By Jessica Wilkerson

People Are No Longer Buying Products or Services……they choose a company. With a plethora of product choices, it has become far too difficult and time-consuming to attempt to evaluate each offering. It is much easier now to determine if the company you’re buying from shares your values and is likely to provide a good experience. We’ve known for a long time that a brand is a heuristic for consumers – a short cut to limit the amount of thinking that is required to evaluate and compare products. But the American consumer has matured beyond using only brands as heuristics to using the company behind each brand as the heuristic.  Or perhaps the company brand is just taking a more prominent role, which would lead to the conclusion that the “brand” is not necessarily the brand, but an amalgam of what the brand stands for and what the company stands for.

This perspective on American consumption is evidenced in Millward Browns’ studies showing that brands with the greatest growth are those that are built on purpose and values, not product attributes.

Commonalities across purpose-driven organizations:

1.Have a charismatic leader who lives the purpose through symbolic action and positive reinforcement

2.Are surrounded by people who embody the purpose in their personal and professional lives

3.Have strong stakeholder advocacy by being a servant, protector, and inspiration

4.Use purpose as the prism for growth and decision-making

5.Earn profits in a way that is consistent with the purpose

At (r)evolution, we believe purpose is more fundamental than brand positioning. It is commonly seen and heard in communications, it guides decisions across the entire organization from operations to M&A to customer service to HR to communications. It is NOT the existing corporate strategy, vision or mission. It is NOT something new or the communications strategy du jour. It is an excavation and discovery of something that already exists. It has immediate credibility and power because it is an articulation of something everyone knows implicitly.

Importantly, the brand’s purpose is always a human truth – something that every person knows and understands. It articulates something unique and distinct about a company and brand’s role in the world and its reason for being. It is most evident in times when the organization must take a stand, like J&J did during the Tylenol crisis. Once the purpose is understood, it can be linked to the existing positioning to develop a comprehensive communications strategy/platform both internally and externally. Eventually, it can and should be used to guide the decisions of the entire organization. Understanding what your company’s purpose starts with a fundamental question, “If your company were gone tomorrow, what would the world lose?”

By Michael Hartley

Marketers have longed championed the cause of branding, especially in the B2C space, citing such benefits as product memorability, familiarity, brand loyalty, and lower product marketing costs. But beyond these quantifiable costs, brands are also a reflection of the company’s spirit, goals, and position in the marketplace. One useful tool in understanding a brand is to think of it in the context of a superhero.

The Importance of Origin

Origin stories explain three important elements of a superhero: mission, identity and powers. Consider the origin story of Batman. Eight-year-old Bruce Wayne, walking with his parents in an alley, runs away as muggers approach and subsequently witnesses the murder of his parents. His traumatic story serves as the backdrop for the creation of Batman. Bruce’s mission quickly becomes clear: to avenge his parents’ death. His identity—millionaire and owner of Wayne Enterprises—explains his ability keep his Batman alter-ego secret. And while Batman has no supernatural power, his Batsuit, Batmobile, and Batcave enable his fight against Gotham’s most evil villains.

In a brand, origin stories are just as important as they are for superheroes. They help the consumer understand how the brand came to be (its identity), what it stands for (its mission), and how it will change the world (its powers). Consider Facebook—a brand with an origin story so powerful it became a book and then a movie. Controversies and drama aside, most people know that college student Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook so that Harvard students could share photos. The Facebook identity was, and still is, one of fun, ease, and empowerment. While its mission has grown in scale, in principle it remains the same: to connect people and enable them to share personal information. Finally, Facebook’s power is that empowers users with the ability to expand their network. Users choose to join the network, choose what content they upload, and choose how they share that information. Facebook’s humble origin and simple mission resonate with consumers and have enabled its tremendous growth over the past 5 years.

Understanding your power and its emotional benefits

Superheroes rely on special powers or abilities to carry out their missions. For companies, identifying your power—at the highest level—can help pinpoint the emotional benefits you provide a customer that truly drive brand loyalty. Coca-Cola is one company that has embraced emotional branding and used it to drive preference. Advertisers love to tell the story of how Coca-Cola’s marketing department defined Santa Claus as we know him today: plump, jolly, and wearing a red suit. Thanks to magazine advertising beginning in 1931, Santa Claus became a de facto symbol of Coca-Cola. While not a superhero in the traditional sense, Santa Claus does have a power—a power that lies in his gift giving (a functional benefit) and the happiness that comes with it (emotional benefits). Coca-Cola has long known that their power isn’t making soda or acquiring sub-brands. Rather, Coca-Cola’s most recent marketing campaign has one simple message: open happiness. After 80 years of branding and marketing, the world’s number one came back to the power of its icon, Santa Claus, to drive differentiation.

How to differentiate your brand

Finally, thinking of your brand as a superhero can help you differentiate your company and understand it’s position in the marketplace. Is your company front-and-center, like Superman? Or does it remain behind the scenes until the customer puts up a Bat Symbol? Or maybe your company empowers the customer, like the ring gives power to the Green Lantern.  Understanding the personality of your brand can help you position your company in the marketplace to be differentiated from other brands.

