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    Brand Strategy

    A Question for Stuart Elliott.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Ask any Chief Marketing Office or Marketing Director what their annual sales are and you’ll get an answer. Ask about the annual marketing budget. Quick answer. Cost of goods, manufactures suggested retail price, market share? These are questions for which marketing leads all have answers.

    Two questions likely to baffle CMOs and marketing directors, however, are: What is your brand strategy (claim)? And what are your brand planks (proofs of claim)? Most marketers know their business KPIs, but don’t have them translated into brand-benefit language. The language that give them life and memorability. CMOs use business school phrases like “low cost provider,” “more for more,” “innovation leader”, “customer at center of flah flah flah…”, but that’s not how consumers speak.  

    claim and proof

    The key to brand planning is knowing what consumers want and what the brand is good at. (“Good ats” and “care-abouts”.) Combining these things into a poetic claim and three discrete support planks is the organizing principle that focuses marketing and makes it more accountable. Across every expense line on the Excel chart.

    Stuart Elliott, advertising columnist of The New York Times should make this a requisite question in all his interviews. “What is your brand strategy?” If he gets any semblance of a claim and proof array, I’ll be surprised. Peace!

    Words. Stuff. And Deeds.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Tesla’s solar business, which needs a name change by the way, is revising pricing in order to regain momentum.  They’re going to make less SKUs (packaged goods term referring to product sizes/flavors) while asking customers to do more to minimize the number of site visits Tesla has to make, e.g., photograph meters and circuit breaker boxes, etc. These actions will drive cost out of the business enabling the price reduction. These latter costs are called soft costs. The panels being the hard costs.

    What’s The Idea? is a brand consultancy that makes paper, ideas and strategy. All soft costs.  At the end of a business engagement my clients have in hand a brand brief, a claim and proof array (one pager) and if they go the full monty, a marketing plan. Soft goods.

    Problem is, marketers really like stuff: Hats with logos, ads, signs, website and package designs. Stuff. My stuff happens to be words. 

    As Mark Pollard, a really smart brand strategist says and will publish in his upcoming book Strategy is your Words, words make brands more effective. Words are strategy. Strategy leads to stuff. Strategy leads to deeds. Strategy leads to valuable, organized thinking.

    Can’t wait for the book to come out. It’s stuff about words.

    Peace.

     

     

     

     

     

    Benzer Pharmacy. Brand With a Difference.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    A pharmacy is a pharmacy, right?  A prescription at CVS is the same as Walgreens, is the same as Rite-Aid. Duane Reade, a venerable NYC brand, sells the same meds as the next girl. Duane Reade, built its marketing around its NYC roots but unless they sell hot dogs with red onions in the store, it’s not much more than an advertising play. Pluck the ethnocentric heart strings. So how would a brand planner build a unique pharmacy brand. 

    Enter Benzer Pharmacy, a regional player with national aspirations, headquartered in Tampa, FL. What they say in copy is what other pharmacies say. From the website: “Be The Best Healthcare Provider For The Families We Serve.”  

    But here’s what they do: Free home delivery, deliveries to hospitals so patients have meds before discharge, provide education on meds making sure patients have much needed understanding, and they provide a service that maximizes drug and cost effectiveness.

    Everybody wants to offer the best care. Few prove it.  Proof in a commodity business is where brands are built.

    Benzer Pharmacy gets product marketing. Therefore, they get branding. Next step, create a brand strategy and take on the world.

    Peace.

     

    Engineered Preference.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Campaigns come and go but a powerful brand strategy is indelible, is a line I wrote for a Gentiva Health Services pitch many moons ago. Gentiva is now owned by Kindred Health for those still counting. A powerful brand idea, is a difference-maker in marketing because it anoints a product or service with a value that only it can claim. Burger King owns “Flame Broiled.”  Coca-Cola owns “Refreshment.”  Google owns the “World’s information in one click.”

    Establishing and owning a brand idea is the job of the brand manager. Constantly and without pause, hammering home a key care-about or good-at, seeds the brand idea — building and reinforcing consumer preference. Preference is not the only job of the marketer but it’s an imperative job. I may prefer an Impossible Burger, but if it’s not in my store, no sale.

    The job of the brand strategist is to engineer preference. I choose to do it with a model based upon claim and proof. My approach is repeatable. Other’s do brand strategy differently.  Shades of right, I guess. Either way, preference is our goal. Preference makes the revenue.

    Peace.

     

    Packaged Goods and Experience.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I define brand strategy as a framework for product, experience and messaging.  The experience component is often a bit of an outlier but good branding companies take it seriously. Experience as a brand component is particularly important in retail and business to business but how does one deal with experience in packaged goods?  A bottle of salad dressing is a bottle of salad dressing. You can say “packaging” is experiential. Perhaps “labeling.” But opening a bottle of Samuel Adams is the same as opening a bottle of Bud. It’s tough.

