Realistic Brand Management Advice

I’m still reading Michel de Montaigne and if he was good enough for Shakespeare he’s good enough for me.

This time the following quote in an essay that discusses how we should be educated got me thinking about Branding:

“Such as have lean and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are defective in matter endevour to make amends with words“

One of the key principles of marketing is distinguishing between what something ‘is’ and what is ‘does’, in other words the benefit rather than the feature, a concern with the solution to the problem. I certainly go along with that.

A classic example of this way of thinking was the radio interview with the executive from Louis Vuitton who was asked how long he had been in the hand bag business.  Dismayed he retorted, “the handbag business? we’re not in the handbag business…we’re in the business of selling dreams!”

Now I’m all for the idea of conveying an idea, and sure Brands make use of associative thinking to give meaning. I’m a Realist too (see Andrew Sayer for more details) and that’s why Michel de Montaigne’s observation captured my attention.

If Branding experts think that their role is changing reality by merely changing meaning through words then the organisations they work for are in deep trouble. As Andrew Collier (Critical Realist) said, we might as well solve the unemployment problem by re-describing people as employed!.

My suggestion would be that Branding experts should concentrate on expressing the true Value Proposition (See Ballantyne, Vargo & Lush et al)  of the product or service, and yes that might be something intangible as ‘happiness’, but mucking about by being manipulatively smart with meaning insults the customer and totally misses the point of the purpose of a Brand.

The Brand should reflect what the product actually does for the customer not be an exercise where organisation executives “stuff themselves out with clothes”. If products and services do not satisfy the needs of customers and deliver the real benefits they seek then Brand Managers should be tackling that issue rather than pretending that something is what it is not through the invention of spurious meanings.

 

Relationship & Service Marketing Advice From The 16th Century

Way back in the 1500s Michel de Montaigne wrote a series of fascinating essays on life, the universe, and everything.

This passage caught my eye:

“I have been present when, whilst they at the upper end of the chamber have been only commenting the beauty of the arras, or the flavour of the wine, many things that have been very finely said at the lower end of the table have been lost and thrown away. Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another”

I reckon this is sage advice for any of us who consider ourselves to be marketing ‘experts’, and a reminder of the value and importance of the insights co-workers can have no matter where they work in the organisation.

Hubris is a danger faced by anyone who finds themselves in a position of authority and power.

When One Store Closes Another Store Opens

So students at Sheffield Business School have lost the Blackwell store at the city campus. I wonder if that indicates a change in student behaviour. There is certainly an increase in the number of students with iPads and Kindles so maybe digital books are really having a high street impact after all.

Its an ill wind the blows nobody any good. When one store closes another store opens as they say! There are other ways to get hold of a ‘real’ book. This is especially good news for those of us that like the touchy feely approach to reading and the joy of owning a dog eared much thumbed and highlight covered text. Now students can get the books on selling they need just like like this…

Business to Business Consultative Selling Skills Recommended Books

Do You Think Outside The Box?

Think Outside The Box by reasonablerobinson
custom embroidered caps by zazzle

If you have ever played buzzword bingo then I’m sure you will be very familiar with the now cliched term ‘think outside the box’.

Like lots of management ideas the phrase points to an important insight about the way we can all become locked into routine patterns of thinking.  Gareth Morgan calls these our psychic prisons, Social Theorist Anthony Giddens  alerts us to operating within the limits of our knowledgabilty, and Chris Argyis  describes the distinction between single loop and double loop problem solving, in which the solutions to our problems frequently lie outside of the system where they occur.

Thinking, whether inside or outside the box is often belittled by practicing managers. Often they will say they can be doing something more useful than thinking. I find that rather strange because every action is based on an idea (however implicit)

Developing your thinking is the primary purpose of all higher education business studies programmes. This is not always made explicit. Often Business School prospectii simply mention what courses are (their features) rather than explain what the courses do for the student (their benefits)

Many people have no idea that purpose of business studies degrees has been carefully thought through by The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (who? I here you say) and The Association of Business Schools.

By studying for a business degree you are embarking on course of personal development that will guide you in four key areas:

i – reflective mindset – recognise assumptions and learn from experience

ii – change master – recognise and manage ambiguity, competing demands, and facilitate change

iii – effective manager – recognise and choose best courses of action amongst alternatives

iv- analytical thinker – deeply understand the nature of business phenomena

Combined,  these four areas together with the experience of study itself will help anyone develop a capability for thinking outside the box. So whatever business degree you choose whether that’s a bachelor’s degree, a specialist MA or Msc or a generalist MBA thinking outside the box comes as standard.

