Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: How To Set Up A Brand For Success

• Inspiration: Kicking Horse Coffee’s “Kickstart Your Heart”

• Upcoming: BBBbites — Marketing your Business

Column: How To Set Up A Brand For Success

Every year brand managers and brand consultants around the world get shuffled around their companies and markets, and are entrusted with new brands they have never touched on in their lives.

This scary yet necessary part of our free markets enables fresh thinking to be infused into brands and new eyes to uncover opportunities not yet capitalized on by their predecessors.

However, the temptation of these managers to jump straight into “doing things” and proving results fast is the first critical mistake committed by the majority of them, which ends up snowballing into a series of missteps over the course of the following 18-24 months that often lead a brand to gaining little, if not zero, ground in the market.

The first critical step when a brand manager sits in a new desk is not to act — but to study the past, as Neil McElroy professed nearly 100 years ago.

The Process of Diagnosis

Brands do not belong to brand managers.

They belong to their customers, and the brand manager’s role is to leave it in a better place by the end of their tenure than when they first found it.

But in order to do that, managers need to understand the context in which this brand existed over the course of its history, what current troubles it faces today, and determine what the organization should do for its future success.

This study is typically compiled of 3 key stages: discovery, testing, and tracking.

Discovery

The first thing a manager should do when given a new brand is to study its origins. Where was this brand invented? Who were its founders? What heritage has it built over the years?

Taking a field trip to the town or building of origin will give managers invaluable information about its roots. In today’s work-from-home laptop world, it can be easy to sit behind our desks and become Google researchers. But this tendency robs us of receiving inputs directly from the source — we read reports, blogs, columns, and case studies written by someone else and take their perspective as the definitive truth.

Can you imagine being the manager of the Hershey’s brand and never having visited Hershey, Pennsylvania? Learned about its Dutch roots, visited the Hershey museum, and seen the Appalachian mountains crossing its landscape? The physical setting of the birthplace of a brand has so much influence over its inception story.

And the same goes to learning about its founders — oftentimes the reason why someone started a brand remains part of its DNA for all of its existence. If the founders are no longer alive, at least digging into the archives to understand their life story and what critical points along their journey led them to start the business will fill you with invaluable context that Google could never replace.

Finally, in today’s post-modern world it can be easy to look at the past as “old” and “irrelevant”. But your predecessors were not stupid — if anything they have already proven themselves to be great managers because the brand is still alive today. Studying what they’ve done, digging up old tactics that may have been forgotten, and understanding the heritage of a brand will equip you with the necessary knowledge to carry the torch forward.

This type of field study can take a few weeks, but I highly encourage everyone to make time for it — it will put you in a much greater position to make the right decisions moving forward.

The final portion of discovery should be comprised of a mix of qualitative research sprinkled with some preliminary secondary research.

Here it might be worth it sitting behind your desk for 3 to 4 days and forcing yourself to scavenge through the internet to learn everything you can about past campaigns, your brand, your category, consumer reports, etc. While not definitive, it will give you an added layer of context to validate your new findings upon.

Then taking a few more weeks to conduct some ethnography by visiting customers in their “natural habitat”, talking to loyal customers to uncover why they love the product so much, and even bringing in a few focus groups to discuss the category and brand will help you understand what key associations, positive and negative, your brand currently has in the market.

Testing

After having done a few of the discovery methods above, now comes the time when a brand manager must process all that information they consumed and test it for statistically representative insights.

This means that running a well-designed brand survey will enable the manager to say with confidence (ideally a 95% level of confidence) how well-known the brand actually is in the market, what associations and positions it currently holds in the minds of consumers, and the stages of the buyer journey that must be improved.

For that, no more than 15-20 questions are necessary, from which a series of derivative insights can be attained by drawing correlations between the answers. Ideally you’re asking some of the following:

• Slicing questions that uncover which key traits the respondent possess that are relevant to your segmentation (i.e.: how often do you eat chocolate?)

• Awareness questions to understand which alternatives come to mind and their level of awareness (aided and unaided) do they have about your brand (i.e.: when you think of chocolate brands, which ones come to mind?).

• Perception questions to identify which attributes (only the ones you’ve uncovered during the discovery phase) do they associate most strongly with your brand and with your brand’s alternatives (i.e.: on a scale of 1-7, how much do you agree with the following statements about Hershey’s - sweet taste, romantic choice, movie night choice, etc.)

• Funnel questions to uncover which brands are moving from each stage of the funnel to the next (i.e.: from the following brands of chocolate, which ones would you consider buying this month? Which ones would you prefer right now? etc.)

From there you should have all the data necessary to understand your brand’s level of awareness, its sales funnel performance, its competitive set, its competitors’ performance along the funnel, your brand image scores, your competitors’ brand image scores, the key attributes that are drivers of success, the baselines for your objectives, the baselines for your brand tracking, all the while being able to slice all this data by segment.

