Brands Shifting

Run for your lives. It's going to blow!

Watching the upheavals in world markets, particularly in the banking sector, it's hard not to arrive at the conclusion that much of the hysteria comes down to a deep mistrust in many of the individual brands standing on the fault-lines.

The queues of people at the cashier desks, removing their money to somewhere safer, certainly don't seem to buy the assurances of those at the top that everything is going to be alright. The mood in the streets suggests that no-one really believes what they're being told and that the once-dormant evasions and half-truths of the past have erupted, with confidence hurtling downhill faster than those in the financial institutions can run.

When you consider the vast amounts of money that have been spent in winning our affections, it's shocking to see how quickly things come tumbling down, and how many of the banks stand isolated and vulnerable.

Where is the bedrock? Much of what has been built is foundering on the sands of self-interest. None of the banks is emerging as a bastion of integrity and good sense.

For those whose savings or business fortunes are tied up a financial house, there's no comfort to be found in the shadow of a teetering giant that might collapse following the next eruption.

Am I being over-dramatic? Again, think of the ads with which we've been inundated over the past years and ask yourself how many of them were concerned with building trust. How many of us truly believe that our lending institutions have our best interests at heart? Even the better of them seem to enter into shadowy arrangements that strike us as having more to do with speculation than investment.

Almost certainly, once the tremors have subsided, we'll hear how we've all over-reached ourselves and words like 'prudence', 'frugality' and 'caution' will be bandied about by the financiers. But there was little caution shown by those same leaders and politicians when the markets were at their height.

In the aftermath, the real challenge to the financial brands is not to lecture us on our spending habits but to build instead on solid rock and earn the trust of a deeply suspicious public.

When The Brand Is Quicker Than The Eye

Roll up, roll up, snake-oil for sale!

A study conducted as far back as 1963 seems to confirm the popular view that much of the business of branding is about sleight of hand.

Each day, the good people at Delancey Place send on what they describe as 'eclectic little excerpts' from various books and articles on almost any subject under the sun.

A recent excerpt, which was taken from Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, cites how expectations seem to colour our taste:

"In 1963, three researchers secretly added a bit of red food color to a white wine to give it the blush of a rose. Then they asked a group of experts to rate its sweetness in comparison with the untinted wine. The experts perceived the fake rose as sweeter than the white, according to their expectation.

Another group of researchers gave a group of oenology students two wine samples. Both samples contained the same white wine, but to one was added a tasteless grape anthocyanin dye that made it appear to be red wine. The students also perceived differences between the red and white corresponding to their expectations.

And in a 2008 study a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even though the sneaky researchers had filled both bottles with the same wine...

Proof, if proof were needed, that branding is just one more gimmick in the bag of the snake-oil salesman.

But, like any instrument, branding can be used to very different ends: Misdirection in the case of the fake label but help and guidance in many others.

Once, at a conference, I chatted with someone who played a role in the recruitment and training of staff for Spar convenience stores here in Ireland. Now, I've never been a fan of the Spar signage. Even as a child I found it ugly and crude. However, my colleague told me about the care that Spar take in choosing people to work in their shops; how they recruit young people, who are cheerful and friendly, live locally and are at school or college. He insisted that these criteria meant that a Spar shop assistant offered a particular brand of helpfulness.

Until that time, I had passed by our local Spar shop with my nose in the air, determined not to darken the door of a monument to bad taste. However, shortly after I met this brand champion, I found myself entering the local Spar to make a small purchase. To my surprise, I discovered the youngster behind the counter to be as friendly and obliging as I'd been told. For the first time, I was able to look beyond the crude exterior and see what was behind it. I've since become a regular visitor to Spar.

Misdirection on the one hand, help and guidance on the other.

In the right hands, the brand plays its role in making the business of selection much easier for the customer. When handled clumsily or dishonestly, it can deceive and mislead.

The real power of branding is apparent when it's used well: for both buyer and seller life is simpler, as the brand skilfully directs customers to where they can get what they want, when they want it and at a price they're happy to pay.

I guess it's time for me to get up onto my soapbox...

Roll up, roll up, brand-direction for sale!

In Trust We Brand

Branding's for sissies!

Whilst polite colleagues rarely put in in those terms, it's evident that many business owners consider branding as being on the fluffier side of commercial practice.

Otherwise, it would be a given part of every business plan, rather than something that's often tagged on only when an enterprise doesn't seem to be making the right impression or is losing ground to strongly-branded competitors.

I've written elsewhere of the real impact a brand has on business success, not only in terms of market share, but on the costs of doing business. For example, I've suggested that a strong brand relationship relieves the business-owner of the pressures and costs (financial and otherwise) of being perfect. However, much of what I've written has relied on my own experience or anecdotal evidence from our own customers rather than independent research backed up by numbers.

