#1 Brand building: the different approaches

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• Binet and Field, Marketing in the Era of Accountability, The Long and the Short of It

• Feldwick, The Art of Humbug, What is Brand Equity Anyway?

• Sharp, How Brands Grow Vols 1 + 2

• Ries and Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

• Martin Weigel blog

• London Strategy Unit on Slideshare

• Admap

#1 Brand building: the different approaches

1. What do we mean by brand building?

2. Butchering Feldwick

3. Butchering Byron

4. A baker’s dozen of brand-building flashcards

1. What do we mean by brand building?

2. Butchering Feldwick

3. Butchering Byron

4. A baker’s dozen of brand-building flashcards

What’s your worldview?

The Plato worldview

Brands have a reality independent of us

They have personalities

Our job is to grasp and express them

The Aristotle worldview

Brands are the emergent reality from a range of assets

They help people do things

Our job is to protect and build them

The Wittgenstein worldview

Brands are a language game

They are things for us to talk about

Our job is to avoid private language

A brand is a collective fiction that allows shortcuts in decision-making

For real people…

…that’s useful because the world is full of stuff

…and of course most of our decision-making is about each other

For organisations…

that’s useful because it reduces the unit cost to acquire and serve valued users

…but let’s think about users more widely

How do we manage segmentation/ personalisation and fragmentation?

Are we talking about comms or something bigger?

How deep into the experience does decision-making pushes our responsibility?

How do we tackle the internal + partnership deficit?

If that definition is broadly right…

What’s your approach?

The Plato approach

Ad folk get brands and beauty

Selling happens elsewhere

Serving customers is boring

The Aristotle approach

Total brand experience

Like getting hands dirty

Serving customers is key

The Wittgenstein approach

Brands are culture

We become part of the world

We create a shared world

1. What do we mean by brand building?

2. Butchering Feldwick

3. Butchering Byron

4. A baker’s dozen of brand-building flashcards

1. Selling

2. Seduction

3. Fame

4. Fellowship

Source: adapted/mauled from Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

Selling

• The historically dominant model

• Still alive and well (see Facebook, Millward Brown)

• USPs

• Consumers as rational decision-makers

• AIDA, DAGMAR models of advertising

Source: adapted/mauled from Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

Seduction

• More varied than it sounds: persuasion, charming, wooing

• Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art (Bernbach)

• A “constrained rationality” view of consumers

• The most powerful element in advertising is the truth (Bernbach)

Source: adapted/mauled from Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

Fame

• The model du jour

• Robustly underpinned by IPA data

• And is good creative awards fodder

• But challenges with maintaining it and sustaining the role of strategy

• “Mental Availability” is perhaps the future here

Source: adapted/mauled from Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

Fellowship

• Connecting with each other is a fundamental human need

• It’s at the heart of many service brands

• It’s perhaps the most obviously interesting from a media perspective

• Advocacy, herding, network effects…

Source: adapted/mauled from Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug

1. What do we mean by brand building?

2. Butchering Feldwick

3. Butchering Byron

4. A baker’s dozen of brand-building flashcards

Butchering Byron

Butchering Byron

Old model

Positioning Differentiation Message comprehension

Persuasion Rational involved viewers

Loyals/ loyalty Involvement Targeted

New model

Salience Distinctiveness Emotional response and

notice

Refreshing and building

memory structures

Emotional distracted viewers

Switchers/ penetration

Heuristics Sophisticated mass

Source: Byron Sharp How Brands Grow

1. What do we mean by brand building?

2. Butchering Feldwick

3. Butchering Byron

4. A baker’s dozen of brand-building flashcards

1. Archetypes

2. Own one word (The law of focus)

https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3378/3571282950_aa1d231d6f_b.jpg

3. Leadbeater system/empathy

4. Challenger

Lighthouses, pirates, big fish eaters…

5. Disrupt

6. Leadership

7. If you can’t be first in category, invent a new category

8. Taxis and trains

9. It only works if it all works v.1

10. It only works if it all works v.2

11. Advocacy

12. Personalisation

Big data, programmatic, small data…

13. Low involvement processing

Be human.

THANK YOU