Restaurant Marketing

I recently presented to a local chapter of the National Restaurant Association at their annual meeting. I spoke about “The 10 Things Every Restaurateur Should Know About Building and Marketing Strong Brands.”

Here are the ten things:

1. Know your customers
2. Know what they value
3. Build awareness
4. Be unique and compelling
5. Have a convenient/visible location
6. Have convenient hours
7. Develop a concept
8. Exceed customer expectations
9. Focus on front line employees
10. Create sensory experiences

For instance, for the first point (know your customers), think about this.

What is of the greatest value to each of these customers?

• A harried father with three young children
• A couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary
• A large person with a voracious appetite
• Business partners wanting to have a serious discussion over lunch
• A vegan
• A business executive wanting to entertain businesspeople from China
• A delivery truck driver wanting to eat in 15 minutes or less
• A couple on their way to the theater
• A high school boy on his first date with a girl on whom he has a crush
• A group of high school kids hanging out
• A world traveled epicure
• A mother wanting a quick bite to eat while running Saturday errand
• A group of thirty-something women celebrating a divorce

Consider the following attributes:

• Menu (type, variety, ala carte versus fixed price, etc.)
• Flavors, textures, ingredients, freshness, organic
• Presentation
• Food quantity
• Availability of alcohol, wine list, etc.
• Ambience (architecture, light, sound, décor, etc.)
  versus comfortable/homey, etc.
• Privacy (versus people on display to be seen)
• Wait staff (invisible versus interactive)
• Activities for children
• Total elapsed time (leisurely versus quick)
• Total price
  

Often, restaurateurs realize that their restaurants need to be repositioned, but they want to do this without incurring the huge expenses of capital projects/leasehold improvements. This can occur when a restaurant gains the reputation of being a “blue hair” restaurant, which can even dissuade 50 and 60 year olds from dining there. It can also occur, when a restaurant located in a hotel is passed over by people in the community because of the general perceptions of ‘hotel restaurants.’ There are cost-effective solutions to repositioning these brands if the restaurateur can identify whom he or she would like to increasingly attract. Often, a simple gimmick, menu change or other market segment-specific cue can be all that it takes to attract new customers. Drive this with a little buzz marketing, and the restaurant is well on its way to attracting a new audience.

Branding Commodities

I was recently asked to conduct a workshop on branding commodities. A commodity, per one Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is “a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price.” By definition, commodities lack the differentiation and ability to charge a price premium that strong brands have. Several participants in that workshop represented different energy companies. Each one wanted help in being able to charge a 10-20% price premium for his or her “commodity” products. Here is the good news -- a colorless, odorless, relatively tasteless alcoholic beverage (vodka) has been branded and commands a price premium -- one brand (Absolut) due to its consistently advertised bottle shape alone. And, of course water has been branded. I remember paying $23 for a bottle of Voss branded water at a restaurant in La Jolla, CA several years ago when that brand was first introduced. And bananas and pineapples are branded. Frank Purdue fed his chickens marigolds and ground carrots to give them their differentiated, healthy looking coloring.

I am a firm believer that everything can be branded/differentiated. I have never encountered a product or service that I could not brand/differentiate. So if it is possible, what are some of the tactics for doing so? For B2B brands, you can pursue any combination of the following to provide differentiation:

• Superior product or service consistency (quality control)
• Superior ability to customize products or services to a customer’s specific needs
• Superior responsiveness (order fulfillment, technical support, customer service)
• Optimal/preferred bundling/unbundling of products and services, creating greater perceived value or better fitting a customer’s approach to purchasing
• Superior range of products and services (one-stop shopping)
• Value chain integration
• Unique/preferred/more accessible distribution approach
• Identify your most important/profitable customers or customer segments and focus on meeting their unique needs -- conduct conjoint analysis to determine what they value the most

For consumer products, you can add the following:
Ingredient branding

• Unique packaging
• Emotional branding (‘brand as a badge,’ superior purchase/usage experience)
• Unique attitude/personality

In emotional branding, the brand stands for something important to the target customer. It projects and reinforces his or her intended self-image. Being associated with that brand says something about who he or she is. It says I am sexy, I am stylish, I am rich, I have high social status, I am concerned about the environment, I am frugal, I am powerful, I am smart, I am kind, I am spiritually evolved, I am athletic – the list could go on and on.

