The Yellow Papers Series
Growth!
What is it made of
and how do you get it?
1
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Companies are so preoccupied
by defining measurement methods
and capability analysis, that you
often experience a certain
arrogance towards the energies
from which they create the results.
You must have a starting point. Crisis
can affect the culture of a company
quite severely. Focus will inevitably be
on the economy and the key words will
be core business and down sizing. So all
plans will be defensive by birth. You go
into hiding and the physical survival will
dominate all processes and decisions.
And when the crises subside it can be
extremely difficult to make an organization
that is suffering from shell chock and has
learned to think defensively, act dynamically,
innovatively – in short; competitive.
Typically all energy has been absorbed in
control processes initiated by the heavy
bottom line focus.
All necessary efforts in connection with sales
and marketing will be marked by demands
for great relevance and effect. There is
nothing odd about this reaction pattern.
It is what they teach at most business
schools. And through the human eyes
the most natural reaction is to crouch
and make your self as small as possible.
But it generates a lot of fear in the
organization and fear has never been
a winning formula.
I will go into the coherence between strong
products and the companies’ culture,
customer insight and ability to define mutual
goals several times in this paper but to the
right I have shown how the energies in a
strong company culture should play together
in order to perform. The idea is that this
culture should be a part of the company’s
bone marrow. If this is the case it will a lot
easier to navigate. Also in times of crisis.
You can find a number of fine
arguments why you should not act
defensively in a time of crisis.
But as a starting point you have to be
attractive and strong in your market.
In a time of crisis the consumers
become extremely rational in their
actions. If you have strong products
that appeal to this rationality, a time
of crisis is the ideal time to manifest
or change you brand positions.
Normally it will also be attractive
economy-wise as the noise from
competitors will be quite limited.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Strong and understood culture,
the route to better innovation
and competetiveness.
Clear Processes
What kind of culture should drive the
development:
Clear Ambitions
Objectives for what the product should do:
· Quantitative targets in relation
to sales and market shares
· Qualitative targets in relation
to image and brand equity
· Role in relation to mutual benefits
of the entire product line-up
· The product’s effect on the position
and mission of the corporate brand
· Sales strategic targets
(e.g. new channels or new areas)
· Marketing, segment analysis
(overview of value creation for all partners).
Consumers
Insights
Valuecreation
Experience
Clear Insights
Knowledge about how the
users/customers think, feel and act:
· User-involvement and co-creation
processes during the entire process
· Establishment of SignBank monitoring
at macro level
· Establishment of mutual missions and
partnerships at B-t-B level.
Culture
Character
Uniqness
Creation
Product
Categori
Convention
Typologi
Succesfactors
· Definition of mutual objective
and success criteria
· Establishment of clear view of the
project’s scope for all involved parties
· Clear responsibility ownerships on
all specific development directions
· Securing of strong cross processes and
synergies focusing on the mutual success
· Effect and demands in relation to client
front and backbone structure.
Company
Capability
Conviction
Ambition
Clearness in execution
It should not just be right.
It should also feel right:
· Design development
· The product’s story telling
· Launch strategy
· Distribution and price strategy
· Service design
· Communication strategy.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Branding by doing.
There are many reasons that companies
risk losing the sense for the market
and do not act adequately customeroriented in their developing of services
and products. “Silo thinking”, lack of
mutual objectives, miserable reward
systems and consequent super
optimisation at department level,
are just a few of the reasons.
Today it is almost a hygiene factor in the
educated company that you carry out
extensive corporate branding processes
to determine and define who you are and
what basic values and visions you have.
Unfortunately these are often very introverted
processes marked by the lack of uniqueness
and edge, which derives from the fact that
everybody has to agree and be comfortable
with the definitions. It is just as impossible
to see yourself as a company as it is as an
individual. That is why it is also very difficult to
be your own coach.
These processes often drain the internal
energies to an extent where top management
very quickly loses the attention, and starts
focusing on the linear operation of the
business instead.
And only too often the project ends up with
a coffee table brand book and five words on
a mouse pad without reaching the market
and the customers at all and what is worse,
without increasing the internal self-perception
and building the spiritual interconnections
that are so decisive in order to create
integrated powerful and efficient companies
with interesting and clear-cut value creating
products that derive from a clear welldescribed and understood company culture.
These interconnections are also a decisive
factor in the successful implementation of
lean processes. First and foremost Lean and
Six Sigma require a serene internal culture.
