Building a brand that has longevity, one that engages and serves consumers over time, while delivering returns to the owner of the brand is a really, really difficult exercise, one that very few get right. Sadly, when it is done right, over time, the essential elements of the brand become forgotten as new people move in, and too often fail to respect or even understand the foundations, and ego takes over.
They do something different, as that is what they think they must do to make their name, and they completely stuff the brand up.
The secret of a great brand is that there is no secret.
No silver bullet, no checklist for greatness, just time, experimentation, investment, and a mental picture of the perfect outcome, for the customer.
By delivering the customer a perfect experience, the one they were promised, and doing it over and over again, at competitive levels of price and service, and with humility, the owner of the brand benefits.
However, there is a very consistent attribute of those brands that are successful.
Stories.
We humans evolved with stories.
We remember, understand, and relate to them.
The power of the story resides in the emotional engagement it generates, by making it personal.
Many years ago, I was lucky to be around as the Meadow Lea brand evolved. The brand went from an also ran in a highly contested and rapidly growing market, to dominating market leader over the course of several years. Unfortunately, I can claim little part in that evolution greater than an engaged observer, a messenger boy with an occasionally audible opinion.
The Meadow Lea story started in the late 1970’s, yes, some of us were alive then. The regulations that ensured margarine was nasty grey stuff that tasted as nasty as it looked, courtesy of the dairy industry lobby, had been removed. Women were entering the workforce in droves, they were educated, ambitious, and driven, but crippled by the accepted mindset that their role was to stay at home, cook, clean, look after the kids, while hubby earnt the money and was basically absent. Meanwhile they were working as hard as men, or often harder at whatever job they had. The juggling was enormous, as was the strain, and as a result they were sleep deprived and ignored.
Sounds positively medieval, but it was only 45 years ago.
This strong desire to be recognised and valued was recognised in the research we were doing, incremental pieces of the brand jigsaw were being fitted together, the result being the simple recognition that women, who did 99% of the shopping, cleaning, and child rearing, needed to be recognised for the backbreaking effort. They wanted to be congratulated for simply surviving, let alone thriving. So, we said it in the advertising.
‘You ought to be congratulated’.
This simple phrase captured the competing driving forces in women’s lives at the time in a few simple words and jingle, backed up by memorable executions that evolved over the following 5 years.
It was the story women were telling themselves.
Later, the idiots that bought the business for its profitability and market position, killed the golden goose by failing to understand the mosaic which made up the brand. They took the easy way out, redirecting the money that should have been spent on maintaining the brand, ensuring it continued to evolve with those who were making the purchase choice, into the pockets of supermarkets.
Meadow Lea is now nothing more than a few tubs on a supermarket shelf. It has gone full circle, but I cannot help wondering if a revival was possible. We still all need to feel valued, to be congratulated for something, even if it is just surviving the crap that was 2020.
Having a story for your brand is a key part of offering the hook with which a consumer can engage.
Take the ‘about us’ page on almost every website I see. Nobody really cares that your grandfather started the business in 1934, and that your father and uncle followed him, and you are now the boss. This sort of story, which everyone uses on their website, is all about you.
Nobody really cares, except your mother.
You must make the story about them, the customer.
Not easy.
Understanding the ‘stories’ of your key customer and potential customer audiences, means you can shape the way you communicate, the words, tone, and the way you seek to shape their behaviour.
To do all that, you need a detailed understanding of who they are. You need to understand their ‘persona’.
When you seek to alter someone’s behaviour, the easiest way is to ‘piggyback’ the altered behaviour onto the existing beliefs and practises, just altering them slightly, which avoids the perception of risk that comes with any change we humans seek to implement.
When you know them well, when they say ‘this is for me’ to themselves, then your task of getting them to deviate slightly in your favour is easier.
Header cartoon credit: Gapingvoid.com with thanks for another visual representation of the words used in this post.
