The 5 Ds of Branding
Everyone knows about the 4 Ps of marketing (or 7 Ps if you’re a service, or even more for some things), but do you know about the five Ds of Branding? We could be cute and call them the 5 Dimensions of Branding. But they aren’t dimensions, and that would simply weaken what we are trying to say.
In a certain sense, branding is the very top of the marketing food chain. A corporate branding programme can cost anything from £50,000 for an NHS Foundation Trust, where there is almost no leeway for name or graphical treatment, to several £ million for a branding exercise for a major international product. I once met the guy who came up with the Orange brand name. I think the cost was £3 million, though I may have misremembered. That was more than a decade ago. His process was fascinating, and it wasn’t hard to see why it cost so much. He was obviously used to having to defend the figure, though: he pointed out that since Orange had come onto the market, BT had changed their mobile phone brand three times, and would probably change it another three times. And he was right. Interestingly, the meeting where I ran into him was about rebranding Coventry. I seem to remember that the tender eventually went against his company. Which may explain why, ten years later, Coventry is still not a brand to be conjured with.
There are tens of thousands of brands in the world around us. Most of us would be pushed to name twenty, though if we were given enough categories, most of could probably name several hundred. More to the point, though, in all but a very few categories, most of us would be pushed to name more than three. Name three brands of car? Easy. Jaguar, Rover, Ford, Kia, Opel, Audi. The list goes on. Name three brands of sugar? Erm… Tate and Lyle… any others? Three brands of motor oil? Duckhams, Castrol… any more? Three brands of vacuum cleaner? Hoover, Dyson… erm? Actually, if you drive up the M6 you will see hundreds of brands plastered on the sides of white vans, trucks and tankers. But most of them will be ones you don’t recognise, even if you are actually quite interested in those services. Some of them may be purely local brands. But a large proportion of them are simply brands that do not work very well.
I followed a van today which had the name “Vantage” emblazoned on the side, with a sort of double circle sign in the top right hand corner. Even after looking carefully at the unusual roof-rack on the top I was none the wiser about which product it was selling. Was this Vantage Highchairs, or Vantage Electronics, or Vantage Satellite Receivers, or Vantage Technologies of Sheffield, or Vantage Land, or Vantage Estate Agents, or even Vantage Spit Roasters? Who can say? The fact is, I might very well be in need right now of the product that that van was carrying, but as I have no idea what it was, and the logo was entirely anonymous, they gained no business from the £1,000 it probably cost to paint the van with those logos.
Most people, when they talk about branding, feel it has something to do with a new logo, or perhaps a new name. A true branding programme may very well result in the development of a new logo, or indeed a new name. But it does not necessarily result in the development of either.
The vast majority of brands most of us bump into are Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs), perhaps with names like PB Electricals, or Stechford Roofers, or Procter and Smith Removals, which, if unremarkable, have the advantage of telling you instantly what they do. More ambitious SMEs, however, quickly err into names like Vantage, Synergy, or Ideal, which say nothing about the product and nothing credible about the company. Furniture companies seem to prefer grandiose titles. Manufacturers of leather sofas are the worst culprits. We have seen many unconnected companies called things like Leather Village, Leatherland, World of Leather, or even, in Belgium, Univers de Cuir. The mind boggles slightly at an entire universe made out of leather.
Ultimately, a brand is a distillation of a distinctive promise to the end customer. All of the SME brands I have just listed fail in this regard. The first three, PB Electricals, Stechford Roofers and Procter and Smith Removals set out the general area of their activities, but they do not distil any particular promise. Vantage, Synergy and Ideal are neither distinctive, nor distillations, nor a promise of any kind. The various geographical entities of leather equally fail to make any particular promise.
Saint Paul famously wrote that “I become all things to all men…”. This is probably the right approach for a missionary (I speak from some experience), but it is exactly the wrong approach for a brand. And, in fact, the brand that Paul was selling, Christianity, was exactly non-negotiable, and Paul’s complete flexibility in his own behaviour was, at least in part, so as not to undermine the distinctiveness of that brand. SMEs which choose names like Vantage, Synergy or Ideal generally do so because they want to keep their options open, rather like Universal Import/Export, the cover name for MI6 in the James Bond novels. But keeping options open is exactly what a brand should not do.
Therefore, the first D of branding is Decision.
Decision
For a brand to be successful, there must first be decision about what it actually is, and who it is for. Wolff Olins suggests that a brand can be based around a product, or an environment, or a communication, or a set of behaviours, or, often, one of these supported by one or more of the others. Ultimately, the brand must reflect and portray the decisive features that make that product, or environment, or communication, or behaviours what they are. Any attempt to keep the options open, perhaps to sell into more than one market, or at more than one market position, or to try to brand two or more disparate things in the same way, is doomed to failure.
