Strategic Advertising Mechanisms

From Copy Strategy to Iconic Brands

Jorge David Fernández Gómez

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789384321
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Publicité

It is the first time that the different strategic advertising mechanisms are explained in a single book. And this is also the first time that a book has brought together the most important and transcendent (for its applicability to the advertising market) strategic advertising mechanisms.

The text explains from classic mechanisms such as Rosser Reeves's USP or Procter & Gamble's copy strategy to modern mechanisms such as Kevin Roberts's Lovemarks or Douglas Holt's iconic brands. It also considers European mechanisms such as Jacques Séguéla's star strategy or Henri Joannis's psychological axis. The book has the most complete academic review.

Strategic Advertising Mechanisms: From Copy Strategy to Iconic Brands, integrates the most important strategic advertising mechanisms developed throughout the time: USP, brand image, positioning, Lovemarks... This is the first and only book to date that compiles the most consolidated methods by advertisers or advertising agencies (P&G, Bates, Ogilvy or Euro) in the history of modern advertising.

Primary readership will be among practitioners, researchers, scholars and students in a range of disciplines, including communication, advertising, business and economic, information and communication, sociology, psychology and humanities. There may also be appeal to the more general reader with an interest in how advertising strategic planning works.

1

Procter & Gamble’s Copy Strategy: When the Advertiser Made Products and Advertising

As already noted, the company Procter & Gamble (P&G) has been one of the driving forces behind the so-called ‘product branding’, almost an understatement when bearing in mind that it was precisely this multinational that pioneered the creation of a management model for its brands, paving the way for what has come to be known as brand management. As will be seen, the brand approach developed by the American company laid the foundations of what is understood now as product branding. In other words, it would not be unreasonable to claim that P&G was the pioneer of these embryonic brand management standards. But, moreover, the company, in line with the brand management models that it continues to develop, conceived what can be considered to be one of the first strategic advertising mechanisms of a rationalist nature in the history of advertising, the so-called ‘copy strategy’, also generally known as copy platform or creative strategy, a mechanism that competed with Rosser Reeves’s unique selling proposition (USP) and certainly influenced the American advertising man when he was devising it.¹ Before performing a more in-depth analysis on the copy strategy, what follows is a brief overview of the achievements of P&G in the field of branding, on the one hand, and the context in which these rationalist techniques emerged, on the other.

1.1. P&G or the prehistory of brand management

Before continuing, it is necessary to answer a basic question: what is meant by product branding? Very briefly, because it is question that is evidently beyond the scope of this work, product branding can be summed up in the idea that commercial and communication management should be subordinated to the product. This approach to the product affects all of the spheres in which a company operates, from aspects of strategic business management to the techniques employed to advertise its products. In order to consolidate this approach, it is essential to take into consideration the economic current prevailing at the time, based on the free market, that contained the germ of so-called ‘modern capitalism’. This aspect is associated with the concept of the ‘invisible hand’, a term coined by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and popularized in his greatest work, The Wealth of Nations (1776). The ‘invisible hand’ is a metaphor that in economics expresses the self-regulatory capacity of the free market, based on profit maximization and resource optimization. This economic–anthropological perspective led to another school of thought that can be summarized in the concept of homo economicus.

According to the ‘economic man’ – an abstraction very much in fashion in economic science at the time – individuals consume rationally on the basis of maximization criteria. Namely, everyone optimizes their usefulness in an attempt to obtain the greatest benefits possible with the least amount of effort. This idea, grounded in a theoretical model that also dates back to the time of Adam Smith,² was taken up again in the theories of ‘rational choice’ – some of which were developed later on by sinister thinkers inspired by Nazi ideology. By the same token, this paradigm is directly linked to ‘self-management’ business models pertaining to branding. In plain English, a brand that is adequately managed by a company through the implementation of optimal marketing policies will triumph, which associates it with behaviourism. Indeed, product branding is indebted to the behavioural psychology – all the rage at the time – of theories such as Pavlov’s ‘conditioned reflex’.³ As a result, advertising resorted to the pre-scientific psychology of the nineteenth century and theoretical models, such as the AIDA and DAGMAR approaches,⁴ and to one of the disciplines that, in the main, is most related to the behavioural school – at least with respect to its operational aspects – namely, marketing. Lastly, the paradigm derived from this still nascent discipline.

