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A User’s Guide to Fear Marketing

goodjob — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 12:00:21 +0000

It’s time to set the record straight on “fear marketing.” The “fear marketing” cases held up as examples in so many books, articles, and websites don’t actually involve fear at all. They really fall under four different emotions: fear, anxiety, disgust, and shame. Dig a little deeper and you find these are complex, uniquely human emotions with sociological dimensions—being afraid of feeling ashamed, feeling ashamed of being sad, being ashamed of feeling disgust, even being ashamed on someone else’s behalf. We’re no strangers to being ashamed of crying, for instance.

So how do these negative emotions differ from one another?

Fear is the most powerful of them all—if you can genuinely frighten people—because it is the most primal. When a person is afraid, every other emotion, and even biological needs like hunger and sleep, is suspended for a while. To create fear, the threat has to be identifiable, shown clearly, and paired with the belief that it can be removed. (That last part isn’t always necessary; a person may act simply because they’re afraid and want to avoid harm.)

Interestingly, one of the best marketers of fear is Volvo. And yet we think of Volvo as a “safety” brand, don’t we? That’s because Volvo does it so well that most of its advertising runs on a positive theme. The turning point in the story is what sends fear through the roof. By the end, the thing you remember most is that terrifying possibility.

Look at the photo here. There’s no explicit danger in it, yet the parents among us have already registered that the child is running toward the road—because they’ve lived it many times and carry a vivid memory of that fear. Even though the man is smiling, the woman’s posture and the blurred figure of the child in front create an extraordinary emotional equation. A genuine work of art.

The catch with fear is that it’s a more momentary emotion. A person doesn’t stay afraid for weeks—often not even for a full day. So the brand either has to sit inside a situational fear-and-safety equation, or keep pumping the fear continuously.

We’ve seen a clear example of fear failing to land in the realm of disaster preparedness. In earthquake-prone regions, almost everyone “knows” a major quake is coming, yet very few retrofit their homes or keep an emergency kit ready. The fear is genuinely enormous—and on paper, the remedy exists. But without a recent tremor to reactivate it, and with the “fix” feeling impossibly large (who tears down and rebuilds their house on a hunch?), that fear rarely converts into action. When removing the fear would require something monumental, people simply don’t believe it can be “conveniently” removed—and so they don’t move.

Anti-limescale tablets for washing machines, on the other hand, have to keep reminding you they exist. That’s been their whole game for years: “Skip us and your machine dies.” (Think of the classic Calgon promise.) So what emotion are these brands leaning on now? Why did they trade fear for disgust? We’ll make that clear as we work through the other negative emotions.

Why is anxiety the most useful emotion for brands? Insurance companies, baby products, cleaning products, anything in the health space, and lately the food category are all, in one way or another, born into a state of anxiety.

While fear has a clear object and a more immediate effect, anxiety draws its power from the ambiguity of its object and lasts far longer. Unlike fear, new information in a state of anxiety can make people more anxious rather than calmer (and usually does). Brands are already experienced at manufacturing fears and anxieties that don’t exist. Anxiety is the most useful emotion because the person has to make an effort to remove its source—and, crucially, that removal feels possible. In short: just by choosing the right brand, you can put your anxieties to rest.

The most useful type here is what I’d call “indirect anxiety.” This is when a brand, while saying something positive, quietly evokes a negative one. Think of the Vegan or Gluten-Free products lining the shelves. They send a positive message, yet they plant an anxiety about the whole category.

But sometimes this backfires for the category’s own future. That’s the single reason Coca-Cola deliberately let its Zero line grow: as long as that black can exists, the red one is framed as the sugary, fattening, unhealthy option.

One recent ad that handles anxiety beautifully comes from the diaper category—Pampers-style campaigns that tie the fit of a diaper to how freely a baby learns to move and walk, building on a deeply felt, long-running parental anxiety about the child’s development.

Disgust is largely physical at its root—tied to food and hygiene. Its most basic job is to keep us from eating spoiled food, to protect our bodily balance, and to keep us alive. It still holds an important place in our lives. We smell food to tell whether it’s gone off; when we catch a bad odor, our face scrunches up and we want to get away from—or get rid of—the source. Disgust also keeps us away from things that threaten our personal hygiene.

Over time, this function took on a sociological dimension. Moral values and social norms entered the picture, and we began to feel disgust toward things that aren’t physically “dirty” at all. When someone cuts in line ahead of us, our anger is often laced with disgust. A cheating spouse, a relative caught in a lie, a breach of etiquette, a broken taboo—depending on the society and the moral code we’ve absorbed, any of these can provoke it. The key point is that much of what we call “disgusting” here is learned, not innate: it is a product of social conditioning, and it shifts from culture to culture and era to era.

One of the sharpest examples of using disgust in its social dimension is PETA’s long-running campaign to make wearing fur socially shameful—turning what was once a status symbol into a moral taboo, and making the wearer, not just the product, the object of disgust.

Beyond that, Domestos—a name often filed under “fear marketing”—used disgust for years by depicting germs. But in recent years the brand recognized the risk of tying itself to the very things people find revolting, and as of 2024 it swapped its central visual from germs to a dragon. To my mind, this is one of those cases that ought to be taught in universities for both its causes and its consequences.

Shame, unlike the others, has no biological basis. It is believed to have emerged much later in our evolution. We used to see it in detergent and bleach ads. Should a yellowed shirt or a stain that wouldn’t come out really shame us? Do the things that shamed us in the past still shame us now? That, I suspect, depends on a society’s moral fabric and the specific situation. Nakedness can be shameful—yet the nakedness of someone in a hospital bed carries no such feeling.

In light of all this, it is fair to argue that negative emotions matter enormously to brands because of their power to prompt a counter-action. Even so, I am genuinely unsure whether an insurer does better work by showing the crash and associating itself with catastrophe, or by showing the positive outcomes it protects. Some insurers’ recent ads feel like exactly what they shouldn’t be—and when you factor in shrinking purchasing power, the staged drama can come across, to put it mildly, as “cartoonish.”

