The introduction of the entertainingly smooth-talking Isaiah Mustafa as the new macho face of Old Spice was an inspired way to revitalise a staid brand, and a deserved winner at this year’s Cannes Lions in the film category. However, in the past couple of weeks, the team at W&K have successfully demonstrated how a great campaign can become a brilliant campaign, with an innovative social media initiative that really brings to life the personality of the character, and underlines the newly-found confidence of the brand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 187 personalised real time video responses to messages posted on various social media sites is an unprecedented way to create a sense of intimacy, whilst simultaneously bringing the campaign to a mass audience. Whilst the social tools to achieve this are by no means new, it is the quality and sheer mass of the bespoke content, together with the immediacy of its distribution, that makes the campaign so compelling. The beauty of it is that it is effectively a form of UCG, with users sending in their own ideas for content that should be created - such as this helpful customisable answerphone message.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Apparently the process for creating this mass of content involved having a team of “digital community managers” tracking and posting content, whilst feeding information to three writers. These writers sent scripts to a fourth writer, who directed Mustafa in real time using a teleprompter. Now that a brand has taken the risk of testing this model of content production it will be intriguing to see how other brands adopt the approach to try and connect with customers.

Having seen Old Spice reasserted itself to a new socially-active audience, the real proof of success will of course be whether there is a shift in attitudes to the brand and whether this in turn leads to an uplift in sales. Much as though this campaign has made me reappraise what the Old Spice brand stands for, I can’t help but feel that it will need to be supported by similarly refreshing innovations with the product and its packaging before I consider adding it to my shopping list.

Swan dive.

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Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

It will be interesting to see how this technology develops into more practical applications, rather than just being a bit of fun for people who are ‘artistically challenged’. Plus there’s the small issue of inadvertently pulling together copyrighted images… At the very least this might simply make the process of putting together internal storyboards a bit quicker.

This is one of the three books that I permanently have at grabbing distance on my desk (together with ‘How to Plan Advertising’ by Alan Cooper and  Buddy Rich’s ‘Modern Interpretation of Snare Drum Rudiments’).  Whilst I have to admit I am more often drawn to the latter, the Business of Brands has proven to be an invaluable reference to dip into occasionally over the past couple of years.

What I like about this book is that it very succinctly articulates the business value of strong brands; bringing together a wide range of analyses, case studies and the wisdom of industry luminaries to make a compelling case for investing in a brand. Useful ammunition in the current economic climate – and actually quite motivating too if you happen to be in the business of brands and ever find yourself wondering if all the pain is worth it!

As advertising folk, I think it’s extremely important that we understand and stay focussed on the various ways that our work helps to create value in the context of brand-building, as it ultimately leads to more effective work. The Business of Brands offers an easily digestible and well considered view on this, with a healthy dollop of realism: “Brands are not a cure for cancer, and they won’t reverse global warming…For many years the hyperbole surrounding brands has alienated the more hard-headed and financially astute…Now this is changing: there’s a growing consensus that brand development is a priority for modern business…A brand can create a powerful sense of purpose - rallying not only customers, but also employees, suppliers and shareholders. When all of these stakeholders are aligned, that’s when the value-making really begins - and this is the real value of brands.”

The book handily provides a “Six Minute Read”. This is my ”Three Minute Read” version, in case you really don’t have time!

Part 1: Brands and Business

5 themes essential to understanding brands:

• A brand enhances the value of a product or service beyond its functional purpose - thereby supporting volume and price.
• A brand is a link between an organisation and its stakeholders, providing a badge of continuity and trust.
• A brand is the result of behaviour - everything an organisation does has the potential to impact the brand.
• A brand exists only in people’s minds.
• A brand can provide an organisation with direction and purpose.

Brand strategy should ultimately be regarded as an approach to build shareholder value - the most important driver of which is cash flow.

Part 2: Sources of Business Value

• Strong brands command market share.
• Strong brands create barriers to entry for competitors.
• Strong brands can extend into new areas.
• Strong brands can enter new markets.
• Strong brands have lower price elasticity.
• Strong brands can command a premium.
• Strong brands can deal with market disruption.
• Strong brands can attract and retain talent.
• Strong brands are a store of trust.
• Strong brands can stimulate innovation.

Part 3: Strategic Brand Planning

Identify the strategic challenge:

• Launch (introduce a brand to a market for the first time).
• Challenge (displacing dominant brands).
• Maintain (defending a market position).
• Revitalise (breathe fresh life into an existing brand).
• Re-brand (channge the branding for a product, service or company).
• Acquistion (integrate an acquired brand into an existing portfolio).

Part 4: Brand Biographies

Each of the following brands is discussed in detail in the book, and the value contribution of the brand is outlined.

• American Express
• Ben & Jerries
• Def Jam
• IBM
• Dove
• BP
• The Economist

Part 5: Measurement and Valuation

• Understanding brand strength: a look at a number of techniques to understand brand equity (loyalty, awareness, perceived quality, associations). Techniques include: Brand Asset Valuator, Equitrend, BrandZ.
• Understanding brand value: a look at several approaches for valuing a brand (e.g. proprietary techniques from Interbrand and Brand Finance).
• The business impact of brands: strong brands reduce business risk and create new areas of potential business activity.
• Building strong brands: Ogilvy research shows that there are commonly four factors that influence brand strength; affinity, challenge, fame, price.

Chairman of Saffron Brand Consultants and co-founder of brand consultancy Wolff Olins, Wally Olins is widely regarded as one of the most experienced practitioners of branding.

In his 2003 book On Brand, Olins explores the role that branding plays in business and in popular culture. It’s less a textbook than a personal commentary on “the cultural phenomenon” of brands, and its witty, uncompromising and straight-talking style makes it a thoroughly enjoyable and useful read.

