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.