Brand Advertising

This week, Mark and Lorraine discuss the importance of brand advertising and why it should be at the forefront of your advertising efforts in today’s world. Join the positioning duo as they dive deep into the advantages of brand advertising and explain why short-term advertising tactics alone aren’t enough to cut it. 

Join Mark and Lorraine for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and today I'm joined by our branding brainiac, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, we're gonna dive into one of your favorite topics today, brand advertising, and discuss why it matters more than ever. No, not wine, not the Eagles.

Lorraine Kessler 
Okay. You took me off guard. No, I thought it was going to be like Italian cooking or something.

Mark Vandegrift 
Brand advertising. And we're also gonna discuss one of your most recent favorite words, which is brand fame. Okay, making things famous. But before we get there, let's touch on a fun brand whose theme is fame and in this case, used misplaced fame as the punchline. Have you seen the new commercial for Skinny Pop with Jennifer Aniston?

Lorraine Kessler 
Yes I have, Yes

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, premiered with the Oscars on March 2nd. And it was a simple ad. It showed the logo pretty much the entire time. And it had all the actors eating out of the bag and making it the distraction and then the resulting punchline. And I just thought what made this a great commercial is that, you know, Jennifer Aniston is truly the famous one and she's not even acknowledged. They can't spell her name. They don't know who she is and of course, everyone's all about the skinny pop. So why don't we see more commercials like this?

Lorraine Kessler 
I don't know because this is, I think because we, well, I don't know, I don't know, but I will say this. You have so many simple things done so well. The copy is ingenious. The whole concept is ingenious, right? And then the copy, the actual scripting of the spot is great. And I think most importantly, the casting. I mean, Jennifer Aniston is just naturally someone people like. She's adorable. I think she exudes kind of an awkward vulnerability, as pretty as she is, as cute as she is. She's like the girl next door who doesn't really quite have all the confidence, you know? And so you want to pay attention to her. She just glistens on screen, too. And then the other actors are fantastic. I mean, they're so...freaking good on how they can't spell her name, they misspelling her name. And she's just trying to be patient, but is confused. So it's really great. And at the end, you know, they recognize the product, the Skinny Pop, more than Jennifer Aniston. So I would just say, well done to this agency. Brilliant spot. Simple. No special effects. You know, no elaborate kind of storytelling. Pretty simple. stays very narrow, very tight, and it's just a great spot.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Good. Well, that's a good way to kick off our episode this week. And to the extent we're going to cover any brand news this week, because we have a multifaceted topic to cover. So, Lorraine, we live in a world today where consumers are faced with the most number of products ever, right? And services. And with all this noise, it's crucial for brand to take the necessary steps to stand out among all the competitors rather than blending into the crowd. We always talk about the copycat thing. You always say, if I touch my head, someone else is gonna touch their head. Yeah, as Jack Trout wrote in Positioning the Battle for Your Mind, getting noticed is getting tougher. And that was in what year? 1981, when the book came out, So before you launch your newest and your latest product into the market, or before you go to the next step in your advertising efforts, you need to first ensure you have a well-established position. That's what Jack Todd taught us. That's what we teach. That's why I have the words behind me that we do. A position is a unique differentiated idea that sets your product service company apart from the competition. So Lorraine, we do this all the time. We've talked about it, our appreciative discovery, but let's revisit the basics here in season three so that any new listeners who are joining us can understand the concept of positioning. And then we'll get to the idea of brand positioning, brand advertising, and making your brand famous, which are all basically interrelated.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, you know, I think what Trout tries to, well, does his entire work is laying out this premise that positioning, finding an idea that differentiates you in a meaningful way in the mind of your target audience is upstream from branding. It is the first strategic choice you have to make. How is my company product service? How am I if I'm a personality? different in a meaningful way that will appeal to the audience I most want to cultivate or I have the greatest opportunity to cultivate. And we've often said that of these two, differentiation and being meaningful. Being meaningful is about relevance. And I like to say it's the R & D of a position is relevance and differentiation. And relevance always comes first. Because if your idea isn't meaningful or important, to a sizable audience, then you have a meaningless difference. So we don't want a meaningless difference, we want a meaningful difference. So you have to say, how important is this idea and to how many people, right? Because the object is to make a profit at the end of the day. Now, also strategically, ideas can be brilliantly brilliant, but they're pretty boring. I mean, it's like kills germs. That's a strategic positioning idea. Better driving experience, strategic idea, overnight delivery, strategic idea, prebiotic soda we talked about in our last episode. These are pretty boring on their own. So what really has to come into play is once you have the idea and you know it does maximize the distance between your product, service, whatever, and competitive offerings. and you know that there's a certain amount of people who care a lot about this idea, they only have to say is how do we communicate this, right? And I would say that how the idea is communicated can turn the idea to gold or dust. It absolutely, this is where the creative is so important. It's the mercurial magic formula that takes into account things like the name of the product, the slogans or the word you use the logo and how it looks, the personality of the brand, how you might personify it. And if you do all these things really well, then the creative actually becomes a benefit of the brand and a benefit of the differentiation. So, you know, when you think about some ideas, overnight delivery, you know, what made that fly? Well, you have this really super fast talking guy and the slogan was, when it absolutely has to be there overnight. Look at all the emotion in that. When it absolutely has to be there overnight. A lot of words. You could have just said, when it has to be there overnight. Not as important, not as good. So there's just such artistry in how the creative is melds with the idea to make it fly and make it sing. You know, and I often think like, Nike and they've been having some troubles lately, but you know, they're famous just do it campaign is less about the slogan in my opinion I mean they got that seated because they have 250 million dollars when they were launching to be able to say that but I think it was the association the personification with Michael Jordan, you know and Made people think well, maybe with these shoes. I can be like Michael Jordan. I might run faster. I might jump higher and I just think they ought to get back to some A-list athletes in their advertising, relevant today, to kind of get that energy and that, know, what's going again, because I think they've kind of lost it a little bit. But anyway, it's this artistry part. We talked about in the last, this Jennifer Aniston spot with Skinny Pop, how brilliant that is, how beautiful it was written. That's where ideas really fly is, you you could take the best idea, like I said, and it's going to turn to dust if it's not communicated in a way that has artistry and creativity and engages.