Good Morning Marketing This Is Your Wake Up Call

Emerging after recent months of recent blogging hibernation I’ve started re-pondering ‘my research question’. I know that, all sounds very academic and a seemingly very obvious thing that someone doing some university research should easily get a grip of. It isn’t. Surely I hear you think, if you want to find something out, it’s because you have an unanswered question and there must loads of those! For me though, 2010 was the year of the ‘unidentified research question’. I need to crack on.

In order to break the log jam (hibernating beaver metaphor alert!) I’ve been reading a variety of articles about current issues in marketing thinking and management. One stood out. “Are We Nearly There Yet? On The Retro Dominant Logic Of Marketing.“ Written in 2007 by Stephen Brown of the University of Ulster, this is a great example of his insightful, bitingly humourous, and thought provoking style. In this article he uses the metaphors of cars and journeys to talk about the state of contemporary thinking and practice in Marketing. Here’s a flavour:

“Once or twice per decade, a radically new concept car makes an unheralded appearance. Souped -up, fully loaded and kitted out, inevitably, with a paradigm shift as standard, this go faster model is universally lauded as the next big scholarly thing, and, for a short time at least, become marketing’s conceptual vehicle of choice, the car that that’ll carry our discipline to its final destination, the fabled city of Scienceoplis.”

To mash up the metaphors. In a nutshell Marketing is a fad rich environment which is strewn with empty new bottles that had old wine in them. A world where practitioners regularly wake up with a splitting headache after over indulging in marketing nouveau and mutter…never again.

Stephen Brown writes from a Critical Marketing perspective which seeks to bring to our attention the problems created by the all pervading dominance of the Postivistic tone and aspirations in marketing management thinking, writing and practice. The unswerving aspiration, in some quarters of marketing, to become a natural science, to become the fig leaf that covers up any academic embarassment and provide the unequivocal facts and direct causes and effects that managers crave. This is not merely an academic reverie. He does point to a serious issue for marketing. He urges caution towards management notions such as the ‘hot new’ Service Dominant Logic concept (the prime target of his article). He cautions us that such ideas merely serve as what he describes as a “conceptual comfort blanket, something that helps marketers face the reality of mounting marginalization and ever increasing irrelevance”

Now we start to get close to some questions. What is marketing capability? Where is it kept? Why would anyone want it? How critically aware are marketing practitioners? How do practitioners judge the value of new marketing concepts? What are the mechanisms that generate the tendencies towards the various forms of marketing deployment? Why does post modern marketing scare me? What is marketing realism?

Marketing has now gone Service Dominant, or has it? I don’t believe you can change reality by just changing how you talk about it (see Critical Realism and Bhaskar, Collier et al) Maybe that’s why marketing is marginalised by many because ‘marketing mystics and gurus’ believe you can and that doesn’t wash with everyday people like you and me because it isn’t ‘real’! Skunks aren’t pungently challenged…they stink!

Because it seems so many senior executives agree with Matthew Parris (writing in the Times on the 25th Novemeber 2010) that marketing is just communications, PR and word games. An after dinner game to played with nuances and innuendos, a bit of in the dark fumbling (Ambler) it is trivialised as a business ‘entertainment’ exercise. The marketing job can be dropped when times are tough because we know its all just flannel really.

Is it any wonder marketing is burdening under ‘ever increasing irrelevance’ (Brown ibid ). Parris wrote, “when hired to advise on improving the ‘brand’ of an organisation marketing professionals will usually find that clients already know and promote their strengths but shrink from confronting their weaknesses. Therefore the client will be professionally advised to identify and remedy brand weaknesses…the corporate image consultant is not hired to rethink the product itself.”

Question. Can there be a singular definition of marketing? How are product and service solutions originated? Time to read more from Stephen Brown who also seems to like penguins.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Marketing Orientation?

I have to say I really enjoyed the first three episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. From a social research perspective we are told that Sherlock uses ‘deduction’ , although it seems that the great detective creates his theory of ‘who dunnit’ from evidence so isn’t this inductive reasoning? If we dig a little deeper it seems more probable that he does a bit of both. He speculates and accumulates. He uses abduction, or what Charles Sanders Pierce called ‘guessing’ based on likely correlations of the facts, but saying that Sherlock was a great ‘abducter’ probably wouldn’t go down well for a character who is meant to be on the side of the Law!

