By Patrick Dailey and Joel Koblentz Transformation is one of the most challenging competencies a board must master. McKinsey & Co. estimates that 70 percent of transformations fail to achieve their objectives. Yet board and management teams instinctively know, change is unavoidable and transformation is compulsory. Companies including Macy’s, JC Penney, The Limited, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, […]
Creative without strategy is called ‘art.’ Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’ ~ Jef Richards
Brands that forget this will always pay a price either in failed campaigns, lost market share or worse depending on the stakes. Creative – in either form – often emerges as a threat when introduced out of the natural order that governs the building of brands.
As all seasoned marketers know, first, you study the market. Second, you position the brand. Third, you bring the brand positioning to life through tactics. It’s a sequence that has proven to successfully guide and grow brands from the very beginnings of brand management.
Creative devoid of customer insight and strategy can take a brand anywhere and nowhere. Tropicana’s costly packaging example has proven this point since 2009, although the temptation and the mistake to put tactics before strategy has been with us for much longer. Advertising legend Bill Bernbach worked throughout his storied career to keep the focus on strategy before tactics. He reinforced this in his creative philosophy:
“Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics and verbal gymnastics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes, makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original theme or product advantage he has decided he must convey.”
Mark Ritson takes Bill’s point further stating; “Creativity has its place, and that place is anchored by a short chain to the market research and brand positioning.”
There’s no doubt that wonderfully executed tactics that propel brands to their goals are the crown jewels of our business. Just Do It, The Most Interesting Man In The World, Think Different, Mac vs. PC and many others are reminders of what is possible when brilliant strategy is brought to life by brilliant creative. Not the other way around.
It is the duty of everyone charged with brand building to take each step in sequence and remember that in the long and twisting journey to building a brand, the external communications stage usually occurs late in the day, if at all. Consequently, the initial research and positioning work will always occur long before any discussion of creative or where it may one day manifest.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where creative is threatening the strategic process, push back and use the four thought pieces below to help enlighten those that are distracted by our industry’s shiniest objects.
1. Tactical Thinking Threatens Marketers Everywhere
Marketing strategy is where we play and how we win in the market. Tactics are how we then deliver on the strategy and execute for success. In traditional military strategy, the generals of old would gather, survey the battlefield in depth, review the enemy’s forces and then decide exactly where to attack, at what time and with which forces. Strategy agreed, the orders would be sent down to the various battalions who then concerned themselves with the tactical business of executing their respective objectives. A troop charged with taking a hill, for example, might deploy its archers and then send in the infantry to finish off the enemy.
In the traditional world of marketing we follow a similar systematic process. First we build a map of the market from research in the form of a decent segmentation. From there we can decide which segments to go after and how to position our brand for optimum success. Finally we devise clear strategic objectives for each target segment specifying the goal we will achieve. Only then – with clarity on who, what and when – do we start to think about tactical execution and which specific tools we might apply.
2. Confusing Brand Strategy With Creative Strategy
Often, when an ad agency talks about brand strategy, what they really mean is the thinking that has led to the work they have been doing on the brand. So while many agencies will tell you that they do brand strategy, what they actually offer is creative strategy. Both are necessary but the terms are not synonyms.
3. Translating Brand Strategy To Creative Messaging
Seemingly the intersection of brand strategy and creative messaging is an area where many marketers struggle. Developing a brand strategy is a top-down introspective process driven by a business strategy, while creative expression is a downstream activity centered in marketing communications. In many organizations, these two disciplines occupy different levels on the value chain.
Brand strategy is not marketing. Brand strategy can’t be created from the outside in. Brand strategy is not a decorative or promotional process either. All leading brands represent a single, compelling unifying principle that drives business performance from the inside out.
Brand strategy illuminates the brand’s behavior in every internal action taken by stakeholders, and in all mental and physical interactions customer/consumer’s experience. Strategy and messaging are two sides of a coin.
Having carefully defined your target markets, done your research and determined the most important customer benefits puts you in a very good position. Now it is time to focus on the top one, or at most, two benefits that are highly important to your target customers and unique to your brand. They should be emotional, experiential or self-expressive benefits or even shared values with your customers. If you are still at the functional level with your brand’s benefits, you need to ladder up to an emotional and shared values level.
Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.