    Along comes the internet and now we have a little something more to play with. Web experience can be built so as to adhere to brand strategy. Not via messaging, i.e., pictures, copy and sound but through the actual user experience. The brand strategy claim and proof array should be delivered in actions, navigation and visitor behavior.

    As an example, let’s look at Highland Brewing whose claim is “Pioneers in craft.”  The website experience should deliver on the claim. Perhaps some tips on how to make beer. Or a demonstration of what makes a craft beer different from a mass-produced pasteurized beer. Someone around the campfire this weekend said done poorly a website can be an “electronic brochure placed in the ether that gathers dust.” Well let’s make websites package learning, create new behaviors and reward deeds – that’s how you can upgrade your packaged good experience.

    Peace.

     

     

    Feeling Is Believing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Before Christmas, I was removing dead strings of Christmas lights from garland – not a recommended pastime – and as the mind wandered I thought of my favorite pastime brand planning. While hunting for the next light in the branches I found that my sense of touch was often more powerful than my eyesight. When I couldn’t see the next light I just had to feel for it.  It dawned on me, as my fingers began to lose feeling, that most marketing is visual. Even radio, though an auditory medium, paints a visual picture. Ads, websites, search links are all constructs that show or tell consumers what to buy.

    Brand strategy, however, is a more “eyes closed” selling medium. Close your eyes and tell me why you buy Coca-Cola. Close your eyes and tell me why you prefer Burton snow board pants. Close your eyes and explain your preference for Disney World over Six Flags.

    Of course there are visual cues in branding that spark associations, but done the right way the most powerful associations are feelings.

    The difference between good and great brand planners can be found in their ability to drill past marketing jargon and ad phraseology and head straight to feelings. Feeling is believing.

    Peace.

     

    Sticky Brands

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    In a piece of 2014 research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on the subject of customer experience, the top box response to the question below was about message uniformity.

    I know to the hammer everything looks like a nail and to the brand planner everything marketing thing looks like brand strategy, but this one made my day. Brand strategy, defined here at  What’s The Idea? as “An organizing principle for product, experience and messaging,” is the key to message uniformity. Sure “voice,” “tone” and “personality” are important (ish) but the substance of the message is how one builds brands.

    Find your claim. Identify your three proof planks, make sure they are key care-abouts and brand good-ats, and you have a strategy.

    Stick to it and it will stick to your customers. And prospects.  

    Happy holidays to all. Peace.

     

    Brand Strategy Trumps Formula.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    When is faster not faster?  And when does modular, formulaic construction create an inferior product?   The answer is in marketing communications. Here’s how this shizz should work.  After all the money discussions are complete, after the bosses shake hands, and proprietary company information is exchanged, someone with strategic  bone at an agency should write a brief.   Brand brief, creative brief, project brief, call it what you will. If there is not a strategic idea within the brief that feels right (and I do mean feel), that inspires pictures and music in the heads of the creators and developers, then the brief is poor and should be rewritten.

    Time to market.

    Once a brief is right and approved (and be prepared for some fighting, fear and diplomacy), only then should creative work begin. A tight brief is the fastest way to good work. For those who like metrics, a tight brief gets to approved work faster.  Approved work gets produced faster. Produced work gets seen faster. And organized, singular work – be it banner, website, promotion, direct, promotion or advertising – gets acted upon by consumers faster.

    Where the system breaks down is when the strategic idea is unclear. As creators of marketing deliverables become more process focused and less idea focused, as they become more formula driven, the work suffers. Formula replaces the cerebral cortex when creators are uninspired.  I wrote a brief for a friend’s commercial maintenance company that took some real digging.  The brief likened his operation to that of a team of Navy Seals.  That’s who they were.  That’s who they will be. The company is  “fast, preemptive and fastidious.” That’s a plan creators can get behind – without formula or module. That’s brand design. Peace.

    UBER brand strategy. ‘sup?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    charger strom trooper

    UBER is doing a really neat promotion in NYC, tying in to the new Star Wars movie. It is making 8 Dodge Chargers, painted to look like Mattel Hot Wheels Star Wars Storm Trooper cars (white with distinctive black striping), available for free for the day, providing you use the appropriate promo code. It’s really cool for Dodge, whose cars become roving brand billboards, and it’s a nice way to get UBER some excellent pub.

    The promo made me wonder though about UBER’s brand strategy. I’m not sure I know what it is at this point. And that’s often okay for a first-to-category company. Your Is-Does becomes the brand claim a la “Your Ride, On Demand.” But without a brand strategy (1 claim, 3 proof planks), it’s hard to decide if a promotion is making a deposit in the brand bank or a withdrawal.  So this seems to me a promotion for promotion’s sake, not for strategy’s sake. Though I don’t know the Dodge Charger brand strategy, I’m feeling a proximity to it with this promotion. Storm troopers charge, no?

    Start-ups and category pioneers need brand strategies. VCs should encourage this. It helps everyone make decisions about product, experience and messaging. UBER should have one.

    Peace.          

     

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