The brand promise system is an attempt to correct the simplistic application of Maslow to marketing, resulting in brands that are founded on nothing more than higher-order emotional dimensions. As we have seen, in order to survive and prosper, brands in the advanced economies of the world have had to evolve and become more sophisticated. If a brand represents a promise made by the company to its customers, then these promises have consequently become more complex. In managing the modern brand for immortality there are three aspects that must be carefully considered: first, the creation of the promise itself; second, how it is to be conveyed; and third, how it is to be kept.
Thus, a company should manage its relationship with its customers by analysing its performance in terms of the rational, emotional and ethical dimensions of its promise. This approach can be summarized as the ‘brand promise system’ (Figure 11.8).
Most brand promises are a cocktail of these three ingredients, and brands have different ‘centres of gravity’ in terms of where the weight of their consumer promise lies. Thus there are still many successful brands that trade predominantly on their rational or functional benefits – some leading deter-gents such as Ariel and cleaning products such as Flash are prime examples.
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Creating
Figure 11.8 Brand promise system
Source: Hamish Pringle, Brand Beliefs Limited, 2000
Typically these functional brands convey their brand promise through a product or service demonstration. The long-running and highly effective ‘half head test’, which featured in the commercials of P&G’s anti-dandruff shampoo Head & Shoulders, was a classic of its kind, though even this has now been superseded by a more emotional approach. The performance of this type of brand is measured by rating it against its key competitors through comparative tests, both blind and branded, to see to what degree it’s keeping its promise to customers. For functionally defined brands, huge pressure is placed on relentless innovation to keep the brand competitive – Gillette has now predictably gone one better than Wilkinson Sword’s four-bladed razor by offering men a five-bladed razor (Figure 11.9). What next from Wilkinson Sword? Please surprise us!
Those personal products such as clothing, fashion accessories, watches, cars and other purchases that customers use as an expression of their personal identity make promises that are heavily laden with emotional and psychological benefits. While there nearly always needs to be a grain of product or service truth to support the brand’s emotional edifice, be it quality of materials, skill in manufacture or pleasure in usage, it is the brand image that is the core of its appeal. The user is promised variously an aspirational lifestyle, an enhanced self-image, or some emotional and psychological reinforcement. This is conveyed by brand naming, identity, packaging, advertising style and tone of voice, sampling, pricing, and purchase experience in appropriate surround-ings that establish the desirability of the brand’s personality. Celebrities may be used as an executional device to bolster the cachet of the brand (Figure 11.10).
Successful delivery of these sorts of brand promises is very difficult to measure quantitatively because emotions are notoriously difficult to gauge in structured
Figure 11.9 Gillette Fusion razor
Reproduced by kind permission of Gillette
interviews. For that reason, marketers often turn to qualitative research, with all its statistical uncertainties. Ultimately a leap of faith is required between communication and observing the hard sales results. And herein lies the chal-lenge for this approach: modern business practice is heavily focused on risk reduction. Leaps of faith do not sit well with those more accustomed to discounted cash flow projections.
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Figure 11.10 Rimmel London, JWT
Reproduced by kind permission of Rimmel. Photographed by Dusan Reljin
Many brands have decided they need to acquire ethical values in order to add another Maslowian higher-order dimension to their brand promise. Market research has shown repeatedly that most consumers are not primarily moti-vated by altruism and will not sacrifice product or service performance or other lower-order benefits in exchange for saving the planet: they want both washing efficacy and environmental responsibility. Thus a brand like Tide Coldwater sends a clear signal to the customer, but has to deliver in terms of performance. Many companies are enhancing their brand promise through corporate social responsibility programmes. In Figure 11.11 we see a clever linkage of leading UK retailer Marks & Spencer to a cause of great relevance to millions of their customers, the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Charity.
Club Med has gone one better than the ‘save the environment, please reuse your towels’ notices that have become generic in the hotel industry by providing highly visible, indeed decorative, opportunities for guests to take positive action to protect their planet (Figure 11.12).
Two of the longest-running UK CRM programmes have been Tesco’s
‘Computers for Schools’ and Walkers’ ‘Books for Schools’; however, both came under consumer attack on grounds of poor value and exploitation of families
Figure 11.11 M&S lingerie advertisement, RKCR/Y&R
Reproduced by kind permission of RKCR/Y&R and Marks & Spencer
and kids, despite their best intentions. Conveying an ethical or CSR brand promise is a minefield, as companies often get accused of ‘greenwashing’ when they try to help tackle complex social issues. Despite these challenges, the leading companies still strive to achieve a balance in their ‘triple bottom line’
of delivering profits to shareholders, mitigating environmental impact and putting something back into society. They measure the keeping of their promise through stakeholder surveys gauging key measures such as trust and employee morale.
With global warming now topping the UK public’s list of concerns for the future, according to a 2007 Millward Brown ReputationZ study, we can expect to see a strongly growing influence of carbon-related issues on the CSR activity of companies and their brands (Figure 11.13).
The same study illustrated some strong commonalities with US consumers, though global warming, despite reports of rapidly growing US consumer awareness and the success of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, failed to make it into to the top 10 concerns (Figure 11.14).
The key point is that brand managers need to be reassessing on a regular basis the constituent parts of their brand promise. They must ensure that it not only remains compelling and competitive within its market sector, but also reflects the wider shifts in sentiment within society that could in turn affect their customers. Longevity for a brand comes from being adaptable in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs 107
Figure 11.12 Recycling pots
Source: Photograph by Hamish Pringle
UK ranking UK issue Level of concern %
Figure 11.13 UK public’s list of concerns
Source: Millward Brown/ReputationZ 2007. Reproduced by kind permission of Millward Brown
Figure 11.14 US public’s list of concerns
Source: Millward Brown/ReputationZ 2007. Reproduced by kind permission of Millward Brown
US ranking US issue Level of concern %
1
response to changing circumstances, but so often this manifests itself as a tactical activity rather than a strategic process. Clearly, marketing people have the primary responsibility for the guardianship of their brands, but in reality a good deal of that duty falls to agencies. In fact, given the relatively short job tenure of the key decision-makers in key markets such as the United States and UK, it often turns out that the agency has longer and deeper experience of the brand than their client. In 2007, research by recruitment consultancy Spencer Stuart found that the average tenure for chief marketing officers (CMOs) in 100 leading US consumer branded companies in 2007 was 26.8 months. Less than one-third of the companies (29) had CMOs who had been in their posts for three years or more. In addition, 16 per cent of the compa-nies had a vacant CMO position or have no such role in their organization.
The situation is a little better in the UK, where similar research carried out on behalf of magazine Marketing Week shows that the average tenure is about three years. It is worrying, therefore, that the arrival of a new CMO or marketing director often leads to a competitive review and change of agency.
A change of agency nearly always means a change of campaign direction, sometimes with disruptive or damaging implications for the brand promise.
Too many brands are damaged rather than enhanced by changes of agency brought about for change’s sake, rather than to build shareholder value.
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