Category Archives: brand name

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

The disappointing reality of Twitter

Posted on Thursday 10 June 2010 | 1 Comment

Twitter is a great tool when used creatively, but, don’t forget, it’s just medium like any other and the same rules apply.  There are a few brands that really work social networking and a few celebrities who bolster their brand by entertaining us in this new media space, but I find the majority of tweeters, in reality (because I think Twitter brings out the “real” in everybody) a bit of a let-down.  So, while we marketers push our clients into social networking, I can’t help wondering whether this isn’t a bit like giving a firearm to a toddler.

Quite smart people fail to fully understand what they are doing with Twitter.  For instance, I decided to follow the dragons from the TV series Dragons Den.  After all, they are accomplished business people so my expectation – reasonable I think – was that I might pick up a few business insights and maybe the inside track of a few Dragon’s Den stories.  How wrong could  I have been?  I can live with the fact that Deborah Meaden hasn’t used her profile.  At least she isn’t wasting my time or contradicting her on-screen brand persona.  Theo Paphitis started Tweeting, but gave up after a week.  Probably too busy counting his money – fair enough!  While James Caan seems to have grasped the golden rule of Twitter – If you haven’t got anything to say, shut up! Peter  Jones and Duncan Bannatyne, in contrast, must have done untold damage to their personal brands (although my guess is that Peter Jones’s brand equity had already been drastically diminished by his appearance on that ghastly TV commercial for insurance or something) by resorting to a drawn-out and vulgar public game of  one-upmanship – a constant barrage of claims and counter claims about whose holiday was most lavish and who had the most money.  A mistake on so many levels and very much in the realm of failing to deliver their brand promise, which, as any marketer knows, is the number one no-no for any brand.

You might argue that Stephen Fry, raconteur, wit and professional twit, has less to lose.  I’d expected a few one-liners maybe, clever use of 140 characters and elegant satire from him, but instead when opening my Twitter home page I was greeted each day with a torrent of meaningless and undecipherable text-speak, all from him.  I quickly “unfollowed”.

The BBC newsreader, presenter and journalist Susanna Reid might fall toward the “homely” end of the newsperson scale, but for heaven’s sake, a morning TV presenter is supposed to be smart.  On Twitter she appears decidedly dippy and spent three days last week canvassing advice on how to set up her i-Pad – hardly the place to get into a long forum-type discussion and definitely not one where a serious newsperson should be seen struggling with household appliances.  Very much out-classed by her co-presenter Sian Williams, who, at least, sticks to business.

Apart from shattering a few of my illusions, these Tweets, I have also just discovered, are having another more significant impact on my own brand.  Because my Tweet history is linked to my LinkedIn profile where they appear for everyone to see, I find I am inadvertently breaking one of my own basic rules for brands – “beware the company you keep”.  As I have said many times, consistency is the secret of a strong brand and the company it keeps, which means other brands, distributors, retailers, famous people and more, are taken as stong indicators of your values and beliefs.  The same applies to personal brands.  I should waste no time in acting on my instinct to unfollow the Tweeters that I have ben unimpressed by.

If I was disappointed by individual Tweeters corporate users have proven no better.  There are no brand communities more potent than those of retailers, but so few really get the Twitter and FaceBook thing.  I was talking about this to the head of marketing for one of the UK’s biggest restaurant chains a few weeks back and I’ve been sensitive to the way the sub-sector uses social networking ever since.  There are quite a few retail food chains that include Twitter and FaceBook in their communications portfolio, but the way they use the medium is very mixed.  For instance I have always considered Nandos to be a fun brand, ideally suited to Twitter, but a couple of weeks ago a bunch of international sportsmen were larging up Nandos on Twitter and there was no reaction from the company itself – an opportunity missed.  Similarly Taybarns had a load of  Tweets about a Carling promotion they were running and failed to leverage the opportunity.  This smacks of the old one-way communications habit that I thought had died out a few years ago and is the antithesis of what social networking is all about.  Twitter is for listening as well as talking.

