Ed - Mark Ritson
3/4/12
17:42
Page 46
ritson
mark
marketingweek.co.uk
THE THREE RULES OF BRAND MANAGEMENT
Conference season is upon us once again. I have
sat through far too many of these sessions
where a guy in a suit explains why his brand
strategy is perfect followed by a showreel of ads
from his latest campaign. There is then a call out
for questions, an embarrassing silence and then
everyone shuffles off for a bad cup of coffee and
a dodgy looking brownie.
A recent addition to this uninspiring
conference experience has been the dreaded
social media session. A slightly younger
marketer shows you a bunch of cool social sites
that he has recently found and then shares with
you some insane stats that indicate 110% of the
British population tweets an average of eight
times every hour.
He then announces the death of TV as a
medium and without a single bit of ROI data,
advises you to spend your entire 2013 marketing
budget on Thwacko or Blip-Blip or some other
new social media site that you have not heard of.
To be fair, I do my fair share of these sessions,
and I’m probably as bad as the rest of them. In
fact, being a marketing professor I may even be
more boring than the usual cadre of professional
speakers. But I do have one advantage – I am a
teacher, not a speaker, which means I watch
people’s faces as I deliver my presentation
rather than looking at my slides. And over the
years of conference speaking I have developed a
three-pronged strategy to strike a chord with
the audience.
First, never ever talk about logos. The minute
you raise fonts, colours or the dreaded need for
“consistency of look and feel” in front of senior
non-marketing executives you make yourself
look like a total tit. Your chief executive already
thinks branding is superficial bullshit and that
your main job is to arse about with logos, so why
confirm his very worst fears about both you and
the discipline?
The reason most CEOs think marketing is
fluffy is because it usually is. Therefore, use the
one time they actually listen to you discuss
brand strategy as an opportunity to actually
demonstrate that branding is about making
money for the company and not about colours
and fonts.
The only people who care about fonts are you
and your team, so never raise it in front of senior
people if you want to retain their respect and
progress your career. Hire a design agency to
look superficial and disconnected from
commercial reality in front of your CEO instead.
This brings me neatly to my second key
c
Demonstrate that
branding is about
making money for
the company and
not about colours
and fonts
Mark Ritson is an
associate professor
of marketing, an award
winning columnist,
and a consultant to
some of the world’s
biggest brands
46 | Marketing Week | 5 April 2012 | marketingweek.co.uk
observation about brand management. You are not
a brand manager if you haven’t got brand tracking
data. If you can’t show me a representative
survey of your target market conducted in the last
12 months in which you measured brand
awareness and brand associations against your
segments and key competitors, you aren’t really
doing brand management.
Instead, you are cocking about with logos,
brand books and all the other bollocks that makes
it look like you know what you are doing, but
which actually demonstrates to anyone in the
know that you have not got the faintest clue
about branding.
Tracking sorts the girls from the women and
the boys from the men every time. Yes, there are
a multitude of reasons why you don’t have brand
tracking data – but all of them are bogus. One of
the first things a good brand manager does
when they take a new role is to make sure that
they somehow get the money to obtain the data
annually. Without it you have no idea whether
your brand strategy is working or your
communications spend is justified. No brand
tracking, no clue.
Third, your positioning is shit if you can’t
write it down accurately right now without any
reference to your laptop or colleagues. At this
point in my conference talk, I pause and take a
sip of coffee while I wait for the audience to
scribble down their brand positioning from
memory on the pad in front of them. And of
course, 75% can’t do it because it is so
complicated they need to consult their eight
slide presentation to remember all 32 words that
they used to capture the essence of their brand.
That means your brand strategy is totally
useless because a complex brand positioning
built in the image of a three-dimensional
rhombus might have looked good when you
were developing it, but its complexity means it
has zero chance of actually being applied to the
business or engaged with by employees. Less is
more when it comes to positioning.
So if you just read the last few hundred words
and emerged unscathed, congratulations! You
are my kind of brand manager – the kind who
knows what they are doing.
For the rest of you, don’t panic. No one will
spot your shortcomings. In fact, there may even
be a slot for you on this year’s conference circuit
where you can share your new logo and
consistent look and feel with other equally
hopeless exponents of the art of brand
mismanagement. G