When CMO’s were asked last year to list their three most vital capabilities, one third (33%) of more than 400 respondents listed Brand Strategy, highlighting this as the most vital capability they needed to consider for the future.
Published on MarketingCharts.com in July 2020. Data Source: Gartner. Based on a survey of 432 marketing leaders in North America, the UK, France & Germany at companies with $500million to $20 billion + in annual revenue.
This was a big move up the priority list from the 2019 study indicating how shaken those CMO’s were to Coronavirus and the impact this will have on their strategy.
It’s almost as though the batshit craziness of the social media rabbit hole many brands were hurtling down made the industry pause for a moment. Those that control the budgets started to think, ‘hold up a minute’ let’s take some time here and figure out why our TikTok channel isn’t selling any Lawnmowers or why Clubhouse isn’t where our target market spend their 8 pm relaxation time.
There is nothing wrong with these advertising platforms (if you think they are anything but advertising platforms, you shouldn’t be in marketing); it’s just that you should be thinking strategy before tactics every time.
Those that start with tactics are by nature ‘tactical’, and whilst they may be brilliant at the tactics, they are no use to the long term strategy of the company.
The above list makes for interesting reading; it is the Brand Strategy result we are most concerned with. Brand Strategy is not some vast unwieldy process that you need to do from scratch each year; it’s relatively simple if you follow the process and so let me break this down.
In a nutshell, if you can answer these three things, then you are well on your way to managing a brand.
1) Who do you want to speak to?
2) What do you want to say?
3) How do you want to say it?
That’s it. Who-What-How. Nail this, and you are managing your brand. The process is always easier than the practice but run the steps, IN THAT ORDER, and you’re doing your job. You need to diagnose the problem first and then concentrate on the strategy. Think like a doctor; find out the problem, run some tests, confirm the diagnosis, and then fix the problem.
Always always, Diagnosis then Strategy.
Diagnosis comes in the form of looking at everything you do through the lens of your consumer and not the loudest sales person who ‘thinks they know exactly what your consumer ‘wants’ and ‘thinks’. Before you get all ‘that sounds like my company’ remember this; they are well-intentioned and have had to do this over the years as all the marketing department ever did was fanny around with the website, talk about AI and convince the CEO that the office cat is a good look for the company TikTok channel. Our industry is in a mess, but just because we made a hash of it yesterday doesn’t mean we have to make a mess of it tomorrow. We can be better, and this is how we do it.
Start with getting comfortable with orientating your business away from what the loudest internal voice, to what the consumer says and does. These are the people that buy your stuff, not Terry from the ops team. The way you do this is by scaring the shit out of them. Tell them things that they never knew; tell them that the latest thing your innovation team came up with was considered total bollocks. Watch them slow down, watch them look for better answers. This is your moment, show them what they need to know – If you changed ‘x’ ‘y’ and ‘z’, they would buy a shed load more. If we say ‘a’ ‘b’ or ‘c’, they will tell their friends to buy it as well. Do anything you want, but do it from the perspective of the consumer. They will thank you for it. Trust me. I’ve done this a few times.
This is the research that starts the market orientation and diagnoses your problems. Do brand tracking, proper brand tracking. Take your brand attributes, the ones you know that work with your target audience and track them annually. Are you doing what you said you would do? Do you remember pleading with the FD at the Xmas party for the budget? Well, now is the time to prove her right.
Have you segmented the market? Have you taken yourself off for a couple of days and understood and mapped out the market? Adding in where your goods/service fits into this where you know your market share and the total value of the market. You will be blown away by the number of people that pay lip service to this – Think it’s not worth doing, think it’s something they already know? Go and get a pen and paper and map down the market; I’ll bet you that you start to uncover things you didn’t know when you got out of the bed this morning. Do some proper market segmentation, and if your competitors are any good, they will have the same market segmentation – Now, you can start to see more clearly. The target segments will begin to leap out at you, and this is where you can check where your brand sits within these segments. If you don’t have a play in this market, then go back to market segmentation and check if you are targeting the right segments. You might have to go back to your brand positioning and tweak this, so it appeals to your target segment. The brand manager’s role is to get this bit right and have no fear of going back and forth; this is why you are paid the big bucks.
So, by now, you have your company orientated towards the consumer. You have completed your market segmentation, identified your segments that you are going after and have carried out research to identify the problems you need to fix next year.
