The brandgym blog

Are you more like Prada, or petfood?!

Tom Fishburne nails another point with another brilliant cartoon. This time his target is the way marketing folk get carried away with the idea of trying to seek salvation in emotional benefits, or sizzle. The risk of course is getting carried away and forgetting the product sausage.

In Tom's cartoon the company are trying to inject emotion into tile grout (the stuff used to stick tiles together). In an earlier post I asked whether your brand was more like Prada (emotional sizzle and lifestyle are key) or petfood (where you need a balance of sausage and sizzle)?

Perhaps the guy in the cartoon in a mate of Hugo, the mis-guided marketing director from the Where's the Sausage? book?

V shows risk of picking a fight with the wrong brand

I wasn't surprised at all to read in Marketing Week that Danone UK is planning to put the gun to the head of its V energy drink and put it our of its misery.

The latest re-vamp was backed with a pretty hefty £3.3 million campaign by RKCR/Y&R. The idea was that V invigorates the mind. Mmm. Sounds familiar? Isn't that Red Bull, the brand that "gives you wings?"

The demise of V is a good example of how hard it is to make a dent in the share of a dominant brand leader. Dominant means a brand that IS the category. In the UK if you say "energy drink", people think "Red Bull". The brand has a huge 89% market share. And in a world where there is just too much stuff to worry about, brands like Red Bull are a godsend, as they mean there's one less decision to make.
-> Energy drink? Red Bull. Bang. In the basket (or in the hand in a garage/convenience store). Next.

[Interesting aside is that V is the leading energy drink in New Zealand, with Red Bull tiny]

To have any chance at all of taking share from a dominant market leader you need a combination of at least 4 things:

1. A decent bit of product/pack "sausage": you need some sort of product or pack innovation to make yourself worth considering.
=> V lacked any product differentiation [1/10]

2. Bravery to break codes: you also need to be brave enough to break some codes and stand out
=> V has the same type/shape/size of can as Red Bull. As far as I know, its sold in the same channels [1/10]

3. Loadsamoney: you need some big bucks to fight the big boys. Re-wiring peoples' brains so they think "energy drink?->V" instead of Red Bull is REALLY hard. [2/10]

4. Stamina: its one thing to launch. Its a whole different challenge to keep up the battle for 2, 3, 4 years and longer. Be ready for a long, hard and bloody fight. Energy drinks are just not key for Danone, who is focused on health, especially dairy [1/10]
TOTAL 5/40 = No chance

I have to eat at least 1/2 of my words regarding one other brand who took on a dominant brand: Trident taking on Wrigley's in the UK gum market. I commented that Trident's smaller in-store presence was like "putting a tent up in front of a skyscraper" that is the Wrigley's brand blocking.

The 1/2 of my words I'm eating now is that after 18 months they have managed to take an c. 11-15% share of the UK market, which ain't bad. With 18 months worth of learning, let's do the check vs. the new brand criteria above:

1. Product/pack: I didn't give Trident enough credit here. They did have a different pack shape, and a different product format (tabs and liquid filled chews) [7/10]

2. Breaking codes: as mentioned, pack shape was different... and they tried to do some wacky online stuff...but could have been more innovative in the mix [5/10]

3. Loadsamoney: they have spent quite a lot...launch alone was £10 million [6/10]

4. Stamina: what helps Trident is that it is a priority, billion dollar global brand for Cadbury. So, it has a good chance of sustained investment [9/10]

Total score: 27/40

But, the 1/2 of my words I'm sticking to is that i) I still think they will struggle to get a business that is profitable in the long-term, as they are still small and will now have to battle it out with a Wrigley's brand backed by the might of Mars, who are buying it. ii) they still don't have a great and proven mix. The original campaign, "Mastication for the Nation", with a dub poet, didn't work. They are now on a new campaign with a bloke taken off on a surreal taste journey and the endline "Mess with your head". This is better, as it tells a product story. But is it enough?

We'll check back another year down the line!