Uncertain. Unfocused. Unsuccessful
Based on a an uninspiring internal
implementation you often see that the
external communication to the market is
also characterized by a very low degree of
interconnection between the company’s
self-perception and the product behaviour
that is required to make the communication
credible, relevant and efficient. To the
costumers that type of communication must
be as interesting as being with a person, who
solely speaks of himself in a self-asserting
manner without saying anything at all that is
meaningful to the listener. Bernbach says it
very straightforward: “Good advertising just
makes a bad product fail faster.”
Nothing beats reality.
You are what you do
The product and the things that surround it are the physical manifestation of a company’s
core. The products should not only be the physical manifestations of the company’s vision
and mission, they should also make the core values come to life and develop and express
the company’s ambitions and direction. As mentioned earlier, the product should at the
same time deliver content and support to make the advertising deliver communication
that is Relevant, Original and has Impact.
A super example of missed opportunities is the telecom sector that has had huge
difficulties thinking across the technology silos for many years and thus has missed
the chance of offering the customers comprehensible solutions that create value in the
individual lives of the customers. This meant that the value of connectivity between the
different technology platforms was more or less missed in the beginning of 2000 and that
the sector is currently missing the next evolutionary step; development of content portals
and platforms around entertainment or knowledge. The required technology has been
available for more than 10 years.
The result is a market without distinct winners, with a lack of clarity and with a sharp price
competition on generic products as a consequence.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Success requires mutual goals
You can only be successful with branding if you include all company strategies in the planning
process. Ex: Distribution can be a powerful tool in the brand story. It can be a vital part of the
success or be the reason for failure. So nothing is insignificant.
Important elements of a product branding strategy:
· Link to corporate brand and strategy
· Clear ambitions for each individual product
· Roles in relation to the mutual objectives for all product brands
· Distribution, launch, choice of channel, pricing
· Clear positioning and behaviour strategies in relation to all contact points
· Unique consumer insights
· Brand story and expected perception
· Design and packaging, styling and tone of voice
· Back-up on service and delivery concepts
· Communication strategy via people, press and media
· Next step for product development and innovation
You can get far with talent if your
family values lives in your genes.
The relationship between the organisation’s
corporate branding and product branding is
in many ways like the mechanisms we know
from the familial: The head of a family must
be able to give his children strong values
and a clear identity anchored in the family’s
past and values. Without the navel cord to
the family’s DNA the children could easily
become rootless and insecure.
But if the family head does not support
and motivate the children, who have to live
out the family values, to develop their own
personality characteristics and have strong
ambitions on behalf of the family, he could
easily strangle their potentials with stagnated
irrelevant values and lack of development
as a consequence. On the other hand, the
strong family head, who has clear values and
a strong easily decoded personality, could
create a very strong starting point for the
development of children with strong genes
and qualities based on mutual values that
can ensure that the mutual battle remains
up-to-date and thus preserve its reason for
existing.
Hard to find a finer and stronger brand than the Kennedys.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Darwin expressed it this way:
“The animal that survives the evolution will
not be the strongest animal, it will be the
animal that has the best ability to adapt.”
Examples of this logic from the world of industry are lining up. In the ‘70s we watched it
happen for the total English car industry almost simultaneously. Today we see the same thing
happening for the American car industry. And it is happening because they are too late in
realising what modern environmentally conscious people have known for decades. Typically,
it is companies with strong traditions and a glorious past that risk cultural stagnation until
they finally go down in a mix of arrogance, self-satisfaction and lack of ambitions. They tend
to see the market from the inside and forget to see themselves from a market and consumer
perspective.
Corporate branding has been such a significant buzzword in the past years that many
companies have followed the trend inevitably and focused one-sidedly on the paternal
embrace and too little on the opportunities this awareness opens up for.
As mentioned, the problem is not corporate branding, but rather the quality of the realizations
and then the fact that it does not move further down to the navigating elements and out to
the customers in the form of behaviour and products that provide a mutual value creating
experience.
You can come a long way in a car
A very strong example of how “clear values, strong competencies and ambitions”, the main
components of Corporate Branding, have formed a powerful correlation resulting in a unique
behaviour is also from the car industry. In the end of the ‘50s when DDB was given the
assignment of introducing “The Beetle” in the US, the world witnessed a campaign, which still
stands out as the biggest and most awe-inspiring ever produced by our business. It became
the starting signal of “The Creative Revolution”. If any businessman or CFO is still not quite
sure about how rational and efficient an investment creativity is, they can take a look at VW’s
life story and find the answer.
