Article first published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing (MCB University Press, London, U.K.) Vol. 15 #3, 254-261 in the summer of 1998.

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The Delphi Process^TM: Strategic Branding Methodology

This article by Jacques Chevron discusses his approach to developing a successful branding strategy and implementing it in your home market or internationally.

Many organizations use the term "Product Manager" interchangeably with "Brand Manager." While most of us could think through the semantic difference between a "product" and a "brand," it seems that (with a few exceptions) the two concepts become indistinguishable when it comes to their management. This confusion may explain in part why there are so few brands and so many products.

The product is defined by its form and function, what it is and what it does. The product is physical attributes, such as price, performance, ease of use, design and style. What a product is can be relatively easily communicated, rapidly changed and effected in the short term using a number of tools: just add a new ingredient or change the shape of the packaging and you have a new product or, at least, a different one. A good product/ marketing strategist is one who can distill a large amount of data about the consumer, the market, his competition, distribution, and boil it down to the few essential premises that will form the backbone of a focused marketing plan. He should be able to distill these premises even further to write an effective communication strategy which, as any honest advertising person will tell you, must be based on a single minded selling proposition. This ability to distill facts down to their simple essence presupposes an excellent knowledge and understanding of the product's consumer or end-user and buyer.

The brand is almost the opposite on all points. Whereas the product has a form, the brand does not have a physical embodiment: It is merely a promise, a covenant with the customer. Some say that the "logo is the brand"... but this isn't so. A logo is meaningless if it does not communicate the brand's covenant with the consumer. And, whereas communication of a product's physical attributes is straightforward and fast, communication of brand values is inherently circuitous and slow. Like the character of an individual, brand character is most difficult to communicate proactively: The individual cannot tell what his character is; the observer must figure it out for himself... an indirect communications process which requires time and absolute consistency. And, contrary to product communication which is best based on one single minded forceful proposition, brand character, like the character of a person, becomes better defined as it gains in complexity. Lastly, whereas the product manager must gain a superior knowledge of his consumer to be effective, the brand manager's success is in great part based on a thorough knowledge of the idiosyncrasies and the values professed by his company and its long term corporate players, i.e., its top management.

To reflect this introverted aspect of branding, JP Groupmp;A has named its method for developing brands the Delphi^TM Process .

1. Know thy brand's character

You have character when another person is told about a situation which you face and which he has never seen you facing before, and that person says: "He'd do this, but he'd never do that!" If this is said with confidence, then you have character in that person's eyes.

A corporation has values that the outsider discovers bit by bit, as circumstances allow the corporation to reveal them. This is what happened when Johnson & Johnson reacted to the Tylenol tampering scare by immediately withdrawing its product from the shelves. By doing so, it took advantage of a rare "character-defining moment" and sent the world a message about some of its values like "our customer counts more than protecting profits." This had positive effects not only on the corporation but also on the Tylenol brand which, in many opinions, came out of the ordeal stronger than it was before.

While the values of a corporation may eventually make their way through the brand's communication and then to the consumer's mind, there are many factors which can slow or interrupt the process: Management change, company merger or acquisition by another, change in advertising agency, short term tactical pressures, etc.. Some of those factors are often terminal; any behavior or message that's out of character, coming during that period when the consumer is trying to determine the character of a brand, brings the character evaluation process back to step one.

It is therefore important to create a document which reflects what the intended brand character is, and then to create systems and organization to ensure the document is respected and complied with.

In theory, the character of a brand can be invented by anyone with a creative mind and some understanding of what character is. After all, product, brand name, packaging, and advertising campaign all are invented. Why not invent the character traits that will make the brand?

