What’s the difference between Advil and isobutylpropanoicphenolic acid? About $8.24 and a good story.

Or, if you look at it another way, about $114 million a year.

The truth is, there isn’t any difference between isobutylpropanoicphenolic acid (ibuprofen) and Advil. Chemically they are exactly the same. The effect on pain and inflamation is exactly the same. The dose form and the strength are exactly the same. And yet, even when they appear side by side on the shelf, consumers willingly reach past the generic ibuprofin and grab the Advil despite the fact that it costs over eight dollars more. For exactly the same thing.

Why?

Pfizer spends more than $114 million dollars every year on marketing/advertising to tell a story about how Advil is the number one pain medication for joint pain. They claim it’s faster acting than Tylenol. And, the story goes, it not only works on pain, but also reduces fever fast. Generics could tell exactly the same story, but they don’t.

Like all good brand stories, the story Pfizer tells in its marketing creates a strong emotional attachment for consumers. Consumers pay more not only for the drug in the bottle, but the psychological comfort that the familiar brand name and packaging provide. It looks more effective (thanks to packaging cues), it sounds more effective (we recognize the brand), and we believe it is more effective (it costs more so the ingredients must be higher quality, right?).

Would you pay an extra $8 just to feel better about your purchase? Chances are, you (and millions of people just like you) already have.

Source: The Rip.
Hat tip: @SunnyBrown.

Every once in a while, a book comes along with enough good ideas and marketing how-to’s that I recommend adding it to your marketing tool box.

But in the case of The Brandgym (by David Taylor and David Nichol), the book isn’t just a tool to be included, it is all of the tools in the box. Reading The Brandgym is a little like taking an in-depth seminar in brand management. With it as a guide, you probably don’t need to go anywhere else for ideas, principles, or to-do-lists to help you manage a brand. (You might choose to, but you won’t need to.)

The Brandgym covers eight “workouts” that will help you strengthen your brand’s foundation and focus your branding efforts on initiatives that will generate income. It’s also loaded with ideas and techniques for creating promotions that support the brand’s position and move customers to action.

Workout #4: Build Big Brand Ideas alone is worth getting the book. I found myself underlining and marking pages to come back to again later.

But what I love most about the approach taken in this book is the focus on a brand’s substance (remarkable products, growth, and the core business), not the so-called “exciting” part of branding (new design/advertising/launch).  It’s a resource for serious brand managers. In fact, it’s good enough to replace many of the marketing books currently used in business schools.

If you’re looking for ways to grow a stagnant brand, or new ideas for stretching a brand into new product categories, or ways to co-ordinate your marketing activities to maximize your spending, this book is a good place to turn. If you are in the process of launching a new brand, it is an essential resource to help you succeed.

I highly recommend The Brandgym.

Full-disclosure: I was given a copy of the book by David Taylor shortly after it was published. But that doesn’t change my recommendation, it’s well worth the read.

Other Brandgym Links:

You can’t purchase the book in the U.S. yet, but it is available here.
Check out David Taylor’s Brandgym Blog, here.
I’ve written about another of David’s books here.

I was at dinner last week, reminiscing with a friend when he asked me if I knew a certain person. “You remember,” he said, “he’s the kid who had the bloody eye.” I immediately knew who he was talking about. Lots of kids had bloody noses, but only one had a bloody eye.

We could have talked about “the kid who wrecked his dad’s car before he got his driver’s license” …or the “kid who kept a goldfish in his locker at school” or “the kid who had that huge afro.” Each of these descriptions (stories) is a short cut that immediately describes a particular person. There is no ambiguity. No question who the person is. There was only one who fit the description.

Consumers do the same thing when thinking of brands. In fact, creating a short cut for the consumer to remember your product is one of the primary reasons for developing a strong brand.

That’s the brand that…

Luke Sullivan, author of the excellent book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, defines a brand like this:

Brand = Adjective

Luke’s simple formulation demonstrates the association of a particular product with a single idea (much like Scott = kid with goldfish in locker).

Nordstrom = phenomenal customer service
Mountain Dew = Extreme refreshment
Volvo = Safety
Southwest = Low cost air travel
Papa John’s = Better pizza

And so on.

What is your brand’s thing?

What simple idea represents the core of who you are and what you do? Does it immediately help your customers remember something important about your product? And does it help you tell your brand story? Geek Squad? They’re the ones who drive black and white VWs and wear skinny black ties. Subway? They’re the ones who helped the fat guy lose more than 100 pounds eating hoagies. Fox News? They’re the ones who report the news from a right-leaning viewpoint. No other brands fit these descriptions.

