A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Scott Bedbury was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Starbucks from 1995 to 1998. Prior to that he spent seven years as head of advertising for Nike, where he launched the "Bo Knows" and "Just Do It" campaigns. He is currently an independent brand consultant and a speaker for the Leigh Bureau.
Stephen Fenichell is the author of Plastic: The Making of A Synthetic Century and Other People's Money. His articles have appeared in New York, Men's Journal, GQ, Lear's, Spy, Connoisseur, Condé-Nast Traveler, and Wired.

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1: all aboard the brandwagon

Principle #1 Relying on brand awareness has become marketing fool's gold.

You've probably noticed in the past couple of years that once-arcane phrases like "brand dilution," "brand synergy," "brand equity," and "brand recognition" have begun tripping lightly off just about every tongue in the business punditocracy. Such glib terms and phrases are typically uttered not only with a straight face but also with a solemn pursing of the lips and no detectable trace of irony.

"In the landmark 1967 film The Graduate," the New York Times business reporter Joel Sharkey recently wrote, "there is the famous scene at the cocktail party where a helpful older man whispers this single word of business advice into the ear of a callow, befuddled young Dustin Hoffman: 'Plastics.' Remake the movie today, and you'd have to change the line to 'branding.'"

These days, the term "branding" is being uttered in the same pious, reverential tones formerly reserved for buzz words like "synergy," "leverage," and "strategic planning." The brand idea is no longer confined just to packaged consumer products. Today the word "brand" has become part of the vernacular within every department of any progressive company. It is on everyone's radar screen, though not everyone really knows what it means. Personally, and speaking as something of a brand fool, all this loose talk makes me nervous. For it was only a few years ago that everyone had given brands up for dead.

Brand Awareness Versus Brand Strength

Step back to the spring of 1993, when Marlboro, one of the world's most recognizable brands (if not the most recognizable) stunned the marketing world when it announced that it would have to aggressively cut its cigarette prices to stay competitive. The move was prompted by an onslaught of lower-cost, less-known competitors. Some of these were essentially generic, without any real brand sensibilities or public recognition in the market, other than that they were cheap. Others were barely brands in their own right. Wall Street analysts hammered Marlboro's parent company Philip Morris's stock, and several business magazines heralded the death of branding the very next week. According to them, it was price, not brand image, that would matter in the future. Building a strong brand was a concept that had run its course.

My friend Watts Wacker, a professional futurist, had it right when he stated at an Association of National Advertisers conference that year, "I believe the nineties officially began with Marlboro's inability to sustain its price. When the number one brand realized that its value proposition (what the brand was really 'worth' in the minds of the customer) was out of sync, that underlines the difference between a pig and a hog."

Asked by one conference participant to define that difference, Wacker gamely replied, "You feed a pig, but you slaughter a hog. Brands can be piggy, but they can't be hogs."

To me, the Marlboro Man had not fallen off his horse because the limitations of branding had finally revealed themselves. What sent him plummeting to earth, spurs pointing skyward, were two things: the product had lost any real differentiation in the marketplace from the equally blurred identities of a growing number of competitors, and its marketing strategy had become entirely predictable. By simply resting on past laurels, which was acceptable in the Old Brand World, the Marlboro brand eventually rejoined the larger pack, if you will, of all the other brands of cigarettes. It began to look like one more player in a very large, mostly unremarkable commodity market. The only distinction between Marlboro and its competition was Marlboro's heavier marketing and higher price, something that must have perplexed more than a few smokers.

To Marlboro's credit, it had established strong emotional connections with millions of core users, thanks to decades of rich imagery of the open West: vibrant vistas of cowboys, cattle, campfires, and coffee. Transcending a product-only relationship and connecting the brand to powerful and often timeless emotion-"emotional branding"-will continue to be important in the New Brand World, but it can never replace meaningful product innovation. Emotional branding merely augments and extends a powerful product or service platform by recognizing that some of the most important product benefits are emotional rather than physical. What is new is the need for greater innovation in both product development and marketing communications. In the future, standing still will be lethal to any brand.

Not unlike Marlboro, Nike also wove its brand into timeless emotions by becoming the category protagonist for competitive sports and fitness. But unlike Marlboro, Nike never stopped reinventing its products and its marketing. It is safe to say that Nike Advertising took a thousand different creative tacks on the same core brand positioning during my eight-year watch, from 1987 to 1994. While Nike Advertising was constantly refreshing the marketing and brand positioning, Nike Design became one of the world's premier product design and development organizations. Speed of change was also important to Nike. Just when Marlboro was beginning to falter, Nike was introducing so many new products and marketing campaigns that it had reduced its average product life cycle from one year to three or four months. Relevance and Resonance

But change for the sake of change can also be marketing fool's gold. The best reason for change is to expand brand relevance and brand resonance, two measures of brand strength that are much more valuable than mere brand awareness can ever be. Perhaps this is the greatest single change in the concept of "brand" in recent years. Where we once looked at brands on a surface level, we now view them in more intimate and multidimensional terms. We plumb their depths, looking for reassurance that they are good, responsible, sensitive, knowing, and hip. Never in the history of business has there been such scrutiny of brand performance.

'So how do brands become more relevant and resonate more deeply with customers? One of the most rewarding strategies for achieving this goal has been mass customization, the process of creating a broader array of "niche" products that emanate from one central brand position like spokes on a wheel. Executed properly, mass customization enables large brands to build and retain relationships with smaller subsets of a mass market while growing the entire brand franchise.

Consider Harley-Davidson. Yet another brand with a timeless emotional position-the open road, personal freedom, and rebellion-Harley-Davidson also understands the value of providing customers myriad ways to customize its core product or embrace its brand. For FY 2000, Harley posted $2.2 billion in revenues from its motorcycles. It also posted $600 million in revenue on parts, accessories, and general merchandise. The latter delivered more than just high profit margins to the company. It also enabled consumers to customize their own Harley-Davidson brand experience.

Another brand historically hell-bent on change has been Intel, with its "self-cannibalization" of Pentium technology in the nineties. Intel was well aware that with every new, faster chip, it was essentially killing its young, but it recognized this violent act as a form of what Intel chairman Andy Grove called "creative destruction." (This term was originally coined by the early-twentieth-century Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter and was later popularized by both Grove and General Electric's CEO, Jack Welch.)

Marlboro's plight gave the big, traditional, Old Brand World brands much to ponder, especially the Über-brands like U.S. Tobacco, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, General Foods, and Nestlé. For them, "Marlboro Friday," as they called the day the price cuts...