Category Archives: Brand Discovery

Are retailers raping brands, or are our brands willing victims?

Posted on Wednesday 25 August 2010 | Leave a comment

We all like a bargain and, as always when the squeeze is on, there has been a surge in the fortunes of retailers who can pander to that need over the last few years.  TK Maxx built their UK reputation on the mountains of liquidated stock, over-orders and manufacturers over-production that were accumulating across Europe, but these days we are all more frugal and surplus stock is a rare sight.  Walk around you local TK Maxx these days and you’ll see stuff that is clearly straight out of the factory and looking suspiciously like re-specd versions of mainstream branded products.  It’s a bit of a let-down by the retailer, but what is this doing for the brands?

It’s understandable that, faced with a shortage of supply in certain categories, retailers like TK Maxx would go looking for alternative sources to support their “Designer labels for less” claim, but for me, at least in some departments, they are failing.  They’ve never been too strong in the footwear department for instance, but, I guess, having staked out their shoe pitch they probably feel its incumbant on them to protect their claim.  Unfortunately that seems to mean introducing minority brands or “brands” that nobody has heard of (because they are just labels that manufacturers slap on to inferior product to help them hood-wink the odd independent retailer into a purchase and not real consumer brands) and it seems to me, even ordering production runs in inferior materials to get the price down.  This might keep their shoe racks full, but it’s not even close to where TK Maxx have in the past tried to persuade me they stood.  It won’t be long before this development is acknowledged by enough consumers to represent a concern to the people running the business.  Somebody said to me only the other day that TK Maxx was a con, but this practice won’t only damage their business, it will reflect on the brands that have stooped to re-engineering their products to meet the retailer’s demands and even those legitimate brands that have constituted the genuine bargains that TK Maxx was built on.

Of course, there are a lot of brands with equity earned in the past that hasn’t been leveraged in recent years, often because the organisations that own them have abandoned them or shut up shop themselves.  SportsDirect is a retailer that has been quick to realise this and have built a very successful business on rebadging inferior Asian-made sportswear and equipment with famous labels from the past like Lonsdale, Kangol, Dunlop and Slazenger.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of people being able to buy a pair of sports shorts for £5, but by sewing a Slazenger label onto them Sports Direct have surely done irreparable damage to this old brand.  Before long, consumers who have been reassured by the label will realise that all they have is a pair of shorts from a Vietnamese sweat shop and henceforth that’s the association Slazenger will have with everybody.

When its a case of retailers buying from independent manufacturers I expect they’ll excuse the practice with the claim that it’s at least keeping the a consenting manufacturer in business and I’m sure there are many willing victims, but when the retailer is buying the brands with the sole purpose of abusing them, it raises a whole new bunch of issues.  Sports Direct own Dunlop in the UK and you can buy Dunlop squash rackets for £30 in their stores that look very much like those used by the world’s top players who they sponsor.  However, the shop versions are just mass-produced rackets from an Asian factory and the similarity to the pro gear ends with the badge, as anybody gullible enough to buy one will soon discover.

It’s a neat route to a quick-buck for Sports Direct, but in the long-term, what they are doing is burning brands – squeezing the life out of them, discarding them and moving on to their nerxt victim.  I guess they have concluded that there are enough old brands with decent equity around to earn their founders the retirement they have their hearts set on and they’ll no doubt go on buying brands and squeezing the life out of them all the way to Dorset’s Sandbanks real estate, but I’m not so sure and anyway, I hate waste as much as I despise abuse and this practice smacks of large helpings of both.

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Posted in brand, Brand Ambassador, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, Dunlop, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, phil darby, retailer, Sports Direct, The Full Effect Company, TK Max, transparency, Uncategorized

If you want to belong, get a guide!

Posted on Tuesday 17 August 2010 | Leave a comment

I happened upon a discussion on BBC Radio Four last week.  The question was ” In the era of the Internet, are guide books still relevent?”.

The pundit that I heard made a very interesting point.  Well, I found it interesting because it was a reality that I find myself highlighting all the time.  She said that printed guides would always be relevent because they do something that an on-line equivalent could never do.  Her point was that a traveller sitting on a train with a Lonely Planet guide (for example) instantly becomes a member of a community of Lonely Planet travellers.  The guide itself is a badge of belonging in a way that a computer or even a hand-held device could never be and in an alien environment, however fascinating and enjoyable that might be, the reassurance of belonging is even more attractive.

As someone who has travelled a bit I have first-hand experience of this.  Just carrying a guide-book in an exotic place is a license for other travellers to strike up a conversation.  Even the different publishers of the guides represent sub-communities – you can find that you become either a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide member according to the guide-book that you carry and I guess there is even a hierarchy.

I’ve recently been involved in a debate over whether being a member of a LinkedIn group is an excuse for other members, whatever their reason for belonging, to send you unsolicited e-mail.  This is an off-line equivalent.  I even had a friend who, years ago, followed a girl who took his eye into a bookshop on Charing Cross Road (They’d call it stalking these days!).  She made for the travel section and after a little browsing bought a guide to Thailand.  He did the same and then followed her to the cash desk where he engineered one of those “fancy that” moments.  To cut a long story short, they ended up going to Thailand together, although, as many partners who go on holiday together, they came back with a mutual loathing!   Personally I have never been put-out by the unsolicited approaches of strange travellers on public transport, although I could imagine, in certain circumstances that I might be, but I am annoyed by e-mail spammers disguised as fellow network members.  Now I think about it a woman on the London to Warwick train a few months ago struck up a conversation with me on the basis of a Lee Child book I was reading. She presented herself as a fellow Jack Reacher fan, which seems to have become another brand community in recent years.  I suppose there could me a moral there – if you want to date buy a book!

