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It has been a gloomy month for US retailers. Iconic brands such as Linens-n-Things and Mervyns are in liquidation, while former electrical retail powerhouse Circuit City filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Store sales are down at every major US retailer - except one.

On Thursday Wal-Mart announced a 7.5% increase in sales for the first three quarters of 2008. Chief executive Lee Scott was smiling when he declared his 'optimism' for the upcoming holiday season, and Tom Schoewe, Wal-Mart's chief financial officer, was in an even more cheerful mood.

There are two reasons for Wal-Mart's success: one economic, one strategic.

On the economic front, Wal-Mart is benefiting from the change in the fortunes of the US consumer. In the past six months, the middle classes across the Atlantic have begun trading down in the millions. A recent survey from Bain & Company showed that US consumers are becoming more likely to trade down and that when they do they feel more educated and more satisfied as a consumer. Thrift is the new luxury, and Wal-Mart is enjoying a middle-class renaissance at the expense of its upmarket rivals.

But there is also a strategic reason why cash registers at Wal-Mart are beeping with such fury. It has learned one of the great secrets of branding the hard way. In 2006 the company made a huge, but relatively commonplace error. Frustrated with flat sales and shareholder pessimism, the leadership team at Wal-Mart decided to reposition the brand.

It's a tactic taught daily to business school students, and the theory behind it could not be more simple. Students are shown a perceptual map in which a brand is in close proximity to competitors and associated with lifeless values. Then the student is pointed to a golden land on the other side of the map, where the consumer's unfulfilled needs are and competitors are few and far between. The implication is obvious: change what the brand stands for and become popular and profitable again.

There is only one problem with brand repositioning: it does not work. Never in the history of marketing has a theory been embraced and attempted by so many, and failed so frequently. It's a peculiar kind of arrogance that fools a marketer into thinking that they can get inside a brand's genetic code and change it to improve its circumstances. I was taught a long time ago by marketers smarter than me that most of the brands I would work for were around before I was born, and would live on long after my death. Great brand managers never rate themselves as more valuable than the brands they serve.

In Wal-Mart's case, the brand repositioning was particularly bonkers. Out went founder Sam Walton's philosophy on reducing costs for small-town America. In came organic food, expensive jewellery and $500 bottles of wine. Celebrities like Destiny's Child were brought in to promote the brand, and Wal-Mart even invested in an ill-fated ad campaign in Vogue.

Last year, however, Wal-Mart realised that its repositioning strategy was not working, and shifted to a revitalisation approach instead. Brand revitalisation is a more simple, humble approach to brand change. First, go back to your history and remember what made the brand great in the first place. Second, revisit these associations but in a modern and contemporary way.

It's one of the hardest lessons in branding. To remain consistent to your brand you must change. Not the brand itself, but the way the brand presents its enduring and eternal associations to new consumers experiencing a new set of circumstances.

30 seconds on... Wal-Mart's brand revitalisation

* Wal-Mart shelved its 'Always low prices' slogan in 2007, after 19 years, and launched a fresh campaign. Its motto, 'Save money. Live better', will feature on items from store receipts to plastic bags.

* Stephen Quinn, Wal-Mart's chief marketing officer, said that the campaign is aimed at personalising the chain's low prices. 'People know they can save money by shopping at Wal-Mart,' he added. 'The emotional connection was what the savings allowed the family to do.'

* In two 30-second TV spots, a US family is shown spending the money it saved at Wal-Mart on a car and a family vacation to Orlando, Florida. The ads end with the line 'Wal-Mart saves the average family $2500 per year. What will you do with your savings?'

* An economic study commissioned by Wal-Mart and conducted by research firm Global Insight showed that the retailer's low prices saved customers $287bn last year, an average of $2300 for each US house-hold shopping at Wal-Mart.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

I have helped organizations position their brands through consensus building brand positioning workshops since the mid-1990s. As a part of that process, I have the workshop participants (mostly organizational leaders) select the brand personality attributes for which they want their brands to stand.

The organizations with which I have worked span a wide range of sizes and industries. They include manufacturing companies, consumer products companies, aging services firms, wealth management firms, medical supply companies, real estate investment trusts, municipalities, high schools, environmental conservation organizations, public service organizations, professional associations and many others.

I thought it would be interesting to identify the most popular personality attributes across all of these organizations.

Following are the most popular personality attributes (in decreasing order of popularity):

• Innovative (45%)
• Professional (41%)
• Responsive (36%)
• Caring (32%)
• Reliable (27%)
• Customer focused (27%)
• Trustworthy (23%)
• Service oriented (18%)

Others with frequent mentions:

• Approachable
• Collaborative
• Committed
• Creative
• Dedicated
• Dependable
• Diverse
• Dynamic
• Easy to work with
• Efficient
• Entrepreneurial
• Focused
• Friendly
• High quality
• Honest
• Inspiring
• Leader
• Positive
• Practical
• Resourceful
• Respected
• Science-driven
• Visionary
• Welcoming

Slightly unusual personality attributes:

• Heroic and proud (a watch brand)
• Light-hearted (an advertising agency)
• Low key, not glitzy (a wealth management firm)
• Non-confrontational (an environmental conservation organization)
• Servant leader (a local United Way agency)

Overall, my clients have used 140 different words and phrases to describe their brands’ personalities. Each brand describes itself using between 6 and 12 words or phrases, with the average brand using 9 words or phrases.

