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In this edition:

• Column: When Your Brand Needs Some Dusting Off

• Inspiration: Hublot’s “The Art of Fusion”

• THIS WEEK: BBBbites — Marketing your Business

Column: When Your Brand Needs Some Dusting Off

Semantics don’t always matter.

But when they do, we should be aware of it to avoid embarrassing ourselves in public.

And no, I’m not referring to “unthawing the chicken”, or “never would have thunk”, or “irregardless”.

I’m referring to the critical differences between brand re-positioning, re-vitalization, and re-branding.

Ok — maybe I’m being a little overdramatic, but knowing how the work differs depending on what’s required of the brand will save you time, money, and headache when navigating the waters of brand management.

Messing With Your Brand

Rule #1 that new brand managers should remember is: you don’t own the brand, your customers do.

This means that resisting the urge to make changes, to leave your mark, to “shake things up” is of the utmost importance.

Do your proper diagnosis first. Learn about its heritage, past campaigns, perceptions in the eyes of customers, before even thinking of touching anything.

Chances are that your job to do with this brand is to simply manage it towards growth. Identifying weak points, setting objectives for them to improve, and executing initiatives with excellence.

Brand management alone is already tough enough, so you’ll have no shortage of challenges to overcome and ways to keep yourself entertained. But eventually you’ll run into 1 of 2 (and in extremely rare cases, 1 of 3) scenarios:

• You’ll need to re-position the brand because its points of differentiation have become table stakes.

• You’ll need to re-vitalize the brand because its attributes are starting to become dated with the market.

• And in extremely rare cases, such as when your business goes through an M&A, or loses a legal battle over copyrights, or when language has changed over the decades and your brand just so happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — you might need to rebrand.

Re-positioning

Brand positioning is a massively misunderstood topic in the marketing world. It’s quite common to see positioning statements that span paragraphs in length, filled with fluff such as purpose, values, beliefs, vision, attitudes, and inspiring words that don’t actually make it crystal clear what customers should think of when they think of the brand.

And as a matter of fact, the very people in those organizations also end up with no clue — requiring 100-page brand books or internal websites dedicated to explaining how to navigate the usage of their beastly brands.

On the opposite extreme, some folks pick a single word as their positioning. “Innovation”, “Synergy”, “Integrated” — as if a brand could “own” a word in the dictionary.

While both ends of the spectrum a filled with flaws, there is a happy middle that actually delivers on what a positioning should deliver on.

As previously unpacked in one of my columns, positioning needs to answer 4 things:

• Who are you for (specific segment, or total market)

• What do you offer (could be your product, brand, category, anything you might be doing it differently)

• Compared to who (you alternatives, which could be competitors, the status-quo, or anything else standing in your way)

• Why should consumers care (what emotional, functional benefit, feature, that makes it relevant to your audience)

For example: among snackers, Snickers is the brand of candy bar that satisfies your hunger because it is packed with peanuts.

Simple, clear, and concise, making it easy to understand what the brand is all about and giving your imagination a jumping off point to bring it to life.

But, sometimes a brand might have wrongly positioned itself in the market for a while, or its points of differentiation have become table stakes. When you brand begins to feel generic, you might have a re-positioning project in your hands.

This type of work involves maintaining the brand’s identity but updating its positioning. The difference between the two is quite simple:

• Brand identity refers to the visible and tangible elements of a brand that distinguish it from competitors. It is how a brand presents itself to the outside world.

• Brand positioning is about how a brand is perceived in the mind of the consumer relative to its competitors. It defines the unique space a brand occupies in the marketplace and its differentiating value proposition.

Therefore, to re-position a brand one must be equipped with a proper diagnosis of what associations a brand and its competitors currently have in the market, versus what associations are actually correlated with driving purchase (or other relevant outputs) in the minds of consumers.

For example, years ago Staples discovered that its brand associations with having a wide range of products, always being in stock, having low prices, and carrying the top brands had begun to become table stakes. Its competitors Office Depot and Office World over the years had moved into that territory as well, thus making it undifferentiated.

But when they learned that being “easy to shop at” was strongly correlated with purchase intent and that no one in the category was strongly associated with it, they decided to re-position themselves towards it.

