Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #14

A brand is a promise.

A brand is a promise, and what is it that your brand promises?  If you answered, “To consistently deliver my brand’s unique brand benefit to my target customers,” you are correct. 

I often hear from workshop participants that they are attending the workshop to hear about the latest, newest, hot trend in marketing.  Although one needs to keep their professional knowledge current, embracing the latest trend won’t make you a good marketer.  Eventually, people will figure out that the latest trend isn’t a cure-all for their marketing problems.  Good marketing is about getting everything, not one thing, right. 

As  an example, a few years ago CRM was the hot tool in marketing.  Never mind that not everyone agreed on what was being abbreviated with the letters CRM, Customer or Consumer / Relationship / Management or Marketing, CRM was the hot tool.   While it is true that retaining current customers is much more efficient than trying to gain new customers, CRM does have two pitfalls. 

CRM Pitfall #1:  Return to Targeting Guide #8:  Don’t confuse your current customers with your target customers:  No one can execute a marketing plan perfectly.  Perhaps you have a product or service offering that appeals to customers who are not your target customers.  Possibly some of your distribution attracts customers who are not your target customers.  Or you have an offering that’s priced too high or too low for your target customers.  Regardless of the reason, your brand is going to attract buyers who are not your target customers.  This is the result of real world imperfect execution of marketing tactics.  The extent to which your current customers are target customers is a function of how close you are to perfect tactical marketing execution.

CRM Pitfall #2:  Your brand needs to continuously attract new target customers into your customer base.  CRM focuses only on current customers.  If you only focus on maintaining current customers, what will happen?  Those customers will age and eventually die.  Where will you brand be when your buyer’s average age is 67?  Very close to extinction. 

So, the learning point of this digression is that good marketers concentrate on getting the basics as close to perfect as possible.  Recall Positioning Guide #2:  In writing your brand’s summary positioning statement, don’t deviate from this form:  “To (your target market), (your brand) is the brand of (category definition) that (unique brand benefit) because (benefit supports).”  Positioning Guide #2 gives you all the basics that you need.  Your brand fundamentally is a promise to consistently deliver your unique brand benefit to your target customers.

The basics include Positioning Guide #8:  “In consumer marketing, your brand’s unique brand benefit should specify how your brand will satisfy the internal wants/needs of your target customer” and Positioning Guide #13:  “In business-to-business marketing, a brand’s unique brand benefit should be economic.”  In consumer marketing, your unique brand benefit should satisfy some internal want/need of your target customer.  In business-to-business marketing, your unique brand benefit should address saving your customer money and/or reducing their costs.

How can you deliver that promise through your product line?  What assortment do you need?  What kind of distribution do you need to deliver that promise?  How do you communicate that promise?  Lastly, how much will your target customers pay to get your brand’s unique brand benefit?

A brand is not a bewildering array of options, product features, product benefits, and services.  During my career, I often heard colleagues say, “We need to educate the customer.”  In consumer marketing, if you try to “educate” customers on all the details of your offering, you will confuse them to the point that they won’t know what your brand does for them.  Stick to repeating how your brand satisfies their internal want/need using product features, product benefits, and services as benefit supports to make your benefit believable.  In business-to-business marketing, your customers don’t care about your product features, benefits, and services.  They want to know how your brand will help them save money and/or increase revenues so keep repeating the economic benefit your brand delivers.

This is the last of my marketing product/service guides.  When I started this blog over a year ago, I said that the body of knowledge making up soft, social sciences, such as marketing, is comprised of principles or guides.  Unlike physical laws, one can readily find exceptions to principles or guides.  Although they generally hold true, they don’t always hold true.  How often do these principles or guides hold true?  Pulling a number from mid-air, say 80% of the time.  The guides that I’ve published over the past year have been the product of my 40 years of studying and practicing marketing.  Many have been published in some form or another. 

So my question for you is … do you have any product/service related experiences that you consider to generally hold true?  If so, leave me a comment explaining the details.  I would really like to expand my list of guides so help me.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #13

Brands should be human.