We help brand decision makers arrive at a set of intended brand personality attributes in the following way. First, we survey target customers, workshop participants and other brand stakeholders about the brand’s personality using projective techniques. Then, in the workshop itself, we compile that list of brand personality attributes to stimulate discussion and decisions about the ideal brand personality.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

What a difference a decade plus four makes. Back in 1994 Naomi, Claudia, Kate and Elle were at the height of their supermodel powers, naked as the day they were born and united in preferring to be that way than wear fur.

Sales of fur had been flat for years and many furriers had closed their doors in despair.

Fashion is, unfortunately, all about change, and today, supermodels are actively clothed in, and sponsored by, the very material they once denounced.

Vogue is filled with the latest celebrities modelling the hottest labels, featuring the finest furs. Designer brands such as Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander McQueen have all recently featured fur in their run-way collections. Now, high-street fashion brands such as J.Crew are following suit.

More worryingly, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is beginning to lose its strong influence over the fashion world. Today, its message is sponsored not by Paris or Nicole, but decidedly B-list celebrities such as Heather Mills McCartney and ageing rock band Motley Crue.

Its tactics are growing increasingly predictable and, therefore, ineffective. Creaming Anna Wintour, the fur-loving editor of Vogue, with a tofu pie may have made the headlines, but it was hardly likely to influence her editorial stance.

No picture better captures PETA's waning impact than photographs from its invasion of McQueen's runway show. While campaigners hold aloft banners proclaiming 'Fur kills', the British designer laughs wildly at the commotion and mugs for the cameras. PETA's approach was not only ineffective, it probably added to the notoriety and, therefore, popularity of the McQueen brand.

The problem for PETA is a common one: ignorance of brand equity. Brand managers often attempt to build brands generically, using the same tactics that worked on the previous brand they represented.

This is a strategic mistake. A brand is the opposite of a generic, which means the tactics and approaches that worked for one brand will inevitably fail on another.

In PETA's case, the same logic applies, despite the fact that it is trying to break brands, not build them. The weak spot of any organisation is its brand equity, but to hurt a brand, first you must develop tactics specifically attuned to its particular equity.

In the 90s, lesbian activists, unhappy at their lack of representation in Nike advertising, created an alternative brand called Dike. It copied the sports brand's iconography and sold counterfeit goods to members of the gay community in such numbers that Nike finally made some concessions.

In the 80s, the eponynmous founders of Ben & Jerry's famously saved their brand from bankruptcy by picketing the headquarters of Pillsbury, the conglomerate that owned Haagen-Dazs, following an attempt by Haagen-Dazs' management to strangle Ben & Jerry's' distribution.

The danger to Pillsbury of it appearing un-American and the threat of a potential boycott of hundreds of its brands forced it to capitulate.

If PETA is to reclaim its power over the fur industry, it must somehow devise similarly brand-specific strategies. I wonder if Landor or Prophet would consider some pro bono work?

I could certainly provide a list of several senior brand managers who, if employed by a fur brand, would do enormous (albeit unintended) damage to their new employer in relatively short order.

Humour is not the answer; certainly not having watched the video footage on PETA's website of thousands of cages packed with Chinese dogs and cats, bloodied and bullied, awaiting their execution, all in the name of fashion.

PETA's current brand strategies might be ineffective, but it has one hell of a website.

30 SECONDS ON ... PETA

- PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was set up in 1980 in the US. It opened a London office in 1993.

- PETA has a number of high-profile celebrity supporters. Movie star Joaquin Phoenix insisted that each garment for his film, Walk the Line, be approved by the body.

- Sir Paul McCartney and pop star Pink are supporting Chicago's Elephant Protection Ordinance, which is lobbying for greater space for elephants in zoos.

- Following Hurricane Katrina, PETA set up an Animal Emergency Fund to help animals affected by the disaster.

- The spectre of a luxury slowdown has not affected global fur sales, which have shown an increase for the ninth consecutive year. The International Fur Trade Federation's latest annual survey reveals that consumers spent US$15.02 billion on fur and fur accessories in 2007, up by 11.34% on the previous year.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

I spent last weekend visiting friends in Holland and headed home on Sunday evening from Schiphol Airport. ING has heavily branded itself throughout and the connecting 'jetbridge' that links the departure terminal to the aircraft was one long ad for the firm. 'Let's talk about your future' exclaimed the ads, as I headed for the plane.

I boarded my British Airways flight and dropped gratefully into my seat. Within seconds I was offered a drink and a steaming towel. Having foregone lunch to make the plane, I delved into my bag to find the sandwich I had hurriedly purchased in the airport. It was from a Dutch company called Sanday's Bakeries and the packaging was strangely familiar. In a tight, clean typeface it proclaimed 'All handmade naturally' and continued with the confirmation that each sandwich was 'made in our own kitchen, every day, fresh'. It ended with the handwritten signature of Sanday's boss.

The use of packaging to make clear statements of intent, the emphasis on quality and the handwritten signature of the chief executive are all hallmarks of Pret A Manger. When Pret entered the snack business 20 years ago, the standard approach to packaging was mass-produced and generic - just like the food. Pret's distinctive packaging was an effective way to signal its differentiation and communicate its brand equity. What was all this doing on a very average Dutch sandwich?

