Brands and Bullshit Page 6

  WHAT TO DO: Put the customer in the center of your marketing strategy to boost trust and deliver ROI (return on investment). By organizing campaigns that build upon customer insight, brands can easily strengthen trust in order to cultivate the types of relationships necessary for continued success. Ultimately, digital campaigns can’t succeed based on Big Data and analytics alone. Instead, marketers must consider clear and actionable customer insights. Delivering the perfectly tailored message to the intended target remains at the core of every marketer’s mission. However, digital marketing will always be secondary to an actual relationship; this is why companies must maintain a real, humanistic approach to their marketing and branding efforts.

  EIGHT. Executives invest in the necessary marketing technology, but not the resources that drive success. While most leaders now agree that digital channels require special attention, many invest time and money into integrating the proper systems, yet few invest in the necessary resources. Companies often thrust management responsibilities on their already tapped-out workforces, setting the initiative up for failure from the onset.

  WHAT TO DO: Create teams that specifically care for and carry out the brand’s digital strategy. Technology isn’t going to operate itself. Instead, strategic development must also include finding the right person or team of people with the necessary skillset and bandwidth to make the investment worthwhile. Ultimately, brands must recognize that technology cannot replace employees, for the customer experience will always require the human touch.

  NINE. Brands neglect to establish one brand manager to monitor metrics and goals. Because companies often implement marketing initiatives with great speed, many use this “bias for action” as an excuse for not taking the time to develop comprehensive plans and well-defined campaigns with specific objectives. Thus, employees begin operating within their siloed departments without one brand manager to oversee and manage the results of the marketing campaigns. What is the goal: brand awareness, leads or sales?

  WHAT TO DO: Understand how each digital asset performs and its contribution to the end goal. By putting one brand manager in the position to supervise all marketing activity, companies will ultimately come to understand the role of each digital asset with regard to how they individually and collectively impact the broader campaign. Thus, brands can easily create one comprehensive snapshot of the campaign and demonstrate how each asset contributes to the end goal so the brand manager may effectively shift budget dollars to maximize marketing campaign performance.

  TEN. Marketing teams lack the company-wide buy-in needed to advance digital strategy development. As with every company initiative, digital marketing requires top-down buy-in if said strategies hope to succeed. Implementation isn’t something that can be turned on or off by flipping the switch. Marketers need continued support so they may take slow, but steady steps toward success.

  WHAT TO DO: Gain executive buy-in and build partner relationships to enable a unified marketing strategy. True commitment must be supported from the top, or else investments in technology, partnerships, infrastructure, and resources will likely lack the fortitude to sustain long-term success. Thus, marketers must establish a clear set of strategic goals and develop a plan with launch milestones and success measurements to ensure all levels of the company are in the loop regarding progress. Developing partnerships with best-in-class providers will also enable marketers to integrate solutions for scalability and expansion. With said relationships in place, companies will be well on their way to establishing a unified marketing strategy that values and benefits the entire organization.

  In the end, the customer experience must be at the heart of every digital marketing initiative, for customers will inevitably feel the impact of both failed and successful strategies. It’s not about the latest digital marketing technology. It’s about the customer and how they feel about the brand. Marketers must proceed with caution, as the customer relationship remains delicate, particularly in this connected age, when the competition is only one click away.

  MOVE FIRST OR FOLLOW FAST?

  MOVE FIRST OR FOLLOW FAST

  As a marketer, you need to understand the brand challenge of either launching a product or service, taking market share or disrupting a marketplace. Why? Because there are so many unknowns. Are you early to the marketplace? Are you late? Where is the marketplace going? Who will be my future competitor? When we did the branding and marketing for Amazon, there were other booksellers already online. Who were they? Who knows or cares now. We reasoned that we were slightly early to the ecommerce marketplace so we decided to create a powerful brand and position Amazon as a leader. Next, we talked to potential customers, created differentiation via having access to a million book titles, allowed customers to post reviews, one-click remembering you and so on.

  We also had the right amount of marketing dollars and founder support to not only create awareness but to build the brand position: Amazon.com: Earth’s Biggest Bookstore. That in turn drove sales. Lots of sales.

  It’s awesome if you are the first to move into a market and can take a dominate position. But the competition is always lurking so you better move fast and build defensive brand positions (i.e. unique formula, critical partnership, patents, etc.). And it’s still no guarantee that being first will win out. In fact, this is rarely true. Over time, 47% of first-movers fail, compared with only 8% of fast followers. As the phrase goes, you can recognize a marketplace pioneer from the arrows in the companies back.