"Ladders and Snakes" - The Risk with Values-based Communication

Onslaught of feedback on Dove's new movie
Dove's new You Tube movie, "Onslaught", has stirred up another storm of debate. Onslaught hits out at the barrage of images from the beauty industry that tell girls they need to look good, get slim etc. It ends by imploring parents to "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does".This film comes hot on the heels of "Evolution", which got 15 million views on You Tube and won the top prize at the Cannes Advertising Festival.  [More on Evolution here]

Has Onslaught gone a step too far? Evolution attacked the Photoshop-ed manipulation of models to make them look perfect, saying "be beautiful, but in your own way". The new film seems to say "Don't listen to anyone who tells you to change the way you look". But then, Dove sells products that help you look slimmer and more beautiful. Uh?

PSFK highlights that parent company Unilever's Lynx/Axe and Lux brands use more stereotypical sexy imagery to sell, and asks if this is not hypocritical. There is even a piss-take advert that says: "Talk to your daughter before Unilever does"! However, consumers are not marketing directors and most are unlikely to say "Oh no, I'm not buying Dove. I have a real issue with their portfolio strategy of having brands with a social mission, and others that are using sex to sell."

The bigger issue - "values-based" communication
But beyond the Onslaught film itself, the bigger issue that interests me is the whole idea of "values-based" communication. Does investing in marketing that works by "laddering up" to a higher order values level pay back in extra sales? Or is it an expensive "brand ego trip"? Should you be following in Dove's steps, or steering clear?

Well, it sure gets impact and exposure. In New York a couple of weeks ago the Dove Onslaught movie made the breakfast news on national TV. And the hits on You Tube are close to a million. And for some people, this marketing will change the way they feel about Dove. However, there is then a jump that has to be made for these feelings to translate into product preference. The impact on the brand is in-direct.

Ladders and snakes
This is a great quote from a marketing director I worked with at Unilever. The risk with climbing a brand ladder is that you can go too high, hit a ladder and slide down. Tom Fishburne has this bit of genius that illustrates the risks:

A better bet could be communication with a more obvious, direct link back to the product. In other words, leave the ladder in the garage, and get the "sausage" (product) and "sizzle" (emotional values) working together.

Looking back at the Dove case in the brand vision book, its fascinating to see that this is the conclusion reached by Dove's agency, Ogilvy, when the Campaign for Real Beauty was created a few years ago. This campaign was based on a "beauty theory", a bit like a brand manifesto. They developed three different "brand anthem" campaigns that tried to get women to stop judging themselves so harshly ('Beauty Has A Million Faces One Of Them Is Yours', 'Give Your Beauty Wings' and 'Let's Make Peace With Beauty'). However, as the planner from Ogilvy agency commented :

"Unfortunately, women were not impressed. They found our ideas patronising. The top-down approach seemed to lead to rather didactic, theoretical and distant work. So we decided instead to work bottom-up - product first, wrapped in beauty theory."

I love that last line: "Products wrapped in beauty theory". Tell a product story, but in an impactful, emotionally engaging way. This led to the launch of Firming Cream, with the now famous advert of  real ladies in their undies. It was fresh. It was honest. And it plugged a product: "As tested on real curves". "Real-ness" and "honesty" was the brand's personality, but not the idea itself.

Time will tell if the Onslaught approach works. And hats off to the Dove team for being courageous and for innovating with media. The pay to shoot their You Tube films, but the media is then free.

But my money would go on emotionally engaging communication that sells. More like the Firming Cream stuff, and less like Onslaught. If you disagree and decide to cilmb the ladder to values land, then a few tips: i) be brave, ii) get your house in order and have some substance: Dove invests real time and effort in their Self-Esteem fund., iii) be ready for the back-lash and the cynics.

To end, an earlier Dove film about the Self-Esteem Fund that is still my personal fave. This one has a health warning. As the dad of 3 girls, I have to own up and say this bloody thing brought tears to my eyes when it was presented by Unilever's CMO, Simon Clift!

BBC News' take navel gazing to new extremes

I had to check this wasn't some sort of late April Fool's joke. It has to be up there in my list of the most Hugo-esque moments of madness of 2007 so far.

Are you sitting down?

