The Brand Gym

A Practical Workout to Gain and Retain Brand Leadership

David Taylor, David Nichols

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470971338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

This refreshingly simple, practicalguide demonstrates how brand management can boost business performance. It is the ideal inspiration for creating growth in today's tough economic times. Following the template of the highly successful original version, the book consists of a programme of 8 "workouts" that will help marketers raise their own game in key areas such as: insight, portfolio strategy, positioning and innovation. The tools and techniques in the book have been road-tested on over 100 brandgym projects out of the last 8 years, making this book extremely practical.

• Based on the inside stories of brand leaders who have achieved success: Tesco, T-Mobile, Unilever and Proctor and Gamble. These companies share their tips, tricks and warn of the traps to avoid.
• 50% of the content is new or updated with the latest thinking on "recession proof branding", how to win when times are tough, communication briefing, growing the core business and new research with marketing directors on the key success factors of brand leaders.
• The authors are most influential, appearing in The Guardian, Marketing, Brand Strategy, Market Leader and The Marketer. The CIM have called David Taylor one of the " World's 50 most important marketingthinkers ".

Workout One: Follow the money

CHAPTER 1

‘You’ve gotta be business savvy really, or else you get the piss taken out of you.’

Melanie B, The Spice Girls

Headlines

Too much of the work on branding is still over-intellectual and theoretical, divorced from the reality of business. Leaders need to be more business savvy, ensuring that brand strategy is always anchored on a clear growth objective, and drives concrete actions. This requires a ruthless focus on those initiatives with the best potential to boost ‘return on brand investment’.

Too much of the strategic work on brands remains a waste of time and money, full of complicated models and language and divorced from the reality of business. This is shown by the welcome we received when interviewing the CEO of a leading insurance company we were working for recently: ‘Oh, you’re here to talk about brand bollocks are you?’. Ouch. But why does branding still have such a bad reputation in boardrooms around the world?

Why branding still has a bad name

Problem 1: Pyramid polishing

Too much work on branding is still spent filling in the boxes of complicated positioning tools. Brand pyramids, onions, keys, beacons ... there’s a shape for every season. These tools create long shopping lists of big, fat words that have little or no practical use to anyone. This approach is also often too backward looking, trying to distil the brand’s past rather than looking to the future.

To make things worse, hours, weeks and even months are then spent ‘polishing the pyramid’: fiddling, word-smithing and polishing the pyramid, or onion, in a fruitless quest to make it 100% perfect. Hours are frittered away debating words or phrases, such as ‘Isn’t the brand personality more “cheerful” than “happy”?’ or ‘Our benefit is “excellent taste” not just “great taste” ’. Even worse is the debate about which box of the positioning tool a certain word or phrase should sit in: ‘Isn’t confidence really a higher order emotional benefit, not a functional one?’

Problem 2: Obsession with emotion

Many marketers remain obsessed with ‘emotional branding’. They have been seduced by agencies urging them to forget the product ‘sausage’ and focus instead on emotional ‘sizzle’. One example is the Lovemarks approach from ad agency Saatchi, that selects brands where ‘Your story tells the world about the emotional connection you have to a product, service, person or place you can’t imagine living without.’ (1) This is a ‘brand beauty contest’, with no mention of business growth, profitablity or even proven brand equity. The problem is well summed up by Greet Sterenberg of Research International (2):

At times product performance has almost been ignored - left off the guest list at the branding party. Marketers often treat it as a hygiene factor - essential, but hardly exciting.

Problem 3: Brand ego tripping

Many marketers seeking to stretch their brand into new markets under-estimate the challenge of taking on established Leader Brands, taking teams off on what we call a ‘brand ego trip’. This has much to do with the obsession with emotional sizzle discussed earlier, with teams mistakenly thinking that this will be enough to add value for consumers. They forget both the product sausage and the practical business issues of entering the new market, such as the company’s capabilities, the supply chain and building enough on-shelf presence in store. These problems explain why at least one half of all these extensions fail. Our book Brand Stretch (3) details examples from the over-crowded extension graveyard, such as Cosmopolitan Yoghurt, Virgin Vodka (brandgymblog.com) and Levi’s Suits. A further problem with brand stretching can be a neglect of the profitable core business where the brand has a leadership position.

