Brand Planning

    Brand Planners and Movie Directors.

    0

    It is movie awards time again. The Golden Globes just finished up and got me thinking about roles and responsibilities. How can a director win, yet the movie or an actor not?  If it is so well directed, why isn’t the movie a winner?

    Since metaphors are a part of the brand planner’s tool kit, I asked myself to project the brand planner’s role in marketing, using the movie business as an analog.  Actors are the tacticians I guess, playing roles consumers experience. Set designers and costume people are production people and grips. The producers of the film are the marketing executives. Script writers deliver copy. That must leave brand planners as directors.

    You never see the director in the work, you just see the work. A movie director is in charge of flow, performance quality, story and emotional resonance. And certainly more. It may be the most important job in movie making, yet also the least appreciated. Me thinks that’s the case with brand planning. Behind the camera, behind the scenes. Movie first, product first. Works for me. Any better thoughts?

    Peace.

     

    Brand Glossary

    0

    I started my first big boy job at a top advertising agency in NYC, McCann-Erickson. Working on AT&T. While most of the team was handling TV work and producing print ads for The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Time Magazine, I was hired to do the technical products: data lines, network management and software defined networks. I was the B2B guy, which suited me. It’s from whence I came. But AT&T and McCann were the real deal and I was scrambling.

    At my first meeting in Bridgewater, NJ, I became inundated with acronyms and telecom terms I’d never heard before.  It was like moving to the Ukraine.  My head spun.  I had to quickly invent a game plan in the pre-internet era.  Laptops were few and far between. First step was to create an acronym glossary. One based upon AT&T jargon. When complete the glossary was probably 20 pages long filled with paragraphs of arcane descriptions. I brought that baby with me everywhere. As my team grew, it became a shared resource.

    When the Bell Labs and AT&T marketing people saw me with my glossary they giggled but appreciated that I cared. I asked lots of questions; they never held back.

    I write a lot about learning the language of the target. In account or project management, learning the language of the client is the first step. Only then can you translate that into the consumer dialect.

    Peace.

     

    Endemia. Root word endemic.

    0

    I’m a NY Jets fan and wonder how the franchise can be so mediocre for so long. We often look at the quarterbacks, coaches, general managers for our answers. But rarely does the average fan look at ownership. The last couple of owners of the Jets, Leon Hess and Woody Johnson, are magnates who built empires upon gasoline and Band-Aids.

    It is a rare business indeed where someone from outside the industry can come in and have massive success; Robert Kraft being an exception in the football world. But Mr. Kraft sans Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, would look, I suppose, quite average as an owner.  

    Brand planners understand how important it is to deeply understand a business — even if only engaged with a brand for a month or two. It is a work imperative to speak the language of the business. It’s critical to understand fiscal drivers, consumer motivations, and operational strengths and foibles. Brand planners cannot set master brand strategy as an outsider.

    Jets ownership, as smart as they may be, are just not football people. They are business people. A restaurant owner can’t be the chief of police. A history teacher cannot be a construction engineer. A cable TV CEO can’t build a basketball team. My drift.

    Peace.

     

    How to measure brand effectiveness.

    0

    I am not in the brand awareness business. I am in the brand association business. And to take it one step further I am really in the brand benefit business.

    Brand awareness is simply recall of a name, logo and/or package. Marketing begins with awareness. It’s the price of admission.

    Brand association takes awareness a step further in that consumers are asked to play back certain context and associations with that recall. It might be category association, e.g., Coke is a cola, Cowboys are a football team, or perhaps the association may extend beyond what a brand “is” to a quality, Apple offers product innovation, for instance.

    But the third level, the one I refer to as Brand Benefits walks consumers beyond rote awareness and context features to benefits they need, desire or cherish. I’m not talking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I’m talking endemic product or service needs. But importantly, these brand benefits must be few (three to be precise) and constant. They are brand planks. 

    To measure the success of a brand, you must track awareness of brand benefits. If consumers can play back your planks in unaided recall testing you are winning the branding war.

    Peace.

     

     

    Charles de Gaulle Airport – the brand.

    0

    Just reading in The New York Times today that Charles de Gaulle Airport, Europe’s second most traveled, is number 34 out of 83 in flyer satisfaction. The culprit: “sprawling buildings with bewildering layouts, interminable waits, forgettable shops and restaurants, and often indifferent personnel.” 

