the outside as well as the inside. However great the ad, it won’t sell dirty bottles. Ellwood advises that this DNA signature must be ‘as concentrated, succinct and powerful as possible so that it can survive intact as it is communicated across media types’.
Two brands in competition may each have unique propositions, and the eventual winner may not be the one with the ‘best’ proposition, nor even the best short-term, single-minded propositions, but the one best able to communicate its proposition as expressed in its DNA. This is the value of good brand advertising.
Magicote
Magicote paint launched the first widely available non-drip gloss on the UK paint market and fast adopted a good single- minded proposition, ‘ease of use’. It was a good proposition, for a while, but had two fatal flaws. First, it was a proposition that allowed others to catch up as they developed their own easier- to-use paints. Secondly, it failed to move with the times as ease of use became taken for granted and trickier and more funda- mental problems were being unearthed, like, ‘will those two colours match or should we just stick to magnolia?’ In the battle of the paint brands it was Dulux that emerged triumphant, not because of the Old English sheepdog, but because of a more powerful brand definition, a stronger DNA. The Dulux DNA was less tangible, but far more beguiling – it was about giving people the confidence to transform their homes.
your assumptions about what your brand is and where it is headed:
• Advertisements must reflect the mood of the times and that mood can change fast. Ads can be changed in weeks or even days, but can the brands that they promote change as quickly, and still retain credibility? There is often a tension between the creative team at the advertising agency who want to make their work as up to the minute as possible, and the brand manager who must judge whether the latest developments in advertising technique or the latest ‘in’ terminology or symbols of street culture will actually be good for the brand’s definition. The problem is a good one, continually testing the brand to check that it is relevant to its customers in substance and in spirit.
• Once started, you can never stop, and the road ahead keeps on growing longer.
Club biscuits
The Club brand once ‘owned’ the UK market for the break-time chocolate biscuit until it chose one year to pull back on adver- tising and regard the money saved as extra profit. It was after all the brand leader, what harm could one year do? It was its bad luck (or was it brand myopia?) that this decision corresponded with a massive campaign behind the Penguin brand with Derek Nimmo’s famous stuttering tag line. Penguin never looked back and Club never regained its position.
Branding is a long-term investment and the promotional plan for a brand must be a long- term activity. Consistency of spend is every- thing, hard as that might be for chief financial officers to understand.
Why Club lost out to Penguin
• The same old adverts can wear thin after a while. Consumers ‘are like roaches – you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while’. David Lubars, a remarkably candid advertising executive in the Omnicom group, quoted by Naomi Klein in No Logo, expresses a truth that demonstrates the weakness of adver- tising compared to the substance of the product or the service. We get tired of adverts, or immune to their hold over us, however good they might be, but we don’t get tired of a good product. It’s another of those good problems, alerting us to the fact that while adverts and other promotional techniques must be recreated almost continually, genuine propositions through the product and the service can be maintained for much longer. Putting effort into maintaining and enhancing those propositions will be worth every penny.
• The ‘production’ can overpower the message.
‘Advertising at its best achieves all its commercial objectives, but also enters the popular culture’ says Rupert Howell, Chairman of HCCL. This is a noble notion, but I suspect most clients would prefer that it was the brand that entered the popular culture, not the ad.
• Advertising is seen by many as intrusive. The argument is often put that advertising provides us with choice, or is it more the perception that we are making informed choices? Knowing an ad tells us that we know something about the brand and the product. This is powerful stuff, but must be handled with care if we are to avoid the excesses of ‘brand advertising fluff’.
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• Audiences are becoming more ‘literate’ – they see the tricks of the trade – and in many cases more cynical. Some brands have responded to this by lampooning themselves and their adverts. Often the adverts so produced acquire cult status (McDonald’s use of the Pearl & Dean format being a case in point) but it is far from clear if they actually build the brand’s own status.
The cynical audience is sometimes handled by presenting a cynical message, or a cynical person- ality. Egg financial services, targeted at a younger and more cynical audience, chose to play on this by using Zoë Ball to present a cynical assessment of its approach, suggesting as she did that at least those Egg folk are like me, and so, like you. A complex but no less powerful emotional charge.