BrandWatch by Michel Gutsatz

Is your Brand a Performance Brand? (Brand Dynamics 3/7)

WHAT IS YOUR BRAND TYPE?

Moving forward in my analysis of Brand Dynamics and in building a Typology of Brands, I introduce today my second Brand Type: Performance Brands. We will next analyze Expertise Brands (4/7), Identity Brands (5/7) and Visionary Brands (6/7). A last post will introduce Brand Dynamics (7/7), showing how a brand can move from one type to another during its lifecycle. 

WHAT IS YOUR BRAND TYPE?

WHAT IS YOUR BRAND'S DYNAMICS?

LET US START A CONVERSATION SO AS TO BUILD COLLECTIVELY THIS OPERATIONAL ANALYSIS OF BRANDS!

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Our second Brand Type is found in categories where functional performance is a major expectation of the Category.
Take for instance the homecare category or the baby care category. In both cases the consumer (mostly a housewife or a mother) will expect the product she has bought to be efficient: she wants her house or her clothes to be clean – as she wants her baby’s diapers to maintain her child’s hygiene.
We find such brands in BtoC ‘care’ categories like household care, personal care, feminine hygiene, baby care and in most BtoB categories (think of Intel or Gore Tex).

We will therefore define a Performance Brand as a brand that offers consumers the best solutions to an identified need – mostly a very functional expectation. Performance Brands will therefore need to reassure the consumer on the performance of their products.

Some Performance Brands

Pampers: the brand story is that of infant comfort. The brand has been bringing to market a flow of innovative products – all targeting baby protection: they introduced age diapers, wetness indicators, and protective lotions. Pampers has been targeting mothers’ trust – with the health of the baby as its primary objective.
Mr. Clean: the P&G brand focuses on the battle against dirt – and its master word is power.  
Dove: originally (before 2000) the Unilever brand stood for “hydration”. Presenting itself as pH neutral and with a high content of moisturizing cream, its main message was on “creaming the skin without efforts”.
Gore-Tex: this successful BtoB brand has built itself on both the use of technical fabrics (Gore-Tex® Fabric) and of a specific technology (Gore-Tex® Technology) guaranteeing that these fabrics are waterproof, windproof and durable. It therefore is both an Ingredient Brand and a Performance Brand.

How do Performance Brands communicate?

All Performance Brands showcase power and service. In fact their major message being on performance, they will highlight their functional results (hydration, cleanliness, protection against smell, etc…). Nevertheless they all have a tendency to try and bring an emotional dimension to this very performance-oriented message. Some will be quite successful in doing this (Dove as we will see in a later post), others less as we can see below.

Pampers gives us very clear depiction of the technicity (and therefore performance) of their products: we are in baby cleanliness. Their packaging similarly only depicts functional benefits.  

Although most of their movie ads will take the same direction (“Baby Dry 3 am”),

some – as the one aired for the 2015 Super Bowl - will take a very different direction: mother love and care.  Pampers tries to move to a more emotional brand – becoming an identity Brand (as we will see in a forthcoming post).

Dove for years has always been showing the benefits of its moisturizing cream – “up to ¼ of moisturizing cream” – and of its benefits for the skin. We will see how it has now moved to a Visionary Brand – with its social fight for “Real Beauty”.

Mr Clean has been focusing since its inception (in 1959) on power, using its persona as the ideal servant that will clean the house for you (the myth of the genie in the lamp is where it finds its origin).

BtoB brands are mostly Performance Brands – as ESP; Gore-Tex; Intel..

Major points to remember

1. A Performance Brand offers consumers the best solutions to an identified need – mostly a very functional expectation.
2. All Performance Brands showcase power and service. In fact their major message being on performance, they will highlight their functional results (hydration, cleanliness, protection against smell, etc…). Nevertheless they all have a tendency to try and bring an emotional dimension to this very performance-oriented message.
3. Most BtoB brands are Performance Brands

 

When Chefs Reinvent Fast Food

The season when financial results are announced will not be bright for groups such as McDonald's and KFC – who are (ultimately) facing growing consumer mistrust.  For the past several years I have been pointing out the escalation of Health as a mega consumer trend during my lectures. My post last week showed its impact on Coca-Cola sales (and on sodas in general).  This (global) disaffection among consumers for fast food chains is essentially caused by a breakdown of trust amplified by fear (we only need to look at the food scandals that rocked these food chains in China for example).
A host of new players are rushing into the breach - all of whom will draw their legitimacy from the quality of their food. We can cite two:

• Fast food chains such as Chipotle (see my post of 2010 here) with the slogan "Food with Integrity" - or Shake Shack (whose blog has the title "Stand for Something Good") that has now banned GMOs from its offer: the positioning it defends is to gradually rebuild consumer confidence in this category.
  
