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What's in a Brand?
Local marketing executives share their insights into business branding
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Business New Haven
2/16/2004
By: Melissa Nicefaro
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Familiarity breeds trust.
Sometimes a popular and trusted name behind a product is enough to sell the product. But more often, a brand name has to be established or even re-established.
Charles Mason, president of Bethany's Mason & Madison advertising agency, defines branding: "Most communications people take a fairly broad definition of branding. Our working definition is 'the management of expectations a consumer has regarding a company or product.'"
Mason says that a common source of confusion derives from whether a brand is the logo and the tagline or whether the brand is something more than that.
In order for a brand to work (sell), expectations must be met.
Mason uses McDonald's as an example: "When you walk into a McDonald's or pull up at the car window, you have a certain expectation about what's going to happen. You know what products are going to be there, but you expect the people to answer your order in a certain way and you expect your order to take a certain amount of time."
He continues: "You know it's going to taste a certain way - and all of that is an expectation that's created over time."
Mason tells clients that there are two factors that create that an expectation over time. "One of those factors is communication in the form of public relations and advertising, but also by word of mouth. The other half is the experience."
Mason admits it's an odd thing for a communications firm to say, but in reality, "the experience" is far more important than any amount of advertising. But first, customers need to be wooed.
"Let's say McDonald's advertising and public relations [people] go out and say, 'If you pull up at McDonald's, you're going to get really fast service. You're going to be in and out of that line in 30 seconds.' Next time you go to McDonald's, you pull up and the line is backed around the corner and the first car is sitting there and sitting there and you wonder what the heck they're doing. It doesn't matter what you've said in the advertising communication, as soon as you hold that up for what you stand for, and the experience contradicts that, you've got a serious problem."
Bruce Silverstone is president and creative director of Silverstone Adkins & Breit Inc., a full-service sales, promotion and marketing communications agency in Stratford.
Silverstone agrees that advertising plays a role in obtaining customers, but it is up to a business to retain customers through building and redeeming trust.
Celebrating its 19th year as an agency with a highly successful track record, he says branding for businesses and their products is extremely important.
"A business needs to differentiate itself from competition, and should make an indelible impression on its target audience, understanding that some companies market themselves directly to consumers and some to businesses," he says.
When crafting a re-branding strategy, Silverstone focuses on developing communications programs that provide agility and cost-effectiveness, as well as innovative creative work.
In addition to traditional communications, Silverstone's agency creates communications programs for clients through viral (online) and guerilla (non-traditional) marketing.
"One of our clients is Panasonic, and their consumer battery division is the largest battery manufacturer in the world, but only number three or four within the U.S." Silverstone explains. "They wanted to stand out and differentiate themselves. We developed a tie-in program with Blockbuster Video. Every time a consumer purchased a certain quantity of batteries, the consumer would receive a free movie rental at Blockbuster. It became a value-added program for consumers."
Just as value-add in the form of a joint venture can increase a company's brand name exposure, a business can do its brand a disservice by not meeting customers' expectations.
Mason notes, "One of my favorite areas of contradiction are when you're put on hold when you're calling a company to buy something and it says, 'Your call is very important to us. Please hold. The average wait time is ten minutes.' Is it important - or are you going to keep me waiting ten minutes? It certainly isn't important enough that you have anybody on staff to answer the phone call."
He continues: "That's what we mean by the combination of communications and experience. They have to work hand in glove to make sure both sides are covered."
Mason says there are three things to consider in a branding strategy.
Advertising executives at the firm use a graph with three circles that overlap, though not perfectly. The first circle represents what's true about a business or organization. The second circle is what is relevant to the consumer or customer. The third circle is what differentiates a business from its competition.
"What we try to find for everyone, the No. 1 target, is what is true, relevant and differentiating. If you can get into that area, you have a really powerful message to deliver to consumers with a powerful branding opportunity," Mason says.
All three factors must be met in order for a branding strategy to be a success: "You could say it's really true that you have great service. And then you can say that's really important to people and relevant to the customer. If you then look at your competition, you may see that every one of them gives great service also. That may not be a differentiating issue, so you may need to find something else to talk about that is different from them. You could find something that is differentiating and true about you, but the customer doesn't care at all about it. We call it the TRU [true, relevant and unique] zone."
Silverstone's course of attack is similar: "When people think 'communications,' they think 'advertising.' What we do here is develop integrated communications programs. It could be point-of-purchase, direct mail, online marketing, and a wide range of other communications media that work synergistically."
Says Silverstone: "If a client wanted to re-brand a product to give it a new life and reinvigorate it, we would develop a program that would make it stand apart from competition. If a company wanted to re-brand itself, the same issues apply. It's a similar process," he says.
"We have a process that we follow to develop a branding program for our clients. It involves a variety of disciplines, both objective and strategy-based," he concludes.
Though there are multiple formulas for branding strategies, and the desired end-result is the same, each company needs to individualize its efforts.
Mason explains. "Look at Proctor & Gamble: Their strategy is to stay relatively in the background for their international organization. What they do is bring to the forefront their individual products. There might be six or seven different variations of Ivory in liquid and other forms. They have enough scale, size and momentum that they can support an individual brand, and their whole strategy is making the individual products the heroes."
Mason believes that P&G executives arrived at that conclusion for a couple of reasons, but mostly because they've acquired companies and brands as the company grew and diversified. Proctor & Gamble had strong existing brands and had to decide if it was going to fold the new brands in and call them by the comparable Proctor & Gamble name.
"They also have competitive brands, and they felt if they put them all together, consumers wouldn't have multiple choices," says Mason. "They have found over the years that they can get a bigger share of market if they have multiple names than if they put them all as Proctor & Gamble soap."
On the other end of the spectrum is a company like Microsoft, which has dozens of product brands such as PowerPoint and Word. Microsoft does not hesitate to use its brand name whenever given the opportunity, and it's pretty clear that those products are subordinate to the Microsoft brand.
"That's a different approach. They generally don't launch products that are competitive with their own. They're both perfectly viable, but address different needs," Mason says.
What works for Microsoft may not work for Proctor & Gamble. And where Microsoft freely uses its well-known and trusted brand name, many companies make the mistake of over-naming their products, Mason says.
"Mostly when we're dealing with B2B [business-to-business] companies, if they're going to make a mistake, they tend to over-name their products. They've got some little difference in a product, and the give a different name to it and try to develop it as a stand-alone thing."
So in order to build a successful brand, we need to name our companies - but not abuse the name. Then we need to stand behind the brand and - at the very least - meet expectations. According to advertising execs, the rest will mostly just fall into place.
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