Jonathan Lane's Sloan Branding Blog

[jonaspcv]

Pitching as Code-Switching & the Role of Authenticity in Personal Branding

While this week’s reading was expressly regarding pitching thyself - contextually, in the professional sense - one of the important, if understated, applications of this idea is modulating across different settings.

As a proud member of the LGBTQ community, I spent the lion’s share of my life trying to find the perfect way to “pitch myself” to a primarily heterosexual audience. In effect, I was covering, as I knew that my social standing and rather instantaneous (150 milliseconds, according this week’s article) would in no small way be determined by my ability to “pass” as heterosexual - especially in red state Texas. Better yet, I collaborated with other catchers to co-create my own personal brand; I’m not sure I fit into any of the three positive stereotypes, as I lacked the heterosexual cultural capital to speak vernacular or navigate authentic flirting. Nevertheless, much of my “pitching” lacked authenticity, and perhaps it was for this reason that fitting in was such a significant challenge in middle and high school.

I’m also reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The World And Me”. Coates speaks at great length about the kind of “code-switching” and self-modulation that he must “perform” between his school environment, where teachers expect him to be polished, polite, scholarly, and the streets, where courtesy and good behavior were perceived to expose weakness and leave oneself vulnerable to assault, or worse. 

I suppose the lesson, then, is less about the kind of character become or the role you play in order to elicit a specific “positive stereotype”, despite the fact that the article seems to outright prescribe it. For me, rather, like brands themselves, any kind of behavior you assume must be authentic with and to who you are. There are certain behaviors and mannerisms and ways of speaking, many of which are automatic and inborn, and trying to adopt a role that is less than fully authentic will certainly be perceived by any catchers in one’s life, be they professional or personal. Thus, my own prescription would be less about adopting a fully fleshed caricature, the ways that we can work to improve our personal brands and attempt to coax out positive stereotypes is by make incremental changes, over times, in ways that enhance existing messaging rather than trying to replace it. 

[jonaspcv]

Two-stage framework for evaluating American Well’s next market moves

Today’s task, by and large, is to help American Well identify its next strategic marketing move among a number of options - the development of the “Team Edition” product, entering different markets along the value chain, and international expansion among them. Since this assignment feels particularly integrative (bringing together various lessons from previous classes), I’m going to do what I would perhaps do in a marketer’s position and create - and apply - a framework such that my decision making is less about intuition and more about deliberate judgment.

First and foremost, I have to make a strategic decision regarding whether to continue focusing on the buildout of the existing product or simultaneously expanding into a new product category. In order to do this, I would examine the existing product based on Roger’s Five Forces, thus deciding if the nascent brand would be sufficient to grow on its own/stand on its own feet, or if another product marketed in parallel would help it overcome deficiencies:

- Relative advantage: based on a B2B model, where the primary buyer is the insurer (payer) and the end user is the patient, I believe this provides a clear relative advantage over the existing system. It saves both payer and patient two things it greatly values - time and money - in exponential ways. Very high marks.

- Compatibility: this will be one of the company’s greatest challenges, as patients are not used to the idea of not seeing a doctor physically. Marketing spend should focus heavily on consumer education, both directly to the patient and providing consistent messaging materials through each of its client payers. Low marks.

- Complexity: it appears that the product is easy for consumers to use, and in fact resembles elements of the freelancer/sharing economy we see today by absorbing and effectively redistributing slack bandwidth (doctors waiting around while others experience high demand). High marks (meaning low complexity)

- Trialibilaity: with almost no commitment from the patient, who will be responsible for the resulting utilization, there is high trainability; payers will have certain sunk costs related to the initial number of addressable lives they purchase, but a large portion of the investment is related to annual, recurring costs - which would disappear if they were to abandon the product. This also gets high marks.

- Observability: it is not immediately observable if you are tele-medicining, though word of mouth value may be high. People may “see” you “using” the existing system - attending the doctor’s office - but the existing system would not benefit from observability any more than American Well. Thus, moderate marks.

