Business Economics

Strong associations result from having a clear and consistent positioning

Sue has spent most of her working life with major media and advertising agencies. She began her career at Leo Burnett, then moved to Lintas. She was later appointed as managing director and worldwide board director at Initiative Media Futures. Prior to joining Millward Brown, Sue was managing director of Carat Insight and board director of Aegis Media U.K. During her career she has worked with a number of leading companies including Unilever, Diageo, Renault and AOL. Sue is a frequent speaker at major media industry events and is a past chairman of the U.K. Media Research Group. She shares her views with BE’s Abhijit Ganguly.

Q) What are the essentials of brand building? What among these is the determining factor in brand recall?

A) The one essential is an understanding that the brand exists as the sum total of the perceptions it has in the minds of the consumers. An essential task is to build and maintain positive associations in the minds of consumers that are tightly linked to the brand name, its logo, its packaging and the experience of the product or service itself. Strong associations result from having a clear and consistent positioning, leaving no doubt as to what the brand stands for and what it is offering to consumers. All brands have users with varying levels of loyalty and the brand must be managed with this in mind. We have found that building loyalty amounts to communicating these things: emotional benefits, rational benefits, popularity, difference, dynamism and value.

Global brand building has to take into account differences between and among countries since people will respond to a brand and its communications differently according to their life history and current realities and values.

Brand recall depends on reaching enough of your customer base with well branded and memorable communications - sometimes people forget that reach is important, but you cannot affect people you don’t talk to. Effective share of voice over the longer term is important in that you need your communications, your brand associations to dominate a person's memories of your category.

Q) Does the product define the consumer's choice or is it the other way around?

A) Any brand must satisfy its customers’ functional requirements and the

strongest brands deliver exceptional experiences. Marketing cannot make up for the failure of a brand to deliver but it can frame the attitudes and expectation people bring to their product experience and can enhance it, like for instance,“oh yes this really does taste quite like butter”.

Q) What major FMCG brands have set the trends in marketing?

A) I was privileged enough to sit as a final judge for the Festival of Media Awards this year and saw some great stuff, but what stood out for me was the W.A.L.S. (women against lazy stubble) campaign and “Shave India Movement” for Gillette in India. It’s significant in that it exemplifies the value of a social agenda, beyond social networking sites, which is going to grow in importance and is moving forward in marketing. When we have “anytime, anywhere” media consumption on a mass scale, people are going to be living in a huge cloud of influences, fragmented and out of order. In such a world people must instinctively recognise the brand and what it stands for irrespective of context or communications channel; in a way that is resilient to a myriad of other influences. A Mass Agenda is a key to this, but the enhanced sociability and influence of the consumer also means that most brands will seek to add a social dimension to it.

This is about more than using the social media. Yes, marketers are learning to interact more naturally through social technologies; going beyond display ads on networking sites to building an opt-in community and developing more intimate relationships with key influencers in the digital space. Indeed, social media will be a great way to listen to and engage with people who want to talk to you, but the ROI on these activities for actually building a brand (versus maintaining existing loyalists/or dealing with specific detractors) will not be there.

We have plenty of evidence of social media's power to harm a brand, but little of it actually building a brand. In the future, the emphasis will be about an authentic social aspect of the Mass Agenda, the sort of thing Gillette has done but on a bigger scale.

Q) How does Millward Brown help clients manage their brand assets? How has this worked in India since the establishment of Millward Brown India in 2008?

A) Our global company strategy is to be the ongoing partner of choice for clients when they are developing and managing brands into the future. Our offer encompasses everything from the development of brand strategy, monitoring brand health, to communications development and communications channel evaluation to the analysis of shareholder returns from marketing investments.

Our competitive advantage currently lies in our pre-eminent position as specialists in understanding how consumers build loyalty to brands and how communications affect loyalty. As we focus on tackling today's important issues for our clients, we don’t overlook what we already know, which is considerable since we have been doing this for 35 years.

In India, our aim has been to build a thinking organisation that develops appropriate new solutions to add value to our clients’ businesses. While we will stay focused on the brand, media and communication space, we are continuously expanding our offerings and leading the industry on innovating.

This year our foray into the exciting world of Neuroscience will add tremendously to our ability to advise clients on their creative needs, thus leading the industry in adoption of new ways of doing research, not via approaches suitable for one-off projects, but approaches that can be applied across frequently done projects. Another area is our adoption of CAPI for large tracks in a market where interviewing is still largely pen and paper based.

We will be focusing more and more on Cross-Media, Digital, Neuroscience and Marketing Science. We are launching these today with the knowledge that they represent the areas where our industry will need to be providing advice to clients in future. Our aim is to take the leadership position on each of these and thereby offer the best brand and communication advice to clients.