Lovemarks for Valentines

Reptilian marketing and the logic of emotion

Real women now eat steak

Jack Trout on Strategy

Branding and
Positioning 101

If you love your career, if you love learning, if you want to know how to turn on your customers’ or clients’ emotional "hot buttons," buy yourself a copy of Lovemarks: the future beyond brands, by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi. Published in 2004, it is one of the most important marketing and branding books published in recent years.

"Human beings are powered by emotion, not by reason. Emotion and reason are intertwined, but when they are in conflict, emotion wins every time," says Roberts.

"The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions. Without the fleeting and intense stimulus of emotion, rational thought winds down and disintegrates," says neurologist Donald Calne, who Roberts quotes in the book.

What’s the secret to long-term success and unwavering customer loyalty? John Lennon had it right: "All you need is love." Find out how to get customers to love you.

Chapters Indigo: Click here
Amazon: Click here

Monday, December 20, 2004

Here’s an interview with French branding and marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille. A psychiatrist by training, Rapaille has been working with Fortune 500 companies for the past 30 years. His clients include Nestle, P&G, Hummer, and Chrysler; his work on the PT Cruiser is particularly interesting.

He is best known for his "Reptilian marketing" or the logic of emotion: an argument for marketers to pay attention to the visceral reaction of customers rather than heed the content of over-analyzed market research.

The interview is pretty much a straight transcript of an episode of "The Persuaders" which aired on PBS on December 15, 2003, but was posted to the PBS website on November 9, 2004. It is long (6,000 words), so get your favourite libation and settle in to a good read:

"The secret of my success? Go Big! You can always go back," said Lana Duke at the podium after a petit filet steak dinner at the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in Mississauga, just outside Toronto. How to Build a Brand from Scratch was the theme of Lana’s after dinner speech. And who better to deliver a keynote speech on branding that the number one USDA Prime Beef Queen herself?

Marketing and advertising legend Lana Duke, of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse fame, was in Toronto on Thursday, November 4 to address a combined session of more than 100 women belonging to the Organization of Women in Trade (OWIT), Canadian Association of Women Executives and Entrepreneurs (CAWEE) and Women in Food Industry Management (WIFM). I enjoyed my steak, but can’t share that delicious taste with you. But I can share Lana’s ideas, information, and tips.

In terms of demographics of steak-eaters, 45% are now women and 55% are men, Lana reported. This is a huge change from 40 years ago when 5% were women and 95% were men. The chain now has 90 restaurants, annual sales of US$400 million, is the number one steak house brand in the world, and has been showered with all kinds of awards. Fine wine sales are up; sales of Scotch and Bourbon are down.

"The road to success is always under construction," continued Lana. Here are her 10 tips for how to build a brand:

1. Have a vision of where you want to be in five, ten or twenty years. If you don’t have a vision, if you don’t have a map, how will you know when you get there?

2. Focus on the most important thing about your brand. With Ruth’s Chris, it was steak. What is it with your brand? What makes it different, special, unique, better? Don’t get lost in the details and clutter. K.I.S.S.—Keep it Simple, Stupid.

3. Give your brand a unique personality, like our prime steak, broiled at 1800 degrees and served sizzling.

4. Know your customer, but be flexible in a changing world.

5. Give it real value. People intuitively understand value for the money, and if you don’t have that, you’ve got a problem.

6. Keep asking questions and keep changing.

7. Create your unique brand profile from the Five Ps of the marketing mix: Product, Price, People, Place and Promotion.

8. Invest in the best—don’t cut corners especially in the areas where corners count.

9. Market the heck out of it.

10. Work your tail off.

Friday, July 16, 2004

Positioning in 2004: 
Jack Trout on Strategy
This week’s treat was a webcast with 40-year positioning and branding guru Jack Trout. The webcast was presented by the American Management Association (AMA) on Thursday, July 15, 2004 in North America.

Here is some of the wisdom that Jack shared with participants:

What is positioning?
It’s how you differentiate your product in the mind of the prospect. Not your perception or your organization’s perception—the prospect’s perception.

What is positioning for?
Positioning is the long-term survival strategy of an organization. If you don’t have the right strategy, you’ll flounder and eventually turn belly up.

1. Perception (theirs, not yours)

2. Being different

3. Competition

4. Specialization

5. Simplicity

6. Leadership

7. Reality

1. The mind is a limited container.

2. The mind creates "product ladders" for each category (cars, toothpaste, accounting services, hamburgers, etc.) There is always a top rung and a bottom rung in each category.

3. The mind can only remember seven items in a high interest category. Most people remember only two or three items in a category.

4. On the product ladder, Positions One and Position Two typically account for more than 60 per cent of the sales in that category. In other words, Positions Three, Four and Subsequent are not profitable.

5. The mind hates complexity. To the mind, complexity equals confusion. People don’t have time to figure out confusion.

6. The best way to enter the mind is to OVER-SIMPLIFY the message.

7. The most powerful positioning is to reduce your message to one simple and easily understood word.

8. Minds are insecure. Most people buy what others buy: this is the "herd mentality."

9. Minds don’t change—easily.

From time to time, clients, prospects and colleagues and I discuss branding and positioning. What is it? What is just a tagline, as opposed to real positioning? How do you position a service? How do you position a product? How do you re-position the competition when the position you want is already occupied by someone else?

How do you position a municipality? First, a municipality is an artificially-imposed geographic area. In Canada and especially in the greater Toronto area, many municipalities are comprised of a diverse mix of established residents, new immigrants, old money, new money, historical communities, newly-sprouted strip malls, established businesses and business upstarts.

Branding and positioning are a science, albeit an inexact one. In branding and positioning a municipality, here are some things to consider:

• Positioning is not what you do to the municipality, it’s what you do to the mind of prospects, both business and residents.

• You also need to know the positioning of your competition. "Me too" positioning is ineffective.

• Positioning doesn’t create something new and different; it manipulates what is already in the minds of prospects. Positioning re-ties connections that already exist.

• In its essence, positioning is a process of reduction, of discarding. You must throw away everything else except the one message that has the best chance of getting through.

• In positioning, you ignore the sending end. Instead, you focus on the receiving end.

• There is a good measure of "perception is reality" in positioning.

• In positioning, oversimplification is the key. Less is more. What one message, above all others, do you want your prospects to remember?

• The one over-arching message becomes your "brand."

The original 1981 edition

One of the first books I read about positioning was by Al Ries and Jack Trout called Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind (1981). It is still a book I go back to again and again. It was re-issued for its 20t anniversary—something not many business books can boast. Most business books end up in the discount bin within 18 months.