The BBC have changed the way the radio news is introduced, and how it ends. And they invested in consumer research to validate the following change:

From: “BBC Radio Four, the news at two o'clock." at the start and "BBC Radio Four news" at the end.

To...cue drum-roll...:

To: "BBC News on Radio Four, it's two o'clock." at the start and "BBC News for Radio Four" at the end.

The rationale for this monumental change was discussed in detail on the BBC News Editors' Blog by the head of radio news.This prompted a predictable, pissed-off response:

"This is thoroughly pointless - why did you waste licence fee money even discussing it? Do you think radio listners are idiots?"

"The fact that anyone at the beeb spent time contemplating this change makes me very angry. What a waste of my license fee."

Another good example of wasting time and energy and money on stuff that people just don't care about.

Sorry. But your consumer doesn't really care

One role we have to play as external partners on brand growth projects is "keeping teams real". When the brand team start to dive into too much detail, to navel gaze and over-intellectualise ("Are we sensual? Or sexual?"; "Which shade of blue shall we use on our new pack?"), I often find one killer question helps get us back on track. The question? "Does your consumer really care?".

This normally stops the conversation dead. People look sheepishly at one another and agree to move on to something more important.

I think in future I might also use this bit of Brandcamp brilliance from Tom Fishburne to help make the point with humour. His cartoon perfectly illustrates that most brands actually play a pretty small role in the lives of consumers. So we need to focus on the big stuff that's going to make a difference, and not sweat on the small stuff.

Have a nice weekend. And COME ON ENGLAND!

Tango's tailspin shows extension is not the answer

This month saw fizzy fruit drink Tango kill the latest in a long line of "dwarf" extensions when it put a bullet in the head of Tango Clear. This follows previous flops Tango Still (launched 1995, axed 1998) and Tango Strange Soda (launched 2002, dropped in 2004). All this flurry of extensions has failed to stop the long-term decline of the brand which has suffered 5 years of declining sales. Its a sorry tale of what happens when you forget what made you famous and neglect your core.

Back in the 1990's Tango outsold Coke's fruit drink Fanta by a whopping two to one. The brand had a clear positioning, "the hit of the real fruit", based on a differentiated product. It stood out with highly impactful and differentiated black packaging. And it had one of the best ever examples of a communication campaign combining sausage (function) and sizzle (emotion), with the endline "You know when you've been Tango'd". I've used the ad with the orange man many times to try and show how to tell a product story in an entertaining way. Click on the image below to watch it, or see it here:

Things started to go wrong around the mid 90's, when a double whammy blow was dealt to the brand. The first blow was self-inflicted. The brand team forgot what made them famous, which was the hit of the fruit, especially orange. They created a series of different flavours that distracted attention from the core orange flavour. But to really make things worse, they tried to give each of these flavours its own personality. Several of these even got their own increasingly wacky ad campaigns like this one for Apple, and another for blackcurrant that walked away from the "You've been Tango'd" idea.

At the same time Tango took its eye off the orange ball, Coke decided to up the support for Fanta. They focused single-mindedly on Fanta orange, and started to use the distribution muscle they had. And they quickly started to catch up with Tango and then over-take it. Fanta is now by far the dominant carbonated fruit drink in the UK.

Rather than going back to what made the Tango brand famous and working on the core of the brand, the series of extension attempts were then used. But, as failure of all of these shows, you can't extend your way out of trouble. Especially when these extensions don't work to reinforce the core brand idea, but rather dilute it. Tango Strange Soda was a wierd mix of juice and milk. And Tango Clear? A brand famous for a black pack and having a big fruit hit trying to compete with Volvic's fruit flavoured water?

A few years ago the brand finally went back to the "You've been Tango'd" idea, but it was too late to save the brand, which continued to decline. And now in 2007, the brand has ditched the last thing which made it different and stand out which was the black packaging. So gone is the brand's edgy personality as well, that made it the bad-boy versus the goody-goody Fanta. The brand is being re-positioned based on containing only natural colours and flavours, which whilst a good idea will not be enough to get the brand growing again.

In fact, perhaps Tango is one of those brands that sadly should just be left to die.