A User’s Guide to Fear Marketing yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Brand Extension

goodjob — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 06:25:21 +0000

In our first article on brand extension, we looked at the kind of method a brand should follow when it extends. Every brand’s strategy and brand core—and, with them, its ideal method and area for expansion—differ from the next, so the extension strategy it chooses has to be its own. We examined eight effective methods for this in a separate article. Here, we’ll dig into the advantages brand extension offers, and the disadvantages that (usually when it’s done badly) come with it.

1. The Advantages of Brand Extension

When it’s carried out successfully, brand extension brings a host of advantages. The most fundamental, of course, is that it unlocks the existing brand’s hidden potential in many ways and grows the brand, increasing its value. Beyond that, it has plenty of concrete upsides.

Reaching new audiences: Brand extension can put your brand on the radar of new target audiences, which usually grows your overall customer base and lifts sales. When Dove reached a male audience with its Dove Men+Care sub-brand, when Starbucks began selling ready-to-drink coffee in supermarkets, or when Mini Cooper launched an SUV, each reached a different audience.

Cost efficiency: Alongside new opportunities to earn more, brands want to save on marketing spend and brand management. In a brand extension, because customers already know and recognize the brand (and here, how well and in what way they know it—the brand core—matters), less budget is needed to build awareness. That frees the company to spend its budget and energy on introducing the new product itself, its difference, and its benefit.

Greater brand trust: Thanks to the familiarity effect, a consumer is more likely to try a new product from a brand they already know and trust. If it’s an area that benefits from existing penetration, reach will be very fast, too. Extending the brand’s current strength—in a way that stays meaningful within its existing strategy—to include new products can increase the company’s power in customers’ eyes. The brand thereby widens its sphere of influence and dominance. And because people are exposed to the brand across more channels, it contributes to overall awareness and trust. The packaged products from a coffeehouse chain like Costa Coffee that you see on the supermarket shelf offer a real benefit to the parent brand.

Sharpening brand strategy and image: From time to time, brands feel the need to refresh their image. There can be many reasons: market dynamics may have shifted due to external factors, or an aggressive competitor may have entered and changed the whole game. In that case, a brand may choose to enter new product areas to develop its image. Depending on its nature, a new product area can help the brand reach different audiences, adapt to critical trends shaping the market, and stay current.

Reviving the brand: Sometimes brands need renewal. This may come from a brand having sat too long without relevance, or from market dynamics accelerating and changing. Launching a new product or service can breathe new life into the business.

Leaving no room for competitors: In some cases, beyond the financial or image returns of the new area, brand extension benefits the brand simply by protecting its place on the shelf. Otherwise, a competitor can grow its shelf share, visibility, and brand strength.

Locking customers into an ecosystem: One reason you can’t switch away from your Apple phone may well be that you use a MacBook. In some cases, brand extension makes it possible to create an ecosystem. Even if a customer isn’t thrilled with a product or particularly interested in it on its own, leaving the entire ecosystem creates a far greater emotional and financial pain.

2. The Disadvantages of Brand Extension

As tempting as the dream of extending a brand is, if it isn’t done right, extension can hurt the company and the brand. More than half of brand-extension cases end in failure. Here are the likely effects when they do.

Loss of credibility: If the new products and value propositions aren’t connected to the existing brand core and strategy—or don’t perform as well as them—brand extension can damage the brand’s reputation. A failed extension signals a failed business strategy, which can be read as a management weakness.

A negative effect on brand image: If a brand launches a product or service that underperforms relative to its value proposition and the quality of what it already offers, the parent brand’s image can suffer. And if a brand extends into an area sharply at odds with its brand core and strategy, it can lose standing even for its existing product—because for some brands, the brand core is their personality and values. Offering products or services that violate those values amounts to betraying the core audience. (Mercedes producing more affordable cars—its A-Class segment—is a case worth studying here.)

The drag of brand heritage: In some cases, a brand’s negative heritage is so strong that it becomes a serious ball and chain. Even a new product area may not transform that negative legacy. Here, carrying out the extension with a different brand can be a less costly path with a higher chance of success. The solution lies in structuring the brand architecture model correctly.

Catching a competitor’s eye: Sometimes extending your brand into a strong competitor’s territory can draw its attention and disturb the comfort you enjoy in your own core area. A brand focused on freezers and coolers extending into other home appliances can seriously irritate a few dominant players in that market—who may then, even at the cost of losing money, pressure you in your core area.

Diluting energy and focus: Many kinds of extension beyond adding to a product line—especially when you enter a different category or change the sales channel—can cause a serious loss of energy and focus, and may even require reorganizing the company. In that case, a company can pour excessive effort into extending when it might have grown its brand in other ways. Some furniture brands, for example, spent enormous effort and time trying to extend into carpets, and none succeeded. Those resources could have gone into developing collections, design, and experience—or even into deepening penetration.

The advantages of brand extension are, of course, many. But even when it’s driven by optimism and big dreams, if it isn’t done carefully and correctly, the brand can end up worse for it.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Brand Extension yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

8 Effective Methods for Brand Extension

goodjob — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 08:03:55 +0000

In my previous article, I looked at the steps a brand-extension strategy should follow to succeed. They were, in order: (1) assessing the state of the brand’s intangible assets and its capacity to extend, (2) uncovering opportunities in the competition and in consumers, (3) deciding on the brand-extension model, and (4) adapting it to the business strategy. Here, we’ll examine the areas into which a brand can extend, and how to identify them based on brand strategy.

Every brand’s intangible assets and the brand core[1] it has established in the consumer’s mind are different. That is why brands’ capacity and areas for extension differ from one another. This holds true even for different brands in the same category—brands that may even belong to the same company.

Your brand can be positioned on essentially four cores, and the core that carries your brand strategy determines the best way to extend: what you do, how you do it, who you are, and your brand purpose. Keeping your brand core in mind, you have eight distinct paths to extend.