This issue is made more confusing because many famous brands were “invented” by sheer luck: To name just one, the Marlboro cowboy was invented as a short term tactical ad campaign in the 60's to counter unfounded rumors that Marlboro cigarettes had been banned in some states. Marlboro had been introduced in the early 50's and though it had been given the name of a woman’s cigarette it was, as almost all cigarettes at the time, positioned as a man’s cigarette. The growth of filter cigarettes had severely reduced the sales of the existing Philip Morris cigarette, and the new product was the company's entry into the filter world. Its original test marketing in Dallas used a stock photograph of a cow-boy, but this was intended to convey "local color" not an advertising theme. In fact cowboys were present in several early Marlboro ad campaigns. One of those campaigns attempted to link a sense of adventure with the cigarette by showing smoking scenes in which the smoker’s hand carried a tattoo. There were several ads with several tattooed hands belonging to fishermen, SCUBA-divers, intellectuals, Wall Street-types, and a clean-cut cowboy with a tattooed hand. Another campaign attempted to associate the product with relaxation and, under the headline "Make yourself comfortable" showed various individuals (with tattooed hands) at rest, including a golfer, a gardener and... a cowboy. However, as of 1964, sales were still dismal, and arch-rival Reynolds' Winston had taken the #1 spot in the market (up from #6 ten years earlier) whereas Marlboro was languishing.

Then the Philip Morris Company heard the rumor that Marlboro cigarettes had been banned regionally and it asked its ad agency, Leo Burnett, to create a campaign to denounce the rumor. The ad, quickly put together, was a newspaper center-spread showing a map of the USA, which made the claim that “America is Marlboro Country” and featured a cowboy. The same cowboy was then shown near various geographical landmarks to drive the point that "America is Marlboro Country”. Importantly, he did not have the shiny boots and artificial tattoo of his predecessors: He was a rugged, saddle-lugging, individualist, self-sufficient and cigarette-smoking cowboy. He caught on, and although those events occurred in the mid 60's, the Marlboro cowboy is still the brand’s symbol today.

We would argue that the reasons why the Marlboro Cowboy became the brand’s symbol are that a) the Philip Morris management at the time implicitly recognized its own values in the cowboy, and b) it stuck with the symbol for a long time. This was also helped by the way the Leo Burnett advertising agency operated during those years: It was one of the few advertising agencies that had the courage, bordering on arrogance, to fight over an idea with its clients. It was very good at fighting those fights and the resulting consistency in communication helped its clients create brands (over the dead bodies of many a product manager) like no other ad agency in the US. Paradoxically - for an ad agency - Leo Burnett spent more time and energy in those years fighting against changing advertising that it thought contained "big, enduring ideas" than it did creating new ads. (The company may have mollified in the recent years.)

In order to have "staying power," the brand's values must be rooted in the long term values held by the company which form the "Corporate Character." To define the "Corporate Character," the documents called "Corporate Vision" and "Corporate Mission" are mandatory starting points. Additional valuable information can be found in the corporation's history (how was it created; by whom; what was it known for? etc.). It can also be interesting to gather the views of the company's competitors so as to have a complete and balanced idea.

To translate all that information into a Brand Character Statement (BCS), JP Groupmp;A, a consulting company specializing in branding strategy, turned to psychology and psychiatry. It found, in the writings of Prof. C. Robert Cloninger, M.D. , a theory by which personality could be divided into seven discrete variables: Four innate "temperament" dimensions and three acquired "character" dimensions. After all, if the personality of human beings can boil down to seven measures, a similar construct should suffice to analyze and write up a rich enough character statement for a brand.

JP Groupmp;A's tool is named the HBCQ^TM or Heptadimensional Brand Character Questionnaire . The HBCQ consists of a battery of approximately 100 self-administered questions or statements which the respondent must answer as if the brand were a person. It is complemented by a one hour face-to-face interview. People to be interviewed typically include:

• The corporation's top managers including only those who influence how the brand behaves (e.g. Board members, Chairman of the Board, President etc.);
• The Senior Vice President or Vice President of Marketing;
• International managers who get to choose and adapt advertising and packaging for their region, or who forge marketing alliances with other companies;
• New product strategists and top R&D personnel, since product formulation and new product introductions are an important part of the brand's speech;
• Senior Advertising Agency personnel (unless a change is contemplated);
• Any other person who is a long term influencer of the brand's communication.

Five to 25 interviews are conducted and the results are analyzed by JP Groupmp;A's team: a clinical psychologist, a conceptual copywriter and myself. A BCS is then drafted and refined with the participation of the brand's management.

