The david ID blog

Ad Age this morning posed the question whether company brands might be better served by investing more in product quality and less in marketing communication. 

The article poses this question in light of the recent troubles at BP, Toyota and J&J.  

Here’s the short answer.  Yes. 

Andy Rooney said this once on 60 minutes:  “What we need today is less marketing and more quality.”

We couldn’t agree more.  All professional marketers should heed the pity wisdom of those simple words.  As we said in our book Why Johnny Can’t Brand:

“Make genuine performance, service, trustworthiness, fair dealings, helpful innovation, and improving the live of every customer the soul of your brand.  Make your vision nothing more than to be the very best you can be at what you do.  Make your mission to do it the right way always.

BP, Toyota and J&J all built their reputations on superior product and service performance.  In other words, their brand images have less to do with advertising and more to do with customer experience of their products.  Toyota built its brand image of reliability by building reliable cars.  J&J built its brand image of uncompromised trust by bending over backwards to be trustworthy, even if that meant losing money as with the Tylenol recall years ago.  

In the world of branding, action is character.  What a brand does is much more important than what it says.  Just like people, we judge people by what they do, not what they say they’re going to do.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ founder and CEO, truly understands and values the power of focus.  He also knows that a business needs to stand for something important in the minds of customers and employees alike if it’s to flourish,  and that this sometimes requires giving things up – especially those things that are not consistent and supportive of the company vision, purpose and positioning.    

Here are Mr. Hsieh’s own inspiring words on the subject from an interview in the May 31- June 6 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.

“We asked ourselves what we wanted the company to stand for.  We didn’t want to sell just shoes.  I wasn’t even into shoes—I used to wear a pair with holes in them—but I was passionate about customer service.  I wanted us to have a whole company built around it, and we couldn’t control the customer experience when a quarter of the inventory was out of control.

“We knew we had to stop doing drop shipping.  It was as if it were a drug.  Over the long term, it was critical that we were handling the merchandise ourselves.  This was the toughest decision I’ve had to make.  We couldn’t build a brand around customer service if we couldn’t deliver it.  When we had the goods in our control, we were able to do so much more.

“Once we made that decision, all the other decisions became easy.  We had already given up a lot, but we knew what we stood for at that point, and our employees could see that we were serious about this.  That made all the difference.”

The WSJ reported yesterday that Amazon’s strategy for competing against Apple’s iPad will be to position the Kindle e-reader as a reading only devise, and narrowly targeting it to “serious readers.” 

We applaud Amazon’s focus, by choosing not to be all things to all people, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Chief Executive said, “ there are always ways to do the job better if you are will willing to focus in on arena.”   Amen.

By targeting “serious readers’ the company concedes that it’s potentially appealing to only 10% of US households.  Still, we suspect that when it comes to e-readers, the 80/20 Rule applies, suggesting that Amazon is smart to more narrowly target the Kindle to passionate readers.  

While Amazon narrowly targets its Kindle device, it’s aiming wide with its e-books by focusing on providing the widest selection at the lowest prices, and offering apps for competitive e-reader devices, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone “which allow customers to read Amazon e-books without buying a Kindle device.”   A lesson it no doubt learned from Apple’s mistake years ag

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to Kevin Cootes speak about his book, The Big Picture:  Essential Business Lessons from the Movies.   In his entertaining presentation, he identified some basic business lessons to be learned from watching movies.  Things like the importance of story telling for more effective communications, customer service, business strategy, leadership and building and maintaining brand equity.  Nothing a seasoned businessperson doesn’t already know, but all good and helpful reminders.

While I was listening it dawned on me that one of the greatest business lessons movies offer is the value of a simple, unique and memorable brand positioning.

By was of example, here are some of my favorite movie taglines that embody the essence of the movie they’re used to promote.   From start to finish, these movies remain true to their core positioning, just as the best companies, in all that they do,  product, pricing, distribution, sales and marketing, remain true to theirs.

Tagline                                                                                         Movie

Houston, we have a problem.                                            Apollo 13                                          

The list is life.                                                                             Schindler’s List

One man’s struggle to take it easy.                                   Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

You don’t assign him a murder case,                                Dirty Harry

                      you just turn him loose.

They’re young, their in love, and they kill people.      Bonnie and Clyde

The mission is a man            .                                                    Saving Private Ryan

The true story of a real fake.                                                 Catch Me if You Can

The first casualty of war is innocence.                               Platoon

BMW has evolved its brand positioning.   In case you haven’t noticed their most recent advertising, the brand is now espousing the “Joy” that comes from owning and driving a BMW, while stepping away from the brand’s well known focus on driving power and performance, famously captured in the slogan “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”

As reported in the Wall Street Journal on 2/14,   according to Jack Pitney, vice president of marketing at BMW for North America, “the new ‘Joy’ campaign is a big departure for us . . . We hope to really add some humanity to our brand.”   BMW also hopes to show the diversity of its owners, including Moms, and its accessibility for everyone. 

