Miscellaneous Branding
by Brad VanAuken

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The Power of Brand Accessibility  |  Engineering the Starbucks Experience  |  Sponsorships: Someting to Consider  |  How Organization, Age, and Size Affect Brand Management Issues  |  Ideation and Creative Problem Solving

The Power of Brand Accessibility

• Coca-Cola used to focus its strategy on the three A's: availability, acceptability, and affordability. While these provided for tremendous growth, they also led to lowered entry barriers. Today, Coca-Cola's mantra is the three P's: preference, pervasive penetration, and price-related value.


• If you were another soft drink company, you might define your competitive frame of reference as the cola market or the soft drink market or even the beverage market. But Coke thinks of its business and its market share in terms of “share of human liquid consumption.” This makes water a competitor. In fact, a Coke executive has said that he won't be satisfied until “there is a Coca-Cola faucet in every home.” Coca-Cola's mantra is “within an arm's reach of desire.”


• An indication of Coke's drive for accessibility, beyond the vending machines that seem to be everywhere, is illustrated in a recent trip I took to Peru. We had spent several days traveling down Rio Madre de Dios on a riverboat, moving deeper and deeper into the Amazon river basin, jungle, and Manu World Biosphere Reserve. When we finally encountered a riverside village of indigenous people and thatched huts, what was waiting for us? A Coke sign and fresh Coke.

Engineering the Starbucks Experience

Excerpted from Nancy Barnet's (Strategic Liaison Director, Starbucks Coffee Company) presentation at the 2002 Summit on Internal Communications, October 22,2002, Chicago, IL.

Starbucks brand is its product, its people and its in-store experience.

Starbuck's promise: For curious and discerning adults, Starbucks provides the best coffee experience that enriches lives.

Starbucks strives to create an inviting, enriching experience that is stylish and elegant and that provides people with respite, time out and a personal treat. The experience is designed to enhance sensory signals.

Starbucks romances coffee drinking. It encourages its employees to approach coffee with a wine steward mentality.

Involvement and personal interaction is key to the Starbucks experience. Starbucks strives to be authentic and stand for something through passionate and committed employees. It promotes treating people with respect and dignity.

Sponsorships: Something to Consider

More and more today, we see sports stadiums and arenas, theaters and other buildings being named after the companies whose sponsorship dollars allow them to put their names on those buildings. While this may very well help in establishing and reinforcing a brand's awareness among a large local audience over time, many people view this to be one of the worst forms of crass commercialism. Instead of naming buildings after founders, civic leaders or other heroes, we now name them after the highest bidders. Historical names are replaced with the names of the brands with the biggest bucks. While this does not seem that different from a university naming a building after the philanthropist who made the building possible or a theater naming a seat after a donor who donates a certain amount of money, to many, it seems indicative of all the things that are wrong with our over commercialized society.

As an alternative, I might suggest that brands “Adopt a Highway” or underwrite specific museum or gallery exhibits, or sponsor certain performances. While it might require more thought and effort to underwrite specific events, performances, community projects and other worthwhile causes, I believe the public will give the brand credit for choosing to support certain worthwhile community-enhancing activities rather than just slapping its name on a building for a large sum of money. Somehow, the latter makes the brand seem much less self-serving, much more community oriented and much more likable.

How Organization, Age, and Size Affect Brand Management Issues

I recently had a conversation with a group of peers whose companies provide brand management and marketing services to a wide spectrum of organizations. During the course of our conversation, it became clear that brand management issues differ significantly based on the age and size of the organization. A key role of brand management is to create and reinforce an identity that promises relevant points of difference to consumers. Smaller, younger organizations have an advantage in this area for a number of reasons (outlined in the table below).

