#mitsloanbranding

[letstaps-blog]

Judgement Day

Professor Gosline’s pep talk highlighted a much overlooked topic at Sloan: actual, practical leadership. Leadership doesn’t just encompass our ability to take ownership and/or hustle. It entails understanding how our behavior can affect, and hopefully, motivate others. Social influence, if you will. 

Comms 101 from the core drilled into us the importance of likeability as a Cialdini principle. Professor Gosline asserts (and I strongly believe) that likability is a key determinant of success. As such, it’s important to consider how people perceive you. 

On the flip side, people are also judgy. So much so, that they make snap judgements about others, often within 150 milliseconds according to the reading. That’s why it’s ever important to understand how people perceive you and ensure your leadership style is authentic not just to who you are, but also to how people perceive you.

It’s particularly important when there exists an asymmetry between our own assessment of who we are and how people perceive us. As I launch my career again over the next few months, I plan to indulge in a lot of introspection and conversations with friends/family/colleagues to understand the following:

- how am I perceived by others vs. how do i perceive myself (perhaps through a 360 leadership, myers brigg, talking to friends)

- what is my body language like (perhaps by videotaping myself as Professor Gosline suggested)

- What are the asymmetries between these perceptions  and how do they affect my relationships (introspection)

- Leadership more broadly: I’m not even really sure what this means but I think it’s worthwhile to think about how I like to be managed, how I like to manage, what motivates me, what are my 5/10/20 year goals, how do I want to be remembered? 

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You know you’ve made it when there is a listicle about your brand on Buzzfeed #WEGMANSOBSESSION

Yes, consumerism is on its way out if it hasn’t died a slow death already. Consumers, particularly millenial consumers, ache for quality, mission, and a vision. This is the wave Wegmans has successfully rode as a family business that began in rural Rochester, New York and now boasts 88 stores throughout the Northeast corridor. And praise the grocery gods as it will finally descend upon my home town in New York City and I can’t say I’ve ever been more excited about a retail store opening. 

Some may say Wegmans supporters are a cult of sorts. But what’s wrong with a cult following of a grocery utopia? Wegmans customers rave about its product selection, which is of the highest quality and greatest variety, their scholarships and career advancement opportunities, and their family enterprise that is fair to vendors and customers alike. This mission of providing high-quality products while treating everyone in their retail ecosystem fairly, sets them apart from their competitors so much so that they are consistently rated the #1 grocery story in the U.S. by consumer reports. 

Wegmans has built a loyal network of customers that bleed their brand image without Wegmans having to spend a dime on advertising or marketing. Now that’s what I call an effective brand. 

[letstaps-blog]

Burberry: 0-100 real quick

Bravo’s rebranding of Burberry was certainly successful in some regards: it converted the old, heritage brand into a functional, luxurious one, and within record time. 

However, Bravo’s branding efforts weren’t based on an intent to create a new promise to its customers. Instead, it was centered around the Burberry check, which became the hallmark image of the brand, and one too easy to replicate. 

While wonderful in the short term, these aspirational qualities of the brand (the token check pattern) unraveled and became too difficult for Burberry to manage. It was found on counterfeit products often replicated outside the brand guidelines, as shown above. This unraveling likely caused Burberry’s main customer base to dissociate itself from a more mainstream brand that was privy to bootleg goods. In addition, the brand was too dependent on a single brand image, not a promise or a story behind the brand, to carry it forward. 

Perhaps Burberry could leverage the history behind the brand, similar to a Nike or a Kashi, to build a better story, and should better manage counterfeit products and the use of its copyright check image. 

[letstaps-blog]

#MYSTOPOVER: ICELAND AIR’s rebranding bonanza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_QTPZ400Vw

Pre 2008 Iceland

Post 2008 Iceland (thanks to Iceland Air’s Branding Extravaganza)

Iceland Air went through a massive branding evolution in 2009. The credit crisis practically ravaged Iceland’s economy, and in turn, Iceland Air pitched an interesting experiment to encourage tourism in Iceland. MYSTOPOVER was IcelandAir’s way of encouraging tourism in Iceland by offering a free stopover in Iceland on guest’s destinations to Europe or the U.S. It worked wonderfully. Post 2009, Iceland became a massive tourism destination, largely because IcelandAir was able to evolve its brand from a local airline, serving a primarily Icelandic population to a global airline that could show its guests the wonders of the Icelandic region. 