When presented with a list of human characteristics, people can readily associate them with brands.  Is your brand warm?  Approachable?  A leader?  Is it cold?  Sterile?  Customers associate human characteristics with brands.  That’s why you should describe the human characteristics you want associated with your brand in the brand personality section of the brand positioning template.  From real world practice and the marketing classes that I facilitate, it seems to me that the brand personality section of the brand positioning template is something with which marketers have difficulty.  When instructed to complete the section with words that one would use to describe a person, some people include phrases like “technological leader”, “high quality”, etc.  These people revert to describing their product and/or company rather than their brand.

A colleague once pointed out to me that in addition to human descriptors, one may also include descriptors associated with other animals in the brand personality section.  I never pressed him for details, but it seemed logical to me.  Ever since the exchange with my colleague, I’ve tried to think about animal descriptors when working on brand positioning.  I must confess that I’ve never been successful.  My thinking always defaults to descriptors that also apply to people.  Jungle cats are muscular, but then so are people.  Foxes are sly, but so are people.  So I’ve never been successful in applying my colleague’s advice.

In the middle 1990’s, the brand on which I was working had a marketing research supplier who also worked on the Mercedes Benz brand.  From research we knew that my brand and Mercedes Benz shared many common personality attributes in the minds of consumers.  Both brands were thought of as being leaders, innovative, and superior.  They differed in that my brand was perceived as approachable, warm, caring, and human.  On the other hand, Mercedes was thought to be aloof, cold, sterile, and impersonal.  I was told that the marketing people at Mercedes envied my brand’s human attributes. 

Mercedes’ marketing communications reinforced these negative personality traits in that it focused on technical product characteristics.  Not long after this exchange with the research supplier, I noticed a change in Mercedes’ marketing communications.  Mercedes’ advertising began to incorporate the human element … more of what the brand does for its target customers with product features supporting the brand rather than product features being the brand.  From their very product-focused advertising Mercedes evolved people-focused commercials including a few that contained a music bed in which Janis Joplin asked, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”  Here are two examples that are on YouTube:

1995 U.K. Commercial:

Most recently, there was a 2011 Super Bowl spot featuring Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.  Note how the lyrics have been abridged so that the reference to Porsche isn’t sung.

So the learning point of all of this is that brand should be human.  How do you add a human dimension to your brand?

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #12

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #12:  For a marketer with a multi-brand portfolio, the goal should be to make each brand the number one brand for their target customers.

When you took your economics courses in undergraduate school, you probably learned that the monopolistic competition market model was the closest approximation of the U.S. “free market” system (whatever “free market” means).  I’ve always thought the the phrase “monopolistic competition” was applicable to a marketer’s view of the U.S. market system.  There is very definitely competition between the brands in a given product category and each of those brands is attempting to gain enough share within the category to have some monopoly control of the category. 

Economists make the assumption that goods are readily substitutional for one another, but marketers attempt to ensure that their brands are not readily substitutional.  Marketers attempt to claim a unique brand benefit that satisfies some internal want/need in consumer marketing or satisfies economic need in business-to-business marketing.  They attempt to convince the buyer that only their brand will provide this unique brand benefit.  If they are successful with some of their target customers, they have created some degree of monopoly power. 

As an example, I’ll return to one of the consumer brands that I admire, Gatorade.  Gatorade through marketing has established itself as the brand for winners; drink Gatorade and you’ll be a winner.  By default, consumers who drink another brand of sports drinks must not be winners.  In the sports drink category, only Gatorade provides this unique brand benefit.  The human want/need that is satisfied is the ego need of winning, a need that is never completely fulfilled especially in males.  The result is that Gatorade has established some degree of monopoly power among target consumers who want to be winners.

In the laundry detergent category, Proctor & Gamble’s Tide brand is by far the market leader with about a 40% category share.  Across the entire U.S. market, Tide is the number one brand.  One would have to have access to Tide’s brand positioning document to understand the exact market segment being targeted and the positioning of the brand.  Taking a guess, I would say that it has something to do with target consumers wanting a hard working cleaning.  Given its overall category share, I would assume that Tide is the number one brand with its target market.