Olins’s approach to explaining why brands work is to simply outline their significance to consumers and to businesses respectively.

“Branding these days is largely about involvement and association; the outward and visible demonstration of private and personal affiliation. Branding enables us to define ourselves in terms of a shorthand that is immediately comprehensible to the world around us.”

Addressing the benefits of branding for businesses, Olins discusses how VW – a company that originally placed all its marketing efforts on functional appeal – gradually discovered the commercial benefits of mastering the emotional as well as the rational elements of its brand.

In subsequent chapters, Olins explores how brands originated simply as marks of quality for FMCG companies, and how they subsequently “grew up” into significant and complex intangible assets – valued equally by consumers, services, B2B companies, political parties, charities, and even countries.

One of the most useful chapters offers some practical advice on how to create and sustain a successful brand – although as Olins points out, they are rather guidelines than instructions as few rules are universally applicable in the branding world.

Like his early employer, David Ogilvy, Olins’s starting point is that brands should have a consistent and coherent promise stemming from a powerful emotional idea (a ‘Big Idea’). Olins suggests that around this core idea there are broadly 11 key considerations that need to be analysed and managed:

1. The four brand vectors (or ‘Senses’): Product, Environment, Communication, Behaviour. In other words, the different ways in which a brand manifests itself.
2. Brand architecture: The organisational structure of your brand – whether it is monolithic (e.g. Nokia, Lego, Tesco), endorsed (e.g. Apple i-tunes, Ford Mondeo), or branded (e.g. Diageo’s Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Baileys etc).
3. Whether the brand is invented or reinvented: each requires very different considerations and strategic approaches. 
4. Product quality: The “licence to take part in the race”.
5. The inside and the outside: brands have two roles – persuading outsiders to buy and persuading insiders to believe.
6. Differentiators or core ideas: most successful brands have a clear and simple idea that sets them apart. Good design is essential to giving creative life to the core idea.
7. Breaking the mould: identifying opportunities to reject existing convention and to go for something entirely new (e.g. Apple). Typically realised through design, but occasionally via a different business model (e.g. IKEA).
8. Reducing risk through research:  Branding inherently involves risk, but good research can be used to indicate what people are moving towards emotionally, and to analyse successes and failures post-launch in order to learn lessons for the future.
9. Promotion: a brand needs to be heard, if it is to succeed.
10. Distribution: Coverage is the key to success – Disney is a great example of how to create impact with overlapping distribution channels (film, DVD, book, musical, merchandise etc…).
11. Coherence, clarity and convergence:  Every aspect of a brand must reinforce everything else.

In summary, On Brand is a punchy, forward-looking distillation of wisdom from one of the industry’s major spokesmen.  Olins presents a compelling case for how the relevance and power of brands will continue to grow, and thus the importance of understanding how best to manage them. Happily, Olins avoids the marketing lingo bingo and cuts to the chase – making a number of useful practical suggestions for how to approach the task and build a successful brand, for the benefit of businesses and consumers alike.

Here’s an excellent series of bumpers from VW to support the brand’s on-going sponsorship of Channel 4’s documentaries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can’t remember when I last laughed out loud at a sponsorship bumper. The TDI/rocket and TSI/football are personal favourites…

There’s a good write-up at David Reviews (also the original source of this video clip).

David Aaker is one of the most respected and widely cited authors in the field of marketing, so it’s with a small degree of trepidation that I’m writing this critique of his 1995 book ‘Building Strong Brands.’ I feel duty-bound to write one nonetheless, as my growing collection of reviews of books that inspire me wouldn’t really be complete without mentioning this one.

I was first introduced to it during my postgraduate degree course, and have gone back to it several times since, as I’ve found it to be one of the most useful and practical references of its type.

Tonally, it hits somewhere between a text book and a five-part seminar; with the theory of managing brands as strategic assets grounded in a wide array of case studies, references and examples of practical applications – the combination of which makes for a stimulating read, despite at times being a bit academic in style. Readers outside of the US will also find that quite a few of the brands cited are local, and, with the content having been written in 1995, some of the case studies are starting to feel a little dated.

That said, the insights gleaned from the case studies are just as relevant today as they were 15 years ago: In the first chapter of the book, the author introduces the concept of brand equity with a look at how Kodak managed its brand assets to establish a strong competitive advantage and to grow loyalty and share. There is similarly an excellent chapter on the concept of brand personality, using Harley Davidson as a jumping off point. Another chapter introduced with a Body Shop case study explores the relationship between a brand’s ‘organisational associations’ (values, culture, people etc) and the subsequent effect on the perception of its products and sub-brands.

The latter parts of the book deal with the management brands as ‘systems’ (the relationship of master brands and sub-brands and the challenges of coordinating them across different markets), as well as exploring the complexities and techniques of measuring brand equity.

When I was studying, I personally found the chapter on the ‘brand identity system’ one of the most useful (it’s also one that I’ve returned to since on several occasions). In that chapter, Aaker describes the broadest concept of a brand’s identity - summarised in four perspectives as a product, organisation, person, and symbol - and how they contribute to delivering a combination of functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits to the consumer (as a value proposition).

I also found Aaker’s concept of ‘brand identity traps’ (the common pitfalls of focussing on brand attributes alone)  a useful way of understanding the importance of looking at brands from a broader, more emotional, and consumer-centric perspective.

Overall, this is a highly-recommended read, but it does needs quite a lot of time and brain investment to piece all the theory together and to get the full benefit of it – something that’s much easier to do of course if you are at home studying, than if you are cramming chapters in between stops on the Jubilee line…