Maybe it was the VW case that made Bill Bernbach say:
“The magic is in the product.”
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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The very presence of VW in the US, and later in the rest of the
world, was brought to life by the DNA that the cars represent.
A democratic, functional, simple and self-ironic personality.
A product with an attitude so characteristic, especially in the ‘50s’
US, that it became a provocative statement from its intelligent
owners.
When you consider the ugly yet charming car it has been interesting to
watch how VW and DDB have managed to keep the brand up-to-date
during the years. From basic to luxury. But still with an intact DNA.
Although VW is a luxury car today, it is still a democratic brand with
distinct reliable brand values.
“Small but tough” / “It makes your house look bigger”
Basically the same lovable product personality and tone of voice since 1959.
“If he can make it, so can Volkswagen”
One of the few image ads from VW.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Products as Brand navigators.
Reliability in all the senses of the word.
This has been possible because they have
communicated via their products. Almost all
of the thousands of ads that VW has inserted
during the 40 years of the cooperation have
been product-related. This way they have
used the reliability that experienced reality
delivers to navigate the brand and keep
it vital.
Today the VW group runs a business that
includes nine car brands that each owns a
unique sharp position, despite the fact that
more than 50% of the parts are used in all of
the main models. Via clever engineering and
product branding they succeed in meeting
and exciting their customers right where
they are.
Another point, apart from navigating your
master brand via product branding, is that
you can strengthen your uniqueness as a
brand and become very aware of your DNA
by cultivating new product concepts based
on just one stem cell in this DNA. An example
of this is found in Burberry’s re-launch that
was carried out around the turn of the
millennium. Deep in the core they found the
check pattern that would bring the brand not
only back but far beyond and longer than it
has ever been. When I think back I can find
products where “the magic was gone” but
where they managed to find their way back.
Triumph motorcycles, the Mini, Skoda, Mont
Blanc, Harley Davidson and Guinness. All of
them have been successful because they
found their unique core and developed from
there. This re-birth could never have taken
place via advertising alone.
From military clothing to fashion armour. I have found some pictures from Burberry.
Here is a funny and true story about
Guinness; back in the ‘70s the brewery tried
to introduce this rather massive type of beer
in the US where they only drank thin beer at
that time.
This was tried using the tagline: “Guinness
is good for you”. The launch failed totally but
they held their heads high. After a couple
of years they finally gave up and pulled out
of the market completely and inserted a
full-page ad in the New York Times saying:
“Guinness is too good for you”.
It is the same stubbornness regarding the
core and uniqueness of the brand that many
years later has made Guinness remarkably
successful, also in the US.
The product is the most important
medium of all
Surely it is a precondition that you have
made an overall definition of your unique
standing point. Know where you come
from. But in their search for the core of the
brand many companies tend to forget that
the product is actually the vitalisation of the
brand. The times have changed and it is
no longer possible to navigate a corporate
brand by the use of traditional advertising
alone. From this point of view two things are
decisive: The development of products and
communicative staging of these products as
a credible rethinking of the master brand. The
story that the products tell, is the story that
navigates the brand and keeps it fresh in the
way it is perceived.
Therefore it is important to focus on the story
that the products tell when the customers
are standing in front of them in the store
considering what to buy. The product must
be able to communicate an exciting new
angle based on the core values. Clearly and
in the very split second that the customer
runs his eye over it. And the story must
intuitively be credible and relevant to the
customer at that moment. In other words
it has to unite past and presence and
preferably point towards the future.
It is in the sale situation, in the retail, where
the product is all alone that it has to show its
strength. Here the product is surrounded by
its worst competitors and the retail brand’s
own products. Most retail chains want to be
strong brands themselves and therefore you
have to join forces with the end-user if you
are an outside brand. And it is the strength of
this alliance that enables you to keep control
over your distribution. Choice of distribution
channel and the entire introduction strategy
are decisive factors of the total staging and
should be seen as an integrated part of the
product’s life as a medium.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Stay fresh …
Already in the ‘70s, Bruce Henderson,
founder of Boston Consulting Group, used
the so-called BCG matrix (the Boston model)
to explain how it was necessary to maintain
a product range by adding new energy via
new innovations to the present portfolio and
development of new product brands that
were strong and new-thinking enough to
follow in the footsteps of the predecessor
and this way keep or expand the brand’s
position and strength. When you consider
that these theories and thoughts have been
an elementary part of the lectures at any
business school since the ‘70s, it is quite
shocking how bad many BtC companies
are at using this inspiring and obvious way of
thinking.