Mark Vandegrift 
Very good. Well, we know if you have something unique or different to offer, consumers are going to take notice. Whether or not they choose it or not, that's part of the deal is you're not going to win it with everyone. But that alone isn't enough to succeed in our overly communicated environment that we have today. So once you establish a position, you need to then own the idea in the mind or it's just a boardroom idea, right? And that's where the brand advertising comes in and that's where you play the game actually. So the problem we're seeing today is that most marketers and a lot that come to us, they're entirely focused on the short-term transactional marketing tactic and they lose sight of the importance of an effective long-term strategy. Lorraine explained to our listening audience why focusing on short-term transactional tactics alone may not be the most effective route for the long haul.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, yeah, and I'll begin with what I think is the core problem is that people are seduced by these metrics that they can get very quickly from a Google campaign, an email campaign, opens, clicks. But all of those can be meaningless in the long run if they don't add up to long term profitable sales. you know, we've long thought this and, you know, It's no different than in business when American business is said to think only quarter to quarter. And these are diseases of the mind, you know? And thankfully, there's a new book out, and it's called The Long and the Short of It by Les Bonet and Peter Field that after extensive research proves that brand advertising, when I called indirect, long-term, indirect brand advertising versus transactional short-term activation advertising designed to get a sale now. It shows that short-term activation marketing does not apply to long-term success. In other words, it doesn't add up. And we can just use your common sense and say, you how many products have you ordered on Amazon or on the Facebook ad because it solved the problem rationally. It had a rational appeal. Hey, here's how you hear it. You can heat a room with this little, you know, small thing you plug in and heat your room affordably. Can't even remember the name. I bought two of them. I don't remember the name, right? How many of those products have people bought? Quite a bit. So there's no brand value. It's like here, it's here today gone tomorrow. Now, conversely, long-term, brand marketing, which is more direct, indirect, and I'll talk about that a little bit, does affect short-term sales, but the reverse is not true. So that's kind of an interesting finding. So if you have a brand, it can create lift, what we like to call lift, on any short-term campaigns that you're running. So the key is to run these together in the right balance, to have a balance between transactional and branding, and understand that they do different things brand creates trust, you know, it's reliability plus delight equals trust. That's what brand designed to do. Transactional doesn't do that. Transactional says, hey, here's this product, solve this problem. This is why you need it. This is how your life will be great if you don't have it. Here's the gain, here's the loss, buy it now. But for that greater emotional connection, that greater belief, that trust plus delight, reliability and just an emotional connection, you brand marketing. So you need a bath. Now the problem is, and this has always been a problem as long, I started in the business in 1981 when the book Positioning first was published and it was handed to me by my then boss and it changed my way of thinking forever. But the problem is people, we are always so reticent to say to clients, brand marketing has to be measured differently, right? You have to have a long view. You have to see the big picture. So we have a problem having a balanced scorecard because our scorecard is overly tilted towards these things that are real quick hits and give us dopamine and we feel great about, but they may not be adding up and that's the problem of the seduction.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Well, we know the short term efforts might be beneficial. I mean, if I were selling a gazillion units on the Amazon, great. But you just showed testimony of the fact that you don't even know what those were names. So every time that someone goes to buy one of those things, there's the potential of having other players in the market. 