Back to the guide books though, the badge thing definitely doesn’t only work while you are travelling.  How often have you turned up at someone’s home and found a bookshelf full of matching guidebooks?  OK, so maybe its just the company I keep.  We’ve also seen the guide-book brands being leveraged to create TV travel programmes, luggage and travel accessories.  Yes, every brand is a community and this guide-book thing has taken my interest.  I must add it to my presentations on brand development in the future, as an example of a brand type, alongside religion, football teams and pop groups.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Guide-book, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Travel, Uncategorized

Don’t hire a celeb. Benefit from the brand ambassadors that are right under your nose.

Posted on Sunday 11 July 2010 | Leave a comment

It seems to be the season for requests, for no sooner had I hit “post” on my last request-inspired piece about brand stewardship that another popped into my in-tray.  “What do you think are the attributes to look for in a brand ambassador?” it asked.  Who could resist…?

As before, let’s get the terminology straight first.  The take I have on “brand ambassador” is someone who represents a brand personally to the public.  This could mean a chairman – Richard Branson comes to mind as someone who fulfills the role admirably – or a celebrity who has no executive responsibility, for instance Lewis Hamilton plays the role for Mercedes, Tag Heuer and other exotic, speed-orientated brands.

A brand ambassador can play a powerful role in the development of a brand and will definitely help emerging brands establish themselves far quicker that they otherwise might.  But, be warned, as with all communications, the wrong person could do your business and your brand more harm than good.

The brand ambassador relationship is, to some extent, symbiotic.  It relies on PR – that’s press relations rather than public relations.  Basically your ambassador should be a darling of the press, the kind of person who is followed around by paparazzi or featured in Sunday supplements … but only for the right reasons.  I suspect that the queue of brands for Peter Doherty, for instance, would be quite a bit shorter than that for Pete Townshend! However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s all one-way traffic, because events that your organisation arranges will often provide the kind of press opportunity that some celebrities consider of benefit to them, so negotiate.

The brand ambassador gig is a kind of extreme form of sponsorship and to get your money’s worth (and this is never a cheap option) your subject has to relate to and enhance features of your business.  For example a few years back I was involved when Skoda Auto first looked at sponsorship as a way to take their Central European brand to the West and beyond.  The brief was to find a subject that would reinforce the speed, skill and excitement of their revitalised (courtesy of the Volkswagen Group) brand and appeal primarily to European and American markets.  We eventually matched them up with the Ice Hockey World Championships and the relationship was so successful they extended their involvement in the sport to national leagues, the Czech national team and national league teams in other countries.  However, the relationship with individual personalities can be deeper and more valuable that the broader benefits of events or teams and that’s waht I see to be the biggest difference between sponsorship and brand ambassadorship.

If you want to get the best out of the relationship, before you go out shopping for a brand ambassador you simply must have a clear understanding of your brand and what it stands for.  That might sound straightforward enough but there are a lot of businesses out there art aren’t as clear as they should be on this issue and there’s no better way of achieving this than with my Brand Discovery programme.  This is a series of workshops, analyses and presentations that culminate in an eleven-point Brand Model that clearly defines your brand.  The next step is to identify the kinds of people who are likely to represent those elements – the core values and beliefs upon which the relationships with stakeholders (that’s internal and external) are founded.  I call these Brandships.

The brand ambassador you eventually partner with is, in effect, a shorthand communication for your brand.  His or her relationship with your target market gives you an instant audience and the kind of credibility you will never achieve from other conventional communications forms.  You can build all manner of constraints into the deal you strike with your eventual ambassador – You’ll notice for example that Lewis Hamilton always puts a Tag watch on before press conferences and like most other sportspeople, Hamilton probably gets bonuses from his sponsors for winning races or in relation to his position in the rankings (because success generates positive press coverage) but when your ambassador is caught behaving contrary to your brands values and beliefs the relationship can become a liability, so a conduct clause is a vital part of any contract of this kind.  The publicity from a celebrity gone off the rails is always bigger short-term than anything they could generate from positive actions and the fall-out for the brand can be momentous – think

Fame or notoriety is always an important factor in your choice of ambassador because its like the readership figures of a newspaper – they define it’s value, but there’s more to the ambassadorial role.  For instance, the values and beliefs of your ambassador are just as important as the exposure he or she gets.

