By Robert Wheatley

The only path to growth in a commoditized world

Tuesday night Barack Obama demonstrated one of the most powerful principles of branding in the new age of saturation: be different. His campaign focus was appropriately simple, defining and memorable - Change We Need. The relevance of it was persuasive not because of its logic and argument but because of its superb reflection of a basic truth. The electorate already believed change is vital and necessary. Obama owns change as a position. Its relevance worked to help marginalize John McCain, who had trouble defining his candidacy beyond his obvious experience and track record.

The fundamental driver of business success today…

We live in an age where technical prowess is fleeting. Where specsmanship has limited currency due to technology’s ability to closely match the formulas and features of one product vs. the other. Excellence is table stakes. So is extraordinary service. Value is important now more than ever but alone it is also a commodity.

Physical distinctions between brands get thin. Therefore habit increasingly plays a role in year-on-year business performance because consumers show a remarkable resistance to apply any brain time to re-think purchase direction if a product fulfills its primary mission. From brand to brand, category-to-category we can dissect products and businesses to reveal a remarkable level of sameness. One airline to another. One pasta sauce to another. One detergent to another. And so on.
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Used to be awareness and implied endorsement

By Robert Wheatley

In the good old days, PR was too-often viewed within the brand marketing mix as a below-the-line bit part player that delivered relatively inexpensive audience impressions with a lovely parting gift: implied endorsement of an outside and respected third party – the editorial media.

While “earned media placement” as its called continues to be a centerpiece of client expectations from their agencies and PR staffs, the substantive contribution of PR has transitioned. Today it is most certainly an above the line strategic leader and thus is integral to generating brand growth and new product trial.

Why? The consumer mindset has changed. Dramatically. How they make buying decisions has changed. Emotionally. How, when and where they consume media has shifted. Radically. It is no longer possible to force and dictate consumer behavior through sheer tonnage in conventional ad media spending.

The incredible volume of new products (over-choice) chasing consumers in ever more narrow and specialized categories, combined with the awesome number of media and mediums (inundation) clamoring for everyone’s attention, has precipitated a near total shut-down of what was once thought to be rational buying behavior. Consumers no longer simply absorb and act on the facts arrayed near them through marketing campaigns, packaging, retail displays and other touch points. Instead they go with their gut and perceptions.

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Demanding High Levels of Relevant Creativity to Break Through

Over the last 15 years – and that includes a previous incarnation of this agency — we have worked deeply, extensively in the adult beverage world. First for Labatt USA’s portfolio of import and specialty beers – which included Dos Equis and Rolling Rock brands. Then on to a wonderful engagement with Barton Beers (now Crown Imports LLC) and the Corona franchise, primarily focused on distributor communications. From there we were invited into an incredibly
invigorating challenge as agency for Molson USA, working to reverse
(successfully I should add) a seven year slide of their share and sales
as a one-time top shelf Canadian import brand in the U.S. We were sorry
to say goodbye to this great client following their merger with Coors
to form Molson Coors Brewing Company . Today we’re delighted again to be with the Barton family — this time in the liquor business as agency for Barton Brands the spirits division of US beverage alcohol leader, Constellation Brands .

Insight Experts

Through the years we’ve devoted ourselves, assets, resources along with many evenings/weekends burning the midnight oil to lift business results, grow share, drive distribution and develop relationships with drinkers. The journey has confronted us with some of the most dynamic creative challenges we’ve faced as an agency. And we’ve learned a great deal about how to carefully peel the onion of consumer insight and then leverage that understanding to dial-in brand relevance, hone image and create compelling experiences that excite and engage consumers – the central path to success in this social beverage category.

Competitive With a Big “C”

Imagine a business where hundreds of somewhat similar brands, foreign and domestic, compete for share of the consumer’s mind and wallet. Granted there are segments and niches that allow for some separation and targeting. But for the most part it’s a constant fight for attention in a very crowded field of products that bear similarity in packaging and ingredients. With entry level drinkers trading up to higher quality brands and drinking experiences, virtually all categories are in the consideration set at the same time and clamoring for a piece of the action. Very noisy marketing environment and brand distinctions are often marginalized. It’s an intense battle everyday in the store aisle, cooler as well as in bars and restaurants.

