Reinventing brands

The traditional marketing agenda of brand
messaging – marketers targeting consumers with messages designed to influence
their purchasing decisions – is dead in the water.

 

 

It’s a lose/lose. It obstructs consumers
in their quest to make better decisions, and it’s both hugely expensive and
counterproductive – it destroys trust.

 

 

Reinventing branding is now urgent aspect
of marketing’s reinvention agenda (along with reinventing CRM). It’s become
urgent for two reasons. First, a transformed communication context. McKinsey
were absolutely right to observe that:

 

“The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically
altered the balance of power between companies and consumers. As consumers have
become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional
company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make
purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about
products.

 

“This tectonic power shift toward consumers reflects the way people now
make purchasing decisions …”

 

 

The pity with McKinsey was that they then
used this observation as a springboard for a dog’s dinner of word of mouth
muddle.

 

 

The second transforming factor is the
ongoing revolution in social, evolutionary and behavioural psychology which has
demolished behaviourist theories (of the human mind as putty moulded by
external stimuli) upon which the messaging agenda is based.

 

 

So what’s the alternative?

 

 

The first, most important step is in our
own heads. We need to see the world differently. Marketers can no longer exempt
themselves from their own core axiom that the job of marketing is to identify
and meet customer needs. Messaging fails to address the consumer’s need for
better decisions. It doesn’t add value from the consumer perspective. It has to
go.

 

 

From the consumer’s perspective, marketing
is just another product which either adds value or not. Consumers may buy
marketing with another resource (time and attention), but the underlying
dynamic is no different to any other marketplace. If it’s valuable I’ll pay
more (in this case, more time and attention). If it’s not, I’ll spurn it.

 

 

What role can marketing communications play
in a world where it has to align to the consumer’s definition of value – ‘help
me make, and implement, better decisions?’ Answer: a huge role. The opportunity
is absolutely massive – if only brand managers could remove those darned
messaging blinkers.

 

 

Step
1.                 Accept
that messaging is dead. Better decisions are informed by independent, impartial information from third parties consumers trust. So invest resources in becoming a trustworthy source, and provider, of
such information including to these third parties. After all, every brand knows
more about its product than anybody else in the world. Build a reputation for
trustworthiness on this foundation.

 

 

Step
2.                 
Distinguish awareness from ‘persuasion’. In human beings, awareness is an
involuntary act. We can’t decide to become unaware once we have been made
aware. Besides, being aware of a product helps us build our consideration sets.
Imagine how difficult decision-making would be without this initial leg up. For
these reasons awareness advertising has a rosy future. But understand and
accept its limitations. Awareness is not persuasion, and once you are aware of
something, more awareness has zero effect. Instead, recast the old adage that ‘50%
of my advertising works, I just don’t know which’ to something like ‘50% of my
advertising increases awareness, the other 50% tries to persuade’. Hey presto!
We have the beginnings of methodology to review bloated advertising budgets.

 

 

Step
3                  
Disentangle value in communication from waste and harm. Some marketing communications
help consumers make decisions. In fashion, advertising is a key source of
consumer inspiration. Consumers buy fashion magazines, in part, for the ads.
Advertising that informs me about a new product is useful and helpful. Yet at the
same time, lots of advertising adds zero value because it’s irrelevant,
repetitive or even deceptive or manipulative. Here, we can continue with our
comms value add audit. For more on this, see my article on ‘Mad Sheep Rage‘.

 

 

Step
4                   Embrace consumers’ desire for better decisions.
If messaging about the product is out (not counting awareness), what else can
brand managers communicate? Answer: everything else.  Look at Pampers.com. P&G knows that
Pampers buyers aren’t interested in messages about nappies, but they are
interested in parenting. So that’s what P&G has focused on: providing
useful, trustworthy information about parenting that’s worth searching for and
paying attention to. Ultimately, consumers only have limited interest in
products and their attributes, which are only a means to an end anyway. But they
are intensely interested in their own problems, interests and challenges. The
communication/information opportunity here is absolutely massive.

 

 

Step
5                   Deploy
information as a tool in the hands of the consumer. Once we accept
that brands need to be reinvented as information services, then the
opportunities for innovation are enormous. I wrote about some of these
opportunities in an earlier article. They include:

- – -
creating new information services to streamline consumer processes (such as
alerts, reminders and ‘where’s my order?’ tracking tools)

- – -
repurposing internal insight to create new value (e.g. ‘people like you’
recommendations and advice)

- – -
creating and supporting consumer communities for peer-to-peer information sharing, support and
advice

- – -
burgeoning new areas such as helping individuals manage their own information
better (which is where brands as information services connects with reinventing
CRM).

 

 

Step 5 is a truly vast agenda; an
unthinkably huge opportunity. Behind it however there is one, single, essential
mental break: breaking free from the assumption that the value we offer lies in
the product/service we sell and that its marketing is simply a means to an end,
a means of selling this value.

 

 

In fact, it’s the other way round. Value
lies in helping the consumer make, and implement, a better decision. A better
product or service is one way of addressing this value agenda. Brands as
information services are another way. The brand manager’s job is to bring them together
to create a superior value-adding whole.

 

 

This is the real meaning of ‘integrated
marketing’.

 

 

Alan
Mitchell      www.ctrl-shift.co.uk
          Newsletter