Understanding Brand Energy

So what has this got to do with advertising and what has it got to do with research about advertising?

I would first say that I do not consider myself an expert on advertising.? As someone in the advertising industry once said, everyone approaches advertising with an open mouth!? As a layman I think advertising in this country is generally brilliant, at least the high profile broadcast stuff that I am most aware of.? I take my hat off to the creatives and others who devise them.

But clearly some advertising is better than others and it can only be as good as the client and the advertisers allow it to be.? And you cannot help but think that a lot of advertising is constrained by clients, and maybe the advertisers themselves, living in the old paradigms.

In recent years there have been significant moves towards developing a more integrated approach to marketing but one senses that clients and suppliers still largely see different above and below the line media working in parallel rather than in an integrated and iterative way.

This is, perhaps, understandable. The delivery of advertising is largely about the application of a linear process: determine content, identify target audience, decide on the channel, shove it out and hope it works, get on to the next project!? The problem with this is that, for the best of practical and commercial cost control reasons, the process, rather than the end objective of the client’s business, can easily become the main driver.

When advertisers are brought in, particularly if it is a big campaign, there is often an implicit assumption that advertising will work in a linear way and that it is the agent of change in the brand’s fortunes.? Moreover, clients have high expectations of what the advertising will achieve. ‘If we are spending all this money then we MUST have a measurable and significant increase in sales’. But often, maybe most of the time, this does not happen. As Colin MacDonald put it in an excellent paper he gave to a recent Independent Consultant’s Group meeting and echoing the work of Andrew Ehrenberg and others:

“The prevailing culture misunderstands what advertising is really for. Growth is not (cannot) be the normal state for most brands, unless the category itself is new or the market as a whole is growing. In established markets, one brand’s growth comes at the expense of others. If one brand does succeed in growing share, others must make room for it.”

In this context, given intense competition to squeeze your brand, standing still or arresting decline is arguably a very good result.

But there is another reason why I would suggest that advertising rarely has a dramatic impact and that is because it is not advertising that is driving the brand in the first place.

This as brought home to me when I once gazed at some tracking research and, like so much tracking research, you could either read into it that there were indications that the advertising was working (whatever that means) or that actually there was no convincing evidence that it had had any effect at all!? The reason, I concluded, why the second view was quite likely to be correct had to do with the way the brand actually worked, so I mapped out how I thought the brand worked which I share with you now in generic form.

Essentially most brand communications, at least for established brands, is through the day-to-day use of the product or service and by its presence in the high street or on the retailers’ shelves. A lot of other communications comes from the media through news stories around the category or business or sector or competitors all of which is unplanned and uncontrollable. Then there is a limited amount of media coverage that you can influence, but not control, through PR or marketing communications and through influencing your internal culture and especially the behaviours of your client-facing staff and their support staff. All this is ongoing and defines the brand experience on a day to day level. Into this is injected an advertising campaign which is a) short in duration b) channeled through specific media and c) limited to a very few key messages.?
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So here, if you like, is a complex system with lots and lots of things going on across it. What the brand stands for is communicated in millions of different ways every day. Into this system is injected some advertising. A linear process-driven model of advertising says advertising creates awareness, involves the consumer, stimulates them to buy, or at least to keep the brand in their mind so that they are more likely to choose it in a buying situation. But actually most of what is going on to maintain the standing of the brand has to do with the experience of the product performance – if the soap powered stops cleaning clothes or the Mars Bar starts tasting like mould, then you immediately reject the product – and presence on the supermarket shelf – if you see it you are reminded of it and may buy it.

But it is also true that great products can make great brands by great advertising. According the Phil Knight, founder and Chief Executive of Nike, advertising is one leg of the three legged stool that explains the phenomenal growth of Nike since the early 1980s, the others being product design and celebrity athlete endorsement.?

With services it is arguably a lot more complex. The relationships are more often to do with people not just products. A mass of things will make you feel positive or negative towards the brand and the organisation. Managing consistency of service is far more complex than it is for a Mars Bar or detergent. And the advertising will not just impact on the end customers but can also impact on those who are delivering the service and very visibly expected to live the brand values. The infamous John Cheese Sainsbury’s campaign back-fired partly because it delivered the wrong message to customers but also because it insulted the staff of Sainsbury’s.

By contrast the extraordinarily successful Tesco’s Dotty campaign seemed to hit the right chord with everyone and is estimated to have generated ?130m of incremental operating profit for what is clearly the most successful retailer Britain now has.

One of the reasons for this is that Tesco are a company that have spent a lot of time in really understanding how their brand works so that everything they do, whether it is in staff training or store layout or logistics or advertising, is there to support the core brand proposition. Their ‘every little helps’ is much more than an advertising slogan; it is the core value of their business which is about teamwork, respect, empowerment and continually improving service for the end customer. The advertising was brilliant but it worked brilliantly because it integrated extraordinarily well with the way in which the brand works regardless of any advertising.

The Nike advertising has been brilliantly successful because it has captured and communicated the core passion of the business. As Dan Wieden, co-founder of the US agency Wieden & Kennedy, the Nike’s advertising agency for the last 21 years said “Nike didn’t discover the power of advertising.? Nike discovered the power of its own voice”.