1. Diversify the product’s content:

This is the first extension method that comes to mind—the one where you’ll spend the least effort convincing consumers about your new product and, done right, the one that succeeds fastest. It doesn’t just win share; it keeps the brand current and leaves competitors no room on the shelf. In this model, extension is achieved through changes to the content of the product or service, to the degree that brand strategy and target market allow. Chocolate brands widen their range—and with it their brand—through changes in product content. KitKat has 43 varieties in Japan alone, and more than 300 have been launched there since 2000.[2] Elsewhere, the number barely fills one hand. The reason for that gap is that the brand core built on KitKat’s brand purpose in Japan (good luck) doesn’t exist in those other markets.

What’s critical in growing a brand through product content is the stance the brand takes when meeting different consumer expectations—and the brand-family model. Beer brands, for example, can diversify their beers. But when Tuborg makes and launches a gluten-free beer, it has to think harder about it. Because shifting consumer expectations—depending on the brand strategy, the brand core, and all of the brand’s intangible assets—may require a shift in the brand model, too. In fact, a brand’s intangible assets may not permit certain extensions, even ones that look as simple as a basic product extension. After all, Tuborg is not just a beer brand; it is a brand that has claimed “MALT” as a method and turned it into its brand core. While Tuborg offers gluten-free beer under its master brand, another brand whose strategy centers on pleasure might ignore this extension, or be forced to extend with a sub-brand.[3]

And was Oreo’s feat of spawning forty-eight products from a single one really down to product-content changes alone? Why couldn’t other biscuit brands do the same? It’s proof of just how important brand strategy and brand strength are.

2. Change the product’s form:

Extension can also be achieved by changing the product’s form or the way it is presented. There are five main elements you can alter to change your product’s form enough to enter a new category. The first is the delivery method. The second is the storage method. The third is the choices you make in in-store placement. Changes to the retail point of sale can also guide how you reshape the product’s form. The one that first comes to mind is changes to product content. A change to one or several of these five elements can carry your brand into a new category.

Snickers put its chocolate-bar product into the freezer cabinet and delivered a successful extension. We later see similar examples in brands like Toblerone. Meanwhile, Starbucks offers ready-to-drink cold coffees not only in its coffee shops but at gas stations, supermarkets, and many other places. It doesn’t stop there: it created an alternative to itself with ready-to-mix instant coffees. By selling these instant coffees in supermarkets, Starbucks changed its product’s delivery method, its point of sale, and its form—all at once—and extended the brand.

3. Transfer the key ingredient to another product area:

Transferring the key ingredient that reveals a brand’s strength—and secures trust in the final product—to another product is another effective extension method. Here, because the strong element in the ingredient will also guarantee the quality of the other product, the extension succeeds.

Honda, for instance, is an expert in engines. That is why it can offer products across cars, motorcycles, and lawnmowers—anything with an engine. The same is true for Husqvarna. These brands succeeded by taking the most fundamental element that affects product performance—the engine—and fitting it into another product.

It doesn’t have to be a technology product. A brand famous for butter can make cheese, or launch butter cookies. A food brand known for tuna—think of a name like John West—might extend, through a sub-brand, into sandwiches, and under its own name into ready-to-eat fish meals. In this model, when the product’s form changes, things may not go as expected. Magnum is an ice-cream brand in which chocolate plays the lead. Its extension into tablet chocolate looked logical, yet it did not succeed. There can be many reasons for that, tied to the target market and the brand.

4. Offer complementary products:

Beyond being a coffee shop, Starbucks is a very good seller of tumblers. Nothing is more natural than coffee and a travel mug completing each other. Here, Starbucks presses the advantage of owning a point of sale and also chooses the path of extending through complementary products.

Signal, meanwhile—though the production processes are very different—stocks toothpaste, floss, and toothbrushes alike. Everything related to teeth falls within the brand’s scope. But Oral-B’s approach to extension is built on expertise (dental know-how), whereas Signal’s is built on brand purpose (the smile). That is why we trust Oral-B’s performance products more, while we feel greater empathy for Signal’s intent.

If a brand’s expertise concerns a product or service, extending into areas that complement it is both possible and likely. One of the best examples here is Google’s extension story. What began with a search engine extended into navigation, an advertising medium, and file storage. Together, these form a world that completes all the needs of the same user. Barilla launching pasta sauce, or Signal producing a toothbrush, are the first examples that come to mind for such extensions. In the same way, nothing seems more natural than a razor brand offering shaving foam.

5. Extend a characteristic you own to different products:

Brands that place their own way of working and their own corporate culture squarely at the center—clearly, as they present the products they make and the services they give—can use that expertise as a vehicle for extension.

What sets this apart from the earlier methods is that the brand isn’t associated directly with a single product (it isn’t like Honda’s engine expertise) or, more importantly, that the system, culture, method, and values behind the product—rather than the product itself—take center stage.

Dyson created a world of its own in product design and technology. Whether the product is a vacuum or a pair of headphones, this brand core is persuasive. Wherever technology and design are involved, Dyson adds unique value with its own way of working and its culture. This brand core frees Dyson from any obligation to be a “home-appliance brand.”

In that sense, even though the product groups Dyson and Apple come to life in are very different, their brand cores resemble each other. If Apple were ever to make a car, there would be strong consensus about how it would look the moment people closed their eyes and imagined it: minimal, white, aluminum, functional.

Brands that draw their “how” from technology and design are in a more advantageous position than others when it comes to extending those elements. Even so, those elements need to matter in the area the extension moves into. Zara, for example, extended into home goods with its Zara Home sub-brand. But does Zara’s “speed” in clothing also give it an edge in home goods? Or, in home textiles, is design not quite so “fast fashion”?

6. Extend the benefit you offer:

A brand’s brand core may focus on the benefit the product offers people, rather than the product itself. In that case, the brand can extend within the frame of that particular benefit.

Arm & Hammer, for example, has a very clear, concrete value proposition: it eliminates tough odors. The brand offers products to deliver that promise in many areas unrelated to one another beyond the fight against bad smells. Some are used inside the fridge; some are sprayed as room fresheners. It even makes sprays and deodorants to prevent bad breath.

Could Red Bull carry its “gives you wings” promise from people to cars, as a gas-station brand? Could Magnum carry its “pleasure” promise into different, highly indulgent areas?

