What is a WoW Brand? Part III

Until now we scored the date, established a consistent equity which stole the heart enough to maintain the ralationship yet there is another challenge which is to keep yourself fresh against the test of time so that you can end up with true love...Now the final episode: "Staying Alive and Keeping your Brand Relevant"...Let's start with a nostalgic journey in time...

I was almost a teenager in the 80s: that wonderful decade when synthesizers defined musical brilliance, Duran Duran were actually cool, and girls in fluoro socks and oversized white t-shirts made me drool.  It was the era of Margaret Thatcher, Mutually Assured Destruction, Boy George, Michael Jackson, Gordon Gecko, BandAid, LiveAid and Koolaid.  A time when audio cassettes suddenly accounted for more than 50% of music sales and Prince was still called Prince. I love it more now than I did back then.

Looking back, the 80s really were a cultural highpoint.  OK, so that’s going a little far, because lets face it: little about the 80s remains cool except to those of us who grew up in it.  But one thing, or rather someone, emerged out of the 80s who provides incredible inspiration to marketers who want to know how to keep their brand forever relevant.  And that person is Madonna.   When she bopped to the tune of Holiday back in 1983, did any of us really imagine she would be huge nearly 30 years later?

 

Love her or hate her, Madonna is an icon, and she manages herself as a brand brilliantly.  I can think of very few artists who were big back then that can still sell 5 million albums before breakfast.  Cyndi Lauper? Boy George?  Maybe Michael Jackson?  Heaven forbid his own lack of relevance had anything to do with it.   But Madonna is releasing albums, shooting films, starring in West End, making headlines, treated as mass–cool and amassing an absolute fortune.   Still.

As brand builders we often ask ourselves the question:  how do you turn around an “old fashioned” brand image? For instance we do ask this question in Turkey for our once legendary (or what Barney Stinson would call Legen...wait for it ...Dary) but now dying Tekel brands (Local franchise of BAT in Turkey).   That’s what we are going to look at today, but I want to take a “glass half full” approach and ask “How do we keep our brands always contemporary and relevant?”  Afterall, it’s easier to stay contemporary than try to regain it once its lost.  I think it’s where brands like Madonna have done well.

IT’S ALL A QUESTION OF RELEVANCE

It’s a brand’s worst nightmare:  in demand one day, then suddenly seen as past it, old-fashioned, a “brand

my grandpa used”.   The key is to realise that when a brand becomes seen as old-fashioned, its all a question of relevance.  The brand has ceased to be seen as relevant to the target consumer’s life.   

Consumers simply can’t connect with you anymore.  You have lost relevance, and the signs are all too obvious:  declining share, aging user base, declining image ratings, and less than positive comments in your consumer research.   Your brand becomes the one people feel comfortable with, but wouldn’t think of inviting to a party.  Ouch.

To consider relevance, imagine where Madonna could have gone wrong.   This is the Madonna we first saw when she debuted in 1983. 

It was incredibly fresh at the time.  Teenage girls everywhere were wearing lots of bracelets and even the toughest of guys would agree that she was more than a little attractive.   But imagine if this is how she stayed?   How long do you think she would have lasted?  A couple of years? Maybe three?   (Did somebody say Brittany Spears?)    Instead, consider how Madonna has changed to keep relevant...

Madonna is called to be a chameleon, and I think that is a good description.  She changes to stay relevant to the times.  In fact, she always tries to stay just ahead of the times riding a trend just as it appears and then leaving it before it becomes outdated.  As a result, she may not define cool for the leading edge people, but she certainly defines it for the “masses”.  

Many brands have suffered because they failed to stay relevant to their target because they sometimes fail to be chameleons.  Perhaps the most celebrated is Levis.  Levis defined themselves behind the myth of the American mid-20^th century teenager, and for a long time this really was cool.  But as we headed into the 90s, that “myth” was no longer interesting to teens.  It had lost all relevance, and the more Levis stuck to it, the more their business eroded.   Its only since they started to look behind the myth to really understand the essence of the brand – which I could simplistically state as an idea of teenage freedom – and communicated that in a modern way have they started to be successful again.

Which leads us to our next point:  to be successful at this game, you have to keep your brand contemporary in a way that is consistent with your equity.

