What makes a great brand?

Why does Jeff Immelt personally manage the GE brand?

Every month I sit down with my advertising team to review all the ads they are proposing to support our overall company brand. I have been doing this since I became CEO and, in that time, have seen dozens of ads, most of which I love and a few, that I didn’t.

So why would I spend hundreds of hours over the years to review all of these ads? I would imagine that our advertising team asks themselves that question at every one of these reviews. The answer is that owning, protecting and nurturing the brand is one of most important jobs of a CEO.

I have strong views and occasionally suggest a few new lines, or shots or ideas. I am not particularly artistic, but I do know what we stand for. I have a great appreciation for our creative talent in GE and our agency and their ability to tell our story.

If it were up to me, I would make our products the hero of every ad. I think a locomotive is beautiful … but that is just me. Recently, my team convinced me that an ad called “Childlike Imagination” would register with the outside world. This is an ad of a young girl bragging about the wonder that her Mom creates at GE. They were right.

A new ad is called "The Boy Who Beeps" and it is terrific storytelling by our team and our longtime creative partners at BBDO. I won’t ruin it for you but it isn’t the typical story about industrial technology or people. It’s about what we call the “industrial internet” and the outcomes that companies like GE can produce for families, friends and communities. I think the ad team used the word “metaphor” about a dozen times during our screening.

So for a guy who grew up selling our products, it wasn’t what I usually look for in our ads – big, powerful GE turbines, engines or blowout preventers – that are invented, built and sold by our people around the world. I always ask myself in these reviews, what would one of our customers take away from this ad about GE? Would a utility executive, an airline CEO or a hospital administrator want to do business with us because of what he or she just saw on Thursday Night Football or on Squawk Box? Does it tell a deep industrial story of efficiencies, savings and productivity that usually get customers excited?

At first, The Boy Who Beeps didn’t check these boxes for me. But, in watching the ad and others over the years, I have come to realize that sometimes I need to listen to the team … I am not the audience. I have learned that a company like GE also has to put a human face on technology and demonstrate that our products are an important part of everyday life. And it helps to understand that our customers are people too. So an engaging, emotional story like The Boy that Beeps is another way to reach them -- and to say something larger about GE’s culture and people. Another new GE ad, "Ideas Are Scary", doesn’t show a single GE product or service. But it demonstrates that GE people are determined inventors and entrepreneurs who love good ideas, regardless of their source. For a company to stay relevant for 135 years, our ads need to make people think of GE in a whole new way. Both The Boy Who Beeps and Ideas are Scary do that extremely well.

Our brand is worth close to $50 billion. That’s real money. Every decision I make must support the long-term health of our brand, including which ads to run. It must trump other shorter-term considerations. Few others in the company have as broad, or as passionate, a point of view on this as the CEO. While I review every ad, I encourage our team to be different. Working together, we tell a meaningful GE story to the world.

http://www.equitorial.in/2014/09/leaders-own-brand-and-ads.html

Brand as a Verb

Brand As Verb: The Principles of High Performing Experience Brands from Jack Morton Worldwide

Goa Fest: "A Logo Should Be a Symbol of Ambition"

Quotable Quotes:

• "All a CEO wants is profits, not brand awareness, brand attributes ..."
• "...telling clear, simple stories has a dramatic effect on the share prices"
• "Creativity is about making useful and unexpected connection," e.g. Mercedes Benz and Safety
• "...design is a language that can help people move brands from being tolerated to being loved"

Wolff Olins designed every aspect of the customer experience for Heathrow Express


In his presentation on 'Combining rigour with magic to solve complex business problems', Charles Wright, MD, Wolff Olins spoke about how an all-inclusive approach and overall efforts by the organisation towards brands help them become profitable.


In his presentation on 'Combining rigour with magic to solve complex business problems' on the Day One of Goafest 2012, Charles Wright, managing director, Wolff Olins attempted to give a deeper meaning to brands and the impact on profits. According to Wright, a CEO shows disinterest in brand awareness, brand attributes and market share. "All he wants is profits," he said.


