A Brand Leader’s view of what makes a Good Advertising Agency

28 April 2013

It seems that clients are firing ad agencies very quickly these days.

I’m half way old enough that I’m straddling the fence on whether agencies are as good as the old days. But it seems that there are pitches going on constantly, and yet no one is really wanting to look themselves the mirror and say “Am I part of the problem?”

I’ve been brought in a few times to look at the situation. The first thing I normally tell the Brand Leader is “you have to fire yourself first” and then see if the agency is still bad. The best clients respect the process, the agency and their own judgment. And yet, most Brand Leaders under-estimate the role the client plays in getting to great creative. As a Brand Leader, if you knew that showing up better would get you better advertising, do you think you could? If there are 100 steps in every advertising development stage and you show up OK at each step, how are you possibly thinking you’ll end up with a GREAT ad at the end?

How do you fire Yourself?

When a relationship gets off the rails, what I do is an Advertising “Audit” where we look at the behaviors and processes in getting to the advertising.

What’s your brief look like? Is it fundamentally sound? I’ve seen 8 page briefs that don’t even have a benefit or any consumer insights. And I’ve seen other clients that say “we didn’t write a brief for that one, we just phoned it in”. Even though the media has changed in this modern world, the fundamentals around writing briefs should not. You need to distill your strategy, either from your brand plan or what’s in your head down to 1 page. Here’s a story on how to write a better creative brief. How to Write an Effective Creative Brief
What is your behavior like at advertising meetings? My belief is that advertising is a balance of freedom and control and many clients I see give too much freedom in areas they should control and too much control in areas they should give more freedom. You should control the strategy and decision-making, but you should give freedom to the creative expression and execution of the work. I’ll observe tone to see how motivating you are, how you communicate and how you make decisions in the meeting that lead to the direction you give. My view is that one person should do all the feedback and that the feedback should be motivating yet it really should be directive as to how to improve the work. Too many clients try to be motivating but fear giving direction so they opt for vague. The agency walks away not even knowing what’s next. Here’s an article on how to Judge Advertising: How to Judge Advertising
How do you make decisions? As long as it’s consistent and transparent, there is room for latitude, but the agency just has to know so they can adjust. Too many times, clients don’t want the agency to see how decisions get made. If you have a consensus culture, what I recommend is that during the creative meeting, you take a 30 minute break where your team gathers its feedback and then assigns one person to take the agency through. If your culture is top down, and potentially the real decision maker isn’t even in the room, I recommend that one senior agency person accompany you through the internal approval process. They can listen and respond to the comments directly. And usually, they are better at selling creative work than you are. As long as they are aligned with what you want, the tag-team approach should be even better.

The reason you want to “fire yourself first” is it allows you to now see clearly if it really is the agency or if it was just you. The added benefit is that if you still see that the agency is not where you need them to be and you still want to fire them, then at least you will be showing up better to your new agency, rather than that dysfunctional client before the audit.

What Makes for a Good Advertising Agency?

I come at this from the vantage of a client, having spent 20 years working as a Brand Leader. I’m not an Ad Agency guy, never having worked a day at an agency in my life. But I’ve seen some great agencies and some not so good. Here’s my list of what makes a Great Agency:

They work for you, not your boss. While your boss pays them and has the final say, they still know you are the client. Nothing worse than a client services person constantly trying to go above your head. The best way for an agency to earn your trust is to consistently demonstrate that they work for you. That trust will earn them a seat, along side you, at the table of your boss. You will know they have your back and will support your recommendation, not cave at the whim of your boss.
They understand your goals, your issues and your strategies. They write briefs that are on your brand strategy and deliver work that expresses your brand strategy. Yes, The modern agency struggles to write advertising strategies that align to the Brand’s strategy. Just as though clients are not trained enough in the areas of strategy and planning, I see the same thing on the Agency side. As margins are squeezed, the first casualty is strategic planning. Yet, that might be one of the most important. I’d prefer to have a great strategic planner on the brand than have 5 client services people each show up taking notes at meetings.
They make work that drives demand and sells more widgets, not work that just wins awards. Awards are part of the agency world–helping to motivate creative people and establishing the agency reputation in the market. I once had an agency person say: ”we can’t write that strategy because it will make for boring work”. The balance of winning awards and selling more widgets always has to side with selling more widgets. I’m really tired of agencies starting off creative meetings with the “we are so excited” line. You want an agency that comes into a room and says “we have an ad for you that will sell more of your product”.
They give options. And they don’t always 100% agree. Come on agencies. We are in year 100 of making ads and you haven’t figured out yet that the clients like options. Each option has to deliver the strategy. Nothing worse than agencies who tear apart the brief and deliver options for each part of the brief. (e.g. here’s one for the younger audience, here’s one that does fast really well and here’s one that does long-lasting) That’s not creative options, that’s now strategic options. We collectively decide on the strategy before the creative process begins, not meander the strategy during the creative process. As clients, options give us comfort. But even more importantly, options treat us with respect that we can still make the right decision.
Agencies are not territorial. They are transparent allowing you open and free access to their planners and creative people. It’s really the account people here. Good account people allow you to communicate directly with the creative team. Most great creative teams that I have worked with want direct access to the client, rather than have it be filtered through a series of contact reports.
They adjust and easily take feedback. Agencies serve at the pleasure of the client. Every client is unique and the best agencies adjust to that style. Not only the company but even the individual. I used to sit with my Account leader every quarter and go through how we can each get better. Some clients aren’t even doing annual agency performance reviews.
They are positive and already motivated to work on your brand. While I do encourage clients to motivate their agencies, it’s much easier to motivate someone who is already motivated. When I see a 25-year old account person openly complaining, I see that as a problem with the culture of the agency, not a problem for the client to have to figure out. I’m now on the service side as a consultant, and we can never openly complain.
They teach. When I was a new Brand Manager, my client services person (Leslie Boscheratto) taught me more about advertising than any client should have to learn. In fact, I’m still embarrassed at how little I knew, yet thrilled at how much I learned from that team at Bates back in the mid 90s.
They act like you are their only client. And you feel important to them, no matter what share your budget is of the overall agency. Why sign you up as a client and then keep reminding you that they have Coke, Budweiser or Dove. When you are with me, treat me as though I’m the most important client in the world.
Trusted Advisor: They are a trusted advisor who will give you real advice, not just on advertising but on your performance and on the overall brand. Most senior agency folks have seen plenty of clients come and go. Never be afraid to find a quiet moment with your agency person and ask two simple questions: ”what can I do better” and “what do your best clients do that I could learn from”.

Here’s the flip side to the story with an article I wrote a few months ago on “The worst type of Clients”. To read that click on: Ten Worst Types of Advertising Clients

You’ll notice the one thing missing from my list is “They Make Great Work”. That’s a given because that’s the only reason you hire an agency. Yes, some agencies make better work than others. But even those agencies that make great work, also make bad work. And if we were to look at why, it would likely start with the relationship, processes or interactions. So if the client can fix what they are doing wrong and the agency can show up right, then you should be able to make good work together.

Making great advertising is simple, but very hard to do.

Here’s a presentation on How to Be a Better Client

How will Brand Leaders Win with Media in the Future?

26 April 2013

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I’m not a media expert at all. So there will be no answers here, just questions about where I might be confused about the future or where I might see an impact to my media thinking. I come at everything through the lens of the Brand Leader. My questions are more about the impact on consumer behaviour and how the brand can win through media in the future. If you’re a media expert, feel free to add solutions. At this point, like most Brand Leaders, I’m a bit confused and I just have questions, not really solutions!

1. Will people watch even more TV in the future?

I love asking this question because it usually confuses people, because of the expected downward trend of TV viewership over the last 10 years. At first, this question might sound crazy, but with more tablets and instant internet access everywhere, we should expect a shift to watching more TV, not less. This year, books are up 13% due to increased readership via tablets. Will we see that impact to TV? More access means more use. If you’re on the subway, an airplane, waiting to pick up your kids or on your lunch hour, wouldn’t it be great just to catch an episode of Modern Family? Now you can. And while this is at the early stages with early adopters, we’ll quickly see it going mass over the next few years. But the TV model will have to change. Consumers won’t want to be watching 8 minutes of TV ads. It seems people see their computer as their personal space and they find intrusive advertising even more annoying on their computer than they do their TV. We need a new model for TV advertising–I haven’t seen it yet.

As a Brand Leader, I recommend that you don’t give up on TV just yet. Maybe it will be on a tablet or a phone. Just be a bit more creative. Maybe you need to make your spots more interesting to take advantage of viral shares. Make sure your spots are more engaging so people want to watch rather than just tolerate. Be open to integrating your brand right into the shows, or maybe go back to the past when brand sponsorship kicked off every 1950s TV show.

2. How can Advertisers Capture the Internet Babies (12-22 years old) as they move into adulthood?

As someone said, this segment never “goes on-line” because they are “always on-line”. They are never “off-line”. Last year, my 14-year-old daughter had 3 friends over and when teens visit, you have to expect a bit of excess noise. All of a sudden, there was silence for 20 minutes. I thought they must have left but then I see four teenagers all sitting at the kitchen table texting away, not a word being said. Complete silence. This generation lives on-line and put their lives on-line. It remains confusing as to their true view of privacy–do they want more or do they just figure their lives are an open book.

This group has their priorities shaped by the age of instant access. They want everything now–sports scores, rumours, or videos of what they just saw on TV. They are multi-tasking so much it’s arguable they never give anything complete focus. When they watch TV, they have the laptop up, their cell phone in hand–navigating Facebook, twitter, texting, instagram and Skype all at once. No wonder ADD is growing. They choose Apps over software, expecting an App solution for any problem they have. They see advertising as completely ubiquitous and are more open to brands than other generations. But how they consume media is completely different. E-Commerce is an expectation, as they buy songs, games and movies or a new phone case at a whim.

As a Brand Leader, we need help to figure out how to win with this group when they turn 25? I know as a parent of this age group, I have no wisdom I can pass on. Maybe someone in this age group can help us out, because I’m utterly confused.

3. Can Newspapers even Survive?

So far, newspapers haven’t figured out the profit model between the traditional broadsheet and the on-line versions. Making it free was likely a mistake, and makes it hard to turn back. If your newspaper has been free on-line since 1997, I’ll be pissed off if you now expect me to pay for it. If I’m interested in the topic, I’ll just Google the same headline and find a free version. As long as newspaper publishers see a direct link between the actual broadsheet and the newspaper they run the risk of extinction. If you think a newspaper is a collection of amazing journalists, you’re off to a good start. But if you think it has to be a broadsheet, then you’re completely lost.

News now is instant, ubiquitous and more casual/social. The tweeting that went on during the US presidential debate (e.g. Big Bird) is evidence of how social media drives the story. I don’t need to read a journalists take on it. I already know. By the time the broadsheet version of the newspaper is ready, this story is now old news and even has had 12-18 more hours to evolve into a completely new story line. The broadsheet can’t keep up. I love the business model for the Huffington Post. What started as on-line political opinion is becoming a source for broader news–entertainment, sports and lifestyle stories. With more publishers going without a printed version (e.g. Newsweek just announced they’re cancelling their printed version), this has to be the future.

As a Brand Leader, I’d recommend moving your Newspaper spend on-line or even choose other mainstream media options. You’ve put up with the bad production quality for 100 years–is there really anyone under 50 still reading.

4. Can Advertisers Figure Out how to Win in the New World?

The Commodity Brands that have funded mainstream media remain completely confused.

Traditional media has always been funded by advertisers whether that means TV ads for 8-12 minutes per hour, newspapers and magazines with 25-40% of the space for ads and radio with ads every second song. Traditional Media has been free as long as you were willing to put up with advertising interrupting your usage of the media. That ability to interrupt consumers allowed the Commodity Brands (dish soap, diapers, toothpaste, razor blades and batteries) to break through to consumers, as they sat captive and watching their favourite TV show.

But New Media is free, unbridled and fairly commercial free. In general, a lot of the advertising still just sits there along the sidelines where we don’t click. While the high interest and high involvement brands have started to figure out how to use the New Media, the Commodities remain in a state of confusion. If you want to see what confusion looks like, go see Head and Shoulder’s twitter page with 320 followers or Bounce’s Facebook page “where they talk about fresh laundry” (their words, not mine)

These Commodity brands need to either get people more involved, which Dove is the best in class brand, or they need dial-up the potential importance for a core target which Tide has done a good job. As we see many of the new media companies (Facebook) struggling to figure out how to make more money from Advertisers, there needs to be a step up in creativity to find new solutions. Banner ads that just sit along the side aren’t going to do much for the advertiser or the media owner. If social media sites want to win over these commodity brands, they need find that right balance of interrupting consumers without annoying their membership.

5. Are there too many Social Media Options?

I know there are still new social media options every month, but most of these feel fairly niche. In the mainstream social media sites, we are seeing that winners have emerged and they are turning into leaders as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linked In and Wikipedia all now dominant in their given area. It looks impossible for a new entrant to really challenge them. If a new entrant were to try for leap-frog strategy, these leaders would just duplicate the innovation and kill the challenger. Every industry has gone through a similar pattern: early innovation, divergence of brand options, then a few power brands emerge, and then a power play where the strong squeeze out the weak through mergers and acquisitions until there are a handful of brand owners remaining.

As these Social Media sites look to turn their power into wealth, we will see a shift from fighting for members to fighting for advertiser dollars. This will likely force a convergence of social media options where the strongest brands try to squeeze out the smaller sites. There are already small signs in Google’s strategy they are thinking this way–trying to be the one stop shop. Mergers are always tend to surprise us, almost the unimaginable. Can you imagine Facebook buying LinkedIn? Who knows, maybe we’ll even see a merger between social media brands and mainstream networks. AOL already tried it with Time-Warner. But can you imagine Google buying CNN, Facebook buying MTV or NBC buying the Huffington Post? If you’re an Advertiser, expect some uncertainty in the next few years and expect a few mergers.

6. Will New Media people ever be able to Convince Brand Leaders of what they Should do?

Marketers love what they know. It feels safe. The people who spend 100% of their lives living and breathing new media know what Brand Leaders don’t know. The problem is there is no bridge between the Brand Leader and New Media. New Media don’t really get the marketers, don’t understand their motivations and how they think. So they just keep barking and no one is listening. Here are some tips: Start with the consumer and map out how they interact. Don’t start with the media. Demonstrate to me that you understand my brand: who is my target, how do they shop, what is my main benefit, the key issues I face, strategic options available and how my brand makes money. Show me things other brands in my predicament have done and the results. Be fundamental in the way you talk with me. Look at how I was trained, strategy first, tactics second, execution third. Go in that order so I can follow along. Don’t show me what Bud did on the Super Bowl. Teach me as much as you can, because if I have more knowledge I’ll be more comfortable. And help me to sell it in, because everyone above me is even more confused than I am. Right now, we are a little scared and we’re doing this because we know we should, not because we know what we’re doing. Help us.

When It Comes to New Media, Brand Leaders still need to be Fundamentally Sound

For a Media Overview that can help Brand Leaders get better media plans by learning more about both traditional and digital options, read the following presentation:

How to go Deeper on the Analysis of your Brand

21 April 2013

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Too many times, marketers come to conclusions based on pure instincts and put them forward to their management team and the set of peers who might agree or disagree. The problem with instincts is that because it’s really just an opinion, with nothing to substantiate it. And even if you are right, you’ll have a hard time convincing others, so anyone with a counter view, retains their own opinion and the team remains divided. Even if they go along with it, they remain a quiet dissenter just waiting for it to fail and waiting to say “I told you so”.

When you don’t go deep on your thinking, I call it surface thinking. I equate “surface thinking” to “surface cleaning”. When your mother is coming over to visit in half an hour, you “surface clean” by quickly take everything and jam into the drawers or closets where she won’t be able to see. You never really clean up. The same thing holds with “surface thinking”. Yes, you think, but it stays at the opinion level. You don’t dig in to the data, you don’t listen to others or go do the necessary research to back up your opinion. You never really go deep enough to uncover the deep rich insightful conclusions. And everyone knows it.

Opinions are great. Every leader should have one and be able to articulate their views. But it’s best when you can layer it in fact. One good rule for communicating your opinion is something I learned in my first year Logic class: Premise, Premise, Conclusion. Try it out, next time you’re engaged in debate. Just make sure the premise is backed by fact.