CONTEMPORISE WITHIN YOUR EQUITY

Staying relevant does not mean you should change your fundamental equity.  Rather, the secret lies in understanding the essence of your brand, and communicating that in a modern, relevant way.   

Lets go back to the Material Girl….  What is the essence of Madonna as she presents herself to us?   I find it hard to capture it in one word but I think she is about independent sexuality and the “good Catholic girl” with a dilemma:  she wants to be bad and make you uncomfortable but wants you to like her.  There is an angst that wears a veneer of “I don’t care”, but really she does.   And here is the key:  she has remained true to this essence throughout every transformation.  

Brands that stay contemporary do what she does:  stay relevant in a way that fits their core equity.  Lets consider Apple computers.  Everyone loves this case.  When Apple first launched in 1984 they did so with a very clear equity:  as the human-friendly alternative to the faceless complexity of the computer industry, with IBM clearly in their sights.  In a world of DOS, complex programming and square grey boxes it was enormously successful.  But into the 90s the brand started to suffer.  Yes it was human-friendly, but it was also not very powerful.  What to do?  Time to think different. (Sorry, I had to use that).   Here is the key:  they didn’t change their equity.   They just thought about how that equity would manifest itself in today’s world, to their target – the creatively minded computer user.  So they came out with the eBook, with its simple one-touch internet access, and their iMac, with its beautiful design, and ease of use but with the power that people wanted, and positioned this as a power to release creativity.  They remained totally true to the essence of the brand – but how that manifested itself to the consumer was new and fresh. Ipod, IPhone and Ipad followed. Ask most people which computer company is going to be bringing the most people-friendly innovations to the industry in the next 50 years, there is a good bet they’d say Apple.   Unless, that is, they stop being relevant again.

So the key is to contemporise in a way that is consistent with your equity.   Too often we think that because our brand is seen as old-fashioned we must radically change our positioning.  But that throws the baby out with the bathwater.   For most brands that were once successful, the key lies not in playing around with the WHAT you stand for, but rather going back and thinking about the HOW:  how can I bring the essence of my brand to life in a more contemporary and relevant way, through product innovation, communication, PR, targeting… whatever.   It’s a pretty good bet that if your brand was once successful, and its not now, that it’s a case that you have a desirable benefit but you are just not positioning it in a way that makes it relevant to today’s consumers.   

BUT WHERE DO YOU START?  

The secret is through discussions that unleash the answer to this question:  what is my brand really all about?  Some tips:  Review your historical advertising reel and executions.   It’s a great way of understanding how your brand has unfolded.   Talk to “brand historians”, people who have worked on the business for a long time, or worked on it when it was successful.   Talk to consumers – they can usually tell you where the brand sits in their mind, and with some expert probing you can understand the nuggets that make you great.   Now, one word of caution here:  go beyond what your brand LOOKED like (eg white coats or happy mothers) to really understand what that MEANT at the time of success.  

THE “HOW” OF BEING RELEVANT

Once you uncover your brand essence, you are ready for the “how” discussion:  how do I take what my brand stands for and make it relevant to today?   That’s where the work and fun really continues.   Product upgrades (like Apple did); new line extensions (like flavor combinations of Starbucks); repositioning your equity to a new unmet need (what about low smoke less smell);update the look and feel of the brand and its communication at every touchpoint are all just a bunch of ideas to contemporarize the brand. Or there can be some cases where your brand may actually benefit from exploiting its age as long as it is actually intrinsic to its equity (Coca Cola heritage packs, Volkswagen Beetles)

PROACTIVELY RECREATE YOURSELF

The mistake we often make as marketers is that we do not think about our brand’s need for relevance until we have lost it.   Ask yourself – have you ever been on a brand where you had a discussion about how you are going to make sure that you are still seen as relevant 5 years from now?  Never!  Nearly all our brand relevance discussions come when our brand is already down the relevance toilet, and its hard thing to climb out the s-bend. But imagine the power of proactively managing your relevance before you start to lose it.  Wouldn’t it be powerful if during equity reviews we asked ourselves the question “What will we do to be sure our equity will still look fresh and relevant next year, and the year beyond that?”   What a great question to ask!

