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.

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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.

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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?

It isn’t what they say about you, it’s what they whisper.

// …Some useful branding advice from Errol Flynn

Sales Bags by I See Modern Britain on Flickr.

3 Rules for Brand-Friendly Sales Promotions

Tis the season of sales promotions, and 2011 is looking like one for the record books. Black Friday and Cyber Monday were both extremely successful this holiday season. These periods of sales promotions drive store traffic and sales volume through the promise of low prices. They work because shoppers love discounts. But discounting can become an addiction. Too many brands have been destroyed by constant discounting. If repeatedly used to drive sales, brand equity disappears. Here are three guidelines to help you use discounting in a brand-friendly way.

1. Make it a privilege. I’ve been tracking a retailer who blasts a deep price discount to email subscribers every day. No surprise, this brand is having trouble differentiating from competitors. Our research showed that price was the only distinctive brand attribute. Retailers like Nordstrom have mastered the art of discounting in bursts. Their half-yearly sales are massive traffic-drivers because shoppers know the great prices won’t last. Nordstrom takes it to another level: they provide early access to the discounts exclusively to their most loyal shoppers. Consider how you can time your discounting activities to drive volume when you need it, and make the experience so alluring that people can’t wait for you to do it again.



2. Resist the temptation to promote on price. Yes, people will want to know how much they can save, and a splashy add that says “50% off” will drive traffic. However, you begin equating your brand with price. Instead, use your branded advertising and media to draw attention to what’s available now with better access. Let others talk about your great price discounts. This is one area where social media can play a huge role. Draw attention to the brand with your traditional communications, leverage your network to create buzz about the amazing discounts. When I was at Disney, we never allowed licensees to promote “discounts” with Disney. Instead, we asked them to talk about “great value.” It was dogmatic and artificial, but the idea was right and it helped us preserve the specialness of the Disney brand.



3. Keep your promises. A lot of retailers spend 11 months of the year trying to build a reliable brand image and then throw it away during the one month they wish to move sales. They hire temporary personnel who don’t deliver the right brand touch. Or their site is a disaster. Worse, it crashes because of traffic spikes. Many retailers discount products that weren’t strong to begin with. They promise one thing (discounts on something you love) and deliver another (discounts on things you don’t really want). I asked a colleague who worked with McDonald’s why instant-win coupons were always on the boxes of french fries. He said it was because McDonald’s didn’t really want you to redeem them. They put the coupon on the box because they knew no woman would want the greasy, smelly clipping from a fry box in her purse. Many retailers take the same tactic with their special offers. To preserve brand value, deliver an experience that lives up to what you promise.

A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an … agent does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.

// 

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

I love this quote because it validates something I have been telling brand strategists for years: a brand promise should be active, not existential. Strategists love to write promises that declare what a brand is. But these promises are harder to grasp and less likely to stick in memory. We understand characters in action. The next time you think about defining your brand this way — “Brand X is a …” — think again. Don’t tell me what your brand is. Tell me what it does.

5 Best Branding Books

If I wanted to learn more about branding, what book should I read? That’s a question I get asked a lot. I try as hard as I can to bite my tongue and not say, “well, mine, of course!” Instead, there are 5 books I almost always recommend. I’ll share them with you, too.

1/ Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel. Though it is known primarily as the bible for advertising account planners, I think Steel’s book offers a lot for brand strategists, too. He focuses your attention on how to find the big idea and translate that idea into something that can be expressed creatively.

2/ We, Me, Them & It by John Simmons. In the US, it can be a challenge to find this book by my friend John Simmons, but track it down. It’s worth your search. John makes a compelling case for brand voice. It’s one of my favorites.

3/ Managing Brand Equity by David Aaker. Aaker has written several books since this seminal tome on what makes a brand a brand, but they all pale in comparison. Sure, the examples are dated, but the principles are timeless.

4/ The Pirate Inside by Adam Morgan. With so many brands aspiring to be challenger brands, there’s a lot you can learn from this book. It proves that a brand is more than a logo; it really requires a different state of mind, and a whole lot of discipline.

5/ Different by Youngme Moon. This is another book that’s not really about branding, but brand managers and strategists can learn a lot from it. Moon’s observations on breakaway brands, hostile brands, and reverse brands are thought-provoking and entertaining.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

// Henry Ford

Why is Black Friday Black?

You can’t surf the web, listen to the radio or watch TV today without hearing some reference to Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving here in the States and one of the busiest shopping days in the holiday season. Shoppers love Black Friday because there is an opportunity to find massive discounts. That’s why people are willing to line up in front of stores the night before.

But how is it that Black was chosen as the name for this annual discount ritual? Conventional wisdom says its because the one-day sales hit from this day can put a retailer “into the black.” But that seems an odd reason to attract shoppers. You’d half expect them to react to Red Friday, a day when you’d expect prices to be slashed. Then again, red has perhaps some negative connotations of its own. Perhaps Red Friday is better suited to a massive discount on Stephen King novels. But the color Black doesn’t always conjure a positive association . For example, Black Flag is a line of insecticides. It’s a brand name that earns your purchase because it is guaranteed to kill.

The truth is that our brains do interesting things with color names. When the color in the name easily matches what we expect from the experience (i.e. a Red Tag sale), we don’t give it much thought at all. But when you use a color in a name that isn’t a literal match, we spend a little more time thinking about it. That extra time can lead to positive associations. If we like the unusual idea suggested by the counter-intuitive color name, it might actually stick in our memory and get used more often than a conventional, literal name. Consider Red Bull, The Yellow Pages, The Kelly Blue Book, and Simple Green.

A 2005 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research studied the color brand name question in greater detail. The researchers found this:

…color names impact product decisions due to both the name’s atypicality and its lack of specificity.

Stop Over-Branding

Sorting through some files I’d set aside for my book, I came across this article again. I think I posted it once before, but it’s worth posting again. It’s time for brands to learn that less is more.