Typical statements include: Brand X prefers the old "tried and true" ways of doing things to trying "new and improved" ways, or, The brand can laugh at itself which the respondent must answer with: (Yes/ No/ Doesn't apply). Those answers allow rating the brand strengths and weaknesses along the following axes:

• High novelty vs. low novelty
• Security vs. risk taking
• Seeks reward vs. doesn't depend on reward
• Persistence vs. irresoluteness
• Self-sufficiency/ Maturity
• Cooperativeness/ Prosocial
• Integrity/ Conscience

2. The Brand Character Statement

None of our clients authorized us to reveal the statement that we worked on with them, and other BCSs which have been published are too incomplete or single-minded. What follows is a hypothetical example. We have chosen to write a BCS for Ben & Jerry's ice cream because most of our readers will be able to empathize their way through it. We wrote the document after taking the HBCQ ourselves and trying to impersonate Ben & Jerry management while answering the questions. To verify the accuracy of this BCS, we submitted it to a Ben & Jerry PR person who found it accurate and requested only one word change.

Please note that it contains a number of constraints or commitments which may not always be easy to live with. So it should: A character statement that does not commit much isn't worth much either.

Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Brand Character Statement

Ben & Jerry's Homemade ice cream is ice cream as it should be, made with fresh and natural ingredients blended with something unexpected and original. It combines the tradition of Vermont where the company is, and the creative iconoclasm of Hippies which Ben and Jerry were in the 60's.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream brand begins with the best ingredients, like real fresh cream and fresh fruits, which are processed according to traditional methods of ice cream making. Everything that goes into Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- ingredients, preparation, packaging, distribution, and service -- bears the mark of its Vermont origins: Friendly farmers with solid down-home values and humor, attached to traditions that extol nature and good food.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream makes ice cream fun to eat with unexpected mixes; it seems as if it had been made by two imaginative guys working in the farmhouse kitchen.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream as a corporation is traditional, but not conservative: No starched shirts here, but flannel ones with funny and unexpected patterns. Everything Ben & Jerry's ice cream does reflects the strong values of Vermont tradition without compromising the creativity and progressive 1960's values of its two original entrepreneurs. It was started by friends, with an idea and no means, not by food technicians blessed with financial backing. It represents entrepreneurship and the victory of the little guy against the big corporations (which it has contempt for). It is generous as only a small artisan without a large accounting system to control cost can be: There are lots of real chunks of brownies in the Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream and large amounts of dough in the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream is committed to the environment in which we all live. The brand is very active in several "green" political causes. While this may have its origins in the founders' hippie past, it is nevertheless a very current and very strong corporate commitment.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream is corny as if corniness were an article of faith. It believes that seriousness only serves to protect the dim-witted.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream product names often wink at its consumer: Cherry Garcia winks at its hippie past. They do not aim to be taken seriously. They are just a way to foster a bond with like-minded people.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream doesn't seek novelty for novelty's sake: it is open to all ideas because it doesn't have preconceptions or prejudices. While it is creative, it doesn't hold creativity as an essential virtue. Nor does it hold "incongruity" as a vice either.

3. Applying the Brand Character Statement

From the time when a BCS is developed and agreed to, it must be used with absolute consistency and no exceptions. It is important to understand that not all of the points it makes have to be included in the brand's communication all the time. What is essential, however, is to ensure that no point of the BCS is ever violated by any communication whatsoever.

In the Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream example it says that: "Ben & Jerry's ice cream brand begins with the best ingredients like real fresh cream, and fresh fruits."

This means that, wherever B&J uses fruit, it must use fresh fruit. But it also allows B&J to market sorbets (which do not contain cream) and vanilla or coffee ice creams (which do not contain fruits). Ben & Jerry could not, however, market a simple vanilla or coffee ice cream which would violate another mandate from the BCS which requires it to blend tradition with the unexpected. In practice, all its vanilla ice cream is mixed with fruit, and the "Coffee, Coffee! BuzzBuzzBuzz^TM" is sure packed with unexpected ingredients and textures.

In any marketing oriented business, the pressures of day-to-day tactical issues are such that the demands of the BCS could easily be set aside if they became burdensome to a product manager. An example of this is very much in evidence in the United States at this very moment: The original Ray Kroc edicts which together composed the McDonald's character included a prohibition of any coin operated machine, including telephones, on a McDonald's premise. It also banned any price-based promotion. He rightfully reasoned that if you offer value every day, you can't offer more value at one time than another... It took a few years after Ray's death, but those bans are now long forgotten. Taken in isolation, the abandonment of those commitments doesn't seem to be a big compromise. But, where Brand Character is concerned, one simply cannot pick and choose the character points one wants to follow. The fact that McDonald's has been able to break its own set of rules signals to this writer a general weakness in that company's image and foretells the progressive deterioration of its brand's character.