Again, I think Madonna is good at this.  The funny thing about her is that she rarely creates new trends, but she rides new trends early and with real ownership.   Every new transformation of Madonna feels fresh and a little confrontational for its time – both in her image and in her music.    She makes the edge trends relevant for the masses, and most importantly she dictates to us how we should think about her.  And this is turning relevance into an artform – not just being seen as keeping up with the times, but somehow leading it.

Proactively staying relevant requires three things. Firstly, an acute understanding of what your brand is all about.   Secondly, staying tapped into the changing needs, desires and trends of your target consumer.   And finally, having the courage to often lead those desires.   Sony does this.  In one famous quip the founder of Sony asked “Do you think consumers would have told us about the Walkman?”  They know their consumer but they also come to the consumer and tell them what they should expect from new entertainment technology.  Like Madonna, they are thought leaders.  Chameleons.  And they stay relevant because of that.

So there we go – a look at brand equity through the eyes of a pop icon.  The summary?  Remember that becoming old fashioned is not a question of “is my equity dead”, but rather, “how do I keep it relevant?” Remember to reinvent your brand while remaining true to what your brand stands for.  And if you are riding high now, take time to ask how you are going to keep yourself relevant.    At the end of the day, becoming old-fashioned is a choice you make. 

Sinan Seha Türkseven 

 

What is a WoW Brand? Part II

We just scored a date with the consumer through 4D's of dating advice... Next is how the relationship continues...

...I am now about to marry a thief.

No, I’m not going to tell you she stole my heart. I mean it: she is a thief.  When my girlfriend was a little girl she nicked a bar of chochlete straight from a shop counter.  But what is more remarkable than the fact that she has done anything dishonest in her life is the fact that she can still tell you exactly what the chochlete looked like and, with no entreatment from me, sing the brand’s jingle:  “First comes the sun, air, water then nutrituos diet, Papa when you come home don't forget to bring Ulker”.  Why?  Because the brand stood for the same thing for so long the association is unavoidable.

Fast forward  25 years.

I’m going to attend GmX training in March and I have a homework to ask my friends what brands are lovemarks for them.  What brands can’t they do without, and why?  The list read like a who’s who of the rich and powerful:  Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Mini, Sony, JW, Diet Coke, Nespresso.  Yet more remarkable than the list was the fact that each friend could tell you in a heartbeat what they loved about their chosen brand.  Why? Because the brands have stood for the same things for so long the association is unavoidable.

That’s the power of consistent equities.

Great brands know what they want to stand for in the hearts and minds of their consumers, and stick to it.  Usually it is something simple, and they make sure to bring it to life consistently over time and across touch points.  Apple is always about design and creativity.  Starbucks is about a relaxed personalized coffee-house experience.  Sony TV is about colour.  Nike is about Just Do It and a passion to win.  Each brand has made some mistakes in the past - Starbucks have famously recognized that their move into automatic espresso machines and even cheaper plastic seating in some stores has diluted some of the equity they’ve built up - but each brand seems to know where true north is because they keep coming back to it.  And consumers reward them for it.

We have our own examples of where we have got equity consistency right, then wrong, then right again. However a brand is what it is and playing with the brand essense, stretching it to a different personality usually fails. So What’s at play is consistency.  The reason is that we remember and are influenced by people and things that consistently say the same message.   Psychologists call it the rule of commitment and consistency.  Not only do people try to look consistent through their words, deeds, beliefs and attitudes but we are also more open to relationships with people and brands that do show such consistency.  (Think of politics: we respect leaders who stick to their principles, not those who flip-flop with public opinion.)  Furthermore, Associative Network Memory Theory (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase) reminds us that information that is strongly associated in an established memory network is more likely to be recalled than less associated information.  Said another way, we remember things that have strong associations to something else in our minds.  Paris equals the Eiffel Tower.  Cows equal milk.  Milka equals purple cows equals milky chocolate.  It’s why my girlfriend not only remembers the chochlete bar she lifted but the song about the chochlete she lifted:  it’s all built around associations...  

And how are such links formed?  It can be through sudden disruptive associations.  I am planning to propose my thief in Notting Hill, failure or success, it will  forever be associated in my mind, even though it will happen just the once.  Or it can be through consistent, engaging repetition, like my grandmother and her scones.  She always brought them when she came over.

