Making The Most Of Your Brands

Glenn Hall, shows how research can classify brands and lead to better brand strategies.

After 38 years as the largest full research agency in Ireland, on 18th April 2002, Ulster Marketing Surveys, along with its Dublin based sister companies became part of the international research agency Millward Brown, an acknowledged world wide leader in brand and communications research, adopting the new name of Millward Brown Ulster.

This very exciting move to join the Millward Brown family was driven by recognition that users of research are consolidating and that multinational clients are increasingly demanding consistent international data, complemented by a continued focus on providing high quality research to clients whose needs may be changing in different ways.

The Millward Brown global network is in a pretty unique position. We’ve been tracking brands and advertising for 20 years - we’ve run over 1,200 brand-tracking studies, and we’ve copy tested over 17,000 ads worldwide. We’ve also assessed thousands of brands using our proprietary brand equity system, BrandDynamics, including the Brandz global brand equity study for our parent company WPP, which alone has served over 16,000 brands in 30 countries since 1998. This experience gives us an unparalleled opportunity to look across brands and pull together the characteristics of success and failure.

Few things in marketing have propelled products and services more than branding but as Jeremy Bullmore, speaking at the British Brands Group Lecture 2001 said, "brands are fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half real/half virtual things. When CEO’s try to think about them, their brains hurt." We’re all familiar with the brand ‘life cycle’ - the idea that brands progress through distinct phases of introduction, growth, maturity and inevitable decline. However, the idea that eventual failure is pre-ordained jars with what most marketing managers would like to believe. Current global research into brand behaviour carried out by Millward Brown suggests that the life cycle concept does not hold up to empirical evidence and therefore will cause us to re-think our understanding of the intuitive life cycle.

In their findings, researchers divided brands into eight broad categories, each of which faces different strategic challenges :

Olympic brands are the strongest - they are universally known, well loved, have permeated popular culture and are used by many. Coca cola, Gillette and Tesco’s fall into this category in many countries.

Classic brands are also strong. Well known and well liked, they are often market leaders. Sony is a Classic in the UK, for instance.

Specialists are successful brands that appeal to particular groups rather than a mass audience. They may be too expensive for many, like Clinique, or they may not deliver something relevant to everyone, like Apple. But in each case, those for whom the brand is relevant are strongly committed to it.

Little Tigers are less well known, but attract a strong following among those who have discovered them, and have strong potential for growth, e.g., H&M.

Defenders occupy the middle ground in their categories. Not strong or weak, they lack the edge of the leading players, but are still acceptable to many. Mastercard would fall into this category.

Fading Stars are in more trouble - they are well known, and still relevant to many, but have often been overtaken by the competition. They lack competitive advantages or differentiation.

Weak brands have relatively little to offer most consumers over the competition, either being just bland or, at worst, actively rejected by many.

Clean Slates are often just getting started, or have failed to register with consumers, and have only attained low levels of awareness and trial.

Most marketers are taught that brands progress through distinct phases from introduction to growth, success and eventual decline, and we might therefore assume that brands follow the sequence of starting out as Clean Slates, becoming Little Tigers, growing into Classic or Olympic brands, then declining into Fading Stars before passing on. However, this doesn’t hold up.

Millward Brown analysed 1,663 brands included in the Brandz study in both 1998 and 200, or 1999 and 2001, and found that just under half moved from one classification to another. Of those that changed, only half of them changed their classification in a way that was consistent with the intuitive ‘life cycle’. This is not very impressive for one of the basic assumptions in our industry. So while brands do form distinct groups, their future is not set in stone. Two brands with similar issues may face very different futures - it depends on how the brand team responds to the challenges.

So what is it that drives success? Successful brands have a vast array of characteristics, but they can be distilled into four broad areas.

Business Basics and Great Products

By business basics we mean marketing essentials, like gaining distribution for the brand and appropriate pricing. We’d also include broader issues like an efficient, flexible supply chain, and management structure that enables the business to respond effectively to changes. These are necessary prerequisites for success, but many declining brands can trace their problems back to these basics. Business basics and great products may seem obvious, but get it wrong and the consequences are dire. It’s acknowledged that the decline of Marks & Spencer was prompted by weaknesses in these areas - and its recovery attributable to addressing these issues.

Brand Clarity

Brand clarity means a clear, distinctive and relevant set of brand associations - standing for something. This makes sense when we think about why brands have power. Brands can be seen as mental ‘short cuts’ that set buyers expectations when they enter the purchase-decision window. A brand that triggers a clearer set of relevant associations will be more attractive than a brand with muddled associations or few associations at all. The success of brands such as Orange, Asda and Dove illustrates the power of clarity. The consistency of the marketing message is also crucial over time and across all the points of contact with the consumer. Too many messages may hurt the brand itself as its original meaning gets lost. In many cases declining brands begin to recover only when a focus on the brand’s historical values is regained. Sainsbury’s is a good example. Its recovery seems driven in part by a refocus on the core values of quality and food credentials, after some years of trying to fight competitors on other credentials.

Projected Leadership

The final characteristic of successful brands is the projection of leadership. We mean leadership in a broad sense - that the brand is leading the way rather than being the biggest. This idea combines both the rational and emotional aspects - it can be the perception that the brand is offering the latest and greatest products, but also covers a sense of immediacy, of contemporary relevance, that makes the brand attractive in itself.

In summary, brand growth or decline is in the hands of the brand team and its partners, as the idea of an inevitable life cycle doesn’t fit with the way brands really develop. Given this there are four broad characteristics of successful brands: strong business basics, great products, brand clarity and projected leadership.

These are key questions for marketers to answer when considering brand strategy. Are the basics in place? Does the product fit with changing consumer tastes? Does the brand have a clear set of relevant and distinctive values, and is it supported and reinforced with a consistent message? Is the brand leading the way and does it have momentum.

The answer 'yes' to these questions will produce a strong and valuable brand.