Is this the secret formula for creating sustained marketing success? Lucian Camp explores the myth of a 'Philosopher's Stone' that can turn any brand it touches into gold.
How can you tell that marketing isn’t a science? Lots of ways, obviously, but one that stands out is that in marketing there doesn’t seem to be any body of received wisdom that’s passed on, unchallenged, from one generation to the next.
In science, new generations of zoologists and physicists don’t feel the need to rediscover and re-analyse the way that blood circulates in the body, or why apples fall from trees. We know this. We can take it for granted. We can move on.
In marketing, each consecutive generation has to re-invent the wheel. If the discoveries of previous generations are known about at all, they’re certainly not unchallenged. Every twenty years or so – actually, for demographic reasons that I can’t explain I think it’s more like every ten – all the old chestnuts get dragged out of the chestnut store and chucked back onto the brazier.
At the moment, it seems that we’re re-examining the whole “how important is differentiation” thing. Two top profs – Professor Patrick Barwise and Professor Sean Meehan – have just written a piece in the Marketing Society’s excellent Market Leader magazine raising the issue in these terms:
“Volvo is a textbook well-differentiated brand. Ask a convention of dentists in Sydney about their association with it, and … most will say ‘safety’. Volvo is indeed a valuable brand… but Toyota is a much more valuable one despite being much less clearly differentiated. Dentists in Sydney will certainly know Toyota, and will associate it with quality and reliability. But if you ask them how it differs from Honda, they’ll struggle… Toyota has created a valuable differentiated brand based largely on the superior delivery of the generic category benefits that matter most to consumers, not on unique features or benefits.”
Actually, I think the profs’ analysis is pretty shaky. In particular, they seem to miss the key point about the way that Toyota’s brand strategy differs from Volvo’s: Toyota differentiates more at the sub-brand level, so that for example models such as the tank-like Land Cruiser, the eco-friendly Prius and the utilitarian Previa have much more distinct identities than the variously-sized cars in, say, the Volvo 50, 70 and 80 series.
But that’s not where I want to go in this piece. Where I want to go, a bit like in Life on Mars, is back to the mid-70s – to a world of kipper ties, Ford Cortinas, Showaddywaddy and the Heineken “Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach” campaign.
This was one of the earlier occasions – I’m certainly not brave enough to say it was the first – when the importance of unique propositions was challenged. For some time before then, the pro-differentiation theory of the advertising guru employed by the Ted Bates agency and running the Mars confectionery business, Rosser Reeves, was in the ascendant. This was of course the theory of the USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. Reeves would certainly have agreed with the famous (but much later) saying of the British adman Robin Wight that the way to set about the business of brand positioning was to “interrogate the product until it confesses its strengths:” in Mars’s case, these interrogations came up with confessions such as the fact that Snickers “comes up peanuts, slice after slice,” and the sugar coating on Treets means that (altogether now) they “melt in your mouth, not on your hands.”
Looking back on the results of Reeves’s theory, it all looks completely bonkers. Who “slices” a Snickers, for goodness’ sake? And has getting your hands all chocolatey ever been a major problem for sweet-eaters? The trouble was that it might be possible to find a UP, so to speak, or an SP – but all too often the UPs weren’t very S and the SPs weren’t very U.
Still, this nonsense was more or less what people believed till Heineken. Heineken took refreshment, one of the three category benefits of lager (the other two being taste and strength) and used it as a springboard for what is in reality no more than a series of brilliantly-written and well-branded comedy sketches. There isn’t really any serious attempt to communicate refreshment at all – even the obligatory drinking shot is pretty cursory, serving only to provide the pause between the “before” and the “after.” People aren’t seriously being asked to choose the lager because it’s refreshing: they’re being asked to choose it because they like the advertising.
For many years after this, the Heineken strategy – identifying a big, obvious, generic category benefit, and using it as a jumping-off point for an exercise in building brand personality – was more or less ubiquitous in big-ticket consumer advertising. At the level of hard, rational proposition, “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” isn’t really any different from “You’re Never Alone With A Strand” – but in terms of personality, they’re poles apart. And “I Bet He Drinks Carling Black Label” was so un-unique to Carling that WCRS had originally pitched it to the Milk Marketing Board as “I Bet He Drinks Milk.”
But strangely, despite the mountains of evidence in support of the generic-benefit-plus-distinctive-and-engaging-personality approach (GBPDAEP for short), the proponents of the USP-like “hard” differentiated proposition never went away. Throughout the post-Heineken era, people – especially on the client side – have gone on massively over-estimating the importance of “hard” differentiation, rejecting countless sound and perfectly successful strategies on the grounds that “any of our competitors could say the same thing.”
These anxieties become more widespread the further you move away from big-ticket consumer TV advertising, and by the time you reach b2b press advertising they’re pretty much ubiquitous.
For the avoidance of doubt, on the rare occasions that USPs actually exist, I have no objection at all to communicating them – whether they’re big-picture USPs that can inform and underpin the totality of a brand’s positioning in its marketplace, or, more likely, short-term tactical messages (for example pricing or performance claims) that provide the substance for a single execution.
But even though, as so often when academics try to make sense of things that are going on in the real world, the two profs’ Market Leader feature seems strangely unworldly and off-kilter, I’m in no doubt whatsoever that they’re absolutely right to cast doubt over the primacy of the hard-differentiated approach.
It’s just that having seen the debate ebb and flow several times over the last few decades – and having seen the GBPDAEP approach trounce the opposition on every previous occasion – I am mildly astonished that the case still seems to need making.
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