Brand Biology

Thanks to BrandAutopsy for the excerpt of Al & Laura Reis’ latest marketing book, The Origin of Brands. Looks like another book for my stack (I've been on a fiction binge, and way behind on my business book reading!). Click over to BrandAutopsy for more detail... my favorite excerpt is:

A new brand is like a new species. A new species does not evolve from an existing species. If the “lion” is a brand, you can’t create a new brand by improving the lion. No matter how much you improve the breed, a lion is still a lion.

New species are created by divergence of an existing species. Somewhere in the distant past, the ancestor of the lion (panthera) diverged and a new species was created called a “leopard.” In the same way, the panthera diverged a number of times creating the jaguar, the tiger and other species. That’s the way nature works.

That’s also the way branding works. If you want to create a powerful new brand, you should look for ways that your product or service can diverge from an existing category. In other words, the best way to build a brand is not by going after an existing category, but by creating a new category you can be first in.

Customer Co-Creation

I've got a new book to add to my pile. Check out the book excerpt on CIO.com from The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. Here's the executive summary:

In their book, The Future of Competition, C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy contend that companies need not (and should not) go it alone when trying to create value. Their research suggests an emerging economic model of value cocreation, in which consumers and companies routinely collaborate to create personalized value. I n the world of cocreation, imagine every individual who interacts with the company as a "consumer," and discard the artificial distinctions among enterprises and households. And don't mistake self-service for customer involvement. Cocreation, the authors maintain, is not the transfer or outsourcing of activities to customers or a marginal customization of products and services. It isn't scripting or staging of customer events around the company's offerings. Those kinds of company-customer interactions no longer satisfy most consumers today. It's the cocreation experience (not the offering) that is the basis of value for each individual.

Check out the full exerpt; it's a good read. Thanks to Fresh Inc. for finding this.

Branding and Top-Line Growth

The April issue of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article called "Take Command of Your Growth." The author outlines 5 revenue sources from which to build revenue growth:

- Base Retention (continuing sales to existing customers)
- Gross Share Gain (take business from your competitors)
- Market Positioning (show up where growth is already occurring)
- Adjacent Markets (attack neighboring markets)
- New Lines of Business (Invest in unrelated new businesses)

The first three stem from a company's core business; the other two lie outside the core. The author doesn't mention how a strong brand (or 'corporate self') spurs revenue in these areas, so I’ll fill in the blanks. To lay the foundation for discussion, I define a brand to be the idea about your company in the minds of stakeholders. That idea is created by operations and marketing (what you say and what you do.) If a company’s words and actions consistently deliver on customers’ needs, the brand gains power. That power manifests itself into revenue growth in the 5 areas listed above.

Base Retention: Prospects hear a meaningful marketing promise, make a purchase, and experience the delivery of that promise. Consistency builds trust. Trust builds loyalty. Loyalty leads to…

Gross Share Gain. Loyal customers refer new customers, which is the least expensive way to take business from competitors. Testimonials and case studies support direct sales efforts. Clear definition and communication of the corporate brand helps customers and prospects understand why they should do business with your company.

Market Positioning. Although plenty of companies in high-growth markets are simply order-takers, the few with strong brands ultimately win in the long run. Too often, companies in high-growth markets build up their sales and order entry divisions at the expense of customer service, operations or R&D. Without continuing to deliver on the initial brand promise, these companies put Base Retention at risk.

Adjacent Markets: The strength of a brand makes it much easier to penetrate related markets. Apple’s well-known brand attributes for fun, stylish and simple products directly facilitated its successful iPod launch. And Sony’s brand equity supports any new product launch in the consumer electronics category.

New Lines of Business: Same thought process as above. This is also where companies can capitalize on brand equity through licensing. A colleague of mine thought that Volvo should enter the baby-seat business; its ‘reliable, safe & secure” brand attributes would be transferred to a completely new category where these attributes are highly prized.

Bottom line, a corporate brand should be built with all five of these revenue sources in mind. A brand statement like “We’re the leading provider of xyz products for the abc market” is meaningless to customers and inhibits your thinking about non-core opportunities. Conversely, if you design a ‘corporate self’ with core attributes like reliability, innovation and style, you can be flexible in your top-line growth opportunities while maintaining consistency in your brand promise.