Dell go green (and blue and red ) with envy

I posted earlier in the year on Dell's attempts to advertise itself out of the doldrums. At the time, it sounded worryingly that they wanted to be more Apple-like, which reeked of brand jealousy more than business sense, given the small share Apple have of PCs (c.3%).Well, the ad campaign is now out. And we can now see Dell's Apple-envy in all its multi-colour glory.

Job-one: re-envision the advertising message (!)
A report in Business Week seems to confirm that new Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Jarvis, is steering well clear of the burning but more boring business issues , such as the future competitiveness of the Dell's direct selling model, on which the business was built. No, the report says that

"Job one for Jarvis is to re-envision an advertising message that traditionally has stressed either a PC's price or its main features, including computing speeds and memory capacity.

Hence the flurry of ads that goes live July 12, drawing heavily on colour, music, and images suggesting fun and whimsy. "

Let me just make a note of that for future Hugo speeches. "Job one is to re-envision the advertising message". No, really, I couldn't write this stuff, its so daft. And "a flurry of colour and music suggesting fun and whimsy." Well a flurry of whimsy is really going to scare the living daylights out of HP and Acer, the brands really stealing Dell's share.

I'm creative too. Honest. No, really, I am
Now. To give Dell credit, they have created a new product on which to base the new campaign, rather than a sizzle-only brand anthem-based piece of "sponsored entertainment". The new product is the Inspiron, a laptop plugged its range of different colours. According to PC Advisor, its "pitched at consumers who want a computer as a media centre, workstation and fashion accessory." They even launched the Inspiron notebooks with a 'fashion show' in Marbella, Spain. Mmmm. Dell and a colourful fashion accessory?

Doesn't it feel a bit like Dell is suffering from Apple-envy? Launching a range of nice colour options can't offset years of being a dull but functional purchase. And isn't it trying too hard to be something you aren't? I mean, check out this Dell movie... I like the music, and its a visual feast. But it does have the horrible feeling of "your dad disco dancing" to it. And in now way would make me think about buying one instead of a Mac:

What it does make me think of the PC versus Mac ad where PC is trying awfully hard to be an "arty-farty" creative.

Logo slapping frenzy for phones

Mobile Today is predicting a "brand invasion" in the mobile phone market, as companies eye jealously the success of the Prada by LG phone. The influential CEO of Carphone Warehouse, Charles Dunstone, is quoted as saying that "the Prada phone lifted sales amid a gloomy market, and the prospect of fashion-conscious consumers buying mobiles with the desire to have the latest and coolest was a reason to be cheerful." There are at least two reasons to be cautious about the success of Prada wannabees, of which Levi's are at the front the queue.

Logo Slapping, not branding
First, and most importantly, its likely that the copy-cats will rush into market with a "logo-slapping" strategy. The only main added value in this case will be the brand name, and the hope that this "badge" will be enough to get people to buy it. This is a classic example of "brand ego tripping", where a company gets too big for its brand boots, and under-estimates the value they need to add to take on the competition and win over the consumer. The biggest brand ego tripper of all time is of course Virgin, who slapped their logo onto a string of mediocre products which duly flopped or stayed dwarf-like (e.g. vodka, jeans).

In contrast, the Prada phone had the sexy sizzle/emotion of the Prada name, but also a very nice bit of sausage/product in the way of a code-breaking piece of industrial design. It has beaten the Apple iPhone to market with touch screen technology, and has a sleek black look. This is a good example of a brand idea inspiring and guiding the creation of a cool product. If LG had just slapped the Prada name on any old phone, it would not have worked. People aren't that daft.

Now, compare to true brand added value of the Prada phone to the phone planned by Levi's. This will have, wait for it, "a chain that could be fixed onto a pair of Levi's jeans". Well, watch out iPhone and Prada.

Getting to the disco as the DJ packs up
Isn't it amazing how again and again brands have an over-powering impulsion to copy success, rather than trying to find their own spin on it? By the time they eventually get to market, often with an inferior product, the differentiating edge has gone. And what was once innovative become the norm. They get to the disco just as the lights are up, and the only person left is the DJ packing up. But as they're there, they have a dance anyway.