The tv series seems to have captured the Zeitgeist by tapping into a detective approach that moves away from the scientific rationalism that dominates C.S.I, Waking The Dead and the like by appealing to the creative pattern spotters in all of us. Is it stretching it too far to say that is echoes the difference between Plato and Aristotle? The Platonic appeal or Sherlock versus the Aristotelian appeal of Horatio Caine and his colleagues. If Sherlock was in Marketing he’d certainly be a rule breaker than a rule taker, he’d kick back against fromulae, he get frustrated with prescription. As for the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle he seems to have had interesting take on Marketing and maybe this seeps into his characterisation of Sherlock Holmes.

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Gulf of Mexico – America’s Magical Waterland

The brand challenge facing BP runs deeper than any logo and strapline.  These examples come from a post titled Rebranding the BP logo.

As subversive rebrands they reflect the perceptions of some important stakeholders. No matter how BP would like their brand to be thought of their brand meaning is owned and controlled by others.  These logos shed light on how brands are really built. They are built on performance and experience.  Yes they are creative, they are eye catching and salient and they are grounded in a reality. Until the tragedy of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill BP could make the case that it acted in accordance with the green sunflower eco-friendly promise, and the power of its public relations machine could successfully rebut any counter claims. However no PR department packed to the roof with gurus could  put a positive spin on destroyed livlihoods, managerial gaffes, and ruined eco systems.

How will  BP overcome their brand challenges? How will they ‘reposition’ their brand. Reiss and Trout called this task the ‘battle for your mind’.  How will they persuade the people of Louisiana and Florida to think differently of them? Will the board of BP decide to invest in a new logo and strapline? If you were running BP what would you decide to do?

Positioning and its marketing cousin re-positioning are pieces of marketing jargon.  Part of a lexicon that often generates more heat than light.  Words used to impress.  The words frequently imply a capability to change people’s minds. What is rarely mentioned or explained is that like many marketing concepts positioning and re-positioning have two connotations.  One implies an almost mystical and hypnotic  capability to transform how people think. Imagine if it could do that! (wink)  The other is a strategic management task that makes real changes to products and services; the essence of the value proposition.  When brands are truly ‘re-positioned’ they are tangibly moved away from one status towards  another through direct action on product and service attributes (qualities).

BP is re-branding through decisive management actions. Senior management changes, effective capping of the leak, financial compensation, and changing its working practices. It is on a journey of moving its brand away from the current negative perception that many people have as Black Pest towards something in time more positive. Something actions can do and Sophistry can’t. Unless of course you take sophistry to mean genuine,  profound and educated managerial insight.

Marketing Speak Hijacks Business Minds

A bad habit of marketing ‘experts’ (and for that matter any other experts) is the over use of jargon. Specialised language is used to indicate that you ‘belong to the club’, to simplify conversations between experts, to shut out people who don’t belong to the club, and to pull the wool over the eyes of the less well informed.

An old idea that has been around for nearly 15 years (probably originally attributed to Tom Peters) is Personal Branding. In plain English this has been known for centuries as Reputation. We don’t need an expert to tell us that personal reputations matter. We don’t need an expert to tell us that we are responible for putting across our worth and value. Robert Louis Stevenson was saying this way back in the 19th century when he said “everyone lives by selling something”. Personal branding is nothing new and it is not complex.

Let’s get the toes curling. Paul Johnston – ‘transforming open minds for a competitive future’, Paul Johnston – ‘enthusaneer’, Paul Johnston – ‘defender of marketing innocents’. It is of course true that people and their names come to symbolise what they stand for. This is also known as celebrity. Mention a name, see a photograph and as Bob Cialdini says, ‘click whirr’ we make the association. Brand Management is in the business of pushing into the foreground the associations we want people to believe. The positives. In social influence terms it is a form of ‘landscaping’. Personal Branding is a compelling idea because of what it promises. However just ask Tiger Woods about the consequences of the difference between rhetoric and reality.

A curious habit we have is the way we ‘make sense’ of things through conceptual lenses. Jostein Gaarder in his wonderful book Sophie’s World explains it this way. The character Alberto Knox is talking to Sophie.

“Could you bring me those glasses from the table over there? Thank you. Now put them on”. Sophie put the glasses on. Everything around her became red. The pale colors became pink and the dark colors became crimson. “What did you see?” – “I see exactly the same as before, except that its all red” – ” That’s because the glasses limit the way you percieve reality. Everything you see is part of the world around you, but how you see it is determined by the glasses you are wearing”

The type of glasses we wear determines the way we deal with problems and solutions. I was recently told a story by John Kawalek of Sheffield University about someone he met who was utterly convinced that solutions to his company’s problems was ‘TQM’. Probing further John discovered that the person had recently joined the company a few weeks previously after being TQM champion for several years in his last post. Every problem was a TQM problem with a TQM solution.

