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Marketing Loyalty: How Tactics Kill Strategy
August 02, 2007
Keeping customers loyal starts with their ability to consistently recognize your brand
By Gene Zarkin, Founder of "Zarkin & Partners" Brand Consultancy, and David Brier
Imagine that you had one face yesterday, another one today and will have yet another tomorrow. Your friends and relatives would probably stop recognizing you. The same goes for your brand. Without a clearly formulated and reasonable advertising strategy, your brand has no lasting power nor individual character. Unfortunately, this is one of the key mistakes a great majority of modern brands make.
A brand image changed too often and straying from its core niche can throw consumers into the state of confusion. While brand consistency—if it meets customer expectations and resonates with their needs—will lead to increasing customer loyalty and favorable word-of-mouth that will strengthen the brand's position even further.
In Action: Tactics vs. Strategy
A good example in following strategy consistency would be Tide washing detergent. Once having staked itself on "whiteness," the brand consistently followed its chosen direction for many years. The consumer saw advertising spots replaced for new ones, fresh characters entering the scene, tactics changing, etc. But the key strategy remained the same: "whiteness," "whiteness," "whiteness." The brand also positioned itself by comparing clothes washed with Tide to those clothes—which resulted in less-white whites—washed with another detergent. Yes, it was simple. Yes, was "dull" and stereotyped. But it worked. Tide took a persistent leading position in its market and held that position for a long time.
Victoria's Secret is yet another brand that has become successful from strategic branding, selling not bras and lingerie, but sexiness. You never hear them promting the various attributes of their bras except when it will make a woman look more sexy. They never talk about their stores, their customer service, their company attributes—only of how they can make their customers look like sexy models. They don't bore the listener with "technical information" but go straight for what that brand offers: 'A quick sexiness solution."
Yet another example is Nike and how it has successfully utilized the "Just Do It" strategy for years. Even though different celebrity athletes have sponsored their products (the tactics), the strategic theme was the same: "Strive to be the best, and reach for your athletic aspirations, no matter what they are." They strategically reached into the common theme of "knock off the planning, the talking, the excuses, and JUST DO IT."
Violating What Worked
Unfortunately, these success stories are few and far between on the market. And sometimes we'll even see one of these rare prosperous brands suddenly change its advertising to a not-so-good variant and become unregonizable. We even see brands reach a certain point when what once made it stand out becomes so similar to its competitor that it results in failure.
Who can forget when FedEx used to stand for "when you need it there overnight?" This was a very powerful slogan—no brand prior had carved out this niche. Of course shipping had been offered but no one dared offer something as risky as guaranteed next day service. FedEx has grown over the years, but someone got greedy and started to dilute their brand niche and focus. They started to offer "FedEx Ground," which went head-to-head with UPS. This weakened the brand and confused customers—especially when FedEx introduced different colored logos on their trucks. While the goal was to broaden their market, it actually diluted their brand niche and meaning to the customer. If FedEx had looked at their offering more along the lines of "How can we offer MORE in our focused brand promise?," they could have found a logic that supported the overall brand strategy instead of killing it with short-term tactics.
Even the great Coca-Cola brand made a similar mistake when it introduced "New Coke." In fact, Coca-Cola had to revert and restrategize to release "Classic Coke" due to the public outcry. Their mistake violated decades of offering "The Real Thing" and changed something that had nearly reached sacred status. You can call me this or call me that, "but don't mess with my Coke!"
These mistakes are made by many world brands. And it may not only have to do with the "creative" but with the destruction of a longstanding successful strategy—such as through "linear expansion." Linear expansion is by no means a good branding strategy—rather it's a destructive tactic in the longer term. Jack Trout and Al Rice covered many sheets of paper writing on this, but it seems that the idea has never fully come across to brand owners. The Fanta brand would be an illustrative example of this.
Many people remember very well how Fanta appeared on the Russian—or Soviet, to be more precise—market in 1980. What was it? An ORANGE beverage! Wasn't it? An ORANGE beverage cannot be an apple or strawberry one, can it? It was the death of Fanta.
It is as true as the statement that Mercedes cannot be a pan with a teflon coating. Or can it? "Buy the Mercedes Kitchenware, and serve meals that go from zero to 60 as fast as possible?" Sounds cute—even interesting—but it would inevitably be disasterous and lessen the pride of car owners and the status associated with Mercedes. Thank goodness, Mercedes didn't hit upon such an idea so far.
Walk the Walk for Strategy
Now you may question: "OK, but how can one develop and renew a brand? How about new ideas?"
It's an interesting question. Let's look at an example related to RALF shoes, a brand very well-known in the Russian market that quickly gained popularity and recognition throughout the country.
Nowadays many citizens of Moscow and Saint-Petersburg know the slogan "When nothing is tight" and some have already heard and saw another one, "Turning Earth." Inhabitants of other regions ver well remember—and researches confirms it—a totally different slogan: "RALF is all-terrain men's shoes." And it is the slogan (created in the advertising agency "Melekhov and Filurin" mentioned above) that boosted the RALF shoes on the national level in 2002, and won the brand the EFFIE prize.
To promote itself as producing reliable and high-quality shoes, RALF used a comparison with a jeep to successfully illustrating the most important characteristic for customers—reliability. A RALF jeep-shoe varoomed, braked and then the slogan was given—that's all.
How did they develop it? There were three such clips—one each for spring, autumn and winter. But the scenarios were all based on the car concept. The jeep-shoe was also depicted on the package, sale stands, etc. As a result, sales increased by 84 percent. In fact, growth could have been more but was limited by production capabilities and many distributors had empty stocks by the end of the selling season. The stories were different, but the successful CONCEPT remained the same. This is the "following the strategy" point.
Ultimately, RALF changed its strategy and became "comfortable" shoes and "Turning Earth" shoes. The switch was possibly connected with a reorientation in positioning—research showed that "comfort" might cause a stronger consumer response than "reliability."
Just Do It
Nevertheless, the right thing to do is to decide on a strategy, choose once and follow it consistently. If you choose correctly—and base your strategy on the accurate results of marketing research, it will inevitably bring a longstanding success to your brand.
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