American marketers have an exquisite dilemma: should they stand against President Trump’s policies and risk alienating half their market, or stay impartial and weaken their brand values?

The approaches range in both tenor and impact. On one end of the extreme are brands like Dove, which gently mocked Trump and his team’s invention of “alternative facts” with a campaign in which Dove makes a series of unsubstantiated and fanciful claims about its antiperspirant (it increases your IQ, first used by Cleopatra – you get the idea). The gentle humor and the fact that the campaign is, at least primarily, only being run in the UK ensure it’s on the mild side.

In contrast, coffee chain Starbucks was earnest and explicit in its response to Trump’s recent ban on immigrants entering America. “I write to you today with deep concern, a heavy heart and a resolute promise,” explained CEO Howard Schultz last week. “We are living in an unprecedented time, one in which we are witness to the conscience of our country, and the promise of the American Dream, being called into question.” Schultz went on to announce that Starbucks would find jobs for 10,000 refugees across the globe in its various coffee shops.

In between these two extremes were the brands that got caught out and caught up in the cultural melee that surrounded the immigration ban and the subsequent media fallout. At first Uber stayed silent and used surge pricing when cab drivers in several major cities went on strike supporting immigrants trapped at the airport.

But the sudden explosion of #deleteuber tweets combined with the clever maneuvering of rival firm Lyft, which donated $1m to the American Civil Liberties Union as soon as the crisis began, left Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick changing course faster than a limo driver looking for their last pickup of the night. Suddenly he was all about his immigrant employees and a few hours later Kalanick had withdrawn from Trump’s advisory board too.

Budweiser was caught in a similar position, albeit heading in the opposite direction. Their beautiful Super Bowl ad at the weekend was the tale of an immigrant – Adolphus Busch – who lands in America and forges a path to greatness thanks to a chance meeting and a big idea about beer.

But the ad, which had been thought up and produced long before President Trump’s inauguration or his subsequent ban on immigration had been announced – presented Budweiser in an unintentionally liberal light to an audience of more than 100 million Americans – around half of whom take a very dim view of anything that deviates from the Trump doctrine.

So while Travis Kalanick and Uber were rapidly backing away from supporting the new president, Anheuser-Busch InBev the global brewers of Budweiser, were quickly moving back towards Trump and denying their ad had subversive content of any kind.

“There’s really no correlation with anything else that’s happening in the country,” Ricardo Marques, AB InBev’s most senior marketer told Adweek after the new spot aired. Rather, Marques claimed it was “a universal story” and certainly not one specifically referring to this current moment.

Standing Up For Brand Values

So what was all this maneuvering really all about? Well there have always been two ways to communicate what you stand for to consumers. The traditional method for positioning is to talk about your values and beliefs and hope they resonate with the target market. The alternative is to pick out an enemy or rival and oppose them in order to communicate you stand for something totally different.

I can try and impress someone by telling them how much I support gender equality or I can find an overt sexist and pick a fight with them in front of the person I intend to impress. Or in many instances I might try and do both.

Avis famously built its brand by positioning against Hertz and suggesting that as the number two brand it would work harder than the established leader in the car rental market. Virgin Atlantic built its reputation by spending the 1980s continuously at war with British Airways for no other reason than that the easiest way to show they were value, fun and innovative was to pick a fight with a UK conglomerate that was none of the above.

Trump is currently towering over most of the discourse, media and news in America. It’s almost impossible for brands – particularly those that now espouse the importance of brand purpose above all other things – to avoid being caught in the shadow of his increasingly disturbing and authoritarian ideology.

The problem for marketers is that despite many of his alarming policies and comments Trump continues to retain the support of almost exactly half the American population. So while brands want to position against Trump to make their own values clear, they desperately don’t want to lose half their potential market in the process.

It’s a desperately difficult situation for American marketers because they almost have to choose between a stronger brand with a smaller target market or a bigger market with a weaker offer. American brands are going to have to work out how they dance between these two extremes for the next four years and perhaps beyond.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a name, term, symbol, and/or design that’s intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competition.