  First-mover advantage isn’t automatically bestowed unto the first product in a category. It’s not even guaranteed to exist in your industry and, when it does, it is fought for and earned. It’s first winner, not first-mover. Being first to the market means precisely nothing. Being the first to enter a market brings opportunities which, when exploited, can turn into advantages. First-mover advantages have a shelf-life and must be replaced with longterm differentiators. And you better demonstrate those differences in a way which means something to your customers and empowers your brand. The tactic here is to refine the user experience of the product or service such that it appeals to more than just early adopters. You need to move into early mass customers and then the mass market to succeed. This is what Apple did when they watched Saehan, Diamond Rio, HanGo, Creative Nomad, Cowon, and Archos all launch increasingly more advanced MP3 players to a slow-to-adopt customer. Rather than getting caught in this mess, Apple waited until the technology was sufficiently advanced and the market was sufficiently matured before launching a product with the best brand experience. iPod.

  So, if being the first to enter a market is not absolutely critical (think Uber then Lyft), what is then? Some of you might have already guessed. More important than entering the market first is to enter the market before someone becomes a dominant brand and then better understand the customer needs, innovate and evolve your product or service to become the dominant brand in the industry. Contrary to what most people think, King Gillette was not the first to market safety razors. They were invented in 1880 by the Kampfe brothers, and a decade before King Gillette opened his company there were already commercial safety razors being sold. Gillette, however, evolved the product rapidly both by improving the design and by creating a business model where the profits would be made with the disposable blades. Neatly crafted business strategy, good understanding of customer needs and great marketing enabled Gillette to dominate the safety razor market for such a long period of time. And they were not the first to enter the market. Now, they have to deal with a brand disruptor, Dollar Shave Club.

  Another challenge you have as marketers has nothing to do with existing companies. It has to do with large customer groups who are changing their needs.

  BRANDS, BOOMERS AND MILLENNIALS

  While I will go into more depth with these two large customer groups in Chapter Ten, I will briefly review the challenges of branding to baby boomers (aged 56-85) and millennials (aged 18 - 35). Just in the USA, boomers number about 71 million an
d declining (you could say dying) and about 76 million millennials (81 million by 2025). Currently, there are about two billion millennials worldwide. These two customer segments are incredibly important to marketers. Why? It’s not just the sheer numbers. It’s the amount of current wealth the boomers have and the amazing wealth the millennials will inherit. So, you better understand what’s important to each segment from a branding perspective. Here are some things to keep in mind when targeting either of these two groups with your marketing and branding:

  Baby Boomers. They hold massive amounts of wealth, they are living longer, they are more active, they don’t want to move into retirement homes and they are actually using technology albeit as late adopters.

  Millennials. They love technology, they don’t have enough money (or maybe even desire) to buy a house in suburbia, they live in downtown or in lifestyle areas, love to travel, socialize via social media and will care more about social issues and the environment.

  If you don’t know enough about them or don’t have key insights to these two groups, you better read and learn more about them, especially on a global level. Keep your eye on these two groups as they will make and break brands. Better yet, understand the benefits you need to build into your brand in order to be successful.

  BRAND INSIGHT

  This $11 billion entertainment industry could not get out of its own way when renegade companies and customers start to decimate its sales by getting its products through other channels, albeit illegally. Industry leaders and executives of major brands argued for over three years about how to solve the problem. One person seemed to understand the problem and his company had the brand permission from its customer base to launch a new sub-brand called iTunes. iTunes created the first legal music store online, made buying music online fashionable with its silhouette campaign, leveled the playing field for independent artists and labels, created the simple “single” price and helped to slow the erosion of all out piracy. You can argue the long-term effect of “singles” pricing but it definitely jump-started the legal sale of music online. And it did not hurt iPod sales either. Regardless of how it turns out now that we have streaming music, Apple leveraged its brand equity and really made the first powerful step of becoming a consumer goods company and not just a computer company. They evolved their brand before the competition forced their hand.

  KEY TAKEAWAY

  Your brand needs to evolve to stay relevant as your customers change. If you build a powerful brand that customers love, they will give you permission to introduce a new product or service that they believe you have the capability and the where with all to fulfill their needs. That is what we call an amazing brand.

  4

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BENEFITS OF BRANDING.

  * * *

  The world is full of products. Amazon alone sells over 500 million products through its website. Most of these products are a commodity. While that is not necessarily bad, it means there is a substitute product for every product sold. While that may be perfectly fine for someone selling on price, it does not work for creating a powerful brand where “emotion” can be more powerful than financial value or even another similar product. Let me explain. Products perform a function. They have properties that when combined together do something for customers. The problem is that within any given category, most products perform similar functions. There’s very little differentiation. Ingredients are ingredients and they tend to be the same across a category. Products are all about what they do for people. Products fulfill a customer’s needs. Functions, ingredients and needs — that’s what makes up a product.