Anyway, all this psychology makes me want to lie down on a couch some where, so let me skip to what I think it all means to us.

First, make sure everyone who works on your brand knows the simple equity you want to stand for.  Consumers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day.   In such an environment, any given brand can only ever hope to build up a small handful of meaningful associations.  What messages and associations will be most persuasive for your consumer?  These, and only these, should be captured in a choiceful equity pyramid and shared with anyone who touches the brand. 

Take a long, wide view to building brand equity.   Rome, as the saying goes, wasn’t built in a day, and brands take even longer.  Remember that equity statements are long term visions of what you want your brand to stand for in the hearts and minds of your consumer.  The contributions you make today to building your equity are for the benefit of future leaders of the brand as much as your own.  It means that every initiative you do should be driving a key equity choice.  It means that every piece of communication you produce should be true to the brand you are trying to build.  It means that at every single place the consumer engages with your brand they should have the same equity messages reinforced.  So whether you are a brand executive or global head of brands, do equity audits:  consider every touch point your consumer has with your brand that you have some control over and ask yourself:  am I building a consistent brand here?  If not, what has to change? 

One of my favorite quotes on this topic of the long, wide view of brand equity comes from Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Disney who said “We came to think of Disney as a canvas on which many artists paint one dot at a time.  If each of these dots is executed with precision, imagination, and an awareness of the whole, the painting becomes richer, more vibrant, and multidimensional.  The opposite can also occur.  When a new group of artists comes along, the risk is that they bring lack of attention to the whole.  Point by point, stroke by stroke, the masterpiece deteriorates into something mediocre and commonplace, even ugly, until eventually it is destroyed altogether.”   That’s magic.

Have executional consistency. Remember that equities are not just strategic.  In fact, execution plays a huge role in driving associations for the consumers.  That’s why there is so much power in executional equities like the Nike swoosh and “Just Do it” or the lounge-room like feel of a good Starbucks experience.  They bring associations of the brand to life for the consumer.  It’s why consumers remember characters and icons like Marlboro Man, Milka Purple Cow, Apple bite, etc... who have been walking purposely into the hearts of consumers since decades.  Having executional consistency is maybe your only means to build a consistent equity especially if your brand doesn’t have the chance to air an advertising campaign.  Memorable equities are a gift to your brand when it comes to driving influential associations between your brand and your benefits.  People remember these far more than they do individual ads. 

Stay fresh.   Finally, remember that consistent doesn’t mean being boring or formulaic.  Our jobs as marketers is not to create entirely new things to say, but new ways of saying the same thing in fresh and relevant ways.  That’s where true creativity comes in.  That’s how brands are built.

So I guess what I’m saying is this:  stand for something and keep standing for that something.  Sooner or later you will have a brand that consumers will not only notice, but will associate great things with and will gravitate to.   Then you’ll have built a brand that stands the test of time. 

Only, watch out for beautiful little girls with innocence in their eyes and desire in their hearts.  They don’t always pay for what they take.  But they will sing your song.

Sinan Seha Türskeven

What is a WoW Brand? Part I

Asking my collegues and friends which brands they are attached to and they actively and passionately promote to others I came up with brands like Coca Cola, Apple, Starbucks, Nike, Mini, Sony, Johnny Walker, Mercedes, Google, etc...So this probed me the question what really a WoW brand is? How do some brands succeed to score a date with the consumers? and then turn this into a sucessful relationship? and how do they manage to stand still against the test of passing decades... Could there be an analogy between building successful brands and building successful and longlasting relationships? 