We hope for the company’s sake that the shift to “At BMW, we don’t make cars, we make joy” is a temporary advertising maneuver intended to address the current economic climate in which consumers are more frugal and value conscious, and that they’ll eventually return to their roots – in a contemporary way.   After all, there are many ways to bring “The Ultimate Driving Machine” to life in advertising with modern relevance without having to go all the way to something as seemingly generic as “joy.”

There is hope.  BMW advertising still retains it’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” slogan in small type.

We want to thank Sterling Publishers in India for the honor of entering the Indian/Asian market– the biggest business book market in the world. The Asian edition will be titled:  The 8 Week Brand Secret: How to discover the Big Idea. Expect it out this spring.

It’s quite a day for a couple of itinerant brand gurus to get their book on a list on Amazon.com with the likes of the Brand Titans, David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins and Victor Schwab. But thanks to Diane Durante and her excellent blog, we did.  Diane is a copywriting expert and teacher www.versaquill.com who appreciated the “How-To” quality of our book Why Johnny Can’t Brand: Rediscovering the lost art of the Big Idea. And there’s more Why Johnny Can’t Brand news…

Seth Godin just wrote a post on ‘cliches’ which gets him into Micro-Script territory–our territory. See “How to Use Cliches” at http://sethgodin.typepad.com. True, many of what we call cliches are so tired, they don’t mean much any more and for a writer, they can just be lazy speech. The empty language ones that is. Like “Artsy-fartsy” and “it’s an ace in the hole.”

But clichés represent some of the most effective Micro-scripts of all time. A great many clichés are just a Micro-script invented somewhere in history that was so popular and true that it became a platitude. Anything can be a cliche, not just words. Like a famous historic site. The leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a travel cliche. But the reason it became one is that it is so incredible, everybody had to see it and tell others about it. Go see it if you think I’m wrong.

I say, a writer should be so great as to create phrases that are so succinct, memorable and repeatable, that they become clichés. Fact is, millions of people including you and me only know them because they’re brilliant. A lot were invented by wise men like Ben Franklin, Bill Shakespeare and the writers of the Bible. The good ones are often verbalized Rules of Thumb, a.k.a. mental heuristics to cope with everyday living. Parents teach them to us to install conventional wisdom. I taught them to my little kids because I want them to remember instantly: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Live and let live. No pain, no gain. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And how about this little cliche: Do unto others as you’d have others do to you. As one of the great Talmudic scholars said: “That’s the entire Bible in one sentence. All the rest is commentary.”

Pretty good one, huh. I’d like to be able to write cliches like that.

Much has been written and speculated about the crisis at Toyota due to its foot pedal malfunction, and its slow and underwhelming public response to the problem.

Despite the magnitude of the crisis, we suspect that Toyota will come out on top in the long run – stronger as a company and a brand. 

Here’s why:

1.  Although every company’s defective product crisis is different, just two years after it recalled 6.5 million tires, and was the poster child for crisis MIS-management, Bridgestone returned to profitability and infused its brand with renewed vitality.  

2.  While no one likes recalls, consumers know that they do happen to all automotive companies.    Toyota has built up enormous brand equity in the areas of quality and reliability.   While these equities will be temporarily strained, overtime, as the company reinvests in product quality and safety and marketing, they will return.  Consumers have short memories.

3.  Toyota has a huge war chest of $24 billion in cash.  Investing some of this back into product quality and image improvement marketing will go a long way. 

4.  The company is learning, albeit slowly, how to be more open and forthcoming with the public about its performance problems.   Although it hasn’t been easy for them, Toyota has learned the hard way how to admit errors, apologize and rectify the problem.

We keep reading that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is seeking new ways to get his minions back to the basics that made them great entrepreneurs once upon a time–before Starbucks got so big and mainstream, that it became ‘the man.’ It’s not news that Starbucks has had its share of business and brand setbacks in the past few years. And it can no longer be entirely blamed on the bad economy that’s forced the closings of a few stores. Starbucks should have been realizing that a brand essentially built by performance and thus Word of Mouth, not big advertising, would be dismantled by Word of Mouth if they ever started doing things like making Lattes by machine (ohmygawd, like Dunkin Donuts). Which they started doing. Still for $4 bucks a pop.

So now three years after we made a speech at Starbucks world headquarters based on our book Why Johnny Can’t Brand–essentially to tell them “now that you’ve built one of the modern era’s legendary brands, the hard part is staying there. Look to the truly great brands that have lasted for 70 or 80 years– you need to at least understand what they did to stay on top for so long.”

What we wanted to tell them is what Howard Schultz is telling them: You need to get your hungry entrepreneur’s spirit back. You’ve got to think and act like a challenger again– wanting to change the game, make a big difference with the fewest resources, damn the torpedoes. Change the world, change the game.

At David ID we’ve always defined our mission as finding Dominant Identity for Challenger Brands. We’ve always reminded our clients, even the ones that are global corporations–that the greatest, longest lasting brands never stop seeing themselves as challengers do.

We’re glad Mr. Schultz is finally listening.