With this analysis in hand, I would immediately discard the idea of trying to expand into a new product at the moment. There are clear synergies between the two, but while the temptation of the firm is to expand quickly and ruthlessly, they risk overshooting their resources and overextending their brand by moving too far, too fast. I feel they should only engage in Team Edition if their core product is otherwise insufficient as a standalone, but this is clearly not the case. They should not enter the Team Edition product category.

Looking, then, at market opportunities, I would be most concerned with the following elements:

Credibility: since Compatibility with existing processes is markedly low, our brand is very new, and the brand is attempting to change major elements of consumer behavior, I think that the brand should focus heavily on what markets will bolster its credibility among consumers. Not least because medical care is involved, Trust - by patients, payers, and providers alike - will be a bedrock element of building this brand.

Lateralism: having already begun to convince insurers of American Well’s value proposition, moves into new markets should happen in ways that are already closely connected to existing customer base (payers). This way, we avoid marketing mission creep and brand dilution, keeping our embodied value and exchange values alike consistent and ensuring curation of a brand that does not yet have substantial brand equity.

End User Awareness Development: I would want to see the “franchise” built out in ways that get users interacting with the product more frequently in places where they would have traditionally accessed the existing healthcare delivery system. This will position the brand for future forays into DTC, which could be a much larger market (eventually).

Regulatory Complexity Avoidance: at this stage, it is about rapid growth; being burdened by trying to learn and navigate new regulatory regimes is incompatible with trying to reach scale quickly, for the time being. This effectively mollifies any international expansion for the time being. 

Limited Stakeholder Resistance: since Compatibility is already low, American Well will want to limit the number of other stakeholders who might resist our entry until we are able to develop more brand influence and product inertia. 

Thus, based on the other available options being considered - market entries into hospitals, retail clinics, or pharmacies, or international expansion, using these criteria I would opt for Market Entry into Hospitals. Retail clinics might increase end user awareness, but it would be the most likely to present resistance (since this may undermine parts of their revenue model, even if it provides other benefits and more effectively redistributes demand across the system). Hospitals would appear to be more dependent on insurers even than pharmacies - the latter which can subsidize its pharmacy revenues with other retail in-store - and they certainly command the most credibility between the three potential options. As indicated, international expansion right now is preemptive, as attempts to deal with regulation (already one of the most onerous regulatory frameworks globally) would distract from growth.

[jonaspcv]

Applying the brand manifold to Salvadoran tourism

This week, without the benefit of a case for which we could provide our very best ex post rationalizations and critiques, I’ve decided to take a different approach. When I spent roughly a year in El Salvadoran working alongside the US government and the Interamerican Development Bank to develop a regional tourism development strategy for northwest El Salvador, I recognized that my task was perhaps less about gimmicks, promotions, and the mass marketing for which they had initially contracted me and more about defining a brand. While the article on brand architecture was interesting, it felt less immediately relevant than that on brand manifold; as a potentially compelling exercise, I’ve decided to apply the brand manifold framework to analyze my own previous professional experience.

To provide a little bit of color and context for the underlying theory: brand manifold refers to the multidimensionality of brands in terms of both time and constituencies - at its core, this means that brands are dynamic and evolve over time, and brands are the aggregation and approximation of many different stakeholders’ own perceptions (termed “embodied value”).

The challenge I faced in El Salvador was not that no brand existed - they had worked with the Ministry of Tourism to create the Ruta Fresca, loosely “Fresh Air Trail”, prior to my arrival - but that the community leaders and regional tourism authorities were wed to the antiquated idea that advertising was the lynchpin of any successful strategy moving forward. What follows is an assessment of the Ruta Fresca brand, based on various benchmarks referenced in this week’s reading:

Brand communications: moderate. There was an intense focus on advertising and promotions through newspapers, television media, and radio; however, this was guided by serious marketing myopia - narrow definitions of business based on what specific services the association provided. The quality of external communications often lacked professionalism as much as tailoring to desired segments, and for months it appeared that internal communications were themselves not terribly cogent regarding the vision for their brand.

Brand embodiments: moderate. Those that opted to visit the Ruta Fresca often handily enjoyed their experience, while other segments complained that they weren’t sure else what there was to do. Customer service was fairly high, which led to a sense that expectations (including those developed by brand communications) were met or exceeded upon visiting.

