Category — Brand Management

Develop offerings so innovative that competitors are irrelevant. By David Aaker. The only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to develop offerings so innovative that they create customer “must-haves” that define new subcategories for which competitors are not relevant. The goal is to win not by having a brand preferred over competitors but because competitors were not considered. You strive not to be the best but the only.

Creating a marketplace with weak or nonexistent competition has a huge potential payoff. It is Economics 101, the ticket to real growth in sales and profits. Consider the Chrysler minivan introduced in 1982 as the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan, which sold 200,000 during its first year, 12.5 million since then and enjoyed 16 years with no viable competitors. It literally carried Chrysler for nearly two decades … read >>

The future belongs to those who measure the total brand experience. By Al Wittemen. Each and every one of us has endured our share of pain over the last several years. In all my years in marketing, it’s safe to say I’ve never experienced anything quite like the last five. It now appears that the worst of the economic calamity is behind us, but it would be foolish to think that the pain is over.

In fact, in many ways, it is just beginning. A recent IBM survey of 1,700 chief marketing officers across 64 countries spelled out the sources of our discomfort. It identified some of the biggest challenges facing chief marketing officers, each of which is a pervasive and universal game changer … read >>

Below-the-line agencies are rising to the top. By Paul Kramer. In the past, when asked what their biggest asset was, marketers would invariably reply, "our brand." In today’s environment, you are just as likely to get the answer, "our customers," defined as both retailers and their shoppers.

Yet surprisingly, in today’s highly visible world of brand building and mass advertising, the reality is that traditional, above-the-line agencies often lose focus on the most important part of the equation — the customer. The better agencies tend to be adept at growing brands while also building customer relationships. Below-the-line agencies, where the focus is on targeted, direct and measurable customer interactions, are well-positioned to meet today’s challenges, and tomorrow’s … read >>

Does your brand speak for itself? Building loyalty requires it. By Jayne Eastman. A “small-boy story” is a marketing positioning that is so complicated you need to send a small boy along to explain it. It’s lazy marketing — filling up the consumer’s time with so much information and so many product signals that you are essentially asking them to do the hard work of understanding what really is important about your brand and why they should care about it.

Small-boy stories are often the result of a lack of clarity about what is truly important to your target consumers, what will firmly attract and then attach them to your brand, versus what is irrelevant. We have become victims of too much information. We have learned so much about a market, a consumer, a need or a brand’s equity that it all ends up getting jammed into the positioning … read >>

Assortment optimization technologies create a better shopping experience. By Tom Young and Greg Orth. Successful retailers are rethinking the notion of carrying massive numbers of items on their shelves and realizing that their stores have unique consumer dynamics. Many owe much of their success to a shopper-centric approach that is easy to implement via assortment optimization technologies.

Walmart struggled to redefine the role of individual categories in its stores and the depth and breadth of product assortment choices. As a result, its (now-ended) item reduction initiative alienated many shoppers because Walmart did not clearly understand the degree of loyalty to particular products. Just because a product is a slower-moving item does not mean that it does not have a loyal following. Take organic soup, for example: It does not have high velocities relative to the category, but if it is not available, the shopper will leave the store without making a soup purchase … read >>

Breathing fresh relevance into older brands. By Howard Schultz. You know their names and you probably remember what they look like, but can you remember the last time you heard from them? No, I am not referring to long-lost relatives; I’m talking about classic consumer brands (some may call them legacy brands, others may call them heritage brands, but to me, they are the classics). They are the brands that have spent years building their reputations and successes but, as of late, seem to have fallen completely off of the radar.