But My Category is Different...

Since 1999, I have helped well over 160 brands. They represent at least a third as many product/service categories. When being considered for a project, I am often asked, “Have you done work in XYZ category?” “Ours is a different category. We are only interested in consultants with experience in our category.” I have had this question asked about B2B, heavy industrial, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), retail, pharma, federal agencies, professional firms, trade associations, not-for-profit organizations, medical devices, financial services, senior services, church-related organizations, hospitality, luxury products, municipalities, colleges and universities, celebrities, nations and I am sure there are some others.

My answer always is, “You are the experts in your category. I am the branding expert and I am also a quick study. It benefits you that I have experience across a myriad of categories.  I will be able to bring ‘out of the box’ insights and ideas to the project.”

Are there differences between categories? Sure. Are they differences that would stymie a brand consultant? No, not unless he or she didn’t have much mental horsepower.

What categories have I found to be different?

• B2B because of the decision making process and the marketing tactics used
• Pharma because of the regulatory issues and insular nature of the industry
• People (especially celebrities and famous people) because there is a self-analysis and personal coaching component to the project
• Places (municipalities, regions and nations) because of the diversity of the stakeholders and the complexity of the decision making process
• (Sometimes, but not nearly as much as one might think), not-for-profit organizations because of the lack of budget and sometimes the lack of a marketing counterpart in the organization
• FMCG because one has to understand retail, POS data, category management and other issues specific to FMCG

Having noted some differences, brand consultants are called upon because of their customer insight and brand strategy/positioning expertise, not their expertise within a particular product or service category. Our branding processes, templates and criteria work across all product/service categories. They haven’t failed us yet. But then again, we have not yet done work in the ‘QRS’ category. 

Most Popular Brand Personality Attributes

I have helped organizations position their brands through consensus building brand positioning workshops since the mid-1990s.  As a part of that process, I have the workshop participants (mostly organizational leaders) select the brand personality attributes for which they want their brands to stand.

The organizations with which I have worked span a wide range of sizes and industries. They include manufacturing companies, consumer products companies, aging services firms, wealth management firms, health care organizations, real estate investment trusts, municipalities, museums, environmental conservation organizations, public service organizations, professional associations and many others.

I thought it would be interesting to identify the most popular personality attributes across all of these organizations.

Following are the most popular personality attributes (in decreasing order of popularity):

•    Innovative (45%)

•    Professional (41%)

•    Responsive (36%)

•    Caring (32%)

•    Reliable (27%)

•    Customer focused (27%)

•    Trustworthy (23%)

•    Service oriented (18%)

Others with frequent mentions:

•    Approachable

•    Collaborative

•    Committed

•    Creative

•    Dedicated

•    Dependable

•    Diverse

•    Dynamic

•    Easy to work with

•    Efficient

•    Entrepreneurial

•    Focused

•    Friendly

•    High quality

•    Honest

•    Inspiring

•    Leader

•    Positive

•    Practical

•    Resourceful

•    Respected

•    Science-driven

•    Visionary

•    Welcoming

Slightly unusual personality attributes:

•    Heroic and proud (a watch brand)

•    Light-hearted (an advertising agency)

•    Low key, not glitzy (a wealth management firm)

•    Non-confrontational (an environmental conservation organization)

•    Servant leader (a local United Way agency)

Overall, my clients have used 140 different words and phrases to describe their brands’ personalities.  Each brand describes itself using between 6 and 12 words or phrases, with the average brand using 9 words or phrases.

We help brand decision makers arrive at a set of intended brand personality attributes in the following way. First, we survey target customers, workshop participants and other brand stakeholders about the brand’s personality using projective techniques. Then, in the workshop itself, we compile that list of brand personality attributes to stimulate discussion and decisions about the ideal brand personality.

Brand Aid, second edition available here now.

"I regard the First Edition of Brad Van Auken's Brand Aid (2003) to be the best and most practical book on branding I have read. Hence, I was very keen to get the updated Second Edition to see if he could match my high expectations following the success of the first. I am delighted to report that this edition is again loaded with highly practical content that has been updated to reflect the changes in customer behavior, digital media and a host of other subjects including brand architecture. Another feature that I like are his generous use of user-friendly checklists and never talking over the heads of readers who may not have MBAs. Importantly, Van Auken is never self serving, like too many authors of marketing-branding books. This is a book, like the first, that you will always keep close at hand and read over and over again." Amazon.com customer

Branding Water

For the past ten years, when conducting brand education workshops, I have often included a “branding water” case study. The point of the case study is to illustrate that anything can be branded successfully, even commodities. Hundreds of teams from dozens of countries have presented their recommendations on this topic. Most of the recommendations had at least nuggets of good ideas for creating unique brands of water. And many were strong enough that they could easily be turned into thriving businesses. I wish I had saved all of the teams’ flip chart pages from this case study over the years as their content could easily have been the basis of my next book, Branding Water: Differentiating Commodities for Fun & Profit.