However, we argue that a brand is more than a mere name that helps with identification and differentiation. Identifying a brand and differentiating it from competing brands only makes sense when the brand offers value. We define a brand as a value-generating entity (name) relevant to both customers and the brand owner. If no one wants to buy the brand, the name doesn’t have much market relevance. Such a brand fails to provide value to either the company or customers. But what does it mean to say that a brand offers value to customers and companies? Let’s first consider what we mean by brand value to companies.

Surprisingly, we have paid so much attention to brands as identifiers and marketplace differentiators that we have not paid much attention to the substantial, real, and strategic benefits that brands can provide to companies. But these benefits are numerous and significant.

What An Admired Brand Does

1. Revenue Generator: An admired brand increases customer loyalty and attracts new customers.
2. Cost-Efficiency Enhancer: An admired brand is in demand, which allows the company to take advantage of economies of scale and allows the company to enjoy cost-saving customer brand loyalty and brand advocacy behaviors.
3. Growth Facilitator: An admired brand facilitates the introduction and success of its extensions to other markets and other products.
4. Human-Capital Builder: An admired brand helps recruit and retain talented people who will ultimately determine the company’s success in the market place.
5. Employee-Morale Booster: An admired brand motivates employees to protect and strengthen the brand.
6. Second-Chance Provider: An admired brand enhances customers’ willingness to forgive mistakes made by a company.
7. Market Protector: An admired brand serves as a barrier to entry to future competitors.
8. Alliance Facilitator: An admired brand facilitates alliances with desirable and powerful external partners.
9. Asset Builder: An admired brand enhances the company’s marketplace value, and also allows it to demand a premium price in a brand-selling situation.

Revenue Generator

An admired brand increases customer loyalty and attracts new customers. These twin outcomes enhance a brand’s revenue. Although producing a soft drink is not rocket science, new entrants find it incredibly hard to compete in this market, since most customers have a strong and long-standing preference for a particular soft drink brand. And this holds true worldwide. A strong brand also increases revenue by making customers less price sensitive, allowing companies to charge a higher per-unit price. Think about the price premium brands such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs can charge in the marketplace.

Cost-Efficiency Enhancer

An admired brand is in demand, which allows the company to take advantage of economies of scale. Strong brands also create favorable word of mouth (WOM) and customer evangelists who further contribute to marketing efficiency by lowering marketing costs. In fact, some brands became marketplace successes purely through WOM. Trader Joe’s is an example. Think about the stories customers relate about the unique products they can get only at Trader Joe’s. China’s Xiaomi, a tech company, relies entirely on brand communities and WOM from its fans for publicity and brand-promoting activities. Or consider the pride customers take in their durable Patagonia jackets and the stories they share about them. Since advertising and promotion costs often eat up a substantial portion of companies’ budgets, enormous cost efficiencies are realized by fan-based WOM.

Growth Facilitator

An admired brand can be leveraged and extended, creating growth (and revenue) from new product or market categories. An admired brand makes it easier for companies to grow and grow efficiently, through product and brand extensions that use the brand name. Such extensions help the company’s overall growth. Oracle grew by extending its brand to a portfolio of cloud and mobile solutions. Apple’s extensions have allowed it to grow from $19.3 billion in 2006 to $234 billion in December of 2015.

Human-Capital Builder

An admired brand helps recruit and retain talented people who will ultimately determine the company’s marketplace success. Talent is the most difficult core competency for competitors to copy. Think about Google and Tesla’s abilities to attract top talent. Admired brands attract top talent at all levels of the organization.

Employee-Morale Booster

An admired brand also motivates employees to protect and strengthen the brand. Employees of admired brands are more committed to nurturing customers than are employees working for brands with no discernable equity. Why? Because they believe in the brand and are proud of what they do to help it flourish. Costco, which can be called an admired brand, has higher employee morale than competitor companies in the same industry. Employees who work for companies ranked as most admired in their industries take pride in the company’s success, and they work harder to protect and strengthen the company’s reputation. Executives who manage admired brands are even willing to accept lower pay for the opportunity to work for the brand.