The answer is as old as marketing itself. Occasionally a great marketer consults a brand's positioning and then breaks the rules of standard marketing practice. They invent a new way of doing things. In Pret's case, its resolute focus on its core brand values of quality, freshness and being handmade led it to a very different kind of packaging. But last year's brand-specific innovation is this year's industry standard. Pret's success has meant many of its radical approaches have been copied by rivals and gradually subsumed into the standard way most sandwich chains do business. Where once there was brand-based differentiation, now there is just generic parity.

The same is true of the jetbridge ads in Amsterdam. Seven years ago, HSBC practically invented this form of advertising. Peter Stringham and his team were struggling to find advertising media that was both global and local to be consistent with HSBC's latest brand positioning. They opted to sponsor the connecting jetbridges in airports in London, New York, Paris and Asia to communicate the two dimensions of the brand. Just like Pret, however, its success led to competitors such as Bank of Scotland and ING copying the tactic.

Go further back and even the standard hot towel handed out on aircraft was once an innovative, brand-building technique. When Singapore Airlines began to battle its bigger rivals 60 years ago, it did so by offering a superior customer experience. One early initiative was to distribute hot towels - a traditional Singaporean gesture of hospitality - to customers. The tactic was so differentiating and surprising that it rapidly became generic and expected, as every airline followed suit.

So as 2008 dwindles away, there are two seasonal messages for marketers. First, congratulations to those who built brand equity by questioning and then altering the generic practices of your industry. You are heroes in our field. Second, do it again in 2009 because all your good work will rapidly be copied by your competitors. The battle to build brand never ends!

30 SECONDS ON ... AMSTERDAM SCHIPHOL AIRPORT

- Schiphol started life as a military airbase in 1916, comprising only a few barracks. It is now Holland's main airport.

- Its name means 'ship hole'. Before 1850, the area on which the airport is built was a lake. Its original name was Schiphel, which means 'ship hell', so called because many ships were mysteriously lost on the lake.

- The airport serves 260 destinations across 91 countries.

- Schiphol has won more than 120 prizes, including best airport in the world seven times between 1980 and 2003. It was named best European airport every year between 1988 and 2003.

- It is the world's lowest major commercial airport; the base of its air-traffic control tower is 5m below sea level.

- Schiphol has five main runways, the most extensive of which is 3800m long.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were long-time friends and hippies when they established Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. True to the hippie-dom of which they were a part back in 1978, their brand continues to be driven by a well-informed social and ecological conscience. Some months ago, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream released its anti-nuclear ice cream. A fun novelty for some; a responsible message of the most serious type for others. The ice cream sold out in days. Visit Ben and Jerry's website and you’ll discover another expression of this corporate responsibility in action. “Help Lick Global Warming With Ben & Jerry’s New Flavour” is the invitation issued alongside the flavor sensation known as Fossil Fuel. The “sweet cream ice cream with a yummy chocolate fudge swirl and handfuls of chocolate cookie pieces” even comes complete “with four species of chocolatey dinosaurs to unearth”. Buying the flavor supports Ben & Jerry’s global ‘Lick Global Warming’ campaign which raises awareness and money for climate change research.

The Ben & Jerry brand is based on the founders’ opinions about business, society, the environment, and the way in which all three benefit each other. And, even though the brand has changed hands and is under the directorship of Unilever, Ben and Jerry’s forthrightness and its social mission remain driving forces.

Richard Branson painted “No Way BA” on his entire fleet of aircraft when he characteristically made a clear display of animosity towards his formidable adversary, British Airways. This was Branson’s answer to British Airways subterfuge, BA having been caught making free with a Virgin database by mailing false messages to Virgin customers to secure their business.

Then there’s the Australian clothing brand, Mambo. The Mambo guys have always been upfront and, after years of successful trading they’re still going strong with distinctively robust design and fashionable t-shirts that employ artwork to make political statements. Take a look at Mambo’s witty ‘ex-website’ which, quoting the famous Monty Python parrot sketch, announces the site’s death and imminent resurrection as a new and improved mambo.com. “Happiness is only a stone’s throw away” according to one of the five rotating designs that accompanies the obituary. The statement is accompanied by five figures in anti-riot gear, bearing shields and brandishing batons.

But, could this brash and opinionated branding approach be a dangerous game as well as a courageous branding tactic or socially-responsible corporate style?

United Colors of Benetton certainly learned its lesson when its billboards across the world featured AIDS victims. Many thought the company had gone too far in the name of raising awareness of global issues, a mission the company has pursued on a roughly annual basis since 1989. Its famous ‘Priest and Nun’ image from 1991 drew the ire of the Vatican. It developed its 2003 ‘Food For Life’ global campaign in partnership with the United Nations’ World Food Programme. “Creating added value for the brand” is the declared aim of the company’s corporate communication. And guess what – it works. Benetton’s sales increased. And this despite the fact that Benetton’s advertising budget is less than 5 per cent of what is set aside by GAP, or any other major clothing brands. The Benetton brand’s advertising is driven by its enormous store presence and its hard-hitting, politically-oriented advertising.