For brands in which there is no product or service differentiation, the role of the marketer becomes critical. The brand itself, and what it stands for, may become the primary or only point of difference.

While this is a quick survey of the topic, I hope I have shown you that any product or service can be differentiated/branded in a way that allows for a price premium to be charged. One needs to ideate (brainstorm) in a focused way around each of the differentiation approaches listed above to arrive at a successful differentiation strategy for his or her brand. And, don’t forget, any successful differentiation approach must pass this test: (1) the differentiating benefit is highly important to the target customer, (2) your brand can deliver the benefit well and (3) your competitors cannot. That is, your brand must promise to fulfill a strong customer need for which there is a marketplace gap. I wish you great success in branding your commodity. If you need some help, let me know.

Brand Research -- Brand Management

Brand management cannot succeed without research.

Brand Creation -- Research uncovers the underlying customer values, attitudes, needs, motivations and perceptions that lead to a brand's positioning. It identifies competitors' strengths and weaknesses, helping you further differentiate your brand from the competition, and perhaps even allowing you to reposition their brands to your brand's advantage. Research can help you identify the most powerful brand identity configuration, one that delivers the highest recognition and recall and the most positive associations. It can help you choose the advertising execution that best meets your brand's objectives. Research will help you determine the most advantageous pricing strategy for your brand. It can also help you determine the optimal mix of product/service attributes that deliver the greatest customer value for the least cost.

Brand Management -- Ongoing brand equity monitoring can help you identify ways to strengthen your brand's equity and customer's loyalty to the brand. It can also help you identify when the brand might need to be repositioned to remain vital. A wide variety of brand equity components should be monitored in this process -- from awareness, relevance, differentiation, value and accessibility to emotional connection, vitality, preference, personality and other key associations.

Brand Growth -- Research significantly increases the probability of success when entering new geographic markets with a brand. And research is essential in maximizing the likelihood of success when extending the brand into new product and service categories. In summary, research is essential to your brand's success as you create, manage and grow it.

I will devote the next several blog posts to the effective use of research in each step of the brand management process. This will include a discussion of the different research methodologies available and the most important considerations when using them.

In this blog post, I will focus on research that can help with brand management.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is especially true of a brand and its equity. A robust brand equity measurement system will accomplish the following objectives:

• Measure the brand’s equity across a variety of dimensions at different points in time over time
• Provide diagnostic information on the reasons for the changes in brand equity
• Gauge and evaluate the brand’s progress against goals
• Provide direction on how to improve brand equity
• Provide insight into the brand’s positioning vis-à-vis its major competitors including its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Provide direction on how to reposition the brand for maximum effect
  

BrandForward has identified that the following five attributes drive customers to insist upon specific brands: awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility and emotional connection.

These brand insistence drivers work together to move customers from being aware of your brand and preferring your brand to purchasing your brand and being loyal to your brand. The next chart shows how this works

We recommend that brand equity measurement studies:

• Focus on the key drivers of customer brand insistence
• Measure changes in brand equity over time
• Diagnose reasons for changes in brand equity
• Provide insight into the current brand positioning, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Provide direction on how to increase customer brand insistence
  

Brand equity studies should measure the following for your brand and each of its competitors, with responses reported separately for different user segments:

• Awareness
• Convenience/accessibility
• Perceived value (including quality and price sensitivity)
• Rank in consideration set
• Preference
• Usage
• Relevance
• Differentiation
• Vitality
• Emotional connection
• Loyalty
• Multiple personality attributes and
• Other brand associations.

Another Unusual Advertising Medium

Are you looking for a way to make some extra money while promoting your favorite brand(s)? Advertisers, are you looking for new advertising media? Consider Human Billboard advertising. Go to www.TatAD.com and select from permanent or temporary tattoos to one of many other types of human billboard activity. Rates will vary based upon how much exposure you receive and in which markets. Just when you think that advertisers are running out of new media, you are proven otherwise.