However, P&G recognizes that there are market segments other than the one at which Tide is being targeted.  In P&G’s Web site, they list six brands in their detergent portfolio: Bold, Cheer, Dreft, Era, Gain, and Tide. It would be my belief that each of these brands is targeted at a unique market segment.  Moreover, it’s possible that each of these brands is the number one brand in its respective target market.  One of these market segments must be concerned about color fading and color transfer.  To address the needs of this market segment P&G offers Cheer … “Dirt Goes.  Color Stays.”  Cheer may well be the number one brand for its target customers.

So the learning point for you multi-brand marketers is to attempt to make each of your brands the number one brand for its respective target customers.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #11

A brand is more than image.

For a brand to be long lasting, there has to be substance behind the brand.  The brand really does have to deliver the unique brand benefit that it promises to deliver to its target customers.  Each year a host of new brands are launched.  Many of those brands do not deliver what they are supposed to deliver, and they eventually fail in the marketplace.  Abraham Lincoln was correct in saying, “You can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”  If a brand doesn’t deliver over time, it won’t fool enough people to survive.  What do we call brands that don’t have substance and don’t survive and yet we still remember them?  Fads.  Many fad brands have appeared in the toy product category: Hula Hoops in the 1950’s’; Pet Rocks in the 1970’s; Cabbage Patch Kids and Rubik’s Cubes in the 1980’s; Tickle-Me-Elmo in the 1990’s.  However, other product categories aren’t immune to brands with huge short-term popularity but little substance to survive the long-term:

·      Fashion apparel: LA Lights lighted athletic shoes and

Skinny Jeans (still very popular, but I think that we’ll look back on them as a fad)

·      Household goods: Laval Lamp, Chia Pet,

George Foreman Grill (still popular, but post peak), and Onion Blossom Maker.

 

·      Food goods:  Heinz EZ-Squirt colored ketchups.

A brand is also behavior.  In business-to-business product categories, target customers are economically motivated, and salespeople represent the brand.  Do your sales people just push what they’ve got to sell or do they deliver your brand promise to reduce your target customers’ costs and/or increase their revenues?  Have you prepared your sales people with tools to demonstrate your brand’s economic benefit, such as ROI calculators?

In consumer goods product categories, target customers are motivated by the need to satisfy internal wants/needs.  Where marketers have owned distribution, they have control over the retail behavior.  In my opinion, Apple computers are horribly over-priced; but the outstanding retail experience at their stores provides a value that justifies the purchase.  Unfortunately for most marketers, they are often separated from their customers by intermediaries in the channel of distribution, for example, wholesalers and retailers.  The marketer often has little control over these middlemen.  The retailers represent to consumers both their retail brand -- Wal-Mart, Target, Dillard’s, Best Buy, etc. – and your brand.  Is your retail distribution consistent with your brand’s unique brand benefit and its brand personality?  Influencing the behavior of independent middlemen in the channel is difficult, but a task that marketers must undertake to ensure that retail behavior is consistent with their brand.

Service is one element of the human face of the brand.  In business-to-business categories, service is generally controlled by the marketers and can be a distinguishing feature in their offering.  In consumer goods categories, many marketers often don’t control the service element of their offering; the retailer or a third party does.  Is the service provided by the retailer consistent with your brand’s unique brand benefit and its brand personality?

The learning point in all of this is make sure that your brand really does deliver its unique brand benefit to your target customers in terms of substance, behavior, and service.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #10

A brand is built through customer experience with the brand.

Each purchase and each use is a customer interaction with the brand.  Through purchase and use, consumers build the experience with the brand that leads to either satisfaction, re-purchase, and brand loyalty or dissatisfaction and brand switching.  In almost all product categories, consumer research will reveal that the number one reason for considering the purchase of a brand is satisfactory prior experience with the brand.  Conversely, the number one reason for not considering a brand in the purchase process is unsatisfactory prior experience with the brand.