The fact is that consumers are tiring of perfectly polished brands. Inoffensive brands. Brands essentially without opinions or courage. Bland brands. That’s why brands increasingly need to take a stand on issues, to express their values and opinions, and demonstrate responsibility towards them. Brands without well-defined opinions will find it increasingly difficult to gain traction in the market place. The challenge is to ensure that the opinions are in tune with the core values of the brand. That they are authentic, and not an opportunistic and superficial play for attention by deception.

What’s your brand’s opinion towards the environment? Towards humankind, health, religion, sexuality? What are your brand’s best intentions? If you want your brand to stand out from its competition – and you do, don’t you? – you need to keep pursuing your brand’s true difference. A difference that could well lie in your brand’s opinions. If the trend progresses as I believe it will, opinionated brands will overtake their competition, and not necessarily because they attract adherents to their viewpoints. Many new fans will be offended by branding opinion, but disapproval won’t always lead to boycott.

What does your brand have to say? Whatever it is, make sure you mean it, and that your brand’s message is consistent, communicated fearlessly and relevantly, and is on brand. The brand’s reward for expressing opinions is being heard, and discussed. So, is your brand provoking conversation? Go on - give people something to talk about.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

A survey from the Chartered Institute of Marketing suggests British marketers are lost when it comes to setting prices for their products.

According to the report, the most extensively used technique for pricing was 'face-to-face research'.

A report from consultants McKinsey observed that many firms set prices based solely on anecdotal evidence.

You will struggle to find a marketing textbook that defines the 'face-to-face' approach or explains the role of anecdotal evidence in marketing decisions because, of course, both are hallmarks of marketing managers who don't have the faintest idea.

Times are changing, however. The introduction of the euro, in particular, has ensured that most European marketing managers have been faced with a huge number of simultaneous price changes and very few 'anecdotal' guidelines to help structure their thinking.

There are three key constructs to consider when setting a price. The first task for any pricing decision is to determine the value of the offering to the customer. Inevitably, any market research into this area will reveal that different customers can derive very different utility from the same product or service and thus a hallmark of a good pricing strategy is that it is usually combined with the parsimonious segmentation of the market.

Value, of course, is relative and that leads us to our second consideration: competitors. Strategic pricing usually depends upon clear and up-to-date competitor analyses. This is simple in the business-to-consumer world where prices are advertised and rarely altered, but in the fascinating world of business-to-business, prices are almost always open to rebate and off-price discounts.

I once worked with a large US B2B company whose pricing systems were so complex that it once celebrated a six-year, multi-million dollar contract win, only to realise weeks later it was losing money on every order placed.

We must therefore also consider a third factor in the calculations: our costs. This entails first estimating a break-even calculation to ensure that the price charged exceeds the fixed and variable costs of production.

But then comes a second more subtle cost: that of changing prices in the first place. In many instances firms incur greater losses by increasing their prices than leaving them at the same level. Because the physical, labour and communication costs associated with a price change often exceed the marginal increase in revenues.

Hope is at hand however with Electronic Shelf Labels, ensuring that supermarkets can cut the incompetent marketer out of the pricing task altogether. Prices are displayed in the supermarket on small LCD panels. As goods are scanned, computers at head office make a calculation based on the remaining supply of goods and the predicted demand and alter the price in each store. Not to be outdone, Coca-Cola is testing a prototype vending machine that increases the price of each can as the temperature gradually rises. Pure, perfect, elastic pricing will soon be ours and economists will rule the world! You have been warned.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

A variety of newspapers and trade magazines run a piece themed 'Campaign of the Week'.

The format is probably familiar to you. A senior marketer names their favourite advertising campaign of the moment and explains why it works as a piece of marketing communications.

For example, I recently read a marketing director extol the virtues of the latest campaign for Levi's. She was taken with the "incredibly haunting quality of the ad, noted that it "held my attention for the whole minute and concluded that the campaign would "engage people with the brand on an altogether different level than in previous campaigns".

A marketer in another article found the ads for X-Box "clearly adult in tone and "deeply disturbing".

The problem with these reviews is that they display a fundamental ignorance of the prime directive of marketing. The first stage in becoming a good marketer is to appreciate the difference between being a producer of products and a consumer of products. As a marketer your job is centered on connecting the latter to the former.

When marketers forget this essential dichotomy and start reviewing ads, products and prices as if they were consumers, they become marketing gurus, and there is no place for gurus in marketing. It is simply impossible to step into the shoes of a consumer for a few moments to review the quality of a marketing output.

When marketers do this they usually assume that the whole market is uniform and either the campaign works or it does not work. The complexity and variance of the actual market, with its different segments and response is ignored in favour of the 'general consumer'.

Worse still, a marketing guru who begins to speak for the market rather than listen to it is potentially a barrier to the market. Too many marketing directors are happy to save money and time by allowing their opinion to replace the voice of the consumer.

The only correct method of evaluating any marketing effort is by talking to actual consumers. Data is the only voice marketers should make use of. Without appropriate data from the market the only correct response to any marketing question is silence. Because silence draws attention to what is not there.

The industry is replete with marketing gurus. Ad agencies ask potential employees for their favourite ad in the first-round interview. Marketing directors ask themselves whether consumers perceive a recent price rise as fair. Brand managers look at three different packaging styles and conclude that the first design best communicates the brand values they have already assumed will be the most attractive to their target market.