By Danny Chapman

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, began changing its Coca-Cola product cans and bottle tops from iconic red to snow white as they raise awareness for the habitats of the polar bears they’ve so long featured in their holiday advertising. The design will make its way on to over 1.4 billion cans and will allow consumers to donate $1 by texting the package code to357357. Coca-Cola plans to donate around $4 million dollars towards the WWF’s efforts to maintain a tundra habitat twice the size of Texas between Greenland and Canada.(1)

This isn’t the Coca-Cola Company’s first major can design change this year—the company gave its Diet Coke product a much needed makeover for the fall season. The new can, which features the Diet Coke logo scaled up is both interesting and different.

For a brand that, according to Interbrand’s Guide to the Most Valuable Brands(2), is the most well recognized brand globally, it can be a risky to change the identity of your product. Packaging is the final frontier before purchase for customers. However these two can changes reflect the power that great branding can have. In terms of the first-ever white can, Coca-Cola is able to not only draw attention to their product but also demonstrate corporate citizenship through support of the environment and its beloved polar bear mascots. Not all CSR programs work for companies, but in this case, Coca-Cola has found a perfect balance between strategy and charity.

Sources:

(1)http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2011/10/27/in-first-coca-cola-cans-go-white-for-polar-bears/
(2)http://issuu.com/interbrand/docs/bgb_report_us_version

Think back to when you were a young child, sitting in school and waiting anxiously for the teacher to announce “Storytime.”

What made this so special? It was probably your best chance to let your imagination run wild, for you to connect, if only for a short time, with a world not familiar to your own.

Now think back to the last business presentation that you either attended or delivered yourself.

Did it engage you and inspire your imagination to run wild? Did it motivate you or your audience to take quick action or get truly excited about the prospect of a new idea? Most likely, the presentation lacked these qualities, and it probably contained PowerPoint slides or spreadsheets to get the main points across. That’s because it was not a story.

So, what happened to Storytime?

Turning Presentations into Stories

While not formally a part of many companies’ cultures, storytelling is becoming more present than you might think and there is plenty of room for it to grow.

The fact is, business in general is teeming with powerful stories and engaging storytellers, and true business success heavily depends on the power to tell a good story. Yet mastering the art of storytelling is not an easy task, and understanding how to apply this mastery is even harder.  The stories are all around us already – tapping into their potential is what makes all the difference.

In his book, Tell to Win, Peter Guber talks about the revolutionary power of telling a good story as a fundamental to business success. The telling and listening of oral stories is deeply embedded in our DNA – and so too should it be part of your company’s DNA.

By highlighting tales of new business ventures, screenplay pitches, and other radical propositions that all relied on storytelling, Guber is able to paint a clear picture that Storytelling leads to Success. But how can it be applied in business and marketing settings? More importantly, how do you master this art?

What Makes a Good Story?

As a formula for storytelling, Guber breaks down the story into three equally important parts:

- The beginning should shine light on the challenge or problem
- The middle should present a struggle to meet that challenge
- The end should offer a resolution that ignites the listener

When it all comes together, your story should get your audience to say “ah ha!”

What Makes a Good Storyteller?

Remember that anyone can be a good storyteller, and practice is definitely the key. It is about tapping into your own experiences, seeing the world around you, and framing your story in a way that connects with your audience.  It is about introducing the characters, the hero, and the drama to get your story moving. Most importantly, it is about showing your passion and wholeheartedly believing in your story.

Telling Your Story to the Consumer

But storytelling isn’t only a good tool for presentations. Companies always look for more ways to engage their customers, and storytelling is the perfect way to do that.  It brings a human element into marketing that is hard to beat, and when used correctly, can lead to increased sales and brand affinity.

Of course, it is not always easy to figure exactly what kind of story you should tell, and how. Here are a few simple ideas to introduce storytelling elements into your marketing efforts:

- Every company has a story – from its founders, to its mission and purpose, to the breakthroughs and developments that helped grow the brand over time – and the authentic story can engage consumers
- The story can be told on the packaging itself, signaling to consumers that they are buying products from humans, not just corporations – Horizon Dairy does a great job of telling their own Farm Story
- The shopper experience can be a story in itself – Find out what the “drama” is in the consumer’s life, make that consumer the “hero”, and offer a “resolution” with a product that they can’t live without – Or better yet, make the product the “hero”

So, the next time you prepare for a presentation or even try to develop a new marketing strategy, think about how you can tell a better story. Know your audience and what they will connect with. Know your desired outcome and the action you hope to inspire. And figure out how to arrive at the “ah ha” moment.  The possibilities are endless.

Sources: Tell To Win – Connect, Persuade, and Win With the Hidden Power of  Story, Peter Guber, 2011, Image The U.S. Army

Over the past few decades the balance of power within retailing has shifted from the manufacturer to the retailer. The rise of Walmart and Target along with consolidation within the grocery and drug channels has significantly consolidated the US retail market. The practice of category management among retailers was a direct outcome this consolidation. Prior to category management, retailers most scarce resource – shelves - was often the battleground between competing brands and products with little or no gain for the retailer. For example, an advertising or price promotion of Crest could result in 10% increase in sales for Crest, a 10% decrease in sales for Colgate and no net gain for Walmart. There were also diminishing returns in price negotiations with manufacturers and a realization that profit growth for the retailer was linked to growth of the entire category.