Relevance Paramount

This business simply can’t turn solely on analytical points of difference. My hops are the best. Barley, too. And I use the purest water. Ok. So does the other guy. Yes, respect for the liquid should be a consideration in how brands are presented. But in the end the decision to “wear” a beverage brand is an emotional one and related to a form of magnetism between user and brand image. Then again all brands are really a reflection of how the consumer “FEELS” about them.

Corona, one of the best-positioned brands in the business, is fundamentally about a $3.00 vacation in a bottle. An amalgamation of imagery cues around the consumer’s intense emotional affection for relaxation, the sandy beach, palm trees, good times and kicking back. It is relevant and aspiration-al for most young adults in their hectic lifestyles. Corona is now the sixth largest brand by volume (foreign AND domestic) in the U.S. Just amazing.

Application to Effective Brand Communications

There are important guidelines here for consumer brands generally because consumers now hold the power to opt in or out of engagement. Virtually all markets are facing intense pressures of commoditization as retailers push price, categories mature and points of difference between brands collapse. Engagement today is more of a one-to-one proposition – how brands can become an enabler of lifestyle interests and passions.

Mining the core thread of brand DNA and lifestyle relevance –

At no other time in modern marketing has consumer insight been more important. Brands must identify a “higher purpose” that transcends the transactional nature of the seller/buyer paradigm. Brand relationships are created and maintained on a different level. The pathway to relevance can only be built on understanding of the consumer’s own interests and creating linkage between those interests and the brand. The tricky part is to do this in a manner that relates to the specific DNA ingredients of the brand itself.

Narrowcasting not broadcasting –

The era of mass marketing is essentially dead. There’s more to be gained investing in core users and working to build brand evangelists from those heavy users in the fan base than shotgun blasts of broad based communication in an attempt to lure in everyone on the planet. This issue is especially nettlesome for marketers of larger consumable product categories who feel locked-in to a tractor beam of wanting to be all things to all people all the time. Can the few be as important as the many? The answer is yes. And it should be mentioned that heavy user groups are not necessarily small in numbers either. In the end more is to be gained by focusing on invested fans than trying to tackle those who don’t care and aren’t listening.

Touching the brand –

A related subject to narrowcasting is the deployment of brand experiences and events that allow consumers to make contact with a brand personally. The proximity is important and the ability of a brand to be a partner with its users by intersecting with and enabling their interests and passions is the key to cultivating relationships. Calphalon cookware’s cooking school in Chicago, a foodie paradise, is a wonderful example of marrying the brand with consumer passions for creativity and self-expression in the kitchen.

Everything Matters –

Brand behaviors should be driven from immersion in a complete view of a brand’s radically unique proposition. Consistency in how this view is communicated is then essential and that requires synergy across all touch points from package to Internet to communications to customer service. Even employees count in this scenario. This issue is the great truth serum because so often brand communications is more focused on the current campaign and less on creating a 360-degree point of view – the acid test of how powerful an idea really is. If the concept can drive brand behavior at all levels then you’re on to something big.

If adult beverage businesses are good breeding grounds for this kind of thinking, what other categories also require focus on brand behavior platforms and mining emotional touch points?

“>Hard Wired Humans Look For Authenticity

Cleaning out some files I ran across an article from FastCompany that I blogged about in May. Really resonated then to Bill Breen’s take on brand strategy. Just leafing through the piece again I stopped on this point: “overloaded by sales pitches, consumers are gravitating towards brands they sense are true and genuine…(the) hunger for authentic is all around us.”

But what sets the stage for authenticity?

This is a frequent subject in our blog because it is so fundamental to successful brand and communications strategy. Breen goes on to state, ”authenticity comes to a brand that IS what it SAYS it is (read: not a poser).” Jim Hardison, Creative Director of Portland based brand consultancy Character explains authenticity this way: “The story that a brand tells through its actions (must) align with the story it tells through its communications.”

