Artful Realist

Wage a Campaign Inside

It’s time for a new mode of thinking in brand alignment. When we introduce a new brand to customers, we launch a splashy campaign. But when we introduce that same brand to employees, we delegate brand cops who will crack down, compel, and control. I tell my clients they need to think of an internal brand launch as though it were a political campaign. Political campaigns change how people think and create a groundswell of public interest. An internal brand campaign should do the same. There’s much that political science can teach us about transforming a branded organization, including how to frame the mandate and the narrative.

Every four years, when American voters cast their ballots for the highest office in the country, pundits wonder about mandates and they frame the narrative of the candidates’ campaigns. Framing and mandating the narrative are critical buzzwords for an internal brand campaign. Your mandate is a better brand experience—framed by the narrative of your strategy, which is tailored to key audience segments. We have already discussed the importance of a brand narrative, but in this instance we’re focusing it on the people inside. You begin your campaign by articulating why change is necessary. What benefit will be created? What promise must be kept? How will it be delivered? You can’t effect change unless you can clearly answer these questions for your employees, partners, and investors. As you develop your strategy, you must consider how you frame these questions for two groups within your organization: supporters and the unconvinced. We can further divide these two macro groups into four subparts, as follows.

Supporters

•       Evangelists: These are the people who do more than believe in the mandate. They’re willing to get out there and convince others of its necessity. Your job is to provide them with the narrative that will help them grow the base. You should identify your potential evangelists early in the process. You’ll often find them while you’re developing the brand strategy. You’ll know who they are by their ability to persuade you of the brand’s opportunities and merits. You’ll also know them by the influence they have in the organization. While you’ll certainly find brand evangelists living in the C-suite, you’re likely to find even more working close to the action. Don’t mistake official status with evangelistic potential. Some of the best brand evangelists line up with the majority of the organization. That’s why they wield power.

•       Followers: These are people who believe in the mandate and are mostly willing to do what it takes to see it through. They need a narrative that articulates what they can do to make a difference. In the age-old will/skill analysis, these internal audiences have the will, but they usually need skills and resources to be effective.

Unconvinced

While it’s not the most appealing segmentation name, the “unconvinced” comprises anyone in your organization who’s not yet on board with the strategy. The campaign to the unconvinced is the battleground for a winning brand implementation effort. It addresses two subsegments.

•       Detractors: Though this is generally a very small segment in most organizations, an influential detractor can greatly impede brand implementation. Most detractors, for whatever reason, don’t believe the strategy reflects the true promise of the brand. Maybe they have a conflicting agenda or maybe they’re misguided, but they are strongly opposed to the change you wish to make. If not addressed, they will create a counternarrative that can derail or diffuse your effort to act on the mandate.

•       The undecided: This is often the largest audience to address, particularly in big organizations. Most of the undecided aren’t opposed to the change you wish to make; they just don’t understand the mandate. In my experience, most people in an organization who have no opinion about the state of the brand are that way because no one has taken the time to help them understand why the brand matters. No one has linked a promise to the brand’s experience. No one has illustrated how the delivery of that experience creates value that is relevant to the undecided employee. This is where you focus your narrative.

The Road to and From Memory

Think of memory as a two-way street. First, memory is about storage. Your memory is a place to file away information for later use. Unfortunately, your brain can’t remember everything. If you tried to store every experience, every idea, and every mundane piece of data that you encounter in your life, you would quickly exhaust your supply of brain cells. That’s why your brain is selective. It filters through all the information that streams by you in a day, and it uses clever rules to decide which information is worth storing in memory. To win the memory game, a brand’s first priority is to pass the brain’s fitness test and earn a lease on some memory cells.

Storage is only half the battle, though. Each of us stores a lot of information in memory that we seldom retrieve. It’s called forgetting. You know how it goes. Suppose you’re casually rifling through your closet and you come across a shirt you’d totally forgotten. Now that it is in plain sight, maybe you remember when and where you bought it, or maybe you remember odd little details and emotions from the last time you wore it. These memories flow into your stream of consciousness with little effort. All it took was a simple reminder—a cue. Until you were cued, the shirt was out of sight and out of mind. But the cue unlocked memorized information about the shirt. How well a brand is retrieved from memory is a critically important factor when you play the memory game. We forget about a lot of brands we encounter, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get stored in memory. It just means they aren’t top of mind. An effective brand is easy for us to store in memory and hard to forget.

If you want to win the memory game, you need to answer three important questions:

•  What is it about my brand that will make it easy to memorize?
• What can I do to ensure my brand sticks in a consumer’s long-term memory?
• How do I encourage a consumer’s brain to recall my brand at relevant moments in time?

Fortunately, there’s good science to help you answer these questions. For starters, we know that associating a brand with a concrete idea makes it more likely to be understood and stored in someone’s memory. Concrete ideas are specific. They connect to concepts we already know and understand. They are tangible, not abstract. We’ll talk more about them in a moment.

