In it for the long haul? – the paradox of marketing
Category: Thinking pieces
About the Author
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago - Warren Buffett said that, and the man has a very good point.
The brands that mean the most to us are the ones which have been carefully grown and nurtured over time to encapsulate a set of values that we find both appealing and relevant. Oxo has always held a knowing mirror to the family and its relationships. Kit Kat has celebrated the break through wry humour for over thirty years and, until recently, if you wanted the ultimate Teutonic driving machine then you had to look no further than Stuttgart. All these brands made continuity of personality and behaviour a valued brand asset.
For us to know a brand we need to understand what it stands for and how it will behave now and in the future - just like our friends, it's by acting consistently that we learn to trust them. Sure brands can evolve just like people do, but their central personality and values mustn't flex.
So developing brand assets and values is a job for the long term. You don't develop a deep relationship in a day; it takes time for consumers to learn and understand a brand. But marketeers aren't always focused on the long term and herein lies the dilemma.
Marketeers need to make a mark to build a career - a promotion is easier to justify if you have developed and owned an 'all new marketing plan' and its associated execution programme. It's by changing communications and 'challenging the thinking that has gone before' that marketeers build careers.
Who wants to do what the last chap did? That's not exciting and that's not going to get you noticed. So often pragmatically and selfishly the agenda for change is set.
Agencies too are all too quick to dismiss previous work even if, as is often the case, they developed the work themselves. New, it appears, is always better. This year's plan is always better than last year's plan. They are always 'building on new learnings'.
Of course evolution of any comms programme is a necessity to avoid wear out and over-familiarisation - but all too often brand teams and agencies indulge in wholesale reinvention of not just the execution, but the wider brand idea and often the brand personality too. The upshot is brands that people thought they understood and could rely on to act in a particular way are suddenly all-new, alien and 'supposedly better'.
In the real world this means consumers can't keep up - too many messages changing too often and executed across a myriad of ever-tempting fragmented media touch points.
Stella Artois - reassuringly expensive quality or an overt focus on natural ingredients? Or is that Beck's - or Carling? Actually it's all three. BMW talking about fluffy, happy 'Driving Joy?'. What happened to the precision of the Ultimate Driving Machine? (And anyway, weren't Honda talking joy three years ago?)
If these brands play fast and loose with their propositions and personalities how are we expected to know them anymore?
The way out of this constantly churning pot of messaging is to put a new and rigorous focus on consistency.
If consumers develop brand trust (and accordingly brand relationships) in the long term, then that's how we as marketeers should manage our brand assets.
Marketeers should be as true to brand personality as to brand proposition. Continuity of action is everything. Additionally, activation spaces should be identified for the long term and brand ideas selected only if they have the capability to last for years, not months.
Other brand touch points should also be audited for the long haul. A brand strapline should help consumers summarise their take-out of your brand messaging, whilst also confirming the brand source of that information. Why change it every 12-14 months?
Another reason there is so much changing of messaging and overstretching of brand personality is the time-pressured way in which strategy is developed against brand planning deadlines.
If you take away the temptation to change the communication strategy every year and focus instead on enriching a fully researched, longer-term 5-year brand idea, then the purpose of brand planning becomes more channel and execution-focused. An altogether more manageable task.
Wholesale change of proposition and/or personality should, in summary, only be entertained under exceptional circumstances and only when lessons have been learned from previous mistakes.
Change should come through the executional evolution of long-term brand ideas which develop and enrich already loved and respected personalities.
We should all be building brands with consumer-validated longevity rather than being slaves to reinvention, creating tactical pop-up offerings with familiar logos for our own vanity.
Now if you really want to make your mark - there's a real creative challenge.