If you are getting the idea that the brand ambassador idea is beyond you just now don’t throw the idea out entirely. Just because your budget doesn’t stretch to the kind of numbers a big name celeb would command doesn’t count you out of he game.  Give me fifty low profile individuals who’ll accurately and reliably represent everything that’s good about a brand for free any day and every organisation has that resource at its disposal already. I’m talking, of course, about harnessing the ambassadorial value of your own brand community, Your employees and customers. I’ve seen organisations pouring millions into sponsorship while their greatest and cheapest resource goes untapped.   Any business that understands brand development, of course, will be running an internal marketing strategy and nurturing this group with a really good internal marketing strategy will cost you the tiniest part of a regular sponsorship package and give you a great return on your investment.  Organisations that are good at this are John Lewis in the UK and SouthWest Airlines in the US, but there are probably hundreds around.

With the world becoming ever-more competitive and the squeeze firmly on, no business can afford to underutilise its resource and Brandships are probably as valuable as assets can get.  If you are brand conscious you’ll know that already and be developing and leveraging your Brandships, so re-adjusting your focus to include the brand ambassador remit isn’t going to add much to your effort or investment.  Its worth the consideration of any business these days.

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Posted in brand, Brand Ambassador, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Lewis Hamilton, marketing, phil darby, Skoda Auto, Uncategorized

Brand stewardship – what’s it mean to you?

Posted on Sunday 4 July 2010 | Leave a comment

Last week I was put on the spot when someone asked me for my views on “brand stewardship”. Apart from the fact that its like asking for my view on world peace – I could either just say “I’m in favour of it” or talk for three hours -  the term “brand stewardship” poses a question in itself.  I mean what is it?  What’s the difference between “stewardship” and “management” or “development” and, given that anything to do with a brand touches on every aspect of a business, where should I start (or end for that matter)?

Let’s begin with nomenclature.  My guess is that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, came up with the “stewardship” concept in order to accommodate the fact that the closest we can ever get to owning a brand is in the role of minder.  But why not “management”?  I assume that this must be based on the belief that “management” sounds a bit too formal and structured for something that is very human and organic.  So far, even though I have a loathing of the terminology that marketing people think up to make themselves appear smart, but actually just confuses everybody, I can live with all of this and if I’m right, I guess I understand the question and whether you call it stewardship, management or development it’s all about caring for a brand.  I’m going to assume that a brand steward is like the steward of a golf club – he’s there to make sure processes are adhered to and everything is kept in shape but he/she doesn’t have an executive role. So, let me try to summarise my views on “brand stewardship”.

I must have explained my understanding of what a brand is hundreds of times, but to this day defining “brand” even among the “marketers” who participate, remains a critical component of most of my workshops and seminars.  Such are the vagaries and inconsistencies within the marketing business.  I view brands as communities, which, like any other is really just a group of people with something (or things) in common.  A large part of this is values and beliefs. Some members of a brand community create a product or services that reflect these beliefs and values and others buy and use them.

People buy BMW’s because Brandenbergischen Motorenwerke belive in things like quality, engineering excellence and innovation and the cars and motorcycles they produce are manifestations of that.  If you need a car and  these things are important to you, its logical that you’ll feel comfortable in the BMW community.  Similarly, Apple is all about innovation and style, so if these subjects are important to you, you’ll probably own a Mac., i-Phone or i-Pad.

These brands and others have taken the time and trouble to drive awareness of what they stand for and as a result the brands themselves have become icons for a clearly defined set of values – you have YUPPIES driving BMWs and then there’s “white van man”.  Provided the reality measures up to the promise you’ll have the reassurance of knowing what to expect from a product wearing a familiar label.  It works the other way too.  Owning a BMW or a Mac is a badge of belonging to a community – a symbol of your beliefs – and because, as Maslow revealed, most of us are insecure, sales of many products are driven by people who have a need to wear a badge denoting our belonging to a group.  Why else would we wear clothing large areas of which are taken up with advertisements for their manufacturers?

However, this is a bit simplistic.  Few people, for instance, will find a single brand community that represents everything they stand for so most of us combine a portfolio of brands to represent different aspects of our belief system.  If you think of a brand community as a residential community you’ll recognise that you choose to live in a place because it is “your kind of place” but because the brand thing is not exclusive, when you move in you bring the trappings of your other communities with you.  In this way, while joining the community may broaden your horizons, at the same time, to some extent, you’ll enrich the community with the stuff you bring with you.  That explains why brand communities are constantly changing.

All truly great brands are like Marmite. However broad and diversified your brand community may be you are never going to appeal to everyone, and you shouldn’t want to.  Brands with broad appeal are inherently weak because, along with the need to belong we also have a need to express our individuality.  That’s where quirky niche brands play their part in life’s rich tapestry.  A strong brand is normally vivid or distinctive and while stark differentiation like this means it won’t be to everyone’s taste, distinctive brands will foster deep relationships with community members (I call these “Brandships”) and strong loyalty.  These factors are the keys to sales, profit and longevity.

Difference is very often synonymous with newness.  Its relatively easy to be different when you are the new kid on the block, but the success that your newness drives will take you ever closer to becoming “the establishment”.  The more successful you become the greater the challenge of maintaining your difference becomes.  A successful brand will recognise that it is the difference of the products it makes rather than the products themselves that is responsible for their success and as their products become familiar and competitors bring look-alikes to market, they’ll find new ways of representing “difference”, just as Apple have done by constantly changing their products and introducing radical new ideas.  Of course, some new products and ideas will fail, but failure is good because it is a product of innovation, change, experimentation.  While longevity can be a valuable and reassuring asset it is important to recognise that having been around for a long time may not count for much if you’ve not changed anything about your business in all that time.

