Notes

[MUSIC]
So we just talked about brand positioning,
which is the strategic part of brand
position.
And if you really think about brands,
you'll realize that although you
know some great, crisp brands it's very
hard to get to that positioning.
You can have lots of different thoughts.
You can have different point
of differences, different target segments,
different
frames of reference with lots, and lots,
and lots of different choices.
But then you want to hone in to the right
choice.
That's the trick of marketing.
To explain marketing, the concepts aren't
that difficult to
grasp but they are very, very hard to do
right.
There are lots and lots of ways to do
marketing wrong.
And only a few ways to do marketing
precisely right.
And the next concept that I'm going to
talk
about is the brand mantra or an elevator
speech.
This, the elevator speech you may heard
of that.
This is the way you define a brand in 30
seconds.
So we're talking about 30 seconds worth of
material.
It sounds so easy, 30 seconds.
But the truth of the matter is, to get the
right critical 30 seconds.
The right brand mantra, that takes lots
and lots of analysis.
And a lot of wrong turns, and a lot of
wrong ways.
If you come up with a brand mantra right
away, or an elevator speech right away.
maybe you're lucky, but chances are, you
haven't given it enough thought.
You really do need to think about of lots
of the different positions.
So what I'm going to suggest here, what
I'm going to talk about is
a relatively easy concept to get, but it's
very hard to do well.
So what we're, what we want, where we.
Let me tell you where we want to end up
and I'll talk about how we get to it.
We want to add up, end up with the 30
second speech, as I said,
the elevator speech.
Or a brand mantra.
And a brand mantra may be three words; but
I want to get down to the right three
words.
And so one of the things you do is whe-,
when
you're creating a brand and thinking about
a brand or thinking about
a product category, there's a lot of
market research that you can
do to try to figure out what's going on in
customers' heads.
And how do they think about the category,
and how do they think about different
brands?
And one way
you can think about it, in order to figure
out again, what's the essence
of the brand, what's the brand mantra, is
to develop what's called a mental map.
And what a mental map is a kind of a
graphic, with
circles and arrows and things like that,
of what the brand is.
And it's kind of a, a thought association
process.
You ask the consumer what comes to mind
when you think of the brand.
And then there's lots of different ways
to do this and I'll just show you one.
But there are a lot of different ways, and
you write down what the
brand is, what the essence of the brand is
from the consumer point of view.
What the different associations are.
And how those associations lead to other
associations.
And some people call this mental map, some
people call them schemas.
and there's a lot of different techniques
you can do in these mental maps.
You can, the size of the circle can be how
often that association is named
by different people.
The lines that connect one circle to
another
circle can be the strength of those
associations.
But essentially what you're developing is,
sometimes it's
called a semantic associative network or a
mental map.
You're developing a picture of the thought
and associations that come up with the
brand.
And so what I'm going to show you here is
a mental map of McDonald's.
You start out
with what differentiate McDonald's, you
think about the golden arches, the brand
name, and then, and this is just one
person's thought process, you
come up with things that are
characteristic of the category, and so
those are the red circles, so McDonald's
makes meals, it provides services.
It's you know, family food, family fun.
It's good value, and then the
yellow circles here are the associations
with each one of these points of parity.
Actually.
Frame of reference characteristics that
are unique to McDonald's.
So McDonald's has certain meals.
What are the meals that McDonald's has?
Well, it gives hamburgers, it has
breakfast, it has fries.
What are the brands associated with those
meals?
Egg McMuffin, a Big Mac.
What's the quality?
Well, it's always consistent, it's fresh,
it's
good-tasting.
and these, this is one example of the
mental map.
There's lots of other ones that you can
come up with.
But you can see the idea here is that
you have circles and lines that connect
these associations.
You can do this in a lot of different
ways.
You can do it, the closest ones to the
core are
the ones that are top of mind, that come
up first.
The ones that are further away, you know,
come up after a time.
