Brands and Habits

Habit:

1. A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition
2. An established disposition of the mind or character
3. Customary manner or practice
4. An addiction, especially to a narcotic drug

We all have habits. For instance, we order the same menu item every time we go to a specific restaurant. Or we purchase the same brand of soda pop. Or we start our day with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. Or we go to the gym and work out every morning. 

Some of our brands are habits for people. For instance, someone may smoke a pack of Marlboro Reds every day. Or maybe someone stops at Dunkin' Donuts every morning on the way to work. Or perhaps someone only goes to Hallmark stores to purchase her greeting cards. Someone may have a favorite peanut butter brand or a favorite brand of toilet paper, which she faithfully and habitually buys. Or maybe someone pours himself a shot glass of Tito's vodka after arriving home from work every evening.

Some brands have tried to increase sales by suggesting that their brands could be incorporated into daily rituals. A food brand might try to incorporate its use into the morning breakfast ritual. Other brands might try to incorporate their use into family picnics, happy hours, Thanksgiving celebrations or graduations. 

I recently interacted with an organization whose 9 month reconstruction project would create a brand interaction hiatus for that long. The organization is a cultural institution and the audience is composed of cinephiles. I suggested an ideation session to identify ways to engage the audience in similar brand-related habits until the theatre reopened with teasers to create anticipation of the reopening. 

For a while, Starbucks was encouraging its morning customers to purchase a second drink in the afternoon via a price discount offered on their register receipts.

If your brand interaction is habitual, congratulations. Focus on reinforcing that habit and be careful not to do anything that could break the habit. If your brand interaction is not habitual, consider how you can make it so. Habitual behaviors tied to brands create regular guaranteed frequent repurchases of the brands. 

As a side note, I would strongly encourage the establishment of healthy brand habits, such as working out at an LA Fitness club every morning, using a Waterpik water flosser every night or hiking with Merrell hiking boots every Saturday over more health damaging brand habits. 

To learn more about the ten habits of Starbucks drinkers featured in the image above, click here.

Emotionally Connecting with Your Customers

Most brands want to connect emotionally with their customers but few actually do. What does it take to create that emotional connection?

Brands that create emotional connection are deliberate about achieving it. First, those brands and their brand owners often have a strong set of values, values that they ultimately share with their customers. For example, Patagonia's almost reverent love of the outdoors and a pristine environment. Or Tesla's and Elon Musk's dream of a post-fossil fuel world. Or FOX New's focus on a very specific view of the world.

Next, those brands need to really understand their customers. They need to possess deep customer insight. This usually happens through qualitative research, often using guided imagery and projective techniques.  They need to understand customer self-perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears and anxieties. We helped Footjoy do this to refocus its brand from superior functional attributes (keeps your feet dry on a wet course) to a self-expressive benefit - The Mark of a Player.

Next, one must carefully design the customer experience. This may include customer journey mapping and customer touch point design. Often these brands create customer experience or engagement manager positions to maintain focus on the customer experience.

Next comes building the customer experience into the culture. Disney does this well, as does Zappos, Nordstrom and Starbucks. One of my favorite examples of this is Ritz-Carlton's "Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen." If you are interested in creating a better customer experience,  I would encourage you to read Be Our Guest (Disney), The Zappos Experience, The Nordstrom Way - Customer Service Excellence, Leading the Starbucks Way and especially The New Gold Standard (Ritz-Carlton).

At Hallmark, we pursued a Legendary Service initiative, in which we encouraged customer facing employees to deliver service that is so unexpected and extraordinary that those service moments became the basis of widely told legendary stories.

This notion of emotional connection needs to work its way into the brand's essence, mission, vision, values, promise, unique value proposition, archetype and personality. That is, it needs to become part of the brand's DNA.

One way we work with our clients to do this is to create "We believe..." statements, statements which reflect their values and that will connect emotionally with their customers.

There are many tools and techniques to create deep emotional connection with customers. If your brand is not connecting emotionally with its customers, contact us. We can help you make that happen.

Other related blog posts:

• Fast Food and the Customer Experience
• Customer Service Comes of Age at Insurance Companies
• Branding from the Inside Out
• Creating the Total Brand Experience - Starbucks
• 10 Proven Steps to Align Your Organization with Its Brand Promise
• Mastering the Art of Brand Engagement
• Brands and Core Values
• Brand Personality as a Point of Difference
• Marketing and the Deep Understanding of Human Behavior
• Brands and Humans
• Brands and Authenticity
• The Reemergence of Authenticity
• Brands and Emotional Connection
• Brands and Their Emotional Appeal
• Purpose Driven Brands
• Brands and Positive Emotions
• How Do You Want Your Brand to Impact its Customers?
• Brands and Empathy
• Brands and the Emotions They Evoke
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• Brands and Freedom
• Brands and Belonging
• Mind Blowing Brands
• Brands and Tribalism
• Tribal Branding
• Brands are People Too
• Customer-Centric Branding
• Differentiating on the Unexpected
• What do people want?
• States of Mind
• Customer Service and Brand Perceptions

Common Brand Problems

Over the past twenty years, I have helped more than 200 brands in a wide variety of product and service categories. Here are the most common problems that brands seem to encounter.