Brand stewardship in many ways is just the same as any kind of management or indeed parenthood.  Its mostly about facilitation, providing the scope, tools and resources and opening the doors to opportunity, guiding where necessary, but avoiding imposing your own values or rules on your charge.  Its about providing opportunities for discourse, listening to what your members are saying both to you and each other, providing what they need to do the things they want to do (Which also means predicting what they will need in the future), offering up suggestions and being around to fix things that go wrong.  In other words, providing access, introducing communications like on-line or social networking, fuelling and being involved in discussion, collecting insights and data, analysing it and developing products and services that because of all of this you can be confident your community will welcome and generally policing.

In order to do all of this you first of all have to be absolutely clear what the brand and its community is all about – its that values and beliefs thing again – and to do this you’ll need a methodology to help you condense, what is a complex thing into as simple a form as possible.  My Brand Discovery programme introduces such methodology and using it any business can create an eleven-element Brand Model that will sum up their brand.  But that’s just the beginning.  You then have to apply it to your business, making sure that the actions you take on every level of the organisation reflect and support the essence of your brand.  That will take a brand Steward into every corner of your business where he/she will influence pretty well everything that is done.  This can be a risky job in organisations that don’t already have a team-playing culture, which is why Brand Discovery also provides an ongoing management system that engages everyone in the organisation, gives them the tools they need to ensure that their decisions and actions are aligned to the brand promise and ensuring they are fully involved in the process of keeping your brand alive.

Good brand stewardship drives things like Cupidtino the new dating service for Apple users, Saturn’s annual owners factory tour, Yeti bikes’ bashes, Harley Davidson’s HOG chapters and many other different elements of the communities of discerning brands around the world.  Good brand stewardship is the reason why innovative organisations innovate and efficient businesses are efficient, but, as I said earlier, it’s a very big subject and this is a very simple answer.  If you want the whole nine-yards we’ll need a much longer discussion.

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Posted in Apple, brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business development, business strategy, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harley Davidson, i-Pad, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, saturn Motors, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Yeti Cycles

Blue may be the new green, but does it suit your business?

Posted on Monday 21 June 2010 | 1 Comment

So, the debate is pretty well done and dusted – the Green movement is dead. A victim of the same monarchical culture that has buried so many other great ideas and business over the years.  Adam Werbach pointed all this out to us in his speech “Eulogy for the Green Movement” at the Commonwealth Institute in San Francisco way back in 2004.  The mistake he made then was not to offer an alternative and as a result he was vilified by old Greenies, the press and a bunch of other people with no imagination or brains to work it out for themselves.  As he said, people don’t like being called “dead”!  So, he returned to the same venue in 2009 with the missing pieces, which he has called “The Birth of Blue“. Yes, without a doubt, Blue is the new Green, so start adapting your wardrobe.

In fact, Blue isn’t anything new.  Just as the demise of Green followed the familiar path beaten by Communism, a few religions and other movements that relied on compliance under threat rather than a voluntary embrace.  Adam isn’t alone in what has done, but where he scores the bonus is in introducing an imaginative and practical solution, in this case, by adapting a proven approach to a different problem.  I say proven with the certainly of first-hand knowledge, because along with all the other initiatives, cultures and institutions that have successfully adopted this kind of strategy, I have been following it for years with my programme of brand transformation that I call Brand Discovery.

History couldn’t possibly give us more conclusive proof that a culture based on strict rules will fail, yet its not surprising that governments worldwide have adopted a heavy-handed approach to getting us all in line behind the sustainability thing.  When you throw old ladies in jail for putting paper in her rubbish, or stick tracking devices and chips in wheely-bins you really can’t expect anything, but resistance from folks.  The same applies to any community, brand or organisation.  If you make a community welcoming, comfortable and rewarding enough people will want to be a part of it.  Conversely, if you want to drive people away from a place you make it threatening and unpleasant.  Maybe if we gave less thought to prisoner’s rights and conditions incarceration might represent more of a disincentive to criminals?  However, I digress.

Green failed because it didn’t welcome people to its community and brands fail for the same reason.  What constitutes “welcoming” is another discussion and will vary from one brand or community to another, but what I want to do now is focus on the process involved. Its simple really.  You firstly need to lay out all the facts and associated issues in a clear and unbiased way (something that governments just don’t seem capable of).  You then fuel debate and discussion and LISTEN (something that few organisations of any kind find natural). People will work out their own relationships with the problem or issue at hand and if you really are listening, you’ll discover that they are writing your strategy for you.

Sustainability, affects us all.  It influences communication, travel, jobs, in fact pretty well everything in everybody’s life.  As our schoolkids are learing (and these future customers are way ahead of us on this see Graeme Codrington’s Hanna’s Rules) nobody can avoid it, so its really just a matter of helping people understand how it affects them individually.  Then you can start to offer them suggestions of things that they can do to help, if not themselves, their kids, avoid a future that’s far less inviting than that which we have today.