So what happens when you just do “surface thinking”:

The programs bomb, and because you don’t know what elements of the program really failed, you throw out the entire program—the strategy was wrong, the tactics didn’t do what you hoped, the goals weren’t set up right and even the agency did a bad job. You throw it all out, and might even fire the agency.
There’s management doubt from your boss and your peers. They can clearly see you don’t go deep, so they remain unconvinced or even confused. They might confront you with their own opinion, but then we just end up with two talking heads that refuse to go deep. But, to protect themselves against a strategy they aren’t quite sure of, they subconsciously short-change you on investment or even on support from their team.
When you just operate at the surface level, when you’re debating a topic, instead of the team going deep and seeking out real and rich facts to support one side or the other, the conversation moves sideways instead of deep. What you’ll notice is you’ll be talking about distribution at the surface level, and because no one in the room wants to go deep, they say “well what about the new cheery flavor, I took it home and my wife didn’t like it, are we sure it’s going to work” or “this new golf shirt for the sales meeting is very cool, I want one of these puppies”. The leadership team spins, round and round, never diving deep enough to solve the issues, just casually moves on to new issues. This is how bad decisions or no decisions get made.

How to go Deeper

The best way go deep on your analysis, ask “so what does that mean” at least five times and watch the information gets richer and deeper.

Looking at the Gray’s Cookie example above, intuitively, it makes sense that going after Health Food Stores could be one option put on the table. But to say you need to be better, without digging in remains an unsubstantiated opinion. As you dig deeper, you see that going after Health Food stores, who are highly independent is labor intensive and the payback is just not there. Yes, you’re way under-developed. But it’s more expensive than other options. When you bring the option of going after mass into the mix, which is head office driven, you start to see a higher return on the investment. This is just a fictional example, but look how the thinking gets richer at each stage. Force yourself to keep asking “so what does this mean” or “why” pushing the analysis harder and harder.

Thinking Time Questions that will Help you Go Deeper

The first analysis is “What do we know?” with 5 key questions to help you sort through your analysis:

What do we know? This should be fact based and you know it for sure.
What do we assume? Your educated/knowledge based conclusion that helps us bridge between fact, and speculation.
What we think? Based on facts, and assumptions, you should be able to say what we think will happen.
What do we need to find out? There may be unknowns still.
What are we going to do? It’s the action that comes out of this thinking.

It forces you to start grouping your learning, forces you to start drawing conclusions and it enables your reader to separate fact (the back ground information) from opinion (where you are trying to take them)

The second type of analysis is “Where are we?” with 5 key questions to help you sort through your analysis:

Where are we?
Why are we here?
Where could we be?
How can we get there?
What do we need to do to get there?

These questions help frame your thinking as you go into a Brand Plan. The first question helps the analysis, the second with the key issues, the third frames the vision and objectives, the fourth gets into strategy and tactics and the fifth gets into the execution. My challenge to you: update it every 3-6 months, or every time you do something major. You’ll be surprised that doing something can actually impact ”where are we?” on the analysis.

The Deeper the Thinking, the Smarter the Leader

To read more on How to Analyze Your Brand, read the presentation below:

How to create a Brand Strategy Road Map

14 April 2013

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Master Brand Strategy Road Map

Having the brand road map on one page can help align everyone that works on a brand. This is especially useful when managing a Branded House or Master Brand where there are various people in your organization that each run a small part of the brand. The road map helps guide everyone and keep them aligned.

Here’s the one I use that has all the key elements that help define the brand:

Key Elements

Brand Vision: It’s the End in Mind Achievement. What do you want the brand to become? Think 10 years out: if you became this one thing, you would know that you are successful. Ideally it is Qualitative (yet grounded in something) and quantitative (measurable) It should be motivating and enticing to get people focused.
Purpose: Start with what’s in you: Why do you exist? Why do you wake up in the morning? What’s your purpose or cause behind your brand? Very personal and connects to your own story. In the spirit of Simon Sinek: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.
Brand Idea: A Beloved Brand is an idea that’s worth Loving. As Brands become more loved, they go beyond being just a product and they become an idea that fulfills consumers’ emotional needs in the consumers life.
Five Connectors With the Consumer: Under the Brand Idea are 5 Sources of Connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including 1) the brand promise 2) the strategic choices you make 3) the brand’s ability to tell their story 4) the freshness of the product or service and 5) the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Here’s an example of how these 5 connections would look for the Special K brand.

Brand Values should come from the DNA, and act as guideposts to ensure that the behavior of everyone in the organization is set to deliver upon the Brand’s promise. How do you want your people to show up? What type of service do you want? How much emphasis on innovation? What type of people do you want to hire? What behavior should be rewarded and what behavior is off-side. Having the right Brand Values will help you answer these questions. The Brand Values become an extension of what the Brand Leader wants the brand to stand for. To read more this subject read the following: Brand = Culture
Goals: While the vision serves as a 10 year big goal, it’s also important to have annual goals to push and challenge everyone in the organization. It’s a great way to ensure milestones on the pathway to the vision are being hit. Goals should be S.M.A.R.T. which means they should be specific, measurable, attainable,relevant and time-sensitive.
Strategies: These are potential choices you must make in HOW to get to the vision. Good strategy has focus, early win, leverage and a gateway to something even bigger. Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planners who can see connections. There are four main types of strategy: 1) consumer oriented 2) competitive oriented 3) operational and 4) financial. My recommendation is that Master Brands have 3-5 key strategies, but never more. This forces you to focus.
Tactics: Activities and executions that fit under the strategies. This could be advertising, media, sales, events, social media and professional influence. I recommend focusing on 3 key tactical areas per strategy, continuing to ensure focus.

With this format, having it all on one page forces focus and allows you to keep a tight control over those that will be working under the Master Brand.

House of Brands

When working with a house of brands, where you have multiple brand names under one corporate name (P&G, Kraft, General Mills and Johnson and Johnson) the brand plan would look different. The big differences are the teams are smaller and the culture of each team usually follows that of the corporate name.

Here’s a good example of a Brand Plan that would fit within the House of Brands and here is the related story on How to Write a Brand Plan

To read more on How to Think Strategically, read the presentation below:

What to do when your Brand is Stuck at “Like It”?

7 April 2013

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Don’t feel bad. Most brands are at the Like It stage

You have been able to carve out a niche and be a chosen brand against a proliferation of brands in the category. And you have good shares, moderate profits and most brand indicators are reasonably healthy. It’s just that no one loves you. There’s nothing wrong with being a Liked brand. All the power to you. But just know that you might be leaving good money on the table.

Beloved = Power = Growth = Profit

The Brand Love Curve

In the consumer’s mind, brands sit on a Brand Love Curve, with brands going from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and finally becoming a Beloved Brand for Life. At the Beloved stage, demand becomes desire, needs become cravings, thinking is replaced with feelings. Consumers become outspoken fans. It’s this connection that helps drive power for your brand: power versus competitors, versus customers, versus suppliers and even versus the same consumers you’re connected with. The farther along the curve, the more power for the brand. It’s important that you understand where your brand sits on the Love Curve and begin figuring out how to move it along towards becoming a Beloved Brand.

With each stage of the Brand Love Curve, the consumer will see your brand differently. The worst case is when consumers have “no opinion” of your brand. They just don’t care. It’s like those restaurants you stop at in the middle of no-where that are called “restaurant”. In those cases, there is no other choice so you may as well just name it restaurant. But in highly competitive markets, you survive by being liked, but you thrive by being loved. Be honest with yourself as to what stage you are at, and try to figure out how to be more loved, with a vision of getting to the Beloved Brand stage.

The Like It Stage

At the Like It stage, the funnel is fairly strong at the top but quickly narrows at purchase and has a very weak bottom part of the brand funnel. As people see your brand as a good rational choice, they might consider it and use it, but it lacks separation from the other brands and it’s missing that emotional connection. Brands stuck here usually focus on what they do (features) and not what the consumer wants (benefits) In the funnel, you’ll see pretty strong awareness and consideration but you’ll lose out at the purchase stage and have no real repeat or loyalty at all. You’ll notice fairly high trade spend just so you can keep your share going–and you use price as a weapon to close the deal. The best strategy here is to begin to Separate Your Brand from the clutter of the market, by establishing a brand promise based on benefits–rational and emotional. A brand like Dove was at the Like It stage back in the 1990s. Only when they could shift from talking about themselves to talking about the consumers would they be able to establish more love for their brand.

Consumers see your brand as a functional and rational choice they make. They tried it and it makes sense so they buy it, use it and they do enjoy it. It meets a basic need they have. They likely prefer it versus another brand, but they think it is better, cheaper or easier to use. Or your mom told you to use it. But, consumers don’t have much of an emotional connection or feeling about the brand. Where Indifferent is really bad, you’re ordinary, which is just a little bit better. Overall, consumers see you brand in the “it will do” space.

The Five Sources of Brand Love

Under the Brand Idea are 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Everyone wants to debate what makes a great brand–whether it’s the product, the advertising, the experience or through consumers. It is not just one or the other–it’s the collective connection of all these things that make a brand beloved.

Why is your Brand stuck at the Like It Stage:

If your brand is stuck at Like It, look to the five sources of love to see if you have a weakness.

Protective Brand Leaders means Caution: While many of these brands at the Like It are very successful brands, they get stuck because of overly conservative and fearful Brand Managers, who pick middle of the road strategies and execute “ok” ideas. They do a bad job at either telling the story or launching new products. On top of this, Brand Managers who convince themselves that “we stay conservative because it’s a low-interest category” should be removed. Low interest category means you need even more to captivate the consumer.
We are rational thinking Marketers: Those marketers that believe they are strictly rational are inhibiting their brands. The brand managers get all jazzed on claims, comparatives, product demonstration and doctor recommended that they forget about the emotional side of the purchase decision. Claims need to be twisted into benefits—both rational and emotional benefits. Consumers don’t care about what you do until you care about what they need. Great marketers find that balance of the science and art of the brand. Ordinary marketers get stuck with the rational only. The promise stays very rational, and the execution of the brand story becomes rather bland.
New Brand with Momentum: As a new brand, you might not have found a way to use a unique brand promise to separate yourself from other competitors. Stage 2 of a new brand innovation is ready to expand from the early adopters to the masses. The new brand begins to differentiate itself in a logical way to separate themselves from the proliferation of copycat competitors. Consumers start to go separate ways as well. Retailers might even back one brand over another. Throughout the battle, the brand carves out a base of consumers.
There’s a Major Leak: If you look at the brand buying system, you’ll start to see a major leak at some point where you keep losing customers. Most brands have some natural flaw—whether it’s the concept, the product, taste profile ease of use or customer service. Without analyzing and addressing the leak, the brand gets stuck. People like it, but refuse to love it. That leak could be in the freshness or experience stage.
Brand changes their Mind every year: Brands really exist because of the consistency of the promise. When the promise and the delivery of the promise changes every year it’s hard to really connect with what the brand is all about. A brand like Wendy’s has changed their advertising message every year over the past 10 years. The only consumers remaining are those who like their burgers, not the brand. The story never gets told in a consistent manner that delivers the brand promise. It fails to catch on, so instead of just fixing the communication the brand also changes the brand promise.
Positional Power–who needs Love: there are brands that have captured a strong positional power, whether it`s a unique technology or distribution channel or even value pricing advantage. Brands like Microsoft or Wal-Mart or even many of the pharmaceuticals products don`t see value in the idea of being loved. The problem is when you lose the positional power, you lose your customer base completely. The brand with just positional power becomes complacent and lazy–with a culture that does not create a brand experience that surpasses the promise.
Brands who capture Love, but no Life Ritual: There are brands that quickly capture the imagination but somehow fail to capture a routine embedded in the consumers’ life, usually due to some flaw. Whether it’s Krispy Kreme, Pringles or even Cold Stone, there’s something inherent in the brand’s format or weakness that holds it back and it stays stuck at Loved but just not often enough. So, you forget you love them. The strategy of linking the brand’s promise to the other connection points of the brand.

Indicators that you’re at the Like It Stage

Low Conversion to Sales. While the brand looks healthy in terms of awareness and equity scores, the brand is successful in becoming part of the consumer’s consideration set, but it keeps losing out to the competition as the consumer goes to the purchase stage. It usually requires a higher trade spend to close that sale which cuts price and margins.
Brand Doesn’t Feel Different: A great advertising tracking score to watch is “made the brand seem different” which helps to separate itself from the pack, many times speaking to the emotional part of the messaging.
Stagnant Shares: Your brand team is happy when they hold onto their share, content to grow with the category.
High Private Label Sales: If you only focus on the ingredients and the rational features of the product, the consumer will start to figure out they get the same thing with the private label and the share starts to creep up to 20% and higher.

Why Would you want to get to the Love It Stage

As you become more loved, you can use that love consumers have for your brand to drive more power for your brand. That power may be against retailers, other competitors, suppliers, media and key influencers. As well as a power over the very consumers that love your brand. With more power, a more loved Brand has 8 ways it can add profit.

In terms of pricing, you can charge premiums and any change in pricing is relatively more Inelastic. Loyal consumers, weakened channels pay premiums, and trading up where offered. More engaged employees deliver better experience—even more premiums. This gives your brand an opportunity to drive higher margins.

With costs, a more loved brand becomes more Efficient and Powerful. You’ll be able to achieve Economies of scale. Suppliers cut costs due to volume & wanting brand in portfolio. Efficient media spend, free media through search, earned and social. Gov’t willingly subsidize. Partners give favorable terms. This gives your brand lower costs–both in terms of product costs and marketing costs.

A more loved brand can drive market share by pushing the Momentum and finding that Tipping Point. Crowds draw crowds. Power of media (search + social + earned) keeps brand in the conversation with heavy influence. Competitors can’t respond to the momentum. You can steal share from weakened competitors who have no love, or get current users to use even more.

A more loved brand can enter new markets. Loyalists Will Follow Wherever: Loyal users will follow where brand goes, and doors will open to new ventures. The idea of brand no longer tied to product, but to how brand makes you feel.

As the brand is more loved, the P&L statement looks a lot stronger–higher markets, lower costs, higher share and new market entries all add up to much higher profitability. It’s worth finding that love.

How to get to past the Like It stage

Focus on action and drive Consideration and Purchase: stake out certain spaces in the market creating a brand story that separates your brand from the clutter. Begin to sell the solution, not just the product. Build a Bigger Following: Invest in building a brand story that helps to drive for increased popularity and get new consumers to use the brand.
Begin to Leverage those that already Love: Focus on the most loyal consumers and drive a deeper connection by driving the routine which should increase usage frequency. On top of that, begin cross selling to capture a broader type of usage.
Love the Work: It is time to dial-up the passion that goes into the marketing execution. Beloved Brands have a certain magic to them. But “Like It’ brands tend to settle for ok, rather than push for great. With better work, you’ll be able to better captivate and delight the consumers. If you don’t love the work, how do you expect the consumer to love your brand.
Fix the Leak: Brands that are stuck have something embedded in the brand or the experience that is holding back the brand. It frustrates consumers and restricts them from fully committing to making the brand a favourite. Be proactive and get the company focused on fixing this leak.
Build a Big Idea: Consumers want consistency from the brand—constant changes to the advertising, packaging or delivery can be frustrating. Leverage a Brand Story and a Big Idea that balances rational and emotional benefits helps to establish a consistency for the brand and help build a much tighter relationship.

So be content with being Liked. But just realize that you’re leaving profits behind for someone else to capture.

If you are stuck at Like It, then you are leaving money on the table

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

How to Determine your Brand’s Health using Brand Funnels

31 March 2013

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Brand Funnels

Every brand should understand the details of their Brand Funnel–what’s causing any strength, weakness, changes versus last year or gaps versus competitors. A classic funnel would measure awareness, familiar, consider, purchase, repeat and loyal. But in the change of consumer behavior over the last 10 years, I would now add SEARCH between consider and purchase.

At the very least, you should be measuring Awareness, Purchase and Loyalty rates. While sales, share and profits are the obvious measurements of a brand, they are easy to see but are the end result.

Brand Health vs Brand Wealth

When we first analyze a brand’s performance, we start by looking at the wealth of the brand and look at things like sales, share, margins. That’s a great starting point, but anyone can see those numbers. But that’s like judging someone’s health just by looking at them. You’d miss out on the cholesterol, blood pressure and the internal health an xray or MRI might show. Looking at Brand Health would include looking at how well the brand funnel performs, voice of customer, satisfaction scores and any major changes in market trends. Think of Brand Wealth as the measures you can easily see, and the Brand Health as those measures you can’t easily see.