Half using social networking is about as realistic as being a bit gay.  The fact is, either you are in or you are out and leveraging just some elements of Twitter doesn’t mean that the remaining elements aren’t working, it’s just that you aren’t controlling them. This applies to businesses and celebrities.  Maybe a Twitter account should come with a health warning “WARNING. TWITTER CAN SERIOUSLY JEPARDISE YOUR CREDIBILITY” or an induction course on how to, at least, avoid committing on-line hara-kiri.  The BBC at least seem to have spotted the dangers here and have sent Susanna Reid to it.  I know because she’s Tweeting the entire content live as I write this!  Probably the most interesting Tweets she’s sent so far in her Twitter experience.  I hope the first of many.

Oh, the power of the media and the innocence of those who don’t appreciate that the principles of branding apply to all of us!

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Posted in brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand development, Brand equity, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, Dragon's Den, Duncan Bannatyne, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, James Caan, marketing, Nandos, Peter Jones, phil darby, promise, Social marketing, Social networking, Stephen Fry, Susanna Reid, Taybarns, The Full Effect Company, Theo Paphitis, Tweet, Twitter, Uncategorized

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

Thurman brand not cut out for Motherhood

Posted on Friday 2 April 2010 | Leave a comment

I wouldn’t like to estimate the Uma Thurman brand equity prior to the release of her latest film Motherhood, but the fact that it grossed only £88 on its UK debut is a bit of a give-away.

There’s an inherent promise in every brand and being consistent with that is the secret to success.  Personally I think that regardless of the content of the film it was probably doomed at birth by its name.  ‘Motherhood’ is hardly consistent with the promise established by Thurman’s previous work.  Maybe she would have had more success with ‘Kill Mother’ or  something, but I have to admit, I’m a little surprised that the existing brand equity didn’t put more bums on seats.

Brand builders tread a very narrow path.  Deliver your promise and your equity multiplies, fail to deliver it and it will diminish.  What is more, while it may cost ten times as much to entice a new customer as to sell a second time to an existing one, if you fail to deliver your promise and disappoint, the bill for getting that customer back again will be more like a hundred-times the original cost.  If more than eleven people had forked out to see this movie the disappointment and consequently the cost and the damage to the brand could have been even greater.

Given that cinema like this relies on a younger demographic, who by definition are more likely to research a movie on the Internet prior to buying tickets, its tempting to conclude that the Thurman brand wasn’t strong enough in the first place to withstand the bad reviews that the movie received in the US – hence the low turn-out.  Alice In Wonderland received bad reviews too, but the equity of the Burton and Depp brand proved more resilient.

The critical difference may be that the Depp promise is visual, boundary-breaking, creativity that can and does apply to any role or genre.  Thurman is rather more about mindless action, which lends nothing to Motherhood.  Then again, Depp also has acting ability on his side, which has never really been a factor in Thurman’s brand.

There’s a lot of over-confidence and bad decision-making evident in this disaster.  The belief that the brand could sustain the new idea of the actress in a radically different kind of role and failure to appreciate what the Thurman ‘promise’ actually is.  Its just a pity that the producer, despite the film’s dismal performance in the US, blames the UK distributors for bad marketing.  Although if this were the case and the reviewers are correct, the distributors may even have done Thurman a favor by not revealing it to too many people!

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, Cinema, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uma Thurman, Uncategorized

e-tailing has it Made.

Posted on Wednesday 31 March 2010 | Leave a comment

If you ever doubted that there is a future for retailing on-line there’s a new kid on the block that might just convince you that retail clicks!

The thing that I have always enjoyed most about retailing is the involvement that exists in the “brandships” between stores and customers.  Retailers have, often inadvertently it must be said, always been avid brand builders and the fortunes of the most successful are set in a history of establishing and building relationships with customers that pre-dates the acronym CRM, which is now on everyone’s lips.

I have always felt that retail was the first sector to recognise the element of community in brand-building, but when you take the store or meeting-place out of the equation there’s always a danger that you could be throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Not if Made.com have anything to do with it!