Brand Discovery encourages brand stakeholders to nominate things that they can each do to ensure that they are contributing to a bigger shared objective – the delivery of a brand promise.  Blue takes the same approach by asking people to nominate a DOT – Do One Thing – that will bring them closer to living a sustainable life.  What Blue also realises is that entire national populations are too large to work with successfully, so it relies on dividing nations into smaller work-groups.  They, cleverly chose businesses … large ones.  Their first candidate was Wal-mart, a community of almost two-million employees, not to mention partners and suppliers (I’ve visited countries with smaller populations!) where the approach has proven to be a great success.  More including Morrisons and Sainsbury’s in the UK are following their lead.

The issue isn’t going to disappear by itself and the emerging generations of customers and consumers place sustainable living far higher on their list of priorities than we or our forbears have so its not difficult to see the attraction for a corporation of engaging in sustainability.  In fact, businesses that don’t embrace the cause are going to suffer big-time in the future.

However, if you think it’s just a case of flying a sustainability flag outside your corporate HQ you are wrong.  Apart from their understanding of the importance of sustainability, emerging consumers have inherited a realisation from our generation and they just mistrust pretty well anything that the corporate world tells them, so you are seriously going to have to walk the talk.  What we are talking about here represents a significant change for most organisations.  You are going to need a strategy and there are few organisations around with the perspective and in-house resources to tackle this alone, but before you even find your partner to help you with this you need to understand that blue really is your colour and be ready to trust in your chosen Gok Wan.

In the coming months I will be working on this with my clients, testing out, ideas, introducing initiatives and all the time doing all I can to live sustainably.  Next week I’m off to Marketing Week Live in London and, as I try always to do, I’ll be minimising my carbon footprint by travelling by train.  I’ll be tweeting as I go and hopefully producing a bit of audio on Twaud.io or Cinch.com from the show.  Among the questions I’ll be asking of the people I meet there will be how their organisations are rising to this challenge.  So follow me on Twitter @thefulltweet and make your own contribution.

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Posted in Adam Werbach, Blue Movement, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business strategy, carbon neutral, change management, communications, communist, consulting, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, green lobby, marketing, Marketing Week Live, phil darby, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi's, Sustainability, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Everything you do is part of touching the customer with the brand

Posted on Thursday 17 June 2010 | Leave a comment

In an interview with Forbes today Horace Luke, Chief  Innovation Office at HTC said “Everything from a sneaker eyelet to a brochure to a trade exhibition is part of touching the customer with the brand”.  Great!  A nerd who gets it!  But why stop there?

What Horace is telling us is that the strength of a brand is in its consistency.  To be credible a brand has to achieve consistency, represent the same values and opinions at every touch point. Organisations can no longer get away with paying lip-service to a brand promise, customers are too savvy, too well-informed and too suspicious and if you slip up at any point in your relationship with them they’ll be on to you like a cheated wife!  You simply have to walk the talk, deliver that promise.  Its a simple and logical concept that’s not so difficult to make happen.  You just have to realise that it isn’t done by legislation.  Only by listening and sharing information will you get everyone in your organisation on the same page and from there consistent delivery is an easy road.  Horace is clearly a department head who you can rely on to pass the message down the line and my bet is that everyone in his group share his perspective and clarity of purpose.

This is my passion and it’s why I created Brand Discovery, the means by which organisations can represent their brand consistently at every level.  But if you are still asking why brand is so important you should take time out to read another of today’s rich veins of wisdom, this time from Graham Codrington (That man again! I promise we don’t have any kind of relationship, but he definitely gets it!)

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, consistency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, Horace Luke, HTC, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company

Your future is bright young things. So invest in your brand community.

Posted on Wednesday 16 June 2010 | Leave a comment

I hate to be repetitive, but for the second time this week I find myself shouting “hear, hear!” to a piece by Graeme Codrington.  This time he’s talking on the subject of employee relations.  In particular the challenge of holding on to the bright young things that represent the future for all of us.  But, while I agree with what Graeme says, I see this from another perspective – the perspective of “brand community”.

Graeme, as usual, is right (don’t you just hate folks who are always right?).  Too few organisations focus on creating an environment where employees feel they really belong – a community.  In this article he talks about the old days of outback mining companies that established towns and provided all the facilities their employees needed to live with their families, because they knew that without this infrastructure they simply wouldn’t have any employees.  He also points to the fact that initiatives like these were early victims of the bean-counters, looking through distorted spectacles for ways of squeezing more profit from a business.

So, what has an outback mining community to do with a modern business?  Well, it’s not as different as you may think because whether they are rock-face workers or the smart graduates that an international business needs to build its future on, when there’s a shortage, there’s a shortage, and belive me, there are definitely not enough bright young things to go around.  If you doubt that, just give a thought to the last time you marvelled at some meaningless procedure a business that you were dealing with insisted on taking you through – smart people don’t waste your time (or theirs) with stuff like this!

Graeme talks about investing in the things that make work a great place to be.  A while back, I visited an organisation whose offices were so much better and more comfortable that the homes where the employees lived, that they socialised there too.  In fact it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to go home at all!  However, it isn’t quite as simple as office bars, sofas and a few pot-plants.  My real interest in this subject comes from my passion for brands and my belief that while, as Graeme says, there’s a cost involved in making yourself the employer of choice for smart people, it doesn’t have to be as big an investment as many might think.  I see this as a part of the marketing function and in most organisations there a budget for this and, if you do it right, it is guaranteed to bring a handsome reward.  What’s more I know that with the technology we have at our fingertips today, you can measure anything and that includes the return you get on investment in your “brand community”, so the proof that this kind of investment pays-back is there.