More on Brand as Self

Looks like I was psychically tracking on the same wavelength as Mark at Fouroboros... I was just alerted to his post on Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand, Part II, where he goes into much more eloquent detail on brand as self:

Brand is not product. Not price. Not approachability, nor attitude. Brand is not ego or persona. It is the "self" Carl Jung described. That is, it's the quieter, hopeful, original part of a person, place or thing that can't be neatly tagged yet fits naturally and effortlessly. And it grows along with its adherents and admirers. Better still, it helps them grow. In this way, brands mirror the ambition of a consumer and reveal themselves as tools for the journey of becoming the idealized self we saw in the Statue of Liberty example... So. If brand is not just a suit you put over a flabby body in order to get a date, what's the key to being "real"? Simple. View things as a transformational journey, exactly as the self does. And understand and frame your particular brand, organization and environment as tools and shelter with deeply symbolic power for the trip.

I love his analogy of brand as a 'suit over a flabby body.' Great stuff; go read it. He clearly put a lot more thought into the subject than I did during my coffee time on Saturday morning!

The Corporate Self

Over the past several years I've gotten uncomfortable with the word 'brand.' Branding has traditionally been associated with marketing communications: the logo, tag line, visuals and tone of voice. I've been fighting a losing battle in my attempt to broaden the definition of brand to include operations. Talk to a CEO about his brand and he immediately says, "oh, that's a marketing decision." Yet if a company's actions don't match its words, the brand is simply a facade that customers so clearly see through.

So this morning I was surfing through the thesaurus in search of an alternate word without so much baggage. It was pretty enlightening. Compare the associations with the following two words:

Brand: Classification, badge, identification, signature, symbol, emblem, stamp, label
Self: Being, essence, personality, substance, texture, distinctiveness, singularity, essential nature

Brand is associated with external 'label' words, whereas self digs deeper into essence. And essence is the true heart of a brand. Self -- used as a modifier -- also has many other meanings: self-important, self-confident, self-respect, self-control, self-centered, selfish. It's a great reminder that brand (self) can have positive or negative connotations, and that self-perception may be completely different from how others perceive you.

"What is your corporate self?" What a provocative question. It circumvents every pat, rote answer that's been spewed out to customers, employees and investors about the brand. It forces a shift in thinking from externals to essence. It also wipes out the silo mentality and departmental battles. Because the word implies one body. What is in the best interest of the hand, eye or foot is usually in the best interest of the entity. All parts work together for the good of the whole.

As I play around with this idea, I'd love the thoughts of my fellow bloggers!

Brand Checklist

I recently wrote a 10-point brand checklist for a presentation and thought I'd share the condensed version here on my blog. The 10 items are organized under the following 4 categories:

Mantra Brand Checklist (condensed)
Externalized: Do you know what your customers think about your brand?
Internalized: How well is the brand promise communicated and understood within the company?
Operationalized: How well is the brand promise delivered in all departments?
Realized: Are your customers referring? Are your margins increasing?

To build a strong brand, execs must consciously monitor communication, action and results. Why don't more companies do this? Unfortunately, few believe that a strong brand will positively impact the bottom line. What are the roadblocks that prevent a strong brand from being built in your company?

Viral Chickens

Thanks to David at BrandingBlog for the heads-up on Burger King's Subservient Chicken. This is really funny; go check it out. No wonder it got a million hits in the first 24 hours with no promotion. David asks:

Does this chicken advance the essence of Burger King's brand? Do you feel better or worse about BK because of this? My gut reaction is that this is a good thing for BK. Somehow I feel that I owe them something for the entertainment provided by the chicken. Is the chicken a "Free Prize Inside?"

My answer is yes to both questions. It's an entertaining and engaging way to reinforce their long-standing tag line, Have It Your Way. And it's a heck of a lot less expensive than a traditional TV campaign. We'll be seeing a lot more 'sponsored viral entertainment' (like the SkyHigh Airlines site we discussed a couple days ago) and a decrease in pushy propoganda.

