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Before You Can Market Something, You Need to Know What You’re Marketing

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I was talking with an internet consultant contact of mine the other day – chatting about how he helps businesses with their online client acquisition strategies. In the midst of our conversation he said something very interesting – something that resonated with my own experience:

 

‘Before I even get into the online strategy I spend a lot of time working with clients identifying what they actually sell. You’ll be surprised how many don’t know…’

 

Now clearly you’ll be assuming that this guy must work entirely with morons. How on earth can they not know what they’re selling?

 

Well of course they know what they’re selling – at least on a functional level – in our case, holidays, airline seats, hotel rooms, destinations etc. But they don’t understand what they’re really selling – what their unique proposition to the market is. Why people are buying from them.  That’s where people like me and him come in.

 

Let’s take holidays or weekend breaks – as that’s the market we’re in. One thing consumers have these days is a wealth of choice – of places to go, hotels to stay in, airlines to fly, or people to organise it through. So why should they choose your destination, hotel, airline or tour operator? What makes you unique?

 

If you can’t sum answer that question in a succinct sentence or 2, you’re in trouble because if you can’t do it, you can bet your potential customers can’t do it either.

 

Let’s take an example – SouthWest Airlines in the US, the airline that Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair is modelled on. Their proposition? The low cost airline.

 

OK, that doesn’t seem so profound. It doesn’t need to be, it just needs to be directional for everyone that works there. The (as in the one and only, the lowest cost) low cost airline as a proposition tells staff in no uncertain terms that costs must be stripped out wherever possible. Everything must be done for less than other airlines pay.

 

Ever wonder why Michael O’Leary keeps coming out with outrageous pronouncements about what they’re going to charge for next – toilets, fat people etc? Well, first of all, the press laps it up and it’s good for PR. Secondly, he’s sending a signal to the travelling public and his staff that he’ll leave no stone unturned to make the basic ticket cheaper. If that means charging people for toilet trips and love handles so the normal cast-iron bladdered and svelte travelling public can fly for less, then so be it. Both Ryanair and Southwest Airlines are relentless in living and communicating their propositions – we might not like them, but we expect them to be the cheapest (even when sometimes they’re not.)

 

I should explain that a proposition isn’t a strapline – you don’t have to use it in your advertising (although you can if you want to). It’s succinct way of summing up what makes your organisation or place unique. But if you company lives it, and communicates it, then customers will see and experience something consistent. They’ll understand what you’re about and they can make an informed decision as to whether they want to buy into that concept. If they don’t know what you’re about, they’re not going to value what you sell.

 

Your proposition might be based on a functional benefit, like costs, or an emotional one, like fun, romance or security. Perhaps your company knows it’s destination like nobody else does, is the leading specialist in a certain type of travel, is the best place to pursue a particular activity or has staff that are obsessed with great service. Or a unique combination of those things.

 

Whatever your proposition is, it needs to:

 

• Differentiating, a reason people would choose you and nobody else,
• Appealing to enough people to meet your business objectives,
• Actionable, so your team can live it and communicate it and
• Credible, because otherwise you’ll get rumbled and in the social media age, you’ll probably get rumbled in a very public way

 

And if you’re racking your brains and you really can’t think what it is – and plenty of organisations, including big ones, spend time wrestling with this dilemma – you can come and talk to someone like me.

Brand Vision & Values: It’s Common Sense, Isn’t It?

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People are always telling me that marketing is ‘common sense’ – usually those not in the profession or those that have made a made a move from another role.

 

Frankly, this particular observation drives me round the twist.  It’s like telling a doctor all those years of study and practice were a waste of time as you can just look up your ailment on the internet.  Quite apart from that it’s clearly wrong.  We’re surrounding by thousands of examples of ‘common sense’ marketing and do we pay a jot of notice to it – probably not.

 

But every now and again, something really cuts through all the surrounding clutter. And creating those campaigns requires a deep understanding of target customers, the brand’s own message and the fundamentals of communication and persuasion. Let me give you an example of how transformative clearly expressed vision and values can be.

 

I had the good fortune back in 2003 to work with a chap called Marcus Codrington Fernandez, one of the UK’s leading brand gurus – the man behind the success of brands such as IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Orange.

 

My brand, Simply Travel, was drifting – and drifting in the wrong direction. Our campaign was becoming increasingly ineffective, our service levels were slipping – everything we tried had little or no effect. Like many marketers, I was focusing on the tools – trying different advertising formats, different timings of mailings and emailings and different offers. Good ‘common sense’ marketing – problem was, I wasn’t getting the message right.

 

Marcus had been recommended by another supplier. I met him more in hope than expectation. He suggested he spend some time with members of the Simply team – both old and new and across all functions – to define a positioning for the brand that we could use to shed new light on all our activity.