Brand equity, financial: weak. With many tourism operators treating their hotels and inns more as part-time hobbies than real work, occupancy rates and resultant cash flows for each business were low. Thus, if you were to sell all the assets that collectively comprised the Ruta Fresca, it is likely that it would not fetch much more than the market value of the physical assets themselves.

Brand equity, behavioral: weak. As determined by surveys and interviews (formal/informal), customers did not see the Ruta Fresca brand as being something remarkable; rather, people visited different destinations within the Ruta Fresca - like El Pital Mountain - because it had an intrinsic tourism value itself and happened to be co-located within the region. 

Embodied value: weak. While many leaders in the association could articulate what products and services they offered and the unique value of their own establishments, few could broadly identify what the Ruta Fresca stood for - even with, or despite, the existence of an overly inclusive, 7-line mission statement.

Exchange value, customer: medium-low. The Ruta Fresca brand, with some individual exceptions (including 2-4 higher end hotels) was fairly accessible/affordable to the average domestic (and particularly international) traveler.

Exchange value, management: medium-high. If we assume that affordability/pricing is a key lever in generating a broader base of consumers, then we can say that Ruta Fresca - with a wide variety of lodging and dining options, many of which were in fact affordable - had a competitive exchange value.

Exchange value typology: commodity-mass market. While company equity is relatively strong, customer equity is relatively weak. Compared to other tourism destinations in El Salvador - or even worse, compared to other tourism destinations throughout Central America, including neighboring Guatemala and nearby Costa Rica - the Ruta Fresca destination was not something for which most customers would pay a heavy price premium.

Brand manifold, temporal factors: moderate. In the town of La Palma, there was an incredible history involving the country’s most famous art, the recent civil war, and a strong cultural identity that could be (and often attempted to be) leveraged for the benefit of a brand identity. However, what efforts the regional tourism association had made were almost exclusively to define a static brand rather than to “reinterpret the past in terms of the future, or in a complementary manner, to interpret the future in terms of the past.”

Brand manifold, multiple constituencies: weak. The leaders and tourism operators of the Ruta Fresca had only ever conceptualized the brand as being something it was responsible for defining, curating, and communicating to consumers, but did not take an expansive view of what other organizations (including the IDB, the Ministry of Tourism, other domestic tourism destinations, investors, employees, and local residents) might believe about what the brand was or should be. Given aforementioned challenges associated with a lack of a cogent vision from management (see “Embodied value” above), this meant that the brand was fragmented and inconsistent, destining itself to its commodity-mass market position for the foreseeable future.

[jonaspcv]

Singapore Airlines: The benefits of brand consistency and human capital development in delivering consumer-centric value

The notion of high quality customer-centric service as a source of competitive advantage is hardly novel, at least in theory. Based on the selection of cases thus far, it would certainly appear that A. it is attractive for many brands to compete on quality, such that it creates a narrative of aspiration, permits higher premiums/markups, and lowers pressures on margins; and that B. competing on quality leads companies to define themselves by its experience, not by the utility of the service it provides:

“SIA was not a transportation company; it was a unique travel experience” - Kay Wee Sim, senior vice president

Entering the quality competition can (and evidently did) dramatically balloon costs and lead to amenities arms races in service sectors like airlines, such that all the bells, whistles, and Spacebeds were more akin to keeping up with Joneses than finding and exploiting differentiation. Thus, the company had to ensure that it’s brand was, in fact, the byword for quality across a number of international markets - and if industry surveys and awards are any indication, it has been incredibly successful as such.

I found (at least) two ways that SIA was able to deal with the industry crisis, pull away from competition, sustain consumer-centric value, and make money using a quality-focused competitive advantage:

1. Content, quality, and consistency of message

Singapore Airlines, almost since its very inception, has been a brand that invokes the aspirational. Much as Concha y Toro failed to do - per last week’s case - the quality of its business and first class offerings, and its emphasis not on price but on amenities and service, ultimately bleeds into even its downmarket/economy offerings, keeping it profitable and helping it manage despite crisis and competition. This message has also remained remarkably consistent over the years, despite competitive pressures: it would appear, according to the case’s recount, that the enigmatic, sophisticated image of the SIA Girl born in the 1990s persists to this day. When you leverage a top-down market approach, trying to draw attention to its upmarket offerings and superior service, this kind of resilience and consistency - despite market, margin, and competitive pressures along the way - has created a sort of brand inertia able to endure economic swings. Finally, I’d argue that SIA pays incredible attention to the customer experience end-to-end; per the Behavioral Science article we read for this week, SIA gives more than lip service to its desire to keep passenger queues to an absolute minimum, especially for repeated/heavy users (who earn “privileges”), and provides a ground staff upon arrival that is proactive about, rather than reactive to, customer needs. The way that the customer experiences SIA is incredibly personalized - preparing their favorite drink prior to ordering it, or inviting slighted customers to lunch, for instance - allows the company to go beyond the mere transactional and step into the realm of experiential.

2. Expertly curated human capital

In any service industry, those who interface directly with the consumer play an outsized role in customer satisfaction, and Singapore Air has been incredible successful at recruiting talented individuals who are continuously trained and whose service is meticulously measured. Working at Singapore Airlines, at very least contemporaneous with the case, is an honor and a privilege for many Singaporeans, something that conveys “prestige” and “glamor”. Here the brand is almost self-reinforcing, such that its image itself attracts the kind of people that then serve to keep the brand perpetually sophisticated and highly service-oriented; it also ensures that SIA is about to bring in people who are able to operate off-script, “outside the manual”, optimizing for common sense approaches to bottlenecks and inevitable service breakdowns. After recruitment, it invests heavily in training for these same employees, with some “modules” and “courses” lasting days and even being exported to other service-sector organizations within Singapore. Importantly, this happens not only in economic upswings but also in the downtimes, recognizing that human capital is the crux of their business strategy. Finally, it is incredibly rigorous in monitoring and evaluating service performance by its employees through customer engagement surveys, recording unsolicited customer compliments and complaints, and the Service Performance Index, all of which are/can be utilized to identify and promote top internal talent. While many companies in service industries attempt to recruit and retain the best and brightest, very few are as successful as Singapore Air in recognizing its importance in catalyzing a competitive advantage.

[jonaspcv]

Concha y Toro: a failing grade in wine consumer fundamentals

This case is especially near and dear to my heart: fresh out of undergrad, unhappily employed in private wealth management, and desperately wanting to reconnect with Spanish culture after a transformative experience abroad in Madrid, I moonlighted as a Spanish wine master on weekends - not for money, but for genuine, unadulterated fun.

In light of my own personal passion for wine, as much as professional experiences working closely with government agencies and institutions toward private sector development, I drew two key criticisms - and from them, a prescription from Guilisasti’s two options.

1. Concha y Toro has in many ways ignored the fundamentals of the wine market. Wine is, at its core, aspirational. In Roman times, it was - like so many luxury goods - a symbol of indulgence, of excess, of something easily afforded by and always accessible to the upper echelons of the political and economic elite. In an act of incredible symbolism, the Bible tells of when Jesus turned water - a basic necessity, and something which fetched no price - into wine, something that seemed inaccessible to the poor and humble classes. When ordering wine or uncorking bottles at restaurants and homes, even the most norm core among us assumes an air of veritable wine snobbery; we seek the bouquet, we sip the wine, we talk of its body, palette, and perhaps tannins. However, Concha y Toro treat the wine industry as share to be captured, rather than prestige to be developed. Like Vina Santa Carolina in 1998 Japan, Concha y Toro expressly determined that “the first step is to inundate the mass segment with a price - good quality product - ‘value for the money’”. The wine market shows great indifference toward specific brands and seems to shirk loyalty, instead opting for interest in countries, varietals, or regions of repute; with little capacity to develop brand loyalty, flooding markets and capturing share undermines perceived quality and tarnished the aspirational element for which wine is primarily purchased, and as Latin America’s largest single wine producer, they bring down much of the broader Chilean wine brand with it.