Social Networking and Consumer Power

The emergence of social networking on the Internet (MySpace, LinkedIn, facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) has led to new brand building opportunities and perils. While brands can take advantage of these networks to promote themselves (see the iPod video at YouTube -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BufCM6eKTTw), these same networks have given individuals increased power to make their own positive and negative statements about brands. For instance, view what a disgruntled Comcast customer communicated about Comcast on YouTube -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU. Brand marketers would do well to constantly monitor these social networks for references to their brands. At a minimum, they would learn allot about how customers perceive and use their brands. If they are fortunate, they may also be able to address/diffuse potentially disastrous references to their brands before they become ‘viral.’

Geo-branding

I have been working with several geo-brands lately. Geo-brands tend to have many audiences:

• Current and potential residents
• Current and potential businesses
• Developers
• Investors
• Tourists
• Conference and convention planners
• Sporting event site selection committees
• Business travelers
• Residents’ out-of-town friends and relatives

Following are important geo-branding considerations for the tourist segment:

• Defining and understanding the target market (geo-demographic, lifestyle, attitudes, motivations, etc.)
• Defining/setting appropriate geographic boundaries
• Knowing what the top-of-mind associations are for the place
• Knowing which attractions make the place a destination
• Knowing what makes the place different
• Standing for something
• Remaining authentic
• Knowing and leveraging the place’s assets
• Building on/enhancing the place’s strengths
• Capturing the place’s most important point(s) of difference in a slogan
• Understanding/maximizing the place’s aesthetic appeal
  o Natural features (ocean, lake, mountains, canyon, waterfalls, etc.)
  o Architecture
  o Zoning, code
  o Curb appeal – parks, scenery, landscaping, flowers, fountains, sculptures, etc.
• Creating a consistent aesthetic
• Amenities (restaurants, cafes, public toilets, benches, etc.)
• Sidewalks, bike paths
• Parking
• Signage/way finding
  

Brand Research for Brand Creation

Brand Research

Brand management cannot succeed without research.

Brand Creation -- Research uncovers the underlying customer values, attitudes, needs, motivations and perceptions that lead to a brand's positioning. It identifies competitors' strengths and weaknesses, helping you further differentiate your brand from the competition, and perhaps even allowing you to reposition their brands to your brand's advantage. Research can help you identify the most powerful brand identity configuration, one that delivers the highest recognition and recall and the most positive associations. It can help you choose the advertising execution that best meets your brand's objectives. Research will help you determine the most advantageous pricing strategy for your brand. It can also help you determine the optimal mix of product/service attributes that deliver the greatest customer value for the least cost.

Brand Management -- Ongoing brand equity monitoring can help you identify ways to strengthen your brand's equity and customer's loyalty to the brand. It can also help you identify when the brand might need to be repositioned to remain vital. A wide variety of brand equity components should be monitored in this process -- from awareness, relevance, differentiation, value and accessibility to emotional connection, vitality, preference, personality and other key associations.

Brand Growth -- Research significantly increases the probability of success when entering new geographic markets with a brand. And research is essential in maximizing the likelihood of success when extending the brand into new product and service categories. In summary, research is essential to your brand's success as you create, manage and grow it.
I will devote the next several newsletters to the effective use of research in each step of the brand management process. This will include a discussion of the different research methodologies available and the most important considerations when using them.

In this blog entry, I will focus on research that can help with brand creation. The most important consideration in brand creation is the brand’s positioning. Central to brand positioning is knowing who your brand’s target customers are. The first step is to choose the primary, secondary and tertiary targets based upon an assessment of the following:

• Market size
• Market growth rate
• Market profitability
• Strength of customer need
• Degree to which the customer need is untapped
• Market entry barriers
• Market exit barriers

Market size and growth rate can be determined through volumetric forecasting. Internal analysis and secondary research can help you with market profitability. Strength of need and need gap can be determined through concept testing against a normative database. Market entry and exit barriers can often be uncovered through industry analyst reports and strategic analysis.