The thoughts behind the BCG model
summarise the effects of innovation
and communication with value creation
and bottom line thinking.
… or fade away.
But perhaps it is easier said than done. Because the constant need for additions to the family
make heavy demands on product development and the strength and clarity of the Master
Brand. It demands out-of-line thinking and it is expensive. The dilemma takes its starting point
in the mistaken impression that you leave what you have already got when you are developing
something new. But if the corporate culture is strong enough and implemented in a way that
makes it live intuitively in the company then the new developments will almost always seem
natural in relation to the existing. Born out of the same culture.
The strength that the corporate brand puts its trust in is sadly enough often based on qualities
that are more based on knowledge rather than valuation. Knowledge is not necessarily a
dynamic value when you have to attract new clients or hold on to old ones. The confidence it
creates can strangle the long-term positive development because the company behind does
not really dare to move out of the once safe haven and embracing arms.
Great confidence and low self-esteem is a dangerous cocktail
The Danish producer of audiovisual products Bang & Olufsen is a current example of a
company with a stifling strong corporate brand that has stuffily tried to hold on to a bygone
age of greatness - without the ability to keep up with the consumer development and new
competitive environment.
B&O is an internationally well-known brand that was primarily built up in the golden age of
Danish design in the 1960s and ‘70s. B&O was already known for its cabinet-making and
technical quality from the two innovative engineers that founded the company in 1925.
Through the years B&O managed to develop by being in constant change and by combining
technical and aesthetic quality with recognisable and stylistic consistency in a business where
the competitors marketed clumsy TV boxes. B&O built their success on three pillars. Design,
usability and functionality. And B&O had no problem justifying a high price level. Each radio
and every television communicated clearly and trustworthy rock solid luxury and superior
design in construction, choice of material and performance. They were alone on their own
ocean.
B&O 1974 and B&O 2009
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Make the story tangible.
Today B&O is a company that has lost all of
its capital value in an alarmingly short period.
Product development has almost stopped
and the few products that B&O has actually
introduced in the last five years are still staged
as high tech luxury designs that tell the same
aesthetic story of the corporate brand again
and again. B&O is recycling itself instead of
reinventing itself.
Nevertheless, B&O is still a fantastic strong
brand. But they better hurry finding their DNA
code and make this exciting and interesting
again for the consumers.
B&O is a classic example of what may
happen if you focus too much on your
corporate strength. You easily get arrogant
and lose your sense of urgency.
Back in the ‘70s B&O named their products:
Beocord, Beomaster and Beogram. Just like
Apple use the “i”. Today nobody knows
a single product in the portfolio.
Just as B&O was 30 years ago, Apple is a
contemporary five star example of how
to do it:
As a corporate brand, Apple owns
the intuitive and humane approach to
technology. Almost like a kind of alternative
intelligence. But it is Apple’s product brands
that constantly prove, develop and defend
this ownership. A product brand may have
a narrow autonomic mission which in itself
does not embrace the entire corporate story
but which contributes with new dimensions
that add to the big corporate DNA. The result
is a kind of culture development or navigation
of the overall mission.
The right product idea and design profile can
navigate your company, almost everywhere.
The point is that you should not talk about
your product but via your product.
There is a reason why the founder of DDB,
Bill Bernbach, liked to praise the magical
by the tangible.
What are feelings made of?
The products should be allowed to rise with
the occasion. They should have their own
ambitions with life in the same way that
human children go through a development
where they choose a part of the parents’
core values and add their own ambitions and
objectives resulting in a new, perfect core.
However it is important to remember that
the brand’s behaviour and the costumers’
perception of the product take place at
several levels. Naturally, the valuation
depends on the product itself, its form
and content. But the story telling and
communicative staging is just as much about
all the things that surround it: Design, name,
smell, feeling, service, sale, pricing, choice of
channel and the people that are working with
the brand. All together this is experienced
as physical parameters. But what is more
important it all adds up as something that
we sense, it just seems right in our heart and
stomach. It is like when you choose your
friends and lovers. You do not always know
why you choose them. It just feels right.
Are you exciting to be with?