What followed was a series of tactics that brought this positioning to life in exceptional fashion — from launching a brand new equity campaign around this idea of “That was easy”, making the “Easy” button famous, launching an “Invention Quest” competition open to the public to come up with an idea that solved a real problem in an “easy” way, all the way to breaking the cardinal rule of retail by brining the best-selling products to the front of the store in order to make shopping “easy” — Staples successfully re-positioned itself into this new territory.

Re-vitalizing

The work to re-vitalize a brand centers itself around updating its identity — not its positioning.

While most brands wait until its absolutely necessary to engage in re-vitalization work, the best brands in the world are constantly re-vitalizing their brand by infusing new energy and being in tune with culture without losing its core positioning in the market.

Brands that have been too risk-averse over the years, lacked innovation, haven’t done a proper job in articulating their positioning to the market, have seen their client base aging (effectively following them to the grave), and that have begun seeing the words “iconic”, “traditional”, “classic” showing up in their brand associations research — in all likelihood are overdue for re-vitalization.

The work largely entails going back to the origins and the magic of the brand at its inception and bringing them forward to TODAY. It’s about asking ourselves the question “what do those values and associations demand of our brand nowadays?”

A great example of this was Dior.

Back in the 1940s when Christian Dior created the brand, his designs were quite provocative. They caused a stir in the market due to its glamorous cuts that highlighted femininity in a new light for the time.

But the years that followed his death in the 50s, saw an unchanging brand. And over time Dior, which used to be synonymous with femininity, glamour, edginess, started to feel traditional and conservative as culture changed.

Until 1997 when John Galliano became the new creative director for the house of Dior, and introduced the world to “Hobo-chic”. This caused quite a stir in the world of fashion because Galliano was too provocative.

And that’s exactly what Dior had always been about. Its heritage was never about being classic and conservative — it was always about challenging the norms, breaking down walls that hold back our imaginations, and constantly redefining what femininity and glamour meant.

In order to remain true to a brand, one must change their tactics, execution and products as the years pass by.

Do Your Homework

You may have noticed that I did not include a section about “rebranding.”

The reason is simple — 99% of the time there’s zero upside in changing a brand’s positioning AND image at the same time. This often leads to massive losses of brand equity and the re-introduction of a novel brand into the brand by discarding all that came prior to it.

There are plenty of examples that illustrate this problem, such a Twitter’s rebrand to X, PWC’s brief rebrand to Monday (and then quickly reverting back to PWC due to internal and external revolt) and Ernest & Young’s rebrand to EY (which is awfully close to EY! Magazine in look and feel — I’ll let you Google that one).

So, before rolling up your sleeves and begin tinkering with your brand, make sure to do your homework. The type of work required to address its challenges are vastly different depending on the findings of your diagnosis.

Inspiration: Hublot’s “The Art of Fusion”

I’ve recently learned about this quite expensive brand of watches, named Hublot. But what captured my attention weren’t the watches themselves nor the price tags (obviously), but the strike of genius by its founder and subsequent purchaser and CEO.

Back in 1980 in Geneva, a stylish Italian man by the name of Carlo Crocco founded the watch brand Hublot with the aim of integrating Italian design with Swiss craftmanship.

He came out swinging for the fences and released a $30,000 gold watch with rubber straps. This was unheard of and actually provocative in the industry, which considered rubber not as elegant nor luxurious as leather.

But this leap of faith was all the heritage the brand needed.

Fast-forward to 2004, and the luxury goods legend Jean-Claude Biver buys Hublot, which at the time was generating around $30M in revenues per year.

But the brand was in much need of an injection of vision for it to flourish further. And that’s when Biver’s genious was in full display.

He looked at the combination of gold and rubber and had a lightbulb moment — the only other time when gold and rubber could be found in the same place was just before the Big Bang (yes, he drew a link between this watch and the origins of the universe).

This insight gave life to Hublot’s vision for the future: “The Art of Fusion.”

Fast-forward a few more years to 2019, and Hublot was generating $800M per year under the helm of Biver and LVMH.

That’s the power of clear brand positioning and visionary leadership.

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:

  • How To Grow Small Brands

  • How To Set Up A Brand For Success

  • What Should You Include In Your Brand Plan

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.