Remember, you may have 27 issues that need addressing; you can’t fix them all, pick a couple, one if you want to be awesome and zone in on that. Use your sales funnel to get at this insight.
The strategy is starting to come together, important to decide what you will do as much as you will not do. This is important. You can’t do too many things at once, focus and concentrate. That leads to excellent brand management; we all get bogged down with what we believe needs to be done rather than what NEEDS to be done to build brand equity. That’s your job; somewhere along the way, marketing went off in a different direction, and we lost the point of what we are here to do – BUILD BRAND EQUITY.
Your strategy should also have clear objectives, really pointy and smack in the face objectives. They need to wake you up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. The ones your FD will pull you over the hot coals at the Christmas party for not hitting or provide you with access to the company jet for hitting. So, pull out last years brand plan and hunt for the objectives. If these can’t be measured, they are not objectives; they are fannying around. It’s time to lose the ‘increase brand affinity amongst millennials’ and get with the ‘increase spontaneous awareness with 45 to 55-year-old males from 19% to 24% by July next year. You can then sit in your 1:1 and ask for a pay rise or the bus fare home.
We have now done the strategy and can now, and only now, start to move into the 4 x P’s. Don’t listen to all this bullshit flowing from your screens to your eyeballs about marketing needs to reinvent itself. That’s weapons-grade bullshit. The principals of marketing and brand management date back to the 1940s and became the 4 x P’s when E.Jerome McCarthy presented these in the 1960s and then popularised by the great Phillip Kotler. There isn’t Google, TikTok or any other platform for that matter that will change these fundamentals, and anyone that tells you otherwise is either trying to sell you some google stuff or hasn’t studied marketing. Sure, you can add to them, but these 4 are the cornerstones of what you need to work with.
Product: If you are the eyes and ears of the consumer, then you know what products they will want and what they don’t want. Don’t be afraid to kill SKU’s if they are not doing their job. Don’t listen to the crap that Steve Jobs never did research – Research consultants live in big houses because of the Apple work thrown their way.
Price: This is your job to work on the price of the products that your company needs to set. It avoids the ‘Cost Plus’ approach, and you need research to get to the price that is your true economic value and not some thought up cost-plus calculation.
Place: It’s all on-line on-line on-line D2C D2C… Companies that ONLY take this approach are massively restricting the growth of their products. Remember, there is a reason why Amazon is opening shops, and it isn’t because they don’t have anything to do. Don’t get me wrong, and it may well be that on-line is the best tactic for your company; that’s great so long as you consider all of the other routes to market where your target audience shops. Don’t discount other channels of distribution because the company initially started on-line first. Do you think Gymshark will only ever be a company where you can buy your products on-line and not in a store? Of course you don’t.
Promotion: How do we wish to get our message out to the audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100% social media, 100% TV, 100% carrier pigeon so long as all options are considered based on your target consumer.
Remember that pointy objective we talked about earlier? That one that the entire company knows about, the one where you have secured funds to ‘get it done’, now is the time to put that message to where the consumer will see it and react to it. It’s incredible how much you change your focus when you stick to the objective. An advert on Tik Tok doesn’t seem so appealing now you are focused on getting 55-year-olds to visit a hardware store to buy a sit on petrol lawnmower.
And finally – Zero Based Budgeting. Don’t be afraid of it; leave that to your media agencies, embrace the notion of using funds to achieve the strategic objectives built from the ground up.
Don’t work in a company that hands you a marketing budget each year; that’s not brand building – that’s some money to get you to do some stuff that the board doesn’t really understand.
What the board does understand is ‘strategy’, or at least they should. Once you get invited upstairs to talk about brand strategy, you are doing what Neil McElroy (he invented the idea of the Brand Manager at P&G in 1931) wanted to see happen across all of the companies world; Creating a strategy to building brand equity.
Finally – Stick these three words on your IPAD, your wall, by your computer inside of your eyelids…
Who
What
How
Follow that and the above principals, and you will sell more stuff. Or, finish reading this and figure out how the office cat on TikTok will get Trevor motivated to go and buy the sit-on mower.
Brand Positioning is a brand consultancy company specialising in brand strategy. Call Mark on 07921 818 035 or email him at mark@brand-positioning.co.uk, and we’ll fix your brand strategy.
