Who Really Owns Twinkies?

Were you part of the collective “gasp” when you heard the news that our beloved brand – Twinkies – might be no more?  Hostess, the makers of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, HO-HOs and Wonder bread announced it is shutting down operations.  Hysteria ensued in social and traditional media, with reports of Twinkie-hoarding and outrageous prices. If you were like me, you might have thought “Wait, this can’t really happen…can it?”.

 

Finding Consumer Insights That Lead to Strong Brands

Great brands and compelling marketing campaigns are created when marketers uncover "insights" that reveal consumers’ true needs in a product category.  

Marketers may stumble onto an insight (most do) or find one after deep observation of consumer behaviors and motivating beliefs.  Once found, the path to building a unique and competitive brand is much clearer. 

Please take a moment and watch my short video on the differences between simple observation and uncovering powerful consumer insights:

 

Brand Building - The Power of the Flower

Summary - Brands, like people, benefit from rich relationships which are cultivated with passion and persistence.  

The Philadelphia International Flower Show comes to town this week (March 4 –11, 2012) and over 250,000 gardening hobbyists are expected to come to the Philadelphia Convention Center to see the amazing displays.  The theme this year is “Hawaii – Islands of Aloha”.

The Brand Audit – Identifying Growth Opportunities

Business owners often struggle with perspective when it comes to their brands. Living and breathing business day to day makes it hard to step back and identify marketing and branding blindspots, which could be severely limiting brand growth.

In order to identify opportunities to improve a brand’s marketing strategy, I developed a templated diagnostic tool (a ‘Brand Audit’), used to gauge the strength and weakness of the brand proposition and its competitiveness in the market (sometimes with the assistance of an objective, external partner). A brand audit, once completed, provides a roadmap to significant improvement for a business owner or general manager. This tool can be easily adapted to any product or service offering.

The key elements of the Brand Audit are:

1. Market Assessment and Business Performance – a brand is accountable for results, and the most telling indicator of the brand’s strength is how well it performs in the market versus its competitors.
   • Historical Growth and profitability – overall brand sales and trend.
   • Market segments – definition and growth trends of the individual segments of the market.
   • Competitive strength – sales and market share metrics of the brand versus competitors
2. Branding and Positioning Overview – this is a set of descriptions and metrics that allows for the careful understanding of the power of the equity in a competitive setting
• Consumer Target Definition – clarity and insight around the identified current and future consumers;
• Brand and Positioning – degree to which the brand has a compelling statement of brand promise versus others in the category;
• Brand Conversion – measurement of metrics from first awareness through loyalty and repeat;
• Brand SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) – A tool that provides clarity on the big picture opportunities and watch-out.
3. Marketing Tools Evaluation – this section evaluates the strength of the marketing plan elements including:
• Communication – Looks at how compelling and consistent the outbound messaging are and to what degree customers are participating in conversations with the brand;
• Pricing – opportunity identification of brand pricing versus category trend and competitive strength;
• Product Expansion – Identification of opportunities for range expansion, replacement and improvements;
• Distribution / find-ability / placement – Looking at channel of distribution power and opportunity.

Summary of Brand Strength and Opportunities – here is a short, succinct wrap up that outlines the set of opportunities to refine the plan for greater impact. While it takes a bit of time to do this exercise correctly, it is not meant to be an exhaustive review, but broadly touch on the most important aspects of the marketing plan to determine the key strengths and weaknesses of the plan. It can quickly identify what is missing, and prioritize the strongest opportunities for improvement and growth in a business.

A single blind spot drags business performance down to a far greater degree than management believes. Turning blind spots into opportunities can ignite growth.

Let me know if you are interested and I can share the actual templates. Anything you think should be included?

What is a “Consumer Need”?

Ever wonder why so many brands take such different approaches to advertising and packaging in their quest to entice you to buy them.  They seem to work so hard to stand for something unique.  Look at cold beverages.  While the function of a cold beverage is essentially the same for tap water as it is any soda in the store, the brands in this category try to stand for meaningful differences in the mind of the consumer.  For example, Gatorade and other sports drinks are satisfying the need to restore your body after working out.  Mountain Dew is inspiring an extreme active lifestyle.  Coke is the all-American classic, and Pepsi looks to be the drink for the “younger generation”.  These brands accordingly spend millions of dollars building these unique propositions.  Why?  Because when a brand satisfies a consumer need, it builds a powerful and lasting bond with that consumer.
The most important goal of a brand or business is to find a unique consumer need and fill that need with its solution.

Let me give you my definition of a “consumer need”

• Consumer Need - is a consumer’s desire for a product category’s specific benefit on a functional or emotional level during a specific time or situation.   

Consumer brands need to satisfy both functional and emotional needs, but the stronger is the emotional.  This is because functional improvements are easily copied or outflanked.  
Market leaders find and satisfy unique consumer needs
If two or more brands try to satisfy an identical need, then one of those brands or products is not needed.  These competing brands must rely on tactical thinking:

1. Modify / Improve functional performance.
2. Lower the price of offer short tem price incentives
3. Offer more variety, etc.

The better solution long term is to satisfy a different consumer need. Sometimes a brand has to dig deep with the consumer to find that need, but once found, that brand becomes the single solution for the consumer.
The classic case study of Mountain Dew is a good example.  Back in the 1940 – 1970s Mountain Dew was positioned to fill a need as a unique taste experience – a reminiscent refreshing taste of the rural mountains of Tennessee (Mountain Dew, as I understand, was an old mountain-slang term for home-made alcohol from the prohibition days).  Unfortunately this proposition was largely irrelevant and other taste experiences were springing up everywhere.  The brand worked with consumers to find an unfilled consumer need in the world of cold beverages.  Teenage boys (who consume a lot of soda) were becoming enamored with extreme sports and video games and were looking for brands in apparel, beverages, and other things that supported and complimented that lifestyle.  No other beverages at that time filled that consumer need, and Mountain Dew repositioned itself.  The result of this successful repositioning was that the brand owned this consumer need and grew to be the #4 share brand behind Coke, Diet Coke and Pepsi in the past 10 years. 
Uncovering and filling a consumer need that competition does not fill can mean leadership in a category and more growth potential versus fighting trying to beat another player already satisfying that consumer need.