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affects brand

resilience

These are the key points in this chapter:

• Brands not only have physical attributes, they have emotional and psycho-logical ones too.

• Brands are promises that exist in people’s minds.

• Much of brand management is all about creating, communicating and keeping promises.

• Nowadays, customers are increasingly involved in a two-way communica-tions process with brands.

Before delving into the myriad factors and tools that influence a brand’s ability to keep itself alive and thriving, it’s worth considering the nature of brands in terms of how they’re created, how they live and are evolving. We have already begun to examine the impact of certain strategic thinking models on brand longevity, but what is the process of brand birth, life and survival in people’s minds?

Writing in 1971, the late Stephen King, one of the architects of account plan-ning in agencies and a leading light at JWT, outlined his view of what would make brands successful. His booklet What is a Brand?, is a formidably prescient thought-piece that resonates to this day. He identified that brands were entering a period of retailer power in which only strong brands (‘brands that are more valuable to consumers than competitive brands, brands that have added values’) would be able to sustain healthy margins. He predicted that these values would become increasingly non-functional, and that the creation of integrated brand ‘personalities’ that unite the non-functional and functional values would become essential. He observed that a brand personality must be 21

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unique and constantly developing to stay unique in order to remain salient and profitable. And he rolled his insights up into a three-point test for any piece of brand communication that many would do well to study now:

1. Does it enhance the brand’s total personality?

2. Does it contribute to the blend of appeals to the senses, the reason and the emotions?

3. Does it bring the brand to the front of mind?

‘And if it does not do any of these things, what is it for?’ he concluded.

Helpfully, Jeremy Bullmore, another famous alumnus of JWT, has provided us with a wonderful image of what a brand is and how it is made. His observations on the human mind give an insight into how a brand can outlive a company, product or service.

He draws the analogy between the brand-building process in the human mind and that of birds building their nests (Figure 3.1): ‘People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon.’ Bullmore draws a number of key conclusions from this:

1. Products are made and owned by companies. Brands, on the other hand, are made and owned by people… by the public… by consumers.

Figure 3.1 Bald eagle nest, Missouri

Source: Photograph by Robert Lawton

2. A brand image belongs not to a brand – but to those who have knowledge of that brand.

3. The image of a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand.

4. That highest of all ambitions for many CEOs, a global brand, is therefore a contradiction in terms and an impossibility.

5. People come to conclusions about brands as a result of an uncountable number of different stimuli, many of which are way outside the control or even influence of the product’s owner.

6. Brands – unlike products – are living, organic entities: they change, however imperceptibly, every single day.

7. Much of what influences the value of a brand lies in the hands of its competitors (because they too are building competing ‘bird’s nests’ in the brain).

8. The only way to begin to understand the nature of brands is to strive to acquire a faculty that only the greatest of novelists possess and that is so rare that it has no name.

9. The study of brands – in itself a relatively recent discipline – has generated a level of jargon that not only prompts deserved derision among financial directors but also provides some of the most entertaining submissions in Pseuds Corner, a regular feature in Private Eye, the UK’s leading satirical magazine.

10. It is universally accepted that brands are a company’s most valuable asset;

yet there is no universally accepted method of measuring that value.

11. The only time you can be sure of the value of your brand is just after you’ve sold it.

12. It is becoming more and more apparent that, far from brands being hier-archically inferior to companies, only if companies are managed as brands can they hope to be successful.

13. And as if all this were not enough, in one of the most important works about brands, published in 2001, the author, Robert Heath, says this: ‘Above all, I found I had to accept that effective brand communication… involves processes which are uncontrolled, disordered, abstract, intuitive… and frequently impossible to explain other than with the benefit of hindsight.’

Source: Jeremy Bullmore’s Brands Lecture ‘Posh Spice & Persil’ to the British Brands Group 2001

One of Bullmore’s key observations looms ever larger in the minds of forward-looking marketers: that brands are increasingly outside the control of marketers. We live in an era when consumers, in the chat rooms and social networking sites of the online world, increasingly mould brands, rather than their owners. In a sense this is nothing new: people have always overlaid their How the Changing Nature of Brands Affects Brand Resilience 23

own thoughts and experiences on the marketing-created images of brands – sometimes with destructive consequences (remember how people ridiculed the Midland Bank when it called itself ‘The Listening Bank’, contrary to many of its customers’ experiences?). It is just that now they are able to do so much more powerfully and publicly than before. Co-creation is a very real fact of life for brands. So wise marketers seek to influence rather than control public perceptions of their brands – they feed the online and offline buzz that shapes perceptions and hope to mitigate any adverse impressions.

This process is increasingly distant from the old-fashioned view that adver-tising alone builds brands – the ‘what you tell them is what they will think’

school of marketing. Instead, advertising is one of a number of influences that may condition consumer views of a brand, but is likely to work powerfully only if it works in tandem with those other influences. The realization of this has led marketing into the uncertain world of co-creation, and there have been mistakes along the way. The launch of the 2006 Chevrolet Tahoe provides a helpful illustration of the perils of co-creation. Chevrolet decided to provide online tools for consumers to create their own commercials for the launch of the vehicle. But the Tahoe is a sports utility vehicle (SUV), so what would you do if you were an environmentally responsible person given a chance to make a commercial for the latest gas-guzzling SUV to hit the showrooms? Chevrolet was soon inundated with commercials carrying some very unflattering messages – many could be viewed on YouTube. You will find no mention of this foolhardy experiment on its website now. Other brands that have embraced co-creation have been more successful, but nevertheless nervous.

Sony’s UK agency Fallon was initially distraught when bystanders’ videos of its Bravia ‘bouncing balls’ shoot in San Francisco were posted on the internet before the makers had even seen the rushes of their footage (Figure 3.2).

Then when Sony set up a website to encourage video sharing of the making of its commercial, it was worried about a negative backlash following the company’s assertion of digital music rights. In fact no backlash was mounted and the exercise was a great success. The consumer buzz created by internet pre-release has become an integral part of Fallon’s subsequent ‘Paint’ and

‘Play-Doh’ commercials for the Sony Bravia. The lesson is that while co-creation is a fact of life, it is also unpredictable, and any brand that seeks to encourage it needs to be sure of its footing, to have contingency plans and to be ready to respond quickly to any unforeseen mishaps.

But, to return to Bullmore’s bird’s nest analogy, a clear corollary of his insight that brands exist independently of the corporations, products and services they derive from is that brands can therefore outlive them. If they are well managed they can be immortal. An important part of the management of brands over time is the development of brand architecture, so we will now take a brief look at how this can help.

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Figure 3.2 Sony Bravia ‘Balls’, Fallon London

Reproduced by kind permission of Fallon and Sony