WHITE PAPER

April 2013

Authentic clarity; Brands need to be honest with themselves from the bottom up
The average Marketing Managers tour of duty is said to be about two years. Cynics accuse FMCG marketers of using the Triple R approach to career building: repackage, relaunch, resign! The broader problem is this: marketers often have little or no influence on product development, yet bear the responsibility for sales. The biggest tool they have to play with is branding. Thus all too often we see expensive rebrandsand wonder why?. Too often these efforts concentrate on visual uniformity rather than substantive differentiation. Most product categories have a wellestablished communication language; rarely do these get re-written. Too often branding campaigns are purely aspirational rather than authentically representative of the business/product/service. This is known as Top-down brandingoften built on wishful thinking its perhaps the most expensive and wasteful form of brand illiteracy out there. This is often seen in the branding work by banks, insurance companies, big resource companies, investment houses and airlines which struggle to find clear, tangible differentiation. Its also deeply attractive to the marketing manager wanting the biggest splash for his/her resume for the least amount of inconvenience to his/her employer! Every brand ultimately relies on effective execution; corporate ID, campaign ideas, selling propositions, layout design are all important, but ultimately your brand is based on how your customers and, importantly, your employees experience your products and services. Experience trumps style, every time. It is short-sighted to develop your brand du jour based on how you want customers to see you rather than showing them the truth. Customers see the branding, compare it with their own experience and chalk it down to just another advertising lie. Their guard goes up and their trust goes down. Classic Top-down brand advertising is easy to identify. It costs a lot and usually features happy, generic people doing happy generic things while music plays and voices either sing or speak. Few specifics are provided. It is full of promises and hopefulness It tries to convince you that, hey, theyre people, too, and you really ought to like them. Sometimes its job is to do little more than say weve got a new logo and tagline. The top-down view is that if you just get the branding right everything else will fall into place. Service organisations, with their intangible products, often resort to this approach, and in most categories, this way of thinking simply results in a very costly public dialogue between an advertiser and himself. because despite the brand work, nothing about the company or the product actually changes. A common trigger for this increasingly discredited but still common form of branding is when the product or service is becoming commodotized. Branding gets sold as a solution where genuine innovation has failed - which of course it never is. This kind of branding is based on wishful thinking at best, on lies at worst. If you cant find an authentic differentiator for your product, you should probably go back and work harder on the product! The strongest branding is built bottom-up. Instead of getting customers to try our offering by convincing them to love our brand, we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our offering - which is good enough to delight them. A key platform for effective bottom-up branding is what I call Authentic Clarity. Authentic Clarity is what is sounds like simply telling the truth: To your customers, to your employees, and to yourself (the company). When you do that everything else falls into place. Then your brand makes sense and the stories you tell support your brand resonate deeply because your brand is you.

by Swordfish Advertising & Marketing

Truth is the only defensible competitive advantage. Im not sure why this is controversial, but its true. Seth Godin

And heres the hard bit the bit that those Triple R managers dont like: Authentic Clarity extends beyond (and in some ways supercedes) shallow notions of brand. Its generally accepted that brands are built through all aspects of customer experience these are the tangible realities of the brand where actions speak louder than words. Consequently all business functions are inextricably involved in delivering the brand. If brand strategy is to have a genuine impact, it must have a close relationship to overall business strategy and goals as well as business and market fundamentals such as core competences, business typology and economic drivers, distribution structures and various market forces. In the same way that profitability isnt just an exercise for the finance department, so brand isnt merely the responsibility of the marketing department. Getting the relationship between brand and other aspects of business strategy right is critical if brand is to function as a guide for directors and managers and indeed for other employees. Branding can play a role in getting a grasp on what the company should look like to an outsider; however if a company has multiple sets of unrelated values within each functional discipline - for example; marketing values, cultural values, operational values, HR values etc it is unlikely to deliver itself clearly to its marketplace. In these instances, brand strategy is nothing more than a term for marketings take on the overall business strategy. If the entire organisation is going to buy into a strategic framework and expression, they need to have complete confidence in it. Just as the customers real world brand experience overwhelms any branding niceties, so it is with employees. And that means the brand needs to be built on reality not wishful thinking. Authentic Clarity is the process of identifying and infusing those truths into a healthy culture that is aligned in helping the company do what it sets out to do with everyone in pulling in the right direction - only possible because everyone knows the direction, and HR understands that they need to hire people who want to row in that direction too. If in the process you discover your truths are not up to sharing, you need to work on them. Resist the temptation to plough on with a grab bag of half truths and a plan for a massive whitewash Be judged not by what you say, but by what you do

Case Study: Apple

Apple (as is so often the case!) is a great example of bottom up branding. Under Steve Jobs explosively creative leadership over 20 years the company changed millions of peoples lives by designing great products that focussed unwaveringly on making life easier and more enjoyable. During this period, Apples early branding campaigns were largely conspicuous by their absence. Instead, their communication focussed on product. Will this continue without Jobs? It depends on whether Apple can maintain its product innovation. Sell your shares if you see any of the following: 1.  Big branding campaigns, especially those with their strategy to the fore watch for ads focussed on you the consumer instead of on products. 2.  Changes to the senior marketing and agency team: marketing people relegated to the background by Jobs dominance may start looking for greater influence. 3.  Pandering to new media: Apple has used online media sparingly. The preponderance of its advertising has been conducted in traditional media -- TV, print, and outdoor. Look out for online engagement gimmicks, probably driven in social media. 4.  Complexity: Part of the brilliance of Apple advertising has been its simplicity. Keep an eye out for complicated ideas or ads with more than one product.

campaign youll be found wanting in the most public of ways more so now than ever before. A McKinsey global survey of company directors found that many felt their knowledge about their markets and their company strategies was lacking (January 2005 McKinsey Quarterly Survey of Corporate Directors, www. mckinseyquarterly.com), noting that more than half indicate that they have little or no understanding of the five to 10 key initiatives that their companies need in order to secure the long-term future. The need for Authentic Clarity is apparent in these findings, and although by no means the whole answer, there is much that a deep and comprehensive truth-based bottom-up brand strategy can do to help address these problems: it provides clarity and buy-in and adds meaning to a business plan. It should also form an important part of a compelling company vision based on unarguable positions. Once a higher-level engagement with management has been established through the development of a strategic brand plan, the marketing team now has a solid platform on which to contribute to broader business discussions. Truth in advertising? Now it can finally happen.

MAKING YOUR AUTHENTIC BRAND STRATEGY WORK CHECKLIST:  start with a very clear, well-articulated picture that integrates the brand with the business and its products/services  maximise the breadth of insights inform the strategy from sources and insights drawn from right across the business  be ruthless in insisting on authenticity dont build your brand on wishful thinking. You can handle the truth!  ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and addresses all attributes of the desired brand  wrap the brand strategy into a vision for the organisation, and integrate it with other parts of business planning clarify objectives and share them widely  invest in delivery resourcing, responsibility and rewards  live your truths and insist those around you do likewise

Swordfish acknowledges David C. Baker, Chris Gannell and Bob Hoffman aka the Adcontrarian for their inspiring thoughts and writings about branding.
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