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Paradoxically, the richness of information is exactly what makes brands more important than ever before.

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Customers need a sorting mechanism, a way to find meaning in the clutter of information. Brand awareness and clear brand positioning become guiding lights to navigate after. System 1 is automatic, unconscious and quick, while system 2 is slow, conscious and reflected. Not surprisingly, strong brands are often connected with system 1. However, the problem is that a lot of digital marketing implicitly require system 2. For instance, content marketing generally calls for the customers to actively reflect on the content.

That being the case, even though the customer in theory has a good access to information - how often and when are they really going to make use of it? The brand managers of today have analysis possibilities that former generations could only dream of. We can follow the digital consumer journey, analyse every click and optimise digital campaigns.

This creates new challenges. Focusing too much on tactical and short-sighted marketing efforts, reduces the attention paid to more strategic and long-term branding indicators. There is a danger in underestimating the important data not found online. In addition, data does not equal insight. Even if data can thoroughly explain customer behaviour, it will not necessarily provide us with insight into the motives behind their behaviour.

The Brandgym : A Practical Workout for Growing Brands in a Digital Age

Brand communication used to be a one-way process. One marketing director told me the story of where such an approach created a breakthrough on an innovation project in the laundry cleaning arena. He and the brand team passionately believed that delivering washing powder in tablet form was a big idea, much stronger than the planned route of using a cloth bag that would open in the wash. However, there was so much momentum behind the bag idea that the brand team felt it was like banging your head against a brick wall.


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Consumer data and test results failed to move the senior management, who had invested too much time and money in the other direction and were worried about delaying the launch. For all but one of the consumers, the tablet idea was by far their preferred concept. The video footage was used in a last-ditch attempt to convince the board that the tablet concept had more potential than the bag and helped the brand team win the day.

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The solution was to develop a style magazine that looked more like The Face than a research debrief, with time spent on copywriting and art direction so it really did resemble the real thing. Key takeouts 1 True insight about consumers, brands and markets can help inspire and inform teams in their search for growth. They should also move past evaluation to experience by relying less on testing and more on launching and learning.

Is it helping uncover deep and meaningful truths about consumers, brands and markets? Or is it being used as a prop to help make marketing decisions that could be made by employing judgement? Are you in danger of killing any new innovation ideas by failing to do them justice in the way they are presented? Ensure that the insights have been brought to life in 3D so that they inspire and guide people in the business team. This year Look at the team of people working on your brand or in your department and ask how close they are to the consumer and brand.

Do they have a genuine interest in the category like people at Nike or are they dispassionate observers? To be really challenging, consider yourself as well in this: are you working on a brand or business that you can easily relate to and ideally use yourself? Ensure that where possible the key agency people, especially creatives, are as close as possible to being consumers of the brand so that they can build real empathy. Handover We have now looked at the two key steps to building a solid foundation on which brand strategy work can begin.


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Part III will take us on to three pillars of brand strategy. They focus budgets, energy and commitment and so boost return on brand investment.

The Brand Gym: A Practical Workout to Gain and Retain Brand Leadership

The key to developing the right portfolio is balancing how many brands you need to achieve your business ambitions against how many brands you can afford to feed with the available budget. They often inherited a business where the problem of spreading resources across too many brands had been reinforced by the brand management system itself. This meant that some weak brands were getting a valuable share of the budget that could have been better spent elsewhere.

It was as if every brand was a child needing feeding and if it was not supported it was being starved to death. We will start by looking at just how much opportunity and need there are for brand focus in the overcrowded and overbranded world we live in, before reviewing the different portfolio strategies that can be used.

The Workout will end with a practical, marketdriven approach to portfolio planning that can help you do fewer things and do them better. Having, or at least thinking that you have, too many brands is simply bad for business, as it fragments investment and resources. When a company starts considering a product or service as a brand, it tends to provide a team to manage the brand and its own dedicated marketing support.

Orchard, Vector and Merridean were targeted at different types of people, with Midland Bank relegated to the role of an endorser. So, for example, if you were the young, thrusting and ambitious type then Vector from Midland was the brand for you. Each brand was advertised and in theory this better targeting and adaptation of the product would lead to increased share.