The ideal target market is one that is large, profitable and growing rapidly. It has strong needs for the product or service and there is a large gap in filling those needs. Generally, low exit barriers are preferable. Entry barrier preference will depend on the size and resources of your company relative to its competition. Low entry barriers will allow quick easy entry for you, but also for potential competitors.

Assuming you have found ideal markets for your product or service, the next step is to determine the most beneficial position for the brand in those markets. The ideal position addresses one or two of the most compelling customer motivators uniquely and exclusively. Put another way, brands should choose to ‘own’ one or two customer benefits that are (a) highly compelling and purchase motivating, (b) based on company strengths and (c) not adequately addressed by other companies. Benefits can be functional, emotional, experiential or self-expressive.

Customer benefit structures can be uncovered in qualitative research, such as focus groups and one-on-one interviews. Projective techniques, laddering and guided imagery can often help uncover these. The next step is quantitative research that measures the importance of each category benefit and how well your brand and each of its competitors are perceived to deliver against each of those benefits. Benefit importance versus delivery can be mapped for your brand and each of its competitors to visually expose potentially powerful brand positioning opportunities.

This research can then be used to create a brand positioning statement including brand essence, promise and personality. This positioning statement can guide the creation of the brand’s identity (visual and other sensory cues), its messaging and its customer touchpoints.

Logos, taglines and other brand identity element options can be measured for their congruence with the brand’s essence, promise and personality. They can also be measured for their recognition, recall and preference. Recognition can be tested in the field for different logo options. One can test the greatest distance at which a logo can be recognized in different lighting conditions for different media (from web to storefront) at different times of day. Preference can be determined through a simple customer sorting exercise. Recall can be established by embedding each logo option in with the logos of several other brands (displayed in rows and columns), briefly presenting that logo grouping, and then asking people to recall as many logos as possible.

Brand messaging (from taglines to advertising copy) can be tested for congruence with brand position in one of two ways: (1) measuring responses (perceptions and intended behaviors) before and after viewing the crafted message or (2) testing two forms of the crafted message in the marketplace (more expensive split-run technique).

Corporate Sponsorship of Everything

I have been following with some interest the emergence of corporate sponsorships in various aspects of our lives. It started with sports brands sponsoring athletes. If you watch Tiger Woods play golf, the Nike brand has been encoded in your brain. Sponsorships branched out to the naming rights for stadiums and arenas. Pick a city and you can usually find a sponsored sports venue. When I was in Detroit recently, I found it ironic that Toyota sponsored the Scout Shop at the Detroit Boy Scout office. I am sure that marketers at GM, Ford and Chrysler would not use the word 'ironic.'

I remember reading not so long ago that Clark, Texas offered to rename their town DISH in return for free satellite TV from the DISH network for its small number of homeowners. Las Vegas is selling naming rights to its monorail and Chicago is seeking the highest bidder to name a freeway, currently called the Chicago Skyway.

Just recently, USA Today ran an article citing Sheboygan, Wisconsin's push to sell rights to virtually anything at two public high schools as a way to raise cash. For instance, those high schools now have Kohler Credit Union kitchens ($45,000), Acuity Insurance field houses ($650,000), Sheboygan Orthopedic Associates locker rooms ($45,000) and Associated Bank school stores ($60,000) among other named entities.

Where will this stop? I will not be surprised to hear that a parent has named a child after some company in return for a small financial donation. Come to think of it, I remember having an Allen Bradley cap as a child, something my parents said the Allen-Bradley Company sent them after my birth was announced in the local paper (my full name is Alan Bradley VanAuken). I wonder if they received any money for my name. Probably not. I was born too soon for that and besides, my parents misspelled "Allen."

It will be very interesting to read of the types of sponsorships are offered for sale next.

Brand Research

Brand management cannot succeed without research.

Brand Creation -- Research uncovers the underlying customer values, attitudes, needs, motivations and perceptions that lead to a brand's positioning. It identifies competitors' strengths and weaknesses, helping you further differentiate your brand from the competition, and perhaps even allowing you to reposition their brands to your brand's advantage. Research can help you identify the most powerful brand identity configuration, one that delivers the highest recognition and recall and the most positive associations. It can help you choose the advertising execution that best meets your brand's objectives. Research will help you determine the most advantageous pricing strategy for your brand. It can also help you determine the optimal mix of product/service attributes that deliver the greatest customer value for the least cost.

