Customers come in all shapes and sizes, creating endless needs and wants from a shopping experience. For retailers, creating the ideal experience is crucial in developing their brand. Yet it is becoming more difficult as expectations continue to rise and competition intensifies.
This is the topic of my latest post on the CMA Blog.
Earlier this week, TechVibes reported a rumour of a new partnership between Angry Birds and Starbucks. The plan will see leaderboards of the top Angry Birds scores displayed in Starbucks locations.
Strategic partnerships can be a great way to build your brand. The association with another strong brand can have a positive influence on how people view your own brand. A good partnership can also introduce new customers between the brands. However, at the end of the day a strong strategic partnership has to be a good fit for both brands.
Which is why I am so confused. There are some basic similarities between these brands – they are strong and well known, have loyal users and successfully extended their brands into new opportunities.
But the similarities end there.
Angry Birds has successfully created a small empire around what began as a mobile video game. The brand provided quick entertainment and allowed you to compete against your friends. Starbucks on the other hand, has carefully cultivated a brand based on premium products with the retail experience to match.
Many companies hastily seek out partnerships with a new and trendy brand without considering what value it will bring to their consumers. I worry that this is what Starbucks is doing – chasing Angry Birds so that they can remain hip and relevant. Sadly, the partnership is more likely to harm Starbucks in the long run as their brand gets diluted with a message that has limited relevance to their consumers.
Angry Birds may be one of the hottest tech companies, but that doesn’t make them a good partner to Starbucks.
Twitter has proven to be a great advance for brands. It provides the ability to reach customers in real time on a fairly granular level. It is a great way to check off most of the big social media buzzwords – engagement, conversation, sharing, etc. (Jokes about buzzwords aside, these are important)
In their continued effort to create a viable business model, Twitter announced earlier this week that Promoted Tweets will now be showing up in the streams of users who do not even follow them.
What a shame.
Despite the advances from Twitter, this move is a big step backwards for brands, returning to the interruption marketing of traditional media.
One always expects companies to struggle with this shift from interrupting to engaging, but I guess I thought Twitter was better than that.
Brands be warned – interrupting a conversation could negatively impact your brand among Twitter users, a group of customers known to be quite vocal.
I went to a Blue Jays game a couple days ago. I’m not a big baseball fan, but my brother’s band was playing the national anthem so it was a good excuse for a night out.
Our beloved Blue Jays got pummeled. 14 – 0. No, that’s not a typo. But the amazing thing is that I still had a good time.
The product, the team on the field, was sub-par to say the least. The experience that went along with the game, however, was still great. The food was good. The entertainment on the jumbotron was engaging and made use of social media in a way that builds relationships between the team and the fans. Even the guys selling beer were funny (the beer itself was still over-priced).
I’m not advocating putting out a low quality product and just creating lots of great stuff around. It’s a safe bet that the top priority for the ball club is to win more games.
The surroundings of your product are important
In service businesses, like hotels and restaurants, it can be hard to tell where the product ends and the surroundings begin. For traditional products, setting up a great experience around your brand can be a big differentiator. If customers are happier when they buy your product, they will have a stronger emotional connection with your brand.
Think of the success of the Apple Store. Or your local butcher who knows your name. Or the coaching and expertise you get with your new pair of shoes from the Running Room.
Never stop focusing on how to make your product better. But don’t ignore the impact that the surroundings and experience will have on your brand.
A recent article on Brand Channel discusses Burger King’s continued push into the world of fast breakfasts. This is likely a smart move for the burger chain, as breakfast is the highest margin meal in the fast food industry.
However, Brand Channel misses the mark with the following claim:
“By adding the venerable breakfast food to its growing morning menu, Burger King is following hopefully in the footsteps of acknowledged innovators in its business including McDonalds, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A and Jamba Juice.”
Certainly, these other chains beat Burger King to the breakfast party, but that hardly makes them innovators in this space. Rather, they are reacting to the increasing success of players like Tim Horton’s in Canada and Dunkin’ Donuts in the US, whose focus has always been on breakfast and coffee. McDonald’s has continued to push their breakfast and coffee offering, most recently with their McCafe sub-brand, in order to gain a greater share of this lucrative market.
The mistake that Brand Channel made is a common one – taking a narrow definition of your competitive set. It is easy for a brand to be innovative if they are only compared to a handful of competitors. But once that net is cast a little further, the bar is set a little higher.
Burger King is moving in the right direction by offering more breakfast options. But if they want to innovate they will need to lead a wider group of players, not just McDonald’s.