Lorraine Kessler
Sure. And more so because Amazon will serve you up. All the alternates, right? All the substitutes.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Yep. And they're going to do it based on their algorithms. So they're not, they don't even care about anybody looking over it. They want best price plus best reviews plus best service from whoever's fulfilling it. Boom. That's when you get an Amazon best recommendation, right? Well, that can shift very quickly. And now you have nothing to stand on because no one remembers what your brand is. So it, you know, the other thing, when we say transactional marketing, we're talking about those things that are short place, that don't do much in the way of brand building. And I think of paid search, right? You go, you search, you find something, you go and buy it. You're not buying it typically based on brand, because if you knew the brand already, you'd get there much faster, right? Because you're now typing the brand versus either the category or a description of your problem or whatever it might be. So I think what happens is marketers are told to steer clear of brand advertising because it's a process that doesn't produce that immediate result. Right. I would disagree, even though they're told this, if the idea is right, it can go crazy. Look at Poppi. We were talking about that on the last episode, right? Poppi does the Super Bowl ad. I had never heard of them before. As you said, it got us to trial. And then now I like Doc Pop. It's favorite flavor. If I'm gonna drink anything other than water and coffee, I'm gonna go get myself a Doc Pop. So that was because they did good brand advertising. They had short term play, but Poppy now is in my head. Not, I drank a healthy soda. I don't even remember what it was but now that is in my mind. So the two can live together is my point, right? You don't have to sell your soul to Amazon and you don't have to sell your soul to short transactional paid search, things like that. You can do both and that's probably the big story here.

Lorraine Kessler 
Right, the problem is many marketers, when they hear brand advertising, they think dollars. And I've got to spend a lot more money and look at all the sales and get them. What they don't realize is they're in a very vulnerable position of being substituted or even made irrelevant without that brand bill. And so you know, we just have to get more confident as an agency of using research like this that's in this book to prove the point that if you're trying to build a business and business profitability long-term, you're not going to get there by transactional short-term marketing. That will, you know.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Well, and what I was just about to ask you is there's also this notion of doing brand advertising correctly. So what I think has failed a lot of people is they look like at a lot of money spent for a little return, but they've never looked at the fact that maybe the brand advertising they were doing wasn't actually building a brand. It was a series of disconnected messages that never add up in the brain which brings us back to positioning, we started out with. So share with our listeners what it looks like to do brand advertising correctly, and maybe provide some examples if you have them.