7. Extend the life purpose you own:

When you put a life purpose at your brand core, your brand becomes independent of the product and of how you make it. Nonprofits are born with a purpose by their very nature, which is why WWF could turn into a fashion brand. The clothes carry that special purpose, and people carry that purpose on themselves.

When BOSCH says “Technology for life” and feeds it with Robert Bosch’s legacy, it can offer products fit for that purpose in different areas. It brings together, under one roof, many technologies that enable safe driving for cars, products like spark plugs, power tools, and home appliances.

If Omo says “dirt is good,” it should focus on the beauty of getting dirty in every area of life, and convince us—across different product areas—that we live life better, more beautifully, and more fully by getting dirty. If a hair-care brand like Dove promises to create strong women starting from the hair, it should show up for us in entirely different product groups in the name of women’s empowerment. Of course, these are dreams that look lovely on paper—yet they are thought-provoking examples of how purpose-owning brands can extend.

8. Develop products that embrace a lifestyle and a personality you own:

Complementary products show up differently in brands whose identities are distinctive. There is no equation as simple as toothpaste and a toothbrush here. Brands that reflect the values they hold through a distinctive identity system—and let the buyer reflect them, too—can extend into areas that complement the product line or carry an entirely different characteristic. Virgin Airlines, for instance, pulled this off with its unique and powerful brand personality. The common denominator across all of Virgin’s products is that they depict a lifestyle that stands against the status quo. This worked for some products but sometimes didn’t; Virgin Cola, for example, was a complete flop. Even so, brands with an original, powerful identity can build brands in different areas on the personal values and personality traits they own. Harley-Davidson can sell both motorcycles and boots, and even open a bar. Going further still, it could even found a political party. Harley-Davidson is a brand that makes you become like it and pulls you into its own orbit—a whole identity and community.

Armani, meanwhile, offers fashion and chocolate under one roof—its Armani/Dolci line alongside its clothing—catering to the needs of the top segment. This extension, too, is grounded in a lifestyle and prioritizes socioeconomic status.

Conclusion

In the end, brand extension may be one of the most complex and technical subjects in the world of brands. It should come to life through intensive research and brand-consultancy work. Each of the dozens of examples I have examined here has been read and interpreted in hindsight—but brand extension can only be done according to a forecast of the future. Neither successful extensions nor failed ones serve as one-to-one templates for the next case. Dozens of factors—the conditions of the era, market structure, brand core, brand strength, consumer expectations, competition—shape the success of a brand extension. When every part of the process is carried out effectively and correctly, the brand will successfully chart its own unique path to extension.

[1] Brand Core: a definition produced by Goodjob. It is a renewed version of positioning theory. Where positioning confines a brand to a specific product group or consumer segment, the Brand Core refers to one of the four cores a brand will base its strategy and communication on.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/24/magazine/candy-kit-kat-japan.html

[3] Why extending with a sub-brand or an affiliated new brand is framed as a “necessity” is a separate discussion; but in general, extending a brand using only its own intangible and tangible assets is the ideal one hopes to reach.

8 Effective Methods for Brand Extension yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Brand Consulting Companies and Transformation of the Industry

goodjob — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 09:21:10 +0000

“Today, a brand consultancy company is expected to be a prophet, question like a scientist, and analyze risks like a business person.”

Brand consulting companies are transforming. It is an understatement to say that anything today is in a state of transformation; a cliché. Maybe that’s why saying “brand consulting companies are transforming” isn’t very appealing. I guess the cliché “Pandemic will change everything” also affects this… But some things need to be talked about.

A person who had surgery for appendicitis became more credible than an internal medicine surgeon

As the need for knowledge and the source of knowledge change, sectors whose capital is knowledge are greatly affected. Technological progress does not treat everyone fairly. Doctors experience the greatest impact of this. In the past, doctors were people to whom people surrendered, but now they have been replaced by Google; Doctors are left with surgical interventions that browsers cannot do (there is information about him on the internet). The availability of information presented another problem; accessibility of all kinds of information. All kinds of information, whether qualified or wrong… The reliability of its source is also controversial. A person who has undergone appendicitis surgery has become more credible than an internal medicine surgeon.

The impact of the unpredictable becomes unacceptable. Today, a brand consultant is expected to be both a prophet, a scientist and a business person.

In terms of consultancy and brand consultancy, the effects of this are not surprising. In the past, the person referred to as the “Consultant” was seen as the absolute and absolute source of information, now the information is obvious. There are many marketing theories in the literature; In fact, new ones appear every day. Models, tools, kits… Therefore, consultants who in the past were ostentatious as an absolute source of information (this applies to all consultants) can now provide added value thanks to their ability to adapt to innovation and cultural richness. On the other hand, the measurability of almost everything in marketing requires business processes to be faster and more result-oriented. This makes the job very difficult. The amount of data that needs to be analyzed is increasing, but the patience of companies and managers is decreasing. The impact of the unpredictable becomes unacceptable. Today, a brand consultant is expected to be both a prophet, a scientist, and a business person.

Today, brand consultancy companies have no choice but to base their work on five basic pillars to strengthen the brand by creating a correct and effective strategy for the brand.

5 Indispensable Features of Brand Consulting Companies:
Holistic Market, Competition and Customer Analysis:
The purely market and competition-oriented strategies of the past (some of them are just tactics) have been replaced by complex and partially based on instantaneous data, fed by qualitative and quantitative research. For this reason, it is necessary to use very advanced research and analysis tools for consumer insight. Everyone sees everything visible about the consumer, and it is no longer possible for this to provide a separation. It has been a long time since the advertising and communication industry developed methods to penetrate people’s subconscious. The interesting thing is that the research industry has not adapted to this yet (And this topic will be an article on its own).

Brands should see what others cannot see, and the brand consultant should have glasses that show it naked.

Cultural Design:
The relationship between brand strategy and culture is not at the point Peter Drucker stated; culture no longer has to eat strategy for breakfast. Because what we call culture is not a static thing like it used to be. For this reason, with strategic culture design, it is necessary to identify the distinctive values within the brand/institution and to ensure that the brand strategy lives eternally by redesigning it. Today, a brand consultancy company cannot be only interested in the showcase of the brand it serves. Companies are transparent. The moment you express sensitivity towards women, someone may come out and reveal that you pay women 25% less. You cannot bring to the table what is not cooked in the kitchen. However, it is now possible to create a kitchen for what you need to bring to the table, which was not acceptable in the past.