You may have come across people who have been on management training courses and who have been introduced to Myers Briggs personality typoligies. All of a sudden, that’s how the world works. A new set of glasses and everyone is explained by four letters!

Problem. Credit Crunch, redundancy, fear of losing home, wife and kids. Solution….now let me see, which glasses should I wear? Is it a TQM problem? Maybe I need to sell my ESTJ-ness? I know, pass me my Marketing Glasses. The new, breakthrough, indispensbile glasses for guaranteed results. Hand me my Branding Glasses. I need a clear identity, I need to capture my brand personality, to create my image and develop the ability to convey my unique value differentials in an emotionally powerful way that taps into the hearts and minds of my audience.

For more CV power words I recommend Kevin Hogan, The Psychology of Persuasion and Covert Hypnosis. The real question of course is how has this post affected my personal brand I wonder?

Of Course My Spend On Marketing Is A Good Idea

Human beings are rationalising not rational animals. Rationalising our decisions is very important to us. We do it to justify to ourselves that have done the right thing and to convince others of the ‘logic’ of our choice. There is no necessary correlation between reality and the rationalisation. Unless of course you agree that reality is entirely constructed in the mind. Some of the most adept rationalisers are  marketing executives.

In the film The Big Chill Jeff Goldblum played a character called Michael Gold who made an observation about rationalising behaviour.

Michael: rationalisations are more important than sex

Sam: Nothing’s more important than sex!

Michael: Oh yeah, have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

Let’s imagine for minute that we have spent a large sum of money on a marketing communications and re-branding  project that we sincerely believe in, which attracts criticism and ridicule from some people. These two competing cognitions (I think its a great idea vs. other people don’t) create what Leon Festinger described as Cognitive Dissonance.

He articulated his ground breaking theory in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails. In a nutshell the argument runs that if a person has made a serious commitment to a belief or  course of action that is difficult to undo, the moment they are confronted with (and accept as a reality) new  disconfirming evidence it causes great personal psychological anxiety. The individual then strives to re-establish psychological balance.

People do this by gathering around them social support (people who don’t, won’t or can’t disagree with them out of ignorance or fear) Irving Janis called this ‘group think’, and they  proselytize. They attempt to persuade people of their rectitude, and the reasons they have spent the money.

One of the unfortunate criticisms of everyday marketing communications is that it is very good at spending money and less good at generating it. The mud that is thrown regretably sticks to the strategic task and role of marketing in general. Marketing communications executives have had a long time to become skilled at rationalising the sunk costs of campaigns.

Common rationalisations for sunk costs in expensive re-branding projects include:

Somebody had to do something rather than just sitting on their hands

It must be good because look what we paid for it

People have worked very hard on this so far

Just look at all the things we got for the money

Sunk Costs interfere with rational behaviour. The behavioral economics literature offers some helpful insights here.  Cognitive Dissonance kicks in and…

The price becomes the indicator of the value, when the price paid should be irrelevant.

The chance of a good return on investment is poorly judged due to over optimistic probability of success bias.

I’m responsible for this campaign, it was my decison to spend the money so we should press on regardless of consequences

Of course I’d have to say that my decision to spend money on this new re-brand campaign was a good idea. Though As Mandy Rice Davies said

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

The Challenge Of Creating Compelling and Competitive Value Propositions

What comes first the chicken or the egg? What comes first the communications campaign or designing and delivering an appealling value offer that matches or exceeds the expectations of customers not what we ‘think’ they want.

A Marketing Communications strategy is not a Marketing Strategy. Crafting a Competitive Strategy a.k.a Marketing Strategy is fundamental to the success of any enterprise. It is, at its heart a strategic management process concerned with creating and delivering products and services that people want to use and buy.

As we know there are various levels of understanding about what the term ‘marketing’  means. A significant number of people exclusively and erroneously equate ‘marketing’ with advertising and promotions. A significant number of people understand otherwise. It’s purpose is to deliver competitive advantage.

