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In this edition:

• Column: What Should You Include In Your Brand Plan

• Inspiration: Tom Goodwin on “What’s Wrong With Digital Ads”

• Timeless Wisdom: Pondé on the “Capitalist Soul”

Column: What Should You Include In Your Brand Plan

Writing effective brand plans is not something that’s widely taught in schools.

Typically speaking, managers learn how to write one at the organization they work for, which means if someone in that organization has not learned how to write one somewhere else chances are that the “brand plan templates” are likely out to lunch.

The first sign of that is when you see SWOTs, PESTs, or the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs in the plan.

I have yet to understand how these pesky frameworks made their way into the world of brand management, but whenever I see one I know that whoever is presenting them has not been taught how to write brand plans.

When has a SWOT ever uncovered any insights into how to grow brand? How about a PEST? What in the world can a diamond summarizing political, economic, social and technological factors tell me about what weaknesses I must address in my brand? And don’t even get me started on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (literally what it says is that if you need to take a piss you first need to satisfy that before devoting your attention to loving someone, really).

And for that reason, we should start unpacking how the profession of brand management came about.

The McElroy Memo

The year was 1931. The place, Cincinnati, OH.

Neil McElroy was a young promotional manager at Procter & Gamble trying to figure out how to grow their soap division. He had been running a very successful campaign for their brand Camay for the past few years, but the sales for the brand had reached a plateau.

However, P&G’s soap division didn’t only consist of Camay, they also had a much older and more well-known brand called Ivory Soap. The key difference was that Ivory was targeted at men, and it commanded most of the investment in the company, leaving Camay underfunded.

To solve this strategic challenge he reaches a consequential conclusion that would forever change the world of marketing and branding.

These brands were all being managed by the same people, because up until then P&G was managing its business by category lines. So, inevitably some brands got more resources than others because of how they were performing, effectively letting poor performers at the risk of sinking to the bottom of the totem pole. In other words, Camay’s “membership” of the soap division was its biggest strategic weakness.

So, on May 13th, 1931, McElroy has the idea to split the soap division team into two, getting rid of the category manager role and creating the brand manager role — effectively giving birth to the discipline of brand management.

That day he wrote what is known to this day to be the most important document in modern brand management — the McElroy Memo:

1. Study the past in order to find out the trouble.

2. After uncovering weaknesses, develop a plan that can be applied to this local sore spot.

3. Outline this plan in detail.

4. Prepare sales help and all other necessary material for carrying out the plan.

5. Keep whatever records are necessary, and make field studies to determine whether the plan has worked.

And this is still how brands are managed to this day.

The Modern Brand Plan

With that, our discipline was born. But with every good profession that’s left unstructured, marketing has managed to over the years turn this process of brand management into a 7-headed beast with new additions making it into the plans with each manager that came in touch with it.

It’s not uncommon to see 100, 200, 300-page brand plans these days. Loads and loads of slides running in circles trying to tick the boxes of every possible framework on the land, just to end up in a spot where no sound decisions have been made.

In reality, every brand plan should be able to be presented in 1 hour. That means that no more than 25 slides are needed, with the best ones managing to fit it all in under 15.

This doesn’t mean that a brand plan can be created in a day. Strategy is a discipline of making choices, and those can only be made with sound analysis and thinking time. With that, to land on 15-25 slides, there is about 2-3 months’ worth of time needed to get there.

So, what are the key elements that need to be addressed on a brand plan? If we go off of McElroy’s Memo, it’s quite simple:

1. Diagnosis: How did we perform last year? What have we learned through new research? How are we segmenting the market?

2. Strategy: Who will we target? How will we position our brand to each of those targets? What are the objectives we will seek to achieve with each target?

3. Tactics: What tactics will we implement to achieve each objective? How much will all of this cost?

When you break it all down, there are around 8 parts to a brand plan, with the option of multiple targets and positions under the strategy section.

I’ve written extensively about each of these parts in previous columns, and you can find them linked above if you want to dig deeper.

Communicating The Benefits of Brand

Having a solid plan in hand to present to the organization’s executive team in under 1 hour is the first step in growing a brand. The next step is securing the funds to do so.

The problem that most brand managers often run into is that they explain the benefits of having a strong brand in marketing terms. They voice arguments that make sense to them, and not to the person they’re talking to — and that’s breaking marketing’s cardinal rule #1: market orientation.

There are 10 key benefits of having a strong brand that can be picked from a la carte when attempting to explain it to others in the organization — depending on who you’re talking to (finance, HR, sales, etc.) choose wisely and avoid regurgitating all of it on them:

• Increased intangible asset value: brands often amount to the most financially valuable asset in an organization, easily exceeding 20% of its total market cap.

• Better, harder working employees: great talent wants to work for a company that has great brands. Plain and simple.

• Improved customer loyalty and repeat purchase: strong brands serve as a mental shortcut to making buying decisions, and this familiarity keeps people buying the same set of 1-3 brands in the category over and over again.

• Increased penetration and sales volumes: strong brands travel faster and further through word of mouth. Aim for fame, and people will seek you out.

• Superior advertising effectiveness: the number one variable achieving higher effectiveness is how big your brand is (followed by creativity). Grow your brand, and your investments will work harder for you.

• Higher prices and gross margins: strong brands convey a higher value perception, therefore they can afford to charge higher prices without losing many customers.

• Upstream attraction and pull effects: strong brands bring demand alongside them. Meaning, distributors will want to carry your product and your brand can drive higher returns for all involved in the supply chain because of its increased value perception.

• Sustainable differentiation: technological differentiation is temporary and cannot be owned (outside of temporary patents). But a brand’s image can in fact be owned and last forever if properly managed.

• Market orientation: brands evolve with the times when properly managed, enabling the organization to keep a finger on the pulse of what consumers care about and grow alongside them.

• Diversification into new categories: a strong brand enables a company to expand into new categories more easily, carrying previous value perceptions across category lines. Take Lamborghini, for example, which started out selling tractors and nowadays is known for its sport cars.

There has never been a greater need for strong brands. The past 15 years led us astray as an industry seeking short-term gains through digital “quick-fixes” at the expense of long-term brand building.

But first we must be clear on what strong brand plans look like, and there’s no better place to start than looking at the history that led us here.

Inspiration: Tom Goodwin on “What’s Wrong With Digital Ads”

Tom Goodwin is a living legend in our field having held leadership roles across some of the biggest agencies in the world.

He is known these days for his thought-leadership and last week he shared a heavy-hitting piece on LinkedIn on what went wrong with the digital adland.

TL;DR:

• He argues that the digital revolution of the past 15 or so years has pushed advertising away from its meta-meaning of the world, which is “to pay attention to”, and turned towards “targeting and harassment”.

• Why we’ve turned digital real estate into a click and data industry is something that never made sense, because that’s not how advertising actually works.

• Tom makes a case for companies to better vet advertising quality as opposed to just selling cheap units that pollute the web. “Why does Twitter sell promoted tweets, and not simply ‘big nice banners’?“

• “It's probably the greatest opportunity in advertising today, and something both media owners, and creative agencies, and brands can make happen. Just please don't try to measure clicks. Most people have never clicked on one deliberately.”

Timeless Wisdom: Pondé on the “Capitalist Soul”

"The deeply capitalist soul is also a deeply solitary one." — Luiz Felipe Pondé

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • The Role of Brand Management

  • Planning Advertising That Yields Great Ideas

  • The Strategic Backbone Behind Brand Hierarchy Trees

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.