Giving an example of Indigo Airlines, Wright said that in order to gain profit, delivery wins over theory. In this case, he said, delivery to fly on time matters. "What matters is not what the agency promises (in the ad), but what the client delivers," he reiterated.


According to Wright, telling clear, simple stories has a dramatic effect on the share prices.


At this point, Zia Patel, strategist, Wolff Olins Dubai took over from Wright. According to her, a logo should be a symbol of ambition. "Creativity is about making useful and unexpected connection," she said, citing the example of Mercedes creating a solution for safety.


According to Patel, design is a language that can help people move brands from being tolerated to being loved.


She posed a valid question on how one can help employees deliver on their brands. "It is not by merely giving logo design documents to them. It has to be communicated through various points such as customer experience and HR training." She added that the staff experience of living the brand reflects externally. "Indian companies will need a lot of time and dedication to build internal culture," she stated.


According to Patel, in order to get into the heart of the category, we need to do simple useful things. She gave the example of the Heathrow Express. Heathrow is one of the world's busiest airports, used by more than 50 million people a year. In the early 1990s, its operator BAA set up a joint venture with British Rail to build a fast rail link to central London. But how could it tempt passengers away from the cheaper Tube or from the privacy of cars?


To bring travellers on board, Wolff Olins defined a service offer that, in effect, reinvented the rail link. The model would have airline service standards, with high speed, high capacity, high levels of information and special ticketing. Wolff Olins designed almost every aspect of this customer experience, from the station architecture at Heathrow, through train interiors, to details like tickets and uniforms. The agency advised on pricing and ticketing, and helped create the on-board television service. It also inspired a highly professional service culture. And, to signal this dramatically new way to travel, the agency created the Heathrow Express brand.


Towards the end of the session, Wright revealed how, every few months, there is a survey on the most powerful brands but each survey has different conclusions. According to Wright, the 'four big things in the world' are more choice in more places, technology revolution, brand on the board agenda and united management.

Brand growth requires changing the game not just playing it

Sometimes when I am faced with a problem, I can only see it from one viewpoint. The result is that I get stuck and can’t figure out how to solve the problem.

I was reminded of this the other day when a group of us were discussing how best to grow the financial value of a brand. Because we tend to think about a brand’s status in the context of its product category, we often forget that the biggest opportunity for growth may exist outside the current definition of that category.

In spite of the fact that most of our efforts as marketers and researchers are focused on growing market share, the evidence suggests that fighting for share within an existing product category is likely to be a long hard battle, with little prospect of victory.

In most established product categories in developed economies, brand market shares change very little from one year to the next. Any action is likely to be countered by the competition resulting in a stalemate. It is not that you can afford to ignore the share fight, because if you don’t fight, you risk losing share. But equally, there is a distinct risk that overly aggressive competition will result in unprofitable share fights and price wars.


So what should a brand do to generate growth? In many cases, this requires stepping back from the current situation and looking at it from a different viewpoint. How can you best change the game to your brand’s advantage? This requires finding ways to change the way customers think about the category, not fighting for share within the category.

I think there are three basic ways a brand can change the brand game to its advantage:

Expand the category
Disrupt the category
Exceed the category
Brands expand the category when they find new ways to make their category relevant to consumers. By effectively communicating a new use, the brand will gain a temporary advantage over the competition. The challenge is to ensure that the brand is strongly associated with the new usage before other brands copy it.

Brands disrupt the category status quo when they come up with new, meaningfully different innovation. Real innovation challenges people’s existing perceptions of the category and gives them pause for thought. Often, the innovation is simply adding a new level of benefit, e.g. Colgate Total promised 12 hour fresh breath protection. Adding the anti-bacterial and copolymer required charging more for the new product versus standard Colgate, but many people perceived it was worth paying a premium for the added benefit.

Finally, exceeding the category means meeting the same need but with radically better delivery. When Apple first launched the iPod, it changed the way people thought about personal music players. The iPod met the same need as the Sony Walkman, but did so in a far better way. Similarly, people switched from Blockbuster to Netflix because it was far more convenient to get a DVD through the mail than have to go to the store.

So what do you think? Do these three ways of escaping the share fight make sense to you? Are there other ways a brand might transcend its category? Please share your thoughts.