Too many times assumptions about the market become accepted fact within a firm and then form the basis for multi-million-dollar investments. Talking to customers is often painful and difficult, but it is the only voice that any true marketer will listen to or speak with.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

For lessons in branding there are few richer case studies than Laura Ashley. In the 50s Laura Ashley began silk-screening her own designs onto scarves and napkins. Drawing her inspiration from Victorian images, her work was unusual and sold well at John Lewis and Heal's. She quickly became associated with floral designs, a country idyll and a brand new vision of the past.

Like most founders of great brands, Ashley was a unique woman whose vision encompassed creativity and business.

In the 60s production was moved to Wales, Ashley's birthplace, and diversified into furnishings and Victorian dresses. In 1969 the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid opened across Britain; co-star Katharine Ross, in her vintage dresses, started a fashion sensation that Ashley's designs spoke directly to. Five hundred stores, from Paris to New York, now offered the world a new fashion brand.

Ashley died in 1985, but the success of the brand continued. Laura Ashley was floated on the stock market that year, turnover reached £300m and production was expanded.

The death of a founder is a big challenge for any brand, as they are usually the physical representation of it, the creative spirit behind product development and the protector of the brand equity.

The key lessons for marketers are that they need to be aware of the effect this can have and must understand that a negative impact on brand strategy rarely has an immediate effect on the bottom line. When brands stray from their equity the effects on turnover and profitability are usually delayed, but always imminent.

By 1995 the vacuum created by Ashley's absence had halved the share price and left the brand with annual losses of £30m.

Cue the arrival of US turnaround specialist Ann Iverson as chief executive. She installed her own team, expanded the stores and increased the range and diversity of Laura Ashley products.

Initially the results were positive, but two years later it became clear that Iverson's expansion strategy had been a big error. Huge new stores required an enormous range of products to fill them, but the brand could not support such a large inventory and sales could not match expectations.

The production costs were astronomical and the company announced a profit warning. A series of brand-destroying sales promotions were launched and Iverson resigned.

Iverson's tenure is a perfect illustration of how not to run a brand revitalisation. Your first move must always be to consolidate and cut back, not to expand a shaky house whose foundations need restrengthening and restructuring.

In 1998, close to collapse, the brand was purchased by Malaysian conglomerate MUI, which provided another salutary lesson in brand mismanagement. MUI hired and fired a continual stream of in-effective chief executives, many with no direct experience of fashion marketing. By 2005 the brand had been run by 10 chief executives in 14 years. No brand can survive that. There is a direct correlation between boardroom stability, strategic consistency and long-term brand success.

But there is a glimmer of hope. No matter how badly mismanaged, great brands are indestructible. They may lie dormant for decades, but in the hands of a great marketer, with a mix of a vision for the future and an understanding of brand heritage, revitalisation is always possible.

30 SECONDS ON...LAURA ASHLEY

- Laura Ashley was born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, in 1925.

- At 18 she married Bernard Ashley and set up home in a flat in Pimlico where she began her career.

- The success of the brand has been credited in part to Audrey Hepburn, who appeared in the 1953 film Roman Holiday wearing a headscarf. The look took off just as the Ashleys were producing their first batch of headscarves, tablemats and napkins.

- The couple set up their first factory in Kent in 1955, where they traded as the Ashley Mountney Company.

- On her 60th birthday, Ashley was admitted to hospital after falling down the stairs at her daughter's cottage in the Cotswolds. She spent the next nine days in a coma before passing away.

- At the time of her death, the company was set for further expansion. A year later Bernard floated the £200m company on the stock market. In 1998, the group was bailed out when MUI bought a 40% stake.

- Ms Lillian Tan, who has been chief executive since January, plans to reduce fashion from 22 per cent of sales to 14 percent - with stores cutting back the space they give to clothes in favour of home furnishings, now the most profitable part of the business.

- The company has returned to profitability, posting profits of £12 million for the year 2006/2007.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Rebranding efforts are tricky things. Once in a very blue moon they can prove to be the turnaround that the management team was hoping for.

Sports brand Puma, luxury brand Gucci and the gurus at Apple all provide notable examples of great brand revitalizations during the 90’s.

The strategic lessons from these turnarounds do not emanate from what these brands did, but rather what they did not do.

First, they did not change their names or logos.
Second, they did not announce that they were about to save, reposition or do anything particularly radical to their brand.
Third, they were patient; each brand took a decade or more to turn around.
Fourth, they did it in-house without depending on identity consultants to assist them.
Fifth, they did not recruit senior thinkers from established consumer marketing companies to replicate branding strategies from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG); they did it their own, brand-specific, way.
Sixth, any changes in ad strategies and spend came years after the initial turnaround had begun.

A great brand strategy does not start with name changes, new logos, multi-million dollar ad campaigns or bold predictions from chief executives.

It starts with fixing internal problems. Quietly. It involves rebuilding a brand from the inside out and it takes many years.

Anyone, and I mean anyone, with access to the company coffers can commission peak-time ads and identity overhauls. This is the easy, unsuccessful way to rebuild a brand. Avoid the habit if you can.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

I recently completed consulting work for two US companies. The first, which we will call Midwest Stores, is a big grocery store chain. A year ago it repositioned its retail brand based on the findings of a conjoint study.