In 1960, McCarthy published Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, the forerunner of the ‘four Ps’. In his book, he coined the famous terms ‘product’, ‘price’, ‘place’ and ‘promotion’, which were destined to become some of the most important concepts in marketing. However, the first scholar to consider the marketing mix, as it is understood nowadays, was not McCarthy, but Borden.⁵ In point of fact, McCarthy’s ‘four Ps’ are a simplification of Borden’s original concept (Grönroos 1994: 349). Effectively, Borden describes what he believes marketing should be like in a concise text, explicitly entitled ‘The concept of the marketing mix’,⁶ and as with McCarthy’s work, it is now regarded as a marketing classic:

The marketing mix of a firm in large part is the product of the evolution that comes from day-today marketing. At any time the mix represents the program that a management has evolved to meet the problems with which it is constantly faced in an ever changing, ever challenging market. There are continuous tactical maneuvers: a new product, aggressive promotion, or price change initiated by a competitor must be considered and met […] All such problems call for a management’s maintaining effective channels of information relative to its own operations and to the day-to-day behavior of consumers, competitors, and the trade.

(Borden 1965: 394)

All the aforementioned factors are, to a great extent, behind the concept of the paradigm at hand. In fact, such an important asset nowadays as the brand, under the approach of product branding, was no more than an addendum to a company’s product policy. To our mind, this vision can be considered as the prehistory of brand management; to wit, they were the first attempts made by some companies to manage their brands (understanding the ‘brand’ concept in a germinal manner). Undeniably, the development of marketing and advertising, and above all branding, still had a long way to go, for which reason it could be contended that they were rudimentary strategies. It was the major western business groups that were the first to practise these marketing techniques. Heding et al. (2009: 30) are of this mind: ‘Procter & Gamble gave birth to the first management practices of brand management with its product management approach’. Certainly, P&G was behind the promotion of a new management concept and, for many, pioneered modern brand management. This is how Dyer et al. (2004: 60) see it:

A new generation of managers rising to senior status during this period – people such as Deupree, Ralph Rogan, and Stockton Buzby – laid the groundwork for brand management as they decentralized responsibility for brand promotions. Launching Crisco was a formative experience in this regard. The most influential figure in defining brand management, however, was Neil McElroy, and the pivotal brand was Camay.

And they have a point. In 1930, Neil McElroy, the person in charge of the advertising for the soap Camay, a P&G portfolio brand, produced a memo in which he outlined a new brand management system, which would have a huge impact on the business management world. In was precisely in that report that he planted the seeds of product branding, thus revolutionizing both the brand concept as it was viewed at the time and the way in which those assets should be managed. McElroy’s proposal revolved around the development of an annual plan for each brand in which the marketing policies to be implemented were enumerated; the plan was based on the study and analysis of the product, the distributors and the suppliers. Thenceforth, the brand manager began to take strategic control, namely, establishing independently the annual plans and choosing the most appropriate marketing tools in each situation. As Clark (1989: 34) notes, ‘P&G started the practice of what is known as “brand management” whereby managers take overall responsibility for individual brands just as though they are companies in their own rights.’ McElroy’s brand manager (or chief) system became a classic organizational model for many advertising companies and has served ever since as an organizational principle for the marketing departments of many companies. Dyer et al. (2004: 60–61) also reach the same conclusion in their study of the American giant:

[T]‌he experience of fighting for resources against P&G’s entrenched, big-budget brands convinced McElroy, then a young advertising manager, that the company needed to formalize assignments of its marketers in brand-specific teams and to give these teams a large degree of autonomy in running specific marketing campaigns. From this background and with this impetus, brand management was already coalescing as a de facto policy by the mid-1920s. McElroy took a major step toward formalizing it as an organizational structure in a May 1931 memo, outlining what he referred to as ‘the duties and responsibilities of the brand men’.

Specifically, McElroy’s memo charged brand managers with studying shipments of their brands by units and territories, analyzing where sales were heavy and where they were light, and extracting from that data conclusions about which tactics were working.