Because of the frequent purchase of package goods, the brands of package goods marketers have frequent interaction with their customers.  If these experiences are positive, brand loyalty is built.  Durable and semi-durable goods product categories are not purchased as frequently.  Thus, marketers of durable and semi-durable products have a tougher time building brand loyalty.  In the durable and semi-durable categories, this is compounded by the fact that customers don’t think about the product or the brand during use unless they have a problem.  As an example, consider your home heating/air conditioning system.  You take it for granted.  The thermostat regulates the temperature at a level that you have set and with which you are comfortable.  As long as you’re comfortable, you don’t think about it.  However, when the system fails on a hot day in August or a cold day in February, the system is your top-of-mind thought. 

Since a blog always its author to express personal experiences, let me give you a recent one in our household.  Three years ago, we purchased replacement clothes washers and dryers.  In 45 years of marriage, the purchase was only our fourth.  Three previous purchases over 45 years averaging 15 years between purchases certainly qualifies as a semi-durable/durable product category purchase.  After considerable product category research and expending our allotted shopping effort, we purchased a Whirlpool duet front-loading automatic washer and matching dryer.  I don’t recall the total purchase price for the washer/dryer and accessories, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000.  We used the machines with little thought for two years and then the washing machine refused to function.  A service call led to the replacement of an electronic part at a cost of $300.  For another 1½ years, we used the machines with little thought; and then the washing machine started to make a high-pitched squealing noise during its spin cycle.  A service call resulted in a diagnosis of main bearing failure with an estimated repair cost of $1,300.  Would we repurchase the Whirlpool brand?  Definitely not.  Recall that the number one reason for not considering a brand in the purchase process is unsatisfactory prior experience with the brand.

Because customers of durable and semi-durable products don’t think about the product or the brand during use, marketers can’t rely upon purchase and use to build brand experience.  They need to look at other elements of the marketing mix to increase the interactions their target customers have with their brands. For example, outstanding customer service is more important in durable and semi-durable product categories.  When your customers have problems with your brand, their expectations are low.  Problem resolution can be a time that you not only satisfy, but delight, your customers.

In business-to-business product categories, the question is: Do the experiences support the brand promise?  Is the purchase process paper-intensive or customer friendly?  Is billing a cold and complicated demand for cash or a relationship-fostering and dialog-provoking interaction?

Marketing communications is arguably more important in semi-durable and durable product categories.  Lacking the frequency of purchase in package goods, marketing communications can be the brand reminder to customers.  If your brand has delivered its brand promise to customers who have purchased your brand, marketing communications will be the reminder that your brand has delivered a satisfactory experience.  Recall that the number one reason for considering a brand in the purchase process is satisfactory prior experience with the brand.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #9

A brand must have meaning in the local market.

In this age of globalization, many brands that had meaning to customers in one nation find themselves moving into other nations where they are unknown.  If the brand name conveys benefit or use, it helps among those who understand the language of the country of the brand’s origin.  More often, however, the meaning of a brand name is lost as the brand moves to global markets.

If you’ve studied marketing, you probably read about how Chevrolet had problems marketing the Chevy Nova automobile in Latin America.  Since no va means "no go" in Spanish, the story goes, Latin American car buyers wouldn’t buy the car forcing Chevrolet to pull the car from the market.  Although the story isn’t true and Chevrolet did reasonably well with the Nova in Latin America, the story is often cited as an example of how good intentions can go wrong when it comes to globalizing a brand name.

The European mobile telecom brand Orange was created with a pan-European market in mind.  Orange to most westerners is associated with the brand personality attributes of bright, happy, warm, and friendly.  If the Orange brand were to enter the U.S. market, it may face a problem because to Americans the color orange is also associated with cheap.  To Buddhists, the color orange symbolizes the wisdom of Buddha’s teaching which may be a positive brand personality attribute if Orange were to enter Asian markets.