IcelandAir managed its future brand meaning on its customers’ perceptions of the Icelandic region and tied its internal brand meaning to its external brand meaning of Iceland. Leveraging it’s external environment: brilliant!

[letstaps-blog]

SIA: It’s all about you

Your SIA air-hostess knows you down to your core: from your full name to the type of whiskey you like to sip on pre-flight. This customer-centric strategy has allowed the airline to develop a loyal customer base and a brand that transcends crises (particularly in 9/11). 

What’s important here is that the company vision, mission, and strategy was entirely focused around this high-quality, customer centric mentality. Cabin crew trainings were a sort of bootcamp that offered training on personal grooming, correct pronunciation of difficult english words, and high-quality service. Crew were also unable to indulge in illicit behavior (e.g., smoking) in their uniform, to uphold the image of SIA. Aircraft were updated frequently to maintain customer satisfaction. Specialization and customization was the name of the game for SIA who maintained a long history of information on repeat customers’ preferences and would customize service for these customers when they arrived on the plane. To the extent which it could, SIA promoted a customer centric focus throughout the organization to ensure each touchpoint with the customer was aligned to it’s high-quality brand. 

There’s a lot we can learn from SIA’s strategy. Promoting a coherent vision requires a great deal of work on behalf of the company and every single touchpoint with the customer is integral to the brand -- from the pre-flight boarding experience to the moment the customer leaves the plane. This requires intense repetition, drilling, and training on behalf of the company.

[letstaps-blog]

Concha y Toro and the fallacy of great wine

Your average wine label reads something not too far from this: ‘This deep burgundy wine is blessed with hints of oak, the essence of cocoa, and citrus notes bursting in your mouth’. Who even know what any of that means? Wine is a branding masterpiece: most people don’t know what they’re drinking half the time and usually just opt for the cheap to moderate option. 

Concha y Toro’s bottoms-up attempt is doomed to fail. Few companies have successfully managed to rebrand their ‘value’ brands to a higher end brand or product. Perhaps this validates the existence of big brand conglomerates such as P&G and Unilever that own multiple brands to effectively price discriminate within the market. 

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Peanut Butter Slices = ROFLOL

Even Drake thinks peanut butter slices are ridiculous. In all seriousness, peanut butter slices marketed as ‘the best thing since sliced bread’ are absurd. No wonder it took 432 tries to perfect this formula so Americans could spare themselves the energy to use a knife to make their beloved PB&Js. This thing is certainly doomed to fail, especially when half of the peanut butter is really just food grade wax. 

Relative advantage: Low (-)

One could argue that the advantage of sliced peanut butter is that a knife or a spoon is not necessary for use. In fact, the case argues that because of this, sliced peanut butter makes our lives less stressful. I’m not sure I would agree, though it does perhaps lend peanut butter to additional use cases (e.g., rolling peanut butter around fruit) that would not be possible with peanut butter’s current consistency. The advantage of these additional use cases seem minimal, however. 

Compatibility: Low (-)

Peanut butter slices completely deviate from the current perception of creamy or even crunchy, (hey, no one’s judging) peanut butter. The texture, package, and entire customer experience of sliced peanut butter is different from what customers are familiar with. The beauty of peanut butter is its richness, thickness, and creaminess. The sliced option takes away all of that and turns it into a waxy cube. 

Complexity: Low (+)

Alright, I’ll give it to them. This is an incredibly simple product. We’ve all had the analogous cheese slices and therefore understand how a peanut butter slice might look, taste, and even feel before unwrapping the package. It’s a pretty intuitive process.

Trialability: Medium (+)

The case implies that peanut butter slices were already in test markets in Wal-Mart, Alberston’s and other retailers across the U.S. Assuming samples are provided in supermarkets, it would be quite easy to test them out on crackers or over fruit.

Observability: Low (-)

This would depend on the use case. It would be obvious one was using a sliced form of peanut butter if it were wrapped around a fruit or veggie, but in a sandwich or over a cracker, likely not. 

I hope I’ve convinced you of the absurdity of the peanut butter slice. Waxy, grainy, and disgusting. Probably at a Wal-mart near you.