If your product or service doesn’t own a particular idea, you’ve got work to do.

Successful brands need to be more like the one unforgettable kid with the bloody eye, not the dozens of forgettable kids who had nose bleeds.

A few weeks ago I was driving my car—running errands—with my four-year old daughter, when she yelled out, “bingo!” A few minutes later she did it again. “Bingo,” she said, “Now I have more bingos than Boo” (my nine-year old boy).

I was curious, so I asked, “What’s a bingo?” She answered, “Oh, it’s a yellow car. I have hundreds of them.”

Apparently my kids have been playing this game with each other for awhile. Each time one of them spots a yellow car, they shout, “bingo!” It’s a variation of the slug bug game I played with my brother, without the sore shoulders.

The game works for two reasons. First, bingos (yellow cars) are somewhat rare. Scan a near-by parking lot. Among the hundreds of white, blue, and tan cars, you may see one or two yellow cars, or none (I live in a city where we don’t have yellow taxis). The second reason the game works is that yellow cars stand out from the mass of other bland colored cars. They are easy to spot.

Which got me thinking about how marketers call attention to their brands using something that stands out from everything else. Let’s call them bingos. Some examples:

Apple uses design as a bingo for its products. It started with the unique (at the time) candy colored, plastic all-in-one iMacs and has spread to include every product in its portfolio. You see an Apple product and can’t help but want to touch and play with it. In the technology category, great design is both rare and noticeable. Bingo.

The rhythmic rumble made by Harley Davidson Motorcycles is a bingo. You can hear it from miles away. And you won’t hear it from a Japanese bike. It calls attention to itself in a way that no other motorcycle brand does. Harley Davidson has even filed a trademark application to protect its exhaust sound. Bingo.

Lady GaGa uses outrageous costumes and set-ups as a bingo. Some of the outfits are so ridiculous, you simply see them and think, seriously? But you can’t look away. You want to see what she’ll do next. It doesn’t matter whether her music is good or bad (at first), the costumes get your attention. In the world of music, she stands out from the crowd. Bingo.

Goodyear has for decades put blimps in the air above football games. Blimps are rare. They are pretty easily noticed, especially when the cameras pan to show them above the stadium. Even if another brand put its name on the blimp, we’d still think of it as the Goodyear Blimp. Bingo.

A bingo can be just about anything—a sign, an ad, a shape, an aroma, a color, a design, a function, a style, an idea, a behavior, a voice, an experience, a service, an employee, a distribution model, a price—as long as it stands out from everything else and draws attention to itself. In most cases, it is very hard to accomplish.

Do you use bingos for your brand? Is there something about your product that makes it stand out from the mass of bland competitors? Is there something about your product that is rare in comparison with the competition? If not, should there be?

Note: Though there is some overlap, a bingo is not a “purple cow” as defined by Seth Godin in his book of the same name. Bingos are not necessarily remarkable (though the best ones are). Yellow cars stand out and are easy to spot, but not all yellow cars are great cars. In fact, some are lemons. So having a bingo for your product will not necessarily make it great or worth buying. But it will get your product noticed. And if your product is also great, then what you have are the makings for a very strong brand.

People have been writing about the greatness of Apple’s advertising since about 1984. These days Apple does a brilliant job of speaking to its customers in a unique and consistent voice—no matter what the product (and the voice differs depending on the product and audience). The iTunes/iPod campaign features people dancing with their iPods and reckless abandon. The “I’m a Mac” campaign is both fun and funny, pointing why Macs are better than PCs.

But the big winner for effectiveness in advertising is the iPhone campaign. Here’s why:

1. Beautiful product shots. The only thing you see in this campaign is a hand, or hands, holding a iPhone. That’s it. Of course, the iPhone is used to conjure up maps, photos, games, music and anything else the narrator talks about. But what we see is a well-designed iPhone on a plain white background.

2. Product demonstrations. Notice the ads don’t ever say, “Buy an iPhone” or “The iPhone will make your life better.” There are no promises. Just a simple, compelling demonstration designed to make the viewer think, “Wow, if it’s that simple to do all those things, maybe I should get one.” By changing up the demonstration in each ad (but not the product shots), you quickly see how versatile the iPhone is. Interestingly, the iPhone doesn’t do a whole lot of things you couldn’t do before, it just does them more easily from the palm of your hand.

