·
From
What Great Brands Do (Fast
Company Aug./Sept. ‘97, p.98) -- Scott Bedbury SVP, Marketing for Starbucks
Coffee
1. A great
brand is in it for the long haul.
For decades we had great brands based on solid value propositions --
they’d established their worth in the consumer’s mind. Then in the 1980’s 1990’s, a lot of companies
sold out their brands. They stopped
building them and started harvesting them.
They focused on short-term economic returns, dressed up the bottom line,
and diminished their investment in longer-term brand-building programs. As a result, there were a lot of products
with very little differentiation. All
the consumers saw was who had the lowest price -- which is not a profitable
place to be. Then came Marlboro Friday
and the Marlboro Man fell off his horse.
Today brands are back stronger than ever. In an age of accelerating product
proliferation, enormous customer choice, and growing clutter and clamor in the
marketplace, a great brand is a necessity, not a luxury. If you take a long-term approach, a great
brand can travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to multiple
consumer segments simultaneously, create economies of scale, and let you
operate at the higher end of the positioning spectrum -- where you can earn
solid margins over the long term.
2. A great
brand can be anything.
Some categories may lend themselves to branding better than others, but
anything is brandable. Nike, for
example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with
sports and fitness. With Starbucks we see how coffee has woven
itself into the fabric of people’s lives, and that’s our opportunity for
emotional leverage. Almost any product
offers the opportunity to create a frame of mind that’s unique. Almost any product can transcend the
boundaries of its narrow category. Intel
is a case study in branding. I doubt
that most people who own a computer know what Intel processors do, how they
work, or why they are superior to their competition in any substantive
way. All they know is that they want to
own a computer with “Intel Inside”. As a
result, Andy Grove and his team sit today with a great product and a powerful
brand.
3. A great
brand knows itself.
Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand who they
are. You don’t do this by getting a
bunch of executive schmucks in a room so they can reach some consensus on what
they think the brand means. Because
whatever they come up with is probably going to be inconsistent with the way
most consumers perceive the brand. The
real starting point is to go out to consumers and find out what they like or
dislike about the brand and what they associate as the very core of the brand
concept. Now that’s a fairly
conventional formula -- and it does have a risk: if you follow that approach
all the way you’ll wind up with a narrowly focused brand. To keep a brand alive over the long haul, to
keep it vital, you’ve got to do something new, something unexpected. It has to be related to the brand’s core
position. But every once in while you
have to strike out in a new direction, surprise the consumer, add a new dimension
to the brand, and re-energize it. Of
course, the other side of the coin is true as well: a great brand that knows
itself also uses that knowledge to decide what not to do. At Starbucks, for instance, we were
approached by a very large company that wanted to partner with us to create a
coffee liquor. I’m sure Starbucks could
go in and wreak havoc in that category.
But we didn’t feel it was right for the brand now. We didn’t do a lot of research. We just reached inside and asked ourselves,
“Does this feel right?” It didn’t. It wasn’t true to who we are right now.
4. A
great brand invents or reinvents an entire category. The common ground that you find among
brands like Disney, Apple, Nike, and Starbucks is that these companies made it
the explicit goal to be the protagonists for each of their entire categories. Disney is the protagonist for fun family
entertainment and family values. Not
Touchstone Pictures, but Disney. Apple
wasn’t just a protagonist for the computer revolution. Apple was a protagonist for the individual:
anyone could be more productive, informed, and contemporary. From my experience at Nike, I can tell you
that CEO Phil Knight is the consummate protagonist for sports and the
athlete. That’s why Nike transcends
simply building shoes or making apparel.
As the protagonist for sports, Nike has an informed opinion on where
sports is going, how athletes think, how we think about athletes, and how we
each think about ourselves as we aim for a new personal best. At Starbucks, our greatest opportunity is to
become the protagonist for all that is good about coffee. Go to Ethiopia and you’ll immediately
understand that we’ve got a category that is 900 years old. But here in the United States, we’re sitting
on a category that’s been devoid of any real innovation for five decades. A great brand raises the bar. It adds a greater sense of purpose to the
experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness or
the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.
5. A great
brand taps into emotions.
It’s everyone’s goal to have their product be best-in-class. But product innovation has become the ante
you put up just to play the game: it’s table stakes. The common ground among companies that have
built great brands is not just performance.
They recognize that consumers live in an emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all our
decisions. Not many people sit
around and discuss the benefits of encapsulated gas in the mid-sole of a
basketball shoe or the advantages of the dynamic-fit system. They will
talk about Michael Jordan’s winning shot against Utah the other night -- and
they’ll experience the dreams and aspirations and the awe that go with that
last-second, game-winning shot. A brand
reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connection point that
transcends the product. And transcending the product is the brand.
6. A great
brand is a story that’s never completely told. A brand is a metaphorical story that’s
evolving all the time. This connects
with something very deep -- a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of
things at a higher level. We all want to
think that we’re a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in
their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful. Look at Hewlitt-Packard and the HP Way. That’s a form of company mythology. It gives employees a way to understand that
they’re part of a larger mission. Every
employee who comes to HP feels that he or she is part of something that’s
alive. It’s a company with a rich
history, a dynamic present, and a bright future. Levi’s has a story that goes all the way back
to the Gold Rush. They have photos of
miners wearing their dungarees. And
every time you notice the rivets on a pair of their jeans, at some level it
reminds you of the Levi’s story and the rich history of the product and the
company. Ralph Lauren is trying to
create history. His products all create
a frame of mind and a persona. You go
into his stores and there are props and stage settings -- a saddle and rope. He’s not selling saddles. He’s using the saddle to tell a story. Stories create connections to people. Stories create the emotional context people
need to locate themselves in a larger experience.
