Customer-Centered Brand Management

There's a terrific article in this month's Harvard Business Review entitled "Customer-Centered Brand Management." (You can purchase and download the article here for $6.)

The focus is on how brand management still trumps customer management in most large companies. A good example is Oldsmobile; the brand managers tried to keep the brand alive by repositioning it through the slogans, "This is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" and "A New Generation of Olds." Neither campaign was effective in bringing younger users to the brand, and in 2000 GM announced that Oldsmobile would be phased out.

Why did General Motors spend so many years and so much money trying to reposition and refurbish such a tired image? Why not instead move younger buyers along a path of less resistance, toward another of the brands in GM's stable -- or even launch a wholly new brand geared to their tastes? ... We know why not, of course. It's because in large consumer-goods companies like General Motors, brands are the raison d'etre. They are the focus of decision making and the basis of accountability. They are the fiefdoms, run by the managers with the biggest jobs and the biggest budgets. And never have those managers been rewarded for shrinking their turfs.

The article goes on to promote a reinvention of brand management that puts the brand in service of the larger goal: growing customer equity. Amen to that. A brand is is an idea in the minds of its customers, and it's extremely difficult to change customers' minds. The path of least resistance is to fully understand your customers and determine if your brand can meet them where they're at. Unfortunately, most marketers try to make customers come to the brand instead of vice versa.

Johnnie Moore has some terrific thoughts on brand co-creation with customers, and how brands are emergent rather than 'managed'. You can read his thoughts here, here and here. He says in one post:

I think it helps to think of brands as emergent. Not things that unfold according to the master plan, but that emerge as a result of all the encounters between people who belong, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or loathing, to the community around a brand.

That doesn't mean, that there is no role at all for strategy and planning but to my mind it should shift attention towards responding rapidly to what's going on at the chalkface (I hate that word "touchpoints"). Because your brand is not created in the boardroom or marketing department, it's being created by us ordinary folks who stack your shelves or pick our cornflakes off them.

So if brands are emergent and fluid, what are the implications for the idea of brand equity? The HBR article answers:

Assigning an average value to brand equity is dangerous because it obscures the fact that brand value is idiosynchratically assigned by the customer. Managers begin to believe that the value of their brand is somehow intrinsic -- that, like a diamond in a necklace, the brand has an objective, inherent value.

Which leads to some great questions. How 'set in stone' do you believe your brand to be? How open is your company to bringing the customer into the brand management process? Do you see the world through a compartmentalized brand/business unit lens or through a customer lens?

Comments

[Abnu]

Dr. Paul Temporal's book, Advanced Brand Management, is excerpted as a case study of the Oldsmoblile brand. Here are just a few of his choice words:The demise of any brand isn't a joyful time, and one wonders whether or not Oldsmobile could have survived if it had been consistent over time with its initial identity and evolved as a sporty and innovative brand, leveraging on its heritage. The imposed schizophrenia of the brand personality through inconsistent brand communications and product development basically turned people off. Oldsmobile was no longer the trusted and believable personality they knew. The emotional association was destroyed.

[Johnnie Moore]

Interesting. There's something very conservative about the way many brands are managed. That tendency to see them as solid things with inherent value is part of it. Likewise the efforts to sustain an old brand rather than develop a new one (or let it change). There's a provocative essay in Spiked that considers brands as risk-averse: here I blogged a few thoughts on it here.

[Abnu]

That's a good essay, Johnnie, and I enjoyed your posts, as well.

I'd add to this conversation, a Marketing Magazine article about a four-year global study of 524 brands across 100 categories by Bain & Company, which found that "the keys to growing old brands" were "good, old-fashioned innovation and advertising."Some mature brands grew through innovating product formulas, others through repositioning. Take, for example, Procter & Gamble's Old Spice, which is more than half-a-century old. P&G introduced High Endurance deodorant in 1994 and Red Zone in 1999, both sporty repositionings of Old Spice to attract younger male consumers. High Endurance and Red Zone counted for more than 75% of Old Spice deodorant sales in 2001 and helped the brand grow 13% a year in a category eking out 1% annual growth, on average.Which shows, too, that "old" in the brand name doesn't deter young customers, if you innovate and advertise with a customer focus and make an emotional connection with the new young customers. As a teenager, my first car was in fact my father's Oldsmobile but it never seemed "old" to me.

[Scott Miller]

Agree with your post.

In the particular case of Oldsmobile, the brand's name itself is a significant part of the problem -- it self-positions itself as a brand for old people, and who wants to think of themselves as old?! It's just a horrible name, and wasn't worth the effort to rescue in the first place.