You can read more at BusinessWeek Online: Faux Webcam Becomes Real Branding Success.

10 Rules for Corporate Blogs

Today on MarketingProfs.com, the top 10 rules for corporate blogging. Click through to the story for full details.

1. Be authentic
2. Be an unmatched resource
3. Once you start, don’t stop
4. Keep it relevant
5. Measure your effectiveness
6. Monitor other blogs
7. Trust your employees
8. Use blogs for knowledge management
9. Use wikis for employee and customer collaboration
10. Develop an organizational content strategy now

Smart Questions

Today's Reveries offers a terrific example of effective customer research:

"Medical equipment makers typically ask surgeons, 'How can we build a better stent?' and then get the answer, 'You should make it more flexible, easier to see and stronger.'" However, Dr. Hunter and his team asked a very different question, a question that led directly to a highly lucrative innovation. The question was: "What does the body do to these stents and why do they fail?"

That question yielded a very different response. The real problem with stents was not so much that they were inflexible, weak or hard to see, but that, over time, scar-tissue tended to grow over them, reblocking the artery and sometimes requiring "repeated angioplasty." For that problem, Dr. Hunter's team arrived at novel solution.

Dr. Hunter and company, following two years of tests, decided to experiment with coating stents with paclitaxel, a drug used to prevent the recurrence of tumors... After seven years of tests on animals, Dr. Hunter had a stent with just a three percent failure rate - versus 20 percent for uncoated stents. When its stents entered the U.S. market last month, "they reached $98 million in sales in their first 18 days."

Neuromarketing will never replace the value of knowing the right questions to ask in the first place.

Viral Campaigns

There's been some discussion on my last post about SkyHigh Airlines concerning its marketing effectiveness. Coincidentally, I got this email from MarketingProfs in my inbox yesterday titled "Self-Propelling Viral Campaigns" that sheds some light on the subject.

Passed via peer to peer, "word of mouse" messages can help endorse a brand among like-minded consumers, thus spreading its influence. Because they're passed between individuals at a low distribution level (Bob sends a message to a handful of his mates, who in turn pass it to a handful of their mates), they can bypass spam filters with relative ease...

The success of a self-propelling, viral marketing campaign depends on creative execution and the quality of the initial seeding. To optimize message spread, content must be entertaining and engaging. The online audience will pass on advertainment, not ads. Content that's funny, topical, or sexy has best viral currency as it reflects well on the message sender, not the message originator.

SkyHigh Airline's site is certainly entertaining and engaging. We're blogging about it, so it's definitely viral. The only problem I see is that I had no idea it was sponsored by Alaska Airlines (thanks, Tom, for the tip). So I suppose a final checkpoint for a successful viral campaign is, "people actually know who sponsored it." It also helps if people understand that it's a joke.

A commitment to mediocrity

Check out Sky High Airlines' web site for a glimpse of what would happen if companies started practicing transparency today. What makes this site both funny and sad is that it proudly displays the "elephants under the table" (my new favorite phrase from John Moore UK) that most companies have but won't acknowledge or talk about. Here are just a few gems, but go surf around.

MISSION STATEMENT OF THE WEEK:

The mission of SkyHigh Airlines is to be laser-focused on total customer satisfaction, among many, many other things.

Tag Lines:

"Your Money Sends Us Soaring." "Flying More. Caring Less." "Lowering Fares. Lowering the Bar." "We're Here to Serve You. No, Honestly, We Are." and my favorite, "Excellence Through Compromise."

At the Global Baggage Tracker page:

At SkyHigh, we don't like to think of your missing luggage as being "lost." Rather, that it has embarked on an exciting journey all its own. But rest assured, we're fairly confident your bags do still exist in some form and could be back at home with you relatively soon.

From the Letter from the Chairman, on fees and service charges:

Do you work for free? We don’t. When some one asks us to do something extra during our workday, we expect a little something for the effort. We wouldn’t come into your place of business and ask you for chicken nuggets or to press our shirts for free. It’s all about give and take. And take.