7. A great
brand has design consistency. Look
at what some of the fashion brands have built -- Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein,
for example. They have a consistent look
and feel and a high level of design integrity.
And it’s not only what they do in the design arena; it’s what they don’t
do. They refuse to follow any fashion
trend that doesn’t fit their vision. And
they’re able to pull it off from one season to the next. That’s just as true for strong brands like
Levi’s or Gap or Disney. Most of these
companies have a very focused internal design process. In the case of Nike, between its ad agency
Weiden & Kennedy and Nike Design shop, probably 98% of everything that
could be done is handled internally, from hang tags to packaging to annual
reports. Today, Nike has about 350
designers working for it -- more than any other company in the country -- to
make sure it keeps close watch over the visual expression of the brand. They’re what I like to call “impassioned
environmentalists” with their brands.
They don’t let very many people touch them in the way of design or
positioning or communication -- verbal or nonverbal. It’s all done internally.
8. A great
brand is relevant. A lot of brands are trying to position
themselves as “cool”. More often than
not, brands that try to be cool fail.
They’re trying to find a way to throw off the right cues -- they know
the vernacular, they know the current music.
But very quickly they find themselves in trouble. It’s dangerous if your only goal is to be
cool. There’s not enough to sustain a
brand. The larger idea is for a brand to
be relevant. It meets what people want, it
performs the way people want it to.
In the last couple of decades there’s been a lot of hype about
brands. A lot of propositions and
promises were made and broken about how brands were positioned, how they performed,
what the company’ real values were.
Consumers are looking for something that has lasting value. There’s a quest for quality, not quantity.
·
From
The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events in
America by Daniel J. Boorstin
·
Each of us individually provides the
market and demand for the illusions which flood our experience.
·
We want and we believe these illusions
because we suffer from extravagant expectations.
·
When we pick up our newspaper at
breakfast, we expect -- we even demand -- that it bring us momentous events
since the night before. We turn on the
car radio [or TV] and we expect “news” to have occurred since the morning
newspaper went to press.
·
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and
impossible. We expect compact cars which
are spacious; luxurious cars that are economical.
·
Never have people been more the masters
of their environment. Yet never have a
people felt more deceived and disappointed. We are ruled by extravagant
expectations:
·
Expectations of what the world
holds. Of how much news there is, how
many heroes there are, how often masterpieces are made and so on.
·
Expectations of our power to shape the
world. Of our ability to create events when
there are none, to make heroes when they don’t exist to be somewhere else when
we haven’t left home and so on.
·
The
making of illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America.
The story of the making of our illusions -- “the news behind the news” -- has become
the most appealing news of the world.
·
On
Republicans connecting tax burdens to family values
(5/12/97 USN&WR Culture &
Ideas)
“The single
biggest problem we have in this country today is that you’ve got to have two people
working and this has had the most profound impact on our culture. Thanks to reckless
Democratic spending, one person is going to work to support the family and the other
has to work to support the government.”
·
A
Different Point of View on dual wage-earning HH’s
(5/12/97 USN Culture & Ideas)
“If couples expand the definitions of
“necessity” and build big mortgages and car payments into their 10-year plans,
they deprive themselves of the ability to make more flexible decisions. I
frown on people who say ‘I work because I don’t have a choice.’ It is a choice.
·
Quote
about being long-winded (referring to writer Henry James who
wrote long-winded, labyrinthine sentences)
It was said
of James: “He had a tendency to chew more than he bit off.”
·
Wit
& Wisdom of “passe” Chicago columnist, Mike Royco (5/12/97
USN)
Royco
once suggested that his fellow men would prefer: “dropping a 40-foot putt or
any number of other guy things to seeing their wives ‘waddle’ across the room
in a negligee.”
·
Thought-provoking
“experiment” on creation theory -- “Big Bang” vs. “Creator” God. Students were asked this question by their
professor:
Q. If
you had the power to form the universe, would you cast all matter out like grains
of sand or would you organize it?
All
answered: “I would organize it.”
·
Amusing
anectdote about power of campaign contributions
(from 9/29/97 USN Washington
Whispers)
Roger
Tamraz, businessman, responded this way when asked by Senate committee investigating
campaign financing why he has never registered to vote but contributed $300,000 to the Democratic Party: “Well,
I think this is a bit more than a vote.”
·
On
Tennis Fans & Elitism at the U.S. Open (8/26/97 NY Post
columnist Wallace Matthews)
And what’s up with those fans who dress
as if they’re players even down to carrying rackets? Say what you will about boxing fans -- and 9
times out of 10 you’ll be right -- but I have yet to see anyone in the stands
wearing a robe, trunks and 8-oz. gloves.
·
On
Living, by comedian Red Skelton:
The trick is not to take your life too
seriously; because you’re not going to get out of it alive.
·
On
Mainstreaming the News
( from John Leo, 9/22/97 USN)
Howard
Kurtz of The Washington Post is probably our best media critic, but William Powers
of New Republic said Kurtz’ coverage of the Frank Gifford scandal ‘launders the
news itself for mainstream
resale’.
·
John
Wayne on the “politics” of being anti-marriage (from North to Alaska)
Any woman
who devotes herself to making one man miserable, rather than a lot of men happy,
doesn’t get my vote.
·
On
Openness and Illumination, from Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis:
Sunlight is
the best disinfectant.
·
Mother
Teresa on the world situation:
The greatest
disease is the lack of love.
