Brands and Empathy

Successful marketing professionals are adept at understanding human needs and motivations and playing to those through carefully crafted brand stories, messaging and experiences. We have strong intuition and great analytical skills. We have learned how to appeal to people's hearts and manipulate their emotions.  And we have learned how to use fear to our brand's greatest advantage. 

This may be why I have heard some people call marketers "spin doctors," "practitioners of the dark arts," and "master manipulators."

I would have you pause for a minute and consider another approach. We are good at reading people's emotions. Instead of being very clinical about manipulating people's behaviors, why don't we try to empathize with them, have compassion for them and actually adapt our brands to best meet their needs and even surprise and delight them in ways that they had not anticipated? 

Not only is this a more ethical approach, but it also creates lasting value and stronger emotional connection. 

Jean Giraudoux, a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist (1882-1944) once said, "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." I have heard several political strategists quote different versions of this over time. But I am recommending that you do not subscribe to this philosophy. Do not fake it. Truly be authentic and sincere and operate out of integrity. Further, know that every organization exists for one purpose and one purpose alone, to meet human needs, and hopefully not just the needs of its shareholders, but most importantly, the needs of its customers, patients, patrons, members or clients. 

So do this - think about how your brand can truly help its customers. What problems can it solve in their lives? What needs can it meet? How can it make them feel better? How can it make their lives easier? How can it heal them or make them happier? Wouldn't this be a more rewarding approach to your job? Consider it.

Category Definition

Choosing the right category definition is not a trivial exercise, despite the casual way in which many marketing professionals approach this. In general, people assume a category definition based on the current product portfolio and common sense. But sometimes common sense is not that sensible.

One can choose to use a category definition for which every advantageous brand position is taken. Or one can choose a category definition that allows for future growth. One can choose a category definition that can breath new life into the brand. Or one can choose a category definition that enables the brand to become a "category of one" brand.

Further, one can choose a category definition that makes sense to consumers or one that consumers find hard to comprehend. One can choose a category definition that provides clear product development direction or one that leaves the product development direction much more wide open.

And one can create a category definition based on product features/content or product use or consumer benefit.

Take the (non-alcoholic) beverage category for example. Following are potential category definitions. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. And each has its closer in competitors and further out competitors.

• Beverages
• Bottled water
• Non-alcoholic beverages
• Children's drinks
• Fun drinks for children
• Soft drinks
• Carbonated soft drinks
• Colas
• Un-colas
• Juice drinks
• Healthy beverages
• Hydrating drinks
• Sparkling ice
• Energy drinks
• Electrolyte drinks
• Sports beverages
• Live beverages
• Fruit beverages
• Flavored waters
• Sparkling waters
• Smoothies
• Yogurt smoothies
• Coconut water
• Vitamin-infused drinks
• Tea
• Flavored teas
• Coffee
• Coffee drinks
• Flavored coffee drinks
• Dairy beverages
• Flavored milk
• Dairy alternatives
• Calming drinks
• Hot drinks
• Cold drinks
• Refreshing drinks
• Snack drinks
• Mix your own drinks
• Frozen drinks
• Chillers
• Organic drinks
• GMO-free drinks
• Flavor-explosion drinks

And the list could go on and on. Next time you are quick to say which category your brand is in, give it a second thought. You might find that a new category definition is all you need to energize your brand and bypass the competition.

What is a Brand?

THE ORIGIN OF BRANDS

Brands date back to earliest recorded history when they were used to indicate the origin of a product and information about its quality. As far back as 2250 BCE, researchers have found evidence of brands being used by craftspeople and merchants in trade. They often took the form of seals featuring pictorial symbols and text. Brands (stamping with embers or hot irons) were also used to identify harlots or wrongdoers and to identify livestock ownership.

(Source: Karl Moore and Susan Reid, “The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding,” Business History 50, no. 4, July 2008, pp. 419-432.)

The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them

from those of competition.”

More important, a brand is the source of a promise to the consumer. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. Everything an organization does should be focused on enhancing delivery against its brand’s promise.

Combining a few different definitions, a brand is the name and symbols that identify:

• The source of a relationship with the consumer

• The source of a promise to the consumer

• The unique source of products and services

• The single concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect (according to brand management experts Al Ries and Laura Ries, in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding)

• The sum total of each customer’s experience with your organization

Finally, another way to think about brands is that they are personifications of organizations and their products and services. In this way, brands can hold certain values, have specific personalities, possess admirable qualities, stand for something, make promises, and create emotional connections with people.

Source: Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

Segmenting Voters

Segmentation always begins with in-depth qualitative research to understand hopes, aspirations, fears, anxieties, beliefs, attitudes and values. This can take the form of depth interviews, mini-groups or more traditional focus groups. There are also online qualitative research methodologies. 

While segmentation can be based on demographics, psychographics, cohort groups, geography and behaviors, basing it on attitudinal statements often yields the richest insight into motivation. 

For voters, there are differences between people of different ages, genders, races, religious affiliations, socio-economic groups and geographies. However, the most insight can be gained by exploring hopes and fears associated with the following dimensions, which typically can be represented along continua:

• Sense of personal competence and mastery
• Feeling left behind and powerless versus empowered and a change agent
• Belief in the innate goodness (versus evil) of humanity
• Moral absolutism versus moral relativity
• Degree to which one believes that life is a "zero sum" game versus a state of unlimited potential
• Degree to which one thinks competitively versus cooperatively
• How broadly one views one's "tribe" (my family, people of my race or religion versus all of humanity or all sentient beings)
• Belief in the innate equality of all individuals
• Focus on helping others versus self-reliance
• Where a person is on Maslow's hierarchy of needs
• Degree to which one feels "safe"
• How strongly one embraces personal autonomy, freedom and liberty for all
• Attitudes regarding rules, laws and authority
• Fear of power concentrated in government
• Fear of power concentrated in corporations
• Fear of power concentrated in religion
• View of the role of government in people's lives
• Which form of government one thinks works best
• Which economic system one thinks works best
• Pragmatism versus staunch commitment to an idea
• Openness to new ideas and change

Insights on these dimensions can be correlated/mapped to demographic, geographic and other more actionable targeting criteria. These insights can also lead to the identification of "wedge issues" and talking points that can be exploited to steer voters in specific market segments to vote in specific ways.