This isn’t a first by any means, but I really like the way they have used the scope of on-line to involve their customers.  This is real brand-building (in other words community).  Its a limited range, but I see no reason why that shouldn’t expand, which can only be good.  Customers, get a real sense of involvement in design and there’s a pioneering spirit about the individuality of the range that provides the essential community ingredient that is further enhanced by the opportunity customers have to vote for designs.  The people at Made.com clearly don’t need me to tell them where the opportunities lie, they are screaming at us all over this concept.  I particularly like the potential for a clicks and mortar model that’s similar to one I have in a bottom drawer right now.

Of course e-tailing isn’t the panacea that a lot of its evangelists make it out to be.  I’ve raised issues of customer service overheads in other posts and I’ll be interested to see how this essential element is handled by Made as time goes on, but Made is an idea, and we can’t have too many of them in the new economy.  Ideas are what will set the world spinning again and these people may just have it made!

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Posted in Big Idea, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business strategy, customer service, customers, design, e-tailing, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, ideation, marketing, phil darby, Retail, Retail format, Retail marketing, retailer, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, web site

Carly Simon – A brand that’s not going anywhere?

Posted on Tuesday 30 March 2010 | Leave a comment

Its always sad when a decent brand takes a wrong turn, but it happens and this week the arrival in one of my weekend papers of a free copy of the Carly Simon album Never Been Gone, first released in 2009, was one of those moments.

I’ve received a few free albums in the same way recently, but, though it’s always tempting to conclude that artists distribute their music this way only when it’s so bad they can’t sell it, it’s usually been an element of an integrated campaign to support a tour or event, which is how, in today’s music industry where the role of albums and concerts have been reversed, the real cash is made.  Until now that is.  This time I can’t help concluding that this is a bandwagon too far for Carly.

Performers are brands as much as anything else and therefore subject to the same rules.  Giving away things like CDs works to help strengthen the relationship – Brandship – with fans, but when the album is this bad it has to be wrong.  Never Been Gone is bad on a number of levels.  The songs are largely really bad, down-keyed arrangements of old material, the production isn’t very inspiring.  I’m also afraid, and this is probably the crunch, that Carly is definitely not the girl she was.  The cosmetic surgery is a bit of a give-away, but though many of her era are miraculously still hitting the high notes, sadly she isn’t, by a wide margin in some cases.  As a concert ticket sales tool this seems to me to be a shot in the foot, but worse than that, it could very easily herald the death of the Carly Simon brand, which surely had mileage left in the tank.

The disappointing thing is that faced with the need or opportunity to leverage the Carly Simon brand one more time, there are other better options that wouldn’t have resulted in such a dramatic failure to deliver the brand promise.  Never Been Gone sounds like a performer in an old folks home.  The arrangements are, at best, dreary and often just awful and the whole thing fails to showcase what has always been her strongest trait – writing.  It could have been so different.  Why not, for example present her work in new arrangements delivered in collaboration with contemporary artists?  At least this would demonstrate that good songs live longer than their composers and could have driven a promising touring show.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, Carly Simon, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, marketing, Never Been Gone, phil darby, promise, The Full Effect Company

ESL communication gaff leads to indigestion.

Posted on Monday 22 February 2010 | Leave a comment

Because I have worked in advertising in countries around the world, I am familiar with the practice of multinational organisations who re-use TV commercials in different markets and over-dub them in the local language.  This produces cringe-enducing howlers from time to time, one of which was brought to my attention this morning by John Ward of Not Born Yesterday and The Slog fame in his weekend Slogger’s Review Bar.  I just had to share it with you.

This classic from Gaviscon comes under John’s “In The Media” headline.  I’m not sure how it works, but my guess is that the storyboard he has shown is an English language commercial, translated into some foreign tongue and then back again to English to demonstrate the mistakes that ESL (English as a Second Language) produces from time to time.

If you can’t come up with Pants on Fire nominees to add to my previous post you might find the opportunity to post examples of ESL irresistable.  With stuff like this out there we could start a whole new blog!

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Posted in advertising, Brand equity, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, English as a Second Language, ESL, Ford, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Gaviscon, integrated marketing, integration, marketing, The Full Effect Company, translation, Uncategorized

The increasing importance of customer service in on-line marketing

Posted on Monday 1 February 2010 | Leave a comment

I have just gone through an interesting experience with a manufacturer that has really driven home to me the heightened significance of two elements in the marketing process brought about by the growth of Internet retailing.