I honestly cannot think of a more powerful expression of the essence of the PR mindset and approach to brand strategy and communication than the previous statement. And why does this matter?

Hard Wired Humans…

This concept of brand behavior syncing with communication is fundamentally respectful of how people see and resonate to the world around them. Sure there will be aberrations to the norms. However for the most part we are hard wired in our response to the actions and behaviors of people, brands, businesses and everyday life:

We believe in fairness

Desire honesty over spin

Prefer truth instead of lies

Respect innovation

Root for the underdog

Embrace love

Admire self-less behavior

Abhor cheaters

Believe the best should prevail

Are You Aligned?

Respect and love of the consumer begins with an unrelenting commitment to the highest levels of integrity in how a brand presents itself. Consumers are more aware than ever of the facts around them and highly observant of behaviors in the context of what a brand may claim about itself or its product/service.

Inconsistency in this arena is a dangerous game. Half measures, window dressing, fakery and marketing make-up applied over a less than authentic proposition goes against the grain of the consumer’s own internal Integrity Meter.

The Authenticity Reality Check:

If your customer service stinks the inconsistency will come back to haunt the moment a reasonable branded alternative arrives. Cable guy anyone?

Are formulas and ingredients matching the proposition?

If you executed short cuts to meet a cost number but left the basic positioning for your product claims at a loftier level, are you courting disaster? Think they won’t notice? Think again.

Overstating the benefits?

There is a great temptation in communications to stretch the language (hyperbole) in an effort to maximize the appeal. This can be tricky — go too far and consumers will see through the hype.

Do you love your employees as much as you “love” the consumer?

Fairness, honesty, truth, care – are these characteristics of corporate behavior in dealing with employees also aligned with the efforts made to court the affections of buyers?

When behavior and communication match the stage is set for authenticity – which, by the way, is now table stakes for successful brands in the age of transparency and consumer control.

Mexican Beer? What brand is first in your head?

For many it would be Corona, the leading Mexican import and share leader of the entire import beer category. People buy categories first and the top of mind brands within those mental brackets. Energy drink: it’s Red Bull. Heavy motorcycles: it’s Harley. European style coffee drinks: it’s Starbucks. And so on. In the February 19th edition of AdAge, marketing guru, Al Ries, has a wonderful column on category creation and its central role in successful brand and business strategy. His example is Nintendo’s runaway success with Wii - not a better or more powerful video-game console, a different one that represents development of a new category in the digital gaming battle.

“There is no best auto company, there is no best car. You’re really competing now to be unique. One can still be a large company by meeting a very well chosen set of needs. Whole Foods is not trying to be a great food retailer. It is trying to meet the needs of a certain set of customers. Those customers view the 183-store chain’s eco-friendly ethos as representative of a healthy, socially responsible lifestyle they want to identify with.” Michael Porter, Harvard Business School.

The driving force behind uniqueness can be best expressed as the search for different. The outcome of that search most certainly can be the launch of a new category where a brand rightfully claims its innovation and leadership mantle. As Ries said in his column: “Marketing is a battle of categories…Creating a category and then branding that category in such a way that your brand is perceived as the innovator and leader is the essence of marketing today…The brand is only a marker for the category itself.”

So often the conversation in branding circles is about being better. Who is going to argue with continuous improvement, right? But the battleground has changed with product proliferation (too many products chasing too few consumers) and commoditization forces working to turn brands into blands. The first order of business these days is no longer just differentiation — it’s radical differentiation. And the end game is the development of new categories that a brand can be number one in.

This is the ultimate re-definition of thinking outside the box — by creating new boxes that in turn become the mental shorthand for consumer brand selection and preference.

The recipe for remarkable, meaningful brand connections

The Mini automobile isn’t for everybody. But it is definitely for
some people. Quirky in a fun way, it is an endearing symbol of
whimsy-in-sheet metal. Perhaps one of the stronger examples in the auto
industry of a brand that inspires a loyal following - those who see
themselves as unique individuals and the car as an expression of what
makes them special. Now we learn that Mini is utilizing the latest in
RFID technology to create, of all things, personalized billboards that
when reading a chip in the key fob, greet Mini motorists with a
personalized message. How fun - how Mini-like.