The brand funnel provides a rich diagnosis of the true health of the brand before they even show up in share reports and provides possible indicators of future performance. Almost like a finger print, every brand has a unique brand funnel. Your brand will have certain strength as well as leaks in the funnel.

Analyzing Brand Funnels

Here are the five steps to analyzing the brand funnels.

First take a look at the absolute Brand Funnel scores, compare them to last year, compare to competitors and versus the category norms. An Indifferent brand will have a skinny funnel, a Like It brand will have a funnel that quickly narrows near purchase. Loved Brands will have a more robust funnel, maybe with one easily identified gap. And Beloved Brands have no gaps on the funnel.
Then you want to look the Brand Funnel Ratios, finding the percent conversion from one stage to the next. To create the ratios, divide the absolute number by the number above it on the funnel. For instance in the example above, take the Familiar score of 87% and divide it by the Awareness score of 93% and the ratio conversion is 91%. That means that 91% of those who become Aware will move to Familiar.
What’s most useful is to compare the Ratios of your Brand to the Ratios of your nearest competitor. In this second part of the analysis, the ratio becomes the focus.
You then want to compare the ratios, finding the gap at each of the stages. You will start to see where your ratio will either be stronger or weaker than the comparison brand.
Analyzing the difference between the two brands finds the biggest gaps and begins telling a strategic story for the gap.

Matching the Funnel up The Brand Love Curve

Indifferent: When you are indifferent, you’ll have a very skinny funnel, starting with very little awareness and consideration. The issue is no one really knows about your brand. What could be holding your brand back is a) concept that’s not breaking through into the marketplace b) poor execution behind the awareness driving programs or c) lack of investment behind the right strategy. The strategic focus should be on driving Awareness and Consideration to establish your brand into the minds of consumers and in the marketplace. Align the brand promise and the communication of that brand promise to begin gaining customers.
Like It: At the Like It stage, the funnel is fairly strong at the top but quickly narrows at purchase and has a very weak bottom part of the brand funnel. As people see your brand as a good rational choice, they might consider it and use it, but it lacks separation from the other brands and it’s missing that emotional connection. Brands stuck here usually focus on what they do (features) and not what the consumer wants (benefits) In the funnel, you’ll see pretty strong awareness and consideration but you’ll lose out at the purchase stage and have no real repeat or loyalty at all. You’ll notice fairly high trade spend just so you can keep your share going–and you use price as a weapon to close the deal. The best strategy here is to begin to Separate Your Brand from the clutter of the market, by establishing a brand promise based on benefits–rational and emotional. A brand like Dove was at the Like It stage back in the 1990s. Only when they could shift from talking about themselves to talking about the consumers would they be able to establish more love for their brand.
Love It: At the Love It stage, the funnel starts to fill out, but might still have some gaps. Your focus should be on taking the connection consumers have with your brand and drive repeat and loyalty. Strategically, focus on ways to Tug at the Heart of your consumers so you can strengthen that connection you have. This is where you take a little bit of love and try to become a Beloved brand. And you should aggressively analyze any gaps on the funnel and attack them. Also, once you start to see strength versus one of your competitors, you can start to leverage that power to squeeze them out and attack their weaknesses on the brand funnel. When Samsung started to become a Loved Brand in the TV market, they took all that power to own the in-store environment shutting out brands like LG, Sharp and Panasonic. They shifted some spend from Awareness down to Purchase. Samsung now is using the cell phone and very emotional programs to try to shift from a little bit of love into a Beloved Brand.
Beloved Brand: At the Beloved stage, the brand funnel should be very robust, better than any competitors. With such strong funnel, the strategy shifts towards Continuing the Magic with creativity in marketing programs or Innovation in the product. The analysis here is to keep analyzing the funnel over time and versus competitors on a regular basis and any weakness is attacked immediately before a competitor can discover and utilize. A Beloved Brand like Special K with all their success, has decided to attack their original cereal formula to improve the taste.

Attack Your Gaps

I encourage brands to analyse the Leaks by looking at how the consumer might move along the brand going from Indifferent (unaware, not noticed) to Like It (interested, bought) to Love It (satisfied, repeater) and Beloved Brand for Life (Fan, outspoken). At each stage, match up what the consumer feels about the brand as well as what the possible reasoning for why they might reject the brand.

Brand Leaders like Sony, started to see cracks at the purchase stage as consumers started seeing just how much better Samsung when they were able to compare brands at the store level. In fact, people hung onto the Sony brand much longer than they should have. That’s actually a sign of the power that Beloved Brand status gives you.

Use Brand Funnels to Track and Manage the Health of Your Brand

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

How to Conduct a Key Issues Review

28 March 2013

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From my consumer-packaged-goods marketing days, I learned the discipline of asking the right questions, before moving to figure out the solution. Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They first dive deep to make sure they understand what is truly happening. Then they map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planners who can see connections. So it fits that you should do the work to figure out the right questions on the business before figuring out the right answers.

The right questions are the Key Issues.

The 5 Steps to Doing a Key issues deck:

Start with ‘Straw Dog’ Vision Statement to help frame where you want to go.
Analysis: Top 3 Drivers, Inhibitors, Risk & Opportunities.
Summarize the Brand Health vs. Wealth, cutting it at both Internal and External.
Then using the ‘straw dog’ vision as a beacon and the analysis to explain what’s happening; Brainstorm all the things getting in the way of you achieving your vision. You might come up with a list of 10=20 issues. Group them, narrow them, sort them.
Vote to Narrow to the top 3-5 Key Issues.

Straw Dog Vision Statement

A straw dog vision is really a big huge goal. Put yourself in your shoes 5-10 years out, and ask yourself what would the 3 things you want to have achieved on that date? What would give you a sense of accomplishment? I use the ‘straw dog’ version more as a place holder at this point, and would keep re-fining the vision through the long-range strategic planning process. The role of the vision within the Key Issues process is to open yourself up beyond the current day-to-day muck and get you to think bigger. This allows the issues to become bigger and more strategic.

Force Field Analysis

There are a few possible options you can use, but for real live businesses, I prefer the Force FIeld analysis: What are the factors currently driving your business? What are the factors inhibiting your business? The drivers are about momentum that you are seeing on your business and you want to keep going. The inhibitors are the things holding you back and need to be reversed or knocked down. Always keep in mind, these two factors are happening now.

When you then layer in the Opportunities and Threats, these are not happening, but could happen. The opportunities could be things such as new markets you want to enter, new technologies or an untapped area you’re seeing. You want to raise these ideas and opportunities to management in an assertive selling way. Threats have to be real, not pie in the sky maybe’s. These could be competitors coming into the market, changes in regulations and changing customer behavior.

Actions coming out of the Force Field

For drivers, you want to Continue/Enhance: Stay focused on things going right, keep accelerating and driving them. Continuous improvement.
For inhibitors, you want to Minimize/Reverse. Close the leaks, develop turnaround plans or re-focus the team against the trend.
You want to Take Advantage of the Opportunities. Build plans to mobilize the brand to see if the opportunity is a winning space for the brand.
For the Threats, you want to Avoid or build Contingency plans. Identify and measure the risk, explore plans to avoid. Fill the gap before a competitor.

For new businesses that are yet in the market, I might switch it up so that Drivers become Strengths that speaks to the assets we’re bringing to the market and Inhibitors become Weaknesses that showcase potential gaps in the business. Another good analysis for a brand that is impacted severely by the environment is a PEST analysis where you look at the Political, Economic, Social and Technological.

Deep dive on each Driver and each Inhibitor

Narrow down your list of inhibitors and then a best-in-class deck would blow out the details around each driver and inhibitor with a page or two for each. Looking at the example below, of a one-page explanation behind an Inhibitor, you want 4 key attributes on the one pager:

List out the Driver/inhibitor
Use a key visual or chart that showcases the data and facts behind the driver/inhibitor.
Tell the fact-based story with 2-3 argument points.
In the box at the bottom, you should call out a potential action to address this driver and inhibitor.

Brand Health and Wealth

A great analysis I recommend is to do a Brand Health vs Brand Wealth. Think of the wealth as things you can see connected to things like sales, shares, margins or profits. For Health, it’s the things you can’t see, like trial, repeat, processes etc. just like a human, you can’t judge the health just by looking at someone. You need to dig deep and understand below the surface. Breaking it this way gives us four key boxes

External Health: Connecting with consumers is a source of power for brands. Understand the brand funnel and It’s impact on the results. How your consumer sees your brand, starting at awareness, trial, repeat all the way down the brand funnel to brand loyalty. Build on your strengths and attack your weaknesses
External Wealth: Healthy win in the marketplace. Beloved Brands can leverage success into power and drive wealth. Beloved Brands are more efficient, higher sales, lower costs, better margins, higher over all profits.
Internal Health: What is the internal beacon that helps all employees get it and live it. The idea of the brand has to be embedded right into the culture in a consistent manner. They have to realize their impact on the end customer.
Internal Wealth: Everyone focused on Profit and Value. Assets, IP, culture, contracts, ownership. Lining up and delivering the brand promise to a clear set of objectives, helps employees see that they are contributing to and sharing in the brand wealth. Everyone should understand where and how they impact profitability.

A great example of why breaking it out this way is crucial is Apple in Q4 of 2012. if we look at traditional measures, Apple had their highest sales ever, share increased across all products, margins reached an all-time high, and yet we have to look at the Brand Health to see the stock price came crumbling down. Apple’s innovation has slowed down, the intensity of feelings among the most loyal consumers has slipped due to challenges from Samsung and they seem to lack an internal alignment going forward. Clearly the wealth of Apple exceeds the health, so the stock price began to reflect.

Key Issues

Start by looking at the Vision and Analysis and ask: what are the things getting in our way of achieving that Vision? You might hold a brainstorm with your team and start with 20 things getting in the way. Narrow it down, by starting to group things, elevate up to the next level or two and challenge to find the over-arching issue that might be made up of a few visible issues. As a guideline, there should be 3-5 key issues per brand. The crucial part of key issues is getting to the right level. If you have less, you are likely not detailed or specific enough, and if you have more…you should try to elevate some up to see if you can capture the bigger picture. Play around with it, until it feels at the right level.

Since business has a history of using warfare examples, here are three ranges of key issues for what the U.S. government might have been looking at for the Iraq war:

Too Low: How do we get more helicopters into Iraq? This is too specific or too small. Think about it, if there are other ways to get to the same goal (e.g. you could get more tanks) then the issue is too small.
Too High: How do we drive Peace in the Middle East? This is aspiration, but unrealistic. If it feels too much to chew off, then it’s too big of an issue.
Just Right: What’s the most effective way to change Regimes in Iraq? This talks closer to the overall objective…but with enough room to give strategic alternatives

Following the Gray’s Cookie Case Study example, here are the three Key Issues.

The Power of Three’s:

When I do these workshops, I force my teams tio use three’s whether it’s the driver and inhibitors or more importantly the Key Issues. I like to see the teams focus more. Forcing it down to 3 only might push them to look at the over-arching issues by looking bigger causes and issues than they first look at.

But most importantly, we ask the Key Issues in question format because the answer to that question is the strategy. So, if you narrow it down to the biggest 3 issues that lines you up to having 3 big strategies. I also recommend 3 tactics per strategy. That means, the Brand will have 9 major projects to spread the financial and people resources. Even if you had 5 strategies and 5 tactics under each, you’d exponentially be up to 25 key projects. I would bet that the quality on the execution of the 9 would exceed the execution of the 25 on the other brand.

Asking the Big Questions Leads to Big Strategies and Big Results

Here’s a learning session on Key Issues with a full case study using Gray’s cookies.

Be a Better Brand Leader by saying “Let’s cut to the Chase” more often

17 March 2013

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Cut to the Chase and Avoid the Brand Spin

Stop being that brand that keeps spinning and gets nothing done. Within most brand portfolios, there are those problem brands that just seem to spiral downward out of control. They spin, and spin and spin. Nothing gets done. Decisions don’t get made. They try something. It doesn’t work immediately. So they change course. And spin some more. Everyone thinks they have the answer, but no-one shares the same answer. And more spin.

What’s missing is a leader who will stand up to everyone on the team say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE”

Cut to the Chase with the The 40/70 Rule

I love the Colin Powell rule that when you are facing a tough decision, you need at least 40% of the information, but oddly enough, you should make the decision with no more than 70%. Once you’re in that 40-70% zone, go with your gut and make the decision.

If you make a decision with less than 40% of the information, you are shooting from the hip and you will make too many mistakes. The 70% part of the decision-making rule is what surprises many Brand Leaders. They often think that they need more than seventy percent of the information before they can make a decision. A lot of Brand Leaders want as much data as they can. Many times they hope the data will make the decision for them. But if you want the data to make the decision, then why do we need you in the Brand Leader role? Why don’t we just put the Market Research person in your job? We could pay them less and just go with the data output from the research 100% of the time.

But, in a highly competitive market, if you wait to get more than seventy percent, then the opportunity has usually passed and someone else has beaten you to the punch. A key element that supports Powell’s rule is the notion that intuition is what separates the great leaders from the average ones. Intuition is what allows us to make tough decisions, but many of us ignore our gut. Relying on too much information can stiffen a leader, paralyzing the team to seek out more data. They become afraid to make decisions. Always keep in mind that marketing is half science and half art. Don’t forget about the art. People who want certainty in their decisions end up working for other people, not leading.

So, next time you feel your team has 40-70% of the information say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE” and see if you can push them to making the best decision they can make.

Cut to the Chase with Tough Questions

One of the big spin factors is lack of alignment. Everyone at the table has their own view of what needs to be done. The team ends up paralyzed with indecision. A team moving together towards a common strategy, even if it is only a pretty good strategy, is much smarter than a team moving in three directions, with each thinking they have an amazing strategy.

Align first on the Key Issues of the Brand. In terms of analysis, there are so many ways to do it but my preference is to use a force-field analysis of Drivers and Inhibitors. Basically, drivers are what is pushing the brand and inhibitors is what’s holding it back. These are happening NOW. Then add in the a future looking analysis of Risks and Opportunities. These could happen in the future. The simplicity of this analysis helps the next stage of your brand plan, and set up the Key Issues which are focused on finding ways to continue/enhance the growth drivers, minimize or reverse the inhibitors, avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities.

Here’s an example of How to do a Key Issues Deck. This is something I do with clients all the time and after a 1 or 2 day session, they can feel they are aligned.

Ask the Tough Questions of the team. Tough questions make a team pause and start thinking instead of just doing. I always frame the Key Issues in question form, believing the answers to those questions become the strategy. But I believe that 90% of your effort should go into asking the big challenging questions that startle and yet motivate the team. The better the question you ask, the better the strategy. For instance, if I wanted to lose a few pounds, I could ask the question: “how can I lose weight?” which is not really a good enough question to generate rich insightful strategies. But if I were to ask a better question: “what exercise program would help me successfully lose 10 pounds and work with my busy life?” all of a sudden better strategies start coming to the surface.

Use these tough questions that force tough solutions by saying to your team: “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE”

Cut to the Chase and Find Your Difference

Part of the spin zone brands go through is they never find their own point of difference. They over-react to what competitors are doing, copying them hoping to neutralize what advantage they have. But by trying to be everything that the competitor is doing, they end being nothing really.

The most Beloved Brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or else not around for very long. in a crowded market, it’s really hard to be genuinely be significantly better. And unless your entire company is set up to be more efficient than everyone else, it really leaves different. But as you push for being different, you want to be smart and different. Use this venn diagram to brainstorm points of difference.

Then challenge the team to find their Good and Different. Use the very simple map below to see where your ideas fall.