This subject was examined in more detail in another article published in Marketing Turkey.

Brands should put the power of culture at the center, and brand consultants should stop dealing with the showcase; it should build the necessary culture for the strategy to be permanent and to live for many years.

Person-Brand and Person-Brand Relationship:
Another important issue here is the personal brand. People play a very important role in the formation and development of brands. However, in the past, it had mostly partial representation power for brands and institutions. Both the persons were limited and the power of representation. Now, each employee has turned into a medium and the brand face has its dynamic communication channels. Bill Gates told the newspaper in the past, that he now has 58 million followers on Twitter (Elon Musk’s 80 million).

With a single sentence, he can reduce the shares of IBM, which has 670,000 followers, by 20%. This power has never existed in Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi’s life.

Brands should benefit from the power of individual brands, and brand consultants should have the intellectual background, models, and structures that can create strategies for them.

Brand Strategy:
Brand strategy is the core of the brand consulting profession (if it is a profession). It consists of a brand’s preferences and opt-outs. Although different theories have been put forward about a brand’s focus on a certain value proposition or audience lately, this is the case… No institution or brand has unlimited resources.

Fueled by deep consumer insights under the brand strategy; There are many sub-elements such as the brand’s value proposition, tone and tone, brand personality and values. They should answer what the brand does, how it does it, who it does it for, and why.

Customer Experience Design:
Finally, a brand consultant should have a good grasp of the experience in which the strategy he produces comes to life. On the other hand, he should know how a correct brand name, category-appropriate and distinctive brand identity, effective media preferences, the role of channels in social media, and walking routes in the store or experience areas in the office should be shaped within the framework of the brand strategy.

Brands should not hand over the design of customer experience and touchpoints to strategy-ignorant hands. The brand consultant, on the other hand, should establish absolute dominance in every area where the strategy will come to life.

We started with a cliché and we ended with a cliché. Like brands, brand consultants and brand consultancy companies can generate greater benefits only by transforming. Because wisdom is more important than knowledge, and in today’s world, this wisdom is fed by many sources such as intellectual capital, depth and versatility.

You can read our other article to learn how brand consultancy companies contribute to company growth.

Brand Consulting Companies and Transformation of the Industry yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Culture Doesn’t Have to Conflict With Brand Strategy

goodjob — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 17:16:52 +0000

Culture Doesn’t Have to Conflict With Brand Strategy!

Both the concepts of “culture” and “strategy” are not new. What is new is that these two concepts are used together. Because we have always heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast[1]. In other words, when the two of them get into a duel, culture will always win. Maybe because we accept that culture expresses a status quo and therefore something that cannot be changed (or can hardly change), this thought seemed very reasonable and logical to us. However, there is no need to clash culture and strategy in a way that makes them hurt each other; both of these phenomena just need to be designed rationally. Today, it is necessary to realize the power of the multiplier effect that occurs when culture and strategy work in harmony with each other. This is possible with our Strategic Culture Design model.

When we accepted that companies such as countries, cities, towns and villages also have a culture, things started to reach a slightly different dimension. The interesting thing is that the concept of culture, which is much older than a brand strategy for companies and institutions, is included in the equation so late. When we consider Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, we are talking about a Mehmet Efendi who sells dry coffee and his business culture. In the periods when brands matched with people, people were also equated with culture and many elements (values, rituals, etc.) in it. Over time, marketing and advertising professionals have separated the brand from this equation. They defined marketing as at least shaping perception, if not lying, and convinced people that packaging matters more than content. Those who took things much further here claimed that somehow people’s subconscious can be dominated by hidden elements in the logo and advertisement. A concept called “subliminal” has entered our lives. Maybe this perspective would have continued like this for a while… Maybe companies would believe that keeping the showcase beautiful for a while, no matter what was inside, would bring results and they would manage their brands in this way. For example, he could hide the damage he has done to nature by painting his logos green (YN: Here the author is referring to the term “Green Wash”). However, just as Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based on in his book Black Swan, the impact of the seemingly improbable (COVID-19) enabled many things to transform rapidly. Unlike others, I like to say “I told you so”; I had stated in the expectations for the new year published in Marketing Turkey in 2018 that brands should become more sincere due to the strengthening and transparency of communication. The pandemic, on the other hand, has become a catalyst here, as in many other things.

At the point we have arrived at, first of all, we need to change our perspective on the brand. Brand; It is a multidisciplinary system consisting of culture, brand strategy and customer experience. This system, on the other hand, has to be designed from the inside out, not from the outside in. You cannot serve food that is not cooked in your kitchen in front of your customers.

The Rise of Cultural Design

Cultures, like brand strategy and many other strategies, can be retrofitted. The method is both simple and difficult. It’s simple because designing the sub-elements it has is enough to design the culture. It is difficult because the application is like performing a surgical operation without anesthesia. Everything has to happen in consciousness. For companies, culture is a living organism whose basic building block is human.

On the other hand, there are many limitations in practice. For example, it is very difficult for a company with a status quo culture to create a libertarian brand. An organization can’t have fun creating a strong and successful brand in an area that leaves no room for error. Just like Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, who does his job carelessly and sells stale coffee, cannot create a brand that lives for 150 years…

Culture has two “customers”, so to speak. One of them is the consumers who experience the interior culture as reflected in the products and services and are aware of it even if they do not experience it thanks to the developing communication tools. A culture that “prefers to lose money rather than lose people’s trust” does not and cannot make a bad dishwasher. No one can call the crazy ideas of Lego workers “nonsense”. The most important contribution of culture to the brand strategy is to make the value proposition, which is the reason for customer preference, credible. This is the reason for the recent social responsibility gluttony; corporations think they can shape their culture with ostensible confessions and make a living out of it. What a pity.

The second customer of culture is insiders, employees whose search for meaning is increasing day by day (and peaking in this period). This increases the importance of employer branding.