Virtually all markets in all successful categories subdivide over time like miniature product protozoa into smaller, unique sub-categories that recognize and reward the interests and passions of different consumer tribes. In fact, today mass markets are rapidly being commoditized as the world works hard to separate and trade up to more interesting and unique experiences. Recent news in the beer industry shows this phenomenon operating as imports and specialty brands tally share gains and profit growth while the ubiquitous stalwarts go flat.

Human behavior is not a static thing. The marketing world has changed greatly in recent times, and old methods of approaching the business of building brands has fallen away. Everyday consumers are exercising their newfound clout as master of the marketing universe. If we can’t control our destiny entirely as stewards of enduring brands, what can we do to build lasting relationships with those who grant us access to their personal menu of favored products and services?

We know that brand communications is no longer about “specsmanship” - functional features, technologies, logos or themes and cogent statements. Brands have become the sum of our impressions of them over time, generating strong feelings (or none at all) that drive our preferences - if you will, the blossoming of a true Brand Romance. How do we ignite the fires of product passion and keep them burning? What in fact is the recipe, the tether, the fabric that binds us to some things and by definition makes everything else irrelevant?

We are becoming a nation of tribes, of smaller define-able segments with unique passions and interests. We gravitate to those who honor us with a relationship building effort that is respectful of who we are, what we are and what we’re interested in. Brands that engage consumers are most often naturally attractive not only due to their relentless efforts to be really different - to increase their valuable-ness - but also by virtue of their ability to be unselfish. Helping consumers achieve their interests and passions is the price of admission for a relationship. Stands to reason then, that this can be done only when we truly know and understand what narrower bands of involved consumers really want.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Louise Story has done a wonderful job discussing media saturation and excess. Her take on the issue is the increasing use of what’s called “alternative media” or perhaps better put: crazy places for a product message. In an effort to be distinctive in a world rapidly being commoditized by sameness in every form of communications execution, the answer from many corners in the persuasion game is literally to secure brand exposure on any available two-dimensional surface: shopping carts, floors in supermarkets, airline tray table liners, men’s urinal wall-scapes, doctor examination table paper liners. To the point of conducting a form of sensory invasion, an absurd kind of siege on consumer eyeballs.

The answer, it appears, to ad and communications clutter — yes here it is folks (pause for dramatic effect) is…more clutter. One ad exec quoted in the article opines that “ubiquity is the new exclusivity,” be it an ad, promotion, online channel or any other turn in the media space. Media is now re-defined to mean anything, anytime, everywhere - including, but not limited to, foreheads. Yes, there’s even an agency touting forehead marketing as the new buzz generating solution.

This occurs despite mounting evidence about what consumers are doing in reaction to the senseless sensory overload. They are just working harder to tune out, to ignore, to pass over and eliminate one-way push style messages from sources that by definition lack relevance and engagement - let alone credibility.

Fighting fire with gasoline

Faced with more messages in more venues coming from more products in more categories that clamor for limited mental attention — often in the same media vehicles — the temptation is to raise the brand voice even louder in an effort to be heard above the din. Worried about the decline of audience numbers in conventional media outlets, concerned about the splintering of media generally as special interests siphon off audiences, looking for an answer with TIVO-ing that anoints the so-called “target audience” with a sinister form of avoidance control? The answer, as in gas on a fire, is not to fight the problem with more of the same.

In his excellent book on brand strategy called ZAG, author Marty Neumeier maps the clutter calculus - in 1960 there were 8,400 magazine titles, 440 radio stations, and six TV networks. Today there are 12,000 magazines, 13,500 radio stations, 85 TV channels (probably conservative), and 25,000 Internet broadcast channels. In 1965, there were an average 20,000 items in supermarkets to choose from - now it’s more than 40,000. In 2005, 195,000 book titles were published. That same year 40 billion product catalogs were published. More financial transactions are conducted in a day now than occurred over the course of a year in 1965. The point is: product clutter, ad clutter, message clutter, media clutter - all occurring at once. The human answer to this media saturation tsunami is simple: erect mental barriers and ignore most of it.