If you take a walk up Fifth Avenue in New
York you will see a glass box just before you
reach Central Park. The glass box has been
there for years, but it is still pure in style and
makes its sky-high neighbours look heavy
and clumsy. Inside the glass box hangs a
huge Apple logo. Even before you disappear
down the glass stairs to the store under
the boardwalk, Apple’s uncomplicated and
intuitive design DNA has spoken to you.
Downstairs you will find the Apple staff
dedicated to answering whatever you may
still have to ask.
Unlike B&O, Apple has always read the signs
and is developing it corporate brand in a
dynamic yet authentic way via confrontation
with the costumers. The brand has gradually
been developed through human innovation
and intuitive, functional styling. Each new
product category is a merger of radical
renewal and the family’s DNA and they all
proudly wear the recognisable and usable
family name that can be used in front of all
generic types of products: The small “i” in
iMac, iPod, iTunes, iBook and iPhone. Each
and every Apple product tells and expands
the story and navigates the corporate brand.
Apple’s products are always surprisingly new
and yet the same. They are always fresh and
exciting to be with. Nobody really cares about
the technology that makes this possible.
The success is quite obvious. Because
Apple’s products are so communicating and
have such a big talk value that they always
create a hype around them, Apple does
not have to put too much effort into their
communication in paid media. They do great
with PR and Swarm communication through
all their fans. So even if Apple’s advertising
budgets are not very big, sales figures
and awareness about the products have
exploded.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Awareness is not the same
as friendship.
The image is created in the meeting between
the company’s self-presentation and the
consumers’ perception of the company.
Attention is a condition for reaching the
consumers. Therefore traditional advertising
still plays an important part. However it
requires that the advertising is as deeply
rooted in the family as the products it is
spreading the message about. No matter
how much awareness and how much talk
value a campaign generates it cannot buy
commercial success if the product or the
company is not part of the talk. And the
campaign must grow out of something
fundamentally authentic that is relevant and
credible to modern consumers.
Give the costumers something
to talk about
Today there is no way to avoid the
consequences of the digital media
development when we are talking about
branding. The need for thinking of the
product as a medium and a decisive
communication platform has only grown in
step with the technological development.
The exploding number of media has made
it increasingly difficult for advertising to
reach large groups of the population at
one go. At the same time the internet and
the digital media have democratised mass
communication and as a consequence the
costumers have great possibilities to speak
up in front of a potentially big – and global –
audience.
Both Apple and LEGO master the art of being
where their customers are. And constantly
excite them.
The development also challenges the quality of new products. It is the customers that
reveal untrustworthy campaigns and products. And it is the customers that pass on the
bad experiences to others. If the product is the most important medium the customers are
therefore the next most important. They see through your communication and pass their
own experience and perception on to their surroundings. No matter whether it is critical or
favourable.
If you want to know what your customers want, don’t ask. Observe!
You can spend millions on research and not learn anything useful. Because most research is
simply asking people what they need. But nobody can answer that question, because they
have no idea. Henry Ford once said: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would
have asked for a faster horse’. Nobody ever asked for a Dyson or a BIC lighter.
You have to be much more clever and sensitive in these matters.
So it is just as important that you know your costumers as they know you. As a matter of fact,
you have to know them better than they know themselves. Because then you can take your
starting point in their unspoken needs - conscious as well as unconscious - and put them into
play in relation to your own corporate brand when you develop new products and services
and stage the advertising.
You always start by listening
To listen to the costumers and meet their prejudices is also the key to the retrieved success
of toy giant LEGO. Just like B&O the producer of the building bricks has for the last number
of years experienced how widespread awareness about brand and classic products cannot
alone stop a commercial crisis. But in 2008, a year marked by global financial crisis, LEGO
presented the best financial results since 1981 and showed a growth of 18% compared to
the previous year.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Idea creating behaviour.
This is the effect of LEGO now systematically
including the customers’ experiences in
the product development. The company’s
starting point is the children’s universe and
this has led to co-operations with Disney/
Pixar so the characters that the children love
from movies and TV can now be found in a
number of digital game versions and as LEGO
bricks. The parents are probably thrilled since
they connect LEGO with something far more
educationally healthy than the children playing
violent computer games.
LEGO also tests whether the costumers
would recommend the products and this way
act as brand ambassadors.
That is not just something you decide to do, it
is a process that you have to work hard with
and it means that you have realised that it is
the understanding of the costumers’ lives
and interests that create the right products.
