found on think with google!
http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/quarterly/speed/branding-in-mind.html
Corporate Strategy Styles from BCG
The 3 Dimensions:
Unpredictability: Can we predict the state of "our world" in the future?
Malleability: Can we ourselves influence how our world will be in the future?
Harshness: How hard will change hit us?
What do percentages tell us?
Oh dear, this one is so hard to talk about. There's so much to say and so little fun to talk about it. Boring it is. But not to me. And maybe someone else cares. So let me pick one aspect that especially drives me mad. What really puzzles me is the interpretation of the typical bar chart that is supposed to help understand consumers' motives. They go somewhat like this:
Consumers get asked what is "important to them, when it comes to XYZ". Let's leave aside that this is a very naive question. What I want to talk about is just the numbers and what those quantities tell us.What happens almost all the time is that we go: "Quality is most important, "Knowledgeable Stuff is second", "Selection seems to be least important." Right? Again, forget about the stupid variables, just go by the numbers. Quality is more important than Selection, right?
Well I don't get that. How can those bars tell this kind of story? The questionnaire obviously must have worked this way: "Tel us how important the following blabla are ... etc" and then each variable could be rated (not ranked, unfortunately!). Now, 80% of the respondents said Yes, or have chosen the Top-2-Boxes when it came to the Quality factor and 50% did that when it came to the Selection factor. But how do we know that for each person, or even for most of the them that the Quality factor is more important than the Selection factor? We have never asked them! What we have measured is not the relative importance but the distribution of high importance of each factor in the population. This tells us that salience of Quality is more frequently found, not that it is literally "higher" than that of Selection.
You see, we just do not know by looking at those bars how many percent of the 80% "Quality Seekers" also find Selection very important. There might be up to 50 percent points of them among those Quality Seekers. So probably most of the people who find Quality important would find Selection just as important. Both factors are rather equally important to most of the respondents! How can we than say that Quality was more important, then?
What could it probably mean "Quality is more important?". What they mean is: if you improve your quality perception this would appeal to more people than when you improve your perceived selection. So the underlying assumption behind that kind of bar chart is: "The more people you target the more successful you will be." Thus, the primary imperative is Reach. You can easily evaluate if your task at hand is in-line with this imperative. If it is - than there's nothing wrong about those bars and their interpretation.
Let me give you three examples:
Task 1) "Differentiate our brand from the competitors in the industry."
Task 2) "Create more loyalty for our brand. Raise the re-purchase rate."
Task 3) "Position our new product as the first of its kind and leverage first-mover advantages fully."
Which of these tasks is the one that is in-line with the assumption "The more people you target the more successful you will be"? Give it a try!
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Obviously, it's Task 3. Being the first mover means grasping and owning the most popular, most obvious factors. Task 2 is not primarily about reach because it is rather about depth. Task 1 is not primarily about reach because it's rather about partitioning. Of course, in the sub-segments you are sort of aiming for reach, you could argue. But even that doesn't always have to be true: loyalty could very much be about individual, not popular priorities. Differentiation could is probably more focused on less popular yet energetic, unoccupied territories to make them popular. E.g. Axe/Lynx occupied "smell" probably not because it is the most "important" factor in terms of it's statistical distribution in the total population. But it makes a stronger brand positioning than going for "antiperspirant effect" which probably is slightly more frequently rated as "important".
The most important bias at work when looking at those percentage bar diagrams is a visual one. We are automatically attracted to the longer bar. To us it seems more potent, thus more effective etc.
And we all make use of this bias. Especially because planners often rather abuse than use data. They abuse them "to make the point". i.e. to soothe clients' worries, to make them think less.
Instead of making us think more data - especially simple descriptive percentages - make us think less. That's a pity. We should think much more about what data tell us. Not exactly because this would always make us read more out of the data. In the stupid case above - the very first pic I found on the Net - there's not much to be read. It's not very useful. All planners know that. But we should think more about data e.g. in order to learn how to design better surveys. I would start with the question: "How can we measure how important one thing is compared to another?"and "What needs to be known before we can measure that?". But maybe we just can't know what's important?
And we all make use of this bias. Especially because planners often rather abuse than use data. They abuse them "to make the point". i.e. to soothe clients' worries, to make them think less.