From Employee of the Month page:

After we experienced a sudden drop in employee morale due to shortened smoke breaks and the "unbearable itchiness" of our new uniforms, Michael, SkyHigh's Employee Morale Supervisor, was charged with turning his co-workers' collective frown upside down. Michael responded with a resounding, "Um, yeah, uh, so…" and leapt into action...

Finally, displaying the leadership skills he has claimed to possess since joining SkyHigh, Michael made an impassioned plea to his coworkers: "If all of you just pretended to be a bit happier and more motivated around here, we could stop having these stupid meetings every morning at 5:30!"

The staff responded, sending Spirit scores soaring to a record high. Now, nearly 4.8 percent happier and more motivated, we here at SkyHigh have truly never been more ready (according to tests) to deal with the everyday anguish of keeping our customers un-angry.

WalMart the Bully

From today's Motley Fool news article: Voters Reject WalMart.

A couple of days ago, I wrote a brief article about Wal-Mart's (NYSE: WMT) attempt to skirt city government and construct a Supercenter in Inglewood, Calif. The world's biggest retailer sponsored a ballot initiative that would not only have let it build the store with no traffic review and no environmental oversight, but also prevented changes to the plan unless another election was held and two-thirds of voters agreed.

Yesterday, Inglewood's voters rejected that initiative by a margin of 60% to 40%.

Ballot initiatives are meant as a democratic safety valve for disenfranchised citizens. It's a perverse exploitation of the process when a company with the economic clout of an entire nation plays the victim and tries to spend its way around local ordinances. (Anyone else see the paradox in the fact that Wal-Mart was paying signature collectors more than it pays its retail employees?)

Even Fools who disagree with that ethical stance ought to realize the potential for economic backlash against the firm's tactics. Wal-Mart's success at the expense of its competitors and suppliers already generates enough bad press. It should avoid alienating the public -- and higher government authorities -- through political bullying. There may be more at stake than the $1 million thrown away in Inglewood.

I read this article with great interest because WalMart recently tried to pull this in my neighborhood. After a long battle, the surrounding residential communities finally won. But we heard plenty of inside scoop on how WalMart had "donated" a significant amount of cash to the poorer local churches, and (no surprise) the pastors were preaching pro-WalMart. I agree with the conclusion of the above article; WalMart is making no friends with its bully approach. These tactics certainly clash with its smiley-face, friendly-neighbor brand image it's been working so hard to cultivate.

The Meaning of Business

Great quote on Worthwhile by Mark Kaiser on the meaning of business:

"The simplest definition of business is you solve a customer's problem and create sustainable profits over time. Anyone with vision should understand the problem they're solving. The problem with business today is that people think the meaning is about building a monument to yourself. The meaning of business is having an impact on people's lives."

My definition was close:

A business' purpose is to attract and keep customers. Its one basic function is to reliably solve customer problems...

What customer problem is your business solving? Are you sure it's the problem that they need solved?

Next BBBT: Seth Godin

Be sure to check out the next Business Blog Book Tour, featuring Seth Godin's new book Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea.

When? May 3rd - May 14th

Where?

May 3rd - A Penny For...
May 4th - Brand Autopsy
May 5th - Decent Marketing
May 6th - Dana's Blog
May 7th - What's Your Brand Mantra?
May 10th - Ensight
May 11th - WonderBranding
May 12th - Business Evolutionist
May 13th - Branding Blog
May 14th - Thinking by Peter

PC EZ-Bake Oven

I love it when I stumble across something that makes me laugh out loud. This is a hoot. Mmm, Caffeinated Meatloaf.

Blogging is Booming

Check out the stats on blogging on iMedia (thanks to BuzzMachine for the link).

The Curse of Plentitude

Today's Washington Post offers an interesting article on new product introductions:

Can you name a single new product that was launched last year? I'm talking about packaged food and consumer goods that you'd find in a supermarket, a drugstore or a big discounter such as Target. How about Glad Press 'n Seal, which is kind of like plastic wrap minus its most annoying attributes? Or how about Hershey's Swoops chocolate slices? The Intuition razor? Clorox's Bleach Pen?

If even one of those rings a bell, you're doing pretty well. There are only 33,677 others you don't know about.

