Revival Post: Matching a Brand's Marketing to Its Life Stage

Reviving an earlier post from when my readership was: my mom. In my list of "Yes! This is so right! Why do we tend to over-complicate things, when we could just read this?" this article is right up there. Thank you, David Matli, for simplifying something so complex...

It always strikes me how intertwined brand and business strategies are--or should be. This is an absolute must-read article on "Matching a brand's marketing to its stage of life" by David Matli at MarketingProfs.com. I have provided excerpts here, but please read the full article at its origin.

Matli provides a simple view of the four stages of a company and its brand: new, growth, mature and revival.  He also provides pithy, modern brand examples in the article.

New Brands (Create) 
Primary Challenge: Differentiation and Targeted Awareness
"In the early stages of a brand launch, the question that you continually hear is 'What is it?' Distinct, simple, and viral differentiation create the potential for explosive growth. But most significant, it is the relevance to an early-adopter audience that catapults...a brand past the new, start up phase and into the growth phase."
Example: TOMS Shoes

Growth Brands (Build)
Primary Challenge: Transitioning from Early Adopters to Mass Market Without Alienating Core Fans
"Owners of hot, new brands commonly mistake their rabid and vocal fan base support as something long term that will carry their brands into the mainstream.  That is only true when it is carefully managed. It is critical, in this phase, to strategically shift to a simple brand message, using the short-term support of early adopters...The chief challenge in the growth stage is to achieve clarity of brand standards, messaging, tone of voice, philosophical stance, and values."
Example: Books adapted for screen like Harry Potter

Mature Brands (Leverage)
Primary Challenge: Growth Against  "Cooler" Upstart Competitors
"When a brand has become a household name, marketing has become a core internal function.  Growth becomes difficult to maintain because of the sheer weight of the brand's size and awareness makes it challenging to constantly refresh.  Senior management seeks new ways to increase brand relevance...Continuing growth with world-straddling brands requires not only maintaining relevance with the core audience but also constantly expanding into new taste-makers niches, markets and brand extensions.  That process forces a brand to become more diverse in execution and often softens a brand positioning, unless it is carefully managed. Brands risk not accurately identifying their key differentiation points and skillfully translating those attributes into broader marketing strategies...That can take years, just as the brand took years to build.  Brand managers may eventually find that the brand they own has become a commodity with little value."
Example: Ocean Pacific

Revival Brands (Evolve)
Primary Challenge: Regain Relevancy
"When a brand has been a household name with a broad fan base for a generation or more, brand managers settle into a routine and stop giving much thought to differentiation, awareness, and new competitors...Many companies with such brands tend to hire managers with experience in maintaining a business, but little experience in brand extension, differentiation, or repositioning -- skills essential to maintaining relevance when dramatic shifts occur in the marketplace.  And they always occur...At that point, it's critical that strong brand leadership act quickly to re-establish the brand's core relevance in the minds of its consumers....A brand may be well known but so ubiquitous that it becomes background noise, and people forget why it's special. Relevance in a fresh context can become a growth engine for older brands."
Example: Sesame Street
_______________________________
Update November 25, 2011: @christinecuoco, a fantastic marketer and friend, sent a note about Youngme Moon's book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd. I have only read the excerpt she sent. It goes into further detail about the stages of mature and revival brands and the need for differentiation.

This Gave Me Goosebumps

I had the delight of discovering @JoniGoldbach. It was in the midst of my mission to help marketers find their voice and step out from behind @BunnyBunny99. Joni is schooling all of us, even as she is starting her career. When I later sought her out in person, I learned that she has a great mentor. She told me she was quick to take their help, and she thanked them (+1 for the mentor!). But those aren't the not the only reasons why everyone should read this. Read it because this is marketing today. This is leading our industry. I couldn't possibly have said it better. Thank you, Joni and the posse of supporters who are rallied around you. 

Marketing is a Tax

"Marketing is a tax you pay when your product is unremarkable" is a quote from Robert Stephens founder of the Geek Squad. It has taken on a mythic-ness across the Internet and is a particular favorite among tech companies. There is incredible power and importance in Robert Stephens' 11 words. Blasphemy from my marketing mouth? Not on your life.

However, I fear many people may be misunderstanding the importance of this statement. Marketing in his sentence literally means traditional advertising and paid media. Folks use his quote as yet another grenade in the battle between the product / tech and marketing teams (sad). When a launch fails, all too often the marketers point at the product team and vice versa (sadder). I believe the genius of the expression that "good products market themselves" is misunderstood and has a ton to do with a stage in a brand's life and the nature of the product. Google search, yes. Google wave, no. Google is now running Chrome advertising which will drive search traffic. Tivo was a truly great, leading product without successful marketing and it struggled. Segway?

Hmmm. Marketing isn't just communications. Semantics feel important here. Marketing means: listening and anticipating on behalf of customers for the development of new products, distribution to make it easy to learn about about and access them, the experience you create in their delivery and service, plus how you communicate about them. Marketing (aka branding) can be the meaning that flows through it all.

