Archive for June, 2010

It’s an old story…

Guy goes into the hardware store looking for a drill bit. Every marketer in the world will tell you: this guy doesn’t have a drill bit problem, he’s got a hole problem, just like we all learned in Marketing 101 — you don’t sell features (drill bits), you sell benefits (holes).

Only thing is, that’s not the whole story.

Focus solely on features and benefits and you might be blindsided into offering products that, for all their “superiority,” don’t add up to a superior brand experience. For that, you need to understand context:

• Who are the users of your products?
• What purposes do they use them for?
• What are the systems your products are used within?
• Do you own these systems as well?

By understanding context, you can provide a balance of features and benefits that add up to brand success. How do you get there? It takes a methodology that pulls together the elements of context, systems, products, requisites and desired outcomes to create a blueprint for user experiences that push your product way up the x axis of Brand Significance.

The iPod is a great example.

Apple didn’t simply provide a cool music player (features). And it went well beyond providing an anywhere/anytime personal music system (benefits).

Apple understood how people experience music in the context of their daily lives, and provided an entire system that delivers the experience in three, seamlessly integrated products whose features are perfectly suited to their unique needs: listening (the iPod), organizing (iTunes) and acquiring (the iTunes store).

The result is unparalleled brand experience that enriches people’s lives — and Apple’s pocket book.

It’s easier than ever to satiate our needs and wants. There are more products in more focused categories delivering higher quality for less cost than ever. We’re less willing to offer our allegiance to any product when a better one is likely in the offing.

Product or category leadership is an increasingly specious objective. Simply deliver a superior product, and you’ll be rewarded with an onslaught of competitors and the pressure to make your product both cheaper and better — a battle for market share where margins are the casualty.

Those who do become leaders are increasingly hard to categorize. Apple Inc. dropped the word “Computer” from its name in January 2009. Rather than pursuing leadership through product excellence within the commoditized computer category, it pursued a strategy of bringing enrichment to people’s lives through creativity, music and self-expression.

Similarly, after Harley Davidson successfully petitioned the International Trade Commission for a 5-year tariff to protect its outdated motorcycles against low-cost Japanese imports, it did very little to make its products technically competitive. Instead it took the opportunity to make cartilage-compressing vibration and oil leaks an identifying part of the brand experience, and gave a market of Reagan-era white collar professionals something more — a culture they could proudly belong to — one that artfully melded Reagan’s 50s-era patriotism with an outlaw rebel persona.

We call the kind of loyalty enjoyed by Apple and Harley Davidson “brand significance.” Brand significance is not the result of branding. It is achieved by a combination of two, uniquely integrated accomplishments:

1. inventing a culture that brings meaning to people’s lives; and
2. providing a personally enriching experience that reinforces the culture.

The relationship between meaning, enrichment and significance can be illustrated as follows.

The company’s goal is to push its coordinates up and to the right by finding ways to make the brand more culturally meaningful (y axis) and personally enriching (x axis), resulting in the highest possible brand significance score.

The mechanisms for doing this work will be explored in other posts. First it’s important to see that significant brands go far beyond serving the needs of individuals and their current cultures. Equally important: brands should pursue this by design, not hope to get there by magic.