Recall the discussion of Marketing Mix: Product/Service Guide #2, Customers tend not to remember alpha numeric names.  Some global marketers just give up on maintaining the original home-market meaning of their brand name in international markets.  They revert to abbreviations of their original brand name.  The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation became HSBC which is a meaningless collection of letters that has no meaning by itself.  To give HSBC meaning, the theme line, “The world’s local bank,” was developed.  The obvious purpose of the theme line was to disassociate HBSC from the two cities of its origin and to make it relevant in local markets.

More often than communicating benefit or use, global brand marketers tend to associate their brand names with the softer part of brand positioning, brand personality.  Globally successful American brands often have a distinctly American personality communicating attributes of the American lifestyle.  Marlboro, Harley Davidson, Levi’s jeans, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s don’t hide their American origins.  Similarly, in the U.S. market, some European brands retain their home market associations as those associations have meaning for U.S. consumers.  Brands such as Louis Vitton and Dolce & Gabbana carry with them the positive associations that Americans have with French and Italian fashion.  The Bosch and Miele brands carry with them the positive associations that Americans have with German engineering.

The learning point of all of this is that if you’re working on a global brand, consider carefully what the meaning of your brand is in each national market that you serve.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #8

A brand should strive to “own” a product category name, a product benefit, or a brand benefit in the minds of target customers.

I’ve missed my weekly blog posting for a couple of weeks due to consulting work with travel.  My apologies to anyone who actually looks forward to reading my weekly posts.  Hopefully, this post will return me to my weekly posting schedule.

It should be the goal of brand marketing to “own” a product category, a product benefit, or a brand benefit.  You want to be so closely associated with one of these in the minds of your target customers that when they think of your brand they simultaneously think of the category, a product benefit, or a brand benefit. 

One could generalize and say that the following brands own, in at least some of their target customers, the following:

If your brand is successful in “owning” a product category, you’ll need to vigorously protect it.  Think about the brands that have been extremely successful in owning a product category:  Kleenex, Band-Aid, Coca-Cola, Xerox, FedEx, etc.  These brands so completely dominate the consumer mind share that consumers often refer to the brand name when speaking about the product category. Instead of “facial tissue,” many consumers say “Kleenex;” instead of “photo copy,” many say “Xerox;” etc.

If your brand name should become the generic descriptor for the category, you may lose your legal rights to your own brand name.  Good brand name protection includes:

• Always use your brand name as an adjective modifying a noun which is the product category; e.g., Acura (adjective) automobiles (noun), Cheerios (adjective) cereal (noun), Cole Haan (adjective) shoes (noun), etc.
• Never use your brand name as a noun; e.g., that’s why you should buy a Dell.
• Never pluralize your brand name; e.g., we have more Chevrolets for sale than any other dealer.
• Never use your brand logo in place of your brand name in a headline, body copy, sentence, or phrase.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #7

The strength of a brand decreases with the number of brand benefits that the marketer claims.

Many marketers get themselves into trouble with this one.  Generally speaking, my experience has been that we marketers tend to be ego-driven people.  Because marketing is a social science rather than a physical science, there isn’t a single correct answer to any marketing problem.  Rather, there is a set of better answers and a set of poorer answers.  A marketer’s job is to find one of the better answers and gather the resources to execute that better answer.  Marketing staffs tend to be small relative to the size of the business so marketers have to motivate those in supporting functional areas to support the better answer.  To do this the marketer must have a passionate belief in the better answer.  That passion comes from ego-involvement in the correct answer.

The ego-driven nature of marketing people means that we love the brands on which we work.  We honestly believe that our brands are better than competitive brands in some meaningful way.  Marketer who are overly product-focused and who believe that the key to marketing success is a superior product often want to claim everything that is good about a product category for their brand.  These product-focused marketers often tend to focus on product benefits and include multiple product benefits in their messaging.  There’s nothing wrong with communicating product benefit if they support the brand’s unique brand benefit.  However, if product benefits don’t support the brand’s unique brand benefit, then the marketer is just going to confuse potential buyers.  (If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, go back to the section of marketing guides on brand positioning.)