Good But Not Different: These do very well in tests mainly because consumers have seen it before and check the right boxes in research. In market, it gets off to a pretty good start—since it still seems so familiar. However, once challenged in the market by a competitor, it falters because people start to realize it is no different at all. So they go back to their usual brand and your launch starts to go flat. This option offers limited potential.
Good But Different: These don’t always test well: consumers don’t really know what to make of it. Even after launched, it takes time to gain momentum, having to explain the story with potential investment and effort to really make the difference come to life. But once consumers start to see the differences and how it meets their needs, they equate different with “good”. It begins to gain share and generates profits for the brand. This option offers long-term sustainability.
Not Good and Not Different: These are the safest of safe. Go back into the R&D lab and pick the best one you have–even if it’s not very good. The tallest of midgets. They do pretty well in test because of the familiarity. In market, it gets off to a pretty good start, because it looks the same as what’s already in the market. But pretty soon, consumers realize that it’s the same but even worse, so it fails dramatically. What appears safe is actually highly risky. You should have followed your instincts and not launched. This option is a boring failure.
Different but Not that Good: Sometimes we get focused on the product first: it offers superior technology, but not really meeting an unmet need. So we launch what is different for the sake of being different. It does poorly in testing. Everyone along the way wonders why we are launching. But in the end, consumers don’t really care about your point of difference. And it fails. The better mousetrap that no one cares about.

Look to the grid above and say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE” and push your team to find something that is Good and Different.

What is Your “Let’s Cut to the Chase” Moment?

To read more about how to create a Beloved Brand:

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

How to Write a Brand Plan: The positioning statement helps frame what the brand is all about. However, the brand plan starts to make choices on how you’re going to make the most of that promise. Follow this hyperlink to read more on writing a Brand Plan: How to Write a Brand Plan
How to Write a Creative Brief. The creative brief really comes out of two sources, the brand positioning statement and the advertising strategy that should come from the brand plan. To read how to write a Creative Brief, click on this hyperlink: How to Write a Creative Brief
How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement. Before you even get into the creative brief, you should be looking at target, benefits and reason to believe. To read how to write a Brand Positioning Statement, click on this hyperlink: How to Write an Effective Brand Positioning Statement
Turning Brand Love into Power and Profits: The positioning statement sets up the promise that kick starts the connection between the brand and consumer. There are four other factors that connect: brand strategy, communication, innovation and experience. The connectivity is a source of power that can be leveraged into deeper profitability. To read more click on the hyper link: Love = Power = Profits

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To reach out directly, email me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

Top 5 Things Brand Leaders Should be Worried About

12 March 2013

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Are You Worried Enough?

Everywhere you look, people are telling you not to worry so much. There has become such a “Don’t worry, be happy” mentality. You can buy books on it, go on-line for tips, take a yoga class or attend seminars that are all designed to help you worry less. These might be band-aid solutions. Because if you are no longer worried and you never took any action against those worries, you might sleep better in the short run, but your brand might fall completely apart while you’re sleeping. So oddly enough, I’m here to ask you: Are you actually worried enough? And with that worry, are you taking the right action against the things that matter???

5 things you should be worried about:

The underlying brand health numbers? Most leaders track sales and share, pushing hard on a quarterly basis. But, just like a slim person that works out and runs who can have high blood pressure and cholesterol, a brand can have the same internal health issues. Brand Funnels can help you analyze where your brand really stands, against awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty, whether looking at absolute scores, ratios, comparisons with competitors or tracking over time. The Funnel also helps identify where you are on the Brand Love Curve and can help choose your brand strategy: Indifferent brands have skinny funnels throughout. You should fuel the awareness to kick-start the funnel and drive some sales. At the Like It stage, the Funnel tends to narrows at purchase. Creating a more emotional connection will keep the consumer engaged right through the funnel to the purchase and make you a little more loved than just liked. At the Love It stage, you should have robust funnels, but may still see a leak at the loyalty stage. Closing the leak and building a stronger loyal following will turn your brand into a Beloved Brand. Beloved Brands have the most ideal funnels, but you should still track and attack any weaknesses you discover before competitors can attack them. If you know the health of your brand, you’ll sleep better at night.
How aligned is everyone on your team? I’m a strategy guy, but even I can tell you that a team moving in one direction against a good strategy is better than a stagnant team still in search of the amazing strategy or moving in two or three distinct directions. Part of the problem I see with executive teams is the Leader of each functional area comes with their own bias: The finance leader thinks the brand should maintain margins and go for a lower share. The operations leader wants less skus and a more efficient plant. The sales leader wants more volume, even if it means cutting the price. And the marketing leader wants more advertising to drive share. Each answer has merit, but they are never brought together behind one plan. Strategy is about making choices. But even with a choice, unless the teams are aligned, key members will just be anticipating the failure of the choice. If you have an aligned team, you’ll rest a lot easier on the drive home each night.
What your competitors are doing? it’s important that you’re constantly tracking where your competitors are–not under-estimating them or over-reacting to their tactics. You should understand the competitors actions deeply. A great practice in a real competitive battle is to do up a full brand plan of how you anticipate they will act. That would include budgets, goals, market research, strategies and tactics. Once you find your unique selling proposition, you must work hard to maintain ownership over it. Brands have to be either unique, better or cheaper. Or else, not around for very long. In a highly competitive and combative category, use the strategies of Marketing Warfare: 1) Defensive: Leader of category or sub-category defending their territory by attacking itself or even attacking back at an aggressive competitor. 2) Offensive: Challenger’s attack on the leader to exploit a weakness or build on your own strength. 3) Flanking: An attack in an open area where the Leader is not that well established. 4) Guerrilla: Going into an area where it’s too small for the Leaders to take notice or are unable to attack back. Constantly analyzing and attacking the competition will keep you one step ahead.
What your brand will look like 5 years from now? While you are feeling pressure to make the current quarter, if you keep going quarter-by-quarter, you’ll start to feel like a mouse who is constantly running just to make that next quarter. But every 90 days, you’re missing that long-term vision, purpose and brand values that can help guide your organization in driving the brand’s growth. Does everyone in your organization know the brand vision? Does everyone know and live the Brand’s DNA, weaving it into everything that you do. Once you establish your Brand’s DNA, it should drive every part of your brand organization–brand plan, communications, people, R&D, profitability and sales organization. Everything should drive the relationship between your brand and consumer. If you know where your brand’s direction and get everyone moving towards that common direction, trust me, you’ll feel a hell of a lot better as the leader.
How good are your people? A good leader recognizes that they are only as good as their people. The better your people, the better the work, and that means the better results. You should evaluate your team against skills, behaviors and experiences. To drive effective Brand Leaders, a good rule would be 10% of the time should be on training–not just at junior levels but right up to the Brand Leaders. Many companies are cutting back on training, and you’ll start to see the gaps in your people. Using the 10% rule would mean up to 20 training days–that would be used against strategic thinking, analytics, planning, leading and managing. But if you’re only doing 2-3 days of off-site training or the training you’re doing is to meet corporate compliance, then you’ll notice that the performance of your people just won’t be there. Who will replace the best people on your team? Who will replace you? That should concern you. What’s happening in marketing these days is we hire a bright person and just throw them into the job. While “learning on the job” is a reality in marketing, there needs to be a balance with coaching and training. If you’re relying on bosses to do the training, you have to realize that manager never received any training either so how competent are they to teach? And if you’re worried about investing in training and then the person quits, you might actually realize that maybe if you invested in training you might drive up the retention. A recent study shows that 52% of employees say they would leave a role because of their direct manager, and two-thirds are convinced their managers don’t know what motivates them to be more productive. A constant revolving door will not create great work or the results you’re looking for. To read more on what makes great Brand Leaders, follow the link to the Brand Leadership Learning Center If you have great people on your team, you’ll get much better results on the business, and you can find that work-life balance you’ve always wanted.

So the question I have for is “Are You Worried Enough?” And what are you doing about it?

To read more about how to create a Beloved Brand:

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

How to Write a Brand Plan: The positioning statement helps frame what the brand is all about. However, the brand plan starts to make choices on how you’re going to make the most of that promise. Follow this hyperlink to read more on writing a Brand Plan: How to Write a Brand Plan
How to Write a Creative Brief. The creative brief really comes out of two sources, the brand positioning statement and the advertising strategy that should come from the brand plan. To read how to write a Creative Brief, click on this hyperlink: How to Write a Creative Brief
How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement. Before you even get into the creative brief, you should be looking at target, benefits and reason to believe. To read how to write a Brand Positioning Statement, click on this hyperlink: How to Write an Effective Brand Positioning Statement
Turning Brand Love into Power and Profits: The positioning statement sets up the promise that kick starts the connection between the brand and consumer. There are four other factors that connect: brand strategy, communication, innovation and experience. The connectivity is a source of power that can be leveraged into deeper profitability. To read more click on the hyper link: Love = Power = Profits

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To reach out directly, email me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

How to Run a Brainstorm Session

3 March 2013

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“Creativity is intelligence having fun” Albert Einstein

Brainstorming should be a Regular Part of running your Brand.

To stay in a healthy creative space, I would suggest that each brand team should be having some type of brainstorm (big or small) once a month. You need a constant influx of ideas–promotions, advertising, social media, naming, new products, events, PR, saving money and of course as part of your brand planning, They can be a quick 30 minutes as part of a weekly meeting just to get some quick ideas or a whole afternoon to solve a problem that’s been nagging at the group. Or a team building offsite meeting that goes all day.

There are advantages to having regular brainstorms:

Team will stay fresh and open. Brand jobs can eat you up, forecasting, deadlines, reports can all make you stale. Having regular intervals of ideation, helps to disrupt the work flow to motivate and engage the team.
Keeps the best ideas near the surface. At the end of a good brainstorm, you have some great ideas that bubble up, not all of which you can immediately use. These ideas tend to keep coming up, and that’s OK Sometimes they are rejected because they are higher risk or resource dependent. But after a few sessions of getting comfortable with these ideas, you might start to see new ways to make them do-able instead of seeing why they can’t happen.
As the Leader of the team, it sends the message that while we are strategic, we win by being more creative, faster, and better on execution. It’s so easy to get stiffer as you move up the career ladder and be the one on the team finding fault with every idea. Just because you are starting to know right from wrong, doesn’t mean you need to crush every idea. Having the brainstorming forum allows the newly experienced brand people the chance to bring ideas forward and it sends the signal that you are an open leader and you value the opinions of your junior staff.
The process the team learns doing the brainstorms becomes part of their everyday job. Even on small problems, they’ll come up with a list of possible solutions, use some criteria to judge, narrow down the list to the best idea, and then be prepared with their recommendation. They’ll be able to show their leader they’ve looked at the issue from all sides, and considered other ideas. Marketers that fixate on one solution to fix the problem tend to fail more than succeed.

The Warm Up

Every session should have a warm up, either 5 minutes or 15 minutes. It gets people out of the rut of the day-to-day, and opens up the brains. One that I’ve used is this very simple innocent photo of the kids selling Lemonade and ask them to come up with as many ideas as they can to the question of “What ways can these two make more money?”. I offer a reward of cookies to the team with the most ideas and to the best idea. In 5 minutes, teams should be able to list 50 or 100 ideas. Gets out of a lot of crap ideas but it gets rid of them rejecting ideas before saying them. To get to 100, you have to listen to the group and build on someone’s idea. Eliminate the “yeah but….” I get them to circle the top 3 ideas for each group, which forces them to get used to making decisions. One observation I’ll usually make is that the best ideas are usually found in the list beyond 20 or even beyond the 50 mark, emphasizing that you need 100 good ideas to get to 5 great ideas.

Draw out the rule that “AVOID THE YEAH BUT…” because we have a process for ideating and one for making decisions. With a bunch of leaders in the room, normally you have to re-assure them that they should trust the process. The alternative to the “yeah but” is building on the idea with “here’s a different take”.

The trick to a good brainstorm is very simple: Diverge, Converge, Diverge Converge.

Diverge #1:

Divide the room up into groups of 5-7 people. I prefer to assign one leader who will be writing the ideas, pushing the group for more, throwing in some ideas of their own. A great way for the leader is to say “here’s a crazy idea, who can build on this or make it better”. But if you catch the leader stalling, debating the ideas, then you should push that leader. At this stage you are pushing for quantity not quality. If you have multiple groups in the room, do a rotation where the leader stays put and the group changes. I like having stations, where each station has a unique problem to solve.

Converge #1:

There’s a few ways you can do this.

You can use voting dots where each person gets 5 or 10 dots and they can use them any way they want. For random executional ideas, this is a great simple way.
If there is agreed upon criteria, you can do some type of scoring against each criteria. High, medium, low.
If you are brainstorming product concepts or positioning statements, you might want to hold them up to the lens of how unique they are.
For things like naming, positioning or promotions, the leader can look at all the ideas and begin grouping them into themes. They might start to discuss which themes seem to fit or are working the best, and use those themes for a second diverge.
For Tactics to an annual plan, you can use a very simple grid of Big vs Small and Easy vs Difficult. In this case, you want to find ways to land in THE BIG EASY. The reason you want easy is to ensure it has a good return on effort, believing effort and investment have a direct link.

Diverge #2

The second diverge is where the magic actually happens. You’ve got the group in a good zone. They have seen which ideas are meeting the criteria. Take the list from Converge #1 and push it one more time. Make it competitive among the groups, with a $25 prize, so that people will push even harder.

If you narrowed it to themes, then take each theme and push for more and better ideas under each of the themes
If you looked at concepts or tactics, then take the best 8-10 ideas and have groups work on them and flush them out fully with a written concept, and come back and present them to the group.
If using the grid above, then take the ideas in the big/difficult and brainstorm ways to make it easier. And if it’s small and easy, brainstorm ways to make it bigger.

Converge #2: Decision Time

Once you’ve done the second diverge, you’ll be starting to see the ideas getting better and more focused. Now comes decision time. You can narrow down to a list of ideas to take forward into testing or discussion with senior management. You can take them forward to cost out. You can prioritize them based on a 12 or 24 month calendar. You can vote using some of the techniques above using voting dots. Or you can assign a panel of those who will vote. But you want to walk away from the meeting with a decision.

Turn the Idea into a Project

Trust that the process gets you into the right zone and make these ideas now a project.Once you have a decision on the best ideas, you want to use the energy and momentum in the room to make the ideas a reality:

assign an owner and support team
get them to agree upon goals, issues to resolve
get them to map out a timeline (milestones)
outline potential resource needs (budget, people, outside agencies)

Let Brainstorming bring an energy and passion into your work.

“Love what you do” Steve Jobs

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

How to Drive Innovation into Your Brand

27 February 2013

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“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899

While that quote from 114 years ago may have missed out on the airplane, radio, TV, microwave, car, computer, internet, nearly every cpg product and of course my beloved iPhone. Maybe the sentiment of the quote was just about 100 years too early. In the last decade, most of the great innovation has been relegated to social media and electronics. I hope this century brings us much more than just Facebook, BBM and Twitter. In the consumer goods area, we must be on the 197th version of “new” cherry flavoured bubble gum since 1955, we’ve now seen hundreds of “new” peach yoghurt and I hope I never see another “new” laundry soap telling us that their little blue beads get their clothes really clean.

Generating Love for the Brand

Under the Brand Idea are 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Everyone wants to debate what makes a great brand–whether it’s the product, the advertising, the experience or through consumers. It is not just one or the other–it’s the collective connection of all these things that make a brand beloved.

The brand’s promise sets up the positioning, as you focus on a key target with one main benefit you offer. Brands need to be either better, different or cheaper. Or else not around for very long. ”Me-too” brands have a short window before being squeezed out. How relevant, simple and compelling the brand positioning is impacts the potential love for the brand.
The most beloved brands create an experience that over-delivers the promise. How your culture and organization are set up can make or break that experience. Hiring the best people, creating service values that employees can deliver against and having processes that eliminate service leakage. The culture attacks the brand’s weaknesses and fixes them before the competition can attack. With a Beloved Brand, the culture and brand become one.
Brands also make focused strategic choices that start with identifying where the brand is on the Brand Love Curve going from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and all the way to Beloved status. Marketing is not just activity, but rather focused activity–based on strategy with an ROI mindset. Where you are on the curve might help you make strategic and tactical choices such as media, innovation and service levels.
The most beloved brands have a freshness of innovation, staying one-step ahead of the consumers. The idea of the brand helps acting as an internal beacon to help frame the R&D. Every new product has to back that idea. At Apple, every new product must deliver simplicity and at Volvo, it must focus on safety. .
Beloved brands can tell the brand story through great advertising in paid media, through earned media either in the mainstream press or through social media. Beloved Brands use each of these media choices to connect with consumers and have a bit of magic to their work.

New Products can help separate a brand as well as keep it fresh. For a Beloved Brand, freshness is essential in attacking your own brand before someone can attack you. New products that truly solve a consumer problem in a unique way are rare. This is the generation of marketing incrementalism. On most brand plans I see “launch innovative new products” sits comfortably in the #3, 4 or 5 slot on the plan, while #1 is fix the advertising and #2 is get more distribution.