Instead of making us think more data - especially simple descriptive percentages - make us think less. That's a pity. We should think much more about what data tell us. Not exactly because this would always make us read more out of the data. In the stupid case above - the very first pic I found on the Net - there's not much to be read. It's not very useful. All planners know that. But we should think more about data e.g. in order to learn how to design better surveys. I would start with the question: "How can we measure how important one thing is compared to another?"and "What needs to be known before we can measure that?". But maybe we just can't know what's important?
Planning as problem solving? Brands as tension resolvers?
In an earlier post I wondered if problem-centered thinking really is the best description of how planning works or even should work. You can find that article here & here's Mark Pollard's article that triggered my doubts back then. Let me quote some of the doubts I've had: Do we need a Big Problem to arrive at a Big Idea? Can a lasting brand positioning always be built based on an actual problem the brand has right now? Or take another example: do we need a problem to outline a christmas promotion? Or when a brand is not there yet, its problem is so to say that it doesn't exist, yet. Is this really helpful to find the Big Insight into a Human Truth?
My answer to all that tended to be "no".
In recent times my thinking about those questions evolved further. Two things changed in my mind:
1) I stopped understanding "problem" as just our client's problem but involved consumers' problems as well.
2) I stopped calling it "problem" and tend to call it "tension" - though I'm still looking for a better term.
At the moment I seem to believe that we really could frame any useful information used for strategy as a tension - a.k.a. problem. Firstly, there are client problems communication is supposed to solve. You could also call them "objectives" and that is the way they are codified most of the time. (Let's postpone the discussion if a "negative" framing is better than the "positive".) Secondly, there are consumer motivation phenomena which in Mark Pollards infographic are rather called "Insight". Well, my main point is that those again can all be framed as tensions - a.k.a. problems, although the word problems works less neatly.
Some insights and ideas are tension-driven in a very obvious way:
- "Real Beauty" is built on the tension between what women look like and what society/advertising wants them to look like.
- "Dirt is good" is built on the tension between parents' laissez-faire vs tidiness motivations. Or put it less intellectually, every detergent brand is somehow built on the dirt induced tension: "I want it to go away somehow".
- Avis's classic positioning was built on the tension between being second in the market and people thinking that the Nr.1 is always better than Nr. 2.
Problem! Dilemma! We need a Solution with a capital S!
But for months and even years I have been struggling with other great insights/ideas/positionings that seemed to be of no problem-centric nature at all. Examples of those stubbornly "positive" insights/ideas are:
- "Johnnie Walker. Keep walking."
- "Felix cat food. For cats with character"
- "Ebay. 3-2-1-mine" (the latter being built around the thrill of auction shopping).
There are many more examples out there. Actually more of this "positive" type than of the obviously tension-centric type. So how can we deal with this? Could these positive framings be re-framed in a tension-centric way? Would this help in any way if they could?
What I found out is: these "positive" insights/ideas are not built upon lines of tectonic tensions but they always derive their value from tensions. Simply because there is no value without deficit and no meaning without opposition.
Let's take "Johnnie Walker. Keep Walking." Very obviously, the idea came from the brand name. Probably most of the psychology around it has been made up in retrospective. But that doesn't matter on the level of Truth. (It really doesn't matter if Truth has been discovered in a "proper" linear-chronological, methodical way or accidentally or even in retrospective. Actually, it always happens accidentally, but that's another story.) Back to "Keep Walking". It's an expression of an attractive psychological proposition: probably it's something like Personal Development or Life Success, maybe even Societal Development or Human Progress. Well if every person would develop herself to the max there wouldn't be any value in personal development. If all societies got better anyway there again wouldn't be any value in referring to it. So the value of "Keep Walking" lies in the scarcity of progress - thus in Human Inertia!
Ha! I like it. So maybe we don't exactly need a Big Problem to arrive at a Big Idea but the presence of a Big Problem reassures us that our Idea actually is Big.
Ok, where does the value in "Cats with Character" come from? You see, this is the trickiest one! And again - it doesn't matter how those ad guys actually arrived at that idea - probably by having an Old-Fashioned at the bar. The question is rather - where does the power of the idea reside? My feeling is - and this might sound weird - that the true power of the "Cats with Character" idea lies in the opposition to dogs. Character is what dogs lack if you ask cat lovers. The value of having a cat and not a dog lies in the cat's independence and weirdness.