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For the first time ever, the annual TED Conference in Vancouver will feature an entire session of Spanish-language TED Talks, a bit of programming we felt called for celebration: We’ll be making the live session available for free online at live.ted.com on Tuesday, April 25, from 2:15 pm to 4:00 pm PT.
Titled ¨Conexión y sentido¨, or “Connection and meaning,” the session will feature six speakers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines. They include artist Tomas Saraceno (Argentina/Germany); poet, musician and singer Jorge Drexler (Uruguay/Spain); former presidential candidate and peace activist Ingrid Betancourt (Colombia/France/UK); primatologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo (Chile/US); physicist Gabriela Gonzalez (Argentina/US) and journalist Jorge Ramos (Mexico/US).
The session marks the official launch of TED en Español, a sweeping initiative from TED designed to build content and community in the Spanish-speaking world. The TED en Español team has already been hard at work laying the groundwork for a major effort, actively curating content in Spanish and beginning to share via dedicated Spanish-language channels, including:
…and more than 2,000 TED Talks with Spanish subtitles
TED-Ed Clubs are also underway in Spanish, and mobile users can now download a Spanish-language version of the TED mobile app for iOS and Android.
TED also has plans to bring in new partners to support TED en Español as well as develop distribution deals for the Spanish-language content. In the second half of 2017, we’ll be curating and producing a TED en Español speaker salon event at our NYC theater.
“Native Spanish speakers make up a massive piece of the TED global audience,” said Gerry Garbulsky, TED en Español Director. “By expanding our focus to other languages, we’ll both unearth new troves of ideas, as well as better equip ourselves to share them with a broader audience.”
By Sally Falkow Live video streaming is all the rage. Facebook has the largest digital audience, so Facebook Live is the obvious choice to reach and engage almost any audience. If you’re a one-man-brand, a small business or a large concern, this technology can boost your marketing and digital PR efforts. Facebook suggests you just […]
Branding is competitive. It’s about staking out the right to earn over others. But when that competitive streak becomes obsessive, brands lose objectivity and that can cost them dearly.
Ken Favaro identified the ironies in a piece on strategy’s connection to competition a couple of years ago. First, the upside of competition: the halo effect. When brands build awareness of, and then demand for, what they offer, they also build demand for those around them. Pan Am expanded its own network and in the process grew the airline business generally. Starbucks grew its presence, and in so doing, it expanded the demand for coffee. Tesla and Prius are adding to the momentum for electric vehicles. In each case, the brand has gotten bigger and so has the market, and one could argue that neither was possible without the other. That’s the value creation side of competition, says Favaro. One gains; many gain.
However, those dynamics stop working when brands become so competitive against each other that they lose sight of the customer: “when leaders think of business as a war with their competitors … they inevitably seek to beat their rivals in ways that don’t meaningfully enhance customer-perceived benefits … Such moves rarely grow the total market and almost always produce lower margins and losing products.” Price wars are a classic symptom of such rivalries. Brands literally drive their margins into the ground, and train consumers to bargain-hunt, because they commit to winning at any cost. Literally.
No brand wants to admit they are uncompetitive, or that they are at risk of being so. Maybe that’s why so few brands can look candidly at what is happening in a marketplace and draw the real lessons they need to take to improve. For some, it’s easier to call a war or to cry foul than it is to face a truth.
But the brutal reality is that if your reasons for attacking are defensive, then such calls-to-action are little more than distractions to the real issue: you are not as competitive as you once were or thought you were. Unless you act to correct that, you’re grasping at straws and your competitiveness will only continue to deteriorate. Branding is about learning and being iterative, because expectations change so fast, every innovation mainstreams quickly and markets themselves evolve continually. Brands that don’t learn or evolve continue to justify their right to exist all the way to their demise.
It’s hard not to become introspective. It’s tempting to focus on what you’re doing and to attack the other brands hard. But, if you don’t balance that, with win-win for the customer, you can rapidly come to feel that as a brand you have nothing to learn from your competitors, and that is a mistake. As Favaro points out, “Understanding competitors’ value propositions is one effective way to generate new thinking on how to improve your own value propositions.” In other words, awareness is healthy; obsessiveness is not.
It’s all very well to paint your competitors as the bad guys in your minds, but in today’s market such name-calling is immature. Instead, brands should be taking a more nuanced view of those who are not just competitors, but also colleagues, in the sector.