Brand Management -- Ongoing brand equity monitoring can help you identify ways to strengthen your brand's equity and customer's loyalty to the brand. It can also help you identify when the brand might need to be repositioned to remain vital. A wide variety of brand equity components should be monitored in this process -- from awareness, relevance, differentiation, value and accessibility to emotional connection, vitality, preference, personality and other key associations.

Brand Growth -- Research significantly increases the probability of success when entering new geographic markets with a brand. And research is essential in maximizing the likelihood of success when extending the brand into new product and service categories. In summary, research is essential to your brand's success as you create, manage and grow it.

I will devote many of the next several blogs to the effective use of research in each step of the brand management process. This will include a discussion of the different research methodologies available and the most important considerations when using them.

The Role of Brand Marketing in New Business Success

As I work with more and more smaller businesses, including start-ups, it has become obvious to me that some businesses attempt to address underlying business problems through branding. I find that I am not only consulting on branding but also general business strategy and especially the intersection between the two. Given this clear need, this article is about the intersection of branding and business strategy in creating a successful new business.

A very common problem I encounter is businesses that have a product and a manufacturing process but little understanding of the underlying customer need that the product addresses. Businesses should always start with a solid understanding of the customer needs that its products and services can fulfill – functional, emotional and otherwise. This assumes that the business has already identified its primary and secondary target market segments and knows a fair amount about those segments’ needs, desires, hopes, fears, values, aspirations, problems, concerns, shopping behaviors, etc. All of this can be discovered through formal or informal market research. Research techniques are myriad, but often include one-on-one interviews, focus groups, online surveys and discussions with current customers. Another technique is to ‘shadow’ your customers and ‘live the brand’ with them to discover how they experience it.

Another common problem is developing a product or service that does not deliver a superior value proposition to what is already available, either because it is not differentiated in relevant ways from what is already available or because its cost structure demands too high a price for the perceived value.

Sometimes, while the business may understand the customer’s need and have created a superior solution at a reasonable price, it may not be able to easily identify or communicate with the target audience (or be made aware of the event or situation that triggers the need) making the marketer’s/media planner’s job very difficult and sometimes even impossible.

I have said this many times before: a brand promises relevant differentiated benefits to specifically targeted customers and then makes good on that promise in all that it does. Ideally, it promises a benefit (or benefits) that: (a) are extremely important to the target customer, (b) the company is particularly well suited to delivering and (c) that the competition is not addressing. The most powerful benefits to own are often emotional, experiential or self-expressive.

Another common new business problem is being under capitalized, leading to cash flow problems. What may otherwise have been a very successful, profitable business, dies for lack of cash. This can be solved by accurately forecasting cash flow needs and raising enough funds to cover inaccurate cost or revenue estimates or other faulty assumptions or unforeseen circumstances. A related problem is the ability and will to live with low or no income for a few years until the business has a chance to more fully develop.

Choosing the right business model is also important.

What is the long-term profit potential in the product/service category? Is the business scalable? What is the ratio of fixed to variable costs? What is the sensitivity of demand to price? What, if anything, will make your execution of the business more profitable than everyone else’s?

Adaptability is critical. Most successful businesses have reinvented themselves many times until they have landed on a formula that is successful.

Hard work and attention to detail is also extremely important.

And again, I will stress that businesses often start with a product or an idea, but no real understanding of the underlying customer need or purchase/usage behavior. Marketers, when asked to develop marketing for start-ups and other small businesses, must be able to deliver much more than a logo, tagline, brochure, trade show booth or ad campaign. They must be able to help the business understand its markets and its business model and define and deliver upon its unique value proposition.

Another comment: business owners in my experience -- especially doctors, engineers, and other very smart, analytical types -- often underestimate the importance of marketing and the unique skill sets of experienced marketers. This sometime leads to cutting corners where they shouldn’t be cut or second guessing messages or campaigns based upon anything other than the communication of product functions and features.