Conjoint research is very revealing. It allows a company to find out what consumers most want from its operation. In this case, Midwest asked 2000 customers to rate the importance of price, products and service.

While all were important, Midwest's discerning customer base actually valued product range above price and service.

Midwest repositioned accordingly, with the slogan 'Every brand under the sun', and increased prices slightly to offset increased distribution and marketing costs. However, sales have shown no discernible increase.

The second company, which we will call Baxters Yoghurt, also had problems with sales. Baxters is a mid-sized dairy, which has lost more than 20% market share in the past three years and was unsure what to do about it.

Its ad agency conducted focus groups with existing customers, which revealed a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Everything from flavours, quality and product sizes to its latest ads were cited as reasons for unhappiness.

Baxters marketing director was unsure what strategic decisions to take to restore the brand's health. There were so many issues and, worse, the managing director was openly dismissive of the 'fuzzy' focus group results.

Both companies were struggling because their market research was deficient, but ironically each held the solution to the other's dilemma. Midwest is a classic example of a company that solely uses quantitative data.

This sort of data is weak because it is predicated on measuring a set of questions. This means it is only as good as the options offered to the consumers surveyed. While it may be possible to prove X is more valuable than Y, this result is flawed if the consumer actually wants A, B and C.

The company conducted its survey correctly, but tested a very limited set of alternatives provided by the marketing team. To truly understand customers it needed to postpone its measurement stage until it knew from customers, in an open-ended way, what they wanted.

In contrast, Baxters understood its customers' problems well, but by relying exclusively on qualitative data, it was unable to identify which were most prevalent or important to them. 'Qual' data is weak, as the sample sizes are never representative.This means that magnitudes cannot be developed and, quite rightly, senior management are often uncomfortable executing a strategy based on insights from a small and unrepresentative sample.

Any company that relies exclusively on either qual or quant data will eventually fail. The secret is to combine them. Use a qualitative method, such as ethnography or focus groups, to learn from your customers. Then turn these learnings into a questionnaire and conduct it across a representative sample. In the research game what is needed is neither fish nor fowl, but a combination. A kind of fishy-fowly stew is the way to understand the market.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

The concept of word of mouth (WOM) has been generally ignored by practitioners and academics alike. While its power has been acknowledged for more than 50 years, marketers regarded WOM as a happy accident and an occasional fortuitous addition to their campaigns. But times are changing and a slew of recent marketing success stories suggest that WOM may prove to be the making or breaking of many brands in the years to come.

Advertising has traditionally been the closest marketers have come to WOM. Teaser campaigns attempted to stimulate it, while classic executions for products like WeightWatchers have tried to simulate WOM on the screen.

Research suggests, however, that advertising's brush may be too broad to create successful WOM impact. According to Renee Dye from consulting firm McKinsey & Co, 67% of consumer sales are influenced by WOM. However, she points out that to truly harness the power of WOM marketers must reach a vanguard of consumers who inhabit the first fringe of the adoption curve.

Marketers must stop thinking of their communication efforts as a single transaction (ad impacts market) and attempt instead to create waves of communication that spread from a small number of lead users through consumer-to-consumer interaction.

The process is tricky, but agencies are springing up to help clients.

Wildfire, a London based WOM agency has developed a three-stage methodology: discovering the target groups, developing the key 'stories', then deploying these stories using events and direct marketing.

Another agency, Comment, was set up in South Africa for the millions of black workers who had little access to TV or radio and were largely illiterate.

When employers, unions or health organisations wanted to communicate with them, they used Industrial Theatre: song-and-dance based productions performed on the factory floor. Soon Comment was putting on live ads in cinemas and shopping malls for a variety of clients - a campaign for Organics shampoo saw handsome men serenading women in supermarkets.

There is of course a downside to all of this. The ultimate form of WOM stimulation is never revealed to be stimulation. Rather, hired protagonists engage in artificial behaviours and conversations in order to initiate the first wave. Glamorous students in London, for example, were paid to smoke and distribute Gauloises cigarettes to their peers. Even more infamous, Sony Ericsson paid people in the US to masquerade as tourists and ask people to take their picture with the then new T68i camera/phone. Unfortunately the campaign was rumbled by the US press and spawned a PR backlash against the brand.

Like all forms of marketing communication, WOM has advantages and limitations.

But for the first time the marketing industry is actively attempting to engage WOM as a strategic vehicle. In the cluttered communications world we all inhabit, there is a certain purity in returning to the oldest method of communications around.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

People buy a brand because it stands for something. People buy commodities because they are the cheapest alternative available. It is worth pointing out that brands are not created that way, they all begin life as commodities.

Once upon a time Microsoft was just software, Nike was just running shoes and BMW was just a car manufacturer from Bavaria.

The challenge for any marketer is to expedite a transformation and take a commodity, like water, and turn it into a brand, like Evian. This process is called 'brand building' and involves associating a product with values and meanings that the target audience aspire to.

Advertising, sponsorships, endorsement, packaging and a thousand other techniques can be used to link product to meaning and thereby transform a commodity into a brand. Eventually the brand is built and consumers no longer consider it a commodity and are prepared to pay much more for it as a result.

Many marketers do not appreciate that this process can also be reversed.

