Is Brand Marketing Dead?
GROCERY STORES PROBABLY WERE THE FIRST TO SEE IT. Why buy that expensive, well-known brand of spaghetti sauce when you can get the store brand for less? After all, who sees or cares about the label on the shelf — and, in most cases, the generic brand tastes as good. Retail is quickly following. Sure, some consumers look first for “their” brands, but they shop the sale racks, the private-store brand and discounters as well. The boomer generation, still made up of the biggest spenders, has the confidence to buy without the guidance of a brand.
But there’s more at work here than just having confidence in your buying choices and looking for bargains.
Many brands rely totally on marketing for their existence. Marketing comes up with something it thinks the customer needs. Then, along with the creatives, all sit down and determine what spin to put on this new customer offering. What can we say about it, how can we show it, that makes it appealing enough to purchase or use? After a lot of discussion, eventually a marketing plan, very often relying heavily on creative approach, appears.
And therein lies the problem: A marketing plan that depends solely on image portrayal is no longer enough. Part of the reason for marketing’s reduced effectiveness is that audiences are overexposed, and therefore less inclined to buy into the whole advertising thing.
Another reason the marketing-alone approach is failing is that we tend to look at product offerings from our perspective, often forgetting that it’s not about us. A simplified example occurred when a client wanted to run a gold-plated sauna bucket in their catalog.
“How many people do you think would buy this?” I asked. “Why, all my friends have them,” was the answer. In other words, what our experience tells us is the right thing to offer or the right marketing approach to use may not be anything like the target or available audience really wants.
Why has the biggest consumer catalog category — apparel — continued to be soft in direct sales and retail? Expensive gas, competition from discounters…there are hundreds of excuses. Yet some retailer/catalogers, like women’s clothier Chico’s, continue to show impressive gains.
No one owns up to the fact that the sales approach has been based on the same strategy we used for years: Find more of the same merchandise that sells the best, shoot pretty pictures of it and put it in a nice-looking catalog. Adapt all that to a relatively decent Web sales site. Oh, and be reasonably good about service. Most of us — apparel marketers and others — are coasting along on what we’ve always done.
Maybe we should try this: 1. Gather enough information to know what current and potential customers want before they know they want it; and 2. Take that information and put it into a strategic plan that encompasses all elements of contact with the customer now and three, five, even 10 years ahead.
How do we gather enough information? Market research is a must, but it’s not nearly enough. We need to — dare I say it — look at the big picture. We need to anticipate what consumers are going through and develop a need even before they acknowledge the need.
A person of responsibility in a catalog company should have, as a major part of their job, the assignment of reading and watching everything even closely relevant (newspapers, magazines, top-selling books and TV programs) that target the firm’s market. He or she should visit any company-owned stores to see how customers are relating to the shopping experience. Then frequent meetings should be held to digest and act on those findings.
Toyota, while not a cataloger, is still the best example of a company that’s always anticipated what customers wanted before they knew it. When you read Toyota’s annual report, it hardly mentions its marketing campaign; the focus is on measures and strategies. Just one example of how those measures are assured of success: the president and other top executives make on-site inspections to check quality-improvement activities and confirm progress in reaching quality goals.
“All elements of contact” is something else we talk more about than do. How many of us put ourselves on the receiving end of what we actually send customers? How does it feel to get 97 e-mails a week, a catalog a month, bounce-backs, postcards, phone calls — whatever the ongoing contact per segment is? What kind of emotions do you feel when you have a problem with a product and the service representative blows you off? How does the retail store experience complement or enhance the direct experience? How simple, fun and rewarding is it to shop from your Internet site? Turning each of these contacts into an opportunity to reinforce your company’s positive image, and making them interact with each other, must be in the strategic statement.
If you do more than create a halo around an existing product or service, maybe you can develop a business like Chico’s that had an enviable 44.7% sales increase between January 2004 and January 2005.
Chico’s apparel discovered and met an untapped need but didn’t just stop with the merchandising. Its winning combination: easy care, relaxed-fit clothing for the slightly larger and/or older women who wants to look stylish without spending a fortune; treating customers respectfully; and providing meaningful awards for loyalty. According to Chico’s annual report, it has “1.3 million Permanent Passport (loyalty club) members and over 4.1 million preliminary Passport members.— Chico’s definition of “permanent” is someone who’s spent $500 or more. Incidentally, such customers account for 76% of overall sales.
And here’s a perfect example of “all elements of contact.” Chico’s purposefully does not put mirrors in its dressing rooms. Customers come out of the dressing room and trained salespersons help them understand how to best wear the garment and what accessories go with it. Brilliant.
KATIE MULDOON ([email protected]) is president of DM/catalog consulting firm Muldoon & Baer Inc., Palm Beach Gardens, FL.