In fact, one of the founding principles of my Full Effect Marketing is that a small proportion of your total marketing investment re-directed to internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return.  And, have no doubt, what we are talking about here is “marketing”; specifically building a brand community where all stakeholders (investors, partners, suppliers, customers AND employees) feel a sense of belonging and ownership.  It works like this:  great brand community = happy and dedicated employees = consistency over time because they stick around = improved return on training investment = better decisions = smarter (and more efficient) execution = happy customers = job satisfaction … you get the idea.  Its called “Brandship” and yes, you have individual Brandships with every one of your “stakeholders” (I hate the word “stakeholder” too so let’s just talk about “community”).

The chance of you being a lighthouse organisation in the future (or even being around at all, given the competition we are all going to face) is very much based on the desirability of your “Brand Community”, not just for customers, but for employees.  But there’s another aspect to this.  A brand community isn’t something that’s dictated from the boardroom.  Employees aren’t going to respond to a community that YOU think they should like.  It has to be a place where they genuinely feel “at home”.  A place that they have created.  In fact, the organisation doesn’t even own the brand community.  You just get to be caretaker or janitor.  A powerful brand community is a product of and owned by its members so if you want to create the real thing (and I suggest this should be your objective) you are going to have to engage another Full Effect Marketing idea, which is that all your communications should be two-way, because you are only going to get it right by listening.

Who has come across a large organisation where all the employees get a free pair of Replay jeans?  I have, because we did it at Oskar Mobile in the Czech Republic that not only became the world’s most successful third operator ever, but, against awesome odds, were nominated World’s Best Mobile Operator; success that was driven entirely by their brand community.  This and many other initiatives like it were prompted by employees themselves, who also made a movie themselves about what a great place Oskar was to work.  The movie in turn was distributed to recruiters and shown at conferences and job fairs as well as posted in the Internet and as a result they were getting thousands of unsolicited job applications every week.  The original Saatchi & Saatchi was a community that worked and played together and it was this that drove our international growth.  I remember walking into a recently acquired agency in Helsinki and being bombarded with questions from everyone about the people and happenings in our London Charlotte Street offices.  Our London softball team had shirt with “Official softball team of the biggest advertising agency in the world” printed across the back and people in our offices around the world wore it with pride.

This is what I mean when I talk about Brand Communities and it’s why I created my Brand Discovery programme.  Every day the idea of the central role of “brand” in any business is gaining more credence.  If you aren’t focussing on this already you should be.

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Posted in analytics, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, change management, communications, community, data analysis, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, management, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Consistency – or how to avoid your business going to hell on the back of a truck!

Posted on Monday 14 June 2010 | 1 Comment

The founding principle of Full Effect Marketing is that efficient organisations are always more successful that inefficient ones.  That’s never changed and I can’t imagine it ever will.  Most of you, I know will think its an obvious thing to say and few people argue with me when I say it.  However, what I mean when  talk about efficiency is often different to what other visualise it as.

When I do presentations on Full Effect Marketing a key topic is always consistency.  It’s simple.  If you are aiming for efficiency the last thing you want is waste and inconsistency creates waste.  I talk a lot about the way organisations view their marketing communications.  They invest large sums in sexy media that reach large audiences in impactful ways and devote inordinate man-hours and effort to honing these communications to make them bring miniscule increments of return on investment – efficiency.  And its tough.  Everyone is getting more efficient, your media dollar buys less every year and production costs go up.  The truth is that we are all so good at communications these days that we are all fighting over that last ten percent of the scope of the media.  But are we so smart?  Because, while we are all beating each other to death over decreasing return with big budget advertising campaigns, most of us are ignoring the fact that the hard-won benefit is leaking out of  a side door.  It’s a little like filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom from a tap.  You perhaps don’t care that much that there’s a small amount of water spilling out.  After all, you are filling from a big tap, dealing with big volume, a trickle isn’t going to make that much difference.  However, it is making a difference and if you ignore the leak for long enough, it will get worse until you’ve probably leaked away the equivalent of a bucketful of water – or, a year’s advertising budget.  Even in its early stages, a leak is making some difference and it could be the difference between what you have in your budget to invest and the extra that your competitor down the road is investing that’s making life tough for you.  Either way, its inefficient.

I talk a lot about consistency in communications and most organisations have a lot of communications.  Usually far more than they at first realise and certainly more than any one person in that organisation can manage.  I don’t just mean consistency between different communications, but consistency between what you say and what you do.  Get any of this out of kilter and you are being inefficient.  That’s the reason for my Brand Discovery programme and it’s why one of the rules of  Full Effect Marketing is “refocus on internal marketing”, because if you have got all this communication going on and no one person can manage it all, the only way you can achieve a level of efficiency that’s appropriate in today’s competitive marketplace is to ensure that everyone in your organisation is saying the same thing and behaving consistently.  And the only way that you can be confident that this is happening is to get all your stakeholders on the same page and committed to playing their part in the big picture.  That’s about sharing information and its the job of internal marketing.  Pretty well every business I have come across could improve their return on communications and marketing investment by switching focus towards internal marketing.  Ten percent of investment, switched from external communications (making a promise) to internal communications (delivering the promise) will almost always deliver a level of return that an organisation could only dream of achieving from external investment.