Stages of Innovation

There are four key stages to innovation: 1) Invention 2) Differentiation 3) Experience and 4) Perception. And the marketing is different at each phase.

Stage 1: Invention of the Core Product: The challenge of a truly new product is to finding something that is truly different: a new technology, delivery, format or process. Rarely, do we get to work on a game changing ”invention”.
Stage 1 of a new product usually focuses all of their efforts on launching and explaining why it is needed. The product at this stage is usually just the core product, not yet perfected, higher costs and limited sales with no profits. The advertising is about awareness and the message is simple: you have this problem, we solve that problem. There’s an effort to the distribution, because many customers are risk averse and afraid of new products. Consumers are willing to pay a little more to solve the problem, they overlook all the flaws and limitations, and they think “why didn’t I think of this”. While some consumers love the new product already, most consumers still sit at the sceptical and indifferent stage.

Stage 2: Product Proliferation means Differentiation: With a little bit of success in the market comes copy cats. With more consumers buying, there becomes room for some differentiation, but mostly limited to product still: new features and added services on top of the core product. They might have found a way to make things cheaper, easier to use or better tasting. Prices come down and brands offer more variety. Distribution becomes a battle ground and getting full distribution becomes the goal. Customers try to line up behind certain brands–looking for preferential treatment. The advertising is about consideration and purchase, trying to stake out certain spaces, shifting from product to brand and separating your brand from others. Brands now sell the solution, not just the product. And consumers start to choose, one brand over another. While some consumers prefer one brand over another, most consumers are at the like it stage.

Stage 3: It’s all about the Experience: In order to establish leadership or challenge for leadership, brands begin to talk about the experience consumers will have with their product. It becomes no longer about the brand or product but about the consumer and how your brand fits into their life. Brands look to use positioning strategies to separate themselves, focusing on key targets, with unique benefits–a balance of emotional and rational benefits. Advertising brings the consumer front and centre, trying to establish a routine with your brand in it. Brands try to move to the love it stage, some do, but most will be stuck still at the like it stage. Those that get stuck are forced into value and focusing on price, promotions or value. The brands that reach the love it stage can command a premium, drive share and establish leadership in the category.

Stage 4: Managing the Perception: As the market matures, any share point movements become difficult to gain any traction on real quality so the shift moves to perceived quality. Strategy shifts to brand personality where tone and manner in the execution are paramount so that Consumers connect with the brand and begin to see themselves in the brand. Brands push to become a Beloved Brand, where demand becomes desire, needs become cravings, thinking is replaced with feelings and Consumers become outspoken fans. The brand becomes powerful, with power over distribution because consumers would switch stores before they switch brands and power over competitors who are stuck trying to establish their own point of difference. Profits are at their highest–revenue, margins are both strong and spending is focused and efficient on maintaining the relationship. While at the top of the mountain, with firm leadership in the category, the brand is always at risk of losing that leadership. Challenge yourself to continuously stay at the top. Avoid becoming complacent.

Ask Gap Clothing, Cadillac, IBM computers, Levis, Sony or Kodak who have each reached the Beloved Stage only to be replaced by new products and brands and moved back down the love curve towards Indifferent. Most recently, Blackberry. Only 18 months ago, people jokingly used the term ”crackberry” to describe their addictions. No longer.

The four stages can easily be matched up to the Brand Love Curve and help establish strategic focus for the brand. At the Invention stage, consumers remain indifferent until you build awareness and explain how your product solves a problem in my life. At the Differentiation stage, some like it, but you are now facing proliferation and attack forcing your brand to stake out a claim. At the experience stage, you need to become part of your consumers life and balance the emotional and rational benefits that can move you to the love it stage. And finally, you have to tightly manage the Perceptions to become that Beloved Brand for Life stage, it’s about connecting with consumers so they see themselves through your brand. You need to establish your personality and begin to wield the power of being a Beloved Brand.

But be careful: Without Innovation, very few brands remain at the top for very long.

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

For a presentation on how to write a Positioning Statement, follow:

Finance 101 for Brand Leaders

8 February 2013

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To be a great Brand Leader, you have to be good at running the P&L. Even as you are launching new products, creating new advertising or writing a great brand plan, you have to have profit front and center in everything you do. Yet, there are far too many Brand Leaders who can’t run the P&L. These Brand Leaders hit the mid-point of their career and then we realize that they aren’t very good with numbers and all of a sudden, a fast track career for the super star Brand Manager completely stalls. As you’re looking up to the director level jobs, challenge yourself to get better with finance.

Looking at the P&L

Here’s my Finance 101 that can help simplify your role with the P&L. This is meant for the Brand Manager level who is aspiring to continuing to move up. But regardless of level, if you secretly are weak in the P&L area, this might help you.

While it’s important to learn every line of the P&L, where Brand Leaders can have the biggest impact is on the Net Sales, the Gross Margin and the Contribution Margin.

The Net Sales line is simply Gross Sales minus the Trade Spend. Some income statements have brought the trade spend up to the sales line, while others have left it down in the cost line. Check with your company’s or country’s way of doing it. In many industries, the trade terms are dictated by the channels. While I would want to say the more Beloved Brands have a power over the channels, many times they still aren’t able to turn that power into lowering the trade spend. If the trade spend is out of your control, you should be working with sales to ensure you are maximizing the value in programs that you are getting for the trade spend.

Net Sales is the Unit Sales times Net Price. For unit sales, you’ll have to either drive the market share or enter new markets. That’s where the marketing programs you leverage drive faster growth relative to the spend. And for price, you can increase price or get consumers to trade up to a premium price within your portfolio. The overall brand image you drive will usually be one of the biggest impacts on price. The more love you create for the brand, the more inelastic the price.

Gross Margin is Net Sales minus Cost of Goods. Just like above this can be impacted by how high of a price premium you can drive for the brand, or whether you can lower your Cost of Goods without impacting the quality of the product. As a Brand Manager, this becomes your primary focus for “profit” as you feel the below the line costs are out of you control, so you don’t pay much attention to them. However, as you get up to the Director or VP level, you get involved in discussions about marketing spend, R&D and the goals for the bottom line contribution margin levels. This is where your strength or weakness in running the P&L begins to really show up.

4 Ways to Drive the P&L

Looking at the above P&L lines, in a slightly different way you really have 4 different areas that you can impact the Profit:

With Price, you can increase/decrease the price or you can get consumers to trade up to a premium line or down to a value line.
When looking at Costs, you’re either driving the product costs or the marketing costs. You’re trying to minimize the costs without impacting the brand or the impact on the brand.
Driving the Market Share is a focus on either stealing other users or getting your current users to use more.
The Market Size is all about entering new categories or finding new uses for your current brand.

#1. Using Price as a weapon to drive brand value. It can be a price change, up or down, or it could be trying to get consumers to trade up or down.

Price Increase: You can do a price increase if the market or brand allows you. It likely has to be based on passing along cost increases. Factors that help are whether you are a healthy brand or it’s a healthy market as well as the power of your brand vs competition and channel.
Price Decrease: Used when fighting off competitor, if you need to react to a sluggish economy or channel pressure. Another reason to decrease price is if you have a competitive advantage around cost, whether that’s manufacturing, materials or distribution.

There are watch outs for price changes. It’s difficult to execute price changes especially if it has to go through retailers. You need to understand power relationships–how powerful are the retailers. Many times, price changes are scrutinized so badly by retailers that you must have proof of why you are doing it. Also, it’s quite likely your Competitors will (over) react. So your assumptions you used to go with the price increase will change right after. And finally, it’s not easy to change back.

Trading Up: If you have In a range of products, sometimes it can be beneficial to get consumers to trade up. Can you carve out a meaningful difference to create a second tier that goes beyond your current brand? Does your brand image/ratings allow it?
Trading Down: Risky, but you see unserved market, with minimal damage to image/reputation of the brand. In a tough economy, it might be better to create a value set of products rather than lower the price on your main products.

When looking at Price Increases, here’s a formula to help get you started on your analysis for gaining approval.

Beloved Brands seem more capable at driving profits through pricing, but they also are careful to ensure the premium does not become excessive to create backlash. There are a few watch outs around trying to trade up or down: Premium skus, can feel orphaned at retail world—on the shelf or missing ads or displays. Managing multiple price levels can be difficult—what to support, price differences etc. For all the effort you go to, make sure your margins stay consistently strong through the trading up or down. Be careful that you don’t lose focus on your core business. Can’t be all things to everyone. The final concern is what does it do your Brand’s image, especially risky when trading downward.

# 2. Managing cost as a weapon to enhance the Brand’s Value. It can be either your cost of goods or the potential selling costs.

Cost of Goods Decreases: You are able to use the power of your brand to drive power over your suppliers, you find cheaper potential raw materials, process improvement or find off-shore manufacturing.
Cost of Goods Increases: Make sure that you manage the COGs as they increase. Watch out for suppliers trying to pass along costs. But realize that with new technology, investing in brand’s improved image, going after premium markets, offering new benefit or a format change, that cost of good increases could be a reality.

The watch outs with managing costs: with cuts, make sure the product change is not significantly noticeable. You should understand any potential impact in the eyes of your consumer on your brand’s performance and image. Can the P&L cover these costs, either increased sales or efficiency elsewhere. Managing your margin % is crucial to the long-term success of your brand.

Selling Cost Decrease: To counter changes in the P&L (price, volume or cost), it’s very tempting to look to short-term P&L management or look at changes in go-to-market model. Where a brand stands on the product life cycle or how loved the brand is can really impact the selling costs. Even though we think that Beloved Brands have endless spending, they actually likely have a lower investment to sales ratio.
Selling Cost Increase: When you’re in Investment mode, defensive position trying to hold share against an aggressive competitor or when you see a proven payback in higher sales–with corresponding margins.

Here’s a simple margin calculation to get you going:

Always be in an ROI mindset: Manage your marketing costs as though every DOLLAR has to efficiently drive sales. Realize that short-term cuts can carry longer term impact. Competitive reaction can influence the impact of investment stance–like a price change, your competitor might over-react to your increases in spending.

#3. Externally, the Share and volume game are traditional tools for brand. Either stealing other users or get current users to use more.

Offensive Share Gains: Use it when you have a significant Competitive Advantage or you see untapped needs in the market. Or opportunistic, use first mover advantage on new technology.
Defensive Share Stance: Hold the fort until you can catch up on technology, maintain profitability, loyal base of followers needs protecting.

Be careful when trying to gain share. A Beloved Brand has a drawing power where it does gain share without having to use attack modes. Attacking competitors can be difficult. It could just become a spend escalation with both brands just going at it. After a share war that’s not based on a substantive reasoning (eg. technology change), there might end up with no winners, just losers. Many times, the channel will try to play one competitor against another for their own gain. Watch out what consumers you target in a competitive battle: some may just come in because of the lower price and go back to their usual brand.

Get Current Users to Use More: When there is an opportunity to turn loyal users into creating a potential routine. Changing behaviours is more difficult than enticing trial. It’s a good strategy to use, when your there’s real benefit to your consumer using more. It’s hard to just get them to use more without a real reason.

There has to be a real benefit connected to using more or it might look hollow/shallow. Driving routines is a challenge. Even with “life saving” medicines, the biggest issue is compliance. Find something in their current life to help either ground it or latch onto. When I worked on Listerine, people only used mouthwash 20-30 times a year compared to 700+ brushing occasions. So we focused on connecting rinsing with Listerine to the twice daily brushing routine.

#4. Increase the Size of the Market by Finding New Users or Creating New Uses.

Find New Users: When there is an untapped or under-served need. There could be a significant changing demographic that impacts your base. Or you are able to translate/transfer your reputation to a new user group. There should be something within your product/brand that helps fuel the brand post trial. Trial without repeat, means you’ll get the spike but then bust. Substantial investment required. Don’t let it distract from protecting the base loyal users.
Create New Uses: Format Line Extensions that take your experience or name elsewhere. Able to leverage same benefit in convenient “on the go” offering. Make sure current brand is in order before you divert attention, funding and focus on expansion area. Investment needed, could divert from spend on base business. Be careful because the legendary stories (Arm and Hammer) don’t come along as much as we hope.

As you look to either grow by share or new categories the two crucial calculations for you are Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and Return on Investment (ROI)

For CAGR, here is a calculation tool:

And for ROI,

Show Your Work: Just like in grade school where you get extra points for showing your work, the same thing goes when taking senior leaders through your assumptions.

Most marketers will tell you that branding is about positioning. Positioning is a means to driving growth and making money.

To view a copy of How to drive Profits into your Brand, click below:

10 things that Good Advertising Should Do

2 February 2013

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People always ask me “So what is it that makes a Brand Leader good at advertising?”

I used to think they must be more creative. Or they are more in touch with creative people. Or better yet, they are a visionary.

I never really thought these answers satisfied me. Advertising is so much more than that.

In fact there are many things around advertising that have nothing to do with the creative. There needs to be a great Brand Plan, the Creative Brief should be tight yet rich with insight. Brand Leaders have to manage the process and stay on strategy and they should have an ability to select the right media. They should take risks. They have to be able to handle the stress of ambiguity against deadlines, and the pressure to make the numbers in the face of art. Advertising is half art, half science. They have to be able to give some freedom on execution, yet maintain a tight control on the strategy.

Brand Leaders must be good at giving good feedback, maybe even a bit fussy on details. Be nice though. They have to love the work and bring that emotion to the table. What about motivating the team? Not just motivating the creatives, but the planners, the account people, the editors and even the directors. Someone who is great at Advertising has to make decisions. They have to be able to walk in the shoes of the consumer, yet still live at the desk of the brand. They must have the ability to gain alignment with their own team and yet gain approval from the senior management of the company. They have to be able to sell the work. At all stages. The list goes on and on.

There are just so many things that are required to get good advertising. Being creative is a great start. But it is more.

So after thinking about this question for a few years, I finally nailed it:

A Brand Leader that is good at advertising is able to consistently get good advertising on the air, and keep bad advertising off the air.

It’s such a simple yet complicated answer. Almost as simple and complicated as David Ogilvy’s line “Clients get the work they deserve”. I know that is true, in every way that it is meant. I always ask Brand Leaders, “if you knew that how you showed up actually impacts the advertising, do you think you might show up differently?” I hope the answer is yes. But I’m not sure they do. Those great at advertising get it.

Sadly, there is an equally long list of things that make Brand Leaders bad at advertising. These days, there is so much learning on the job that people end up as the decision-maker in the room, sitting there trying to lead the advertising when they haven’t even properly trained on how to do it. Malcolm Gladwell says you’re an expert when you’ve had 10,000 hours. And yet, there are Brand Leaders are thrust into leading an Ad Campaign with 20, 30 or maybe 100 hours. And no training. Even those who are supposed to teach you haven’t been trained. So you are both learning. How can you consistently get good advertising on the air, managing such a complicated process when you’re still learning. On the job.

The 10 Things Good Advertising Should Do

Here’s a starting point for you when you’re judging creative.