The Brand Parent:

As detailed as a Brand Character Statement may be in writing, it is still open to interpretation. Some of those inferences may be quite contradictory, particularly when they are made by managers who are under the threat of an immediate danger, or by the sophists of a far-away advertising agency. It is best to appoint one person as "Brand Parent" with the responsibility of applying the BCS and of warding off threats to its integrity. Once installed the brand parent must be the mandatory gate for all of the brand communication, including PR, packaging, promotion, etc. His authority should be exercised worldwide.

It is important to observe the following rules for the brand parent:

- The person must have excellent teaching skills and have enough seniority in the organization to command respect;

- The brand parent is not a marketing manager and doesn't interfere with local marketing plans other than those plans that run against the BCS;

- The brand parent reports directly to the top of the corporation (President or CEO) and receives frequent public demonstrations of support from his bosses: The assignment will be made very difficult by many, particularly international managers and advertising agencies;

- The brand parent disposes of a research budget which serves to measure progress made in each country in linking the values in the BCS with the brand in the consumer's mind. The results of this research should have some impact on the compensation of local marketing staff.

In addition to creating a "brand parent" function, a successful branding strategy must carefully create buy-in within an organization. This is made all the more necessary by the "top-down" approach used in the Delphi process: JP Groupmp;A recommends that one of the first tasks of the Brand Parent is to implement local research with the HBCQ^TM so as to find the brand's "character gaps" or the brand's character traits which local communication needs to reinforce. The brand parent should then challenge the local marketing staff to develop an action plan to bridge those gaps and, if at all possible, tie the attribution of a reward to the achievement of these agreed-to objectives.

We cannot over stress the importance, from the onset of the execution of a branding strategy, of establishing the organization which will direct its execution. The concept underlying the creation of a Brand Character Statement is a powerful one and most managers will readily agree to using it. Yet, in our experience, once the pressures of running the day-to-day business resume, those good intentions may vanish quickly.

4. Measuring progress

Progress made in establishing Brand Character must be measured. If no measurements are made, the BCS exercise is likely to remain just that Ñ an "exercise." We also strongly recommend that the results of the monitoring effort be used to allocate special rewards within the company and its advertising agency.

The monitoring effort should be biennial and sponsored and closely supervised by the Brand Parent.

Progress measurement can be accomplished rapidly and at a relatively low cost with a shortened version of the HBCQ^TM. This research tool has the advantage of being self-administered, and, because of the internal redundancy of its questions, of providing reliable test-retest data on the seven scales it measures. Some had warned that the questionnaire would be hard to use where people would have difficulty "anthropomorphising" the brand: For some reason, qualitative researchers use these anthropomorphic analogies for research in most European countries (Germany excepted), but the same techniques are strongly criticized and seldom used in the USA. JP Groupmp;A's experience using HBCQ research in the US as well as abroad has been very positive and has shown no problem of understanding even in pilot tests conducted among rural Midwest consumers.

Note that, while progress in establishing brand character should be measured once every other year, the Brand Parent would be well advised to implement a yearly review of the process used to implement the BCS.

Conclusions:

A "Brand" is a name that evokes specific expectations which we call "Brand Character." Many brands are closely associated with a real or invented living being and provide an easy illustration of their character: from Tony the Tiger, and the Marlboro man to Ben & Jerry or Frank Perdue. But it is not necessary to embody a brand in an individual in order to give it "character." Apple Computers and Federal Express did create strong brand identities, at one time, without anthropomorphising their identity. It requires an internal agreement to a set of values which the brand must reflect at all times. It also requires a branding plan which must be executed with absolute consistency and over a long period of time.

Great rewards will go to those who do build a brand because a brand creates a bond with the consumer. Thus brands do not have to seduce their consumer every single day; they feel less day-to-day competitive pressure; they spend fewer dollars to maintain their image; and they enjoy a higher status with the consumer which can serve as a launching pad for many product declinations. We hope that the few tips we just gave will help you do that.

©1997 - Jacques Chevron - La Grange, IL - USA

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