So the muses in my spirit revived and forged me to ponder a little bit...Let's see if we will be able to solve the riddle behind lovemarks and find a guiding path to build equities that steal hearts ...By the way I'll skip the boring video posting step so bear with my boring content:) Let's start with the first step: "How to Score a Date"

If you are having trouble scoring a date and i believe it’s not through a lack of available resources.  Forget the advice of friends or online dating services; just typing the word “dating” into amazon.com spews forth 33241 books on the topic. My research has led me to conclude that if you want to write a book on dating, the title is important.  It has to be confident, like Mr Right, Right Now, or How to pick up Beautiful Women.   Ideally it should have both a title and a subtitle:  Understanding Women: The Definitive Guide to Meeting, Dating and Dumping. It should assume the opposite sex is an animal, just waiting to be trapped: Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man.  And finally, it has to have an angle; that hook that makes the reader want to skip all the others out there and just date the writer, like Rachel Greenwald’s Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, which offers tips like:  “Market Expansion:  Cast a wider Net” and “Packaging:  Create your best look”.   I’m sorry – that’s not sexy.  That’s sad.  

But I got to thinking…maybe there is something in Ms Greenwald’s approach.  Are there strategies that will score you a date?  But I am not here to advise you on your love life but to offer brand builders advice.  So, perhaps the pertinent question becomes “is there a type of communication strategy that will help your brand score a date with the consumer?’   (The more pedestrian amongst us would call that date “trial” in our so called disposition funnel) 

Yes, I want to talk to you about good communication strategies. What are the characteristics of strategies that will help your communications score dates with the consumer?  But before you despair too much, feeling that I have just teased the lovelorn amongst you, the good news is that the principles of these consumer-date winning strategies pretty much hold for scoring a date out there in the real world of relationships:) 

Before I get into the principles, let me tell you two things.  First, what a communication strategy is.  It is that portion of a brand’s marketing strategy that deals with the content of the message in the brand’s conversations with the consumers.  Said another way, it’s the benefit (what we promise the brand will do for the consumer), reason-to-believe (an optional element that might be used to increase the believability of the benefit) and the brand character (the long term personality, image or attitude of the brand.)    

OK, on with the consumer Dating Tips.





In a nutshell it all comes down to Four “D’s”.

1.       DESIRABLE – substantive, meaningful and relevant.

Guys -ladies forgive me in this because my chromosomes are XY in nature:),  if you are going to win a date with that truly gorgeous woman sitting across from you on the train or in the club (or even at work, although I don’t encourage that, as it will only end in tears), you’re going to want to be desirable, no?  You are going to want to approach her with something that would make her choose you in preference to that other, potentially better looking guy sitting near you.  You are going to want to say something that is substantive and meaningful and relevant to her life, yes?   “Did you see that V12 engine in the latest Trucking Life magazine?’ is not going to cut the mustard.  Really, I’ve tried it. Not a good memory:)  

      It’s no different to your communication strategies.  Your benefit needs to offer the consumer something they want; something that you know will help them choose you in preference to the other brands out there.  We put unrealistic pressure on our communications when we ask it to be built on strategies that are boring, or, worse, irrelevant to the lives of our target consumer.  Conversely, a highly desirable strategy almost sells the brand itself.




     Of course, strategies that promise something desirable to the consumer come about when you have a terrific understanding of your prime prospect.  We should have enough research and consumer knowledge to confidently say, even before we brief the agency, that we have a strategy that offers the target consumer exactly what she wants.   In this way, MR&I collegues are like our dating coaches.  Think “Hitch” with BAT business cards. 

The parallels with dating are again obvious.  While too much research into someone is spooky and a little too like stalking, aren’t the chances a girl will say yes to your request for a date increased if you offer her something relevant to her life?   “Hey, you clearly have an eye for fashion.  I swear that’s a Stella McCartney design you’re wearing.  Would you like to go to her catwalk show?  I’ve got tickets.’  Mmmmmm…you are one smooth dog.   

2.       DISTINCTIVE – relative to the competition

The following will NEVER be a real conversation between girlfriends.

 “I got swept off my feet last night by an amazing guy.’

“Tell me more, tell me more, like does he drive a car?”