My story starts with the on-line purchase of a pair of sports shoes.  I play a lot of sports, a consequence of which is the array of specialist technical shoes in my wardrobe.  I was keen to try a particular brand of shoe that I hadn’t worn before and although I was aware of the possible sizing pitfalls, because I had worn just about every other make over the years, I know what my size is and I understand the principles of construction and manufacture, so I ordered my shoes on-line with confidence.  Besides, this particular brand of shoe is almost exclusively an on-line product, so there wasn’t an option and I couldn’t do what so many people do with other brands and products and walk into a shop to try them on before ordering on-line.

Just to prove Sod’s Law, when they arrived they were too small.  Not just a nat’s too small, but significantly so.  The cost of postage was included in the deal with the retailer, but to return the shoes for exchange was going to cost me £5.00, so I paused for thought.  I rang the retailer and who was blithely unaware of the sizing discrepancy, but said it explained the high number of returns he was getting.  However, he couldn’t tell me what size I should take, so I called the manufacturer.

Speaking to the category manager I learned that they knew of the sizing problem and had addressed this in later production runs, but as a result there are now at least two different sizing systems in circulation for the same product on a variety of retailer’s shelves – chaos!  To make matters worse, they hadn’t advised retailers of the problem.

The standardising of sizes is clearly a big issue for apparel manufacturers who rely to any extent on on-line retailers and as I discovered, where shoes are concerned the subject is a minefield.  It seems the world is not confined to the European, UK and US sizing systems, but tens of others too and depending on where in the world production is based the factories are often translating sizes from one system to another.  Even this isn’t simple because the size increments vary widely between systems so a European 42 for example may be roughly equivalent to a UK 8, but a Euro 43 is somewhere between a UK 8.5 and 9!

This brings me around to the second of my two elements – customer service.  As far as I was concerned the reputaion of this manufacturer was saved by their customer services team.  After trying three different sizes, I found a fit in the shoes I originally wanted, but had it not been for the dilligence of the customer services person I was dealing with, I would have been faced with a bill for mailing at least three pairs of shoes and I would have just reverted to a tried and tested brand.  Plus, as I am always quoting, if they had ever wanted to sell me anything else again, it would cost the offending manufacturer one-hundred-times the cost of an initial sale to entice me back again.

There are so many lessons to be learned from this its difficult to know where to start.  For example, I’d like to compare the cost of the necessary additional customer service to the saving offered by the on-line channel and I’d be interested to follow through on the satisfaction levels of customers who had purchased these shoes already.  Sales of these models might be OK, but what is going to happen in the future and if, as I suspect, volumes will fall in coming seasons as a result of this issue, what will be the cost to the company of  rebuilding its market share, in an increasingly competitive sector?  There are lessons for internal marketing in the exclusion of the retailers in the information chain and brand equity too.

One thing is clear however, this is a vivid example of what can happen when one link in your integrated marketing strategy fails.  In this case, it was the product development or manufacturing operations elements that were at fault, both critical areas of marketing as is customer service, which in this case saved the day for the manufacturer and at least ensured that they live to battle for business next time around.

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Posted in brand, brand development, Brand equity, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, CRM, customer, customer service, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, Retail, Retail marketing, retailer, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Go Direct-Gov – a promise too far?

Posted on Tuesday 12 January 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the fundamental principles behind Brand Discovery is that brands should never make promises they can’t deliver.  It sounds simple enough doesn’t it?  However there are still alarmingly few organisations who really get it, as has been demonstrated by HM Gov this month with their “Go direct gov” campaign.

Just to state the obvious the reason that this idea of avoiding making promises that you can’t deliver is so important is that it just costs you money – often quite a lot of money – and even if that was acceptable way-back in history somewhere, no organisation can afford to waste a cent these days.  Of course, that’s something that the public sector has always had difficulty coming to terms with, as this campaign powerfully demonstrates.