Water is the quintessential commodity. Approximately 326 million trillion gallons of water can be found on earth. (Admittedly, only 3% of this is in the form of freshwater. About 70 percent of our planet is covered in ocean with an average depth of several thousand feet.) And approximately 60% of human bodies are water. Water is largely tasteless, odorless and colorless. Recognizing that water is scarcer in some places, still in much of the world, water is delivered directly to people’s homes at a relatively low cost and is easily available in great quantity. In fact, many people and businesses use massive quantities of water on a regular basis for irrigation, manufacturing and to maintain landscapes.

So how then can one differentiate and command a price premium for water? It has already been done many times before. Consider Voss, Pellegrino, Ty Nant, and many other brands of bottled water.

Here are some of the more common approaches to differentiating water that the marketing executives in my workshops have taken:

• Taste/flavoring/carbonation
• Color
• Bottle/packaging shape/color/functionality
• Source/story
• Health qualities
• Ways to drink
• Size
• Price
• Suggested uses
• Bundling with other products
• Distribution

Some of the most extraordinary forms of differentiation outside of the obvious taste/flavoring/carbonation/color/bottle shape/packaging approaches include the story behind the water and its source/acquisition and the unusual/specialized uses and delivery methods.

I have not yet encountered a product or service that cannot be differentiated no matter how mature or competitive the industry or how commoditized the product is. There are always ways to add on to or bundle or deliver the product in a different way. And services, almost by definition, are not commodities.  It is only commodity thinking that leads to commoditization. I have even worked with energy companies to help them differentiate and charge a price premium for what were previously perceived to be basic energy products.

Have some fun and challenge yourself. Develop a complete concept and business and marketing plans for a differentiated water product. Who knows? It might become your next business venture.

What People Want

Brands that really understand consumers and their needs and desires are more likely to succeed, especially if they are able to successfully fulfill these needs and desires.

So what do people want?

People want to be safe. They want to be free to pursue their dreams. They want to be accepted by others. They want to be respected and even admired. They want to be loved. They want to be at peace. But sometimes they want to feel the rush of adrenalin.  Sometimes they want to be surprised. Sometimes they want to feel on the edge. It makes them feel more alive.

People are attracted to beauty in all of its forms – beautiful people, beautiful homes, beautiful cars, beautiful boats, beautiful gardens, beautiful architecture, beautiful clothes, beautiful jewelry, beautiful paintings, beautiful furniture, beautiful appliances and the list could go on and on.

People enjoy stimulation of their senses. They enjoy colors and flavors and scents and sounds and textures.

People appreciate noble qualities such as wisdom and truth and grace and beauty and freedom.

People like stretching and motion and physical exertion – skiing and skating and dancing and yoga and swimming and tai chi.  

People like learning and variety and stimulation and anything that is new.

People like wealth and status and power.

Immersion in nature rejuvenates people. It offers them solace. It calms them. It centers them.  

Whether brands deliver these things symbolically, metaphorically or in actuality, deliver them they must if they are to remain relevant and in demand.

Trade Dress

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.

(c) 2015 Brad VanAuken. Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition. Order your copy here now.

Big Data Analytics

This is the process of analyzing large amounts of unstructured or semistructured data of various types across different sources to identify patterns and correlations that could provide better targeting, additional revenue opportunities, and other competitive advantages. Some uses of big data include:

• More in-depth and precise business understanding
• Improved customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns
• Optimized segmenting of customers
• Improved market trends and analysis
• Recognition and development of sales and market opportunities
• Improved planning and forecasting

Big data analytics is enabled primarily by substantially improved statistical and computational methods, but also by improved storage and computational capacity. Rather than constructing the experiments first, big data allows one to accumulate vast quantities of data and then identify statistically significant patterns. The largest challenge to big data analytics is an internal skills gap. Big data can reveal unexpected correlations. My favorite is that the purchase

of furniture coasters is a strong indicator of low credit risk and high credit scores.