Let’s use the Chevrolet brand as an example.  What kind of vehicles do you envision in your mind when you think of the Chevrolet brand?  Trucks, SUVs, sedans, coupes, convertibles, sports cars, large, intermediate, small, inexpensive, moderately priced, expensive?  Chevrolet has a problem.  Each product offers different product benefits which leads to numerous and varied brand benefits.  To give a few examples:

With the Chevrolet brand, there are so many products, product benefits, and brand benefits that the brand doesn’t stand for a single unique brand benefit.

While companies may own the brand names, brands exist in the minds of the customers.  Does a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it make a sound?  For sound to exist, it takes someone to hear it – a receiver.  For brands to exist, it takes someone to recall them  – potential customers.  Ask owners of Corvettes what they drive, and they’ll say a Corvette.  The brand Corvette exists at the top their mind, rather than the brand Chevrolet.

Ask owners of BMW X5 what they drive, and they will say a BMW.  Why the difference?  All of the BMW models share one common brand benefit, they’re fun to drive … the ultimate driving machine.  Ask Volvo owners; they’ll say a Volvo.  Again, the brand in the U.S. has a single brand benefit; it stands for safety/security. 

But you need a variety of products to satisfy the varied product needs of your target customers, you say.  Fine.  Go ahead and expand your product range.  But, as you expand, find a way to link the product benefits of each new product back to your brand’s single unique brand benefit.

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #6

Some product categories are high-interest categories; others are low-interest.  Interest in the product category tends to be high if the product category is put on the body, if it is put into the body, or if it is a reflection of the customer.

(Note for followers of this blog:  Sorry that there was no blog post last week.  I was on an Alaska cruise-tour vacation, and the ship's satellite internet link was too slow to upload anything.)

Many package goods (fast moving consumer goods) marketers have an easier marketing job than durable and semi-durable goods marketers.  Think of the various package goods categories: health and beauty aids go onto or into the body; all food categories go into the body; etc.  Many, if not most, package goods categories are either put on the body or into the body.  Thus, they tend to be high-interest product categories.  Consumers are interested in the product category, and they tend to be more open to hearing about the category.  Some durable goods make the list of high-interest product categories.  Automobiles are a good example as one’s vehicle is a reflection of one’s self for many people.

Do you remember the selective processes from your marketing courses:  selective attention, selective perception, and selective retention? 

selective attention:  the ability of individuals to notice only the information in which they have interest.

selective perception:  the ability of individuals to block or modify messages that conflict with previously learned attitudes and beliefs.

selective retention:  the ability of individuals to remember only what they want to remember.

These processes come into play when one is talking about high-interest versus low-interest product categories.  Since people are interested in high-interest product categories, they are actually open to and see the messaging for brands in high-interest product categories.  In messaging for low-interest product category brands, they block out the messaging at a subliminal level.  It’s not only that they don’t recall seeing the messaging.  Although they’ve looked straight at the messaging, they don’t see it.  All of the above are examples of selective exposure.

If the consumer’s subliminal guard is down and an messaging message does slip past into their consciousness, then selective perception comes into play.  In low-interest product categories, this generally works in favor of the brands that are the category leaders.  Advertisements for the smaller brands in the category are often misidentified as being advertisements for the leading brands in the category.  I’ve seen commercials that were misattributed to brands that were the leader in the category several times in my career. All of this is an example of selective perception.

Lastly, selective retention means that consumers generally delete any information that they have absorbed for brands in low-interest product relatively quickly.

The selective processes represent a challenge to marketers in low-interest product categories.  Having worked in the low-interest tire category for many years, I feel that marketers in low-interest product category must resign themselves to the fact that the best advertisement for a brand in their product category won’t have the same level of attention as a mediocre advertisement for a brand in a high-interest product category. 

Go back to your marketing strategy:  segmentation, targeting, and positioning.  If marketers in low-interest product categories do their targeting and positioning work correctly and if the unique brand benefit has been validated through research to motivate target customers to consider the brand, then the marketers in low-interest product categories should focus on communicating and/or supporting their unique brand benefit.  Target customers will pay attention to their messages because the unique brand benefit is important to them; it’s something they want.