While it has been estimated that it costs ten times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell a second time to an existing one, it’s also true that it costs something like a hundred times as much to entice back a customer that you have disappointed.  I guess this doesn’t bother the public sector that much as they have a monopoly, but it should resound with the Labour party, who, I would have thought need all the credibility they can muster in the run up to election day.  So, while its important to make propositions that are attractive, if you raise expectations too high, you are bound to disappoint.  Brand Discovery tackles this by introducing businesses to a new approach to brand development that focusses as much on delivering the promise as it does making it.

This campaign by the UK’s biggest spender on advertising falls at the first hurdle by being incredible to start with.  Everyone knows that our government couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery, so they are on to a loser straight off by suggesting that they can sort out insurance, car tax, pensions and the like at the click of a mouse and as one who this went to battle with the Gov’s on-line tax assessment process this year, I know that its massively more time-consuming, complicated and stressful than handing everything to an accountant, so there are definitely going to be some disappointed customers around.

Then there’s the execution.  I see there’s no creative credit given for the commercial – wise move by the creatives I think!  It seems that the agency has adopted the when-you-are-trying-to-really-blag-it-use-celebrities-with-popular-appeal” strategy that has proven to fail on just about every occasion its been pulled out of the drawer and dusted off.  However, apart from having Z-list celebrities anyway, why dress Christopher Biggins like a baby, and have Suggs prating around like an idiot?  It can’t have helped his credibility.  Its also a mystery to me why, apart from its association with Suggs and Madness, why anybody would use a song entitled “It Must Be Love” to promote anything to do with the government – Yuk!

Like a lot of public-sector initiatives this looks to me like a sound-enough concept (the business principle I mean, not the advertising) that’s been totally screwed up in its execution (Including the advertising).

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Posted in Big Idea, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Government, ideas, marketing, National Branding, phil darby, public sector, the big idea, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Branding – This is it!

Posted on Monday 16 November 2009 | Leave a comment

I have to admit I was more curious than excited about the idea of taking my daughter to see the Michael Jackson movie “This Is It” yesterday but, on a number of levels, I’m so glad I did.

As a musician I was blown away by the quality of the talent that he had gathered around him for this project, as a project manager I was fascinated to see how a project so complex was manged, as someone who has heard Jackson’s music for what seems like most of my life it was fascinating to gain a glimpse of what can only be described as the genius of the man and as a human being maybe I also came  little closer to understanding the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson.  Job done I guess as far as the film makers are concerned.

If one thing stands out in this movie for me, it’s the absolute minute attention this guy gave to every detail, which underlines one of my long-held beliefs, that one man’s attention to detail is another man’s half-arsed attempt.  This is extreme!  I also realised that however hard I might try, I will never appreciate how Jackson’s mind worked.  For example, he appeared to carry around a recording of digital accuracy of everything he had ever done in his mind and more impressive still, he clearly possessed a clarity of hearing and interpretation that in my experience, even with musicians, was unique.  This was highlighted in a conversation he had with his musical director Michael Bearden (himself no small deal) when they were sketching out the intro for one of the numbers in the show.  “How do you want this to sound?” he asked.  “I want it to sound just like the record” replied Jackson matter-of-factly.  “But MJ, we don’t hear it like you do, tell me how we should play it”.  This also hinted at some of the frustrations mere mortals should expect when working with genius, as well as explaining the utter respect the musicians, technicians and managers around him clearly held for the guy.

If this event had made it to the stage it would have been the greatest stage show ever staged in the name of music, there can be no doubt of that.  In raising this movie from the ashes, the producers have performed a “save” of monumental significance and possibly even given us something of value that we wouldn’t have had if things had gone to plan.

There’s no doubt in my mind that freak, weirdo, genius, messiah or just plain nutter, we are unlikely ever to see another musician/performer like Michael Jackson and that’s what a truly great brand is all about.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, great brands stand out and that’s the point.  Its their differences that forge the impenetrable bonds with sections of society that are valuable beyond the appreciation of many businesses.  Worldwide Jackson’s followers are as devoted as human emotions will allow – in my Full Effect Marketing terminology a real “brandship” – and this movie can only strengthen this bond and extend the Jackson brand community still further.

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Posted in Big Idea, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, This is it, Uncategorized