Brenda Ong

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Who Wears the Brand Makes the Brand

Burberry’s approach to fashion and branding is conservative - it appears to focus on the traditional and classic, with side product lines slowly evolving alongside. Firstly, Burberry’s brand consistency is also a reflection of its British lineage, back in the day when it clothed national heroes and celebrities, the Ernest Shackleton’s and Humphrey Bogarts. Burberry trademarked its signature plaid in 1920, and it was added as a lining to its trench coats, giving instant brand recognition but also emphasized understated opulence. Its focus on its history and heritage no doubt, appeals to its absolute segment of customers, the ones with the purchasing power to own unique pieces that emphasised their elitism, and who could afford to support the brand even in times of economic downturns - this is their steady consumer base, and they shun “masstige”.

Burberry through the years can be summarized as - Plaid and the Trench Coat.

However, because Burberry’s designs did not change much over time, and it relied so heavily on an iconic pattern or design, this have counterfeiters time to produce good imitations of its products - which its aspirational customers can now afford. Enter the Chavs - aspirational Burberry consumers who represent the changing face of England, but who are also associated with a less-than-glamorous part of Britain. If Chavs are now donning Burberry en masse, it demotes a once exclusive brand to “masstige”, and Burberry now risks alienating its absolute segment. Who wears a luxury brand matters - because that image becomes an iconic and enduring representation of the brand for the era. If the Beckhams wear Burberry, it is still glamor; if chavs wear Burberry, the brand mystique and inaccessibility that made it desirable is gone.

Burberry became the go-to brand of chavs - who loved the brand and its look - but ironically cheapened its brand image.

ChatGPT tells me that the brand that is least likely to be harmed by counterfeits is Hermes - because it is known for its craftsmanship and uniqueness, retains exclusivity and controlled distribution, has strong brand loyalty and customer trust, and adopts proactive legal measures against counterfeiters to protect its IP. Burberry has done all of that, but what the LLM fails to account for is that brand image is also about who the brand is associated with. This is why Celine enjoyed a revival after appointing Lisa from BlackPink as its ambassador - and why LVMH is courting the global popstar now; this is why Zendaya models for LV and Yang Yang for Valentino - these celebrities are the epitome of the customer they want to go for in each regional market. This is where Burberry has failed to evolve fast enough, and only reacted to later.

Who Wears the Brand, Makes the Brand.

So how can consumers help defend brands? Aspirational customers can start with brand advocacy, by helping to sell the brand, and even if they can’t afford it yet, by sharing that desirable ad of BlackPink’s Jennie wearing Chanel. When they eventually get to the earning level that allows them to purchase the brand (i.e. they become who the brand wants to wear them), they will likely choose only the real product, because years of loyal following has instilled a strong desire for the authentic product, which will also be part of their customer experience.

Where Burberry has reinvented itself after its "chav attack" is also a lesson in Branding. Christopher Bailey ditched the infamous check print much loved by the chavs, and appointed new faces of "English chic" like Eddie Redmayne and Cara Delevingne, to reintroduce the posh and elegant touch to their brand. It is also this understated posh and "class-less" new look that was embraced by the upper class, and also made the brand more difficult to imitate. Today, its plaid is referenced only on occasion, and it is usually done in tongue-in-cheek or rebellious fashion.

Burberry's new looks, celebrities, and Russian designer Gosha Rubchinsky's 2018 take on "hooligan chic".

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AI in CX: "Good Friction" in Policing & Scam Prevention

Humans may think that because AI is pre-programmed to reduce errors, it is accurate and neutral. To counteract these biases we hold about AI and ensure more responsible use of AI, “good friction” can help - this involves introducing strategic obstacles in AI systems that encourage ethical practices, such as greater transparency and human oversight.

I've been a police officer with the Singapore Police Force for more than a decade, and human decision-making has always been an important part of the operational decision-making process, even if we augment our decisions with data. This is partly because data can also be unintentionally biased. For instance, operational data predicting crime rates often face the issue of being self-fulfilling prophecies, as sending officers to patrol an area more often leads to a greater likelihood of detecting crime and having that area listed as a hotspot for more policing. Data fed to AI systems may also not capture everything - data can only capture the measurable and quantifiable aspects of our world, but there are intangible aspects of the world that is difficult to capture in a structured format, e.g. data may not capture the poor security measures in a store that an officer observed last shift and had to advise the store owner on, leading them to question whether that area may become more susceptible to opportunistic crimes like theft.