It was one thing to create three names, logos and advertising campaigns, but another altogether truly to build a distinctive promise and personality for each brand. This case illustrates the need for discipline in creating as few new brands as possible and concentrating efforts on this focused portfolio. In the Midland example the stretch from the core to the three product areas was not enough to require the creation of new brands.

In contrast, Toyota would have struggled to stretch into the luxury car market, as it lacked exclusivity and prestige. This led to the creation of the Lexus brand to attack this market opportunity.

Even when the stretch from where the brand is today is quite far, there needs to be careful consideration before you give up and create a new brand. Its core brand had strong business associations, resulting in an image that was conservative and even somewhat dull. A little bit of branding anarchy started to break out in response to this issue in a couple of smaller markets that were off the radar screen of the global brand team.

These markets created their own stand-alone new brands with a different look and feel, which was judged to meet the needs of young people better. In came black, silver and chrome and edgy advertising and out went the corporate colours of the main brand, not even present as an endorser. There was no shortage of creativity and innovation, but this strategy was a trap with several major risks.

First, the creation of a new brand would divert valuable resources and support from the main brand, including probably the youngest, most dynamic people in the brand team. More importantly, the local companies were removing from the main brand one of its best chances to rejuvenate itself by appealing to younger consumers. How could the main brand have any chance of attracting the next generation of users if all the efforts towards this audience were diverted into a new brand?

The company decided that a better approach was to refresh and reinvigorate the main brand, including extension into new services and products for younger people. They even found that business people reacted positively to the brand being a little more contemporary and energetic.

The Brandgym: A Practical Workout for Boosting Brand and Business - PDF Free Download

Focus is good Several factors have given companies a wake-up call as we start the new millennium, leading to an overdue focusing of brand portfolios Figure 4. In addition, the continual consolidation of the retail sector, in groceries but also in other markets such as mobile phones, means that bigger brands have better bargaining power to keep their share of shelf space.

The rising cost of media is also making it more and more expensive to support brands fully. Unilever is one of the best publicized examples of brand focus, with a commitment made to cut its portfolio from to brands, and within this to focus on a core of In the case of Unilever, as well as many other companies, a promotion of local autonomy led to the creation of multiple brands across markets, with countries often creating their own names, products and packaging. This issue is being addressed by harmonizing names and identities over markets, such as renaming Jif as Cif in the UK The need for focus also exists within markets, where multiple brands have often been created to meet each new consumer need that is attacked.

In many of these cases a brand extension might have done the job as well but with less investment support. This has led to the disappearance of Radion now a Sunfresh variant of Surf and Delight now part of Flora. The billion-dollar brand club The momentum in companies such as Unilever towards focusing on fewer, bigger global brands appears to be unstoppable.

Globally harmonized product design, formulation, packaging and communication produce lower costs but also quicker roll-out of new ideas and products. This is driving a much more aggressive and business-focused approach to accelerate growth on brands like Dove. Whereas the brand purists of the past wanted to restrict Dove to its historical area of expertise in skin cleansing, the brand has been successfully extended into areas such as deodorant and now shampoo.

However, it is now seen as a brand with huge potential for growth that can be stretched much further. Many of the local differences that do exist on brands have no real reason to exist any more, being minor tweaks and changes put in place by local managers adding their own personal touch. Does a consumer in the UK really give a jot whether their cleaner is called Jif or Cif? As long as it still does the job at the same price, they will happily keep buying it.

For example, Mobicarte had been managed and supported as a brand in its own right but was relegated to its rightful place as a product descriptor. In addition, the move was driven by a desire to have a single, global mobile brand with nothing in the original portfolio up to this challenge. The re-branding of Itineris, Mobicarte and Ola as Orange was a mammoth task, with 14 million subscribers to inform and retain on Itineris alone. A total of 18 different letters were sent to subscribers to personalize the message depending on the type of contract held, with the top customers called personally.

So, was all this money worth it? There are some major advantages coming out of the focused, mono-brand portfolio. First, there is now only one true brand that needs to be built and maintained. It is much cheaper to invest in creating and enhancing the emotional values and personality of Orange and communicate different product offers underneath it, rather than building three separate stand-alone brands.