It is often said that the goal of a good brand strategy is to impact the choice of the customer. I would like to offer a different point of view. Instead of affecting what a customer might choose, brands should focus on removing the need for a choice.
Let me explain.
I recently went on vacation, and of course before travelling I wanted to get a guidebook for the area. When I went to the bookstore, however, I didn’t feel like I was making a choice. I simply found the region where I was going, and grabbed the Lonely Planet. I have become such a loyal user of Lonely Planet guidebooks that I no longer even consider looking at other brands. Technically, I made this decision many years ago, but at the time of my purchase there was no decision at all.
Certainly, this is a high goal for any brand and before I reached this point I had to be shuffled through the usual brand funnel from Awareness to Trial and eventually to Loyalty.
As you move your customers down the purchase funnel, try asking ‘How can I make my brand the default?’ When customers make a choice, it is a possibility that your brand could lose. When there is no choice, you remove that risk (as long as you are the default brand). And that creates significant long-term value for your brand.
As the gatekeeper on most customer data, marketers have the extra responsibility of sharing this information throughout the organization.
See my post on this topic on the Canadian Marketing Association Blog.
AdWeek recently reported that Nielsen will be releasing a “a new service that measures online ad campaigns in a way that’s similar to how branded ad campaigns are measured on television.” According to the article, the new metric, similar to Gross Ratings Points (GRPs), will consider reach, frequency, age and gender.
While it is encouraging to see Nielsen trying to tackle online brand measurement, their efforts seem misguided for two reasons:
Overall, this is a step in the right direction, but only a very small one. Until the full breadth of user data is integrated into online measurement, marketers will continue to miss out on the potential of digital marketing.
Today marks exactly 2 years since I started working at Level5 and I would now like to formally announce that I am moving on to the next opportunity in my career. Next Monday I am starting in the Rich Media team at Google.
I am super excited for my new role, but part of me is sad to be leaving Level5. In the past two years I have learned more than I’ll ever be able to capture in words on this page about brands, but I will do my best to share some of the highlights.
Marketing is only a small part of what makes a brand
If your brand represents a promise to customers and potential customers, every facet of your company must be designed to communicate and deliver that promise. This includes your marketing, but also finance, operations, HR and pretty much every other department you can think of.
Strategy is simply a lens to dictate your day to day operations
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of strategy (after all, I’ve made a living helping brands develop their strategy for the past two years) but strategy alone doesn’t sell anything – it is the execution of that strategy that your customers buy. This is made up of each and every individual decision made by your employees (and external stakeholders too). A good brand strategy acts as a guide for all of these decisions.
Culture is arguably the most important component of your brand
I can remember someone in one of my MBA classes saying “I’m not sure I believe all of this culture stuff”. I wish I could go back and shake some sense into him. The culture of your organization dictates how employees conduct themselves, and is therefore a key factor in determining how your brand is communicated and delivered to the market. While the strategy may be set at the top, day to day decisions are made across the entire organization and this is where your culture is lived.
The CEO is ultimately responsible for the brand, but so are you
When you elevate the brand to the level of a company wide effort, only the CEO has the cross functional view required to see all aspects of it. These separate moving parts need to work together to bring your brand to the market and that responsibility rests squarely with the CEO. However, every customer interaction helps dictate their view of your brand. On some level, every employee is responsible for these individual interactions and in turn must take responsibility for the brand.
I’m sure that there are many more lessons that could be added to this list, but I will save those to be tied into future blog posts. Postings will be sparse for the next few weeks as I get settled into my new role at Google, but I intend to continue writing here and sharing brand insights that can hopefully help improve your brand.
Thank you to everyone at Level5 for a wonderful and memorable two years. What I learned about brand strategy here will be carried with me into my future at Google and beyond.
It is easy to think of consumer brands. They are everywhere you look – in stores, restaurants, TV. Even the clothing on our backs often shows off brands.
But outside of traditional products and services, the role of the brand is equally important. There have been a few examples of this lately that have caught my eye.
A brand is essentially a promise made by an entity (an individual or an organization) about who they are and what they provide. With this definition, a brand can apply to almost anything, as shown by the three examples above.
As with traditional branding, it is necessary to take the view of the full business system that delivers that brand, not simply the public face of marketing and communications. Is everything working together to deliver that promise?
I encourage you to watch the world around you with this point of view. Challenge every brand you see and you will become a better marketer in your professional and personal life.