Distillation
Secondly, a brand is a distillation. Advertisers used to talk about Unique Selling Points (actually, they still do, although the more advanced ones are getting sniffier about this). The notion of a USP doesn’t necessarily work for all products, but the idea behind it, that you have to get to the nub of what you are really saying, is sound. Remember though, that a brand is a distillation of a promise, not a distillation of the product, environment, communication or behaviour itself. Many SMEs struggle with distilling the promise because they are so in love with the product they have created that they want to showcase all its benefits. I once spent a year trying to brand a new kind of friction material for car brakes. The German and Spanish engineers who had developed it kept on telling me more and more features (less polluting, lasted three times longer, very little fade as compared to other brakes, less dust, cleaner dust, etc). Whenever I tried to distil the promise, they explained to me first that this was only a small part of what this material did, and also that I was generalising too much. The lower fade was only on the vehicles they had tested… it would be entirely false to claim that it applied generally, until they had tested all the possible vehicles. After thirteen months I left the company, and I still haven’t heard whether they eventually came up with a name for it. Your product may indeed be all things to all people, but your brand promise can be exactly one thing, to exactly one market segment. If you want to market it to a different audience, introduce some variation and market it under a different brand!
Differentiation
To compete in the market place, the brand promise must differentiate itself from competitors. In the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (which is a darned good book, despite the rather over-selling title), Al Ries suggests that if you are the second to market, you should pick as your brand colour the opposite of the first to market’s. Differentiation is about differentiating yourself in the mind of your target buyer. If your target buyer is middle-class men over the age of fifty in Britain, and your product is exquisitely bound and superbly translated tales from Viking Iceland, the name Saga Books would not be a winner — not because it fails to distinguish you from other kinds of books, but because Saga Holidays (and previously Saga Radio, now Smooth FM) is one of the biggest brands in that market place. Note that this is exactly the opposite differentiation strategy from the one mandated on you by UK Intellectual Property’s register of trademarks, which stipulates that you cannot register a trade mark in a product sector where that trademark already exists. Clearly you would be foolish to choose a brand name which was similar to an existing brand for a similar product that sold outside your target market — aside from the trademark issues — because the brand value of that brand would be working against you, giving your customer the impression that you were really aiming at a different market. Remember that the brand is a distinctive promise. Your product may be identical to that of your main competitor. For example, if you are selling regular salt, you are unlikely to persuade customers on the basis of product quality, product features, or cost. But you can still make a brand promise — for example, “Salt of the Earth”, “Sustainable Sea Salt”, “Fairtrade Salt”, “Yorkshire Salt”, etc, which makes a promise about where the salt has come from, or how it has been obtained. You could even use pure showmanship (Olins’s ‘communication’ brand vector) and call it “Old Fashioned Salt”.
Discipline
The fourth D is Discipline. There is no effective branding without brand discipline. If you bring “Fairtrade Salt” to market, and the brand is successful, you have to exert great brand discipline to make sure that you continue to source your salt by fairtrade means. A whiff of exploitative practices, and your fairtrade credentials disappear. Equally, if you are marketing ‘Old Fashioned Salt’, then you need to conform all of your marketing to the old fashioned image. It goes without saying that logos must be used consistently, strictly adhered to and strictly defended (more often from well-meaning sales people who want to lengthen or compress the logo to fit on a PowerPoint slide than from competitors). However, if your biggest customer suddenly decides that they are modernising all their shops and no longer wish to stock products with old fashioned labels, then you have to strongly resist the urge to modernise the product to protect your short term sales. Rather, you should go back to the drawing board and perhaps offer to supply “Techno-Salt — scientifically balanced for osmotic benefit”. Just make sure you don’t deliver it in the Old Fashioned Salt van.
There are only a very limited number of branding strategies out there — Corporate brands, such as the NHS or IBM, allow no variation in graphical treatment or use of the name. Their sub-brands are subtitles to the overall brand, nothing more. Endorsed brands, such as Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruits, etc, allow for a wider range of treatments. Separate brands, such as Techno-Salt and Old Fashioned Salt, depend on their separation to be successful. Once you have settled on a branding strategy, you have to stick to it with enormous discipline. An ill-disciplined brand is like an ill-rehearsed band: it falls to pieces in performance.
Delivery
Finally, your brand is exactly as strong as its delivery. Do you deliver what your brand promises? If not, your brand collapses. Contrariwise, every time you deliver on your promise, your brand equity increases. Consider the growth in brand equity of Microsoft. In the early 1980s, Microsoft was the very junior partner of IBM in the hardware driven world of the desktop Personal Computer. Initially all the brand equity belonged to IBM. It was only when Columbia Data Products cloned the IBM BIOS that the market was flooded with cheaper PCs. However, the testing stone of every PC clone was the question of whether it would run MS-DOS — Microsoft’s Disk Operating System. Every time a PC-clone started up, there was a whirring, and eventually a message telling you that MS-DOS was successfully running. That message was the mark of a working computer. When Microsoft took Windows from a rather flakey graphical task-switcher (Desqview was much better) to a proper environment, it made sure that the Microsoft logo was even more prominent than it had been on the MS-DOS start-up. Microsoft has attracted masses of criticism from all kinds of people, and is hated by many. But it has probably the highest brand-equity of any brand in the world. As much as people may curse their computers, and curse Windows, the appearance of the Microsoft logo is the sign that all is well: Microsoft delivers again.
Thus, we have the five Ds of Branding. Or BranDing, if you want a connection. Decision, Distillation, Distinctiveness, Discipline and Delivery. Provided that there really is a market for your product, a brand with these characteristics will exponentially strengthen your product offering. A brand which fails on one of these may succeed, providing the other brands in the market are weak, but it will greater investment for less impact.