Set Yourself Apart. Beloved Brands must be different, better, cheaper. Or they are not around for very long. The story telling of the brand’s promise should help to separate the brand from the clutter of other brands that are stuck in our minds. And that starts with creative that feels different and of course makes the brand seem different.
Focused! A focused target, a focused message, a focused strategy against a focused communication idea, a focused media. The whole discipline of marketing is founded on focus, and yet Brand Leaders struggle most in this area. They always want that “just in case” option.
Keep the Idea and Communication very simple. Communication is not what is said, but what is heard. Too many people try to shout as many messages as they can in one ad. What does the consumer hear? A confusing mess. By throwing multiple messages you are just making the consumer do the work of deciding the most important message, because you couldn’t figure it out. My challenge to you is to stand up on a chair and yell your main message as though you are standing on top of a mountain. If you can’t YELL it out in one breath, then your idea is too complex. Or just too long. The Volvo Brand Manager gets to yell “Safety” in one clean simple breath. Can you do that?
Have a Good Selling Idea. While Big Ideas break through, they also help you to be consistent, because you have to align your thinking to the Big Idea. You’ll see consistency over time, across mediums–paid, earned, social and search–and you’ll see it throughout the entire brand line up of sub brands. Consumers will start to connect to the big idea and they’ll begin to relate your brand with that big idea. Look at your ad: does it have a big idea?
Drive Engagement: Too many Brand Leaders forget to engage the consumer. They get so fixated on saying their 7 messages that they figure the ability capture attention is just advertising fluff. But it all starts with Attention. The consumer sees 5,000 ads a day and will likely only engage in a handful. If you don’t capture their attention, no one will remember the brand name, your main message or any other reason to believe you might have.
Let the Visuals do the talking. With so many ads, you need to have a key visual that can capture the attention, link to your brand and communicate your message. The ‘see-say’ of advertising helps the consumers brain to engage, follow along and remember. As kids, we always love the pictures. We still do.
Sell the solution, not the product. Consumers use brands to solve problems in their lives. Your brand will be more powerful if it solves the problems of life. Figure out the consumers’ enemy and conquer it on their behalf. Consumers don’t care about what you do, until you care about what they need. No one has ever wanted a quarter-inch drill, they just need a quarter-inch hole.
Be Relevant with the Consumer. A beloved brand finds a way to matter to those who really care. It’s not only the right brand promise that matters, but the right communication of that promise. You can’t sell carpet cleaning to someone who only has hard wood floors. And you can’t sell a golf ball that goes 20 yards farther to someone who despises golf.
Make Ads that are based on a consumer Insight. Insights are not facts about your brand. That’s just you talking AT the consumer. Insights are something the consumer already knows but they didn’t realize that everyone felt that way. Insights enable consumers to see themselves in the situation and once you do that, the consumers might then figure the brand must be for them. Insights allow you to connect and turn the ad into a conversation.
Tell the story behind the brand. There should be richness in your brand’s purpose. Why did you start this brand? How does your brand help people? Why do you get up in the morning? Remember: people don’t buy what you do as much as they buy why you do it.

The ABC’S of Advertising

Another way to rephrase this list is through the ABC’S: Attention Branding Communication and Stickiness.

Attention: You have to get noticed in a crowded world of advertising. Consumers see 6000 ads per day, and will likely only engage in a few. If your brand doesn’t draw attention naturally, then you’ll have to force it into the limelight.
Branding: Ads that tell the story of the relationship between the consumer and the brand will link best. Even more powerful are ads that are from the consumers view of the brand. It’s not how much branding there is, but how close the brand fits to the climax of the ad.
Communication: Tapping into the truths of the consumer and the brand, helps you to tell the brand’s life story. Keep your story easy to understand. Communication is not just about what you say, but how you say it—because that says just as much.
Stickiness: Sticky ads help to build a consistent brand/consumer experience over time. In the end, brands are really about “consistency” of the promise you want to own. Brands have exist in the minds of the consumer.

To read more on How to get Better Advertising, here’s a presentation to follow:

Be a Better Client

If how you show up to the agency will produce better advertising work Then show up right.

Agencies should be treated like trusted partners, not suppliers. Engage them early asking for advice, not just telling them what to do and when. If you tell an agency what to do, there will only be one answer “YES”. But if you ask them what to do, there are three answers: yes, no or maybe. Seek their advice beyond advertising. Build a relationship directly with the creative teams. Be more than “just another client”.

Getting great advertising is a balance of freedom and control. Most Marketers allow too much FREEDOM on the strategy but want to exhibit CONTROL on the creative. It should be the reverse, you should control the strategy and give freedom on creative. Don’t go into a creative meeting with a pre-conceived notion as to what the ad should look like. Creative people are “in the box” problem solvers. What they don’t want a) blank canvas b) unclear problem and c) your solutions to the problem. Let them be in the box and find the solution for you. That’s what motivates them the most.

Here’s a presentation to help you be a better client.

If you are in the mood to see other great advertising, here’s a few other stories:

To see a training presentation on getting Better Advertising:

Brand Management: How to Be a Great Brand Leader

31 January 2013

6 Comments

It seems that marketing these days is more about “doing” than it is about “thinking”.

“Activity Based Marketing” has replaced strategic brand management. Marketers are content if they are doing something, regardless if it is the right something. Everyone I interact with is too busy doing stuff, running from meeting to meeting, chasing the to do list. Marketers today are so busy, that they don’t have time to think. If you want to be a great marketer, you need to be carving out time to sit back in your chair and say “what’s next”.

Are you Strategic?

I know you want to say yes. And I’m sure it’s on your Linked In profile. So you must be. But if you are doing more activity than you are doing the thinking, then you aren’t really operating strategically. You are too busy chasing your own tail. Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planners who can see connections. Non Strategic Thinkers see answers before questions. They get to answers quickly, and will get frustrated in delays. They opt for action over thinking, believing that doing something is better than doing nothing. They are impulsive and doers who see tasks. They can be frustrated by strategic thinkers. Look back at the past week and ask “are you acting strategically?”

Are You a Fundamentally Sound Marketer?

No matter how bright you are, if you haven’t been properly trained, then you aren’t realizing your full potential. You likely are struggling with writing your brand plan, you aren’t quite sure what has to go onto the creative brief and you aren’t sure how to give an agency feedback. You’re not sure which media option makes the most sense for your brand. These days, marketing has become a completely “on the job” training ground. There’s very few fundamentals being taught. You are given a desk and a brand and told that “we think marketers learn on the job” and “we think it’s your boss who should be teaching you”. Since there has been a few generation of marketers who haven’t been trained, it’s very likely that your boss isn’t quite sure of the fundamentals of brand management.

If you are a bright, but you think you are lacking the fundamentals, you are not alone.

Are you Running the Brand? Do you act like an Owner?

Brand Manager has to have a mindset that reflects the CEO, accountable for growth, costs, profit and shareholder wealth. A great marketer runs the brand, rather than letting the brand run them. The starting ground for running the brand is to have your finger on the pulse of the brand and make sure everything revolves around that pulse. Everything in the company should feed off the Brand DNA. The Brand DNA (many call it the Brand Essence) is the most succinct definition of the Brand. For Volvo, it’s Safety, while BMW might be Performance and Mercedes is Luxury. The Brand’s DNA has an external and an internal. Externally, you should be looking at the consumers’ view and the brand personality you’re trying to project outward to them. Internally, the products and the internal brand beacon should help align everyone working on the brand.

The classic role of Brand Management is that the Brand Leader is at the hub and everything revolves around that Brand Leader. But in reality, they aren’t really revolving around the Brand Leader. They are revolving around the Brand DNA and it’s just that the Brand Leader owns that DNA and uses it as a lens to judge all the activity around the Brand. That is the starting point of strategy.

Everything Revolves around the Brand DNA

The Brand DNA should help frame

Brand Plan that drives the business for the upcoming year or the next 5 years
Brand Positioning that connects to the consumer through marketing communications
Customer Value Proposition that links the consumer needs to the benefits of the brand
Go-To-Market strategy that frames the distribution and the selling process
Cultural Beacons that help define the brand internally through values, inspiration and challenge and finally
Business Results, with each brand offering a unique way that it makes money. Each of these six needs feed off the Brand DNA, look to the definition as a guideline for how to align to the brand.

When you begin to blow this out one step further, you can start to see where the complexity comes into play with each of the six areas have their own needs that should still feed off that Brand DNA.

Use the Brand Plan to Drive the Direction of the Brand

The planning area should help to frame the Brand Plan, which is a combination of a one year Brand Plan and a 3-5 year strategic plan. The Vision and Mission provide the future direction, objectives align to the Business needs and Brand Funnel objectives and Strategies and Tactics help to drive towards those objectives. Included as well should be a Calendar and Budgets. For a tutorial on how to write a Brand Plan, click on the following link: How to Write a Brand Plan

From the DNA, map out a positioning statement that can help frame the Marketing Communications plan. That includes the creative big idea, the media mix, earned media (PR, Events) social media, key influencers (e.g. Doctors or Contractors or Bloggers). As well, the positioning frames the identity which could include logo, language, look and feel and brand book. My hope is that you don’t change this very often. Looking at the complexity of the Brand Management system outlined here, it baffles me that Brands facing tough times reach for changing their logo so quickly when so many other factors could be driving the issues. For a tutorial on writing Creative Briefs, click on: How to Write an Effective Creative Brief

Staying on Strategy is just as Hard as Coming up with the Strategy

If you don’t have time to think, then how do you know what you’re doing is the right thing to do? The Go-To-Market plan should also feed off the Brand DNA and come out of the Brand Plan. The Distribution strategy and needs should match up to the needs of the brand, including decisions around Key Account focus, pricing, sku mix, promotion and the possible role of new products. In a fast-moving category like cereal or gum, or a high technology driving category like computers, phones or TVs, both share a high need for product innovation. For brands that require in store selling, you should also include the In-store experience which could be demonstration, signage or trial as well as possible selling messages for sales people on the floor of the distribution channel. These messages should feed directly from the brand messages.

The R&D plan should feed off the Brand DNA and develop products that match the brand. Too many times, R&D is in their own world, trying to invent things that have nothing to do with where the brand sits. They expect marketing to be able to sell their inventions. Even in a technology driven business, Apple is driven first by the consumer. Steve Jobs really understood that you don’t just sell what you have.

Brand also drives the Culture and the DNA should provide a beacon for the People to follow. The brand story told within the company is even more important than what you might tell the market through your advertising. Talent management means hiring the right people and providing the right training. Too many companies are cutting back on training. Remember that better people produce better work that drives better results. Keep investing in your people and the business results will come. Empower your people to get the most from their ideas. Leverage values, inspirational touch points and processes to inspire and challenge them on achieving greatness.

Managing the Brand

Brand drives the Business Results. The more loved a brand, the more tightly the connection it has with their consumers. This connection becomes a source of power that the brand can wield in the market to drive higher growth rate and profitability. The Brand Leader is responsible for driving the P&L, driving sales and share, managing the forecast and costs for an efficiently run brand. The Brand Leader must figure out the levers of the P&L it can use to drive more profits. For a tutorial on driving profits through your brand, click on: How to Drive Profits through Your Brand

Leading the Brand

Putting the Brand Leader front and centre will allow you to leverage the Brand DNA into each of the areas of your business, whether that’s marketing, sales, R&D, finance or human resources. The Brand Leader should be at the centre of this hub, with each area looking to the Brand DNA as a beacon of how they can do their job most effectively in helping the brand drive long-term growth and profitability.

Here’s a robust summary on Brand Management that looks at it through 8 areas:

Beloved = Power = Growth = Profit
Brand DNA and Vision
Brand Promise
Brand Analytics
Brand Plan
Execution
Managing
Leading

Everything Starts and Ends with the Consumer in Mind

22 January 2013

23 Comments

As Brand Leaders, our days get busy, running from meeting to meeting, trying to deliver our numbers, gain share and hit our forecasts. We have a few new products that are long over due and now we’re trying to make the most of them. Finance has found a potential cost savings from the plant but it’s unsure if it will be off-set by a one time surcharge. We have a presentation at Wal-Mart next week and think we’ll walk away with a new listing. We have a new claim from the R&D team that we think delivers superiority versus our closest competitor. And finally, we have the go-ahead to do a new ad, but we think our senior managers will insist that we make the ad to their exact requirements and that it delivers their new vision statement. This is an average day in marketing. Except, we have not thought once about the consumer. Maybe that’s the norm when we get so busy or face pressures to make the numbers.

I always like to ask Brand Leaders: “Do you represent your brand to your consumer or do you represent your consumer to the brand?” Yes, I get stunned looks of confusion when I ask that. But it’s an important question as to your mindset of how you do your job. My challenge to you is to start thinking like your consumer and be their representative to your brand. You’ll notice the work gets better, you’ll see clearer paths to growth and you’ll start to create a brand that the consumer loves rather than just likes. When this happens, sales go up and the P&L spits out higher profitability. Because the more loved the brand, the more powerful position it occupies and the more profit it can generate from that source of power.

Take a Walk In The Shoes of Your Consumer With most of us, when we first fell in love with marketing, there were two key elements that got our juices going: strategic thinking and consumer behavior. Marketing brings these two elements together in a very challenging way. You should be thinking about your consumer every day, all day. Yes, you need to hit your sales and share goals. But your consumers are your only source of revenue and you have to know them intimately. Solving a consumer challenge feels like the biggest Rubik’s Cube we can find. The reason I mention this is if you want to connect with your team and motivate them, then start talking about the consumer and you’ll see their engagement go up. This is what they love. Be curious about your consumer, constantly watching changes in the marketplace.

Live and breathe insights about your consumers. Insight is not something you just do when you’re spending the hour that you write your creative brief. You should be gathering insight at every chance you can, and unleashing that knowledge throughout every day. Insight is not something that your consumers never knew before. That would be knowledge not insight. It’s not data or fact about your brand that you want to tell. That helps, but you have to go a layer deeper to find your insights. Oddly enough, Insight is something that everyone already knows. Insight comes to life when it’s told in such a captivating way that makes consumers stop and say “hmm, I thought I was the only who felt like that”. That’s why we laugh when see the way that insight is projected with humor, why we get goose bumps when insight is projected with inspiration and why we cry when the insight comes alive through real-life drama.

Get in the shoes of those Consumers and you’ll quickly realize that consumers do not care about what you do, until you care about what they want. Instead of mentioning a feature, force yourself to ask “If I’m the consumer so what do I get” five times to see if you can get to the richness of the functional benefits. Then look at that functional benefit and ask “so how does that make me feel”. Stop talking features and start talking benefits–both the rational and emotional. No one has ever wanted a 1/4 inch drill, they just want a 1/4 inch hole.

Consumers are busier than ever. Whether it’s working late, trying to balance everything or doing too much, they have so little time. People are multi-tasking, texting while driving or on the TV while watching TV—which is up 35% this year. Traditional ways with a 30 second ad and a billboard aren’t having the same effect in today’s world. The average consumer is exposed to over 6,000 advertising message per day. The consumers’ brain sorts through the clutter until finds something that might fill their needs. Imagine your boring logical message, well thought and all, breaking through to that consumer. Even with the fast paced life, most consumers are bored with life and just want something to entice them. The simplest way to challenge boredom is to like everything you do unconditionally, but if this bored consumer meets up with a boring brand, it will be rejected very quickly. You have to matter to those consumers that really care. And you have to know what connects with them to get the way to stand out.

Living in the Consumers Shoes is Contagious. When you start asking about how the consumer buys, what they are thinking about now or what do we want them to think, you’ll notice others on your team following your cues and start thinking like a consumer. It will be energizing. When you ask “will our consumer love this” it sets the bar very high. Here’s my simple challenge for you: If you don’t love the work you do, how do you expect the consumer to love your Brand. The best filter for your work is the consumer. It’s more important than what Wal-Mart thinks or what your boss likes/doesn’t like. When looking at new products, the R&D team should be more obsessed with what the consumer wants than what they might be capable of coming up in their lab. As Steve Jobs famously said “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”

Brand Leaders Play It Far Too Safe to Find True Love. Brand Leaders choose the safety of logic and facts instead of getting too deep or going all emotional with their consumer. And, most brands end up liked but never end loved. My Mom Wanted Me to Be an Actuary. Apparently, an Actuary has one of the longest life expectancies, can make quite a bit of money and they live the ideal work-life balance. Sounds like the perfect job, but I just couldn’t do it. What’s lacking in the life of an actuary is the ability to have fun at work or drive all your passion into your work to create something big. You can make a real difference. So if you’re not going to be an Actuary…then stop acting like one when you’re the Brand Leader. We can’t afford to keep doing just the usual, we can’t get stuck in logic and we can’t just satisfy needs. We need to push to go beyond greatness at every touch point with our selfish and bored consumers. We need to cultivate a deep emotional relationship with our consumer and we need to entice craving and desire.

Everything starts and ends with the consumer in mind.

To read about how to Create Beloved Brands, read this:

I run a Brand Leader Learning Center with programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below:

To join the Brand Leadership Learning Center Facebook page dedicated to helping Brand Leaders improve then follow: http://www.facebook.com/BrandLeadership

If you or team has any interest in a learning program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1 or join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BrandLeadership

Manage Your Own Career with an Honest Self Evaluation

15 January 2013

1 Comment

This time of year is when you sit down with your boss and have the dreaded annual performance review. It’s likely dreaded for a reason. You hate getting feedback and your boss hates giving feedback. It’s very common. These days performance reviews feel like a bit of jockeying. When you do you Self Evaluation, you avoid putting anything that can be used against you. And when your boss does your Evaluation, they will avoid putting anything that will imply a promotion, raise or even maintaining your employment.