Tracking

The above is all critical information to get a grasp about a brand and its place in the market. These insights should then be used to inform the brand’s strategy and how much money it will need to spend to achieve its objectives.

But execution is not the finish line.

After a brand manager has gained strategic and budgetary approval of their plans, and have begun implementing it, they need to be able to track its performance in order to inform the following year’s plan.

And by tracking I don’t mean sales tracking. Those are the ultimate business metrics that everyone will get measured on.

By tracking I mean the key brand equity metrics that the manager has set out to improve in the objectives section of their brand plans. Since the brand survey has given us the baseline data regarding our brand’s level of top-of-mind, unaided and aided awareness, and degree of strength relative to key attributes, we now get to run another brand pulse check at the end of the year to see how much we’ve been able to move them in the right direction.

There are some brand trackers out there that can gauge these metrics on a monthly basis (see Tracksuit), but those are better suited for higher frequency consumer brands. The reason I say that is because brand equity metrics move at a glacial pace (1-3 years to see meaningful changes), so by measuring your awareness levels per month there isn’t much you can get out of it that’s actionable. Remember — brand equity metrics are long-term metrics and should not be used as reactive signs to optimize plans mid-year.

Setting The Tone

As you can see, the process of diagnosing a brand’s situation can be a lengthy and labour intensive part of brand planning.

But proper, effective brand planning simply cannot be done without it. Managers that jump straight into tactics, or even into strategy without proper diagnosis for that matter, are setting themselves up for failure — or at best, limited success.

How can one determine what to go do and measure whether or not it has worked without investing into research? It would be like throwing a dart in a dark pub — you might hit something, but in all likelihood not the target.

Now, since this is a somewhat lengthy process, it’s critically important that brand managers know when to start it. And to do that they must first know which month the brand’s fiscal year starts on so they can work backwards.

For example, if a brand’s fiscal year begins in October, then:

• Budgets likely get signed off by finance in late-July (2-2.5 months prior)

• Which means that you need to present your plan with the requested budget for approval by early-July (3 months prior)

• Meaning, your strategy needs to be completed by mid-June (3.5 months prior)

• Therefore your diagnosis must be done by early-May (5 months prior)

• So you must start your research by early-March (7 months prior)

Understanding timing is critically important to set the tone within an organization. Knowing when things get signed off by and working backwards to determine when the work must be completed is what politically-savvy brand managers do.

Start early, give yourself ample time to do the work, and you’ll be setting yourself, your brand, and your organization up for success.

Inspiration: Kicking Horse Coffee’s “Kickstart Your Heart”

I’ve been a longtime drinker of Kicking Horse Coffee. Incepted in the ski town of Invermere, the company managed to build a high quality product with gradually increasing distribution across all major retailers, while charging an above-average price for its beans.

The brand savviness of the business alongside its respectable sourcing practices is what led them to this point — and now they’ve launched their first brand platform campaign across Canada and the U.S.: Kickstart Your Heart.

It’s quite refreshing to see a coffee company taking a bolder stance around its product. Too often coffee companies fall back into that “Sunday cozy vibes” territory that’s already overcrowded.

But not Kicking Horse. And to make matters even better, they smartly leaned into one of their most iconic brand codes, the Kick-Ass Donkey.

Brilliant work that’s distinctive, emotive, and extremely well coded.

Upcoming: BBBbites — Marketing your Business

• October 25, 2024 @ 11:30 am - 01:30 pm MST

• The Hemingway Room, Work Nicer Coworking Calgary, 1204 20 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Reserve your spot HERE.

The Better Business Bureau listened to your feedback and is excited to invite you to a BBBBites session where Pedro Porto Alegre, Strategy Director at WJ Agency (yours truly) will explore the topic "Marketing Your Business".

This session will provide valuable insights into effective marketing strategies, tools, and methods that can help elevate your business to the next level.

Why Attend?

• Expert Insights: Benefit from a candid conversation about how to think about effective marketing strategies to help your business.

• Latest Trends: Learn about the latest marketing trends, tools, and techniques that are shaping the industry today.

• Practical Strategies: Walk away with actionable marketing tactics that you can implement immediately to drive business success.

• Networking Opportunities: Connect with other business owners and build valuable relationships within the BBB community.

• Business Growth: Discover how effective marketing strategies can boost business performance, attract more customers, and improve your bottom line.

• Interactive Session: Engage in an interactive discussion where you can ask questions, share your experiences.

REGISTER HERE WHILE SPOTS ARE STILL AVAILABLE.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • What Should You Include In Your Brand Plan

  • The Role of Brand Management

  • Planning Advertising That Yields Great Ideas

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.