I have seen businesses that have created superior product functionality but ignored the look and feel of the product (its aesthetic design). What otherwise would have been very successful products are spurned by the target customers for this reason alone. Don’t forget product aesthetic design (and packaging, if appropriate).

Two other areas in which marketers can be very helpful to small business owners: in crafting the optimal pricing and distribution strategies (which can only be adequately addressed in separate dedicated articles).

Last, but certainly not least, newer quickly growing businesses are almost always constrained in what they can spend on marketing and brand building. The brand marketer will best serve these businesses by focusing on (a) the basics (defining the unique value proposition, crafting pricing and distribution strategy, etc.), (b) low or no cost marketing techniques (such as publicity, customer referrals, building ‘buzz’ and highly targeted marketing) and (c) the quickest and easiest incremental revenue wins – identifying and pursuing the ‘lowest hanging fruit.’

Here are the criteria that I use to estimate the potential for a new business or brand:
* Size of market (customer need, total revenue potential) – bigger is better
* Rate of market growth (or contraction) – high long-term growth rate is best
* Market fragmentation – this may be good or bad – requires additional analysis regarding the factors that underlay this fragmentation
* Your unique value proposition within the market – extremely important – be honest with yourself
* Your current or projected share of the market – bigger is better
* Market profitability – higher is better
* Market entry and exit barriers – high entry barriers and low exit barriers are best

I hope this helps you as you think about the value of marketing and branding in the context of new business development.

Brand Repositioning and Organizational Reinvention

I have been working with a number of organizations lately whose brand repositioning efforts involve nothing less than organizational transformation including business model and culture change. Take libraries as an example. In most people’s minds, libraries are synonymous with books. However, for those of us who can afford it, Amazon.com is a much more convenient source of books, with its 24/7 availability, advanced search and browse capabilities, extensive product reviews and very quick shipping. One of the underlying benefits of books is information. How much easier is it today to search for information online using one of many search engines rather than going to the local library? And whether you are looking for information or just the pure pleasure of reading, think about the advantages of going to a Barnes & Noble store with its overstuffed chairs, café, book readings and signings, community rooms, etc. Where then does the modern library fit into people’s need fulfillment? I believe libraries need to redefine themselves from ‘book archives’ to ‘community places’ – places for the acquisition of information, sharing of ideas, exposure to different cultures and enrichment of life in general. Obviously, this has huge implications for brand position, competitive set, culture, business model, sources of income and the physical environment. I hope this example demonstrates that increasingly brand repositioning is accompanied by culture and business model change requiring the interdisciplinary efforts of marketing, business strategy and human resource professionals at a minimum.

Geo-branding

Joao R. Freire recently shared a paper that he wrote on Geo-branding with me. It was published in the November 2005 issue of Place Branding.[1] It makes some very interesting points about place branding:

• The worst thing a place can do is not try to intervene in the creation of its image
• Given that brands often are a part of an individual’s self identity construction, places where one might visit will be influenced by the meaning behind the place and what that communicates about the individual’s lifestyle and self image
• Some people claim that branding might corrupt a place’s authenticity and abuse its natives. The author argues that rather tourism and geo-brands deliver these important benefits:

-- Contribute to the preservation of local cultures and thus global diversity

-- Provide important community resources, especially jobs (Most of the resources created for tourists can also be used by residents)

-- Help increase community self esteem by reinforcing the place’s unique values

The most interesting conclusion of this paper for me is the importance of branding places and of choosing meanings that will appeal to the tourists (and residents) that the place desires to attract.

[1] Freire, Joao R., “Geo-branding, are we talking nonsense? A theoretical reflection on brands applied to places,” © Henry Stewart Publications 1744-0696 (2005) Vol. 1, 4 347-352 Place Branding

The Conference Board’s ‘Extending Your Brand to Employees Conference’

I recently had the opportunity to present and lead a panel discussion at The Conference Board’s ‘Extending Your Brand to Employees Conference’ in Chicago, IL. The conference provided a forum for marketing, brand, communications and HR professionals to share how they have engaged their employees to embrace and deliver upon their brands’ promises.