In general, the feedback gets worse when you move up. I think the Manager figures “they know what’s going on and am I really going to make a difference?”. It’s almost easier to give that eager green Assistant Brand Manager feedback then it is to give a Senior Brand Manager, Director of VP good solid feedback.

If You are Managing Your Career Then Give Yourself Feedback

Are you lucky enough to have a boss that puts a lot into the review? Does your boss focus on ways to help you to genuinely improve? Is there a plan you can follow that challenges you and yet help you to be successful? Does your boss care about your long-term career success? I sure hope so. I encourage Brand Leaders to be fully engaged in the careers of their team. The leader has to buy into the idea that the better the people, the better the work and in turn the better the results. For information on how to conduct a performance review, read the following story: How to Conduct a Performance Review.

If you manage your career, (Managing Your Career from ABM to VP of Marketing) then you have to be willing to give yourself the most honest feedback you can. Below is a Tool I’ve used in coaching executives that will help to give yourself a Self Evaluation against the dimensions that would make up 1) Leading and Managing and 2) Brand Stewardship.

Go through each of the dimensions and give yourself a score in relation to your peers. A score of 5 means you’re the best in the department in a given area, a 3 means you are average and the scores of 1′s and 2′s would mean you have a gap. We all have gaps. The real question is what are going to do about closing that gap.

Leading and Managing

This covers areas related to how well you lead your team: holding them to a high standard, coaching, motivating and showing up consistently.

Hold your team to a consistently high standard of work in strategic thinking and planning.
Hold your team to a consistently high standard of work in execution in the market.
People Leadership: your team knows the team vision and is consistently motivated by where you want to go.
People Management: seen as actively interested in helping your team to manage their careers.
Coaching: Teach, guide and direct your team members for higher performance.
Training and Development: provides on-going skills development to make the team better.
Motivation and Recognition: you are seen to actively provide positive commentary to team players, one on one and in public.
Consistent Communication: Both written and spoken, big and small. Easily approachable and makes time to wander.
Actively Listens to Team: asks the big strategic questions, not the small tactical details
Leadership during times of pressure: results, ambiguity, change and deadlines.

Brand Stewardship

This would look at how you do in terms of the marketing of the brand. That looks at strategic thinking, quality of the output, processes and how well you show up to peers.

Takes the time each week to engage in deeper Strategic Thinking to ensure it’s not just about execution.
Has Crafted a Team Vision to help align & motivate team. Stewart of the Direction of the Brand and Gatekeeper to all things strategic
Challenges Team to stay on strategy, yet provides motivation for creative solutions.
Consistency in the Quality of marketing outputs: Advertising/Media, Innovation/New Products and In-store/Promotion
Relationship with Agencies, able to motivate for better work.
Consistently in the relationships you’ve built with the Sales Team
Broad Influence beyond your team with core stakeholders: R&D, Finance, HR, global.
Organization of the work flows. Your team gets things done on time. Deadlines, on budget, on forecast.
Processes: you organize, challenge and manage the processes so your team can execute.
Manages Up: Once aligned with the team you are able to effectively gain support from those above. Seen as one to fight for your team.

Identifying Your Own Gaps

Using the two elements of the review above, identify what are the 3 areas from the Self Evaluation that you feel you need the most focus on? Then as you build your own personal plan for the year, ask yourself what is your objective/goal for each of those 3 areas. And then map out a plan of attack for the coming year? It might feel a bit crazy, but going through the process should help you identify where you need the most help. If you’re reluctant in sharing this with your boss, fearing how it might be used against you, then reach out to a friend and seek their advice. If you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to bounce some of your thoughts off me. I do this with many Brand Leaders. And don’t worry, we all have gaps. I struggled at different times in my career when dealing with the sales team and it took me a while to master the art of managing up. You might be able to learn from some of my mistakes.

To download a copy of the self evaluation, you can find a word version at:

To read more on managing your career, read the following presentation:

I run Brand Leader Training programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below:

To see the training presentations, visit the Beloved Brands Slideshare site at: http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations

If you or team has any interest in a training program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1

Brand = Culture: How Culture can Help Your Brand Win

12 January 2013

7 Comments

Most people think that that Brand is what the Marketers do. And Culture should be left to the Human Resources department. But in reality, everyone is responsible for both Brand and Culture. Creating a Branded Culture might be a great chance for Marketing and HR to be working together, and find ways to involve everyone from the Brand. The new Brand Leader has to understand that marketing is more than just TV ads and more than just Facebook likes. Brand is about the experience that consumers walk away with. If I am going through the drive-through at 4am or on the phone with customer service or getting an email with a Visa “special offer” from the Bank where I have my Visa, I am in constant judgment of your brand.

5 Ways that Brands Connect

Brands are able to generate love for their brand when the consumer does connect with the brand. I wish everyone would stop debating what makes a great brand and realize that all five connectors matter: promise, strategy, story, innovation and experience. The first connector is the Brand Promise, which connects when the brand’s main Benefit matches up to the needs of consumers. Once knowing that promise, everything else feeds off that Promise. For Volvo the promise is Safety, for Apple it is Simplicity and FedEx it might be Reliability. It’s important to align your Strategy and Brand Story pick the best ways to communicate the promise, and then aligning your Innovation and the Experience so that you deliver to the promise. To ensure the Innovation is aligned, everyone in R&D must be working towards delivering the brand promise. You don’t create a new brand promise based on what you invent. If someone at Volvo were to invent the fastest car on the planet, should they market it as the safe-fast car or should they just sell the technology to Ferrari. Arguably, Volvo could make more money by selling it to a brand where it fits, rather than trying to change people’s minds. As for the experience, EVERYONE in the company has to buy into and live up to the Brand Promise. As you can start to see, embedding the Brand Promise right into the culture is essential to the brand’s success.

It starts with the Brand DNA

Everything in the company should feed off the Brand DNA. The Brand DNA (some call it the Brand Essence) is the most succinct definition of the Brand. For Volvo, it’s “Safety”, while BMW might be “Performance” and Mercedes is “Luxury”. The Tool I use to determine a Brand’s DNA revolves around the Brand’s personality, the products and services the brand provides, the internal beacons that people internally rally around when thinking about the brand and consumer views of the Brand. What we normally do is brainstorm 3-4 words in each section and then looking collectively begin to frame the Brand’s DNA with a few words or a phrase to which the brand can stand behind.

The DNA helps Guide the Brand’s Management

The Brand DNA should help frame 1) Brand Plan that drives the business for the upcoming year or the next 5 years 2) Brand Positioning that connects to the consumer through marketing communications 3) Customer Value Proposition that links the consumer needs to the benefits of the brand 4) Go-To-Market strategy that frames the distribution and the selling process 5) Cultural Beacons that help define the brand internally through values, inspiration and challenge and finally 6) Business Results, with each brand offering a unique way that it makes money. Each of these six needs feed off the Brand DNA, look to the definition as a guideline for how to align to the brand.

When you begin to blow this out one step further, you can start to see where the complexity comes into play with each of the six areas have their own needs that should still feed off that Brand DNA.

The DNA sets up the Brand Values

Great Brand Leaders should be looking at the culture as an opportunity to win in the market place. No matter how good your promise is, if your company is not set up to deliver that promise, everything comes crashing down. The brand story told within the company is even more important than what you might tell the market through your advertising.

Managing organizational culture is very challenging. The DNA should provide an internal beacon for all the People in the organization to follow and deliver the brand promise. As you move along the Brand Love Curve from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and on to Beloved status, you need to make sure the culture keeps pace with where the brand is.

While the DNA can provide the internal beacon, it might not be enough to capture all the behaviors. Brand Values should come from the DNA, and act as guideposts to ensure that the behavior of everyone in the organization is set to deliver upon the Brand’s promise. How do you want your people to show up? What type of service do you want? How much emphasis on innovation? What type of people do you want to hire? What behavior should be rewarded and what behavior is off-side. Having the right Brand Values will help you answer these questions. The Brand Values become an extension of what the Brand Leader wants the brand to stand for.

A great example of Brand Values is the Virgin Group of Companies defines what each value is, but also what it shouldn’t be. I love that Fun means enjoyment but not incompetent and Value means simple but not cheap.

The Right People Leadership Matters

Having values is one thing, but the other component of Culture is the right people leadership. Use the values to help people deliver upon the right behaviors, skills and experiences. Leaders must embody the Brand’s DNA and live by the values. Employees will be watching the Leaders to ensure they are living up to the words on the wall. Leaders need to believe that by investing in their people, the business results will come. Better people produce better work and that drives better results. Talent management means hiring the right people and providing the right training. Too many companies are skimping on training and development, which is equivalent to cutting back on your R&D.

Every communication to employees, whether in a speech or memo, should touch upon the Brand Values, by highlighting great examples of when employees have delivered upon a Brand Value. Leverage values, with inspirational touch points and processes to inspire and challenge them on achieving greatness. The culture will only change when everyone makes the decision to make the change.

Brand Leaders should look to Culture as an Asset to make your Brand Experience more powerful.

To download a copy of this article and share with your team, you can find a pdf version at:

To read more on this subject, read the following presentation:

Focus Your Target by Making sure you Matter to someone who Cares.

6 January 2013

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“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. “ Seth Godin

Strategy is all about Choices

Many Brand Leaders think they are good decision makers. Most Linked In profiles start by saying “I’m a strategic thinker”. But the flaw is they keep trying to be everything to everyone. The most important element of Marketing Strategy is the exact area where most Marketers struggle: FOCUS! I still see a fear among many marketers to make choices–whether it’s a target market, brand positioning or strategies or the allocation of spend. Good decision-making starts with forcing yourself to use the word “or” instead of keep using the word “and”. If you aren’t making choices, then you aren’t really making decisions. So forget about decision making and start focusing on making choices.

Find Those Most Motivated by What you Do

I once talked to a Brand Leader who said that they had done their homework on their target and had come to the decision that it was “18-65, current customers, new customers and employees” My response was “why have you eliminated Tourists and Prisoners?” He laughed but I could see him starting to think “hmm, why not”. In that 18-65 age target, there are 3 generations who do not really understand each other. People write books about these generations. Yet somehow you’re going to tell me you think you can find one common way of communicating with them. Now if I told you the Brand Leader was at a Bank, selling ‘first time mortgages’, then how crazy is 18-65? Yes, I know there could be some 64-year-old consumer who is really tired of renting for the last 43 years, but I’m sure they would understand that the bank targets a 32-year-old in their ads. Trying to sell to those that ‘might’ is not as powerful as selling to those that ‘will’.

The most obvious target is those consumers already motivated to buy what you have to sell.

Pick a focused Target Market: While it’s tempting to sell to everyone. Focus your resources on those most likely to buy. Realizing not everyone can like you is the first step to focus on those that can love you. Whether you are a niche player focused on guerilla tactics, or the number two player attacking the category leader having a focused target market is crucial. I see a difference between a “buying target” which is those consumers who currently buy the product naturally without your effort and a “strategic target” of those consumers who you want to get to act–whether it’s considering, purchasing or continuing to buy. Rest assured that the buying target will not likely leave you because they aren’t in the strategic target–whether that’s in your TV ad or as part of your promotions. Think of it this way, anyone can still buy, but who do we think is most likely going to be influenced and motivated by what we have to sell.

Pick a focused Brand Positioning: Start with the target market you just picked–and assess their need states to see where you can best match up.

Beloved Brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or they are not around for much longer. There’s too much pressure to be a copy cat brand–your channel might be the first to reject you, but if not, the consumer surely will. The winning zone is to match up what your consumer wants and what you do best. Avoid taking your competitor on in the space that they are better than you or you’ll get your butt handed to you. Where you are both trying to meet the needs of the consumer and are equal in performance, be careful that the leader may win, unless you can find ways to connect emotionally, be more innovative or find ways to provide superior execution. But even then, this space is a risky place to play.

Know your consumer, and live on their insights

Insight is not something that consumers never knew before. That would be knowledge not insight. Insight is not data or fact about your brand that you want to tell. Insights are not statistics about the demographics, shopping patterns or purchase behavior.

Oddly enough, Insight is something that everyone already knows. Insight comes to life when it’s told in such a captivating way that makes consumers stop and say “hmm, I thought I was the only who felt like that”. That’s why we laugh watching Seinfeld, when see the way that insight is projected with humor, why we get goose bumps during a movie when insight is projected with inspiration and why we cry during a romantic comedy when the insight comes alive through real-life drama. Because they’ve captured how we already feel.

The dictionary definition of the word Insight is “seeing below the surface”. To get deeper, keep asking yourself “so what does that mean for the consumer” until you have an “AHA moment”. What are the beliefs, attitudes or behaviors that help explain how they think, feel or act in life, as it pertains to the relationship to your brand or category. It’s not just data, trends and facts are insights. Facts are merely on the surface—so they miss out on the depth of the explanation of the underlying trends or feelings that caused the data. (e.g. In 1964, US teenagers saw the Beetles as an ‘escape’ from reality after the JFK assassination) Insights help tell the story, paint the picture or inspire the creative juices. Insights need to be interesting or intriguing. My challenge is to think beyond specific category insights and think about Life Insights or even Societal Trends that could impact changing behaviour.

We managed to talk the banker into a more reasonable target of 28-33, within a year of purchasing their first home. This target is going through so much life changing moments that at times they feel overwhelmed with all the change. Insights help bring more life to the target.

“Things in my life seem to be moving so fast–marriage, career, baby and now a house. I’m a feeling a bit overwhelmed but I guess it’s time for me to start growing up fast”
“I really have no business buying a house. I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m just trying to fake it. Everything is so scary. And now the bank wants to know if i want fixed or variable. I felt so stupid asking what’s the difference”

Why focus on a defined Target?

Every brand is constrained by resources—dollars, people and time. Even the richest Brand Leaders complain about the lack of resources. Focus makes you matter most to those who actually might care. Focusing your limited resources on those consumers with the highest propensity to buy what you are selling will deliver the greatest movement towards sales and the highest return on investment for those resources. I was leading a session and I asked who the key targets were. The first answer was pretty good. Then people around the room kept saying “well, what about…” and “we can’t forget…” and “we don’t want to alienate…” And the President says in serious tone: ”we target everyone, because it could be anyone really”.

In a competitive category, no one brand can do it all. Focus makes you decide whether to be better, different or cheaper. Giving the consumer too many messages about your brand will confuse them as to what makes your brand unique. Trying to be everything is the recipe for being nothing. I was lucky that my first marketing job at General Mills was managing child cereals, where each quarter, I had to do a promotion on 5 different cereals. So, twenty times per year, I had to work with the 2 x 2 inch corner of the cereal box and put a message that would make a 5-year-old scream at their Moms to buy the cereal. That taught me a lot about focusing my messaging.

Trying to do everything spreads your resources and your message too thin, so that everything you do is “ok” and nothing is “great”. With a long to-do list, you’ll never do great at anything. And in a crowded and fast economy, “ok” never breaks through so you’ll never get the early win to gain that tipping point that opens up the gateway to even bigger success. I once had a director working for me, who kept spinning around never getting anything done. His team was complaining that every time they started a new project, he’d come up with new ideas. I sat down with him and asked him to bring his project list for the up-coming quarter. He came in with 83 projects!!! I said “how do we narrow this list down to five”. He looked at me like I was insane.

Trying to be everything means you end up being nothing.

When You Focus, Four Things Happen

Better ROI: With all the resources against one strategy, one target, one message, you’ll be find out if the strategy that you have chosen is able to actually moves consumers, drives sales or enhances other key performance indicators. Did you actually get done what you wanted to get done? If you spread those resources, you may never see any movement and then figure your strategy is wrong.

Strong Reputation: When you only do one thing, you naturally start to become associated with that one thing. With consumers, you get the reputation as the “fast one” or the “great tasting”. And internally, as people in the company start to align to your one thing, eventually you become very good at that one thing. Look at Volvo with “safety”. Every Volvo consumer message for 30 years is about safety. And internally, everyone at Volvo is fixated on safety, coming out with new safety innovations ahead of everyone else. Yes, Volvo’s have leather seats, go pretty fast, have a CD player and even come in multiple colours. But they don’t feel the need to have to say it.

More Competitive: As your reputation grows, you begin to own that one thing and your are able to better defend the positioning territory. As categories mature, brands start to stake claims and if you’ve got something that’s unique, relevant and motivating, you’ll be able to own it. To win, you have to be either different, better or cheaper. Or you won’t be around for very long. Defend your point of difference.