One of the ways to strategically use friction to achieve more responsible AI systems is, as Gosline mentions, to practice acts of inconvenience for areas where we question: “Should AI be doing this?”. As such, you do not see officers relying on hotspot crime data alone to plan their patrol routes. Here, the friction added is more time required for decision-making for officers for patrol route planning before their shift, but this is a “good friction” that the officer can afford, and it allows the officer to think through their various recent experiences, recent events and data that they are provided on crime in their area. The sum of their human experience, informed by crime data provided by the system undoubtedly provides a better informed decision. Within an organization, it is important to conduct “friction audits” to identify the areas where introducing friction could encourage human-first thinking that benefits the customer and community.

As much as I love Tom Cruise, Minority Report is not happening anytime soon (left). Instead, the best "data" officers can gather about the ground is really just from good old fashioned community policing, and getting to know their neighborhood (right).

Another way we can try to introduce “good friction” is to be on the lookout for “dark patterns”. In my time with the Singapore Police, we’ve identified several lobster traps when it comes to scams. Very often, victims of scams will give away their bank account details, and money gets transferred out of their bank accounts very quickly - but it becomes extremely difficult to get the money back once that transfer is made. In an effort to combat such dark patterns, good friction was introduced in the banking systems, where monetary limits are set on both local and overseas bank transfers, and delays are introduced if a new payee is added to a bank account. There are also frictions that you can impose when your rational System 2 brain is in charge, such a "money lock" feature to secure your money for a set period of time - to prevent any losses when your System 1 brain succumbs to any scams or dark patterns. Such frictions undoubtedly make it more inconvenient for the customer, but they have been accepted so far, as they have been useful in reducing the amount lost to scams and the incidences of scams in Singapore.

"Good friction" in the banking system helps delay money transfers to scammers, in case Rick Astley's advice escapes you. [OTP = One-Time Password].

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Face-to-face interviews help us best observe a customer's past Emotional Journey

I’ve been working on a biotech startup called LymeAlert, aimed at providing a quick at-home test for Lyme disease for the past year or so, and had been spending a good half of the year on market research to develop an insightful customer journey map. We had taken the usual business school classes that had ground us in the various methodologies that could help us develop this customer journey map, and they included:

Identifying our beachhead market and conducting primary (surveys, interviews etc.) and secondary research (reviewing existing data and needs related to health diagnostics) to understand the motivations, barriers and preferences of our target audience.

Developing and testing hypotheses about our customers’ needs, pain points and critical interactions in dealing with ticks and a Lyme disease diagnosis.

Mapping the customer journey and including all touchpoints from awareness, consideration, purchase, use, to loyalty and advocacy, and identifying the actions, motivations, questions and barriers at each stage.

Validating and refining the journey map, including with quantitative research like surveys, to help prioritize critical touchpoints for customers.

Deriving actionable insights on customers’ needs and pain points from their actual buying behaviour, and implement changes, iterate on the journey map and continuously improve on it.

Thus far, we have managed to work on steps 1-3, but while mass sending multiple-choice surveys have allowed us to gather more data in a shorter amount of time, they lack the insight and observable emotion attached to each step of our customers’ journey that a face-to-face interview provides. Firstly, our customers’ worry starts when they see a tick on them or on their pet, and conventional tests for Lyme disease can take up to 2 weeks for a lab result, during which they will go through frustrations and worries in waiting for that result. These are emotive aspects of a journey which Yes/No or dropdown menu answer in a survey cannot adequately capture. We have found that primary market research, mainly via interviews in relaxed settings (i.e. as they are going about their life) with potential customers, in the anecdotes of how they discovered ticks, experiences with lab tests etc. that we get to understand their thought process and pain points more. We also started with some hypotheses on which customer segments would be willing to pay more, and whether awareness of Lyme disease would result in a greater willingness to pay.

