The brand battlefield resides in customers’ minds
Published on 01/15/2004 under Branding
One sure way to start an argument with a business-to-business sales manager is to insinuate that brands are more important than products, but in several important ways, they are.
Of course, I was alive and coherent through the whole dot-com craze, so you don’t have to point out the fallacy of trying to build a brand with nothing to back it up. But let’s assume you have a really great, new product in a marketplace full of established, branded alternatives--is your new product guaranteed success? Will customers beat a path to buy your better mousetrap?
Not a chance. Most customers will first buy the products they trust to do the jobs at hand. They don’t have time to test every new invention, and they certainly don’t want to stake their reputations on something unproven. As Geoffrey Moore (a managing director with San Mateo, Calif.-based TCG Advisors and author of Crossing the Chasm, among other titles) and Regis McKenna (the Mountain View, Calif.-based “marketing guru of Silicon Valley,” adviser and author) have famously taught us, there are a few early adopters out there who love to try new gadgets, but most people are not willing to cross this chasm until they know for sure something works.
On the other hand, if you have established a brand that causes people to expect that your new products will perform as advertised, the early adoption process can be greatly accelerated.
Take General Electric Co., for example. The GE brand is on everything from light bulbs to jet engines, locomotives and sophisticated medical equipment. My dental plan is even provided by GE. How can one brand successfully cover so many disparate products and services?
According to Judy Hu, general manager of advertising and brand for Fairfield, Conn.-based GE, it’s all about trust. “The General Electric culture is unique,” Hu says, “because our values and processes are consistently the same in every area of the company. Everything we do is aimed at building trust with our customers.”
Part of this trust-building is enhanced by GE’s policy of growing managers from within and moving them freely from one division to another. The rigorous disciplines of Six Sigma (a process GE employs to develop and deliver “near-perfect” products) also play a part, but it’s interesting to note that GE even works hard to help salespeople understand the importance of the brand.
“They’re our last interface with the customer,” Hu says, “so we don’t want a disconnect at that point.” To facilitate this, GE offers a two-hour “Understanding the brand” seminar to enable salespeople to see how the GE brand affects the selling process.
But what if you have a great product, but don’t have a well-established brand? When Cessna Aircraft Co. decided to enter the lucrative business jets market in the late ’60s, it had been building jet-powered airplanes for the U.S. Air Force for some time. “We had the ability to deliver a quality business-jet product,” says Phil Michel, vice president of marketing, “but our image was all wrong for that market.”
The Wichita, Kan.-based aircraft company was known as a maker of small single- and twin-engine planes for flight training and personal uses--low-tech, nothing very exciting. And certainly nothing to compare with the sex appeal of Lear, Lockheed, Falcon, Hawker and the others.
So Cessna decided to create a new image around the name Citation. Within two decades, Citation was No. 1 in business jets, and Cessna was still No. 1 in propeller-powered planes.
So I guess you can have your cake and eat it, too. But what this tells me is that people’s attitudes and expectations about your products and services are just as important--maybe more important than the products and services themselves. If your customers think you’re better, you are.
But they do have to think about you in the first place. For many years Inland-Eastex (now part of MeadWestvaco Corp. in Stamford, Conn.) marketed a quality printing paper anonymously under the generic name TexCover II. The paper had many fine attributes: easy folding, fast-drying, flawless stamping, trimming and die-cutting. Most notably, it was forgiving of on-press variation.
Then they branded it with the name “Tango” and the tagline “Always performing.” In four years, Tango sales went from $40 million to $80 million per year. It rose from fifth place in its category to second. The program generated incremental sales of $126 million for a $2 million marketing communications investment--that’s a 6,000% return on investment. The product didn’t change. The competition didn’t change. Only the customer’s attitudes and expectations changed.
Yes, it’s important to have quality products with lots of features and benefits. But don’t expect that to drive sales. What drives sales is expectations. When customers expect more, they buy more. When they expect less, they buy less or not at all.
As Al Ries and Jack Trout first told us more than 30 years ago, the battlefield is in the customer’s mind. And that’s where brands reside.
If you’re not fighting your battles on the right battlefield, then you’re not doing your job as a business-to-business marketer. I just can’t say it any more clearly than that.