So, against this backdrop I discovered this short clip from a presentation by a very smart guy called Graeme Codrington who I can’t seem to find anything to argue with on any subject that he covers.  What Graeme does here is illustrate better than I ever could, how an apparently minor leak by a leading brand, that could have been fixed, had they focussed a bit more on internal marketing, significantly reduced their marketing efficiency and points to dire consequences for the sustainability of the business.

Thanks you Graeme!

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Posted in advertising, Brand Discovery, brands, brandships, communications, consistency, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Graeme Codrington, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company

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Social Networking – a force for good

Posted on Tuesday 25 May 2010 | 1 Comment

Liam Anderson just Tweeted a link to a TED talk on social networking by a very smart guy called Nicholas Christakis. You should take a look. His bottom line seems to be that, primally speaking, social networking drives the good in society.

This is a subject that I have pondered many times.  As you will probably know, I see brands as communities and this perspective drives all that I do as a marketer.  In the talks I deliver I often highlight the parallels between housing communities and brand communities.  You move into an area because you feel it reflects your standards and values, you aspire to fit in, or it is comfortable, which, by definition means that you have something in common with everyone else who lives there – even if that’s just that the place feels right.  However, every facet of your life is not replicated in every other local resident.  You have hobbies and interests, values and habits that are unique to you in that community and so in joining it you are also enriching it.

Take my son as an example.  He has an amazing network of friends.  Its a very close network of guys and their girlfriends who he has encountered at various points in his life in many different places.  Nicholas suggested in his talk that there are two distinct types of networks those where the “friends” are independent of each other and don’t know each other, their relationship being confined to the “host” and there are others where the friends are inter-connected, they know each other through the network.  The catalyst in both cases is the host who is either gregarious and introduces his friends to each other or is insular and protective of his relationships and keeps them separate.  Each type of network has its plusses and minuses as Nicholas points out and who is to say which, if either is right or wrong.  The important thing is that we recognise the difference.

It’s fair to say that my son’s friends’ lives have all been enriched by the network.  Each has shared their individual interests with the others and as a result there are sub-groups that go rock-walling, others play squash, a big group  hangs out in one guy’s big garden all summer grilling, drinking and playing volleyball.  The more they do together the stronger the community becomes and the broader its interests and the interests of the individuals.  From time to time members of the community have had a tough time and I’ve been amazed at the way the others, even the fringe members, have gathered around to offer support and practical help.  As Nicholas says, a force for good.

Because I see brand communities in the same way, its important to me that my clients provide opportunities for their community members to interact with each other and not just the host (my clients), but while most organisations these days do the social networking “talk”, very few indeed get around to the “walk”.  Brands have to be gregarious to be successful, they have to stand out, be communicative and above all confident enough to introduce their community members to each other.  Organise events like Saturn the US car-maker who each year take their customers on a tour of the factory, Harley Davidson, or the cycle manufacturer Yeti (my favourite bikes in the world) who organise events around the world for their owners to come together race, chat and party.  I blogged last week about Apple’s new dating site, which is another example.

Brand guardians should always remember that their community members will also be members of other communities (buy other brands) where their other interests and values are better represented, but the the successful brands are those that are central to their members lives and achieve the balance between keeping themselves and their products front-and-centre while maintaining a broad church.  What are you doing to build Brandships in your brand community?

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Posted in Apple, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harley Davidson, integrated marketing, marketing, opportunity, phil darby, saturn Motors, Social marketing, Social networking, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Yeti Cycles

Branding your High Street Dreams.

Posted on Wednesday 12 May 2010 | Leave a comment

There’s a new series on BBC television called High Street Dreams in which a couple of entrepreneurs, Jo Malone, who made a success of a fragrances and candle business and Nick Leslau, a property tycoon, work with would-be business owners to help them get off the ground.  I watched the first of these yesterday evening and although it confirmed one of my biggest beefs about “branding agencies” it also gave me a few reassuring surprises.

First the good news.  As one who is often expected to perform miracles on coffin-dodger companies, I always get a lift when I come across people who look as if they have the ability and passion to run a successful business and that was the case with all the candidates in last night’s programme.  The Singh family were hot to take their chilli sauce recipe to market, while newlyweds Roland and Miranda Ballard were already selling their Angus beef products at farmers markets, but wanted to “reinvent the beefburger” with a premium twist.

Both groups had worthy products and they were all hard-working, even well-organised to a point.  It’s good to know that there are fledgling businesses out there that might just keep Britain on the business map.  However, what really impressed me was the grasp that both groups had of the concept of brand.  I have to say their mentors were also plugged in to brands and branding to an extent that I have found rare even among so-called marketers and (and here comes the bad news) in stark contrast to the “branding agencies” they employed who were at best very average and, in the one case, probably a liability.

