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.