The Rise of the Employer Brand

In our research on the Changing World of Meaning of the White Collar[2], which we conducted at the beginning of the pandemic, a father said: “We have been at home for a while. The pandemic has had a huge impact on me and my family. Recently, my mind stopped when my daughter came and said, “Dad, you are a very good person”. It turns out we missed a lot of things.” This example may sound so unrealistic to you, I know; hard to believe but true. A little more, a little more, we all found time to stop and think about what we missed.

We are now living in what Microsoft describes and envisions as the “Great wave of resignations[3]” (research from March 2021 indicates that more than 40% of current employees will change jobs within a year). The pandemic has changed business conditions and methods; needs redefined. Because of all this, the role of HR rose rapidly and came to a strategic point. In the past, HR was an operational rather than a strategic part of the business. He was even a “payroll” in some of them. On the other hand, this transformation had to be experienced to increase the importance of the employer brand. As the number of HR people on the boards of directors increases, practices regarding employer brand and culture will also increase.

This extraordinary experience we have had for more than a year has had a significant impact on the lives of our employees. On the other hand, the rapid increase in the importance of the subject paved the way for symbolic and ostensible practices devoid of infrastructure. Do not worry; Just because you wrote “We are a family” on the walls, your employee does not see you as his father. Just because you have organized a training once a month, people do not feel in a learning and developing organization.

At this point, corporate communication and HR will need to do much more together. HR professionals will have to learn brand and communication, corporate communicators will have to learn talent management. Employer brand strategy will be one of the most important issues of the new period.

[1] “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker

[2] The White Collar’s Changing World of Meaning, Goodjob Human Insight & Brand Strategy, August 2020

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work and https://www.marketingturkiye.com.tr/haberler/buyuk-istifa-hareketi/

Culture Doesn’t Have to Conflict With Brand Strategy yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

How Does a Brand Consultant Contribute to Company Growth?

goodjob — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 18:22:53 +0000

A brand consultant plays a critically important role in a company’s growth. So what kind of service does a brand consultant provide, and how do they contribute to that growth?

Who Is a Brand Consultant?

Brand consultants are people with the ability — and the cognitive flexibility — to analyze data, establish cause-and-effect relationships, and develop strategy using certain technical methodologies. There is no formal education program for becoming a brand consultant today; the great majority accompany brands on the strength of the experience they have gained in professional life. That is why the most basic condition for being a good brand consultant is to hold certain competencies — and, beyond that, to have kept developing them over time. When you look at the competency profiles of successful brand consultants, you see people who have managed to fuse several abilities in a single crucible: people who can understand human and social psychology and observe social and cultural interaction.

A few of the ways a brand consultant contributes:

They bring a work history across many different sectors. As an outside eye — or through what they have learned in other sectors — they find fresh ways out of the chronic, sometimes gangrenous problems of the company or its industry.
A brand consultant treats every situation the company faces, good or bad, as a project with a defined timeline. So the problems employees see as unsolvable, and the successes they assume will simply continue forever, are handled in a project-focused way. A brand consultant knows they must arrive at a conclusion — a finding — at the end of any situation. They leave no problem unresolved and no good development unplanned. Thanks to this results-focused approach, the company can act far more nimbly on situations that might otherwise remain unresolved or unplanned for years.
Companies hold their marketing departments responsible for running current activities and set annual performance targets in those areas. As a result, marketing focuses on the results to be achieved within a year — or even a quarter — and on the activities that will deliver them. A brand consultant, by contrast, has little involvement in day-to-day operational work (communication crises aside). So rather than isolated actions, the whole picture is always kept in view — which helps avoid the mistaken or wasteful spending that can occur in areas such as product development, portfolio strategy, brand naming, identity and packaging design, and advertising and communication.

Creating a New Brand:

The process of creating a new brand must be run according to the fundamentals of modern branding and the conditions of the market. We now see fierce competition in almost every category, and today companies can overcome it only through the intangible power of brands. So in new-brand initiatives, you should work with a brand consultant who steers every part of the process. Doing so saves companies a considerable amount: thanks to the qualities listed above, the company spends its budget and resources within a clear plan of priorities. Instead of isolated actions, the whole picture is always considered — which avoids mistaken or wasteful spending in areas like product development, portfolio strategy, brand naming, identity and packaging design, and advertising and communication.

Most often, creating a new brand arises as entering a new category, or — for product expansion within the same category — creating a sub-brand or a premium brand.

Consumer Research:

This is an area that has also spread into brand consulting over the last four or five years. Consumer research should no longer be left to the survey questions of traditional research firms or to leading focus-group studies. For more superficial, generic findings, traditional research firms and their solutions can of course still be used. But today, to solve a decision-making problem at the point of purchase, far deeper methodologies and multidisciplinary approaches are needed. Just think about the number of advertising messages you are exposed to every day. Given that customer attention is steadily shrinking, an insight likely lying in the subconscious is like a brand striking gold.

With this research we reach a very deep customer and market analysis, and the target audience’s cultural and psychological purchasing criteria come to the surface. For this work we use what we consider the current frontier of science: ethnographic research and cognitive-therapy (hypnotherapy) tools.

Developing Brand Strategy:

It is brand strategy that steers all of a brand’s communication activity (value proposition, reason for being, positioning, and so on). If there is no brand strategy, it must be defined from scratch; and a past brand strategy that no longer answers market dynamics must be updated together with a brand consultant and their team. Developing a brand strategy and using its outputs consistently in communication is the key to being etched into the consumer’s mind. Brands that hold no place in the consumer’s mind cannot be said to have brand equity.

For a brand simply to identify its customer’s problem and find a solution is no longer nearly enough. At what we consider today’s frontier of science, when developing brand strategy we start from the emotion sets defined by the science of psychology. For any purchase in any category, we first identify the customer’s pain point through the right emotion sets, then determine in which direction the brand should transform that emotion set. It is now plainly clear that brand-strategy documents which say nothing about emotional transformation have no real-world equivalent. Through this work, a document with the standing of the brand’s constitution emerges — independent of individual opinions (the Board, the company owner, marketing managers, the brand consultant, and so on).