Just as a commodity can be built into a brand by focusing on its values, a brand can be commodified back into its original form by focusing on its price. When companies overtly emphasise the price of their product or the amount of the product that the consumer will get for a certain price they are effectively commodifying their brand. All of the hard work and heavy investment that went into brand building is stripped away.

January is therefore a difficult time for brand lovers like me. The crescendo of shoppers and the timbre of ringing cash tills can never drown out the sound of brands being destroyed. The increased revenues that January sales usher in come at a price. That price is brand equity.

The more aggressively a company promotes its January sales, the more damage its does to its brand and thus its long-term future. January sales are essentially a de-branding mechanism. Companies are shouting to consumers: 'Don't buy our brands for what they stand for, buy them because they are cheap'. Sales promotions are thus a very attractive, but dangerous, tool.

They should be approached with extreme caution. Today's competitive landscape means that most companies must offer a January sale of some kind. But subtlety and brevity should be the watchwords of any strategic sale.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

It started seven-and-a-half years ago when a woman called Eliza Jones sent me an email enquiring whether I was comfortable with the size of my penis.

I remember reading her email in a state of absolute panic. I could not even recall meeting Ms Jones and, worse, it had never occurred to me before that there was anything wrong with the size of my penis. It was two days before one of my colleagues mentioned that he too had received a similar email and I finally relaxed.

By the end of that year, of course, I was more than used to receiving junk emails for penis-enlargement cream, hardcore web pages and money-making proposals from African dictators. Like the rest of the UK's growing online population, I became adept at ignoring any and all commercial emails.

Last week my thoughts returned to Eliza Jones after I received a spate of phone calls at home. Either our household has suddenly become very lucky, or telemarketing has recently increased. So far this week we have been called six times by a computer informing us that we have we have won some dubious prize and asking us to call back immediately to claim it. So frequent are these messages that we have started screening our calls using our answer machine.

The most probable reason for the rise in telemarketing is its forcible eviction from its traditional home: the US. In June of 2003 the Do Not Call Registry was launched in the US, and it has been a remarkable success. In its first week of operation, more than 10m households signed up to avoid telemarketing calls. The figure now stands at 63m+ US households, two-thirds of the country's population.

With the arrival of Google's Gmail service, the picture looks even worse for direct email. Gmail boasts the most advanced mail filters ever invented, enabling its users to block almost all commercial email. Indeed, at the annual Direct Marketing Association conference in the US, marketers were warned of the 'downside' of Gmail.

There is an inherent duality in the actions of direct marketers on both sides of the Atlantic. In public they trumpet the enormous sales returns as proof of the popularity of direct marketing. But in private there is a tacit acceptance that most consumers no longer welcome direct approaches and they must do all they can to scale their defences. Missed calls, blocked inboxes and kilos of unwanted mail are the direct result of an industry that has focused on attaining 2% response rates and ignored the residual effect on the remaining 98% of consumers.

If direct marketing is so welcomed by consumers, why, among the pie charts and graphs demonstrating the discipline's efficacy, have we never seen a poll showing its popularity? Instead of an underpublicised service to opt out of direct mail and telemarketing, why don't we offer customers the option of opting in?

The very rare examples of truly targeted direct marketing are now washed away amid the detritus of junk. The sad irony is that when direct marketing began as an industry, it looked on the cluttered, non-sponsored world of advertising as something to avoid. Direct approaches were going to be targeted, welcomed, relationship-building interactions with customers.

The demise of telemarketing in the US illustrates how that once-valid dream is becoming a nightmare of customer rejection.

30 SECONDS ON... THE US DO NOT CALL REGISTRY

- The Do Not Call registry was launched by the Federal Communications Commission in October 2003. Similar in structure to the UK's Telephone Preference Service, it allows US consumers to opt out of receiving telemarketing calls.

- 63m+ households have registered. Telemarketing companies must check the list every three months to make sure they don't call anyone on it.

- The system prevents only commercial organisations from calling registered consumers. Political and charitable groups are exempt.

- The US Supreme Court ruled against a group of firms that claimed the registry breached their rights to free speech.

- The registry has spawned its own scam. Fraudsters have called people on the list asking them for their credit card and social security details to 'confirm' their registration.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Our series on scent marketing continues with number 5 - The importance of investing in consumer research.

After an advertising agency puts the results of their creative labor in front of a client, one or even several rounds of consumer research usually follows. Corporate marketers in general are risk averse and want to make sure that they are making the best decisions. Unbeknownst to most consumers, fragrance marketers such as Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and COTY do the same before they launch a new fragrance.

When it comes to scent marketing, only recently the Scent Marketing Institute has proposed similar protocols for the “non traditional” users of fragrances, such as brands engaged in scent marketing. Often, in the scent-design process decisions are made based on key executives’ personal preferences, trust in the perfumer’s expertise or after cutting the creative process short because of budget concerns. But how does the scent resonate with employees and staff exposed to it for long working hours and the customer walking into the store?

It sounds like a no-brainer that any brand should look into these questions and apply at least some of the methods (perception testing, benchmarking) currently available. Is the scent perceived pleasant in general? Is it too strong and overpowering or too weak? Is it “congruent”, meaning matching the customers’ expectation? Research shows that a scent perceived as “feminine” turns off male customers, that a coconut scent released in winter confuses everybody – unless you walk into a travel agency promoting summer vacations.

