Mariana Gomez A

[mgarru]

Check? No, thank you.

Reading about Burberry and Bravo’s strategy to effectively turn the company around in the 2000’s – two very vivid thoughts come to mind:

The first has to do with how Burberry successfully associated their brand with various celebrities in order to ‘give the brand new life’. Although the case talks about bringing Kate Moss in as a part of their advertising campaign, as an avid Harry Potter fan I actually fully associate Burberry with Emma Watson and the Burberry photoshoot her and her brother did with Mario Testino a couple of years later (around 2010). Bringing in a brand ambassador that was not only recognized by her sense of style, but also extremely well known (thanks to her role as Hermione Granger in one of the biggest movie franchises of the time) and had a following of younger fans was, in my opinion, a very effective strategy. Case in point: 10+ years later and I still associate the two together (despite there not being more recent photoshoots/campaigns that I am aware of). Emma Watson – considered somewhat of a style icon even at a young age – was the perfect excuse to rejuvenate the brand and evolve it to make it aspirational and well known to the teenagers that would soon come off age and want to buy Burberry products.

The second association – and one mentioned in the case – has to do with Bravo’s strategy of better controlling the ubiquity of the Burberry check by adopting a ‘check undercover’ strategy (i.e. designing products so that customers had to ‘hunt’ for the Burberry check instead of using it for all products everywhere). What is interesting about this particular strategy is how it impacted me as an individual without even being aware about it. Coming from Colombia, a country where counterfeit products are easy to come by, I actually use the heuristic of ‘how front and center is the Burberry check’ on a particular product to judge its authenticity. Although arguably not the best or most accurate strategy, I have been programmed to associate clothes and accessories that have ‘the undercover check’ / a ‘subtle check’ as more likely to be real than those that have the ‘Burberry check everywhere and all over’. What is interesting about this is that a) I adopt this heuristic without even being a Burberry client – which speaks to how widespread the result of their strategy actually was/is, and b) that in having ‘undercover checks’ Burberry created an ‘in the know’ group of customers. You become part of the ‘in’ crowd (i.e. the Burberry customer crowd) when you are able to recognize a Burberry product without the need for their signature check to be front and center and in display on the products you purchase from them – almost like a ‘password’ for a secret society.

[mgarru]

How did THAT product make it? Roger’s Five Factors are here to help us understand…

When reading about Roger’s Five Factors about Innovation Diffusion, one key word stands out: perceived. For context, Roger states that a product’s rate of innovation diffusion can be more accurately estimated when taking into account five factors: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Key to understanding this theory though is the fact that the ‘real’ measure of any of these five factors is borderline unimportant – product managers should instead focus on the customer’s perception of these five factors.

What really caught my attention when learning about the five factors was precisely this – key to an innovation diffusing quickly was the perception of a product measuring significantly well against any/all of these factors. How many times have you heard about a product or start-up idea and thought to yourself: ‘there is NO way this is going to succeed’, only to follow-up ~6 months later and realize it was a big hit? I for one, have been a victim of this several times. I am left scratching my head still unable to comprehend how such a product was a big hit when I thought of it more as a ‘dead man walking’. It all clicks into place now: I struggled to comprehend said situations because a) I was not the target customer for the product (clearly), and b) since I was not the target customer, my perception of said product largely differed from the perception target customers had of it – regarding how much said innovation was more advantageous than existing solutions, compatible with my values and experiences, easy to understand, available to try out, and/or had an impact on other people different than myself when using it.

But even putting aside the mystery around products and companies that surprise us by ‘making it’ is the hidden message that influencing customer perception will definitely make or break your new product. It makes me wonder how much of perception can be directly influenced by marketing and advertisement campaigns and, if the answer is ‘a lot of it’, how could companies with famous failures (e.g. the New Coke) could have manipulated customers into seeing their products as ‘better’ than they actually were? Are we, through social pressure, etc., able to sustain the image of a product being superior than what it actually is? And if so, how ethical is it? Are human being really that easy to manipulate? All good question to ponder and I promise to myself to search for objective measures proving the superiority of the next innovative products I buy (vs. making it an impulse buy and/or following ‘the crowd’).

[mgarru]

A true wine connoisseur or a really good label-identifier?

After reading the “Concha y Toro” and the “North Dakota wine” cases for this week I am truly suspicious of some of my wine connoisseur friends (but optimistic that achieving their level of wine-knowledge is very achievable).