Brand Equity Audit:

Sometimes a brand consultant does not carry out active development at all. Commissioning a brand and marketing audit while things are going well is work whose fruit companies reap over the long term. For brands, when things are going well — periods of profitable growth — the goal is to extend the duration of that period, and an audit is one method used to maximize the potential gains. In this work, the brand consultant and their team focus on the company’s marketing activities, studying the bond built with the consumer and the long-term health of revenue channels. They report objectively to the Board, the company owner, or marketing department managers, with findings on what is healthily improving and what needs to develop. When things are going well at a company, victory-drunkenness among management and employees is not a rare thing.

How Does a Brand Consultant Contribute to Company Growth? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Frequently Asked Questions About Brand Consulting and Brand Naming

goodjob — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 18:18:33 +0000

Below we share the questions we most often encounter about brand consulting and brand naming, along with our answers.

What Stages Are Needed to Create a Brand?

First, we need to understand this principle: brands exist in minds. For that, you need a brand strategy that can live in the mind. This strategy is built by carrying out a strategic brand analysis — analyzing the consumer, the competition, the market, and the brand’s current situation, and interpreting the data. Brand ideas set without a comprehensive, detailed analysis have, believe me, already been thought of by many of your competitors before you; either they are hard to implement or they are far from the realities on the ground. So the first stage is a detailed research and analysis process. Then, by examining this data, the brand strategy is created. Bringing the strategy to life is applied in two stages: the first is adapting the brand to the defined strategy, and the second is turning that strategy into a marketing plan. This is generally carried out by companies’ marketing departments. Brand-consulting firms can also provide brand-management consulting during the implementation of the marketing plan.

How Is Brand Strategy Brought to Life?

The brand strategy has been set, the brand applications made, and a marketing plan prepared and put into action. A project like this is completed in roughly 6 to 12 months, but the brand needs to keep applying the defined strategy in its ongoing marketing communication. Remember: if you keep hitting the same spot, you leave a mark. So you must patiently apply the same brand strategy. In a branding project, research and consulting firms can sometimes be intertwined structures, and sometimes the research firm and the brand-consulting firm are separate. What matters is that the process of interpreting research findings and turning them into strategy does not run in a disconnected way. At Goodjob we apply this structure in an integrated way, keeping research and strategy under one roof throughout a branding project.

How Do You Become a Brand?

A brand needs a reason for being, a set of values to fulfill that reason for being, and a passionate team to bring the strategy to life. Becoming a brand, contrary to popular belief, is not hard at all. The methods that lead to success have been applied for decades and keep producing results. What matters is putting those methods into practice. Any person and any company can enter the branding process and become a brand by following the steps of brand creation. It is not enough for a company to say “I want to be a brand.” It must grasp the importance of branding very well and carry out what needs to be done — with the help of brand-consulting firms. Brand-consulting firms speed up the process for companies and ensure that the company’s resources are used more efficiently.

Which Are the Best Consulting Firms?

Rather than answering “which are the best consulting firms?” by naming firms, it is more useful to ask what the qualities of the best consulting firms are:

They are firms that, with original brand ideas, let a brand stand apart from its competitors in the market with ease.
They are the ones who make sure the brand strategy they build is applied in the field, not just on paper.
They are firms that chase results, not fame and reputation.

How Much Are Brand-Consulting Fees?

Brand-consulting firms can price their services in two different ways: project-based or as monthly consulting. What matters here is how much time the consultant and the expert working on the project devote to that particular brand-consulting project. An hourly brand-consulting fee is set on the basis of the labor to be allocated to the project.

What Is the Difference Between a Management Consultant and a Brand Consultant?

In very short terms, a management consultant designs the inside of the company, while a brand consultant designs the outside of the brand. The management consultant determines how the company will be run internally — its organization, roles, and responsibilities — while the brand consultant determines how the brand should be perceived by consumers or customers.

What Positions Exist in Brand-Consulting Firms?

In brand-consulting firms there are strategist brand consultants responsible for strategy, analysts who work during the project’s analysis phase, and technical experts who work on technical branding projects. Brand-consulting projects require a professional team fluent in more than one discipline, because the process — which begins with research and continues through the discovery of consumer insight and the setting of strategy — needs to draw on different disciplines. These disciplines may include sociology, psychology, business, anthropology, communication, statistics, and the fine arts.

How Is a Brand Name Found?

Finding a brand name has become harder than ever. Names that ad copywriters once found by leafing through mythology dictionaries at agencies are now almost impossible to register — in short, the mythology dictionary is exhausted. Every month, hundreds of thousands of new brand-name registration applications are filed around the world. In an age where finding a registrable brand name keeps getting harder, brand naming has itself turned into a specialty — a process in which experts in linguistics or writing create new brand names by applying specific methods. To get more detailed information on this, get in touch.

Brand Name Creation Techniques

Some of the brand-name creation techniques are as follows.

Founder brand names: like Ford…
Descriptive brand names: like Facebook…
Invented brand names: like Kodak…
Metaphorical brand names: like Apple…
Abbreviation brand names: like SAP…
Meaningful-alteration brand names: like Netflix…

Brand-name guides, brand-name generators, brand-name software, and brand-name tools are among the frequently used methods. But finding and deciding on the name of a brand that is dreamed to become very large in the future is very hard to do with such tools and methods. Because, as is well known, a brand’s greatest asset is its name. For example, the ease with which a brand name comes to mind takes priority over all the shapes and signs related to that brand. All the visual assets created for that brand are designed to serve the brand name. Awareness stands at the very top of the criteria that determine brand performance — and awareness is a measure tied to the brand name.

Frequently Asked Questions About Brand Consulting and Brand Naming yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

What Does Brand Consulting Add to Your Brand?

goodjob — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 18:07:51 +0000

Brand consulting has not been a profession for very long, and there is still no clear perception of what it is or what benefit it offers.