Courtesy of Harald Vogt, Scent Marketing Institute

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

I have bought a Porsche. Last week I took delivery of my huge, black Porsche Cayenne Turbo, and for the past seven days I have been cruising the streets, intimidating BMW drivers and playing Shakira at full volume through the 12-speaker Blaupunkt stereo.

When my wife and I set out to buy a new car, we wanted an SUV, as we knew a family was not too far around the corner. We started looking at the Volkswagen Touareg, but then I realised that for another 50% of the price we could buy the Cayenne and I could become a Porsche driver.

So now our Cayenne sits in my parking space awaiting a decade's worth of journeys with the Ritson family - moving furniture, transporting children, holidays to the seaside and so on.

I really don't fit the ideal Porsche customer profile. I have only a superficial appreciation for the heritage of the brand.

I have no particular interest in driving performance cars. And I have no idea what is under the hood of my new car.

If Porsche had remained true to its brand, it would have done everything in its power to stop family types like me from buying into it. And I am not alone - more then 80% of Cayenne owners have never previously owned a Porsche.

But the Cayenne is not exactly a purist's Porsche. It's an ugly beast of a car. Despite the attempts of its German creators to add smooth lines and a sleek profile, it looks like a gigantic black bear. It drives amazingly well for an SUV, but is still a long way from the incredible handling and performance of Porsche's two other models, the Boxster and the 911.

Strictly speaking, the Cayenne is not even a German Porsche: 80% of each vehicle is constructed by Volkswagen employees at a plant in Slovakia.

So is my new car a strategic brand mistake on the part of Porsche?

I don't think so. Brand equity should guide everything an organisation does and does not do. I spend my consulting life helping companies identify their brand equity and then ensuring that they act in accordance with it.

In an ideal world, a firm's brand journey should always follow this pure, unadulterated path to success. But in reality, some companies opt, quite knowingly, to leave this path on occasion to make money.

Porsche is a relatively small company. It will sell 40,000 Boxsters and 911s this year. Both models have been around for many years and are beginning to lose some of their lustre. Porsche will also sell 30,000 Cayennes this year - at net margins of 10%.

The decision to create a car in the Porsche-inconsistent but cash-rich category of the SUV ensures a partition will remain between core Porsche customers and temporary additional ones like me. While I might smile at 911 drivers overtaking me in a friendly 'all part of the brand family' way, they will probably look back at me through their rear-view mirrors and scowl.

There is a difference between a company departing from its true brand path because it does not know what that path consists of and a temporary, knowing departure.

In the Cayenne, Porsche has created a vehicle that is inconsistent with its brand equity, but it has done so for sound financial reasons.

The profits made from non-Porsche Porsche drivers like me will allow the company to invest in the next generation of brand-consistent sports cars. While the Cayenne appears, at first sight, to be a brand aberration, the long-term perspective will reveal it to be part of the very brand-consistent path to profit.

30 SECONDS ON ... PORSCHE

- In 1931 Ferdinand Porsche founded the Porsche Engineering Office in Stuttgart.

- More than 70% of all Porsches ever built are still being driven.

- Porsche's net profit margin of 10.1% outpaces even the big Japanese brands such as Nissan (7.3%) and Toyota (6%) - a remarkable feat for a relatively small car manufacturer.

- According to Porsche, the brand embodies 'the epitome of sporty driving and thinking'.

- The United Arab Emirates is the top market for Porsche - 1014 units were sold there in the past financial year.

- A new Porsche Cayenne Turbo costs more than £70,000.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

For a man on the verge of victory, Barack Obama was looking increasingly tense on Monday. With the latest Gallup poll putting him 11% ahead of John McCain, you'd be forgiven for thinking that leading the US through the biggest brand-repositioning job in history was already starting to occupy the thoughts of the junior senator from Illinois. But the real reason for Obama's nerves was more immediate: he did not trust the research. If he did, the presidency would be in the bag. However, two words cast a shadow over the optimistic outlook for Obama's team: Tom Bradley.

In 1982, Bradley was the dynamic African-American politician leading the polls as he stood to become governor of California. He was shown to have a clear lead over George Deukmejian, his white Republican rival, and on election night the exit polls predicted a Bradley victory. Early editions went to press with Bradley on the front page as the next governor.

Then the result was announced. Deukmejian had won narrowly. Later analysis suggested that many of the white voters - who had claimed they would be voting for Bradley when asked by a pollster - had actually opted for his Republican rival once they had entered the privacy of the voting booth. Similarly, a large proportion of self-described 'undecided' voters had also voted for the white candidate when the moment came. As Obama contemplates an apparently insurmountable lead, the disappointed face of Bradley looks back at him. There are, of course, many differences between the events of 1982 and this week's election. The social stigma of voting for a black man is surely less, and Obama is in a much more commanding position than Bradley found himself in California. Nonetheless the worries remain. The punditry and predictions are based on a simple, but unreliable, assumption: that people know their own minds and will do what they say they will do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While many marketers struggle to understand even the most basic issues of their target segment, the consumer in that segment is often equally unclear about their own preferences. I have umpteen war stories of focus group findings and opinion surveys that sent me and my cl