Don’t make brand models harder than they already are

Nothing in marketing is easy. You name it, there’s a reason it’ll keep you awake at night.

Intelligent segmentation. Size-of-prize analysis. Pricing strategy. Briefing new pack design. Hitting back at regs when they’ve put a line through everything you’ve been planning for three years. Negotiating with the trade for, pretty please, a better location on shelf. Hard, all hard.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as getting two agencies to turn up to the same place at the same time with an understanding of the same objectives can involve a torture beyond the imaginations of your peers in other disciplines. Ask any junior marketer who’s tried.

But some exigencies in our discipline contrive to combine unusually high levels of difficulty with unusually high levels of importance. Completing your brand model is one. If we had a marketers’ Boston matrix with ‘kinda hard’ and ‘really hard’ going up the vertical axis, and ‘it matters’, ‘it’s critical’ across the top, the task of setting down an agreed definition of the brand would sit firmly in that top right box.

It was always important – these are billion-dollar assets we’re talking about here – but today it’s even more so. One reason for that is the fragmentation of media. On a chart I saw recently for a mid-sized consumer brand it was casually observed that this year there would be 278 different full-funnel creative assets. Something has to join that disparate activity together, and that ‘something’ is the agreed brand model. Without that clarity and discipline, it will look like you’re managing 278 different brands.

The reason it’s so difficult – aside from the sheer weight of responsibility involved – is that the overarching objectives pull cruelly against one another. One task of the model is to inspire – not just communications but innovation, too. But going the other way, it must set guardrails. It’s like designing a car for awesome acceleration and ultimate safety at the same time.

Reducing complexity

Perhaps you will be finding yourself part of a brand team soon with the remit of redefining the brand – or perhaps you might even be leading that team – and you’re worrying about the difficulty involved. Be heartened. I have devised a surefire method for reducing the complexity of this hardest of marketing tasks. Drumroll…

Don’t make it harder still.

“You don’t say!”, I hear you muttering under your breath. But I do say. Because I know. I work with brand teams across multiple categories on this kind of seminal task and what I invariably see is a strange, almost hypnotic tendency to devote time and resource on diversions that don’t matter, at the expense of the vital challenges that do.

There are a bunch of ways marketers do this, and I’ll touch on a few here, but easily the most pernicious is the urge to fiddle with the model – the framework – itself.

Incoming CMOs are especially guilty of this sin of distraction. Even though the existing model covers all the bases, they insist on some new boxes they feel will give the brand more edge. Those new boxes don’t fit into the current shape – arrow, pyramid, key or whatever – so the internal design team gets to come up with a new one, adding some flourishes of their own.

What I invariably see is a strange, almost hypnotic tendency to devote time and resource on diversions that don’t matter, at the expense of the vital challenges that do.

It is a short step from there to declare the new model ‘bespoke’, to give it a catchy name and perhaps an accompanying ®, and to launch it internally with a flourish. “This is ours – and it’s different from anything else out there.”

Here’s why this is suboptimal, to phrase it kindly. Put aside all the effort and brainpower that’s been sidelined to the model itself and not what goes in it. The real problem here is misplaced differentiation. Because the new model is different, it imparts the false hope that, however it’s filled in, that difference will somehow magically carry across to the final definition.

This is like having a uniquely designed paintbrush, with its alluring grooves and eye-catching adornments, and expecting it to turn you into Raphael. It won’t, of course, but more insidiously it draws the attention to the tool itself, rather than to the creative, soul-searching, synapse-sapping task to which it is to be applied.

If you really must review your current model, far better to go the other way. Opt for the simplest and most vanilla framework possible. Six boxes, set down in an ordered, neutral grid, covering the absolute essentials: why the brand exists, who it is for, how it serves people better, how it comes across, its one-sentence promise and reasons to believe.

When that plain looking model stares back up at you, a sobering reality takes hold. There is nothing remotely differentiated there now, and there won’t be until the team comes up with something powerful to set down in those boxes. There is no greater spur to digging deeper into the data, working harder with the insights, probing the category mercilessly, asking tough questions, and most of all thinking originally and fearlessly, with the objective of bringing greater distinction, desire, relevance and cohesion to the brand.

The challenge of language

But that, I’m sorry to say, merely brings us to another way brand teams contrive to make a hard task harder. They convince themselves that the language in each of those boxes – the precise choice of words, the flow of the phrases – must, itself, be ‘inspiring’.

I don’t have an issue with this. I have three.

First, it is not easy to come up with inspiring language for concrete concepts. That is what poets and advertising agencies are for. It is a task that will eat time, and is just not needed at this stage.

Second, so-called inspiring language, with its tendency towards metaphor and hyperbole, runs the risk of being misunderstood by those working in their second language. Far better to aim for clarity.

Third, and way more important than the other two, is the problem of illusory greatness. The fancy words are beguiling, but they may mask the fact that there is nothing that wonderful underneath. Conversely, simply knowing that whatever you set down will be in clear, simple language, is the impetus you need in your quest for depth and originality in the thinking.

Marketers can’t ignore the opportunity of ‘new frugal innovation’

Still on semantics, here is another way brand teams drive themselves up blind alleys in these brand-model awayday sessions. At some point in the process, somebody will suggest that the model is filled out ‘in consumer language’.

But the model isn’t aimed at consumers. It’s a professional tool. For fellow professional marketers. Of course, the consumer should be kept in mind throughout – but that doesn’t mean they have to be treated like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Again, better to aim for clarity.

Ah, this is cathartic, getting all this out there after so many years tearing my hair out. I could go on – and in fact I will, with a few quickie pointers.

Repetition. Brand teams turn somersaults to avoid it, but it’s fine if it helps you establish a clear ‘red thread’.

Laddering. It’s tempting to take it too far, which not only squanders time but leads you up to absurd, ‘world peace’, levels of purpose and promise.

RTBs. Sometimes there just aren’t that many reasons to believe. Better to admit that than endlessly strain and end up with wish-list nuggets like ‘most trusted brand’.

Hard but not impossible

When you get something worth crystallising in the end – and you probably will, because importance brings its own focus eventually – it’s fine to feel a brief thrill of triumphalism. The diversions, blind alleys and byzantine discussions are at last behind you.

Now it’s time for the next phase: sharing the completed model, ensuring it’s understood by all parties, finding ways to bring it to life with inspiration and flair for agencies, innovators and investors, and parrying attempts at too much ‘interpretation’. It’s an exciting stage to have arrived at. Just don’t expect it to be easy.