There is a difference between advertising and brand advertising. The former may be simply to get attention, to boost sales, to inform about an offer or any one of countless other goals. Brand advertising is intended to build and communicate the brand’s definition. If both can be achieved at the same time then all well and good, but don’t assume that simply mentioning your brand name a lot will build the image that you desire. The promotional philosophy that if you throw enough mud at the wall some of it is bound to stick has no place in the process of building your brand.
Advertising is part of the mix alongside the product, the service, the packaging, the point of sale and the price – and all of this must support the brand’s positioning. There are many reasons that advertising tends to get an inflated level of attention, not least because we all think we are experts, and we all have an opinion. At its worst this leads to the
Advertising and brand advertising… there is a difference
horrors of the home-made ad. There are also some more justifiable reasons:
• It costs a lot of money.
• Done badly the whole proposition can collapse.
• Done well, advertising can represent that whole mix.
Brand advertising should concern itself with communicating the essence of the brand, what we have been calling the brand definition. Most adver- tising media are not particularly good at communi- cating complex messages or detail on product characteristics and benefits, they work best with what are called ‘single-minded propositions’.
The single-minded proposition
Identify the single most motivating and differenti- ating thing that you can say about your brand. This will be your single-minded proposition. This is the point at which advertisers and brand managers come together – the single-minded proposition is of course the articulation through a particular media of the brand definition. If it isn’t, then you are in trouble – either your agency isn’t listening, or your brand definition is incommunicable, or you are using the wrong medium.
Perhaps there is much that can be said about your brand, its definition is more complex than a simple USP (see Chapter 1), but take care not to try too much through any one advertisement. Over the course of a promotional campaign it may be possible to build up a series of individual single-minded propositions, but each specific activity within the campaign should perhaps aim to tackle just one or two at a time.
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Kyocera
Kyocera, the office equipment manufacturer, recently ran a series of press adverts for its Ecosys brand of printers, with a strong central theme and a series of individual messages – one per advert. The campaign was designed to establish a clear link between Kyocera’s unique capabilities (based on its tech- nology) and a single-minded identification of the customer’s needs – business efficiency and environmental concern. Each advert identified a different aspect of the technology, but used a consistent tag line throughout ‘Because business demands effi- ciency and the earth needs attention’.
Communicating the brand’s unique signature – brand DNA
Single-minded propositions are a good start, but they still might not represent the essence of the brand. They might actually represent short-term tactics, like a 10 per cent discount at B&Q on Bank Holiday Monday, or a last chance to buy an Abbey National ISA before the end of the tax year. Useful messages, but hardly building a unique brand defi- nition. We are perhaps still in the realms of adver- tising rather than brand advertising.
Brand advertising must communicate the brand definition and it is useful here to consider an analogy introduced by Iain Ellwood: the brand defi- nition as DNA. Like DNA, the brand definition is a unique signature that runs through every manifes- tation of that brand – its name, its design, its substance, its advertising – every interaction with the customer. A brand of mineral water that has purity as its brand definition, or DNA signature, must ensure for instance that its bottles are clean on
A unique proposition from Kyocera
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.