Second-Chance Provider

An admired brand also enhances customers’ willingness to forgive unfortunate mistakes made by a company, giving it another chance to redeem itself. Martha Stewart, Paula Deen, Toyota, Nike, and Harley-Davidson, to name just a few, have all fallen victim to brand gaffes and disasters. Yet the strength of their brands, the loyalty of their customer bases, and their customers’ willingness to see brand mistakes as rare and unusual events have helped them to recover.

Market Protector

An admired brand protects companies by serving as a barrier to competitive brand entry. Customers are reluctant to switch from an admired brand to a new one unless the benefits of the new brand are sufficiently compelling to motivate switching. Customers’ familiarity with admired brands provides comfort via what they know and have experienced. Their affection for a brand they know and admire makes them unwilling to invest in a new and untried brand. History shows that while many companies can produce athletic clothing, toys, and databases, they can’t simply compete with the likes of Nike, Lego, and IBM.

Alliance Facilitator

An admired brand can facilitate alliances with desirable and powerful external partners. Such alliances can both leverage brand admiration and enhance it further. Alliances allow companies to build additional revenue and markets without making costly investments in areas in which they lack expertise. The ability of Apple and Samsung to attract partners serves as a testament to how much other companies admire these brands. Recent alliances between BMW and Louis Vuitton, Apple Pay and MasterCard, and Spotify and Uber also illustrate this point.

Asset Builder

Finally, an admired brand generates greater shareholder return because investors take notice of admired brands when making their investment decisions. This in turn makes a company’s marketplace value substantially higher than its book value. That explains why Wanda Group paid $650 million to acquire the Ironman brand, which organizes, promotes, and licenses triathlons around the world, including the signature Ironman event that consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride, and a 26.2-mile (a full marathon) run. As a sign of “having made it”, some participants tattoo the Ironman logo on their bodies upon completing this hellish and grueling event.

The critical question is this: If an admired brand offers value to companies on so many dimensions, how can companies develop an admired brand? The answer to this question is both simple and deceptively complex. The simple answer is that companies can’t reap the benefits of these myriad and significant sources of value unless they also provide value to customers. The deceptively complex answer is that the field of marketing has yet to develop a compelling perspective on what customers actually do value.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: C. Whan Park, Deborah MacInnis and Andreas Eisingerich, excerpted from their book, Brand Admiration with permission from Wiley Publishing.

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Making any big organization-wide change is challenging and bringing digital transformation to a company or institution is no exception. Knowing your employees helps when asking them to make changes, which is why understanding millennials and their expectations is critical. Research from The Conference Board shows these five factors are high on the list for job […]

In order to provide value to companies, brands must first provide value to customers. But how do companies make their brands valuable to customers?

Value From Product Innovations?

Several scholars claim that brand success hinges on creating an uncontested market space. Or sometimes we hear people say it is all about creating a “killer application”. But what is a killer application? The argument goes that in today’s information-rich economy, customers have full access to information about products. As such, brands can only compete on product quality and price. Accordingly, customers’ relationships with brands are based on an economic calculus where what one gets (brand quality) is commensurate with what is given (the price paid). The idea goes that due to this excessive product quality and price comparison trend, companies must focus on product innovations that reshape industry boundaries and create new competitive opportunities. This argument has merit. Clearly product innovations are crucial to a brand’s success in today’s markets.

Value From Benefits That Provide Happiness (The 3Es)

However, having an innovative product is just part of the solution for achieving competitive success. Decades of research on customer behavior show that a buying decision is not based purely on an economic calculus. Brand choices are largely driven by perceptions of what brands do for customers. In other words, rather than competing on purely economic terms, brands compete based on the degree to which their benefits make customers happy. Clearly, customers will not invest in brands that are not worth the money. But what they are looking for, more than a quality product at the right price, is a brand whose benefits help them to do what they need and want to do, in a way that is experientially gratifying to them and that makes them feel good about themselves as people. Whether it’s in a personal or a professional context, brands that provide these benefits make customers happy.