Jason Frand of UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management provides these examples of how big data is being used today:

• "One Midwest grocery chain used the data mining capacity of Oracle software to analyze local buying patterns. They discovered that when men bought diapers on Thursdays and Saturdays, they also tended to buy beer. Further analysis showed that these shoppers typically did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturdays. On Thursdays, however, they only bought a few items. The retailer concluded that they purchased the beer to have it available for the upcoming weekend. The grocery chain could use this newly discovered information in various ways to increase revenue. For example, they could move the beer display closer to the diaper display. And, they could make sure beer and diapers were sold at full price on Thursdays. . . .
• American Express can suggest products to its cardholders based on analysis of their monthly expenditures.
• WalMart is pioneering massive data mining to transform its supplier relationships. WalMart captures point-of-sale transactions from over 2,900 stores in 6 countries and continuously transmits this data to its massive 7.5 terabyte Teradata data warehouse. WalMart allows more than 3,500 suppliers to access data on their products and perform data analyses. These suppliers use this data to identify customer buying patterns at the store display level. They use this information to manage local store inventory and identify new merchandising opportunities. In 1995, WalMart computers processed over one million complex data queries. In 2010, WalMart processed 1 million customer transactions every hour feeding 2.5 petabyte databases.
• The National Basketball Association (NBA) is exploring a data mining application that can be used in conjunction with image recordings of basketball games. The Advanced Scout software analyzes the movements of players to help coaches orchestrate plays and strategies. For example, an analysis of the play-by-play sheet of the game played between the New York Knicks and the Cleveland Cavaliers on January 6, 1995 reveals that when Mark Price played the guard position, John Williams attempted four jump shots and made each one! Advanced Scout not only finds this pattern, but explains that it is interesting because it differs considerably from the average shooting percentage of 49.30 percent for the Cavaliers during that game."

As additional examples:

• Netflix mines its customer digital download database to recommend movies and shows that their customers may like, based on their viewing history.
• Xerox is developing social media analytics software to enable businesses to monitor their brand images. The software will be able to identify specific themes in social media content (tweets, blog posts, etc.) and route them to the appropriate internal people to handle.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition. Order your copy here now.

Brand Equity Measurement

According to a well-known axiom, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. This is true of brand equity as well. Any strong brand equity measurement system will accomplish the following objectives:

• Measure the brand’s equity across a variety of dimensions at different points in time over time.
• Provide diagnostic information on the reasons for the changes in brand equity.
• Gauge and evaluate the brand’s progress against goals.
• Provide direction on how to improve brand equity.
• Provide insight into the brand’s positioning vis-à-vis its major competitors, including its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Provide direction on how to reposition the brand for maximum effect.

When I was named director of brand management and marketing at Hallmark, I was given two primary objectives: 1) to increase Hallmark market share and 2) to increase Hallmark brand equity. Market share is a relatively straightforward objective for which we already had metrics. Brand equity was much less well defined. I spent the better part of the next three years drawing upon the knowledge of various consultants, researchers, and scholars and dozens of different brand equity models to define brand equity in a way that was useful to Hallmark. To be useful to Hallmark, it had to show how to move people from high brand awareness to brand insistence. Since then, this work has resulted in a validated and refined measurement system that is used by scores of organizations across dozens of industries.

Components of a Brand Equity Measurement System

Here are the components that a brand equity measurement system should
measure:

• Brand awareness (first mention, or top-of-mind unaided recall, and total unaided recall)
• Brand preference
• Brand importance/rank in consideration set
• Brand accessibility
• Brand value (quality and value perceptions and price sensitivity)
• Brand relevant differentiation (open-ended question and perceptions
• on key attributes)
• Brand emotional connection
• Brand vitality
• Brand loyalty (multiple behavioral and attitudinal measures, including share of requirements/wallet)
• Brand usage
• Brand imagery (against a standard battery of category-independent brand personality attributes proven to drive brand insistence, and a customized battery of brand personality attributes for the particular organization and its product/service category)

Most Important Brand Equity Measures

The most important brand equity measures are:

• Unaided brand awareness, especially first recall.
• Remembered/recalled brand experience.
• Knowledge of the brand’s promise.
• Brand’s position in the purchase consideration set.
• Brand’s delivery against key benefits. (We have found two separate approaches to be insightful: mapping benefit importance against brand benefit delivery—a scaled response—and an open-ended question, “What makes brand XX different from other brands in the YY category?”)
• Emotional connection to the brand.
• Price sensitivity.
• Relative accessibility.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition. © 2015 Brad VanAuken. Available here now.