Four questions I’d be asking:
The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop
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“How can we bridge the gap between the left and right, to have a wiser, more connected conversation?” asks TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, at left, while speaking with journalist Gretchen Carlson and columnist David Brooks at TED, March 01, 2017, in New York. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED
In conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson at TED HQ in New York on Wednesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks and journalist Gretchen Carlson discussed how and why America has become so polarized — and where we can find common ground.
Set between lively renditions of “America the Beautiful” and “Go Down Moses” performed by the Vy Higginsen Gospel Choir of Harlem, the conversation centered on the political climate that led to Donald Trump’s election. Carlson, a registered Independent who once hosted a show on Fox News, and Brooks, a conservative columnist, shared their insights on the tensions at the heart of American politics today … and why 63 million people voted for Trump.
Trump voters were angry and felt like Washington wasn’t listening to them. A native of Minnesota, Carlson has seen the anger in middle America firsthand, and it started long before 2016. “A huge swath of the population feels like Washington never listens to them,” she says. Brooks also traveled around the country during the elections, through what pundits have called “flyover country” — a term, he says, that he heard nearly every hour during the election cycle. It speaks to an impression of middle Americans as less important than people who live on the coasts, namely California and New York.
For many people in middle America, economic mobility is stunted and jobs have disappeared, Brooks says. “In this country, we only have one success story: you go to college, you get a degree and a white-collar job, and that’s success,” he says. “If you’re not rich or famous, you feel invisible.”
Trump has celebrity appeal and a simplified message. Carlson, who hosted Trump on her show many times, reminds us that he is a master marketer. He was able to simplify his message down to phrases (“Make America great again”) and even if he eventually can’t achieve the things he says, he gave people something to grasp onto. And don’t underestimate his celebrity, she says: “I think it had a huge impact on Donald Trump becoming president.”
People were also willing ignore character flaws in favor of policy, Brooks adds. “I think he’s a moral freak,” he says of Trump. “He doesn’t know anything about anything, and he’s uncurious about it.” But his fans were “well aware of his failings,” he says, and were willing overlook Trump’s dustups, like the infamous Access Hollywood/Billy Bush tape and the rally where he appeared to mock a disabled reporter.
“A lot of people put on blinders,” Carlson says. “Policies they believe in, and being visible and heard, were more important than how Trump acts as a human.”
How can we have good conversations with people on the other side? “Come to the table being passionate about something,” says Gretchen Carlson at TED Dialogues, March 01, 2017, New York. Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED
Political correctness has soured conservatives. The conservative media has pounded this issue for the past ten years: Political correctness keeps people from saying what they think, Carlson says. “There’s been a narrowing of what’s permissible to say,” Brooks adds, pointing to his experiences on elite campuses. So it’s refreshing to Trump voters that he says what he thinks, regardless of who he may offend. “There are a lot of people who agree with Steve Bannon but won’t say so publicly,” Carlson says. “Voting for Trump was a way for them to do it silently.”
Trump voters think the mainstream media is biased and not to be trusted. When Trump tweets, he’s reaching the American people without a filter, which is what he believes the media is, says Carlson. In the leadup to the election, there was a groundswell of emotion in thinking the mainstream media is biased. “But there’s a difference between being biased and fake,” she adds. “There are ways to amend bias. Trump is nuclearizing it and saying, ‘Let’s just call all of that fake.’”
“The truth will come out,” Brooks says. Trump says that US manufacturing jobs have been stolen by the Chinese; the truth is that more than 80% of the jobs were replaced with technology, says Brooks. “When he says, ‘I’ll end TPP and the jobs will come back,’ they’re not coming back. We can measure this — either they’ll come back or they won’t come back, despite great marketing.”
With all this in mind, how can people on both sides learn to communicate with people they disagree with?
Be a little more self-suspicious. “You need to come out of the bubble if you’re ever going to have a conversation,” Carlson says. Brooks adds that we need to be wary of censorship and not hearing from people we disagree with, citing and commending the example of the University of Chicago’s rejection of safe spaces on campus. “If you get your feelings hurt, welcome to education,” he says.
Engage with media you usually disagree with. Carlson recommends occasionally watching a news show or reading an article from an outlet you normally wouldn’t. “We have to be accepting of all points of view — that’s how we start to bridge this massive divide.”
