Jan 27, 2010 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing
Product development is most often a process that in its early stages is dominated by technical considerations after the initial idea is articulated. It is about the dimensions, performance characteristics, functionality, features, technology platform, and so on. Typically the product brief will cover all these aspects, and more, but it will not be enough for the designer responsible for the way in which the products interact with the consumer, and therefore does little for the development of your brand.
At some point, you need to reflect the behavior of consumers as they use the product, the level of engagement it attracts, the way they interact with the features, the situation in which it will be used, what else is likely to be going on around them concurrent with use, the way it needs to look and feel, and many, often qualitative aspects.
It is a common mistake to put a lot of effort into the product brief, but less into the design brief, thus ignoring the most important factor in the whole exercise, the consumer.
.
Jan 11, 2010 | Branding, Marketing
A brand is the expression of consumers equity in a product offering. This offering is a mix of tangible and intangible factors, a bundle of benefits, each being inter-related to the others in ways that may vary depending on the differing consumers.
Brand strength = Differentiation x Relevance of the differentiation.
If you apply this formula, it may help in the difficult task of making the choices relating to which customers, which channels, which media approach, which opportunity to follow, which brand to invest more in, and so on.
It may also help to add some numbers to the often qualitiative marketing strategy dicussions, so the CFO can understand what you are doing, and why you are doing it. This is normally useful in a corproate environment.
Jan 6, 2010 | Branding, Marketing
Ironic isn’t it, Tiger Woods has had his squeeky clean image trashed, and in the process has dropped hundreds of millions in endorsements, but his profile has never been higher. Gossip columns, serious discussion in the business pages, piles of stuff on the net from academic analysis to jokes (some pretty funny), surely there are those out there whose products do not depend on the endorsement of the moral right.
The bloke might have his brains wired to the wrong spot, but he is a seriously great athlete, a cross-racial/cultural icon, and he commands attention, what do you want in a spokesman?.
If I was trying to build a brand of mens grooming product, a mid price muscle car, rugged menswear, and several others, I would be getting out my cheque-book while the price was down, and the exposure was up, (‘scuse the pun)
The communication options to be leveraged are terrific, advertising is almost sure to go viral, and I can almost see it, although it may not do a lot for Tiger’s stated aspiration of saving his marriage, although the chances of that would have to be pretty thin, and I suspect of value only to the spin doctors.
Dec 3, 2009 | Branding, Marketing
Building a brand is about the consistency of action thought, and expression over a long period of time, and only the CEO can ensure that this happens.
The CEO must be the chief brand manager, as the brand is the business, it is not the packaging, or advertising, it is everything that a consumer sees, feels and consumes.
This also opens the question to boards, “Do you have the right CEO”?
Nov 18, 2009 | Branding, Change, Marketing
Market research now has a pretty sophisticated set of tools, all sorts of ways to tell you what to do, to provide a crutch for decision making, to take away the responsibility for making a courageous decision.
However, it boils down to the option of qualitative, collecting behavioral patterns, and quantitative collecting numbers.
Many years ago, as the one responsible for the marketing of Ski yogurt in Australia, I struggled with the reality that we were number two in the Australian market, just ahead of a swag of alternatives and the leader had nearly three times our share. Whatever we did, however much we spent, the number did not change much. One day, in a supermarket talking to a young Mum buying yogurt in a 1kg container, I noticed she had to use both hands to pick up the round container of Ski, complicated by the fact that her youngster was insisting on being carried. The solution was blindingly obvious, use a rectangular container, she could pick it up with one hand, and the side benefit was that it now fitted in the door of a domestic fridge, and gave retailers better shelf space efficiency.
The result of the launch of the new rctangular pack was a huge increase in Ski’s market share, and an appetite for innovation that enabled several other ideas to hit the market, resulting in leadership in a relatively short time.
The lesson is that the quantitative data did not tell us this stuff, it told us consumers, both the ones who preferred Ski, and those whose loyalty was to Yoplait, the market leader, were happy with the product, loved the taste, consistency, packaging, and so on, but the approval of the product just did not translate into sales beyond a modest market share. However, the behavioral insight coming from just watching how the product was handled, qualitative data, gave us the insight, it answered a question we had not thought to ask, and with which the consumer had no experience, as all tubs to that point were round, and nobody had suggested any alternative.
Nov 12, 2009 | Branding, Management, Marketing
It is easy to create something, post it on u-tube and sit back and hope it goes “viral” giving you a turbo charged marketing program for not much money.
This rarely happens, as the punters know an ad when they see one.
The real challenge is to first identify those who love your product, and have the propensity to shout about your services, and set about delighting them, then they may send your message viral, but even if they just talk about it over the back fence to their neighbor, they will be your marketing department. Word of mouth, around forever, is really just person to person viral marketing, and we always knew it worked, it is just that now we have person to potentially millions, and we think it should scale up arithmetically, but it doesn’t.
There is not much use telling those who do not care, or who do not care enough to do anything positive, or are satisfied where they are, so focus your attention and passion on the few who will make the difference.