Here are some of the more interesting quotes from that conference:

“Branding is all about the promises your company makes to external audiences and the promises it keeps with those audiences.”

Randall S. Rozin, global director, branding and marketing communications, Dow Corning Corporation


Scott Davis, senior partner, Prophet, indicated that he believes the following three things are most important in branding today:

• Brand relevance
• Customer experience
• Employee engagement and alignment

“It seems to me that when people talk about employer branding, they are talking about one of two things:

• Positioning the organization to potential and current employees
• Engaging employees to deliver upon their organization’s promises to its customers

These two things are important and related, yet different.”

Kristen Weirick, employer brand manager, Whirlpool Corporation


Bonnie Gellas, director, corporate communications, Merrill Lynch indicated that at Merrill Lynch ‘Human Resources (HR)’ has been renamed ‘Leadership and Talent Management,’ reflecting how that company views the evolving role of that function.


Lissa Reitz of Target Corporation indicated that Target’s research showed that their guests (customers) believed that if Target’s bathrooms were clean, it indicated that Target was a well run store. At Target, people are paid not only to clean the floors, but to keep them shiny at all times.


Story telling emerged as one of the most powerful tools to reinforce brand building behavior. Dean Rodenbough, director, corporate communications, Hallmark, indicated that as a part of its internal brand building activities, Hallmark implemented a ‘Stories of Hallmark’ speakers series in which employees tell brand related stories. Yolanda Villegas, global branding leader, GE Insurance Solutions indicated that when her company asked employees to tell a customer story, over 100 employees responded.

Successful Brand Champions

Chief brand champions will be more effective if they exhibit the following personal characteristics:

• Curious
• Well rounded
• Intuitive
• Visionary
• “Big picture” thinker
• Strong customer knowledge
• Strong business knowledge
• Assertive
• Disciplined
• Tenacious
• Resilient
• Passionate
• Able to simplify the complex
• Able to translate brand concepts into something relevant for non-marketers
• Story telling ability
• Teaching ability
• Likable personality
  
  These qualities seem to imply three roles: (1) vision crafter, (2) teacher/evangelist and (3) standards enforcer.
  
  Source: BrandForward’s informal survey of corporate brand management leaders, May 2002.

The Importance of Point of Purchase

Over the past 20 years, retail brands have significantly increased their leverage over consumer product brands because (1) they increasingly control access to products and (2) the environment in which the products are sold and (3) they have point of sale data to which manufacturers are not always privy. And given the relative size of some of the largest retailers (Wal-Mart’s sales of $285.2 billion [year ending January 31, 2005] eclipses P&G’s sales [all brands] of $60 billion), retailers don’t only affect product sales and market share directly through product access/distribution, but also indirectly by contributing to marketplace exposure/brand awareness.

Point of purchase is the place where everything a brand has done either results in a sale or doesn’t. While most consumers still state that product brands are more important to them than retail brands, most would not waste the time to seek out their preferred brand at another store if it is not available where they are shopping. And, according to a March 31, 2005 Economist article, consumers spend no more than 6 seconds trying to find a preferred brand before they give up and settle for a substitute.

So, how can you maximize your product brand’s probability of success at point of purchase? Through the following:

• Offering a unique or superior product sought out by the consumer prior to entering the store
• Developing emotional connection and loyalty to your brand before and after the point of purchase
• Creating a prominently visible brand identity (as seen from a shelf facing)
  -- Including distinctive packaging size/shape/colors
• Developing point of purchase signage that simply and powerfully communicates:
  -- Your brand’s most compelling point(s) of difference
  -- Your brand’s superior value (remembering that value has a numerator and a denominator -- this usually does not translate to lowest price)
• Understanding retailer metrics and motivations and developing product programs accordingly
• Working very closely with retailers’ category managers to ensure that your products receive maximum attention, consideration and placement
• In conjunction with the category manager, developing innovative in-store promotions that highlight your products and brand(s)
• Creating your own retail outlets so that you can develop and control a superior point of purchase experience