3. Story. Give yourself a gold star if you saw this one coming. Every 30 second ad is a short story. Whether it’s the story of the person who found and adopted a dog, or the story of the backpacker who went to Spain, or the story of the guy who missed the train. And the hero of every story is the phone. It helps find missing reports, and book hotels, and post photos online, and makes the airport check-in process easy. Each story is nothing less than a testimonial about how the phone has improved someone’s life. The viewer is left to assume the phone can make their life better too.

This is a campaign that could run for a very long time. As long as there are useful aps to demo and human interest stories to build the demos around, there will be content for more iPhone ads.

You can watch all the stories in this campaign, here.

This entry was originally posted on December 28, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog.

One of my favorite web logs is David Taylor’s BrandGymBlog. David’s no-nonsense approach to marketing is one that really appeals to me, so I’m a regular visitor to his site. A couple of months ago I got a copy of David’s latest book, Where’s the Sausage: Branding based on Substance not Spin. It’s a serious marketing book wrapped in a short parable.

Though I really like David’s thinking, I’m generally not a fan of business parables. Too often they use silly characters, absurd situations, and overly simple solutions that don’t always transfer well to real business situations–like this book. Books like this include a lot of “what”, but not a lot of “how”. And when I heard that WTS? was a parable, that’s what I expected to get. But then, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.

To be sure, the story isn’t high literature. But this book contains a generous helping of useful marketing ideas, ways to get insights from your customers, and smart thinking (the how in addition to the what). And the characters ring true more often than not.

It’s the story of Bob Jones, salesman at Simpton’s Sausages who is asked to spend a year as a brand consultant before being promoted to Sales Director. He’s unenthusiastic about the opportunity and immediately sees through the typical marketing BS that comes from his boss and agency contacts. Rejecting their approach to branding (and rebranding), he finds his own way as he manages the neglected sausage brand. He records his feelings several times a month (in a blog or journal) and includes much of what he is learning from his experience. The story is okay, but the real power of the book is in the chapter summaries and ideas Bob uses to rethink his product—all of which (I assume) come from the BrandGym play book.

Among the observations Bob makes:

• A brand should drive the whole business, not just the image wrapper of communication
and brand identity.
• A new logo can’t cover up the shortcomings of a poor product.
• Many brand extensions are brand ego trips offering nothing new.
• True insight doesn’t come from focus groups, it comes from immersing yourself in your
consumer’s world.
• Having little or no funds for conventional marketing can be a great stimulus for creativity.
• Communication that has only emotional sizzle and not product sausage is ‘sponsored
entertainment’.

Add to that the simple exercises and processes that Bob takes his brand through (and that the reader can do with their own brand) and you have a decent little marketing book. Thanks David.

If you’re looking for a quick read peppered with smart thinking, you’ll like Where’s the Sausage.

More Where’s the Sausage? Links:
Other reviews of the book can be found here and here.
David’s description of the book is here.
Buy it at Amazon.
Read the BrandGym blog.
Video of Hugo Gaines (the book’s star marketing,um, expert).
Video of David talking about the book.

A version of this entry was originally posted on August 6, 2008 at the old Brandstory blog. Bob’s blog is still one of my favorites.

A month or so ago, I stumbled upon Bob Hoffman’s blog called The Ad Contrarian. It has quickly become one of my favorites. He’s not much for advertising as entertainment. He doesn’t appear to like ad planners. He’s not big on Internet advertising, the long tail, or conversations. He’s an unabashed defender of the power and effectiveness of traditional, interruptive advertising. His blog is worth a read.

But best of all, if you want a copy, you can download a free copy of his book (PDF), described by his agency’s president as “mercifully short.”

Written more like a short collection of blog posts (actually that’s exactly what it is), the book’s a pretty good snapshot of what’s wrong with the advertising world. But it doesn’t take the “end-of-advertising-as-we-know-it” approach that so many others keep talking about. Lots of interesting thinking, criticism, and ideas packed into 65 pages.

Of course, there is a catch. The last four chapters detail Hoffman’s (and his agency’s) approach to advertising, something he calls Performance-based Advertising. So it’s a bit of a promotional piece for his agency. Still, the principles are good:

1. Advertising is most effective when it is focused on changing behavior, not attitudes.
2. Advertising messages should be created for, and directed at, the heavy using, high-yield customers in your category.
3. We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand, we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.

I like Bob’s approach. My favorite chapter can be found here. Check out his blog and book.

This entry was originally posted on March 26, 2008 at the old Brandstory blog.

Does your logo get the reaction you want? Do customers think differently or act differently when they see your logo as opposed to your competitor? Should it?