It is astonishing to understand the level of influence that something as simple as a label (and the origin location printed on the label) can have on the consumer’s tasting experience – both of the wine and the food they enjoy paired with the wine! Also astonishing, the amount of work that is put ‘behind the scenes’ to preserve that ‘aura of quality’ associated with wines originating from a certain location – as was described in detail in the Concha y Toro case. It makes me wonder if this is partly the reason why, the French, for example, are so particular about the wines that are associated with their country (e.g. champagne only refers to bubbly wine created in that region) – is it truly to keep subpar wines away from being identified with their ‘wine location brand’? Or is it simply because they know they can commandeer a premium based on the location of their vineyards?. It also makes me suspicious of my friends who claim to be wine connoisseurs – do they really taste the difference? Or have they studied the wine industry enough to know which regions are known to have produced ‘good wine’ on certain years? And if so, how easy is it to ‘get in on that’? – asking for a friend, obviously.

Another thought that pops into my head is just how important packaging is for any product. But beyond general packaging, how important highlighting key attributed on your product’s packaging may be – and how having access to that information (which info will sway consumers to buy your product vs. a competitor product) could really put you at an advantage. For example, does anybody else go into a store and look for the beer and cider cans that say ‘craft’ on them? I certainly do. I also tend to pick the ‘fun’ and ‘hip’ cans that catch my attention and look a lot more interesting than the standard ‘Heineken’ or ‘Corona’ cans/bottles. Do you? And if so, are you sure they actually taste better? Or is this just our brains playing tricks on us once again….

[mgarru]

Nudging – where branding meets engineering design?

After reading ‘A Practitioner’s guide to Nudging’ my first thought was ‘I’ve seen this before’. Racking through my brain thinking on where, an industrial-engineer-turned-management-consultant with little to no previous branding experience could have heard about this concept, I finally found the connection – Human Centered Design! BINGO!

To provide a little more clarity on how these concepts are similar, I will provide some context behind my connection. As an industrial engineering student, I had to take several ‘human factors’ (a.k.a. human centered design) courses – the basic premise of which was that ‘technology should be designed to fit the user vs. forcing the user to adapt to the technology’. Although a pretty straight-forward definition, human factors are considered of utmost importance in engineering design since they have proven to make the difference between life and death on several occasions. Some of the very basic examples of human factors are as simple as:

·       ‘Make the EMERGENCY button on the control board of a nuclear power plant red, big, and accessible – then ensure no other buttons on the dashboard have a similar colour and/or shape’

·       Or… ‘If you want only a certain type of container to go into a specific machine, ensure that container is a) shaped differently from all other containers and b) the opening in the machine is designed in such a way that containers with the wrong shape will be rejected/not go in’

Image taken from: https://humanfactors101.com/2016/10/18/human-factors-and-homer-simpson/

It completely blows my mind that the same concept of ‘nudging’ could be used as extensively in engineering as in marketing/branding since both subjects are usually considered quite distinct. However, when reflecting on it, it makes a lot of sense: the concept of ‘nudging’ relies on the premise that human being will do whichever action seems easiest to them / fits their mental models best. In other words, nudging focuses on influencing people to take certain actions or display specific behaviours without necessarily being aware that they are being influenced/targeted directly. In a nuclear power plant’s control room, where information overload is standard, we need to be able to influence (or nudge) human beings into carrying out the ‘right’ behaviors or risk having potentially catastrophic consequences. Similarly, (but with arguably significantly lower stakes), when a brand wants to achieve a specific goal, it takes into account its consumers’ usual environment and leverages that knowledge to influence them and benefit their brand.

Why is it then that I am relieved that ‘nudges’ are actively used when designing technology but slightly concerned at the idea of potentially being influenced by brands without being aware of it? Where should the line be drawn? Should there be a line? If brands increasingly decide to use ‘nudges’ to influence my behaviour, where does the ‘power of the nudge’ end and my self-control and self-discipline start? I would be very interested to know the different levels of susceptibility that individuals have to brand ‘nudging’ and where I personally stand in that scale.

[mgarru]

Corona vs. Heineken and the branding battle fought by enterprises overseas

As someone who grew up in Colombia, I found the Corona (vs. Heineken) case extremely interesting. Granted, I am not a big beer drinker, but it was interesting to read about the brand perception of these two beers to Americans given how different my perception of these same brands is. It led me to think about brands with international reach and how, when companies expand to different countries, they must think both about maintaining their identities while also making themselves more appealing to a new consumer that is often quite different than their original supporters. It made me realize how complex expansions can be from a marketing and branding perspective and made me re-assess failed cross-country expansion efforts, such as Target’s failed attempt at entering the Canadian market. On the ‘flip side’ of the argument, we also have the fact that international consumers expect a fairly consistent brand experience regardless of where they purchase the product – talk to any Colombian living abroad, for example, and they can go on forever on how the ‘Milo’ (powdered chocolate milk) you find in North American tastes COMPLETELY different than the ‘Milo’ we drink at home. How then should we approach international expansions from a branding perspective? And, as the world becomes more and more globalized, will expectations regarding ‘brand consistency’ evolve to prioritize the original branding over geographic ‘brand modifications’ that appeal to the local customers?