Brand Consulting Optimizes

The most fundamental benefit of a brand-consulting service is that it optimizes branding processes and marketing activities. This optimization takes shape when several dimensions work together. Because the resources of brands — and of the companies that own them — are not infinite, spending those resources so as to achieve the most productive result is the most basic benefit of this work. That is also why brand consulting requires producing results that are specific to the brand and suited to the brand’s own world.

1. Setting the Right Brand Strategy

A brand grows stronger in the light of — and by giving direction to — the business strategies of the company that owns it. Making the right decisions for a strong brand, and keeping those decisions consistent, is not a matter unrelated to strategy. What brands choose matters as much as what they choose to give up. Determining the right strategy across every area — product strategy, pricing strategy, channel strategy, and communication strategy above all — also creates efficiency inside the company. R&D, for example, can focus on design rather than sheer efficiency, and spend more of its energy and money there.

For instance, the strategy we created for a food brand we worked with defined exactly what should be on the menu — and what could never be on it. In time this became a guide for the company’s employees as well: people could turn down alternatives or opportunities that came their way simply by saying, “This isn’t right for our brand.” That is a big advantage.

2. Finding the Right Business Partner

The second most important benefit of brand consulting is finding, among the hundreds or thousands of business partners in the marketing ecosystem, the one that fits the brand best. Every brand and every brand’s needs create different truths. For this reason, a brand consultant evaluates a partner’s work not by personal taste but within the framework of the strategy — and the agency, in turn, is more confident that its work will be judged correctly.

3. Giving the Right Brief and Reading the Result Correctly

For example, in a brief we once gave to one of the best-known corporate-identity design studios for a brand we were about to create, there was a statement like this:

“The logo needs to be orange. Because no competitor in the market uses this color — and at the same time it fits the brand’s strategy and personality very well.”

In the end the studio produced six alternative corporate-identity designs, and every one of them was orange. The studio focused its creativity on the logo’s other elements and offered different shades of orange as the alternatives. The logo that was chosen — and the brand that was created — is this one.

4. Making the Right Investment

In the end, every decision made and every piece of work done for a brand is an investment, and that investment draws on many limited resources — money, effort, and time above all. A brand-consulting service ensures this investment is made in the most correct way. Ideal consulting in any field, in essence, protects people from risks and unnecessary costs; and a good brand consultant returns far more than the fee they are paid.

One Condition

There is a single condition here. Brand owners taking on a service that might be considered a “luxury,” like brand consulting, should not treat it the way they would service at a restaurant. Brand owners and everyone working for the brand must be aware that they are one team — they should feel as though they are building a wall together. Because a brand consultant can guide you with their ideas and experience, but they can never know your brand better than you do, nor manage it better than you can. In other words, it is simply not possible for them to know your business better than you do.

What Does Brand Consulting Add to Your Brand? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Fashion and Brand

goodjob — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:47:55 +0000

The relationship between fashion and brand is at the same time a struggle… Fashion and brand are two separate concepts that support each other yet work by opposing parameters. Let’s start with the concept of “fashion.” The dictionary defines fashion roughly as follows:

1. noun A temporary novelty that enters social life out of a need for change or an affectation of adornment.
2. A social taste that is influential for a certain period; an excessive fondness shown toward something.
3. adjective Temporarily in keeping with novelty and social taste.

What these three definitions have in common is that fashion is a social concept and a temporary one. For something to be in fashion, it has to be sought after, liked, bought or used by a certain segment of society in a certain period. In other words, at the core of fashion lies change — being influenced by certain movements and feeding off many social events.

In the past, changes in fashion came to life along more naive lines and spread over a longer time. For example, the wide, big-collared shirts, bell-bottom trousers, carved wooden armchairs, exaggerated bouffant hair, mustaches, hats and hundreds more that we saw in the films of the 1970s went on showing their influence for quite a long time — partly because society was not under conditions that forced it to push itself to change. Today, though, alongside long-term movements there are also many short-lived ones in fashion, sometimes changing from season to season. Among so many fashion experts it is, of course, not for me to debate or define fashion; the part that concerns me is fashion’s contribution to, and effect on, brand strategy.

Branding, unlike fashion, is based not on change but on constancy. It requires faithfully continuing the same strategy for many years — perhaps for centuries. Branding is about striking the same point again and again, like water boring through stone drop by drop, and about continuously using the brand in the same sentence as similar concepts. It is at exactly this point that fashion and brand clash.

Creating a strong brand is possible by meeting some emotional or physical need of a certain consumer group and continuing that strategy patiently. In this light, brands that read changes in fashion well and gauge the scale of change well can turn it to their advantage — while those that overreact are doomed to pay for it in later seasons.

Brands must understand individual and social psychology well. Then they can give fashion direction and find a place within the movement as a player. The sudden changes that occur in society must of course be examined carefully, and what is needed must be done. But what is essential is the brand’s strategy, and what keeps brands standing is keeping pace with fashion without breaking that strategy. For example, if you are a brand that appeals to families with children and that year’s fashion color is white, then your furniture needs to be stain-resistant, easy to wipe clean, or fitted with washable covers — because otherwise the families with children who are trying to keep up with fashion will not be happy with your furniture.

Brands that spin in the wheel of fashion mostly carry the banner of abstract values. They hold within them concepts like freedom, prestige, comfort and nonconformity. Brands that adopt a whole lifestyle strengthen more easily, because after a while merely choosing that brand can, in itself, stop pleasing its loyal audience if the brand strays. It should never be forgotten that the people who are our benefactors are our core target audience — those who believe in our brand’s values and, when the occasion calls for it, represent the brand. Between fashion and brand there is a relationship that nourishes each side but also makes life difficult for the other.

For example, a brand that promises health should not start making flip-flops just because flip-flops have become fashionable. (Many experts have said that flip-flops are unhealthy. But even a shadow of a doubt about this should be enough for a health-promising brand to step back.) In the automotive world, a brand that promises safety must not be swayed by changes that would keep up with fashion at the expense of safety, and must not let a shadow fall over the values it champions.

In the end, fashion steers consumers toward change, and that change results in shopping. But from that shopping, the brands that come out ahead are the ones that can hold on to their strategy while keeping pace with fashion.

Mağaza Magazine / October 2012

Fashion and Brand yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.