• A disruptive technology has made the brand's core product obsolete. Example: Kodak.
• The brand's level of service and product innovation has not kept up with the competition. Example: Burger King.
• Stuck in the middle. The brand is neither low cost/high convenience nor does it deliver a high-end or unique customer experience. Example: Sears.
• The brand has extremely low customer awareness. Example: many start-up brands.
• The category has matured and all of the brands in the category seem to offer the same product quality, functions and features. Example: this has occurred in many categories.
• The category has been infused with new life through investment in advertising/marketing, but the brand in question has not participated in that investment. Example: any insurance brand that has not begun advertising at a fairly high level.
• The CEO or other organization leader has created a dysfunctional culture. Example: more brands than you would think.
• The brand's leadership is risk-adverse and so the brand (and its products and services) has not been proactive about reinventing itself. Example: numerous brands, Hallmark being one of them.
• A venture capital firm buys the brand, strips out costs and assets, dresses the company/brand up for sale but has not really invested in the long-term viability of the brand. Example: I have encountered many examples of this. I do not want to name them.
• Profit-focused management driven by Wall Street demands has gradually reduced the quality or increased the price of the brand's products (or both) until the perceived value is noticeably diminished. These actions can also be influenced by retailers such as Walmart that have huge leverage over manufacturers and how they price their products. Example: Newell (Rubbermaid). 
• In the effort to increase sales significantly, a more upscale brand broadens distribution to a mass channel, significantly diminishing its brand cache. Example: Columbia (vs. Patagonia or North Face).
• A brand walks away from or ignores its primary differentiating benefit in an effort to broaden its offering and gain more sales across more customer need segments. Example: Volvo (safety).
• A premium brand extends its product line down to the mass market but in so doing risks decreasing the social status associated with the brand. Example: BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar have had to grapple with this tradeoff as they try to extend down into the aspirational or mass luxury market
• Through rapid expansion and wild success, the brand becomes ubiquitous increasing the difficulty of maintaining uniform quality standards and feeling more commonplace in peoples' minds. Examples: Nike and Starbucks.
• The company and brand have been complacent for a long time, so much so that they have not kept up with evolving customer needs or the competition. Examples: Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
• The brand's product or service is so new, revolutionary or complex that people really don't understand what it does or how it works. This is a communication problem. Example: I have encountered this with several high-tech start-up brands that are based on new product concepts.
• Management does not have a good understanding of who their target market is, what they really want or what messaging or product configurations would work best for them. Example: I have encountered this more often than one might think. Stuhrling (watches) is one example of this.
• The brand has a ill thought through pricing or distribution strategy that does not support the positioning of their brand. Example: I have had a few clients that have had these problems. 
• The brand's founder, leader or spokesperson has encountered personal problems that reflect negatively on the brand. Examples: Anita Bryant and Sunkist and President Donald Trump and the Trump brand.

Hopefully, none of these problems seem familiar to you or applicable your brand. If they do, you need to take action before it is too late.

  

Using Lexicon to Build Brand Mystique

Some activities have their own lexicon, as do some brands. When I was growing up, I fished for muskies, walleye, perch and bass with my family. We took an annual two week vacation at Black Lake and spent much of our time fishing. Later in life, I took up fly fishing. In regular fishing, people sometimes use bobbers to indicate when a fish strikes. In fly fishing, these floating devices are called indicators. And in fly fishing, the study of etymology is critical. An attractor is an impressionistic fly pattern tied with certain fish-enticing characteristics. And one must know the meaning of caddis, callibaetis, chironomid, comparadun and Czech nymphing - and that is just a very small example of fly fishing terms beginning with the letter C.  Clearly fly fishing is more high-brow than bass fishing. 

Sailing has its own terms too. A sailor must know the difference between port and starboard. And one must know the difference between a close reach, a beam reach and a broad reach. It is really important to know the difference between tacking and jibing. And there are lots of terms for boat parts - i.e. halyards, a boom vang, a topping lift, stanchions and a windlass. 

And consider some surfing terms - focusing on just the terms beginning with C again - carving, charging, cheater five, choka, chowder, clidro, closeout, clucked, cranking, cripples and cutback. 

These terms seem to create a shared secret language or lexicon. It is a way to talk with precision about the essence and art of your activity. And it lets you know that the other person is part of your club. 