While I firmly believe that a logo can trigger an emotional response attached to a brand, this goes a little farther than I would have expected: According to this post in the Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog, researchers at Duke have found that exposure to a particular logo (in this case, Apple or IBM) can result in behavioral changes. People who were flashed the Apple logo for 30 milliseconds (too fast to be consciously seen) performed more creatively than those who saw the IBM logo.

You can read the study here.

This begs the question–will thinking about the Nike logo make you run faster? Will thinking of the Harvard University logo make you smarter? Will pondering the Weight Watchers logo help you lose weight? Sign me up as a test subject for
all of the above.

Others offer thoughts about the power of Apple’s logo to help you think differently:
Brand Noise.
Fake Steve Jobs.

This entry was originally posted on August 7, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog.

As if we needed more proof that branding works…

A report in the New Scientist details a recent study revealing that pre-school kids prefer foods wrapped in McDonald’s packaging over foods served in unwrapped packaging. Most parents are thinking, no duh. From the report:

“Dina Borzekowski at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and her colleagues asked 63 preschoolers, aged three to five, to sample two meals, each consisting of a chicken nugget, a quarter of a hamburger, french fries, two baby carrots and a small cup of milk.

Although both meals came from a local McDonald’s, only one of them appeared in its original packaging. Researchers presented items from the other meal in plain wrappers, which lacked the company’s distinctive logo.

In most cases children said they tasted a difference between the two meals, and they overwhelmingly preferred the McDonalds-branded foods.”

Interesting. Kids preferred McDonald’s branded carrots by a margin of 2 to 1. Same carrots. Different packaging. They preferred the french fries 73% to 13%. All because of the golden arches. It’s not like we don’t know that branding/marketing/advertising works. After all, we spend well over $10 billion a year marketing products to kids. And billions more to advertise to adults. But it is somewhat disturbing to see the affects on kids as young as three.

Of course McDonald’s has known this for more than 10 years—watch the proof here.

Might be time to unplug the television.

This entry was originally posted on March 9, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time). I’ve made a couple of minor revisions to the original.

John Moore over at Brand Autopsy has written about Jack Trout’s recent article in Forbes which discusses the value of Word of Mouth as a marketing tool. Jack takes a decidedly old-school approach and gets taken to task for it by John, George Silverman, Olivier Blanchard, and others. I won’t deconstruct the article, others have done that already. But I do think that Jack’s column represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the way brand stories are created and shared.

Jack is a big believer in Macro-stories. These are the stories brand managers tell about their brands. They use company controlled marketing tactics like advertising, corporate websites, catalogs, direct mail, and so on to tell the story. Macro-stories are vital to communicating brand positioning and brand values to a huge number of potential and current customers. These are the stories a company can (to some extent) control. They are generally expensive to produce and distribute. And they are often ignored or distrusted by jaded consumers.

Where Jack misses the boat is Micro-stories. These are the stories consumers tell about the brands they love and hate. These are stories that are influenced by Macro-stories, but also include other elements like experience and satisfaction. They are created on an individual basis, one by one. These are stories that companies can only influence, not control.

Take the restaurant chain, Olive Garden, for example. Their brand story (reflected in their television advertising) is one about (large, loving) families gathering for great food, great conversation, and the kind of hospitality you would have received from your Italian grandmother. The company controls the advertising, from where it is placed, to how it is filmed, from the food that is shared, to the attractive people shown eating it. This is the Macro-story.

The Micro-story may or may not reflect this experience played out on TV. If a customer has to wait to be seated, is served cold food, receives poor service, or has mistakes made on his bill, her Micro-story isn’t likely to share many characteristics of the Macro-story. On the other hand, if this customer’s experience is similar (within reason) to the brand story told on the advertisements, her Micro-story will reflect the brand values the company wants to communicate. When she shares her experience, she won’t be talking about the handsome Italian family from the television ads, she’ll talk about her experience at the restaurant.

In other words, once a brand is experienced, the experience, not the advertising or positioning, is the biggest part of the brand story for that consumer. If the experience is compelling, she will share her Micro-story with others at work, at church, at the club, on her blog, and so on. It used to be enough to share the Macro-story and hope for the best, but times have changed.

The biggest difference, of course, is that consumers have so many more ways to share their Micro-stories now that they did just a few years ago. And, thanks to brand experiences disconnected from Macro-stories, more and more consumers no longer believe the brand stories companies “sell” them with traditional advertising. Jack (and hundreds others like him) may always favor the tactics they can control. But their clients will suffer as the power of Micro-stories grows.

That’s why word of mouth matters.