Trade Dress

Trade dress is a form of legal protection for a brand. Trade dress is a brand’s distinctive aesthetic design features (package or product design). To be protectable, trade dress must be nonfunctional and distinctive (or have acquired a “secondary meaning,” that is, source-identifying characteristics). The more nonfunctional differentiating features one can build into a product and its packaging, the more likely it will be that infringement can be proved.

It is easy for a competitor to say “I developed this very similar product independently” when it is fairly generic (such as a birthday card with a floral design that says simply “happy birthday”). It is more difficult to convince a courtroom of that claim when your product has many of the same random, nonfunctional elements that a competitor’s product has (e.g., a line of greeting cards of an unusual size that open from the top with rounded edges printed on green-tinted recycled paper, all at 99 cents, and all addressing the theme of friendship). For a competitor to develop a similar line of cards with similar features independently is highly unlikely. It points to copying.

To protect its trademarks and trade dress, a company must constantly be watchful for and strenuously defend against infringement. For instance, Apple has filed several lawsuits to defend its iPhone against knockoffs, winning a major legal battle against Samsung in summer 2013. Trademark rights can be enforced through lawsuits at a state or federal level. Proving infringement requires proof that the infringer had second use of the mark and that the second user’s mark is confusingly similar to the senior party’s mark.

When launching brand extensions, companies should be careful to maintain the same brand identity and trade dress in those new items. If the brand’s name and logo are the only common elements across all of a brand’s products, it weakens the power of the other trade dress elements to differentiate and legally protect the mark.

Excerpted from Legal Issues in Brand Management chapter, Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

Brands & Ownership Changes

It is a sad day when a previously meaningful and vibrant brand is taken over by or combined with a new entity that does not share the brand’s essence, promise, and values. This happens quite often, with mergers and acquisitions, when a company is taken private or public, or with other changes in ownership or leadership. Sometimes it happens when a financial owner (such as a venture capital firm) replaces the previous management team with its own new team. This is particularly true when people who only understand one thing, ROI (or, more specifically, their personal financial gain), replace the leadership team that had the original brand vision. We saw this happen when General Motors took back control of Saturn, tossing out Saturn’s “different kind of company” operating philosophy and forcing it to run like any other GM brand. Likewise, Compaq once owned 20 percent of the personal computer market, but mismanagement of the brand after Hewlett-Packard acquired it eventually resulted in its complete demise. Quaker Oats 1994 acquisition of the Snapple brand led to huge sales decreases, going from $1.2 billion to $500 million in 27 months. Sprint's takeover of Nextel was a disaster. Sprint had catered to the consumer market, while Nextel concentrated on the business market. Soon after the merger, large numbers of Nextel executives and employees left citing cultural differences between the two brands. Sprint was bureaucratic, while Nextel was much more entrepreneurial. The integration never was executed properly. Jaeger lost its way since its takeover in 2012. And recall the impact on Daraprim's reputation when Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired it from Impax Laboratories and Turing's CEO Martin Shkerli (former hedge fund co-founder) raised that lifesaving AIDS medication's price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill overnight. Shkerli was later arrested for securities fraud by the FBI. 

Such a change is akin to a person’s spirit exiting his or her body to allow a new spirit to inhabit it. While the newly combined physical/spiritual entity may seem to be the same entity as before, new attitudes and behaviors will eventually betray the new spirit, but not until after the huge reservoir of brand equity is traded for short-term financial gains for the new owners. This is one reason previously strong brands seem to “lose their way.”

Much of this was reprinted from Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

Mystery Shoppers

Brands succeed or fail based on the experiences they deliver. That's why it makes sense to monitor and provide constructive feedback on the experience. One way of accomplishing this is through mystery or secret shoppers. These people are trained to experience the brand as a typical shopper would, while taking notes on the brand experience itself. 

This is very useful for retail and other location based brands, but can also work for online and telephone shopping and customer service experiences. 

Here are some of the things mystery shoppers should look out for:

• The length of time they had to wait to be served
• How many steps it took to be served
• Whether the first person they encountered was able to get them what they needed or whether they had to go through several people
• Whether they were able to get what they came for
• Whether all of their questions were answered well
• Whether they were treated with respect
• Whether they felt listened to
• Whether they were made to feel special
• Whether the sales or service people were polite
• Whether the sales or service people were knowledgeable
• How complicated or simple the transaction was
• How many times they had to provide the same information or repeat themselves
• The ambience of the place
• Adjectives to describe the experience - entertaining, energizing, nurturing, calming, engaging, educational, informative, boring, maddening, etc.
• The emotions evoked by the experience
• Whether the experience enhanced their perceptions of the brand, detracted from it or had no impact at all

If your brand provides any type of customer experience, you should know what kind of experience it is delivering and if it is not delivering what you had intended for it to, how to fix the problem and improve the experience. I wish you much success in this endeavor. 

More information on mystery shopping and other research approaches, read the brand research chapter in Brand Aid, second edition, available here.