Brands also create their own lexicon. Consider Starbucks with its short, tall, grande, venti and trenta drink sizes. And how about skinny drinks and leaving room? Starbucks also introduced frappuccinos and macchiatos, terms people had not heard of related to the Maxwell House, Folgers or Sanka coffee brands. 

And consider Harley-Davidson related terms - ape hangers, bobber or bobtail, blockhead and chopper. And how about the Duo-Glide, Dyna Glide, Electra Glide, Hydra Glide, Super Glide, Tour Glide and Wide Glide, which are all Harley-Davidson registered terms?

And of course Apple has iMacs, iOS, iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes, iBooks, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.

Brand-specific lexicon helps people feel the bond of a shared language. It can lead to the sense of being an insider and even to a cult-like emotional connection to the brand. Consider what creating a brand-specific lexicon might do for your brand. 

Brands and Happiness

One lens through which you can view your brand is, "How does my brand bring happiness to people's lives?" Does your brand make people happy? Does it make their lives easier? Is is surprising or unexpected in some way? Is aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? Is it charming? Is it amusing? Is it funny? Does it help people save time or money? Is it an indulgence? Is it quirky? Is it intuitively easy to use? Does it convey status?

Consider GEICO's gecko. Or Apple's product design. Or Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World. How about iPhone's Siri? Or the scent of a Cinnabon product? Or the anthropomorphic M&M characters? Or the latest Hermès scarf design? Or the feeling of driving a brand new MINI? Or Harley-Davidson bike? Or even the simplicity of Swiffer house cleaning products? Consider the friendliness of your local Starbucks barista. 

How does your brand bring happiness to people's lives?

Creating the Total Brand Experience - Starbucks

Starbucks does this (creating the total brand experience) well. Not only is its product extraordinarily different from and better than a normal cup of coffee, but everything else the company does also adds to the brand experience. The stores feature carefully crafted,  aesthetically coordinated components: the smell of fresh brewed coffee, a wide variety of unusual blends, exotic names (Venti Mocha Frappuccino), fresh pastries, piped-in jazz, comfortable wing chairs, a fireplace (some stores), live music (some stores), functional but stylish lighting, sophisticated design graphics, stylish merchandising, etc.

Starbucks store designers must first work behind the counter for a while to better understand the in-store experience. And their employees (called “partners”) receive extensive brand and customer service training and stock options to ensure the quality of the customer experience in the store. Each employee receives a document called the Green Apron Book, a booklet that fits into the pocket of a barista’s green apron, filled with tips and insights about how “to provide an uplifting experience that enriches people’s daily lives.” The company’s website devotes space to the history and mystique of coffee brewing. Starbucks delivers an affordable indulgent experience. Everything is designed to make you feel sophisticated in a warm and inviting way. (Buy a cup of Starbucks coffee and you are swept away from the

ordinary for a while!)

I wrote the previous paragraphs for the first edition of this book (Brand Aid, 2003). Since then, Starbucks has experienced a long period of rapid growth through new store openings, geographic expansion, new product development, and selling Starbucks products through new channels (including five airlines) and retail formats (including Express, which caters to the “grab and go” customer). This demontrates the problem of growing successful brands. Starbucks products are now available in environments in which the company can no longer control the brand experience. On an airline, for example, a passenger may get a cup of Starbucks coffee, but its preparation probably does not follow the company’s brewing guidelines—and it is served to a passenger in a cramped seat on a crowded plane, one of the least comfortable places anyone can imagine. Does this experience fit with the Starbucks brand? Certainly not. To continue on the growth trajectory, decisions are often made that detract from the intended brand experience. Is Starbucks still about that special “third place” experience, or is it now just another ubiquitous brand with mass appeal?

To answer this question, let’s look at an example provided by customer experience expert Mark Gobé in his book, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People. At one point in Starbucks’ history, the company’s financial managers determined that switching from two-ply to one-ply toilet paper in Starbucks’ bathrooms would save the company a significant sum of money annually. Despite the potential cost savings, however, senior management rejected the idea. Why? According to Gobé, “Because Starbucks promises a great coffee experience. And in order to do that, it takes more than a barista and a menu of coffee drinks that will make your head spin. It takes satisfaction at all touch-points.”

The question, then, is how Starbucks can continue to create the total customer/brand experience now that it has become the largest coffee shop company in the world. With competing brands like Peet’s, Caribou, and Boulder Coffee taking market share away from the coffee behemoth and independent coffee shops appearing in many markets, Starbucks has to work harder than ever to preserve the emotional connection with its customers that made the company the leader it is today.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition (2015), available here.

