Branding, Marketing and Sausage Making

"The next decade will be the decade of the Brand!" This oracle was pronounced last October by Professor Don E. Schultz during an American Marketing Association sponsored conference on "Integrated Marketing Communications." His rationale is that general progress in technology, production, distribution and information will deny marketers any competitive advantage in those areas. So marketers will rediscover the Brand and make it their primary competitive tool. But even if we believe in that prediction, it is difficult to know what, as marketing professionals, we should do about it. Should we increase our advertising budgets? Should we reduce promotion? How can we position ourselves to best take advantage of the decade of the Brand? Let's face it: After many decades of marketing, of learned academic papers and of smart thinking on the subject of branding, we still do not have an agreed upon recipe for creating a brand. Brands seem still as likely to be born by accident (like Marlboro's Marlboro man) as to be the result of careful planning or huge advertising budgets. Is the recipe for creating a brand an indecipherable secret? Or is it a recipe that contains such unpalatable ingredients that business people refuse to follow it no matter how desirable the outcome?

Branding strategy and sausage making:

Otto von Bismarck once observed that people with an appetite for law or for sausage should not watch them being made. Is there an ugly side to branding, a dark secret that has prevented marketers from building brands other than accidentally?

Maybe so!

Branding contradicts, at least in appearance, several firmly held tenets of marketing and of modern management. Marketing believes that everything begins with the Consumer, whereas branding doesn't. Modern management believes in decentralizing the decision-making process and in empowering those employees who are closest to their market, whereas branding requires a centralized and autocratic environment.

To a modern manager, either one of those principles are heresies sufficient to make the branding recipe as unpalatable as that of bratwurst. Yet we hope you like the result enough to follow our reasoning and examine the ingredient substitution we propose.

Brandwurst

To understand what makes branding so different from the rest of marketing, one must first understand what a Brand is. A Brand is not just an eye-catching logo. Neither is it a product name which happens to have a high consumer awareness. Nor does the name of a product which is advertised frequently necessarily become a Brand. A Brand is a covenant with the customer. The mere mention of the brand's name should trigger a series of expectations not only about the product, its quality, ease of use, etc., but about what the product would do or would never do in its communication, about its history, the kind of line extensions it could have, or those it could never have. A Brand can evoke a myriad of images, the more the better.

McDonald's, for instance evokes enough images to cover many pages: From Ray Kroc buying out the brothers McDonald, to Ronald McDonald, the Big Mac, the Ronald McDonald Houses, Special Olympics and special sauce (on a sesame seed bun), the Hamburglar, "we do it all for you," Double Dutch tournaments, lawsuits against it because its coffee was burning hot, lawsuits it brought against environmentalists in the UK, other restaurants using the "Mc" prefix, the midwestern charm of the young women portraying its crew in TV commercials, etc., etc. Those many images combine to give us an impression of what McDonald's is or isn't about. They give us an impression of its values, they give us an understanding of its priorities. Together these values form the McDonald's Brand.

Values, whether those of a Brand or of a person, seldom can be communicated proactively. If someone tells you that he is generous and even backs up the statement by giving you a sum of money, will you think that the person is generous? Probably not. It is more likely that, if the person consistently displays traits of generosity for some time, you will form the conclusion that the person is indeed generous. The requirement of consistent behavior which is needed to establish a Brand is what sets branding apart from the rest of marketing and what makes it so difficult to achieve.

Finding consistency in a changing world

Marketing derives its power from its understanding of its consumers or its customers: knowing what product or service they want, knowing how to get it to them and knowing how to tell them about it. For this reason good marketers should always be listening to the voice of their market and be ready to change their plans accordingly.

The brand strategist, on the other hand, must find values associated with the brand that are such that the brand will be able to stick with them at all times. The only place he can find such values is within the brand or within the company that markets it. Values that have historically been associated with the brand, like the Tabasco Brand which is associated with the history of the McIlhenny family plantation on Avery Island, LA., or values that are those of the corporation's top and long term management and which will not be challenged. (Nothing is more difficult to defend than a set of values.) This requires a brand strategist to have a) a very good understanding of what inherent values exist within a brand and the management of the company that markets it, and b) the authority to ensure that the brand's actions are always "in character."

The ugly truth: Dictators do it better

In theory a Brand could have any set of values its creator could dream of. The problem is to ensure that the same set of values is adhered to with consistency. This is where branding begins to show an ugly side. Brands are more often created by business dictators: The Brand values are those they'll dictate, and their autocratic ways will ensure consistency. It is undeniable that many brands owe their existence to the enlightened dictatorship of an individual, often the company founder or top honcho: Charles Revson (Revlon), Ray Kroc (McDonald's), Fred Smith (Federal Express) or Steve Jobs (Apple Computers.) These enlightened autocrats have many advantages when it comes to building a Brand: They can dictate conformity to their wishes without having to face byzantine discussions. They can act fast, an essential plus during what we call "Character Defining Moments." For instance, when Johnson & Johnson had to face the Tylenol scare and opted to recall all of the product, it took advantage of such a character-defining moment: Through its promptness, its action showed that, in J&J's value-set, its consumer came before its profits. J&J could have tried to repeat this message for many years and with multi-million dollar campaigns, without achieving the communication effect it had by acting the way it did, and as speedily as it did. Consensus management is ill equipped to do this that fast. Does this mean that, to achieve the desired result of strong brands we must do away with decentralized management and build retrograde business dictatorships?

Not at all.

Ingredient substitution

Several large companies have been quite successful at forcing their brands to reflect a consistent set of values. Procter and Gamble has mandated a "Brand Character Statement" on its copy strategies for several decades. This statement must remain constant and is one of the aspects by which the company evaluates its advertising submissions. The very formalized way this company reviews its advertising is then sufficient to ensure that the "Brand Character" is respected. Another Consumer Goods giant, the Nestlé Company, appoints "Brand Parents," i.e., individuals who have the worldwide responsibility to maintain character consistency for a specific brand. To make the choice of "brand values" less arbitrary and give them presumably a better chance to go unchallenged in the long term, an upcoming article to be published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing explains how a Brand can be psychoanalyzed. After all, if brands have character like humans, that character can be analyzed like that of humans. The procedure, baptized the "Delphi Process" in reference to the "Know thyself" inscription on the wall of Delphi's Apollo temple, begins with a psychological analysis of the brand values as the people in power in the corporation perceive them. This allows drawing out a set of values which become the strategic blueprint for the brand's strategy. Yet, even if you have a complete set of brand values that were obtained in such a manner that no one will challenge them overtly, the branding process will fail unless you institute a centralized review process for all the brand's many voices. That's because we could not find any remotely effective substitute for branding's key ingredient: consistency.
 

By Jacques Chevron
JP Group
2016 West 55th Place
La Grange, IL 60525
© 1998 Jacques Chevron