 

The_Celestial_Model_of_Brand_Vision_and_Values

The Celestial Model of Brand Vision and Values

Marcus’s aim was to define a vision for the brand – a guiding star upon which we kept our gaze firmly fixed as we moved forward – and 5 values, the rungs on the celestial ladder we needed to ascend if we were going to reach our goal. For him, we needed to define no more. No rational benefits, emotional benefits, brand attributes or any of the other numerous and sometimes unfathomable layers of the ‘brand onion.’ His view was if you got the vision and values right, and then followed the fundamentals of good communication, everything else would flow. Like a deliciously simple recipe you can easily remember and make again and again rather than one with an irritatingly long list of instructions.

 

So what did he come up with? He defined our vision as ‘Helping People to Find Their Own Way’ – a beautifully simple way of defining our role for our clients. We weren’t there to tell them what to do, but we weren’t there to stand back and let them do it all themselves and make inevitable and avoidable mistakes.  We were facilitators and helpers – enabling people to discover the little known and unspoilt parts of the Mediterranean we loved, but in their own way.

 

Our values? Chatty, Honest, Informative, Nimble and Surprising or ‘CHINS’ as they became known.

 

Onions - Great for Eating But Not So Great for Defining Brands

Onions - Great for Eating But Not So Great for Defining Brands

Chatty because we were passionate about what we did and wanted to share it with people, because we viewed our customers as fellow travellers rather than transactions and because we were just as interested in them as they were in us. Honest because the places and properties we chose were authentic and we wanted to depict them in as honest a light as we could because that made for happy customers. Informative because we knew our destinations and properties inside out and wanted to share our knowledge with those who wanted to listen. Nimble because we moved fast to deal with customers problems and faster than our competitors in unearthing new places. And surprising because people like surprises – good ones at least – and they’re what makes an experience memorable. And memorable holidays make people want to come back and tell others about them.

 

By reviewing all our activity in the cold light of these visions and values, we made some remarkable things happen. Our customer service ratings in the UK and overseas leapt up after 4 years of decline. Our marketing efforts scooped awards at CIMTIG’s annual bash. And I’m sure we outperformed the market – we certainly outperformed our sister brands at TUI.

 

My point is that we have a tendency to get immersed in the best ways of using the tools in marketing rather than focusing on the core message which will resonate with our customers. The ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ or the ‘how, so to speak.  But I can be the most skilled paintbrush user in the whole of the world – without a vision I’m just a painter/decorator, not an artist.

 

So the next time someone tells you marketing is ‘just common sense’, you can tell them from me that they’re right – ‘run-of-the-mill’ marketing is common sense.  And great marketing is sense too, but of an entirely more uncommon variety.

BA’s Campaign Proves to Go Forwards You Sometimes Need to Look Backwards

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I rather like British Airway’s ‘To Fly, To Serve’ campaign. As a marketer it appeals to me on several levels.

 

Firstly, it’s focusing on what is perceived as a core brand strength – service, delivered in a distincly British way. As BA’s MD of Brands and Customer Service, Frank Van Der Post, put it:

 

‘BA is a very strong brand. We do not need to reinvent ourselves as something else. What we need to do is to tell the story a little louder.’

 

Secondly, they’re backing words with actions – £5bn of investment in new aircraft, new cartering and new technology to enable their staff to deliver better service and their customers to better serve themselves (i.e. the ability to print their own luggage tags at the airport).

 

Thirdly, they’re involving their staff – which makes sense as your staff are at the core of any service proposition. Not only are they focusing aspects of the campaign on specific staff and their stories, but they clearly see re-instilling staff pride in the brand is as important as re-instilling our pride in the national flag carrier.  The ‘To Fly, To Serve’ positioning is not only something for staff to rally around, it’s a challenge they for them to live up to.

 

Fourthly (!?), the agency has had the courage to say something that’s already there will do the job rather than trying to be clever and inventing something new.  That’s brave, and it’s a bravery that many marketers don’t display in their haste to ‘put their stamp’ on the brand.

 

In ‘To Fly, To Serve’ BA’s agency, BBH  have unearthed and lovingly restored something right at the foundations of the brand – a bit like a marketing ‘Time Team’.  For me, it highlights we should all be great students of our brands – brand archaeologists, so to speak – as often we’ll need to look backwards to inspire our brands to go forwards.

 

When I was at Simply Travel, we didn’t need to look back that far but just glancing at the brochure covers from 5-10 years previously of women herding sheep in Crete reminded us that the core appeal of the brand was the ability to transport people to places from which they could enjoy their own authentic experiences. Our brand was more about the authenticity of a place than the facilities of the accommodation.

 

I should imagine that there are many travel brands out there that have lost their way – in the search for growth and new customers they’ve compromised the core essences of their brands. And if your potential customers start to get confused about what you stand for, your ability to command a premium erodes away.

 

I’m not saying travel companies shouldn’t innovate, but see your brand as a house. Make tasteful alterations to exterior and interior to bring it up to date, but don’t mess with the foundations otherwise you’ll bring the whole thing toppling down.