The first few initial interviews seemed disparate with no concrete conclusions we could draw, but as more interviews were conducted, common pain points, frustrations with existing processes emerged, and we started to see more customer experiences prove and disprove our hypotheses - in recounting their experiences, people continue to retain and display their memory of the event, which we have found very helpful in mapping the emotion to their customer journey. The benefit of going a little slower with this face-to-face process, was that it allowed us to go deeper than the numbers and aggregated data in our secondary research, and really understand a customer’s concerns and emotional journey as they discover a tick, and help us to plan at which stage we can try to intervene to alleviate this worry.

However, this customer interview method does take up a lot of time, and as we try to move on to develop the business and explore other new markets, we see it used more when we are trying to understand a new market and have no information or data on that, and need to understand what motivates or frustrates our customer. For existing markets that we have gathered enough data on, we would likely move on to try to refine the customer journey map and validate it with larger-scale quantitative research methods.

P.S. If you want to support us, we are at www.lymealert.info

Some of the most useful and interesting tick discovery and Lyme disease anecdotes were told to us at the bleachers of a school game, or while waiting in the vet's office.

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Consistency is Key

“Beer is all marketing. People don’t drink beer, they drink marketing." (Michael Foley, Heineken USA Inc. CEO, from 1994-1999)

The Corona-Heineken rivalry is a case study on the importance of consistency in brand communications, especially when brand associations take a long time to build up.

Corona has always tried to conjure up “Fun, Sun, Beach” for its brand. This was built from its consumers experiences with the brand, usually on vacation in Mexico and enjoying the light beer in the sun and on the beach. When people grab a beer, it is usually in a setting where they want to kick back and relax, and be transported away to more relaxed times, so Corona’s brand fits with this consumer need - think about the conversations around the Corona as well, where consumers can start chatting about their fun times and wild experiences (there are bound to be a few) in Mexico, becoming the perfect social lubricant. Corona is also exported to other markets in its authentic Mexican form, so the consistent packaging draws the same emotional association with the relaxing Mexican holiday for the consumer. The added advantage for Corona was that its innovative brewing process eliminated the oxidative effect, more consistently preserving the taste of Corona to consumers as they remember on that sunny beach in Mexico. Advertising content and taglines (‘Change your latitude’ in 1994, ‘Find your beach’ in 2010s) and tie-ups with celebrities that embody the “party” like Jimmy Buffett in its early days to Snoop Dogg more recently, remain faithful to that initial branding vision, allowing the positive brand associations as a premium Mexican beer, to be cemented in consumers minds over time. From its advertising, product look, taste to price in global markets, Corona has executed high consistency in the way its beer is marketed, to guarantee that a strong positive cognitive association to the positive holiday is ingrained in consumers over time. They have also chosen a niche association that is difficult to replicate.

Contrast this to Heineken, where we have a Dutch pilsner in a green bottle. The oxidative effect can cause a sulphurous taste, which commonly leads to a “skunky beer” when left for too long. It is traditionally viewed as a premium beer, associated with quality, heritage and sophistication - but this also happens to be the same values that many foreign imported beer brands also focus on building - meaning that the association to quality can be easily replaced by many other competitor beers as well, those coming from heritage, European type brands, as with many brands under another competitor brewer, Anheuser-Busch. In the 1990s, the changing demographics in the US saw the population in Southern and Western US outpace that in the Northeast and Midwest, alongside the growth of the Hispanic population exceeding that of other ethnic groups. Heineken’s advertising strategy through the 1980s-90s focused on product quality, but this was not necessarily the desired value in the beer that they’re young consumers that they were trying to attract - the conversation revolving around the Heineken would be very different; you are less likely to hear younger consumers waxing poetic about the quality of the Dutch pilsner or the Van Gogh museum they visited in the Netherlands. Heineken also changed its packaging in the mid-90s in the US, and its “personality”, trying to introduce humour to the brand, but this ran the risk of deviating from the values that drew its core customers to it. This switch also requires Heineken to have to rebuild brand associations again.

Through consistency in brand communications, Corona has now overtaken Heineken as the 2nd leading imported beer brand in the US in 2022 (Source: Statista). The Top beer brand, Modelo Especial, is also owned by Grupo Modelo - also a reflection of their patient brand-building that tapped into the American love of sports with associations of a “fighting spirit”.