Lorraine Kessler 
All right. Well, I think to do it correctly is to understand it operates a little differently, right? Than a message, a direct message, and then you buy the product. It works indirect. So let me give you an example. This is kind of a crazy example of this. But if I say to you, I am funny, and that's the stimulus, your response could be, no, you're not and you're gone, right? I don't find you funny. I remember someone telling me once and I'm sure my face showed it. I'm a very smart person. I know my face was like, really? I don't think so. So you've already discredited yourself. So brand advertising can't work in a direct way that a transactional marketing can. That's rational and it says, is this product. This is what it does. This is why you should so how it would work is I tell you a joke where we have a conversation and through that conversation you find a lot of things I say as being funny. You laugh and you say, God, she's so funny, right? Because brand advertising believes in the premise that what you discover for yourself is better than what I tell you. So that's the indirectness of it. And so what happens when that happens is you come again. You know, if you want to meet with me again, you're like, my God, this will be fun. Cause she's funny because I discovered that about her. Not because she told me she was funny and I had to believe it. So, so I think that kind of is a little theoretical, but what it does is when you understand there's a different end to the customer and it's emotionally based too. has to tie to core emotions, things that you want, like these five great motivators of pride or wanting to be emulated or want others to emulate you or success and looking successful and all these other emotions. Those have to be in the brand. That's very hard to put into a rational buy now kind of situation. And the brands that do this really well, we go back to that. How do I tell the story of this difference with in artful way? You know, some of the brands that have created fame. I mean, they're famous for the way they've advertised. You think about NINJO, Green, and Coca-Cola. Still, people talk about that. I mean, decades later. The Affleck Duck took everyone by surprise. And if I'm not wrong, I think Flow came after Affleck, maybe. And then after Flow, you know, they all started having some, right, like mayhem. Can you hear me now? which was Verizon. I think Uber Eats with Matthew McConaughey has the potential to be that kind of brand advertising that pleases people. And what's the discovery in that? Well, Uber now delivers food and it's fun. They made it fun. So I'm thinking Uber Eats is kind of cool. you know, when you have those feelings, I mean, at the end of the day, a brand is a gut impression. It doesn't reside in the System two intellectual part of the brain. It's very system one and So the other thing that and this is what's hard for clients but every brand that's built the recipe is constancy and Consistency you mentioned something about some people think they're doing brand advertising, but every message is random Well, you can't you can't count on the audience with everything that's going on in their life to tie it all these unstrung pearls together. You have to tie them, the necklace has to hang. So you need to have the same message repeated over and over and over and over again, artfully, not in some boring way. And you need to have some constancy in how long you're in the market and how often. You can't just kind of come in and then jump out and then think people remember you six months. Look at what happened with the Super Bow score we did in the last podcast. I mean, we're only like a couple of weeks away and people don't even remember. So you've got to be constant in the market. That's a concept of recency and you need to be consistent in the message. If it's working, stick with it. If it's not working, find one that will work and then stick with

Mark Vandegrift 
So would you say that's your formula for fame is consistency and constancy?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, you got to have an idea, creative idea on how you, right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at the Clydesdales, right? I mean, I can say it and everybody's going, Budweiser, right? That synonymous kind of equivalence is because of great advertising that's been very constant, very consistent. They've told the story different ways from a young little colt to an older one, but we all get it. So I think absolutely. And this is something, any client, any size can do. And in fact, the smaller you are, the more consistent and you need to be in your message and you need to be as constant as you can afford to be. Because you don't have a war chest maybe the size of some of the national brands we talk about, but you got to be as constant as you can be.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, and let's check our thinking then and show people the outcome of that. I always do this when I'm presenting on positioning and I say, I'm to give you a category right now and you're not even thinking about these brands. But the moment I say the category, the brands are going to come to mind. And when I do that, that is the equivalent of having the fame that you're talking about because you might not even use those products, but the products the brand names are famous enough that they're still on the top of your ladder. And the example that I always give is a very mundane category. And I go toothpaste and Crest, Colgate are always the first two that pop out of the mind. And I take that further with like sensitive toothpaste and people connect that to sense or organic toothpaste. And they think of Toms of Maine. But the point is, is that if I say athletic apparel, Nike is going to be at the top of my ladder. Right. So the point there being that in the consideration set, if your brand is famous, you're already on that ladder. that is a goal right there.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, because if you're famous too, that means there's a lot of people who made you famous, which gives me confidence, because we're very much a herd, right? We follow the herd. We get on the bandwagon. And so if everybody's running to Nike, then that's an assurance to me that I can trust Nike.

Mark Vandegrift 
Some might point to Nike's short-term declines, you already mentioned them, due to some of the up and comers and some of the bad moves that Nike has made. Would you say that means that brand advertising is losing its effectiveness or do you point to other factors that have caused their decline?

Lorraine Kessler 
I think that Nike's just lost a little bit of the magic. It's the blush is off the rose. They have a lot of competitors that are very similar. They're no longer kind of unique. They're ubiquitous. They're everywhere. You can almost see a Nike article of clothing everywhere you shop. And so they have a problem of success, right? And success creates its own problems. And I think the hardest thing for a brand that goes from, you know, we have these stages from introduction to growth to maturity. They're at a maturity stage. And athletic wear is at a maturity phase. I don't know if you've priced logoed like Nike, Adidas merchandise. I had to buy stuff for my grandson, he's 13. The sweatpants were $90. You could buy a suit from Adams for that price.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, it's ridiculous. I'll give Adam a call and let him know that.