Once you’ve defined your brand concretely, repeated exposure improves its chance of making its way into the consumer’s long-term memory. Repetition plays an important role in making a brand top of mind.

Finally, the brands that are recalled most often are connected to a consistent system of cues. Variety might be the spice of life, but to ensure the highest rate of memory retrieval, real brands help us connect dots. Through consistency, they use cues that trigger a chain reaction of memory retrieval that reminds us why the brand really matters to us. Specificity, repetition, and consistency are the ingredients of brands that win the memory game. It may sound like common sense, but if you do a quick survey of the branding universe you’ll find a lot of brands that ignore the rules and end up ignored.

Stake Promises, Not Positions

A brand promise is not the same as a brand position. It is a common nugget of brandlore that the two phrases mean the same thing. They do not, though they are related to each other. A position asserts a line of argument (as in “what position shall we take in this message?”) or it pinpoints a location in perceptual space (as in “which position do we or shall we occupy in the mind of the consumer?”) Positioning thrives on “open space”—perceptual territory that your brand can claim because it is unclaimed by competitors. Imagine you operate a brand in an environment where every competitor uses a red logo. To effectively position your brand, you might choose to make your logo blue because that color is “ownable.” This example is a gross oversimplification of positioning, but it illustrates one reason a position is different from a promise. You position to be different and to stand out. It’s an essential activity, indeed, but it is possible to reposition a brand by focusing on purely cosmetic changes and not deliver any real, incremental value. In contrast, when you make a brand promise, you still stake a position, but you also create a covenant with consumers. You commit to deliver value.

Positioning is an artful and intelligent way to design messaging campaigns. One particularly useful application is to position in order to deposition a competitor. Coupled with semantics, a position can help you cast doubt on your competitors and it can cause consumers to reconsider their current behavior. Used in this way, positioning is a powerful redirection tactic that transforms public opinion in a short period of time. Consider how Republican pollster Frank Luntz described the way he depositioned the estate tax in a matter of days. “It’s not an estate tax,” he said. “It’s a death tax, because you’re taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn’t viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people.” It’s compelling proof of why positioning is useful, but it also demonstrates the difference between a position and a promise. Luntz’s position didn’t prescribe value-producing behavior.

A brand promise is the glue that aligns experience with expectations. Without it, you may stake any number of positions, but they’re little more than marketing tactics. You don’t have to promise anything to take a position. You can change your look so people think you are something that you are not (a beautiful wine label attached to an undrinkable vintage). You can send out messages that appeal to distinct audiences and trends. You can use evocative words, imagery, and experiences to create a perception of what you might aspire to be or what you want others to think of you. But that’s not the same as promising to deliver specific value and executing all of your business activities to live up to that promise. Many brands have fallen into an endless cycle of repositioning initiatives, constantly redefining the brand in an effort to satisfy market trends and shifts in consumer tastes. This never-ending positioning process actually destroys brand value over time because it confuses us and makes us question what the brand really stands for. It weakens the brand’s credibility by eroding the link between our concept of the brand, what we expect from it, and what we know of its reputation. Here’s how it works.

If you lend me $5 and I promise to pay you tomorrow, on the next day you will expect me to give you $5. If I do, you will find me to be a man of my word. You’ll be likely to lend me $5 again, and when someone mentions my name in a similar context you might vouch for me. Your experience with my brand helped me establish a good reputation. On the other hand, if you show up the next day and I pay you only $2, you’ll have doubts about me the next time around. If someone asked you about me, you might be inclined to warn them. My reputation is in danger because of your most recent experience with my brand, which did not live up to the expectation I set with my promise to you. It won’t matter how I go about positioning myself next time. I can dress differently. I can make claims about cleaning up my act. I can try to convince you that I am financially stable or I could tell you I aspire to lofty goals. None of that is likely to impress you because I didn’t fulfill my promise the last time. My positioning activities might convince other people to give me $5, but as soon as you log on to Twitter and squawk about your disappointing experience with my brand, I’d have what public relations experts call a “reputation problem.”

Wild GOP race an example of questionable brand attachment

After the Tuesday Republican primaries in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, a lot of election watchers are scratching their heads. Is this one of the most unpredictable primaries in history? Do we not have the “right” candidates? Are voters simply more fickle than in years past? All of these questions are being tossed around frenetically by pundits and the talking heads of media. I believe the data tells us we have brand problems afoot. One brand force that wouldn’t surprise a corporate marketer is driving the volatility for politicians: Brand attachment.