So, what could be the answer to these problems that are giving branding a bad name in the boardroom? How to ensure a more pragmatic and bottom-line focused approach to branding, that concentrates time, people and money on gaining and retaining brand leadership. Well, here it comes. The only three words you need to remember.

Follow the money

Follow the money

In our experience, keeping this principle in mind helps solve many or even most problems to do with where a leader should spend time and resources. Which projects to spend you time on? Follow the money. Which countries to invest in? Follow the money. Which products to launch? Follow the money. It ensures that brand strategy work is practical and drives action, helping solve the issues we saw earlier. We’ll now look at three ways to help you follow the money.

Brand-led business

Following the money starts with seeing branding as a means to the end of profitable growth, rather than an end in itself. We are still shocked by how some senior marketers still seem to view branding as a beauty contest. They focus on creating emotionally appealing advertising and lovely logos. In contrast, the ‘brand-led business’ approach we introduced earlier is a harder edged, more practical approach to branding. It involves driving the brand idea through every bit of the business.

Start with the end in mind

To follow the money, any project should start by framing the business issue that needs solving, such as driving penetration or increasing customer retention. This helps remind everyone that the strategy is merely a first step on the journey to growth, not the endpoint. In addition, clarity up front on which bits of the brand mix will be driven by the new strategy enables you to involve the right people from the start. For example, most projects will require new communication, so getting the ad agency on board from day one is crucial. Also, any stimulus, material used to explore alternative strategies can use examples of the sort of creative work that will be used in the final mix. A proposition might look great on paper, but will it work in press advertising or on a piece of packaging? Finally, as the creative agencies are involved from day one, they can experiment with rough executional ideas as the strategy evolves.

We recommend setting a time limit on any brand strategy work, with clear deadlines to help force the team to move from vision to action, and avoid pyramid polishing. The brandgym Workouts should take 12-16 weeks. Any more than this and the work will lack urgency and momentum, and the risk of navel gazing and pyramid polishing increases.

Where can we lead?

Our belief in the power of focus has only got stronger since the first edition of the brandgym. The recession has been a long over-due wake-up call forcing companies to focus on the few things that really drive growth, not the latest sexy innovation. Leaders need to work on identifying where the brand really has the competitive edge needed to gain or retain leadership. This is in terms of product categories, but can also include geographies and channels. For example, the Pago brand of fruit juice in France (Figure 1.1) has focused on the CHR channel (cafés, hotels, restaurants) where they are the strong Leader Brand.

Figure 1.1: The Pago brand, leading in cafes and restaurants.

This approach means spending less time on branding theory, and more time on business issues. Rather than asking questions such as ‘Could Dove stretch into baby products?’, we should be asking ‘Can Dove make any money out of babycare?’ Brand equity issues are of course important, and extensions do better with a clear link back to the ‘mother brand’. However, the emphasis is on harder-edged commercial issues and ‘following the money’, by looking at two main things: size of prize and ability to win (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2: ‘Where to play?’.

Size of prize = market attractiveness x brand added value

The size of the prize is an estimate of how big the business opportunity is, based on the size of the market, and how strong a value proposition we have. In a first case this can be developed using assumptions on trial, re-purchase and purchase frequency. It can be made more robust through quantitative testing or simulated market testing.

The first issue is to look at the market we are looking to enter. This should cover the size and growth of the market, but also how intense the competition is. Particular care is needed when our brands are trying to attack markets with dominant brands for whom the market in question is their core business. Examples would be Lynx/Axe taking on Gillette in shaving, and Bertolli taking on Frito Lay in salty snacks.

The next critical question is ‘brand added value’: can we can create a co...

Table of contents

• Praise
• By David Taylor
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• What’s new in Brandgym 2?
• Overview to The Brandgym Workouts
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Workout One: Follow the money - CHAPTER 1
• Workout Two: Use insight as fuel - CHAPTER 2
• Workout Three: Focus, focus, focus - CHAPTER 3
• Workout Four: Build big brand ideas - CHAPTER 4
• Workout Five: Grow the core - CHAPTER 5
• Workout Six: Stretch your brand muscles - CHAPTER 6
• Workout Seven: Amplify your marketing plan - CHAPTER 7
• Workout Eight: Rally the troops - CHAPTER 8
• References
• Index