“No.  Actually, he was kind of boring.  Nothing different about him.  Nothing different at all.  In fact, there wasn’t anything about him that you would say was the least bit surprising.  He was just like any guy I suppose.  But he asked me out on a date and I said yes!”  (Giggles with excitement)

“Well-a, well-a, well-a..huh?! “

If you ever hope to win a date, there has to be something about you that the other person finds different and intriguing. This holds true for your brand; only the word we use is “distinctive”.   Your communication message strategy needs to capture that aspect of your brand that sets it apart from competition and provides a meaningful basis for consumer preference.  We know for a fact that distinctive strategies work, and that great strategies often have two or more areas of distinctivity.  Where the distinctiveness comes from is less important.  If you’re lucky, it may be straight out product performance superiority.  It may be a distinctive twist on a usual benefit or via an emotional benefit tied back to your functional benefit, or by a unique and compelling RTB or even by a distinctive brand character, which, by the way, if your brand doesn’t already have then you are cheating your brand out of a lot of potential first dates with the consumer.  (Push for something distinctive, like Kent's “Click & Change” or with benefits which resonate with unmet consumer needs susch as longer lasting smoker through LIP or LSS in KS formats .  Wouldn’t you rather date someone like that than a “trusted expert?”)  Net, ensure your strategy is distinctive versus your competition. 

3.       DECISIVE – clear and simple

For most of us, there is nothing more nerve-racking than asking someone out on a date.  Your heart feels like it’s in your throat and sweat drips from places you didn’t know you had glands. The strong become meek and the meek become weak, and all that nervous energy tends to make us verbose beyond description.  We can’t seem to get one word out, so instead we put out three hundred.   We ramble, kind of like I’m doing now…

The dating game belongs to the decisive. 

Just make the proposition clear and simple (oh, and a little bit romantic).

I think we must be nervous when we write communication strategies to woo our consumers, because those strategies are so often verbose and unclear as well.  Simplicity works.  In fact, it’s critical.  I cannot stress enough the importance of simplicity in your strategies.  It is simply impossible to communicate more than one cohesive thought and hope that consumers will digest it and run with it. ' Simplicity = Success square' where even Einstein throws his weight behind the importance of simplicity in communication.

4.       DIVIDEND PAYING TO YOUR EQUITY

Before we get back into the relational dating tips, here’s a question for you.  Are communication strategies there to build your sales, or your equities?  Or both? 

Hint:  both. 

Good strategies drive sales but also pay dividends to your brand equity, in that they are born out of, or are consistent with clear equity choices your brand has made.  If they aren’t, rewrite the strategy.  Now, that all sounds very black and white; but hey, I believe in moral absolutes.  There should be a direct link between your brand’s promise to the consumer and one of your equity building blocks.  When there isn’t, you fail to build equity for your brand.  In cases where your brand has well established equities, not being consistent with them just risks leaving the consumer confused or unable to recall that the promise is actually from you.

The analogy with dating is again helpful.  Yes there are obvious cases where you are asking a complete stranger out for a date, and I guess that in those circumstances you can be whatever you want to be, but in most cases we are asking friends or acquaintances if they want to take the existing relationship a little deeper.   In those cases, they already know a little of what you are about – what your personal brand equity is, if you like.   What is more likely to work?  To be your normal wonderful self, or to suddenly become someone you are not, hoping you’ll still be able to make a connection?  Well, the poet of a new generation, Avril Lavigne (1984 - ?), sums it up well in her song “Complicated”

You're tryin' to be cool, you look like a fool to me. 

Tell me why you have to go and make things so complicated?

I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else gets me frustrated

In summary a good strategy matters.  It really does.  Building great brands likens it to the ground upon which you build your house.  If it is strong, it’s like building on a rock.  It will inspire great work that will create an emotional connection with your consumer.  If it is weak, it is like building on the sand.  Nothing will remain once the tide of competition sweep over you.

So go ahead and have your brand ask the consumer for a date, but do it with a communication strategy that is desirable, distinctive, decisive and dividend paying to your equity. The 4 D’s of dating.

Who knows, do those successful may turn into a relationship, and the relationship into love? while those things must be progressively harder to navigate - Amazon has 167962 books on “relationship” but 262612 on “love” – you will never know unless you first get a date.

Now it is late and some well deserved break for a movie before sleep time. Just inserting the Conan 3D in the BlueRay drive and to test my new Sony LED screen.

No no  no...My girlfriend is now with me -she was supposed to be asleep- and we are going to watch an Anne Hathaway movie...Subtitle is "Twenty Years. Two People'

Maybe it is written in today's stars int the sky and my destiny is really about WoW brands, lovemarks and defenitely about romantic movies:) Sinan Seha Türskeven