  

• Another new approach is, I believe, much more interesting: Chefs (starred, for the most part) are entering this category - reinventing it under a new name, "fast-casual".  They offer pizzas, burgers, salads, sushi, dishes - all sporting the health seal (origin of products, ingredients) AND guaranteed by the aura of their famous chefs.  The prices are all "entry-level".

 This new trend is at work both in France and the US.  For example:

• In France, BOCO – "Un repas de chefs étoilés en bocaux" ("A meal in a jar by starred chefs") - (www.boco.fr) offers dishes and desserts in old-style jars (ah, nostalgia and reassurance!!) and sold in their restaurants, as well as on the TGV. Their model: the neighbourhood Parisian bistro. Prices for each dish between € 7.40 and € 9.80.
  
  

• In the USA, INDAY (Indian food), BEEFSTEAK (a vegetarian restaurant - www.beefsteakveggies.com), PORANO PASTA + GELATO, LOCAL PIZZA, PASTA FLYER FAT NOODLE (Asian recipes) ... (see the very interesting article about them by WSJ). As John Kunkel who has just launched LEWELLYN'S CHICKEN & BISCUITS, says, "The lesson for all of us in fast-casual is keep it simple. If you're going to do something, specialize, and do it better than everyone else".

At last! Coca-Cola changes from four brands to one but...

Coca-Cola has announced a major change in its marketing strategy: it is abandoning a 4-brand approach (Coca-Cola / Coca-Cola Zero / Coca-Cola Life / Diet Coke) for a single brand strategy (Coca-Cola) for marketing the four products. This new strategy launched in Britain and Spain will gradually include 11 countries, among them the USA.
The arguments used by the company to justify this change are symptomatic of failure: they claim that consumers have a hard time identifying the characteristics that differentiate the brands (e.g., 50% are unaware that Coca-Cola Zero contains no sugar or calories).  We must therefore conclude that the significant marketing budgets allocated separately to the 4 'brands' do not help consumers to understand the differences between them! The company has therefore decided to streamline its brand portfolio to render its marketing outlays more efficient.
However, it is important to look beyond press releases and understand the market situation and the trend in Coca-Cola sales. The market for soft drinks is clearly in decline; consumers are becoming aware of the health risks of these drinks.



Coca-Cola has set itself a target: its products with lower sugar content and calories will represent 50% of its sales by 2020. But that's still a long way off!  In the USA the Coca-Cola brand still represents almost 60% of sales, Diet Coke 32% and Coca-Cola Zero 18%.  And the trend is very unfavourable to Diet Coke - global sales fell sharply:




In Britain the brand images of Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero are very weak:



So we see that, in a context where consumers are looking more and more for products that are good for health, the separate-brand strategy followed since the launch of Diet Coke in 1982 and Coca-Cola Zero in 2005 failed to really position Diet Coke, Coke Zero and (since 2014) Coca-Cola Life, in the marketplace.  Consumers still do not understand the differences between them.  Meaning that it has been a failure.

From a conceptual point of view this 4-brand approach in my opinion has been a fundamental mistake from the outset, since each one is implemented separately and does not bring value to the Coca-Cola brand itself.  Here we touch upon one of the deviances in the marketing of American brands that favours an architecture Masterbrand / Sub-brands, while a European approach would be Masterbrand / Product line.

There should be only one Coca-Cola story - each product being at the service of the story and answering a different consumer expectation. 

Now it remains to be proven that Coca-Cola's new approach will help to position the 4 products more successfully: the change of packaging, displaying the Coca-Cola name horizontally, colour codes, or the fact of now having to present the 4 products together - will they be sufficient to increase the sales of the 4 products?  Do the last three really correspond to clearly identified consumer expectations?