Bigger and Better P&L: As the focused effort drives results, it opens up the P&L with higher sales and profits. With a better ROI, you get to go back to management and say “it worked” and they’ll say “ok, let’s increase the investment”. And that means more resources will be put to the effort to drive even higher growth. As you efficiently drive the top-line, the P&L opens up a bit and becomes easier for a brand leader to work with.

So if you’re a Brand Leader and you know that by focusing you’ll get a higher ROI which means even more resources and you know you’ll get a reputation and a position you can defend….then, why won’t you focus?

You have to Matter to Those Who Care

To see a training presentation on getting to a Better Creative Brief read the following:

If you or team has any interest in a training program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1

I run Brand Leader Training programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below:

Ten Resolutions for Brand Leaders in 2013

1 January 2013

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Happy New Year!!!

As we approach the new year, it’s a great time to come back fresh from the break and challenge yourself to get better. In the words of T.S. Eliot: ”For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice”.

#1: Take a Walk in Your Consumers Shoes. See the brand as they do. It’s not just about doing research and finding consumer insights. It’s about experiencing the brand as your consumer does. Bringing the consumer into everything you do tightening the connection. Consumers do not care what you do, until you care about what they want. In 2013, be the spokesperson who represents the consumer to your team and watch the work get better. When doing TV ads or digital ads, realize that the consumer now sees 5,000+ brand messages per day: Would this capture their attention, would they get it and would they do anything with it? Read the following article that puts the consumer front and center in what we do: Everything Starts and Ends with the Consumer

#2: Ask Bigger Questions, Get Bigger Answers. As a senior Brand Leader, it is easy to get so wrapped up in the details of the execution that you’re making the non-strategic decisions on behalf of the team. You have just really become the “senior” Senior Brand Manager that really annoys your team. Instead of providing the team with a vision, challenging on strategy or teaching the team, you’re telling them to make the flash bigger and change the sell sheet to purple. Instead of telling people what to do, why not challenge yourself to sit back slightly and ask the really tough challenging questions. You’ll know you’ve asked a really tough question when you don’t even know the answer. To figure out the best questions, read: Ask Bigger Questions, Get Bigger Answers

#3: Create More Love for your Brand and you’ll drive More Power and Profits for your Brand. Brand Leaders are too logical for their own good. So much so that it’s holding their brand back from being great. To create more love for your brand, there are 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Once you have the connection with your consumers, use that power with retailers, media, competitors and even the very consumers that love you. With added power, you’ll be able to drive bigger profits, with inelastic price, more efficiency in costs and consumers will follow your brand with every new product launch or category you enter. Realize the magic formula and find more growth for your brand in 2013: Love = Power = Growth = Profit. To read more about this, follow this link: Brand Love = Power = Profit

#4: Focusing makes your Brand Bigger. Lack of focus makes it Smaller. I still see Brand Leaders struggling to focus. They want as broad of a selling target they can find so they can speak to everyone, yet in reality they speak with no one. They want so many messages, mainly because they don’t know what the consumer wants, so they just say everything they can think of. And they choose every media option because they don’t even know where they are, so they try to be everywhere. When you don’t make a choice, you don’t make a decision. Great marketers make choices–they use the word “or” instead of “and”. They apply their limited resources against the biggest potential win–with a focused target, focused message and focused medium to shout it in. They look bigger than they are to those who are the most motivated to already buy. To challenge yourself to focus, read: Brand Focus Makes You Bigger

#5: At every turn, ask yourself “DO I LOVE IT?” Reject all work that is “just ok” because OK is the enemy of Great. Moving your brand from indifferent to Like It is relatively easy: good product, smart investment and doing the basics right. But moving from “Like It” to “Love It” can be a herculean task. If you want your consumer to love your brand, you have to love the work you do. Look at the love Apple projects to its consumers through the magic of design, branding and marketing. Never let something out that’s “just ok”. If you’re indifferent, then you’re brand will be as well. Challenge yourself in 2013 to lead yourself with passion equal to logic and find a way to love the work you do. Read the following article at: Reject OK because OK is the Enemy of Greatness

#6: Find Your Point of Difference by Being Different. Brand Leaders always try to find that nugget as their point of difference. They get so logical and then try to make it a big deal in the consumers mind, even though many times the consumer does not care. And yet, these same Brand Leaders play it so safe that their work looks and feels just like everyone else. In 2013, push yourself to be different in your execution. If the consumer sees 5,000 brand messages a day, they’ll only be attracted to something they’ve never seen before. All the ‘me-too’ messages will be lost in a sea of sameness. Whether it is new products, a new advertising campaign or media options push yourself to do something that stands out. Don’t just settle for ok. Always push for great. If you don’t love the work, how do you expect your consumer to love your brand? The opposite of different, is indifferent and who wants to be indifferent. Read the following link: The Art of Being Different

#7: Care More about the Careers of Your People: The best way to connect with your team is to care about their careers. If you are authentic i how you approach their development, they’ll do listen to your advice, follow your lead and give more effort than ever. If they feel they are getting the training and development needed, they’ll likely stay longer with your company. If they have added skills and motivation, their performance will be even better and if the work gets better, then the results will be better. For you the equation is simple: The better the people, the better the work and in turn the better the results. To read more on how to help with their careers, read the following link: Managing Your Marketing Career (Free Download)

#8: Create a Culture around your Brand—Brand should be everyone’s job, not just marketing. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people impacted by the vision, mission and values you set out for the brand. While most people will think the Brand Manager leads the brand, it’s the collective wisdom of all those who touch it. From Sales People negotiating on the brands behalf to HR people who pick the right people to various Agencies, right down to the Editor who works just one day on your brand. Motivate them, embrace them, challenge them, lead them, follow them and reward them. Great people make great work and great work leads to great brands. In 2013, challenge yourself to realize that you need more than just you living the brand, you need everyone living and breathing it. The best case study on how to drive the brand right into the culture is Ritz Carlton: Ritz Carlton

#9 : Be a Better Client and Get Better Work: I get asked a lot: “So what is it that makes someone good at advertising?”. I always think people are looking for some type of magical answer, but the answer I give is always very simple yet if you think about it very complex: “They can consistently get good advertising on the air and keep bad advertising off the air”. It all starts with being a better client thought. As David Ogilvy said “Clients get the work they deserve”. If you are your agency’s best client, you are much more likely to get the best of their work. To get better, read an article on the Worst Type of Clients

#10: Be a Better Brand Leader. Be more Consumer focused and live as though Everything Starts and Ends With the Consumer in Mind. That’s why you got into this business isn’t it? Follow Your Instincts and use the gut feel of Marketing. If you have more fun, so to will the consumer. Revel in Ambiguity and be more patient with Ideas. It’s ok not to know for a little bit because that’s when the best answers come to the surface. Actively Listen and use more questions than answers. Focus on the People and the Results will come. Here is an article for you: Eight Brand Leader Behaviors

I really hope you try one of these out in 2013. And I hope you see the difference.

Here’s to a Great Year in 2013!

To find ways to make your brand more loved, read the following presentation:

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1

You can always reach me by email at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

I run Brand Leader Training programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below that might interest you:

Finding your Work Life Balance makes you a Better Brand Leader

19 December 2012

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During my career, I always have felt that being able to keep my balance was one of my competitive advantages. While my peers were burning out, somehow I was able to stay fresh, energized, creative and positive. I have always said that what kept me going was a love of the work. But secretly, what really kept me going was to know when enough was enough, finding small ways to rejuvenate myself and always keeping things in perspective. It’s a fact that actuaries have the longest life expectancy of any job. It’s a 9-5 job, compete certainty, follow the process and go home. But, even with a shorter life, I’d still rather be a marketer.

Marketing jobs are very hard. The pressure is immense. The pressures of deadlines, career advancement, politics, budgets, making the year, uncertainty, conflicts with others all adds up. The pace of the jobs can wear you down. While your calendar is jam-packed with meetings, everything is due yesterday. While you know the big planning dates, because you’re doing approvals on packaging or fixing your forecast, those dates somehow creep up faster than you want some years. While the variety in the job is stimulating, it too takes its toll. It’s hard being a jack of all. As you move up, you’re not allowed to really have weaknesses–you need to be strategic yet creative, organized yet flexible, decisive yet open, able to give feedback and yet receive it. It’s all about continuous improvement just to keep up in the job. If you’re a working mom or dad, then you are likely running around every week night and weekend. You might be rushing to the day-care but you’re also signing back on after the kids are in bed.

As we get to the holiday period, this week is likely the quietest week in your office. Half the staff has bolted for the holidays. Aside from you getting your last-minute accrual in to finance, completing all the HR things you forgot to do from October and doing as much work as you can just to catch up so you can get a few days off, this is a great time to start to think about work life balance.

Ask yourself these two questions:

This year, on a scale of 10, how good is your work life balance?
In 5 years, on a scale of 10, what would your goal for what you would like your work-life balance to be?

If the answers are different, then you have a problem. Do you really think your answer will be any different or will you just have a new set of challenges in 5 years. Well, this week is a great chance to have that life-changing “ah-ha” moment where you take a look and adjust. Make a new year’s resolution that you want to live a more balanced life in 2013.

Careers are a long distance race, not a series of sprints.

As you come up to your new years resolutions, maybe it’s time to think about work-life balance. Instead of feeling guilty about it, look at this as a competitive advantage that can make you even better.

Here’s my work-life balance tips I have used for years to keep my balance:

Never work on weekends. If you are going to stay energized and creative in your role then you need that 48 hour break to stay fresh. I’d prefer to work Thursday night till 10pm to get what I needed to get done. This will help you live a more balanced life.
When you look at your weekly calendar at the start of each week, or each day, challenge yourself to get a major task done in the morning and then get a major task done in the afternoon. That means you do COMPLETE at least two things from your project list each day. At the end of each week, you will have COMPLETED 10 major tasks–far better off then if you hadn’t. The alternative is getting to the end of the week, driving home and saying “damn it, i forgot to get that report out”. This is a simple system that knocks things off your to-do list and you’ll be shocked at how good it makes you feel. If you think this is too simple, my challenge to you is did you get 10 major things done list week?
Also in your calendar, create 5 fictional meetings that thinking time. Thinking, whether strategic or creative, is a part of the job. But you can’t do it with wall-to-wall meetings from 8 till 5pm. Many leaders who like to be active, forget about the thinking. They become known as “do-ers” not “thinkers”. People will look to them to get things done. They’ll call them “good soldiers”. And yet, they get stuck somewhere on the org chart because they forget to think. This will give you an ownership of your calendar that ensures you do at least 5 hours of thinking time.
Take up walking–at least 30-60 minutes a day. While it burns off some calories, it’s a great way to stay balanced. It’s the best thinking time you can do. Driving is also a good time, but doesn’t burn off any calories. I would bet half my ideas came from walking time. If you have “No Time”, then get off the subway 5 stops earlier. Go for a walk at lunch with a buddy. Or better yet, have a walking Meeting at some point in the day. Steve Jobs used to do walking meetings all the time. I love these and when i do workshops for teams, I always put in a 15 minute walking exercise. This allows you get away from the hustle and bustle of things and open your mind a bit.
When you come off a big busy crunch period, it is time to spoil yourself. Use the next 3 days as slacker days. And in those 3 days, do something, go somewhere and eat something that’s a favorite. Spas, massages, hamburgers across town, old movies, reading a book, taking a long hot bath. Your call. But while the last few weeks or months have been a sacrifice now it’s time for a bit of “me time”. This rewards you for the sacrifice you just made over the past few weeks/months. It will get you back in the game ready for the next sacrifice, because you know you’ll reward yourself after.
When you go on vacation and shut it down, you have to shut it down completely. Get rid of the phone, the laptop. Stop checking voice mail. If your mind is on fun and work at the same time, you won’t be much fun. If you have a great vacation then you’ll be even better when you get back to the office, ready to go.
Get yourself better organized. If you feel in control of everything, then you’ll be surprised how much easier it is to achieve balance. If you are constantly chasing your tail, you’ll burn out. I’m always organized–which I always say allows me to know where I can off-course because I know the entry point for getting back on track. This will help you to live a bit simpler and find the balance easier.
Isolate the planning period to ONE MONTH. These companies that do planning for 9 of the 12 months…. seriously? When are you suppose to do your job. Planning should be 3-4 weeks maximum. If you do a 1-2 strategic workshop with the 10 people on your brand, you can easily get your plan to the 70% stage and use the rest of the time to improve and tighten it up. But if you’re always planning then when are you doing the work.Doing up fancy chart after fancy chart does not make you a better strategic thinker. It makes you worse. Stop it.
Write a plan you can do easily. I always try to get my clients to focus on 3 strategies with 3 tactics per strategy. That gives you 9 major things you have to do in the coming year. Think about how good of a job you would do on those 9. Compare that to a plan with 7 strategies and 7 tactics per strategy. 9 vs 49. You do the math and see who will be a better marketer, who will look like they are doing the job with complete ease. I once asked one of my directors to show me his project list and he said he had 87 major projects due this quarter and the list was always changing because we keep coming up with better ways. His team all wanted to quit and he burned out months later.
Don’t create work for others and they likely won’t create work back for you. I remember as I was a new director, I used to send out notes that created work for my team. Do this….look up this….complete this for me. Then I started to notice they’d have questions for me, or send me back the answers and ask for my feedback. I started to notice the loop: The more work I create for others the more work that I create for myself. So stop it!!! I did.
Have a “work out” session with your team. Map out all the ideas and prioritize them on big vs small and easy vs difficult. Try to do all the big and easy ideas and avoid the small and difficult ones. These time wasters just don’t matter and they are a drain on resources.
Keep perspective. It’s just marketing. Yes, these jobs are amazing. They are fun. It’s what we do. But it’s marketing for christ’s sake. We aren’t saving lives, fixing world peace or world hunger. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Take a Breather to really change the way you live your life. Find your balance. Force yourself to rejuvenate. Do something for your health.

Stop thinking that Work-Life Balance is a Weakness. Think of it as a Competitive Advantage.

If you are a long time reader of the blog, or a first timer, I want to wish you a happy holiday period and here’s some optimism for a healthy, prosperous and balanced year in 2013

How do you fire Yourself?

What Makes for a Good Advertising Agency?

Making great advertising is simple, but very hard to do.

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1. Will people watch even more TV in the future?

2. How can Advertisers Capture the Internet Babies (12-22 years old) as they move into adulthood?

3. Can Newspapers even Survive?

4. Can Advertisers Figure Out how to Win in the New World?

5. Are there too many Social Media Options?

6. Will New Media people ever be able to Convince Brand Leaders of what they Should do?

When It Comes to New Media, Brand Leaders still need to be Fundamentally Sound

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So what happens when you just do “surface thinking”:

How to go Deeper

Thinking Time Questions that will Help you Go Deeper

The Deeper the Thinking, the Smarter the Leader

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Master Brand Strategy Road Map

Key Elements

House of Brands

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Don’t feel bad. Most brands are at the Like It stage

The Brand Love Curve

The Like It Stage

The Five Sources of Brand Love

Why is your Brand stuck at the Like It Stage:

Indicators that you’re at the Like It Stage

Why Would you want to get to the Love It Stage

How to get to past the Like It stage

If you are stuck at Like It, then you are leaving money on the table

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Brand Funnels

Brand Health vs Brand Wealth

Analyzing Brand Funnels

Matching the Funnel up The Brand Love Curve

Attack Your Gaps

Use Brand Funnels to Track and Manage the Health of Your Brand

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The 5 Steps to Doing a Key issues deck:

Straw Dog Vision Statement

Force Field Analysis

Deep dive on each Driver and each Inhibitor

Brand Health and Wealth

Key Issues

The Power of Three’s:

Asking the Big Questions Leads to Big Strategies and Big Results

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Cut to the Chase and Avoid the Brand Spin

Cut to the Chase with the The 40/70 Rule

Cut to the Chase with Tough Questions

Cut to the Chase and Find Your Difference

What is Your “Let’s Cut to the Chase” Moment?

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

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Are You Worried Enough?

5 things you should be worried about:

So the question I have for is “Are You Worried Enough?” And what are you doing about it?

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

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Brainstorming should be a Regular Part of running your Brand.

The Warm Up

The trick to a good brainstorm is very simple: Diverge, Converge, Diverge Converge.

Diverge #1:

Converge #1: