we grasp a cup also fire when we see others grasp a cup. By mirroring the activities of others in this way, mirror neurons endow us with a built-in leaning toward empathy, social interaction and altruism.

We don’t always behave well in social settings, but because we are predisposed to social engagement, the rocketing rise of social networks makes sense. If, as some neuroscientists contend, the big ideas that stick are those that match brain structure and function, then social media are here to stay and will prove the naysayers wrong.

The discovery of our innate social faculty adds to our understanding of marketplace transactions. Embedded deep within dollar-and-cents exchanges are social exchanges of interpersonal connections – some good and some bad – that resonate to our very core.

What social networks have done is peel away the part of these exchanges that have always involved relationships. The relationships that matter most are family, and family means kinship. This is the currency of social networks. More and more these days, the currency of kinship must be spent first before any financial value can be realized, and this has big ramifications for growth opportunities in the marketplace ahead. Four warrant special mention.

First, happiness is the new metric of success. Relationships are a primary predictor of life satisfaction, so with the increasing importance of social networks and relationships, happiness will figure more prominently. Though brands like Zappo’s and Coke are touting happiness, it is not something most brands can do. But all brands can audit their consumer touchpoints to ensure that they are not upside down in their kinship accounts. This requires a different view of what relationships are all about.

Brand Strategy: Repositioning Commodities

Even producers in the commodity world of meats and produce have found ways to reposition themselves and thus create a unique selling proposition. Their successful strategies can be summed up in five ways.

1. Identify. Ordinary bananas became better bananas when a small Chiquita label was added to the fruit. Dole did the same for pineapple with the Dole label, as did the lettuce people by putting each head into a clear Foxy lettuce package. Of course, you then have to communicate why people should look for these labels.

2. Personify. The Green Giant character became the difference in a family of vegetables in many forms. Frank Perdue became the tough man behind the tender chicken.

3. Create a new generic.The cantaloupe people wanted to differentiate a special, big cantaloupe. But rather than call them just plain “big,” they introduced a new category called Crenshaw melons. Tyson wanted to sell miniature chickens, which doesn’t sound very appetizing. So it introduced Cornish game hens.

4. Change the name. Sometimes your original name doesn’t sound like it would be something you would want to put in your mouth. Like a Chinese gooseberry. When the name was changed to kiwi fruit, the world suddenly had a new favorite fruit that it wanted to put in its mouth.

Brand Strategy For Startups

A startup business faces many difficult challenges getting off the ground. For many early stage CEO’s assessing their priorities, product development and the seed money to grow are their primary concerns. Few if any are thinking much about brand building–mainly because they believe it to be sophisticated marketing they simply can’t afford.

For startup CEOs, brand building needs to be as important to early success as product development and raising money. You can have the most innovative, groundbreaking product ever conceived, but if you can’t create a strong foundation for communicating that value to the marketplace, chances are the business won’t go far. Developing a strong brand is critical to the early success of startups. 

The Ugly Baby Syndrome
Many startups have a difficult and awkward task of communicating the value of their product/service innovations in ways that matter to investors and potential customers. At the beginning (especially when seeking investment capital) founders have a tendency to believe that everyone will “get the big idea” of their next big thing. As a result, they usually message their value badly at the beginning.

Like any newborn, learning to walk the talk requires falling down and getting up again and again. But the break neck pace of the VC deal making machine is not very forgiving to the stumbles of startup founders not able to tell a compelling story of why their innovation matters to anyone beyond their Mother.

The heart and soul of brand building embodies a relevant and differentiated value proposition. Founders must be able to articulate why their baby matters to some people! Remember, at the beginning nobody cares!

Private Label Brands: The Future Leaders Of Retail?

Consumers are definitely giving retailers permission to grow their private label brands. The real question is will retailers grow private label brand value or simply grow more private labels? In the age of mega-private label brands, this trend is giving national consumer product goods brand managers some added anxiety these days. It also presents some relationship challenges for retailers to grow the value trusted CPG brands bring to their customers.

According to a report published by consulting firm Deloitte, consumer’s perceptions and attitudes toward private label brands are changing significantly; and offers insight into the notion that spending less for private label brands doesn’t mean consumers are settling for less from private label brands. According to the report only one-third of the respondents endorsed the statement “ I often feel that I am sacrificing when I purchase a store brand instead of a national brand”. This is no surprise when one stops to think that many consumers today believe that store brands and national brands are essentially made of the same ingredients. According to the report, 80 percent believe the statement “most store brands are manufactured by the national brands”.

The report further suggests that the current economic climate has made consumers more discerning about the brands they prefer. 75 percent of respondents agreed “ these economic times have made me more aware of which brands I care about and which ones are less important to me”.

Brand Strategy: Set Up A Positive And Attack

What you need to build into a brand is a positive. The purpose of hanging a negative on your competitor is to set up that positive idea. Some years ago, Stolichnaya vodka hung “American made” on its U.S. competitors who were “making believe they were Russian.” It was setting up “the Russian vodka” as its positive idea.

Many years ago, BMW introduced its automobile into the U.S. market by repositioning Mercedes as “the ultimate sitting machine.” This was a set up for its long-term position of being “the ultimate driving machine.” Repositioning Mercedes as a living room on wheels did indeed resonate with people, as at the time Mercedes was indeed manufacturing big limo-type cars. The first BMW was the 3 Series, which was a long way from today’s 7 Series, which is also a “sitting machine.” It’s also the main reason that I’m not a fan of these big gadget-loaded BMWs. They are not driving machines; they are high-tech sitting machines. It’s why you don’t see many of them driving around.