    Sounds like something that would take hundreds of millions of Euros to fix. But maybe not.  All big airports are sprawling — they have to be.  Think about it.  Planes can’t take off and land at a good pace without sprawl.  So what needs to change is the organization of that sprawl.  Bewildering is fixable.  Good communication, good signage, ergonomic re-laying out of buildings, better transportation design and a little compromise among the airlines are fixable. Some airlines may have to consolidate space or even switch buildings. The parties need to come together. The interminable waits may require some technology upgrades, even more compromise (unions/competitors/gov’t) and once again better communication.

    And, as for forgettable shops and restaurants and indifferent personnel?  If the other fixes are made, these will fall into place.  Remember we are talking about one of the busiest locations in the world…with lots of wallets and lots of income in those wallets. And oh, it’s France. Paris, France.

    Before I picked up a shovel or an architect’s rendering, I’d create a brand strategy for Charles de Gaulle: an idea and some organizing principles. Sell that to all parties, then start to think about how to spend the money. Not easy…hard.  But very doable. Peace!      

    Going Comando.

    0

    I was thinking about what’s wrong with education and it dawned on me that a teacher could go for decades without changing his/her  lesson plan.  Okay, that might be an oversimplification but bear with me.  So let’s says that happens for an American history teacher…how does that teacher refresh? Well, one might say they focus on the pedagogy – the teaching itself. With all students being different, the lesson may stay the same but the means of getting though, packaging, and connecting the lesson to “this years” student may change. (Let’s hope.) In other words the material doesn’t change the delivery does.

    So what does that mean for branding and marketing? Do we use a syllabus to create our marketing approach? I suspect we do. I, for instance, have been using a couple of planning tools over the years that have not changed much: 24 Questions and a battery of Fact Finding questions.  Sounds kind of formulaic, no?  Am I lazy? These rigors act as fishing nets for me and what I catch will vary. What I do with that catch creates the differentiation. Hmm.

    But suppose I approached each assignment more like composing a song. Or creating some other form of art?  It would dash the formula don’t you think? This would be a case of getting rid of the syllabus. And going commando. Let’s think about that in 2013 and see if we can blow some doors off our approaches to strategic development. Peace!

     

    Working From Home.

    0

    A lot has been written about working from home since the pandemic began. So much so, that it now has its own acronym WFH. We’ll as a brand planner, working from home is a poor substitute for working at large.  I, too, sit at my compute most of the day like many WFHers. We gather our information from screens, organize it and package it for use, guidance or sales.  But the brand planner in me looses alacrity staring at videos, reports, and even live talking heads, out of context.

    I need fresh air. I need to see and study people in situ. Observation of behavior is best done not in a chair in your home. 

    The definition of noun is a “person, place or thing.” These are best experienced in person.

    And definition of verb is an “action, state, or occurrence.” Again, best experienced in person.

    Working from home for the brand planner dulls the senses. Working from home may be more comfortable but it’s less conducive to what Faris (need I say Yakob?) would call recombinant thought.

    Get yourself out of the home as quickly as you can and back into the business jungle. Safely. With a mask, But git!

    Peace.

     

    Best Definition of Branding.

    0

    Were I to guess, I’d say 90% of people who use the word “branding” misuse it.  Designers use it to define packaging. Art directors to describe “look and feel.”  For P&G brand managers it’s a reference to budget size. Direct marketers think it means synergy with general advertising. Copywriters don’t really know what it means. The digiterati try not to use it. And agency principals think it is whatever makes the bank deposits flow. 

    Noah Brier while a head strategist at the Barbarian Group once asked me “There are lots of definitions of brand plan, what is yours?” That’s a question every marketer who hires an agency should ask. There would be a lot of Rick Perry answers, me thinks.

    Branding is an organizing principle. Locked onto the right organizing principle one can build a brand with ease and sharp measurement. Brand strategy as an organizing principle can guides all the other strategies you will hear during the course of the marketing day: the product strategy, sales strategy, retail strategy, channel strategy, pricing strategy, media strategy, messaging strategy.  I could go on.  

    The organizing principle defines how a product is built, cared for, presented and nurtured. It’s one simple piece of paper that organizes the others. It organizes leadership, employees and the hard to manage consumer. 

    I always wanted to create an ad agency named Foster, Bias and Sales. It’s where the rubber meets the road in marketing. But without an organizing principle to guide these steps to a sale, you are simply a tactics jockey.