On the other hand you actually do not need the opposition to dogs to get to that notion. You could really get there in a very straight way: "What do you like about cats?" or "What kind of love relation is there between you and your cat?". But my point is not how you get there but what makes a notion a real issue, a really significant notion. And the issue here is: I'm a cat lover. Cat lovers nurture character not devotedness - as dog lovers do. And here you have your tension. The tricky thing is: the tension seems to be outside the category, somewhere you wouldn't have thought of. Who thinks of dogs when he works on a cat account? Well I do now. I try to look for oppositions - even if there are no obvious oppositions involved. Oppositions constitute meaning. Cats vs dogs? Old cats vs young cats? Cat vs cat owner? Having cats vs having children? It's less a motivational tension, it's more of a tension in terms of "meaning". (Also read my older post about "meaning" as something to be found between two poles here.)
Let's try to apply this oppositional thinking to Johnnie Walker. You could start of by asking yourself: What's the difference between Whisky and Vodka. One of the answers will be: maturity issues. Maturity of the product and maturity of the drinker. Well, that's already quite close to Personal Development or Life Success, isn't it? Fascinating stuff.
The main question remains: Does all this help us planners? I actually believe that almost none of those ideas has actually been derived or discussed that way. They have not been discussing Human Inertia before the idea of "Keep Walking" was there, have they. Once it was there - they might have. Though probably not - managers tend to be allergic to negative formulations. Most people are.
Well you see - I don't care if they had talked about it. Their brains had processed it that way anyhow. "Tension = interesting. No Tension = less interesting." It doesn't matter if others use these patterns explicitly - maybe you could. So, keep it secret and practice a bit.
Tension here: if it doesn't work I shouldn't tell anyone about it. If it works... maybe I shouldn't tell anybody?
Also read this text here about problems as primary objects of good planning by Martin Weigl.
Impressive Theoretical Work: The Universal Principles of Persuasion
You will find a really interesting text as a PDF here. Obviously, it is less interesting if you are not into metatheories of what planners do. I find it impressive and have never read anything like it. You will need an hour or so to properly read it... Well, just check it out.
Maximum Difference Scaling Provides Better Survey Results
We are quite used to survey results to tell us nothing of particular insight or even clarity. I know a lot of people in agencies who are so disappointed by market research that they think it doesn't work for them.
But most market research studies are conducted with very conventional and flawed methods although those flaws are well known among researchers. Unfortunatelly, most clients (and planners) don't know much about research methods beyond basic "qualitative-quantitative"-talk. Not to mention limited statistical skills.
I love quantitative if it's done with some methodical wit. But the kind of stuff I like is hardly ever conducted. And if it is - it should be kept in secret, actually. Because in my opinion, research methods are a way to competitive advantage. And there is NO competitive advantage if research is done the same way as everybody does it.
Here's an example of what I mean. A simple scaling method that delivers different (= "truer") results than the ones we usually get. Watch the video here:
But most market research studies are conducted with very conventional and flawed methods although those flaws are well known among researchers. Unfortunatelly, most clients (and planners) don't know much about research methods beyond basic "qualitative-quantitative"-talk. Not to mention limited statistical skills.
I love quantitative if it's done with some methodical wit. But the kind of stuff I like is hardly ever conducted. And if it is - it should be kept in secret, actually. Because in my opinion, research methods are a way to competitive advantage. And there is NO competitive advantage if research is done the same way as everybody does it.
Here's an example of what I mean. A simple scaling method that delivers different (= "truer") results than the ones we usually get. Watch the video here:
From Competitive Advantages to Adaptive Advantages?
BCG's Martin Reeves on the Future of Strategy in an Uncertain World.
Listen to or download the interview here:
Listen to or download the interview here:
3 examples of well researched & defined business problems to be solved.
Very often a brand's business problems are described in a fuzzy, unspecific way. Lots of planners even believe, "real problems to be solved" arise rather on communication or "customer perceptions" level. So one level "after" business problems. The reason for this thinking is mostly not laziness but rather the lack of time, money & tools to asses & nail down concrete, distinct business problems. (Though I must admit that young people are just not taught to think in terms of business problems beyond - or rather beneath - "The brand needs more awareness" or "The brand needs to engage the target group".) Bain & Co show us how this could be done in a more skillful way. I wish, planners in agencies had access to such insights.
