MV newsletter - November 2004

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If you have ever given a conference speech, there is one thing that you learn very quickly: nobody, but nobody is there to learn how to do anything.

In fact, it is a classic case of ostensible benefits vs. banal reality.

Presumably, people persuade their bosses that, when they come back from a conference, they will know a lot more about the topic in question. Maybe the boss even believes this for a second or two. If so, you needn’t worry. No-one is ever going to ask you what you learnt at the conference, because they already know the answer – nothing.

During the best conference speech we have collectively ever seen, the speaker lifted his jacket and showed the audience his bum. The extraordinary thing about this is not that it happened, but that he actually had an interesting story to tell too.

We forget the company, but they imported Ricoh copying machines during the 1980s. The most pertinent fact about a Ricoh copying machine during the 1980s was that it was guaranteed, like all other copying machines at the time, to go wrong. What this company worked out was how to analyse how a customer described a problem over the phone so as to ensure 95% resolution of the problem first time.

This had two benefits: someone experiencing this level of service was virtually guaranteed to order another Ricoh copying machine. Secondly, this particular Ricoh distributor radically reduced service costs. And this was all done with 1980s expert system technology.

Now, if you want a modern day exemplar of a little bit of imparted knowledge, and a lot of showmanship wrapped into a conference speech, try Don Schultz.

Here are three excerpts of his speech (courtesy of iMedia):

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3

What you will notice is that across the whole speech he says virtually nothing other than that life is complicated, we haven’t progressed very far in 50 years (well, probably in a couple of thousand actually), and that we tend to multi-task nowadays, but what style!

The way I really am…………….

On our web site, we give as an example of our personal branding processes, the “I/Me” model. This was developed by George Herbert Mead to indicate that we see ourselves differently from the way others see us, and from the way we see others as seeing us.

It stands to reason therefore that this discipline is only useful if we can draw comparisons between how we see ourselves, and how others see us.

However, another of our personal branding processes is the Irving Goffman “Role play” model, which argues that we behave differently in different situations.

It is fairly rare for a major brand to take situational marketing into account. Many brands try to remain the same in different situations, but how many try to be different?

One of the few brands to really go down this route is Coca-Cola, who are driven by the need to ensure that you are never more than an arm’s length away from a cool, refreshing Coke.

They have therefore ensured that you can buy it on tap in McDonalds, that small plastic bottles are available in garages for ease of drinking and driving, that 6-packs and 2-litre bottles are there for parties (depending on whether you are the host or the guest), and that you slug away at the 1.5 litre bottle everyday at home.

Now, we believe that situation-based segmentation is segmentation in its most powerful form because the same people are more different in different situations than are different people in the same situation.

So, if McDonalds were to take this concept on board, they would not only offer their products in restaurants, but they would also do catered children’s parties – after all, they already have the clown. They might also offer microwave-able McDonalds family packs in the supermarket freezer compartment, with a couple of children’s toys thrown in. We do not have the slightest idea if these approaches would be profitable for McDonalds to do, and we are sure that lots of people in McDonalds would wander around muttering “cannibalisation”, but they probably would work.

At a stretch………………

The other thing Coke has learnt to do is to stretch its brand, which is interesting when you think of the furore around the authenticity of the New Coke product that led to an apparently full-tilt retreat to Classic Coke (we still think it was all a hoax to get lots of free publicity).

There are Diet Cokes, Diet Cokes without caffeine, lemon Cokes, vanilla Cokes, cherry Cokes, and cola-flavoured sweets (which may not be branded Coke, come to think of it).

In the 1990s, Mars pioneered the “brand leap” by stretching Mars Bars into branded ice-creams. The move paid off, and there are now many other brands that have followed suite (Milky Way, Snickers, Smarties, Twix, etc.etc.).

Indeed, this sort of brand leap has become a major trend. The real advantage is that, when faced with 90%+ new product failure rates, stretching a well-known brand into a new field improves the odds enormously.

One of the first rules of brand management is “do not develop a new brand if you can re-use an existing one”. Whether you can re-use the existing one depends on whether the new application supports that particular brand proposition, which is what all the agonising is all about, but whereas once the default position was to invest in a new brand to avoid impugning the sanctity of the existing one, many companies are taking a hard cash view that it is a lot cheaper to use an established brand, and there is a much greater likelihood of success. So, if some brand purity is lost in the process, so be it.

So Nivea hair care, Malteser’s ice-cream and Smarties biscuits it is.

I really wish you hadn’t said that……………..

You have recently spotted a brightly packaged, attractively promoted, and downright smelly “Tahiti” liquid soap on the supermarket shelf. You try it, and it is good. You buy it a couple more times in the different flavours – vanilla, coconut, peach or whatever.

Then one day, as you are lying in the bath, you notice a rather prominent “Palmolive” label under the Tahiti logo.

“I really wish they hadn’t told me that”, you think as you conjure up images of cracked green, astringent-smelling soap cakes rotting next to brown scale-covered taps (OK, so this may not be everyone’s association set for the Palmolive brand).

So what is the Palmolive brand doing there?

Brand management theory has it that this is an alternative model to trying to stretch the Palmolive brand into the fun, cheap sector of liquid soaps. Instead, you create a new brand, like Tahiti, with its own precise positioning, then you back it up with an established safety brand like Palmolive.

But does it really help, and do you need to?

The theory again says that if you associate an old, clapped-out brand like Palmolive (and we don’t suppose we will be doing any work for Colgate Palmolive in the near, or distant, future) with a lively young thing like Tahiti, you not only give the latter a bit of gravitas, but you also pep up the established brand – give it a bit of a Viagara rush, so to speak.

But we have to say that, in this case, all that remains for us is dissonance. We trust the Tahiti brand because we consider that its performance is guaranteed by the supermarket, and our skin has not fallen down around our ankles yet.

Equally, the fact that Tahiti is marketed by Colgate Palmolive probably means it is more likely to be listed, but that can be a secret kept between the manufacturer and the supermarket. Although we all know that it is very rarely the case nowadays that anything new on the shelf comes from a passionate Ben & Jerry-style independent, we would like to retain the illusion for a bit longer.

On the other hand, Robertson’s Fruit Shoot. Wow, that really put some zip into the Robertson’s brand. Good on ‘em!

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© 2004, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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