This is what looks set to happen with fashion-brand mobile phones. The same thing is happening in clothing stores in the UK who are linking up with celebrities. H&M did it with Madonna. Top Shop went one better by getting Kate Moss, a true style icon who connected with young shoppers. Next was New Look with Lilly Allen, which seems to have had less impact... and the next one is likely to have even less effect, as the novelty wears off.

Steroids for under-performing brands
One brand who feels no need to use guest designers or other brands is Zara, and its nice to see them sticking to their success formula of great design and speedy changes of collection. Luca Solca of the Bernstein consultancy summed up the downside of clothing chains using stars, which applies equally to phone companies using fashion brands (from Yahoo news). He said that "stars are a substitute for design, speed and quality" and compared firms that use them to "athletes forced to take steroids to compete."

Inside innocent part 2 - reasons to be careful

Yesterday I posted on the "reasons to be cheerful" after my trip to Fruit Towers to meet creative head honcho Dan, trying to bottle some of the innocent brand magic that he and the rest of the team have woven. Today I'm following up with some "reasons to be careful" regarding the brand's growth, and in particular the launch of This Water.

For any brand, its important to be clear on what is essential and what is optional when you grow, in particular in the area of brand extension. For innocent going forward, how do they do what Richard Reed calls "keeping the main thing the main thing"? And what is "the main thing"?

It was interesting to learn from Dan there they are looking at two main ways to grow, with separate teams looking at each of them.

Route 1: Warning! dangerous road ahead
The first route, led by Douglas, is looking at new types of HEALTHY DRINK, starting with This Water. This is the one that set my warning bells ringing, as I see it as moving away from what made the brand famous, and diverting attention from the core. After talking with Dan, I'm less concerned, though some questions remain.

First of all, you can't argue with the business opportunity. innocent, like Pepsi, Coke, Danone and every other food & drink company, are looking at the explosive growth in water. This Water is the first step to getting a share of this market. The idea would be to use this as a platform for launching other water-based drinks, such as vitamin-enhanced water and perhaps even a healthy energy drink.  And as innocent stands for "nothing but nothing but fruit", Juicy Water (c. 80% water) didn't really fit and even confused some people. So, rather than force it into the brand, the decision was taken to re-launch the product under the This Water brand.

Some questions remain:

i) My biggest concern with this is diverting management attention from the core. But Dan suggested that the amount of management time was clearly limited. Douglas and his team are like an internal start-up who have to beg, steal and borrow resources. This is OK for now, but care will be needed to ensure the "new toy" doesn't steal more than its fair share of money and time. But I still worry that overall this move takes the company as a whole away from its core in fruit. After all, the HQ is called Fruit Towers, not The Fruit and Water Tower. This is especially true if the brand moves beyond fruity-water into things like vitamin-enhanced water that is not fruit-based at all.

ii) Also, the water market has some formidable competition...as Virgin found in vodka and Axe/Lynx found in razors, you need to be ready for an expensive and painful bloody nose when you do this.

iii) Finally, the pack of This Water I bought has none of Dan's magical copy on it...its very mundane, and I couldn't find a single funny line. I hope the team are not following the daft suggestion from Wolf Ollins that they should "grow up...stop relying so heavily on a brand voice which speaks to a small group of consumers". Dan did say this was start, and it will evolve over time...I'm going to start collecting This Water packs to see if this happens Dan!

Route 2: Go, go, go
The second route, led by Rosie, is "sticking to the core" and looking at how to do more with FRUIT, which feels absolutely spot on. Its reassuring to hear that this is clearly where the focus is. Some of the many growth opportunities here include:
- The Smoothies for Kids have been more successful than planned, and there is lots more to do there
- New formats like the 1 litre tetra packs
- Starting to advertise for the first time to broaden awareness, with the investment paying back several times
- Geographic expansion
- New distribution, including, yes, selling in Mc Donald's

On the last one, I don't share the concerns expressed by other innocent fans about linking up with Mickey D's. It's a great business opportunity. And it helps parents have a healthier choice for their kids. I don't think it will have a negative impact on the brand at all.