Of course, the programmes were edited (very well I thought) from what I guess were hours of recordings and for this reason I can’t say for sure what process these agencies had followed to arrive at their conclusion, but it seems that neither took either group through a clearly defined programme of discovery, prior to starting work on their design and as a consequence launched into the presentations of their final proposals by telling the groups what their brand was all about, which as any real marketer knows is rather arse-about-face – only the client knows this for sure and the best any agency could hope to come up with is a good guess.  Starting this way of course meant that neither agency was in a position to ease their client through the process of brand and strategy development that follows the creation of a brand model, but as they didn’t enter that territory anyway, they failed, by any definition, to qualify as “brand consultants”.  In this case the one solution was a whole lot better than the other, which should have been rejected and probably would have been had the brand model and the briefing and judgement criteria been in place, but neither were brand or branding solutions by any stretch of the imagination, they were logo and packaging designs – different planet!

As I have discovered over my years in the business, this isn’t unique in the world of marketing.  There are designers all over the place who have decided to call themselves “brand consultants” without having the first idea of what that is, just as there are advertising agencies that call themselves “marketing agencies” or “integrated marketing agencies”.  Frankly, most of them just talk bollocks, but the problem is, these guys are snake-oil salesmen who talk a good talk and if you are an SME looking for sound advice, the odds are you’ll not have the experience to spot the rogues among the smoke and mirrors.

The really sad thing about this is that for years we’ve worked with the knowledge that in the UK seven out of ten new businesses fail within three years and, post recession, that figure will undoubtedly rise.  The “new economy” is an even tougher battle ground with new rules emerging daily.  The last thing we need are idiots, passing themselves off as experts making the game even tougher for the guys who are enterprising enough to give business a go.

So as a service to would-be entrepreneurs everywhere here are three tips to kick-off your brand development process:

  1. Before you get to do any kind of logo design you need a Brand Model.  That’s a document that defines your brand and its character from as many parameters as you think is appropriate (My Brand Discovery Brand Models have eleven).  Either you must do this for yourself, which is tough if you have no experience of these things, or you should seek the help of a consultant.  A real brand agency will have a prescriptive process that they take you through to establish what your brand is all about and create your Brand Model BEFORE you even talk to a designer.  If they don’t, bid them a polite “good day” and make for the exit!
  2. Next you need to create individual briefs for your logo/package/literature designers.  These MUST be based on your brand model, which is why that comes first.  Among other things, your brief should explain to the designer how you want his work to reflect the important elements of your brand – its character, its promise and the pillars that support the promise.  Again, any brand consultancy worthy of the name will have a briefing format that works with the brand model to provide the designer with the important information he needs to do his job properly.  If they don’t and you are still in the room, think again!
  3. Then you need judgement criteria.  Its easy when you are inexperienced in working with designers to get carried away by the excitement of seeing their work and as a result accept proposals that aren’t spot on.  I can’t over-emphasise the importance of getting details like this right at this earliest stage of your business development.  Start off with the wrong logo or packaging and your business will be compromised until you change it – believe me, you don’t want to go there!  You need a set of criteria against which you will judge each proposal and these criteria will again relate back to your brand model and brief.  If the nice people at your brand consultancy don’t help you with this, its definitely time to take off the rose-tinted specs!

One of the issues that the Singh family were struggling with on the High Street Dreams, was the versatility of their chilli sauce.  They believed that it was good for cooking with, dipping and adding to food like a table condiment, but neither the “brand consultancy” nor their mentors seemed to really address this issue and it came back to haunt them when the category manager at Asda asked “where do you see this sitting in our store.  On condiments or cook-in sauces?”  The answer was both and more, but to make that credible they needed three packaging variation (they didn’t necessarily need three different recipes, although that would have been icing on the cake) A bottle to sit alongside Tabasco sauce, a wide pot to compete with salsa dip and a jar to match cook-in sauces.  Asda wouldn’t necessarily have taken all three, but it would have demonstrated the versatility of their product and given Asda the opportunity to try all three areas of the store to see which gave them the best results.

The Ballards on the other hand had a wholesome product that looked like a lot of things that are supposed to be “good for you” – pretty bloody unappetising!  Their early research had made this point quite decisively.  The agency’s answer was to put it in a box so you couldn’t see it, which is a bit of a nonsense for a product category where customers are particularly keen to see what they are buying.  It’s a dilemma and quite frankly, I don’t have the answer, but then again they haven’t paid me to come up with one, so I’m not at fault.  Unlike their “brand consultancy” who not only failed to resolve the issue, but came up with a package design that looked like a high-school project!

Again, a brand consultancy will sort things like these, because they know about in-store categories and how to work the merchandising.  They’ll also tell you what things you need to do in other areas of your business to bring everything in line with the “promise” that is made by the brand, the product and the packaging.

The new post recession economy is throwing up opportunities every day, but anybody who wants to catch one and run with it is going to have to be smarter and faster than businesses that made it in the old, pre-recession marketplace if they are going to make their High Street Dreams a reality.  If you have your eye on a place in the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs this year you are going to have to do everything you do better than your competitors and that means hiring REAL experts to help you.  Hopefully I’ll have helped you spot a good brand consultant when you need one.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, design, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, High Street Dreams, ideas, integrated marketing, Jo Malone, marketing, Mick Leslau, Mr Singh's chilli sauce, opportunity, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized