Executive Summary: Brand Bubble

executive summary The Authors: John Gerzma is Chief Insights Office for Young & Rubicam Group. Ed Lebar is Chief Executive Officer of BrandAsset® Consulting.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Business is riding on yet another bubble: a brand bubble.

The first half of this book explains the research Y&R performed.

The second half is a guide to how to develop an irresistible brand as well as how to completely alter your organization to become consumer-centric.

You can watch a 2-minute introduction on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hixzdC9Sne0

CHAPTER 1 Financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them. While Wall Street has been bidding brand values ever higher, consumer perceptions towards brands are substantially eroding.

Brand names, logos, and other intellectual property are part of a company’s overall intangible worth. In fact, a Fortune survey of 2006 found that 72% of the Dow Jones Market Cap is now intangible.

Are intangibles important? John Stuart, former chairman of Quaker Oats thinks so…

“If the businesses were split up, I would take the brands, trademarks, and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar – and I would fare better than you.”

But consumer confidence in and appreciation for brands as a whole are slipping for three key reasons:

1. Excess Capacity With 285 varieties of cookies, 275 cereals, 175 salad dressings and 80 different pain relievers, consumers are largely sleepwalking through their relationships with familiar brands from too many rational appeals and too much repetitive marketing that shows up in all the same old familiar channels and doesn’t say anything new or exciting.

A Harvard Business Review stuffy found that only 7 percent of ads out of a study of 340 prime-time commercials included a “differentiating” message.

2. Lack of Creativity When brands can’t differentiate by simply being better and more affordable, the pressure to be more creative is even greater. Real creativity is the only way to break through the clutter.

3. Loss of Trust A 1997 study shows 52% of brands enjoyed exceedingly high levels of consumer trust. By 2006, because of scandals and failure of brands to adapt to consumers, that number had slipped to 25%.

If marketing’s role is to create value for the consumer, many marketers have forgotten the definition of marketing. They have replaced the word value with sales. Consumers then value brands less because business has forgotten what a brand really is. A brand is, after all, a promise.

CHAPTER 2 Energy is the consumer perception of motion and direction in a brand. If you add energy, you become irresistible.

• The principles of an Irresistible Brand: • They are highly irrational and yet entirely irrefutable.

• The move with innate purpose and conviction.

• They constantly reinvent themselves.

• They engage consumers on their own terms. They talk not of attribute but of ethos.

They have a point of view on the world beyond profit making.

• They don’t force devotion – they compel it. Their presences extends to a wide group of people without marketing.

• They move culture as well as categories.

An assortment of brands with high energy.

Energy is necessary because they keep brands constantly evolving, refreshing, and staying in step with consumers. Simply put, marketing based on unique selling propositions – USPs – no longer works. For a brand to sustain consumer interest, it can’t just be different; it has to keep being different.

For example, the energy of brands like Virgin Atlantic, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue translates into loyalty almost twice as high as the rest of the airline category.

The authors invested a hypothetical $10,000 in the top fifty energy-gaining brands and compared their investment against a $10,000 investment in the S&P 500. After five-and-a-half years, the energy portfolio beat the S&P 500 by 30%.

CHAPTER 3 Consumers now select brands based on the same principles investors use to select stocks. Successful companies consider the lifetime value of their consumers. They see them as investors.

Successful, energized brands realize there is a delayed impact of energy on sales, and don’t mind this. For example, if thirty people feel more favourably toward Puma today, ten of them will go out and buy new sneakers, while twenty will buy Pumas in the notso-distant future. Both groups feel the brand has improved in their estimation, they just behave differently.

CHAPTER 4 With creativity, brand integrity becomes believable. At its most primal level, creativity promises happiness, honesty, and hope. For now, creativity is the new must-have of the marketplace because it offers honesty, progress, and a place to turn to find answers to life’s uncertainties. Innovation comforts like never before.

CHAPTER 5 In ConsumerLand, people are using new media to behave differently, blurring the lines between consumers, advertisers and entrepreneurs.

But they are still pursuing timeless human wants and needs. The problem is, many companies cling to the old thinking of persuasion, metrics and an “us-them” landscape, and remain blind to the behavioural shifts transforming customers right in front of their eyes.

Consumers now trust each other more than they trust brands. Mediaedge:CIA found that 76% of people rely on what others say versus 15% on advertising. Review sites like Digg and Reddit have become the third-most-common use of the internet after e-mail and search.

In 2004, a consumer-generated video of a Kryptonite bike lock being picked with a Bic pen caused problems for the company. But the company made it worse by failing to engage in the dialogue, which went something like this: Day 1 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: Yes, your bike locks are the best.

Day 2 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: Yes, your bike locks are still the best.

Day 3 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: Ummm…Yeah I’m sure they are, but what’s all this about some recent video on the net that’s supposed to show how you can crack your locks in ten seconds using a Bic pen?

Day 4 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: Hey, I just saw that video on a friend’s Web site. And I’m kinda ticked off because I just paid $60 for one of your new locks three weeks ago, and I’m wondering if a Big pen can crack my lock or not⑺oes the pen crack all Kryptonite locks or just one or two models?

Day 5 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: Hey, I just visited your Web site and saw no mention of the Big pen problem.

What are you doing about it? Are you going to fix the locks? Are you going to give me a refund?

Day 6 Kryptonite: Our bike locks are the best.

The Market: No, they’re not. My bike just got stolen! A whole bunch of my friends are going to hear about this.

Brands are a belief system. And all belief is based on trust, honestly and transparency.

PART TWO: APPLICATION Everyone must become a brand manager. Accountability for the brand must reside in every department. The entire company must transform itself into a marketing-driven firm, rather than a firm with a marketing department.

Too much time is spent on thinking what a brand is, rather than what it can be.

CHAPTER 6 Energy can be generated for brands as reliably as it can be generated for homes.

Most of this chapter is an in-depth look at how Y&R’s BrandAsset Valuator rates Brand Strength vs. Brand Stature. It’s a background to understanding how to use the tools provided on www.thebrandbubble.com.

The First Law of Energy: Creativity spreads out risk.

Many companies confuse risk avoidance with risk management. A common myth about outside-the-box thinking and creative risk taking is that it is the sole domain of iconoclasts and small, challenger brands.

In this everything-is-media world, the burden of creativity no longer rests solely on advertising, because now everything – or even just one thing – communicates to consumers. Creativity not only spreads risk, it spreads responsibility.

Case study: LEGO The LEGO group used their customers enthusiasm, loyalty and passion to turn around their brand that lost $120 million in 2001. They reinventing themselves, spreading out into new product and story lines (e.g., Bionicles), as well as interactive websites. They also launched MINDSTORMS, a product that allowed users to create and program robots that hooked up to computers. This caused a massive influx of people interested in LEGOs as a hobby. LEGO now uses a MINDSTORMS competition to invite hundreds of devoted uses to help with new product testing and development. LEGO has become an energized, elastic brand that spreads out its risk by innovating across as range of initiatives.

CHAPTER 7 Companies must use brands as an organizing principle. What’s interesting about companies like Apple, Starbucks and Google is that their brands are more an embodiment of their executive leadership than an artifact of their marketing departments.

The Second Law of Energy: Brands don’t control, they enhance and extend.

We can no longer doubt that we can control our brands no better than we can control our stock prices. But when a company shares its brand, the consumer actually starts to come inside the organization.

An example of this is Duncan Sheik’s album White Limousine, which was released as a two-disc set, with Disc 1 titled “Mine” and Disc 2 “Yours.”

The former was Sheik’s new CD, while the later included software allowing listeners to remix tracks any way they liked.

Case study: Virgin Atlantic Using the simple maxim “Brilliant Basics, Magic Touches,” Virgin Airlines has built its reputation by enhancing and extending.

Virgin identifies markets where consumers are getting a bad deal and provides an alternative, tangible Virgin solution. Their flights give incredible attention to detail, giving consumers not only what they expected, but astonishing them with things they never imagined (haircuts, massages, personal TVs, etc.).

CHAPTER 8 Building an energized value chain is not corporate restructuring. It’s more like reawakening and repositioning the current company to think from the perspective of the brand. To quote a Harvard Business Review paper, “If brands are built over years, why are they managed over quarters?”

The Third Law of Energy: A brand is not a place, it’s a direction.

We can no longer rely on positioning a brand with the hope that it will stay in place. We used to think of positioning as a hole in the ground in which to plant a brand. But the marketplace is in constant motion. And the best way for a brand to own a position is to be constantly dynamic within it.

Case study: Xerox When Ann Mulchay took over as CEO of this fallen brand, she recognized the culture of loyalty in the company and drove the brand back through the organization. Part of that was reawakening the dormant value of Xerox’s innovation. “Our financial advisors thought that slashing R&D was a no-brainer. But we knew it would have been a hollow victory if we avoided financial bankruptcy today only to face a technology drought tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 9 The key to making progress stick is when people in the organization begin to own the brand, the business challenges, and the culture as well. Companies don’t need a bigger marketing department. They need a marketing mindset that permeates the entire organization. “Marketing is too important to leave to the marketers.”

The Fourth Law of Energy: Brands with remarkable marketing access remarkable privileges.

No one ever questioned whether a coffee chain had the credentials to sell books and music. No one admonished iPod for the highest cost per gigabyte in its category.

JetBlue’s customers forgave it for its logistical failings. And Google’s aura was enough to get it landing rights at a NASA-managed airstrip seven minutes from its offices.

Case study: Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers This remarkable company’s business model is quite simple: Deliver home-cooked meals to over 200,000 workers among millions scattered throughout vast city office buildings every workday in Mumbai. Its product has a five-hour shelf life and requires a logistics system of 2.4 million hand movements each day. And yet the company’s workforce is nearly 100 percent illiterate, equipped only with pushcarts and bicycles. Other than a train ticket, they employ zero technology. Yet they enjoy remarkable marketing access and privilege because they achieve nearly a 100 percent accuracy rate, making only one mistake in 16 million transactions.

CHAPTER 10 Purchase funnels are really purchase pretzels. Any picture of an orderly, patient, and controllable consumer marketplace is presenting something that just doesn’t exist anymore. Let it go.

The Fifth Law of Energy: Tactics are strategy, strategy is tactics.

A sailboat tacks (that is, changes direction) to maximize the benefit of the wind, but it keeps its destination point fixed. Similarly, a defined brand strategy may be the end point, but it needs tactics to respond to the winds and reach its destination.

A new rule of brand management is “Act accurately, but by all means, act.”

Case study: UNIQLO Originally, a relatively staid brand in a static Japanese fashion world, UNIQLO has maintained a state of perpetual metamorphosis in its business model to stay ahead.

During the recession of the 1990s, it appealed to the Japanese youth by being an antistatement with their manta “Clothing says a lot, but you can say it better,” and making their logo nearly invisible, tucking it away inside each garment. It has evolved and restructured to address the saturation of its competition like Gap and H&M, extended its brand by reaching out to artists, musicians and designers, and recently turned itself to international markets.

EPILOGUE Redefining the future of brand management to both grow and protect shareholder value is now a key imperative for business.