All of the above ideas stick with smoothies, and I hope that innocent keep this focus for the next few years. I can also imagine the room full of mock-ups for other products Rosie must have (but I didn't see!).... sorbet, fruit lollies, fruit bars...the list is endless. But these would again divert attention from the core business.

The sell-out?
This was the other issue I raised in my original post. It does seem that the 3 founders (Richard, Adam and  Jon) are having a lot of fun, and doing alright in terms of houses/cars/cash. And they deserve every penny. Along with the original investors, they do still own c.80% of the company, and you worry that if the cheque from Coke was big enough, it would be hard to say "no". You can see the press release now "Coke take 30% share of innocent, providing valuable funding and distribution to help us take the innocent brand global, getting our message and product into the hands of more people". After all, Ben & Jerry's and Body Shop have done it.

But I do hope they hold out for few more years. Sell the company and its hard not sell your soul. And then, the brand is in danger of losing its magic. The good thing is that innocent do allow people to take a share of the company, and this is where the other 20% of the equity is.

My suggestion? One, get employee share ownership up as fast as possible, so that the people in the company have a say in the decision on selling out, and also benefit from any eventual sale. And second, why not invite innocent fans to buy a share of the company....not sure how. Perhaps you have to send in 100 proofs of purchase, or write a funny poem, or draw a picture. But you somehow make it a "family business" in a true sense.

Virgin: the worst or best of brand extension? (and win a free book)

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, so here we go. It draws on the research done for the brand stretch book (blatant plug: the only book in the whole wide world on brand extension). I'm offering a free copy of the book to the reader who is first to answer a Virgin brand trivia question at the bottom of the post.

Virgin is perhaps the most mis-understood and mis-used examples of brand extension ever. Make no mistakes, Sir Richard Branson has more balls, bravado and billions that I or anyone reading this will ever have. But when it comes to a case study in brand strategy, he's not the guy I'd use for inspiration.

Virgin is often portrayed as a 'philosophy' or 'lifestyle' brand that has successfully stretched into everything from life assurance to lingerie, unbound by banalities such as functional product performance. According to this theory, its the emotional values that ties together the 350 different disparate Virgin companies. So, people fly Virgin Atlantic because they buy into the philosophy of the brand challenging the big bully boys like BA.

This is, how can I put this politely? Sorry, I can't...its a load of old bollocks.

Firstly, the brand stretch performance of Virgin has been patchy. Virgin Atlantic is by far the biggest success, with its £1.9billion of turnover roughly 50% of the entire Virgin Group's sales. But as Professor Mark Ritson of London Business School commented in Marketing magazine, 'For every Virgin Atlantic there have been numerous failures such as Virgin Cola'.

Second, and most importantly, it aint the emotional 'sizzle' of lifestyle values that drove Virgin's success. The successful brand extensions all have a great product 'sausage', inspired by the Virgin personality of being irreverent and fun. You can see this in the Virgin brand values from the brand's website. Four of the six values are linked to product/service (innovation, brilliant customer service, quality and value for money), with the other two more about the sizzle (fun and competitively challenging). Of course the antics of Sir Richard have been a huge help in getting PR for the brand's extensions. But the long term success or failure of these extensions comes down to how good the product is.

Virgin Atlantic works because of the host of great service features they offer, such as a limmo service, amazing lounges, market-leading entertainment, on-board massages and so-on. But look at Virgin Vodka, Virgin Jeans and Virgin Cola and ask 'where's the sausage'? Where was the innovation? Would you ditch your Diesels for Virgin Jeans, or pour away you Absolut for Virgin Vodka? No. These products were examples of logo slapping the Virgin name onto me-too products. In the case of vodka and jeans, the brand lacked the credibility to compete in these markets. These are what I call 'brand ego trips', where the brand gets too big for its boots.

The other thing the sharp minded readers out there may have figured out is that there is another common feature of the successful Virgin brand extensions that differentiates them from the failures. What is it they have in common?

Prize of a free brand stretch book for the first correct answer posted below in the comments section (Monday e-mail readers, click on the title of this post to go to the site and add a comment).