	Smaller, Younger Organizations	Larger, Older Organizations
Leadership	An entrepreneur with a vision and passion	A seasoned executive with experience in running large, complex enterprises
Size	A small number of people who work closely together and often share the entrepreneur's vision and passion	A large number of people in different divisions and departments with different functional backgrounds and allegiances, often very much decentralized
Business Scope	Usually focused on one core product or product category	Usually offering a wide variety of products and product lines, many times in multiple business categories and even in different industries
Brand Structure	Usually one brand	Often very complex including multiple brands, sub-brands, endorsed brands, etc.
Organization Infrastructure	Rapidly being built to support the entrepreneur's vision	Many assets, systems, processes, organizational levels, etc. Very difficult to change.
Corporate Culture	Usually strong based upon the entrepreneur's personality. May evolve as new top managers are added.	May be very strong based upon the legacy of a strong founder or a current strong leader. Companies that have long and rich histories often have entrenched cultures.
Marketplace	The business category is often in its infancy with many positioning possibilities for a new company.	Industry is often mature or maturing. Sometimes declining. Competitors are much more entrenched with few, if any, viable marketplace positions not taken. (Recently deregulated industries provide notable exceptions.)
Decision Making	Usually very quick with fewer decision-makers.	Depending on the organization design, the decision making process can be very cumbersome.
Financial Resources	Often scarce as the organization is growing rapidly and reinvesting all available cash flow. May be less scarce after an IPO.	Usually substantial including cash flow and borrowing capacity.
Primary Marketing Method	Publicity	Advertising
Brand Identity	Often evolving, but easier to encode in standards and systems (because the organization is starting with “a clean slate” ).	Often strong and entrenched, but more difficult to codify due to the scope and complexity of the enterprise and the inconsistencies that have arisen over time.
Brand Awareness and Esteem	Usually low or non-existent	Often high
Brand Differentiation	Usually very high	Usually declines over time as more and more competitors enter the market

The first two laws of branding in Al Reis and Laura Reis' book, The 22 Immutable Laws of BRANDING are as follows:

• “The Law of Expansion: The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope”
• “The Law of Contradiction: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus”

Clearly these first two laws favor smaller, younger organizations.

Brand identity firms will tell you that often they can create much stronger brand identities for smaller, younger companies because those companies have fewer constraints (existing logos, store décor and signing), more focused businesses and stronger business visions. They also have a more coordinated marketing function (often a department of just a few people). Conversely, large organizations usually have separate product development, advertising, promotion, public relations, sales and marketing research departments (to name a few).

Some people will tell you that the best promise a large organization's brand can make is to be “the quality, innovation leader in (insert the company's business category).” They say that organizational brands of large enterprises offer authority and assurance period. Yet some of the most successful organizational brands have more focused (consumer benefit based) brand essences. For instance, Disney promises fun family entertainment, Nike promises genuine athletic performance and Hallmark promises caring shared. All three are distinctive yet broad enough to make multiple product categories possible. Consider all the businesses that Disney is in. Hallmark has much growth left (despite a mature greeting card category) as it could offer gift candy and flowers and even “love boat” cruises.

Below is a summary of the most likely brand problems of small and large organizations:

Smaller, Younger Organizations	Larger, Older Organizations
Lack of funds	Current leadership team (including CEO) doesn't know what distinctive, compelling value their organization brings to the marketplace
Lack of time	Original marketplace position is no longer distinctive or compelling
Little or no marketplace awareness of the brand	The brand structure has become too complicated and unclear
(Sometimes) don't fully understand who is buying their products and services and for what reasons	The brand identity standards and systems have fallen into disuse
	The organizational infrastructure and institutionalized bureaucracy work against a reinvigorated brand position
	Marketing functions are not integrated
	The organization has become too big and decentralized to create a consistent brand voice

For smaller, younger organizations, key brand activities include developing a strong brand identity, building brand awareness through publicity and other less expensive means and sometimes, better understanding their consumers through marketing research (such as attitude & usage studies and focus groups).