This led to the modern practice of category management. All related or substitutable products in the portfolio are grouped together into a “Category.”  Each category is run like a mini-business, managed by both the retailer and suppliers, with its own joint P&L targets. The relationship between manufacturer and retailer becomes more collaborative and open where suppliers are expected to propose initiatives that add to the total category sales and the satisfaction of the shopper.

Over the last decade, major consumer goods organizations have reoriented their Marketing, R&D, Innovation and Sales processes to align with the retailer category management approach. This shift was in response to the increasing power of retailers but also a realization that contributing to category growth led to better performance than the historical zero-sum competitive battlefields on the shelves. Simply put, in the modern retail environment, category growth creates more ROI for both retailers and suppliers while, at the same time, enhancing consumer value.

We interviewed innovation and marketing professionals at Georgia-Pacific, Kraft, The Home Depot, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Hasbro and General Mills to better understand the advantages for a manufacturer to reorient from the historical brand-centric approach to a category-centric approach. Each had a unique perspective but several common themes emerged:

•    Consumer Insight Capability. Developing a deep understanding of consumer needs across an entire category can lead to a portfolio of offerings targeted to the needs of diverse user segments, occasions and needs. For example, Georgia-Pacific manages both Quilted Northern and Angel Soft bath tissue brands. Rather than being cannibalistic, a broader understanding of consumer needs within the category has led to a portfolio targeted to specific needs.

•    R&D Capability. An investment into a category approach, with a broader, more robust understanding of the fundamental science behind the category and the emerging technologies that can meet consumers’ needs, leads to more effective R&D investment. For example, Colgate’s investment into understanding teeth and gum biology led to a pipeline of industry leading oral care products that closed the share gap with Crest.

•    Assets and Equities Development. Category-focused consumer insight and R&D also lead to a more robust development and management of brand equities as well as improved technology and the patents to create a sustainable advantage from that technology. Brand equity, as an asset, can be leveraged to create growth with a category. General-Mills recently introduced its Simple brand of cookie mix and has already built enough equity around the brand to leverage it to drive growth of multiple brands across the entire baking category.

•    Innovation and New Product Development. Capabilities and assets are only advantages if they translate to viable and sustainable growth. P&G has become an innovation leader by truly understanding consumer needs within the category, investing in R&D to develop (and patent) products and developing strong brands with appeal across categories. Swiffer is an example of a successful innovation that could only have been the product of a category approach to insights, R&D and asset development. P&G had several cleaning brands but it was a broader category insight and R&D capability that led to the development of an entirely new cleaning system – one that none of P&G’s individual brands would have developed independently. Within ten years of launch, Swiffer is likely to become P&G’s next billion-dollar brand.

•    Growth. Ultimately, the primary rationale for a category strategy is growth. Innovation and new product development lead to organic growth but a category is a defined space with a profit pool and set of consumer needs that can be satisfied through acquisitions as well. Mattel, the world’s largest toy maker, acquired American Girl as part of a broader strategy to dominate the doll category. Rather than building the equity of its Barbie brand or developing a new brand in the category, Mattel acquired the successful brand and made it immensely more valuable by folding it into Mattel’s existing distribution system.

A category approach is more holistic than a brand-centric approach.  It does not assume that a brand is well positioned.  It identifies a space – a potential profit pool and an area of consumer needs - and then develops innovations that meet both the internal financial hurdles and the consumer needs.

Innovating in categories does not constrain the organization to thinking narrowly about a brand’s equities, targets or distribution. Category innovation allows the company to find the best brands (internally or externally) and to build, buy or partner to deliver on consumers’ needs. A brand-centric focus leads to more line extensions and increasing brand affinity to drive sales. A category focus can broaden the thinking to developing new breakthrough products, capabilities or sub markets to grow share within the category, or grow the category itself.

In the end, marketing and sales must deliver on customers’ needs and, in the modern retailer environment, retailers are demanding an approach that aligns with their category management philosophy. So a category approach is increasingly a mandate rather than a choice. But it is a mandate within which manufacturers can develop the consumer insights capabilities, R&D capabilities, brand equity and IP assets to create organic growth by leveraging existing brand equities and/or new product development across the entire category. It can also lead to brand-adjacent acquisition to capture a greater share of the category.

The modern retail environment has shifted power from manufacturers and suppliers to retailers but this shift offers significant opportunities for growth by focusing on the consumer needs across entire categories and partnering with retailers to deliver brands and products to serve those needs.

Image source: SpringsBargains

Hello readers. We’re working on a white paper on the importance of B2C marketing for some B2B companies, and we’d love your input! If you’d like to contribute, post your perspective on the following question as a comment. Thanks!

Question: Under what circumstances should a B2B company invest in consumer marketing and what are the benefits?