Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category
Friday, August 27th, 2010
This week father-in-waiting Matthew Harrison reflects on the imminent addition to his family, and what this tells us about industrial branding.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that buying a house and getting divorced are the 2 most stressful experiences in life. Frankly this is a statement I find it difficult to agree with, and not only because my in-laws are coming to stay next week. Looking for and buying a house is one of life’s pleasures, bringing with it the opportunity to tread mud through strangers’ houses and chuckle at their patterned carpets. As for getting divorced, so long as I resist insulting my wife’s family on my company’s blog I am optimistic that this won’t happen.
No, by far the most stressful experience of my life has come these past 8 months – the duration so far of my wife’s pregnancy. The sources of my angst are too numerous to mention. Is the baby healthy? How is my wife feeling? Am I capable of looking after another human being when I can’t even look after my household’s Christmas card list? Will I find my way to the hospital without getting lost? What the hell is a BabyBjorn? And how will I know when I start dilating?
Even these worries pale into insignificance, however, next to the decision that will affect the success or failure of our future child’s life: what shall we call our future offspring? Of our two current labels, ‘it’ is frankly derogatory and ‘Bump’ would most likely result in playground bullying. These may be adequate descriptions for a child we are yet to meet and who – despite my rapidly expanding wife – remains abstract to us, but a more personal name will be required once the baby enters the big wide world.
Naming a baby, it seems to me, is rather like choosing a brand name for an industrial product. A brand is something that is asked for and referred to by name. It is, however, far more than a mere descriptor. A brand name must reflect the product it refers to both in its personality and in its aspirations. It should be individual enough to be memorable, but not so individual as to invite ridicule. A successful brand name is backed up by closely aligned brand values. These values, in turn, should inspire. Everyone working on behalf of a brand lives up (or down) to the expectations set by that brand (what would be the implications of calling a product or indeed a child ‘garbage’, for example?). It is clear that the choice of my baby’s name is of the utmost importance.
In-depth market research maximizes the chances of getting a brand name correct, exploring issues such as the target audience’s likely reaction and whether there any other companies with a similar brand name. Having trawled through a number of baby-naming books and websites, my wife and I conducted desk research, Googling potential names and seeing what the world’s leading search engine churned out. ‘Audley’ was crossed off the list when we were reminded of Audley Harrison, the erstwhile Olympic boxer (a glance of my physique would tell you why). ‘Tina Catherine’ is also out of the question when you learn that TC Harrison is a second-hand car-dealer in Leicestershire. And how could we realistically call our child George?
The target audience’s reaction was judged scientifically, through a series of informal interviews with friends and family. This research was aimed at drilling down into the darkest recesses of the audience’s imaginations and prejudices. “Sounds like a 13th century poet” guffawed my Dad as we broached the name ‘Theodore’. “Is that an industrial lubricant?’ harrumphed my drunken friend as we debated the name ‘Alexa’ late one Friday evening.
Some people name their children after themselves, which strikes me as either egotistical, unimaginative or both. More importantly, a brand that is not clearly distinguished from the competition – like a son who shares his father’s first name – is by definition consigned to a life of anonymity. My father (Martin) only shares an initial with me, but it didn’t stop him opening my post for 18 years.
So, where did this research take us and what does this tell us about industrial branding? Well, my wife and I eventually agreed on male and female names that we both liked, resisting the temptation to analyze them too deeply or seek the views of anyone outside our own front room. I also thought of some of the world’s most successful brand names and it struck me that most of these are based on relatively mundane criteria such as the original geographical location of the company, the founders’ name or the initials of companies that have merged into the corporation over time. Most successful brand names have no intrinsic meaning beyond the superficial, and only gain real meaning through their activities and interactions over the years.
Building a business-to-business brand, like bringing up a child, is a task that requires continuous investment. The name itself is rather like the wallpaper in a maternity ward – so long as it isn’t offensive, no-one is likely to notice. The final proof of this came when I Googled ‘Matthew Harrison’ and was left agog at the wide range of activities undertaken by my namesakes. A Las Vegas musician, a Rastafarian spokesperson, a Missouri Lutheran Church president and – horrifyingly – director of the film ‘Kicked in the head’ were amongst those conspiring to keep yours truly out of the top 10 pages of the search. I am hoping that, like the best industrial brands, I eventually grow into my name and make it my own.
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Friday, August 20th, 2010
In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Paul Hague considers the importance of “voice” and how it can be your most important asset…
“Good morning from the flight deck. This is your captain speaking.” I can’t help looking up from my John Grisham novel and admiring the dulcet tones of Capt. Bill Jones. I am on a Continental flight from Newark to Manchester although it could be from anywhere to anywhere. All captains sound different but they all sound the same. They seem to exude the same confidence and assurance that we passengers are looking for on a flight and yet the only thing they manage to tell us is what time we will arrive and that it will be raining in Manchester when we get there.
It got me thinking. Is it genuine confidence that is being communicated by Bill Jones’ voice or am I being influenced by his seniority and his position? He sounds more authoritative than the chief steward but maybe that’s because I know that he is the captain and have conferred status and authority to him.