There are various posts and comments on this blog which give a flavour of the ways in which the term ‘marketing’ is understood and how it should be deployed. Alexander Repiev (on this blog) uses the metaphor of the Augean Stables to discuss the amount of ‘marketing manure’ that has built over the years in the marketing profession. Regretably even some seasoned marketeers sincerely believe that the role of marketing is primarily one of marketing communications and thereby reinforce the misconception. This is sometimes given extra gravitas and importance by describing it as Branding. Jean Noel Kapferer amongst others explain Strategic Brand Management otherwise. Much to the chagrin of many marketing professionals they are sometimes ‘cast’ in that role by people who think the marketing job is to merely sell what the enterprise has on its shelves, or hopefully transform worn out products with a new wrapper.  This is invariably a forlorn hope. President Obama described activity such as this in more candid terms recently.

One of the snake pits of the ‘marketing is communications’ approach is that it invariably puts the cart before the horse. It predisposes management to hyperbole and self agrandisement. It fools people into believing that if you say it loud and often enough it is the truth.  Experience has taught many businesses the hard way that if you approach competitive strategy from that perspective its has its costs. A more effective approach in this sequence.  (see Kotler et al):

1. Define the value based on deep customer insight to create key benefit segments. Not all customers are alike. Don’t rely on guess work, high hopes, conventional wisdom, personal assumption or preference. What if Bill Oddie look alikes  and wellingtons symbolise a  significant high value customer segment? Do you disparage them because they don’t fit with a personal idea of the ‘ideal customer’?  Clearly and objectively gather evidence to answer the questions ‘why should anyone  buy from us?’, ‘what benefits do they tell us they are seeking?’, ‘what differences make a difference to our target customers?’

2. Produce and deliver the value. Not all customers are alike. Do the good stuff that transforms customer experience of products and services. Segment the offers. Provide the value that people seek not what you think the value should be.  Create a solid evidence based platform from which to shout from.

3. Finally communicate the value. Not all customers are alike. Talk about proven benefits in terms that are meaningful to the customer not in language that we ‘think’ is meaningful or could be meaningful if only the right meaning is used. The meaning of communication is the way it is received. Different segments want to hear different things said in different ways about the benefits they seek.

Communications preferences in a commercial context should never be judged by whether someone likes or dislikes them on entirely subjective grounds. Talking about strapline preferences ‘as if’ they are merely the stuff of subjective opinion tivialises their true purpose. It’s not about whether somebody ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ a strapline its about whether the strapline is effective in purpose.   Marketing Communications has a purpose. It also goes much further than ‘salience’ or capturing peoples attention through shock or controversy.  I prefer to judge a communciations campaign on the commercial effectiveness of its  social influence.

Marketing Communciations is what it ‘is’ and Social Influence is what it ‘does’.  Any communcications endevour can therefore be measured in terms of how effectively it changes attitudes and consequently behaviours. There is however no guarantee that a change of attitude will translate into a change of behaviour (see criticisms of the Hovland Yale model and AIDA).   It can’t ever be described as money well spent simply because the advertising ‘stands out’, or the thing advertised has become more ‘top of the mind’, it can’t ever be decribed as good value for money just because people have worked hard on it and created alot of ‘stuff’ that people can use.  However commendable the effort, this misses the point.

It should also be remembered that changing a behaviour can change an attitude without the expense of marketing communications collateral. A positive experience is often more powerful than any ‘top down’ marketing communications claims.

If you communicate what you believe to be the value before you’ve provided it, you preach before you practice, you have no evidence that you have matched customer expectations. It is nothing more than a well intentioned aspiration. Actions speak louder than words.

There is a crucial philosophical and theoretical point here and as Kurt Lewin said “there’s nothing so practical as a good theory”. Our theoretical understanding of marketing determines how we do it in practice.

So let’s imagine we are deeply involved and experienced in a particular business sector. This business is facing some competitive challenges. We know that our competition has increased over the years  and there are more appealling choices for our once loyal customers. We also know that the experience we have delivered has been below par in some instances. We also know we have good things to sell too and we can’t rely on other people to do this for us. We know that if we stand idly by then our business is likely to dissapear. What do we do about that?

A good place to start is point 1 above. It seems self evident that we should provide ‘quality’ but and here’s the rub… What does ‘quality’ really mean? Whose ‘quality’ are we talking about? We can only establish the ‘quality’ that should be delivered by understanding the needs and expectations of the diversity of customer segments. What does ‘quality’ mean to them? What are the critical choice factors that customers, present, lapsed and new say they want. Do we have evidence directly from them.  Is there any correlation between what we think is of value and what they think is of value? Getting this right is marketing.