Brand Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the five drivers of customer brand insistence in our proprietary BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system.  How does accessibility contribute to customer brand insistence? First, accessible brands insure that brand preference is converted into brand purchase. Why wouldn’t I purchase my preferred brand if it were completely accessible to me? If it were inaccessible, I might purchase a substitute product or brand or perhaps nothing at all. But I am getting ahead of myself. First let’s define accessibility. Accessible brands are brands that are easy to find, purchase and use.

What makes something accessible? Distribution. When a brand has broader distribution, it not only increases its accessibility, it also increases its awareness, one of the other five drivers of customer brand insistence. So increased distribution can increase customer brand insistence in two ways.

If a brand is ubiquitous, there is no excuse not to purchase it if it is your favorite brand. McDonalds, KFC and HSBC strive to be ubiquitous worldwide.  One of the key pillars of Coca-Cola’s success is distribution. It talks about pervasive penetration and being within an arm’s reach of desire.  And, at least in my town, Dunkin' Donuts seems to be opening locations every few blocks, competing with Starbucks for ubiquity.  Hallmark’s closing stores around the country certainly demonstrates that it is in trouble.

The Internet is changing the importance of physical distribution a bit because it enables people to research and purchase products 24/7 from the comfort of their homes. This works better in some categories than others. For example, physical distribution is still important for many articles of clothing because unless you can try the clothes on and see how they fit, look and feel on you, you don’t really know if you want them. Online retailers have innovated many approaches to overcome this limitation, but it is still a limitation.

But, what other than distribution can increase accessibility? If you think about the two most important scarce resources in people’s lives, they tend to be time and money. So anything that takes less time or costs less money increases accessibility. A somewhat counterintuitive corollary of this is that if you can make the experience more interesting, educational, entertaining, exciting, nurturing or otherwise positive, often people won’t mind spending more time. The same thing goes for money. If the higher price is a signal of social status or good taste or some other positive self-expressive quality, a person may not be as put off by the higher prices.

Time and money also relate to the value brand insistence driver. Value has a numerator and a denominator. In the numerator are all of a brand’s benefits – functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive together with the values it shares with its customers. In the denominator is how much time, money and perceived effort it takes to purchase and use the brand.

High prices can make brands inaccessible to many people. For instance, not everyone can purchase a Tesla automobile. And even fewer people are able to purchase a Maserati or a Bugatti.

I often use the example of choosing a college or university to illustrate the concept of brand accessibility. If a high school student has a strong preference for a specific college, but that college does not accept him, what is that brand’s accessibility to him? How about if the college puts him on the waiting list? Or, if the college defers his admission for a year? What if he is accepted to the college but, after financial aid, that college will cost him ten thousand dollars more a year than the other colleges to which he got accepted?  So price (or cost to the customer) affects brand value and can affect brand accessibility too.

Limited store hours, nearby road construction, overcrowded parking lots, exceedingly long lines or only accepting cash as a form of payment can also reduce accessibility.

Accessibility helps brands grow through increased sales to existing customers and acquisition of new customers. Research has shown that larger brands have many advantages, even beyond the economies of scale and network effects. They have greater awareness, market penetration, popularity, and perhaps surprisingly, customer loyalty.

Even brands that have exclusivity as part of their mystique must be accessible in some way to their target markets.  For these high-end products and brands, price may be the best accessibility limiter. Price will be an issue for most people but not for the target customers. However, there still needs to be some sort of easy distribution method. The Internet is one option. Rodeo Drive (CA), The Mall at Short Hills (NJ) and other upscale shopping districts and centers is another. But how about selling the products at polo matches, equestrian events, yacht races and other targeted events.

Hopefully, this has shown that accessibility is an important driver of customer brand insistence. The other two drivers I mentioned in this article are awareness and value. The two brand insistence drivers that I did not mention (until now) are relevant differentiation and emotional connection. But, I will talk more about those in other blog posts.

Brands and Belonging

Remember the television show, Cheers? People love to spend time in a place where everyone knows their name. Churches, coffee houses, book groups, country clubs, fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, summer communities - they all create a place where people feel as though they belong. People want to be recognized and understood. They want to hang out with others who know their name, share an interest, share stories and perhaps even share the same view of the world. 

Starbucks creates its in-between place where people can relax and get to know one another. I have met several of my friends of many years at Starbucks. Orvis is a place where people who love fly fishing can hang out. The North Face is for the outdoor enthusiast. Robert Graham wants you to join their Collector's Club and Hallmark wants you to join its Hallmark Keepsake Ornament Club. Harley-Davidson owners feel an affinity for one another as do Patagonia and Tesla customers. 

Colleges and universities want their graduates to feel a lifelong affinity to their institutions and brands. They go to great lengths to create alumni associations and events. 

How is your brand creating a space or platform for people to feel as though they belong and are known?