Branding
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Introduction
This is a story about brands and branding. It is made up of 3 simple points that are easy to remember, can be simple to implement and do increase customer loyalty. And loyalty means retention and revenue growth. Many of the points come from the offline world. But they are still applicable in a digital age.
1. Don't Position yourself, Take a Position - There is no right answer, there is only one wrong answer -- and that is not having an answer.
2. Act, Don't Talk - Your brand is not what you say, it is what you do.
3. Don't Communicate, Evangelise - Don't just talk to your customers, talk to your team and unite them around what you believe in.
1. Take a Position
There is no right answer, it is essential to have a single answer and believe it
Brands like Google, Apple, Skype, Nike. These brands aren't built on advertising; they are built on product innovation. Product innovation and product communication that focuses around a single very strong belief. Even in a commodity marketplace if you take a position, people will respond.
Google, Apple, Skype, Innocent Drinks - they are all single minded about what they stand for and focused all of their activity to reinforce a single message.
Google built a search engine after there were 5 other search engines in the market. They said we will innovate to amaze people and they have done that with search, mapping, text link advertising and email. Their mission is to organise the worlds information - but their brand is based - in my opinion - on amazing people with what you can do with networked computers. Apple focuses on simplicity and design. Everything they do focuses on simplifying the task and making it beautiful.
At Ogilvy we call these positions a brand's "Big Ideal." Simply put you need to ask yourself a simple question and continue to return to the answer. The question is "The world would be a better place if …" The world would be a better place if everyone could find anything they were looking for immediately online: Google. The world would be a better place if everyone's electronics were beautiful and worked well together. That’s Apple.
For Dove, we believe the world would be a better place if women didn't have a distorted opinion of beauty. Dove is in a competitive market with a fairly commodity product but Dove believes in real beauty and all of its products and marketing comes back to this core thought. What's the truth about beauty? Dove recently set out across 10 countries and interviewed 3,000 women to find out. They learned that
- Only 2% of these women describe themselves as "beautiful,"
- About 3/4 of them rate their beauty as "average"
- Almost 1/2 of them think their weight is "too high"
When Dove took the position that women should see their real beauty, it found out a lot of woman agreed and because they believe in what Dove is doing, they buy their products.
2. Action
Your brand is not what you say, it is what you do.
If you believe in something, you have the taken the fist step that organises everything you do. But if you really believe in something, you can't just talk about it. You can't market with claims, you need to market with services.
Nike says "just do it" and in 2001 it produced NikeID - a simple product configurator - call it a sophisticated online brochure - that allowed you to build a pair of shoes online. They also realised they could send that request to the factory and ship it to your house. Now their website - which is a marketing tool - allows you to get the exact shoe you need to achieve your goals.
Nike has a simple sponsorship - The Run London 10k Road Race. Yes, they put their banners on the course and hand out runner hats with the famous swoosh, but they also offered an online tool that allowed runners to upload their favourite runs, share them with their friends, and track their progress in training for the event.
Today they've taken this idea on step further. Nike Plus is a monitor that records how you run and stores the information on your iPod which can then be synchronised with their website. This is a 20 Euro gadget - it could be a give away as a sales promotion with Apple - but given Nike's obsession with helping people achieve their goals it lets you upload your numbers and your routes and your favourite tunes to a global community website. Track your progress on individual runs. Chart your calorie burn and compare it with other runners across the globe.
For Dove the services we've offered are a Self-Esteem Fund for young girls. A global forum where people can discuss issues around beauty. A commitment to using real women in all of its advertising - even if it takes 3 weeks to cast the perfect 50 year old for a Pro Age advertisement instead of the 3 hours with a modelling agency.
Nike and Dove understand branding and marketing today: It isn't about telling your customers that your product is better, it is about doing things for them and people like them that complement your product.
3. Don't Communicate, Evangelise
Speaking to your team as well as your customer
The final tip focuses on communication. Today's markets are complex and your organisations are run with smaller teams and everyone is incredibly busy. I've made the point that unless your whole team focuses on the brand ideal, you won't deliver for your audience. The way this works is to take your "marketing idea" and communicate it across your internal teams from R&D to end sales.
This is a challenge - We all know we need our teams to be creative if they are going to be innovative and be relevant. 15 years ago you could simply tell the world that Gillette is "The Best a Man Can Get," translate it into 50 languages and run your ads all with the same shot of the razor. Not the blue one, the shiny cool silver one. But what happens when you are asking your team to do events, you are expecting new applications on a quarterly cycle, that you need website applications - as well as tactical sales promotions to shift aging stock. The answer is you have to give your teams more - you have to let them take the ideal and work with it.
The good news is that if you have a strong ideal and focus everyone on supporting this belief, your marketing will naturally fall in line. The brand position isn't just a tag line, it has to be a filter that can be used to evaluate marketing communications, website functionality, sales presentations, everything.
When Cisco says it believes it is the "Human Network" that is really amazing - not the routers and firewalls that make the IP network -- it provides a single focus for its marketing organisations worldwide. It sets a stake in the ground that focuses on the benefit - that people can collaborate, communicate and work together -- not just the product features. It forces everyone to return to a single point of reference whether they are an enterprise sales team, a direct marketer mailing small businesses or an awareness campaign for consumers that purchase through retail outlets and provides an easy way to say that work is "on brand" or "off brand."
What is essential though is that the brand ideal is not seen as "just marketing," it is seen as what the company believes in and everyone's actions from product development, corporate management and local market sales promotion all rally around this one key point.
Conclusion
So, returning to our three key principles:
1. Don't Position yourself, Take a Position - There is no right answer, there is only one wrong answer -- and that is not having an answer.
2. Act, Don't Talk - Your brand is not what you say, it is what you do.
3. Don't Communicate, Evangelise - Don't just talk to your customers, talk to your team and unite them around what you believe in.
What does this mean for digital agencies? It means you all need to find a brand filter that your teams can rally around and you need to raise it up so it is more than an ad campaign. Only when you can come to a conference like this, or out on the streets with your customers, and have everyone give the same answer - that network is about phones that are fun, this network is about being a real reliable business tool, your network makes it easier to call home to Pakistan, this is a network makes it easy for parent to give a phone to their kids - then you will have real branding. The people you want to reach - those that also believe - will actually seek you out. And if you deliver on your beliefs, you will have loyal customers.
On Dove, our Vice Chairman and creative director had an interesting experience. He was in a London Taxi and mentioned that he worked in advertising and that he'd worked on the Dove campaign. The taxi drivers reaction was "that's those posters with the fat birds innit? I like that, I can't stand all of those ads with skinny bints - they're not women at all." It is pretty clear that the Dove marketers didn't intend for their campaign to be remembered as a "Fat Birds" campaign but it does show that a big ideal can be translated into any language for any market.
If you talk about something your audience believes in, they will talk about it and that is the most effective marketing of all.