Join something. “Be a part of an organization that meets once a month, with people you don’t have much in common with,” Brooks says. He uses the example of pickup trucks — which hold the top three spots for best-selling vehicles in America. “Ask yourself: How many people do I know who own pickup trucks?” If your answer is none, you may want to do something about it.
The amazing Vy Higgensen Gospel Choir of Harlem performs at TED onMarch 01, 2017, in New York. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED
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The story of how the venerable Ford Motor Company managed to recover from the Great Recession of 2008 may be one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in U.S. history. And it demonstrates how great brands rebound from turbulent times. Not only did Ford recover, but it ended up thriving and achieving heights once thought impossible for an American carmaker.
A Different Way of Thinking About Brand
Alan Mulally, the former Boeing executive who was recruited by Bill Ford to save the company, has gotten most of the credit for pulling off the unlikely feat. There is no question that Mulally deserves every accolade he has received. The automotive industry, if not the whole country, should thank him for leading the restoration of a brand so iconic and a company so instrumental to American pride and competitiveness.
But the story of Ford’s recovery from its near-death experience is more than a lesson in leadership by one person. The truth is, the turnaround at Ford required wholesale changes in culture, strategy, operations, and execution, and involved a series of decisions that company executives made as a team. It was a transformation that, at its core, involved a different way of thinking about the company and its brand.
Ford’s turnaround makes for the ultimate case study of how great brands rebound. Great brands including Nike, Apple, and IBM have achieved their leadership positions by integrating their brand platform into every aspect of their business. Their brand aspirations and core brand foundations have undergirded their strategies, fueled their operations, and informed their tactics. This “brand-as-business” approach is the same methodology that great brands including Ford have used to survive some of the most destructive threats in business.
One Ford
Mulally introduced, and his team eventually embraced and executed on, the notion of “One Ford,” a single vision for the organization and its mission. In short, “One Ford” was about unifying the people, plans, operations, and products of Ford to restore the brand to automotive leadership. It involved putting the purpose, spirit, and values of the Ford brand at the center of the organization and executing with relentless commitment and laser-like focus on whatever it took to make Ford great again.
Mulally was inspired by a 1925 advertisement for Ford he found in the corporate archives. Entitled “Opening the Highways to All Mankind,” the Saturday Evening Post ad depicted a Norman Rockwellian scene of a young family atop a grassy hill overlooking a road filled with automobiles, the shadows of a Ford factory in the distance. It encapsulated the simple, yet utterly compelling, vision with which Henry Ford began Ford Motor Company: “I will build a car for the great multitude…it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”
Credit: Ford Media
Mulally understood that, at its core, Ford stood for cars with value for the masses; the company just needed to once again deliver on that brand promise. Every decision he and his team made from then on was put through that brand filter. Mulally once explained the decision to sell the company’s luxury brands, including Aston Martin, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Volvo, saying, “It was a question of ‘What did Ford stand for?’ What do people think when they see Ford’s blue oval? Do they think of us as a house of brands, or do they understand that they are going to get a complete family of best-in-class vehicles that are also affordable?”
The Core Brand Values and Brand Essence of Ford
Ford’s successful recovery was actually a return to the company’s founding values and the core essence of the Ford brand. Mulally and his team recognized that the company had deviated far from what was most valuable and different about Ford, and they set a new commitment to that core. Using the original Ford brand vision as its guide, company leaders developed and then executed with steadfast perseverance a plan that turned in quarter-after-quarter of profits at a time when almost every other organization was still reeling from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That original brand vision then laid the foundation for continued profitable growth.
Imagine how the history books would differ had the Ford Motor Company never lost its commitment to the core of its brand. Henry Ford certainly had laid the foundation for a brand-driven approach with his vision for the way Ford would change the way his organization worked, the way the business would succeed, and the way people would live. But over time, those values got lost in the internal push for growth and the external pressure from competition. Of course, the company could not have avoided the disruptive forces of the Great Recession, but if it had kept Henry Ford’s brand vision as its central organizing and operating idea, recovery might have been easier, faster, or both.