Example quoted from Bain & Co's paper:
"The insight:
The Bain Brand Accelerator process revealed a series of surprising insights that helped explain why the brand's growth had slowed and why past efforts had not gained traction.
First, the team found that the company needed to reassess its strategy for where to play. Fully two-thirds of Delicious Co.'s actual sales were coming from usage occasions that were flat or shrinking due to changes in consumer behaviors that were unlikely to reverse. The behaviors that had driven growth for decades were now in decline. In the past, the majority of advertising spend and innovation activity had been aimed at breathing new life into these core occasions. Now, a deep understanding of why the occasions were shrinking made it clear to Delicious Co. that this strategy was unlikely to be successful.
But there was good news. The decline in the core was being mostly offset by organic growth and momentum in emerging occasions where loyalists and younger users were using the brand in new ways, such as in recipe ingredients and ready-to-eat snacking. It was especially surprising to see growth of the brand as a recipe ingredient—which had not been formally developed at all. Delicious Co. realized it had an opportunity to capitalize on these emerging pockets of momentum.
The team also found that despite conventional wisdom, the recipe ingredient occasion was the right place to focus—not ready-to-eat snacking. When the Delicious Co. team rigorously evaluated Snacking—for example, by studying the true competitive set, occasion by occasion—it became clear that the winnable portion of the ready-to-eat snacking option for Delicious Co. was much smaller than the company anticipated. Further, the economics were less attractive, and the operational investments to be made would be substantial.
In contrast, the recipe ingredient market was very large, the behavior was growing and it presented attractive margins. More important, Delicious Co. had distinct assets in this occasion, as its product had unique advantages over the competition. But the existing product portfolio was wrong for recipe ingredients—there were significant barriers in taste, consistency, education and packaging. A deep dive into consumer behavior in these areas, using such techniques as statistical cluster analysis and ethnographies, identified the key dishes to focus on and precise issues to address with innovation and advertising."
Read the whole article here:
Also read my short text about setting communication objectives - which deals rather with issues AFTER real business problems have been nailed down. But it still talks about being specific and knowing your main lever. Read it here:
Example quoted from Bain & Co's paper:
"The insight:
The Bain Brand Accelerator process revealed a series of surprising insights that helped explain why the brand's growth had slowed and why past efforts had not gained traction.
First, the team found that the company needed to reassess its strategy for where to play. Fully two-thirds of Delicious Co.'s actual sales were coming from usage occasions that were flat or shrinking due to changes in consumer behaviors that were unlikely to reverse. The behaviors that had driven growth for decades were now in decline. In the past, the majority of advertising spend and innovation activity had been aimed at breathing new life into these core occasions. Now, a deep understanding of why the occasions were shrinking made it clear to Delicious Co. that this strategy was unlikely to be successful.
But there was good news. The decline in the core was being mostly offset by organic growth and momentum in emerging occasions where loyalists and younger users were using the brand in new ways, such as in recipe ingredients and ready-to-eat snacking. It was especially surprising to see growth of the brand as a recipe ingredient—which had not been formally developed at all. Delicious Co. realized it had an opportunity to capitalize on these emerging pockets of momentum.
The team also found that despite conventional wisdom, the recipe ingredient occasion was the right place to focus—not ready-to-eat snacking. When the Delicious Co. team rigorously evaluated Snacking—for example, by studying the true competitive set, occasion by occasion—it became clear that the winnable portion of the ready-to-eat snacking option for Delicious Co. was much smaller than the company anticipated. Further, the economics were less attractive, and the operational investments to be made would be substantial.
In contrast, the recipe ingredient market was very large, the behavior was growing and it presented attractive margins. More important, Delicious Co. had distinct assets in this occasion, as its product had unique advantages over the competition. But the existing product portfolio was wrong for recipe ingredients—there were significant barriers in taste, consistency, education and packaging. A deep dive into consumer behavior in these areas, using such techniques as statistical cluster analysis and ethnographies, identified the key dishes to focus on and precise issues to address with innovation and advertising."
Read the whole article here:
Also read my short text about setting communication objectives - which deals rather with issues AFTER real business problems have been nailed down. But it still talks about being specific and knowing your main lever. Read it here:
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