Brand benefits refer not to the features the product has, but rather the outcomes from brand acquisition or use that meet customers’ needs, wants, and goals, as human beings. This holds true regardless of whether these humans are occupying the role of B2B customers, B2C customers, sports and/or celebrity fans, or targets of nonprofit marketers. Our perspective on customer value is both novel and parsimonious. Specifically, we identify three broad classes of benefits that underlie human happiness: benefits that enable, benefits that entice, and benefits that enrich customers.

1. Enablement Benefits: An admired brand enables customers by offering solutions to problems and challenges (large and small) and conserving customers’ limited resources (time, money, psychological capacity, physical capacity). When enabled, customers feel empowered, secure, safe, relieved, and confident.
2. Enticement Benefits: An admired brand entices customers by engaging customers’ senses (touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste), their thoughts, and their hearts. When enticed, customers feel gratified, stimulated, engaged, and warmhearted.
3. Enrichment Benefits: An admired brand enriches customers by resonating with their beliefs and their sense of self (who they are, who they were, and who they want to be). When enriched, customers feel inspired, proud, connected, and validated.

Benefits That Enable Customers

Customers find value in brands that enable them. Such brands solve customers’ problems. They remove barriers, eliminate frustrations, assuage anxieties, and reduce fear. They provide peace of mind. Benefits that enable customers offer solutions to nagging problems (both large and small): for example, how do I avoid this acid reflux, how can I protect my home from burglars, and how can we get one IT system to talk to another. With the brand as a solution, customers feel empowered to take on challenges in their personal and professional lives. Knowing that they can count on (and trust) the brand to solve problems reduces anxiety and allows the customer to get on with other aspects of their lives. Fear and anxiety are replaced with feelings of empowerment, confidence, and security.

Sometimes both problems (and solutions) relate to resources, such as money, time, and physical and psychic energy. Brands can also enable customers when they help customers conserve the scarce resources they have or help them acquire the resources they want. Schwab helps customers plan for secure retirements: people feel more con dent about dealing with the future when they have a safety net to protect them from life’s unexpected curveballs. SAP helps organizations to streamline their processes, cut waste, and run simple for greater agility and growth. Waze maps the most efficient route from where one is to where one wants to go.

Brands that solve problems and conserve resources make customers feel empowered, secure, confident, relieved, and safe, and they provide peace of mind. In short, customers desperately want products and services whose benefits enable them. They want to feel that they can live with more security and efficacy and with fewer complications and stressors.

Benefits That Entice Customers

Customers also seek benefits that entice them. Enticement benefits stimulate customers’ minds, their senses, and their hearts. They replace work with play, lack of pleasure with gratification, boredom with excitement, and sadness with feelings of warmth and amusement. Customers, whether in a B2B or B2C environment, want to feel gratified, engaged, excited, playful, grateful, and warmhearted. For example, they like marketing materials and web sites that are interesting and visually pleasing, and ads that are emotionally evocative. They want to feel cared for and taken care of by the brand and its employees. They want corporate offices and retail spaces to be warm, comforting, and inviting. They want to interact with employees who are friendly and helpful.

Disneyland epitomizes these sensory and heartwarming benefits. Disneyland creates magic for millions of kids (and adults) every day. Park guests experience these benefits through the beauty of the Magic Kingdom, the thrill of the rides, the joy of meeting Mickey and Pluto, and the vivid reworks show and parade. Enticing benefits also seem to explain the success of the Hello Kitty brand. How else can we explain how a seemingly deformed and mouthless cat commands such strong loyalty from children, let alone fully grown adults? Hello Kitty offers sense-pleasing and heartwarming benefits that are difficult to explain. Devotees can’t stay away from the brand. In the 40 years since its introduction, more than 50,000 product items have been introduced under the Hello Kitty brand name. Interest in and affection toward this brand are still high.

Benefits That Enrich Customers

Finally, customers seek benefits that enrich them and their sense of who they are as people. Customers want to feel as if they are good people who are doing good things in the world. They want to act in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and hopes. They want to feel as if they’re part of a group in which others accept and respect them. They want to be inspired to be the best people they can be, now and in the future. They want to feel proud of their identities and where they came from. Enriching benefits provide meaning to life. Without meaning people feel at a loss and regard their lives as pointless. Benefits that enrich customers make them feel inspired, proud, connected, and validated. They motivate people to act with good intentions and with honor and courage, and to be their authentic selves.