Now the point of my introduction is not to be obsequious to airline captains but to get us thinking about something that is crucially important in shaping our view of people. In fact, a search on the Internet suggests that the voice, its intonation and its delivery accounts for 40% of the impression that we make on someone we meet for the first time. If this is true, it is massively important. Forget worrying about your height, the size of your nose, your sticking-out ears and your hairdo. What matters is what you say and how you say it.
When you think about it, there must be some truth in this. Obama has a wonderful speaking voice. So had Churchill and, God forbid, so did Mister Hitler. And what does a wonderful voice mean? It means (I think) that it communicates your strength of personality, your enthusiasm and your authority. It gives a clue as to your upbringing through your accent, to your confidence as a person, and to your intelligence. Forget being six feet tall with dark wavy hair and a dimple in your chin (and that’s only the females) – you could be let down immediately you open your mouth if you sound like Kenneth Williams.
All very interesting you might think but what has this got to do with a business blog? I was reading in the Financial Times today about one of Italy’s richest entrepreneurs – Enrico Preziosi. My interest was aroused when I read the story of his transformation from a street hawker of toys bought from China to a €1 billion turnover, fully integrated business, which is now the fifth largest toy company in the world. Apparently his success is all down to his voice.
To be more precise it is down to his company’s voice. A few years ago, when he ran a fledgling company, he learned that Mattel and Hasbro, the two leading toy companies, spent all their advertising money in October and November, just prior to the Christmas buying season. Preziosi used his relatively small advertising budget to run a television campaign in every month outside this period. In other words, he bought “share of voice” and achieved it by choosing months when he would be heard and not swamped by those who could shout louder.
Of course, voice is not just about being loud and being heard; it is also about communicating the right message. Preziosi knows a thing or two about this. “About every five years toys change completely,” he says. “If you want to stay stable in the market you have to be trendy. In 1978, girls still played with dolls when they were aged 14. Now if I gave my daughter, aged 11, a doll, she would throw it out of the window.” You have to be right on message to resonate with your fickle and ever demanding audience.
Working out the importance of voice to a customer or potential customer is not easy. I said earlier that 40% of the impression we make on people when we first meet them is due to our voice rather than our appearance. Let us assume that this figure is roughly right for business introductions. What if the impression we make for our companies is achieved in a similar way, as with Preziosi’s company, by our voice – as measured by the impression left by our sales people, our signage, our logos, our adverts, websites and the like. I leave you with a very important question – are you getting your share?
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
By giving us an insight into the creative and sometimes surreal world of advertising, Simi Dhawan rightly reminds us that it’s better to risk knowing about a failed plan than to risk implementing a plan which will fail…
As is routine within our so-called “modern world”, no week would follow the norm if a plurality of “forwarded emails” did not make their merry way into my personal inbox. Whilst I can appreciate the heartfelt sentiments that might go into a friendship chain mail, I’ve seldom the patience to pass these on and, frankly, I find them more than mildly irritating. (Having to manually delete each one wastes at least a few seconds of my life – possibly several hours spread over a lifetime!) However, one which didn’t follow this same ill-fate by instantly grabbing my attention included the artwork of a Mr. Julian Beever – a British artist now famous for his ability to create 3-D illusions using just chalk (and an eye for detail) on pavements all over the globe. By some, he has been bestowed the respectable title “Pavement Picasso”. I include one such example of his ingenious work below:
At first glance, it’s difficult to comprehend how a sketch could be made to look so real and far removed from a standard 2-D drawing. The answer can be found in the angle at which the photo is taken and only one perspective allows for the 3-D effect we are seeing, as the photographs below demonstrate:
Whilst this startlingly clever trick-of-the-eye might be considered no more than “art for art’s sake” by some – merely a momentary distraction from whatever we were doing before we caught sight of these images – I beg to differ. The talented efforts of our aforementioned “Pavement Picasso” are, in fact, modern-day examples of some very creative advertising, and it is certainly no accident that these have landed in my inbox – or that I now share them with you! To prove that this 3-D image technique has been used in practice more explicitly as an advertising medium, see the following example, courtesy of the German-owned company Bionade:
At the core of any project we are assigned, in one form or another, every client ultimately seeks to strengthen their brand. From market segmentation and product testing, through to customer satisfaction and value propositions, all of these research agendas allow an opportunity to communicate with customers/potential customers and raise awareness. Even if we do not explicitly ask questions about the brand itself, it’s part of our professional DNA as researchers to ensure that we meet our responsibility to positively represent our client when communicating with these respondents – so as to (at the very least) protect the reputation of our client’s brand.
An array of marketing mediums ensure that we meet the goals we set ourselves in getting our message across and reaching our target audience – ranging from branded products, literature and POS materials, through to posters, banners, newspapers, trade magazines, television adverts and internet websites (to further examine some creative design ideas, you can view images of multitudinous campaigns at www.toxel.com).