Great Brands Rebound with Brand As Business
When an organization has suffered a blow or experienced a major setback, the “brand as business” approach provides the power, clarity, and focus it needs to recover. Turnaround leaders use their brand as the engine, fuel, and compass to right the ship. But great brands don’t wait until they’re under duress to adopt the brand-as-business management approach. Great brands live out brand as business to sail ahead when business is thriving, to buttress their efforts when under duress, and to bounce back after suffering a setback.
related:
Inspired to Fail
Brands To Watch in 2017
Onward by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
The post how great brands rebound: ford’s remarkable turnaround was driven by the brand as business management approach appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.
As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use.
But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause.
It’s the prompt.
And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to.
Do you know the story of Abraham Wald? His reasoning shows why what you think you see can be so misleading. The mathematician was called in to determine how to make bombers safer during the Second World War. Everyone agreed they needed more armor. But where? Armor is heavy. If you put it everywhere, the bombers would never get off the ground. The answer seemed obvious. Put the armor where the planes were being shot the most. So Wald went to work and sketched all the places where bombers returning from their runs were most shot up.
But then, in his analysis of the situation, Wald turned everything on its head. The areas of most apparent damage were not the problem, he concluded, because they appeared on planes that made it back. The real areas of vulnerability on a bomber were those areas that weren’t marked – because planes shot there were the ones that never made it home.
Wald’s wonderful insight was to resist the temptation to ask, “what am I looking at?” and to ask instead “why can I see this?” Which leads us to this timely marketing point; when grappling with marketing issues don’t veer towards what you understand. What you need to do is set a course for what truly isn’t making sense.
Overcoming brand challenges is hard as is navigating change, but it’s certainly easier with the help of others. In early May, 50 marketers will converge at marketing’s only problem solving event to take on the obstacles of now and prepare for what’s next.
The Blake Project and Branding Strategy Insider have designed a uniquely powerful experience for brand leadership in the age of disruption. We call it The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World.
It’s unlike any other branding or marketing conference you’ve attended before:
No Attendees. Only Participants.
The best pathway for learning is through participation, not observation. The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World will challenge your thinking about brands and brand management. To do that, we’ll put you on a team of 10 and offer you opportunities to compete and learn alongside other marketers in a unique environment. The challenges you’ll tackle are based on and influenced by the actual issues that you and other participants are facing.
In May of 2017, our 5th event, we are focused on: Disruptive Marketing Trends, Building Emotional Connections, Encoding Brands In The Mind, Brand Storytelling, Brand Leadership, Digital Strategy, Customer Experience, B2B Brand Strategy and more.
It all takes place at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, California May 1 – 3, 2017.
Our schedule…
Monday, May 1st – Kickoff Mixer: 7- 9pm at The London Hotel Rooftop Pool
Tuesday, May 2nd – Day 1: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel / 6:30pm – ? Team building event and dinner
Wednesday, May 3rd – Day 2: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel
Who Should Participate?
We have reserved these two days (and a kickoff mixer on the evening of the 1st) for 50 senior B2C and B2B marketers who see professional growth as a mandate for success and who seek a learning experience superior to last century’s format of marketing conferences:
-Marketing oriented leaders
-Marketing professionals (brand managers, product managers, directors, vice presidents, CMO’s, brand strategists etc.)
-Advertising agency professionals (account executives, planners, creatives, agency heads)
-Marketers facing brand strategy issues
-Marketers seeking a competitive advantage
-Professionals in charge of brand building, brand management, human resources
-Professional brand consultants, digital consultants and researchers
-Marketers who prefer participation over observation
-Marketers who don’t believe that last century’s format of marketing conferences advances them as leaders.
Every year a wide range of marketing oriented leaders and professionals from around the world join us representing startups, emerging, regional, national and global brands. Past participants include AAA, Bayer, Bloomberg, Humana, Land O’ Lakes, Liberty Mutual, Pilot/Flying J, RJ Reynolds, TD Ameritrade, GlaxoSmithKlein, Wounded Warrior Project, Monsanto, Ogilvy, Kawasaki, GE and many more.
Only 50 marketers can participate. To secure a spot for you or your group at The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World call me directly in Los Angeles at 813-842-2260. Or simply email me.
Special pricing for MENG / Marketing Executives Group and American Marketing Association Members.
I do hope you can join us.
Sincerely,
Derrick Daye for The Un-Conference, Branding Strategy Insider and The Blake Project
*reSET is the only Connecticut organization to receive the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Growth Accelerator Competition Award, announced by President Obama on August 4th, 2015.