As can be seen, P&G introduced a radical change in business management in general, and in marketing management in particular.⁷ And what is more important, in a visionary way and at a moment when management was primitive and unsophisticated, the company introduced a series of working methods that have survived the passing of time. Dyer et al. (2004: 41) discuss how in around 1890 P&G began to plan its business on an unprecedented scale and to interiorize a series of principles that are still clearly fundamental. In their opinion, neither was this transformation planned nor was it a timely occurrence: ‘It was more like a chain reaction, as one round of change set off another somewhere else within the enterprise. Strategic crisis drove new product development, creating new marketing experiments (consumer packaging, branding, mass advertising).’ However, as held by other authors, the authentic revolution sparked by P&G was doubtless the concept of product branding:

From an external point of view, though, the most dramatic impact came in the marketing of the product. Harley Procter and Ivory’s other ‘brand managers’ (to apply a term Procter & Gamble itself would not invent for another fifty years) were venturing into unexplored territory […] Only after a period of experimentation and analysis did the first, elemental understandings emerge about how brands were going to work.

Chief among these early lessons was the basic idea that to sell brands, Procter & Gamble had to connect with consumers. […] The consumer may not yet have become ‘boss’ by 1890, but Procter & Gamble was beginning to learn how to listen to her and certainly coming to understand that if it listened better than its competitors did, its brands would win in the marketplace.

(Dyer et al. 2005: 66)

P&G was also the company that developed what is regarded as one of the first strategic advertising mechanisms of a rational nature, called ‘copy strategy’. As a matter of fact, as will be analysed below, P&G would play a crucial role both in establishing the highly product-centric marketing policies, and in devising and applying markedly rational advertising strategies like the aforementioned copy strategy and the USP, which will be examined in the following chapter.

1.2. The birth of rationalist advertising

The roots of rationalist advertising should be sought in Chicago in 1898, when the talent of John E. Kennedy and Claude C. Hopkins, regarded nowadays as the fathers of advertising copywriting, caught the attention of Albert B. Lasker,⁸ a partner of the agency Lord and Thomas. Similarly, Clark (1989: 64) sees in Lasker the ‘“father” of modern advertising’, because hitherto the concept had been very rudimentary and mainly based on product information that was repeated in the press. However, it was in fact his encounter with Kennedy that changed the course of advertising, because the latter understood it in following terms: ‘Advertising is salesmanship in print’ (Clark 1989: 39). This was truly a novelty, relevant enough for Rosser Reeves (1961: 120), a person never inclined to offer gracious compliments, to have called him a ‘remarkable man’. For Kennedy

believed that an ad should be salesmanship in print, not just news or publicity. Advertisers had to do more than merely inform people about their products, he said. They had to persuade the public to purchase. Lasker, impressed by this thinking, hired Kennedy for a staggering $50,000 a year.

(Meyers 1984: 25)

In this vein, John O’Toole, the head of the agency Lasker, believes thus:

It seems so simple and obvious today. But what this definition did in 1904 was to change the course of advertising completely and make possible the enormous role it now plays in our economy. For, by equating the function of an advertisement with the function of a salesman who calls on a prospect personally, it revealed the true nature of advertising. For the first time, the concept of persuasion, which is the prime role of a salesman, was applied to the creation of advertising.

(Clark 1989: 39)

Although Lasker should be merited with the discovery of such outstanding figures as Kennedy and Hopkins, it was these two men who actually revolutionized advertising thinking. The former because he included persuasion in the marketing mix, as noted above, and the latter thanks to his reason-why copy concept, namely the issue at hand. In fact, Hopkins can be regarded as the creator of argumentative copy or, what is the same, the reason why people purchase a product: ‘His carefully crafted ads stressed the unique qualities of a product and listed specific reasons why it should be bought. People in the industry called this “scientific selling”’ (Meyers 1984: 26). And to professionalize the industry he resorted to market research, a then incipient and unrefined technique. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Procter & Gamble’s Copy Strategy: When the Advertiser Made Products and Advertising
• 2 Rosser Reeves’s USP: The Reality in Advertising Is the Product
• 3 David Ogilvy’s Brand Image: The Rise of Emotion in Advertising Communication
• 4 Henri Joannis’s Psychological Axis: The Advent of Motivational Research in European Advertising
• 5 Jacques Séguéla’s ‘Star Strategy’: Selling the Hollywood Star System to Sell Brands
• 6 Kevin Roberts’s Lovemarks: The Return of Emotional Mechanisms in the New Century
• 7 Jack Trout and Al Ries’s Positioning: The Appearance of Cognitive Psychology in Advertising
• 8 Douglas Holt’s Iconic Brands: When Cognitive Psychology and Motivation Research Converge
• Notes
• References
• Index