What I've been wondering is why so many new products are being introduced these days in the first place. Manufacturers brought out 53 percent more last year than they did 10 years ago, when just 21,986 items were unveiled...

Boston communications firm Schneider & Associates has found a growing number of consumers are unable to recall anything new to the market. "Fifty percent of the consumers we polled on the Internet could not name a single new product that was launched last year," said President Joan Schneider, who is writing a book called "New Product Launch: 10 Proven Strategies." "Advertisers spent $249 billion in 2003 launching new products. That's pretty disappointing."

It's especially sad since consumer awareness dropped from the previous year, even though advertisers spent more. In 2002, Schneider's survey found, just 33 percent of consumers couldn't name a single product after advertisers had spent $233 billion promoting them...

Which gets back to what motivates manufacturers to spin out so many new ideas and line extensions. There is the defensive aspect of product rollouts, of course, but there's also the opportunistic side of the business, which at the moment is contributing to the plethora of low-carb food items landing on supermarket shelves.

It's also about growth, because new flavors and sizes and variations on existing brands are relatively quick ways to gain market share... Publicly traded manufacturers are also eager to show shareholders how much they're innovating, pushing them to identify niche markets that can be targeted. Now there's practically a product for every niche, but every time a new niche is identified, everyone else jumps on it too.

I don't know if it's possible to ever go back to 21,000 annual product introductions, or if that would even make a difference. But the frenzy we're in now isn't working: In an all-out effort to make products more exciting, manufacturers and marketers have only made consumers more indifferent.

Reminds me of a couple recent posts on plentitude: Stop the Madness (mine) and When is Enough about Enough Enough? (Chris Lawer). The frenzy is definitely not working.

So what's the solution? How can consumer goods companies continue to push forward without creating more consumer apathy? Not having worked on any CPG accounts, I defer to those of you who may be more experienced in this area. Comments welcome!

Reviving a Brand, Revised

Making the brand/marketing blog circuit is Jeff Himmel's Brand Revival Checklist as seen on HBS Working Knowledge article, Second Acts for Old Brands. My take on the list is that it's geared almost exclusively to consumer packaged goods and focused heavily on the advertising component of branding. Often CPGs don't have clear-cut points of difference, and there's no real 'brand experience' as found in most B2B, service, technology, retail or hospitality businesses.

So I created my own Top 12 list for reviving brands that fall outside the CPG sphere.

Mantra Brand Revival Checklist
1. Listen to customers and understand what they want.
2. Determine how your customer experience measures up to what they want.
3. If it doesn’t measure up, fix it. If there’s a list of things to fix, start with what’s most important to customers.
4. Do you have a meaningful point of difference from competitors? If not, create one using the understanding from #1.
5. Create a focused, durable brand position that meshes with the previous 4 items.
6. Communicate that brand message consistently over time throughout every customer touchpoint.
7. Break down internal silos to ensure that all departments are working together to build the brand.
8. Create mechanisms to gather ongoing feedback from customers.
9. Make sure your employees understand how they can build the brand, and make sure they’re happy. Happy employees make happy customers.
10. Happy customers generate referrals. Measure your buzz factor.
11. Now that you’ve built your brand from the ground up, it’s worth spending more money on advertising.
12. Have discipline to follow – and continually reevaluate – all the points on this list.

And here's Himmel's list, if you haven't seen it:
1. Point of difference. Will consumers buy this product instead of another brand?
2. Unique selling proposition. Does the product tell a unique story?
3. Make the brand stand out.
4. Dominant share of advertising.
5. Frequency of advertising. Make sure the message about your product is repeated over and over to the public.
6. Listen to the consumer, and then listen again more carefully.
7. Produce creative advertising that strikes a chord with the consumer.
8. Control commercial production costs. (He tends to only spend about $2,000 producing a commercial.)
9. Use your money to place ads, not make ads, and get a dominant share of advertising.
10. Live in a state of perpetual paranoia and always know what your competitors are doing.
11. Consider the X factors about your product. For example, does it have an existing distribution, or will it have to be created from scratch?
12. Have discipline to follow all the points on this list.