Brand Strategy
Having a good brand strategy means defining a story or purpose that is relevant to Consumers, is different than the Competition, resonates within your Company (i.e. it reflects your culture, values or customer experience) and speaks to a larger aspect of Culture.
Why are these 4 "Cs" important?
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If your story is not relevant to consumers, connecting with them emotionally and delighting them on a rational level, you will be ignored.
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If you aren't different than your competition, you won't stand out.
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If your brand story is something that is not reflected in your corporate culture or values, your employees will struggle to deliver on the experience that story is promising.
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If your story doesn't tie to the broader culture, you will only be thought about when someone thinks about your category, which lowers your brand's salience and the chances of it being relevant.
Case Study: Kingsford Charcoal
Kingsford created the charcoal category and had over a 70% market share. But over the years, Americans chose to grill on gas, with a corresponding decline in charcoal use. The problem was a generic issue: time. With more and more families having two working parents, cooking with charcoal was perceived as taking longer and being more involved, even if did make food taste better.
A segmentation study showed that there was one particular segment of people who loved grilling. We undertook some ethnographic research, grilling and eating with them (yum!) to understand why they loved grilling with charcoal.
What we found was that to them, grilling wasn't a way to cook, it was a way to socialize. These were people who loved being outdors, hosting and were very "type B". Griling with charcoal meant there was time built into a meal for them to socialize, crack open another beer and spend time with people. The problem we thought we had - time - actually wasn't a problem for these people.
This pointed us in the direction of our cultural insight: the problem wasn;t that charcoal was slow, it was that people were doing to much! Data from trend company Yankelovich showed that success was being defined less and less by money and material possessions, and more and more by being able to live a balanced life. The idea of slowing down food - sitting down and eating less processed, freshly cooked meals – had become less of a fringe idea and has moved more into the mainstream.
So, our brand strategy became simple:
Kingsford invites you to slow down and grill
The TV ad shown here was just one of a number of ads and promotions that came out of this strategy. We first started to see results when this ad appeared on YouTube, with consumers trying to play the guitar solo from one of the TV executions.
Results
Then the sales results started to roll in and showed that Kingsford's dollar market share had grown by 13.5%. The campaign also had a big effect on growth of the charcoal category, with the rate of sales growth jumping significantly after years of being relatively flat, which re-energized retailers to merchandise charcoal again. What role did the advertising play? Kingsford's econometric modeling showed the sales volume attributable to advertising was up 27% on the prior year.