Forget likability and the favorable/unfavorable poll data. There’s a mountain of evidence to suggest that likability is a very poor predictor of consumer behavior. Many consumers claim to like brands they never buy. In contrast, attachment has been proven to be a strong predictor of purchase behavior and long-term loyalty. We measure attachment by how much a consumer views a brand as part of their own identity—how much they see themselves in it, their values, their life. Looking at the various polling data, voters are having a hard time seeing any of the candidate brands as an extension of who they are. Worse, the GOP brand is fragmented, creating two different sets of values to facilitate brand attachment. Before a voter can project their Republicanism into their self concept, they have to struggle with which kind of Republican they’re attached to. In consumer branding, we’d call this a band dispersion problem-when a master brand means so many things that it becomes less effective at attaching itself to any consumer identity.

Like any good brand, the candidates and the GOP have to focus on the promise of their brands and be comfortable being disliked by some of their constituents. Here’s why. Even though they might not like the brand at the moment, if a voter can seetheir values in the candidate’s brand, they’ll stay the course. They’re attached. A lot of voters didn’t “like” Bill Clinton before and during his presidency. The same is true for George W. Bush. But many voters identified with the values of each candidate brand and they cast their votes accordingly.

Live or Memorex?

Back in the days of tape decks, Memorex ran a series of advertisements featuring Ella Fitzgerald that asked consumers to judge whether the music they heard was live or Memorex? It was a successful campaign that lasted more than a decade. Today, consumers might instead be asked, “is it real, or is it branded?”

The US consumer has been conditioned to focus far too much on the cachet of brands. Now, make no mistake, I make a living from creating and managing brands. There’s a part of me that celebrates the power we’ve ascribed to leading brands, but with any power there’s also danger. If I had $1 for every time a client or a potential client asked me if a good brand campaign could compensate for weaknesses in the client’s product, service, or corporate culture … well, let’s just say I’d have a bigger savings account balance.

The truth is that this mode of thinking isn’t sustainable. I believe that Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party are just two sides of the same coin. Consumers are angry. They feel they’ve been duped one time too many. They’re furious at their government (i.e., the lowest Congressional approval ratings in history) and they’re suspicious of promises (i.e., the odd back and forth of this year’s Republican primary).

Now, more than ever, brands must focus on the substance of their offering. Know what you promise. Don’t promise too much for the sake of winning attention. Promise only what you can deliver. Better yet, under-promise, and over-deliver. There’s nothing new in this formula. Your father very well may have given you the same counsel. But few brands are practicing this approach. The ones that do will be the ones the market rewards. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires management to forego lucrative opportunities that might put the promise in doubt. It requires investment in parts of the business most managers find boring (i.e. human resources, infrastructure, distribution systems, etc.). And, it requires a strong focus on customer satisfaction. The customer is not always right, but when they’re consistently unsatisfied they won’t be customers anymore.

When you manage your brand correctly, your customer should see no difference between real and branded.

Epitaph

Five words on your headstone (Cheery. I know). What do they say? Is that your personal brand? Does it tell your story? Five words.

The Brand Resolution

Attention business managers: Happy New Year! Welcome to 2012.

If somewhere inside your business plan you list building your brand as a critical part of your success then it’s time to make a New Year’s resolution. Unlike the list you may have created for yourself, the resolution you need to make for your brand doesn’t require you to lose weight or cut back on the drinking. It’s actually very simple. It goes something like this:

This year, my brand promises to deliver {insert a valuable benefit} to all of our stakeholders (including customers, employees, investors, etc.). 

See. Told you it was simple. Before you hire that fabulous designer to create a logo or update your website, focus all your energy on fulfilling this one resolution. Make yourself crazy and make everyone in your organization crazy striving to live up to this resolution for a full year. Everything you do should serve this goal—marketing, product development, customer service, hiring, capital investment decisions … everything. Because that’s what makes a real brand.

We’ll talk in 2013 about your next resolution. 

Happy Face by howzey on Flickr.

I was recently asked a question that probably seems painfully obvious to answer. Why do so many serious brands create whimsical brand campaigns? You know the type — the old Washington Mutual Woo-hoo campaign for banking is a good example. The answer is: because they want you to like them.

Favorability is one of the most frequently used measures of brand health. We measure the degree to which a consumer likes or dislikes a brand because it is a somewhat reliable indicator of brand equity. In fact, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that consumers consistently made better judgments about brands when they were in a positive mood. Thus, making a potential customer smile might encourage them to try or buy your brand.

While advertisers often rely on this strategy by delivering humorous campaigns that make us laugh and smile, too many brands forget the lesson when they deliver their brand experience. A great campaign won’t save the day when a customer is waiting for 20 minutes on a phone tree, getting lost in the bad information architecture of your website, or wandering aimlessly through a retail store trying to find your product. Experiences like those—which are so close to the actual moment of choice—often have people frowning. Which begs the real question: what are you doing to put your customers in a good mood when they’re ready to buy?

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

+ Orson Welles