For larger, older organizations, the brand management job is much more complex. The most important task is to get the senior leadership team to agree to a distinctive, compelling marketplace positioning for the brand. Often the brand needs to be repositioned. Often the brand identity standards and systems need to be overhauled (and the brand hierarchy simplified). Frequently, major organizational design changes are required. The necessary changes may be as wide reaching as rethinking the business portfolio itself.

Clearly, brand management needs vary with organization age and size.

Ideation and Creative Problem Solving

The mostly highly admired brands are usually unique, original, fresh, and leading edge. In fact, many have invented or reinvented entire categories. To be that kind of a brand, an organization must be highly innovative. Element K CEO Bruce Barnes likes to talk about the “Virtuous Circle of Investment/Innovation.” It is very simple:

• Investing in customer-relevant product/service innovation leads to increased revenues
• Increased revenues enable continued product/service innovation

Innovative brands with innovative products, services, and marketing approaches typically make extensive use of creative problem solving and ideation (idea generation) techniques.

Creative problem solving usually requires two distinct phases: divergent thinking (ideation) and convergent thinking (idea analysis and evaluation). The purpose of ideation is to generate as many ideas as possible in as condensed a timeframe as possible.

Brainstorming is the most popular ideation technique. Brainstorming requires the following components to be successful:

• A well defined problem
• Two or more people together in a room. Ideally, you have a mix of people from different disciplines, including someone who knows nothing about the subject (to offer perspective) and a subject matter expert. Also, participants should be screened for divergent thinkers with diverse experiences who are willing to actively share their thoughts and ideas.
• Relaxation training, autogenics, psychodrama, sociodrama, and other techniques can help prepare people to ideate effectively. The intent is to break down mental blocks and preconceived notions and to get people to relax and to feel confident and safe from criticism. A warm-up exercise also helps to get people to think about things in new ways, to encourage “boundary-less” thinking.
• Providing participants with crayons and paper, Play-Dough, clay, Tinker Toys and other activities often helps people open up in their thinking.
• The exchange of ideas to generate more ideas
• Session ground rules: no criticism or judgments allowed
• The facilitator ensures that each person's ideas are drawn out.
• No ideas are filtered out by the session facilitator – all are captured as presented, typically on a flip chart.
• The facilitator keeps the session moving so that people don't have time to make premature judgments.
• The facilitator interjects questions to stimulate additional ideas when ideas are waning. Facilitators should have prepared a set of conceptual blockbusting questions before the session. “What if it were bigger? What if it were the opposite of what it is? What if we morphed it? What if it were only one-dimensional? What could we do to solve the problem if we had no money to do so? What could we do if we had unlimited financial resources? What if it were round? What if it were red? What is the high-tech solution? What is the low-tech solution? How would environmentalists solve the problem? How would farmers solve the problem? How would Albert Einstein solve the problem? How would a five-year-old girl solve the problem? How would the Chinese government solve the problem? How would your cat solve the problem? How does nature address this? What if you were the problem? What would you do? What if you were the solution? How would you feel? Etc.”

Other ideation techniques include the following:

• Visualization, guided imagery, fantasizing and envisioning the future
• Attribute listing, discovering connections between those attributes
• Mind mapping, diagramming relationships
• Question the problem and its assumptions, broaden the problem, look at the problem at a meta-level
• Applying ideas from one context to another (metaphorical thinking)
• Creating connections for two previously unconnected items (bisociation)
• Free associations (What is the first word that comes to your mind when I say…?)
• Forced relationships (Or, forcing an association between the problem or solution and random words)
• Conceiving of two unrelated entities occupying the same space (homospatial thinking)
• Stopping to further consider associations that initially make us laugh (laughter results from the unexpected connection between two things)
• Sketching and doodling
• Stream of consciousness writing
• Experience the problem emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically
• Incubation (walking away from the problem after intensely thinking about it)
• Live a life of diverse experience

Who drives the pace of change in your industry, you or one of your competitors?