This week alone has seen my involvement in several projects centred on this ever-present theme of advertising and, whilst I’d like to conclude that research outcomes have offered me a foolproof insight into surefire campaign approaches, I’m afraid I can’t quite claim that to be the case. In practice, every company needs to assess their (often inter-related) unique target markets and end-goals thoroughly, to create a powerful and effective bespoke solution to the continual challenge of raising both brand awareness and perception. Unfortunately, ad-hoc choices based around a “gut feeling” of what might work, in short, might work – and that’s the point. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process to invest in any such campaign and, to avoid unnecessary risk-taking, we shouldn’t launch into these blindly – careful planning is imperative.
Led from research experiences thus far, as a starting point, my advice is to seek thorough answers to the following 3 questions (although possibly not at the same time):
- Who is my target market?
- How do I reach them?
- What do they want?
Most interestingly, it is the first question which is most understated in practice and actually, it is the pre-cursor to the others. Only too often, we see that it is sometimes a pre-agreed business plan or budget allocation which sets our creative minds spinning – and very like the 3-D drawings we saw earlier, our own preconceptions offer a sometimes misleading perspective. As a result, possibly in our understandable eagerness to reach our customers, our focus naturally tends to shift to the latter two questions which effectively cover off questions we want to know to set the ball in motion. Questions such as “What do they want?” “Which are their preferred advertising mediums?” “How can we improve these or better our competition?”
Whilst these are crucial questions, a fundamental backdrop to bettering our understanding is “Who is our audience?” “Do their needs differ based on different parts of this market or are they similar?” “Do we need to consider multiple avenues of communication to suitably engage with different parts of our market?”…and so forth.
Collectively, all questions we ask should strike the correct balance between what we would like to ask in relation to our preconceptions and what we need to know to make suitably informed decisions – even if the outcome directs us to completely review our current strategies and plans (better to risk knowing about a failed plan than to risk implementing a plan which will fail!).
In short, as our “Pavement Picasso” might commend – our chalk is any problem drawn-out or created by a business; the pavement is our canvas or research design to lay out the problem; the passers-by are our audience feeding us their thoughts and opinions……whilst we, the researchers, seek to ensure that our perspectives are not skewed by any illusions…so that we can help reveal the real picture.
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Branding, Corporate Positioning, Customer Satisfaction, Segmentation, Simi Dhawan, Thursday Night Insight |
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Good news for market researchers everywhere! After a difficult 2009 for many industries around the world, there is some positive news: According to the latest survey of Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) members, half as many respondents expect to cut their market research spend this year compared with 2009.
Last year, more than 20% of members questioned said they would make less or much less use of market research. For 2010 that figure is just 10%. Meanwhile those who envisage greater or much greater use of market research has risen by six points to 45%.
A recent survey by Casro, the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, also found optimism to be returning in the US market research industry. 78% of Casro members who were surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2009 said that better times had already returned or would do so in 2010.
Returning to the MENG study, and of the 533 MENG members surveyed, a quarter expect their overall marketing budgets to increase in 2010. A similar number, 27%, expect further declines – although it must be noted that more than 50% expected cutbacks when asked last year. Almost half of respondents believe their marketing budgets will remain unchanged in 2010.
Some of the top findings from the report include:
- 66% of marketers are more optimistic about business opportunity in 2010; 28% view 2010 similarly to 2009, while only 6% are less optimistic about the outlook.
- Social media remains hot with 70% of marketers planning new social media initiatives in 2010. Interestingly, social media, twitter and social networking ranked as the top “buzz words marketers are most tired of hearing.”
- Regarding companies’ presence on social media sites, large companies are more likely to have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace; smaller companies rely more on LinkedIn.
- “Marketing ROI” moved from the third most important marketing concept in last year’s survey to the number one spot in this year’s survey, followed by “Customer Retention” and “Brand Loyalty.”
- China was still ranked as the top geographic opportunity for growth, followed by India, Latin America and Brazil.
Find out about the opportunities that China could present your business by emailing beijing@b2binternational.com
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
We all know that you may need to adapt your winning product in some way in order to successfully build its position in a foreign market. Cultural, linguistic, religious factors and the like, all help to influence people and to shape what they do or don’t like, prefer or desire.
Let’s take an extreme example. Many Westerners are partial to a Kit Kat. In the UK, Kit Kat is the number one brand both as a confectionery item and as a biscuit (or cookie). In Canada and the US, Kit Kats also feature in the top ten chocolate bar brands. But how would you British, Canadians or Americans fancy a soy sauce-flavoured Kit Kat? Perhaps not licking your lips quite so much now, are you?
In Japan, however, Nestlé has created a whole host of unusual flavours for its Kit Kat bars – among them soy sauce (the most popular nationwide), miso, green tea, wasabi, yubari melon, baked corn, sweet potato, cucumber, pickled plum, bubblegum and mango varieties. And it seems to have worked: Kit Kat is the No. 1 confectionery brand in Japan too.
Many of the flavours are considered regional, and therefore only sold in the Japanese region for which they were created – and often for a limited time only. This has built the brand into something of a phenomenon, with domestic travellers snapping up the unusual varieties as souvenirs or gifts.
A clever marketing strategy, right? Not only have they adapted their product to suit local tastes, they have chosen an unusual distribution strategy and created some real excitement around the brand. It’s certainly an interesting approach and gives us all, ahem, food for thought….!
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