A Missed Positive

Some years ago, I was down in Venezuela working with a big ketchup brand called Pampero. By the time we were called in, Del Monte and Heinz had nudged it from its number one position. Pampero was in a decline. What was needed was a differentiating idea beyond its current claims of “redder” or “better.”

Why was Pampero better?  What did the company do to its tomatoes? After some prodding, what emerged was the fact that Pampero removed the skin so as to enhance the flavor and color. It was something that its big competitors did not do in their manufacturing process.

Are Brand Relationships Like Human Relationships?

I am hearing a lot these days about brand relationships being like human relationships. Maybe it is just me, but I don’t feel that my relationship with brands is the same as the one I have with my fellow humans. I might feel genuine affection for one or two brands, but most are simply familiar solutions to a specific need. Here are some of my thoughts on the topic but I would love to hear yours.

Initially, I thought my concern about anthropomorphizing brands was to do with the intermittent nature of our relationship with many brands. In reality, there are few brands that we think about or interact with on a regular basis, the mobile phone being the most frequent for many of us. Most of the time brands are out of sight and out of (conscious) mind. But then a human relationship can range from fleeting to enduring. And once a relationship is established, we often seem to be able to pick it up again where it left off, even if years have intervened. 

Then I read this in the Wikipedia entry on Interpersonal Relationships:

Interpersonal relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship tend to influence each other, share their thoughts and feelings, and engage in activities together.

Now this seems to address my concerns more closely. To what degree are we interdependent on the brands we use? Are there any brands that you use for which there really is no acceptable substitute? And just how dependent is that brand on you? Would Apple really miss you if you decided another mobile phone better met your needs or desires than the iPhone?

David Ogilvy: The Danger Of Discount Pricing

David Ogilvy, a legend along-side the likes of Rosser Reeves and Bill Bernbach, has some strong words to say about deals and price. They are certainly worth repeating:

• Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.

• The financial rewards do not always come in next quarter’s earnings per share, but come they do. When Philip Morris bought General Foods for five billion dollars, they were buying brands.

• There used to be a prosperous brand of coffee called Chase & Sanborn. Then they started dealing. They became addicted to price-offs. Where is Chase & Sanborn today? Dead as a doornail.

• The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building a favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brand, are the ones who will get the largest share of market at the highest profit.

• The time has come to sound an alarm! To warn what is going to happen to brands if so much is spent on deals that there is no money left to advertise them.

• Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of American life.*

*David Ogilvy, “Fiftieth Anniversary Luncheon Speech,” Advertising Research Foundation, New York City, March 18, 1986.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Reviving A Legacy Brand

Ovaltine is reintroduced with new advertising but the same old orange jar. Sales of the century-old, malt-extract, milk flavoring powder doubled in the first 100 days. Coca-Cola brings back the 40-year-old Fresca brand of citrus soft drinks with a graphics makeover and new flavor combinations.

Can everything old be new again?

As the publisher of BrandlandUSA, Garland Pollard is an expert on America’s legacy brands. A native of Virginia Beach, VA, he is active in historic building preservation efforts – and in a sense, his study of the value and tradition of “old brands” serves that same purpose for marketers and brand-builders.

We asked him about the lore of old brand names – and what they mean for today’s marketers.

Q: What are some notable brand names that are coming back to life?

Recently I’ve written about Hyatt bringing back its storied Hyatt House name, as a re-branding of its Hyatt Summerfield Suites extended stay properties. A Hyatt House was the place to stay in the 1970s – a smart, slick, modern hotel.

And it appears Nissan is driving the Datsun name out of the brand graveyard. Datsun will reappear in emerging markets such as Indonesia, India and Russia as an entry-level economy brand. It’s another example of how companies can re-use their brand names a few decades down the line.

Brand Strategy: Repositioning A Competitor

There are times, though rare, that a repositioning the competition strategy is not to hang a negative on them, but simply to put your lead competitor in its place—or, shall I say, in second place? This was the case in a project we did for the producers of Spanish olive oil.

Few people know that Spain is truly the dominant producer of olive oil. It generally produces more  than half the world’s olive oil. Italy, the number two producer, has only half Spain’s production. In fact, Spain outproduces all other countries combined.

But there is a big problem: while Spain is the dominant leader in olive oil production, many people  perceive Italy as the  king. Because of that, Spain makes most of the oil, while Italian companies make most of the money with their olive oil brands. How do they do it? They buy their olive oil from  Spain, put it in their cans and bottles, and ship it off as Italian olive oil. What should Spain do? That was a question we were asked by the Spanish producers. Our answer came in three steps.

Step 1 was to clearly reposition Spain as “the world’s number one producer of olive oil.” This little-known fact had to be put into the minds of the customers and prospects for olive oil. Spain’s production credentials were an important part  of the message. Outproducing all competitors combined is a great story. But Italy was already in people’s minds, so a way had to be found to reposition it as a producer that used Spanish olive oil.

Low Price Strategy: High Risk For Brands

Price is often the enemy of brand differentiation. By definition, being different should be worth something. It’s the reason that supports the case for paying a little more for a product or service, or at least the same amount.

But when price becomes the focus of a message or a company’s marketing activities, you are beginning to undermine your chances to be perceived as being unique. What you’re doing is making price the main consideration in picking you over your competition. That’s not a healthy way to go.

Few companies find happiness with this approach, for the simple reason that every one of your competitors has access to a pencil. And with it, each of them can mark down its prices any time it wants  to. And there goes your advantage.

As Harvard’s Michael Porter says, cutting prices is usually insanity if the competition can go as low as you can.

The Case Of Cheaper Carrots
To support Porter’s premise, we point you to a start-up company that came up with  a unique packaging system for baby carrots. It was one that  produced a decided price advantage over the two big suppliers that were already in the business.