And so there are a lot of things, but what
I'm
trying to get here is all of the thought
associations that come up with a brand.
And then what you want to do is do this
over several
customers, and do it in market research
stages, several different ways.
And essentially, you want to take all
these different
abstract phrases and concepts that are out
there.
And figure out which are the most
important maybe
five to ten, which are the very most
important.
And so, what you're doing is,
you're starting with the mental map or the
associations that people
have with the brand or maybe that with the
category and depending
upon how well known the brand is you might
do it at
a category level, you might do it at a
what if level.
You might do it at a prototype level, a
concept level or the brand level.
But you have this big mental map and then
you want to hone
down that mental map to the core brand
values which are the five or
ten critical brand values that are
important to that brand.
And from that you then want to reduce
those five or ten to the
key concepts that are going to be the DNA
of the brand, the brand mantra.
So, the brand mantra is defined as the
heart and soul of the brand, the DNA.
It's the brand essence, the brand promise.
And, and it's again goes back to that
elevator speech.
It's just really
what people think of as the core of the
brand.
It's very important to know this brand
mantra because
everything you do within this brand
mantra, all your products
that you come out with, all your new
products,
all your advertising has to all fit within
the essence.
The customer's going to know the brand
mantra,
the employees are going to know the brand
mantra.
You really want if you have a very, very
strong brand
it's very crystal clear what that brand is
and what it means.
And it characterizes everything that's
done under
the brand name, and that's very, very
important.
It's particularly important nowadays as
you go online, offline, websites, phones.
Your brand is on lots of different things,
and
you really want to make sure that the
heart and
the soul of the brand is consistent across
all
of these different media, these different
platforms, these different products.
So what is the essence of the brand
mantra?
It has three
basic parts.
One part is the brand function, it
describes the nature of the product
or service, it describes the type of
experiences, the benefits that the brand
provides.
Then there's the descriptive modifier that
further classifies or
clarifies the nature of what the brand is
delivering.
And then there's an emotional qualifier
that
kind of explains exactly what those
benefits are.
And, and in what way the brand delivers on
them.
Now it's probably easiest to give you some
examples.
Before I do that though, let me just say
again, what the brand mantra is used for.
It's used internally to guide decisions.
I think I already mentioned this.
It's what the brand should and shouldn't
be.
By the way, that's a very important idea.
A brand mantra, not only, says what a
brand is.
But as importantly it says what a brand is
not.
and you really want to
have, almost black and white, that idea.
This is a Nike.
This is not a Nike.
That kind of idea.
And it communicates the baoundries of the
brand.
It, it, it has to be short, simple and it
should be inspirational.
So now we have the examples.
these are very famous ones.
Nike, they're global brands, Nike, Disney,
McDonald's.
so Nike is authentic, athletic,
performance.
The all, just do it, be real, you know,
the, that's authentic.
It, it's very much an athletic brand.
It's not just shoes, it's clothing.
But when you think of Nike, you think
about athletic, and it's about
performance and the, the technique, or the
ability to, that can, just do it.
That kind of notion.
Disney and McDonald's are kind of
interesting,
because they both are about family fun,
and,
and they actually both have a lot of
things in common.
But the brand mantra is different.
Disney is about entertainment.
Now that is not to say that Disney doesn't
have food.
Disney sells quite a bit of food at
their parks and in different places that
they have.
But when you think Di-, Disney, you think
fun family entertainment.
And even the food comes within that brand
mantra of, of Disney, of entertainment.
McDonald's, on the other hand,
is fun and family.
But its food, and even if you have a
McDonalds playground or
something like that, you still think of it
as the food first.
And so, although these are similar and you
know, what.
In some sense, you can see they're
actually also quite, quite
different and I don't think you'd ever get
Disney and McDonald's confuse.
even though they're going after similar
target markets and they're offering
similar emotional
benefits, they really are quite, quite
distinct, different
brands and they have very different brand
monitors.
>>
[MUSIC]