I am a marketer on the frontier of what we marketers do, and it is hard to explain my role in any traditional terms. My work crosses product and communications. With technology and customers' changing use of it, the traditional siloed roles of NPD, advertising, tech teams, etc. don't necessarily make sense. A perfect iconic example is Steve Jobs. Do you notice how the tech folks see him as their hero? And so do the designers, the distributors, the businessmen, the advertisers, and the marketers. I love that. He was all of them. Another perfect example I like to use is Facebook. Every consumer products company wants to work with Facebook right now because that's where the customers are. So who do you send to the meeting with Facebook? Are they a media partner? Are they a distribution and sales channel for your product? Are they actually part of your product (eg games, payments)? Are they servicing through your social media team? In a corporate org structure, you could imagine sending 20 people to Facebook across NPD, Advertising and Media, Servicing, etc. It just doesn't work that way anymore. Many technology companies are media companies and the more they can integrate the creation, curation or distribution of stories (aka content), the more those silo lines can blur. As the Internet of Things emerges and the Internet is embedded in more and more everyday objects like cars and cameras, the possibilities get even more amazing. "Marketing" or whatever we are going to call ourselves has to keep up. And when we mash the old roles up, it is so much fun. We're just getting started. Let me give some examples.

Media marketing is part of the product itself...
Facebook "likes" is a perfect example. As you use the Facebook platform, you are broadcasting your interests in a very branded way by Facebook. This works extremely well, because the product by its nature is social. But what about other products that aren't literally social themselves?

Threadless. They run t-shirt design competitions through an online social network. According to Bonfire Social Media, Threadless "revenue is growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company has never advertised, employ no professional designers, use no modeling agency or fashion photographers, have no sales force, and enjoy no retail distribution." However, they do understand social media and have built an active, empowered following of hundreds of thousands of people. The shirts become the media. They all carry the Threadless brand.

Product is part of the media advertising...
For the launch of Jay-Z's biography Decode Jay-Z, Microsoft Bing and Random House literally took pages of his book and placed them where he grew up in NYC. The product itself became the advertisement, instead of the traditional "author head shot, cover art and launch date." It also gave a reason for customers to explore the Bing technology rather than watching a video demo. I love this campaign. (Interesting, from May 2010 to 2011 Bing gained search marketshare from Google. In May 2011, Google started their largest traditional campaign ever).

So back to Robert Stephens' and his quote that rang across the Internet world in 2008 and is still reverberating today. What I have since deduced is that Robert Stephens was working with Crispin Porter + Bogusky around that time. To break the finger pointing between the marketing, sales and tech teams at Best Buy (who purchased Geek Squad in 2002), I bet Stephens' and his agency Crispin threw a white flag up to the tech and product teams to shift the dialog away from advertising. Geek Squad spent a considerable budget on marketing, just not all on traditional paid media. They shifted the expensive television media budget to "bake the marketing" into the product experience. The branding on the Geek Squad cars, the uniforms for the agents, plus more. They had custom made shoes that left tens of millions of guerilla marketing imprints of the Geek Squad logo. This brand story is even more amazing to me because Geek Squad is a service, not a tangible product, and their service is not inherently social or embedded in tech.

Robert Stephens has a very unique understanding of branding and an amazing relationship with his marketers. You can see the irony in using Stephens' words to dismiss the true, forward looking marketing leaders, branders or the function all together. These are the types of marketers who the product and technology dreamers might want to find in their organizations--the marketers who truly respect what they do and who may even know how to read a little code.

John Iwata the CMO at IBM says, "The marketplace is changing faster than the marketing function." Let's change that.
____________________________
Update 11/15/11:Timely video on Amazon and Facebook: Changing the Definition of Marketing.
____________________________
There are two really good reads I have found on this topic of silo-jumping: Marketing in a Time of Change by HHCL in "Please Read It Now, Now, Now" and not surprisingly, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves by Alex Bogusly and John Winsor. You can also read more about the original Geek Squad branding in this 1999 article in Fast Company.

Marketers as Inspirers

When someone asks me one of the proudest and most important skills I have as a marketer, I always say collaborating with creative teams to produce amazing work--some of the proudest of their careers, I always hope. Designer Murat Mutlu has this great quote on his blog: "The process of getting a bit of paper containing a brief and turning into a real life experience is pretty great." Just think, it is the marketer's brief that needs to light that fuse. This requires translating the business, simplifying the customer insight, conveying what the product does in clear way, and tying it to a higher purpose for the brand. Most importantly, it requires talking to teams in a way they will hear you. And for designers and creative teams, that means they need to feel it.

I am not going to get into the skills of writing a kick ass brief here, more on that later. But I will dwell on inspiration and the art of briefing. As I continue to (b)log the best of the best I have found so far, this is an iconic example of how to capture inspiration in a brief by Damian O'Malley who is a savvy agency planner in Europe. He recreated the story of Michelangelo's brief for the Sistine Chapel. It also helps bring to life why creative collaborators get a wrinkle in their forehead when you literally tell them what to do: "Change this color to red." "Use the word 'joyful', instead of 'happy'". "Customers think we are X. Tell them we are Y." Creative teams work from a concept and why they are doing something, not what they are working on or how they do it. Thank you Damian O'Malley for getting this point across in such a compelling way.

Please don't perceive the comparison of creating a product or a brand to the Sistine Chapel as disrespectful. It is meant to be the exact opposite. Brands and the companies behind them create jobs, protect money, plus much more. It is an awesome responsibility that should be taken seriously and with integrity. I think branders should strive to find the significant meaning for customers, even if that means reaching for aspirational analogies like this that are very far out of our realm.

The Brief For The Sistine Chapel