  Brands are different. Brands offer an emotion. Brands are actually quite different from products because they don’t just cover a customer’s needs, they fulfill a customer’s wants. We don’t fall in love with products — we fall in love with brands. Brands offer a promise and an emotion. Brands are about how they make people feel. Promises, emotions and wants — that’s what makes up a brand. It’s a big difference. In short, while you may need a product, you will want a brand you can trust.

  So for example, I may need a cup of tea, but I personally want to get it at Starbucks. Tea is the product in this case and caffeine is the ingredient. I need it to get going in the morning and I could get it literally anywhere, including at Dunkin’ Donuts, the corner market or at home. But I choose Starbucks. Starbucks is the brand in this case, and the experience at Starbucks is the emotion I want in the morning. I want a Starbucks tea because of the unique experience I get and how it makes me feel. It prepares me for the day ahead and makes me productive in the morning. With Starbucks tea, I am ready! I want Starbucks for how it makes me feel. Products equal functions. Brands equal emotions. Hopefully you can see that products are basically at parity to each other, they fulfill the same needs. Brands are what differentiate the products because of how they uniquely make people feel. What happens when, as a marketer, you focus on product marketing versus branding?

  PRODUCTS JUST CAN’T SURVIVE OVER TIME

  Early in my career, without really understanding branding, I created amazing product marketing campaigns that did well and led to product sales. But it was a vicious cycle. Do more marketing to sell more products. Sell more products, do more marketing. Eventually we were always competing on price as we were selling commodities. And if a good brand was falling out of favor with its current customers and they did not change to meet customer needs and wants, then one of two things always happened. One, they lost market share and the company response was to do promotions effectively lowering price and devaluing the product and the brand. The second, and worse scenario, was the company ignored the problem and went into a freefall eventually heading for bankruptcy or sale to a competitor. Think Borders or Blockbuster.

  I am watching one such scenario right now with a product you know. Go-Pro. GoPro was launched in 2002 so it’s more than 15 years old. When they launched, they offered the world an amazingly small camera that was seen as new and innovative even though it was really just a new form factor. It had most of the ingredients, along with a waterproof case, of any small camera. I assumed over time that they would evolve to become a powerful brand that understood that they were not selling cameras but were helping customer’s create memories. So I kept waiting for the “brand” to evolve into new products, maybe an online easy to use editing portal that would distribute all the “memories” into people’s social media dynamically. Or better yet, evolve into a line of consumer products like wireless remote cameras, the new RING replacement for doorbells, security, etc. Well, that did not happen. GoPro grew on back of the rising popularity of social media not on its unique value. Guess what? Smartphones came along and had improved cameras. And it seems that everyone who wanted a GoPro has bought one. Now the competitors are arriving from offshore and prices are falling. GoPro’s stock price has fallen from $87 to $9 dollars a share. Ouch. I don’t necessarily want any company to fail. The marketplace and customers will decide that. But I do know one thing. GoPro never built a brand and now they are paying the price for being a commodity product.

  UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRANDING AND MARKETING

  Product marketing vs. brand marketing: Separate your product or seperate your customers? Product marketing differentiates your products from other products. Brand marketing differentiates your customers from other customers.

  Imagine walking on a solid, enormous, continuous surface presenting all the possible features of products in a category. Customers can and do wander anywhere along the surface. Over here is higher quality, walk over there and the price goes down, walk over here and the product gets faster and more efficient. Product marketing inherently assumes this continuous surface connects all the products customers can consider as competitors. Think of this surface as the marketplace. Product marketers look for differentiation. They look for a spot on this surface they can own. And when things go exactly right, they look for customers to self-select based on a deep prefer
ence for that spot in the landscape.

  In this sense, the Holy Grail for both brand and product marketing is differentiation. But how differentiation is defined in each case is very different.

  Differentiation in product marketing is the perceived separation between your product and your competition on this continuous feature surface. The ideal positioning is a spot only you occupy and therefore what you offer is defensible. Often these spots are different in ways only you recognize as significant. This is a mindset known as the “narcissism of small differences” to anthropologists. In feudal times, you can imagine a feudal lord finding this position and building a fort to defend it so no one else can occupy that spit of land. However, if you are small it is likely your fort is trivial and weak. And it is likely that one of the bigger land owners will be able to overwhelm the territory if they try.

  Brand marketing is different. With brand marketing you’re attempting to create an island disconnected from this surface. Brand marketing is realizing that your goal is to separate your customers, not your product. You are creating your own island. A discontinuous piece of land that may be hard to reach, but it is just as hard to leave. You are creating separation in the customers’ decision process for your product versus your competitors’, not on features, but personal identity. You are trying to get your customers to see themselves as the kind of people that look for options all over your island, and not over on that other larger surface of land where you would likely be almost defenseless against competitive onslaught.