2. To this point, Concha y Toro also appears to suffer from a brand - or lack thereof - over which it has precious little control. The article indicates very clearly that certain regions and nations draw explicit preferences (when known), and suggests that these may be linked with its national profile; it mentions in the same breath that Chile itself “didn’t posses a readily identifiable music, cuisine, or cultural identity.” It is perhaps for this reason that Argentinian wines - led by its flagship grape, the Malbec - are much more readily recognizable in the market than the bold and beautiful Carmenere for which Chile is known. In this sense, Concha y Toro is critically hamstrung in trying to develop its own brand while the broader brand associated with Chilean wines stagnates. 

Based on this analysis, and the two alternatives being considered, it should be clear that I am in favor of a bottom-up strategy. While the damage associated with creating a “value” brand and flooding markets had perhaps been done in each of the 110+ countries where Concha y Toro brands and sub-brands were sold, a brand that led with its upmarket, least affordable, most luxurious, highest quality, most aspirational and least accessible labels while exiting lower quality labels could restore the prestige Concha y Toro needed in order to appeal to all status-seeking segments of the market regardless of price point. It was certainly possible that Concha y Toro would have to follow the lead of Toyota and Ford in developing and/or acquiring labels that were altogether removed from the Concha y Toro designation in order to achieve acceptance, but Concha y Toro’s primary challenge is overcoming declining margins and profitability. At the lowest end of the market - where their first market entry is often taken, and where many of their sub-brands still reside - they are destined to continue down the same course. 

In addition, through their relationship with Vinos de Chile, the trade association and Chilean wine industry should consider lobbying for increased intervention in marketing Chilean wine. Trade policy, market coordination, and aggregated, deep-pocket marketing spend are some of the key levers for turning a “Volvo of wine” brand into something more extraordinary, and government is well positioned to finance the response.

[jonaspcv]

Reflections on Corona: windows of opportunity and the US import market

Just got done reading the Corona case - while Corona’s stated objective (contemporaneous with the case) to overtake Heineken as the most imported beer in the US market was perhaps ambitious, it was far from impossible. If anything, a reading of the case suggests that Heineken was incredibly vulnerable, having experienced declining sales, being forced to acquire its US distributor in order to increase brand control, shifting its focus from product to market, and changing its message from haughty to humble and humorous. 

Heineken’s own actions notwithstanding, it seemed as though Fernandez and Diez had narrowed down possible competitive responses into four main approaches:

1. Head-on advertising confrontation with Heineken: the case characterizes advertising spend escalation as a serious risk, but I felt that this was a highly appropriate time for direct confrontation. At a time when Heineken was weakest and still trying to redefine itself - having finally had to take Corona seriously - Corona had the potential to pick up customers from declining Heineken loyalists. Additionally, pursuing a “smart” rather than “large” advertising strategy  (to Frank Waters’ point about larger advertising budgets causing floundered messages) wouldn’t per se push up spending as much as it would repurpose it.

2. Focus on regional strategies rather than national campaigns: in conjunction with the first point, I think this would be the lucrative strategy. Potential options could include increasing price in the northeast, leveraging the brand’s recovered image (following 1980s brand crises) to appeal more to expensive-beer-drinking Heineken yuppie types in the import-drinking (20% of total beer sales) high-purchasing-power northeast; at the same time, they could lower prices in the southeast and south central, whose explosive population growth but lower purchasing power would have them pitted against domestic brands with a relative import greenfield (only 5% import/total sales in the southeast) but perhaps greater price sensitivity.

3. Focus on off-premise sales: given the process innovations that kept Corona from oxidizing despite a clear bottle, it did not appear that trying to push off-premise sales - which, speculatively, have lower average inventory turnover - would be deleterious to the brand vis-a-vis decreased product consistency. Nevertheless, I wasn’t clear on how efforts would materially change off-premise sales, given fairly strong results at the time of the case.

4. Reconsider the traditional “Fun, Sun, Beach” theme: this seemed to be the least desirable of all options. It has created a consistent brand over a number of years, and it was this brand that had and would again defend its reputation against unsourced rumors about quality. The only piece that I might change is the price - as Corona was priced slightly below Heineken, one might gain share by actually increasing price: if you are offering simply a beer (see: Heineken’s very simple advertising), you are not going to be able to charge nearly as much as offering a vacation experience (see: Corona’s advertising). People may actual imbue more value into the product if they were to push up the price, helping Corona achieve its initial goals.