Engagement and relevance: the new paradigm for permission to enter

The answer isn’t toilet seat messaging or other forms of invasion, rather it’s about relevance to the lifestyles of the consumer you’re trying to reach. It’s about educational forms of communication that can carry information and ideas of intrinsic value to the audience. For P&G it was parenting information and advice at their overhauled web site for Pampers. This is by definition an unselfish kind of outreach intended to establish a relationship and a conversation - not just polish a sales message. Marketers spend money on communications with a purpose in mind: to affect changes in behavior, to cause an action most often described as a purchase. Yet, we’re now operating in a world where the consumer is in charge and votes daily on what will be let in and what will be kept out.

Doesn’t it make sense then that understanding the lifestyle interests and concerns of a brand’s audience, and looking for ways to help consumers realize their personal passions is a better idea than chasing them around the room with an even bigger media gong. More than at any other time in the history of marketing, our challenge as experts in the field is strategy. Looking for the unique coalescence of brand and consumer interests. Our job is to serve these interests and in doing so to earn our way into their confidence and trust. One thing is for sure, you can no longer just buy your way in through sheer tonnage in media.

I love this quote from Bob Greenberg’s most recent column in ADWEEK magazine: “Newly empowered consumers, equipped with all the consideration tools the new marketing era affords them, will vote irrelevant brands ‘off the island’ at a quickening pace. Avoiding this fate will require nothing short of reinvention - of brands, of client organizations and of agencies.”

Brand relevance is front and center the most commanding and also perplexing challenge businesses face. It forces us all to think differently about the roots and fabric of what a brand is, what it stands for and how it interacts with consumers.

Redefining your destiny

The pathway to relevance, I believe, begins with your soul. Yes, most brands have them, some certainly more than others. But soul is about a higher calling, a more broadly defined purpose that gets beyond features and benefits and into things that matter most to consumers. What makes life interesting isn’t so much about the goals and achievements as it is the journey itself. So what higher purpose can a brand aspire to that reaches beyond the core aspects of the product itself?

A diaper brand understands the compelling importance of successful parenting as a predominant theme with new mothers and fathers, and moves to intersect with that driving interest. The food brand sees the passions some people have for creative expression and experimentation in the kitchen, and works hard to help their consumer realize the road to tantalizing food adventures. Identifying a higher purpose is about moving the focus from navel gaze to consumer-centricity. It’s about them, not us. The more we think about them, the more we open the door to reciprocal behavior - earning the right to a relationship.

You get me, understand me, know me

What is the happy intersection of interest, passion and compatibility? You might say it’s a good marriage, and right you would be. Not far a-field from this relationship metaphor, the same rule applies to successful brands. If a brand puts itself in a league with the interests and passions of consumers, by defining first its higher purpose, there is a shot at that magic moment when a consumer says quietly to themselves: they get me. We should all be so fortunate for this moment to occur early and often. Relevance is about knowing and maybe even loving the consumer. If we truly love them then the relationship isn’t just transactional, it’s about meaning that connects with what consumers actually care about.

Relevance, meaning and value

Remember the old retail axiom, “the customer is always right.” Stretch that a bit further, and more globally, and it should read - “the customer is it, period.” Business is no longer about sales and market share, it is about securing and keeping fans. The onus is on brand stewards to find and mine the touch points of emotional resonance that creates the basis for a real relationship.

For a fashion brand it is recognizing that powerful sense of self, expression of personal style and creativity - as seen through the eyes of those who appreciate fashion and fashion-able-ness. For an adult beverage brand it’s seeing beyond the bottle to embrace the social connections to people, relationships, laughter, memories and personal adventure that the product could help facilitate. Too often we’re down in the trench focused on ourselves and our competitors, and not enough on finding the love. Either we start investing in this kind of thinking, or as Bob Greenberg says, it’s going to be “off the island” - and sooner rather than later.