Well, The Speed of Trust, a recent book by Stephen M.R. Covey seems to offer the backup that I've been looking for. I haven't read the book yet but heard Stephen talk about it at length on the always-useful Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.


Stephen says that the speed and cost of our transactions with customers are always affected by the levels of trust that lie between us and that there is both a trust tax and a trust dividend depending on those levels. His research shows that companies that enjoy high levels of trust (with stakeholders, colleagues and customers) outperform others where suspicion reigns by almost three to one. Now those are impressive numbers.

I like Stephen's use of the terms 'tax and dividend' as I find that it draws a notion that can be dismissed as soft across to the harder edge of business. I've always been a big fan of the writing of Stephen's dad, Stephen R. Covey, in particular The Seven Habits Of Effective People; so am looking forward to reading how he builds on that in The Speed of Trust.

In the meantime, if any of my readers have got to the book ahead of me, I'd love to hear what you make of it.

For you know what they say: 'When the going gets tough, the tough get branding.'

Not So Much Tanned As Red-Faced

Whilst on holiday recently ("No, I'm not going to say where," he said mysteriously), I came across news of a survey by Boots UK that revealed that the 'high-rise Costa Blanca resort of Benidorm has been named the most embarrassing place to go on holiday, followed in quick succession by Tenerife, Ibiza and Magaluf.'

Apparently, the coolest places are Paris, New York and Portugal.

Given the business I'm in, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that even our choice of where we spend our down-time reflects on who we are and what we value although I wonder how many of us plump for one place over another simply based on how it's going to go down in the office afterwards.

In the spirit of Myles Na gCopaleen (who memorably proposed a service where professional readers would go through the books in your library that you'd never read and rough up the covers, dog-ear the pages and make pretentious notes in the margins so that you could make it appear to guests that you were extremely well-read) and with the wide range of online tools available to us now, perhaps some enterprising opportunist will furnish us with pseudo holiday experiences (including heavily-doctored family snaps and fantasy restaurant names and menus) that will save our blushes at our 'uncool' choice of holiday destination and allow us to boast instead about our wonderful two weeks in Portugal or the latest hot spot du jour?

Give us a break! Refreshed after switching off for two weeks from my own world of branding, I'm beginning to wonder whether there's anywhere we can retreat to in the modern world that doesn't come labelled with connotations of taste and status?

As for my own holiday destination..?

No, I'm not going to play that game. Let's just say that it didn't feature at either end of the cool-scale.

Do The Chinese Love Their Children Too?

Just as the 1978 World Cup in Argentina comes to my mind when the football competition rolls around every four years, so too the Moscow Olympics this last week in the lead-up to Beijing 2008. I was fifteen when it seemed half the world decided to boycott the Olympics in the old USSR and my memories of that time are very vivid.

Despite much of the political turmoil and hostility around Beijing's Games, the time when the world was divided east and west by a Cold War seems more than a lifetime away.

Some time after Moscow 1980, Sting recorded a song Russians in which he wondered 'if the Russians love their children too?' Back then, the Soviets (alongside all of the others on the far side of the Iron Curtain - even that expression seems quaint now) were remote and unknowable. In the absence of familiarity, we were free to think all sorts of awful things about them.

The connections made online these days make such remoteness almost unimaginable. Apart from a relatively small number of places like North Korea and Albania, we feel we know the people in other parts of the world and, even when we don't understand everything about them, we don't doubt for a moment that they love their children too. Even in some of the more critical reports of the Chinese authorities at this time there isn't any suggestion that they lack basic human feelings; some of their actions may be monstrous but we don't conclude that they are monsters.

As we grow closer to others around the world, it would be easy to believe that there are no longer foreign countries, that everyone speaks English (or at least understands it) and that we can move effortlessly from one place to another.

But even between two people who share a common language, there can be culture shock when we move from our home place to somewhere else. There are times when even those who live nearby to us can seem alien. They think differently, they don't look at the world in the same way we do.

So what's that got to do with brands and branding?

Well, brands have a remarkable ability to ease that passage from one place to the next. The power of the great brands is to bridge the gap between the familiar and the unknown. Business-owners often underestimate the importance of making this happen and can leave their visitors stumbling about looking for direction.

Whilst those visitors may not doubt that we love our children too, they can quickly conclude that we are unsympathetic in other ways - unfriendly, unhelpful or unprofessional - and break for the border back to the home country or to other, more hospitable, places as quickly as they can.

So as the Games begin, why not brand your way to a greater connection with your customers.