Another realisation LEGO has made is
that costumer-oriented projects cannot be
developed in silos but have to function as
clues widely spread in the company.
Thus at LEGO, not just the professional
innovators that work directly with the
users but also production people and top
management are in direct contact with the
users.
Based on idea creating trend studies the
company works with an Apple-like strategy
about regularly launching brand new products
or concepts on the market, products that do
not look like anything the LEGO-user has ever
seen before but yet still recognisable as an
obvious LEGO product. It is worth mentioning
that LEGO chooses to let its concept live
on all accessible technological platforms. In
many ways LEGO’s story can be compared
to B&O’s but unlike B&O, LEGO – based on
their original idea – has managed not only to
reinvent itself products-wise. The company
has also managed to go back to the insight
and curiosity that helped form LEGO in the
beginning.
Never let go of your idea.
There is not a glimpse of self-satisfaction
in LEGO’s approach to the market. Rather
a listening humility followed by creative
enthusiasm and energy. At the same time by
encouraging freethinking in terms of platforms
they have used the product innovation to
navigate the company in a new direction
where it is more fun. They have also cracked
the code, which will ensure that they do not
end up in the same locked situation again.
They have broken down internal kingdoms
and defined mutual goals and methods.
Freedom of speech is actually free and
everybody shares creativity as starting point
and carries the same spirit. Exactly like Avis in
the 1950s and ‘60s.
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
“We have touched the bottom.
Back then we made heavy cut-downs
in the innovation and we have had to
build it up again gradually since then.
It is quite a challenge to innovate
when you have only a few resources.
That made us re-think the way we did
innovation and among other things
we found out that we had a resource
outside of the company, the kids!”
– Managing Director Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in MandagMorgen
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Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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Defence is the best attack.
Defence is the best attack
The new market conditions imply that you have to think about branding and advertising
much more holistically than earlier. You not only have to be the spokesman for a company
and its products. You also have to learn a new and more challenging role: Ask all the critical
questions right from the very preliminary product development.
That means you have to make sure that all the products in the range and other initiatives
where the brand acts in relation to its surroundings can clearly answer a number of critical
questions:
• What is my own special ambition in relation to the core of the corporate brand?
I.e. how do I keep an authentic connection to the family and its values and what new
dimensions do I add to attract new costumers or contribute with renewal?
• What is my contribution to the brand family?
I.e. how do I create value for the other product brands and the master brand? What rub
off does it leave on the family’s credibility and perception when costumers, cooperative
partners or critics hear about me?
• Why am I interesting to the costumers?
I.e. as the latest addition, how do I become a worthy and relevant universe to somebody
who already has plenty of competing brands to choose from? Which of their needs can you
affect? What should make them keep looking at you when you catch their eye?
Brand experience The Yellow Paper Series
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If it is not communicated,
it doesn’t exist.
1. The consumers expect concrete, credible communication. This requires products with
authenticity and good stories to start the talk. It does not mean that emotions and dreams
have nothing to say. It simply means that the promises the products make have to be kept.
2. The consumers want products with signalling value. We all want to be something special
and we all want to tell stories about ourselves. A great part of our social behaviour has now
moved to platforms where we design our presense ourselves. We have become “situoids”
and we choreograph ourselves in relation to various situations.
3. A diversified media picture makes demands for greater clarity in the communication to the
costumers in the purchase situation. Choice of channel and the demands to the stories
the consumers are served, are sharpened. The product does not consist only of a physical
product but also of the way the product is sold.
4. The product is the most important media of all. Behind the product you find a corporate
brand that carries the fundamental values, the big DNA of the company. The individual
product carries the further development of the basic DNA and it has to appear unique with
its own role and mission.
“You can say the right thing about
a product and nobody will listen.
You’ve got to say it in such a way
that people will feel it in their gut.
Because if they don’t feel it,
nothing will happen.”
Because the product is so important and therefore should also carry the biggest assignments
it does not mean that other assignments and processes in the company are of no
importance. Only you often see that the administrative and linear disciplines take over most of
the scene and this way lead to process-run companies where the very core and culture that
form strong products could easily die.
Even the best product does not exist if it is not communicated and therefore communication
is totally decisive for success. As mentioned earlier I see the product as the most important
medium in an integrated communication plan. I started this paper with Bill Bernbach and I
would like to conclude the same way – only this time by letting him tell us what is the most
important issue for this communication.
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