Salesforce.com isn’t just a cloud computing company with technologies that serve all manner of companies in an easy and visually pleasing way. It’s also a company designed to make the world a better place. It supports nonprofits and higher-education customers, and it has donated more than $53 million in grants. Salesforce employees have donated more than a million hours of their time to charitable organizations. Customers know that by using Salesforce products, they too are contributing to make the world a better place, both locally and globally.

Exponential Impact Of The 3Es

Combined, these benefits have an exponential effect on enhancing customers’ happiness.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: C. Whan Park, Deborah MacInnis and Andreas Eisingerich, excerpted from their book, Brand Admiration with permission from Wiley Publishing.

Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual problem-solving event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The survey provides insight into how ANA members are conducting eCommerce initiatives as well as intelligence on how member companies structure their eCommerce departments and work with agencies.

Valentine’s Day comes at a time when the world seems to need all the love it can get. And now Denmark’s leading florist, Interflora, tries to spreads some love in a touching love story with a surprising twist. It’s reminds us that love conquers all – even when love is extra difficult to express.

In a stunningly beautiful film, taking place in the 1920ties we follow a young man who tries to declare his feelings to that special person he has fallen in love with. But the world is filled with barriers in his way. In the end, however he accomplishes his mission – but with a surprising twist.

The film is directed by world renowned director Martin Werner and written by Danish ad agency Brandhouse.

“We want to show that Interflora is a champion of love, even when it’s complicated and met with obstacles,” creative director, Mikkel Elung explains.

CMO of Interflora, Zvi Goldstein adds; “In the end it’s about courage and having the nerve to take that last bold step towards love where you risk everything. It’s a special moment that we try to describe and support in our films.”

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It seems to be the question of the moment, in meeting after meeting: “If you were preparing a strategy for an American brand right now, what would you tell them to do?”

At one level, I get the question. As consumers react to what they see or believe about the world today, the threat to overtly nationalistic brands seems very real. That’s because consumers can lump country and brand together, according to Tony Chapman. And if buyers could bundle ideology with country, that suggests an increasing tendency to tie politics to brands.

Haven’t the reactions in the business world so far been interesting? Everyone’s running into a spotlight or ducking for cover. Some companies are trying to look like they’re playing nice with the wider political agenda. Others are trying to get away. Once upon a time, a brand could only have dreamed of being mentioned by a President. Now CEOs are resigning political appointments because their customers and employees have told them they got too close. Even the Superbowl ads are up for scrutiny …

It’s as if, in the face of brazen politics, everyone thinks it’s their business to be a politician too. I don’t think that’s the role of brands at all. To me, there’s a huge opportunity here for those brands that choose to take it. These are emotional times. And brands are powered by emotions. Instead of playing politics, brands should perhaps be looking to meet the wider needs of their customers by providing reassurance, reinforcement, support, inspiration … brands have an opportunity in this environment to do something powerful. In America. And beyond. I wonder how many will step up, go beyond the platitudes and make that happen?

According to the most recent Havas Group “Meaningful Brands” report, people wouldn’t miss 74% of brands and they find 60% of the content that companies produce is poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver for them. That’s a massive indictment on the strategies that most brands are using and on the content that they’re producing.

Brands need to get back to the things that mean something: how do we help people, and why should they look to us for that help? This seems like a great time – perhaps the best time – to focus on that.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

From 199th pick in the NFL draft to five Super Bowl rings, Tom Brady is the undisputed greatest ever. Under Armour along with it’s ad agency Droga5 and New England Patriots fans from Boston celebrated his win yesterday by releasing this tribute video: “The Legend of Tom Brady”

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Droga5

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Adoption of mobile ad-blocking software is increasing around the world, but the usage rate remains relatively low in the United States.

Using social influencers to drive shopper marketing.