Lorraine Kessler 
crazy because it's just all about demand, right? Demand and supply. But what the problem is, I think, is that when you get to these mature categories and what have you, the fascination is easy to lose. And it's really how do you get that back? You know, and I would relate it to, know, what are you here? I worked in the church for a long time. I think you are familiar with that. And we've worked with people who have divorced, right? And I remember hearing many times where one spouse stepped out on the other and you would hear this phrase, well, the magic just went out of the marriage. It's really hard to put the magic back in the marriage. It's really hard to put the magic back in the brand. It starts to lose it. So I think it's a time to reinvent and I think Nike should regroup, reinvent, think about how do we do this? How do we adapt? And maybe it's a whole different brand that does something quite different than nike and you let that ride, right? That drives a lot of volume and sales and profit, but you create something totally new that isn't in the market.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good, well, we have a lot of smaller clients and prospects and nonprofits. Of course, they always point this out. We don't have enough money to do brand advertising. We're lucky if we get $50 to do a Facebook post. What's your advice for them regarding their cry of the limitation of resources? And be frank.

Lorraine Kessler 
There is no easy nor kind answer to this question. The job of the marketer is to find the money first. That's the first job. You don't have the money, you got to find it. And you got to use your why. Why you do what you do, why it matters. If it's a nonprofit, what cause it is that you are really uniquely set up to solve and you have to make investors your number one job. You got to get the money. You can't do anything without money. You know, and so that's where you have to begin. And you find the people who care a lot about what you do, who have some needs, and you have to, you know, it's like police work. It's door to door, boots on the street, and you go and you ask, but you have a great presentation.a great proposal that they can't refuse. And that's what you have to do.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And I always like to remind those organizations that, well, the good news is you're talking to the right agency because the one thing that positioning does is it tells you to say the same message over and over again. And I'm not saying you repeat the same words, but you repeat the same idea. And the benefit of that, and it's one of, you know, my favorite words is efficiency. If I don't have to come up with a new idea every time one, it's freeing. Two, it's the most optimal spend of resources you could have because every message, even if it's a $50 Facebook post, should be adding up in the prospect's mind. No exceptions. The next post that you boost should be doing the same thing. And the next post in the next post, right? So you may not be doing a big TV spot or a big radio run or have a big billboard up, but if all you're doing is social media, that message has to ring through. Your job is to figure out how can I emotionally make it get attention? And two, what you were talking about is how do I avoid boredom by the audience that's seeing it? And the problem there is we get bored with our own advertising, right? But the audience doesn't necessarily get bored near as fast with it because they don't see it as frequently. They don't live it every day. So there's figuring out a balance of avoiding, don't even worry about your own boredom because frankly, we always say branding is boring business, but be in tune with the audience to gauge when has it become boring and when is it time to get new creative to say the same message? That's what we're talking about. and how do you emotionally capture the irrational side of the brain that's gonna pop up and go, I'm paying attention. What's the message? Boom, it's in the brain.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, and you know, if you work outside in, the thing that's most adaptive is the creative that you wrap your core idea around. The positioning idea, if it's a good idea based on our four filters, right? The company fits with your DNA and what you really care about, your mission, your vision, the competition, it maximizes the distance of competition. All the customer maximizes relevance. then lastly, context. It really fits the times. It should fit the times for a really fairly long time. Even technology. Apple created its beautiful, sleek, aesthetic design as its mojo, you know, what, 40 years ago. So it's still relevant. So the position is the core. Let's think of it as the person. That doesn't have to change all the time, but the dress The dress can change. The dress is the way you communicate that to advertising. So that is the most changeable part. And so you work outside in. And that's real important. But you hit it again. It's constancy, consistency. You have to do enough in the same way with as much recency as possible to begin to occupy some space in the mind of the customer.

Mark Vandegrift 
Very good. Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. Thank you, Lorraine, for joining us as always. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today. Don't forget to subscribe, like, like, subscribe, subscribe some more.

Lorraine Kessler 
And send a check to... 

Mark Vandegrift 
And send a check, that's Lorraine.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, we need the money first.

Mark Vandegrift 
And then tell your friends, your colleagues, your family to do the same thing. And until next time, have an amazing day.