Brands are not things; rather brands are a representation of a highly valued idea that resides in the minds of customers and stakeholders. A brand strategy’s success or failure depends on how well brand owners understand how the mind operates.

Brands represent a set of unifying principles that guide an organization’s behavior and its manner of delivering experiences customers highly value above the available alternatives in the marketplace. Strong healthy brands maintain an intrinsic value to customers that over time translates into tangible financial value for the brand’s owners.

Consumers care about what a brand represents to them on the highest emotional level. The physical properties and functional benefits that comprise and define a brand are of less importance–this explains the difference between Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Toyota, Apple and the rest of its competitors.

Sounds simple enough. The trouble is consumer’s minds are fickle. And worse, the marketplace is a slush pile of competing brands. It’s easy for brands to lose relevance with customers quickly – especially in our age of instant connections, abundant choice and consumption. Brands with the sticking power to drive purchase behaviors over decades consistently lead their tribe of loyal advocates forward through a compelling value proposition and positioning that transcends the consumer’s inherent and natural tendencies toward fickleness for the next greatest thing.

A brand strategy’s success or failure depends on how well brand owners understand how the mind operates.

Minds have limited capacity.
The mind rejects any information that does not compute. It accepts only new information that matches its current state of mind. The mind has no room for what is new and different unless it is related to the familiar.

Minds resist confusion.
People resist that which is confusing, and cherish that which is simple. People want to push a button and watch the thing work. People love simple.

Minds are insecure and emotional.
Minds are emotional, not rational. People buy things for emotional reasons. When people are uncertain, they often look to others (influencers) to help them make the right decision about how to act.  People don’t like being out of the loop.

Minds don’t change often.
We are more impressed by what we already know (or buy) than by what’s “new.” Once  a mind has formed a habit it’s very difficult to change.

Minds have difficulty staying focused.
The more variations you attach to a brand, the more the mind will lose focus. The more the brand loses focus, the more vulnerable it becomes. In toilet tissue, corn oil, or toothpaste, the specialist or the well-focused competitor is always the winner.

Strong brands need to be exceptional at one thing than good at many things. Strong brands represent a single, simple, ownable, credible, highly valued and differentiated position in the minds of the target audience segment the brand serves.

With 120 Sears and Kmart stores about to be shuttered, the future looks uncertain for yet another iconic US retail brand. Here’s our view on what it might take for Sears Holdings to create a brighter future.

It’s an understatement to say the retail environment has become a slush pile in the past decade. Once a dominant presence in every major mall across the US, Sears is now a relic from the past struggling to find its way in a culture that no longer seems to care.

Same goes for Kmart– these iconic and once beloved brands (like Kodak) appear beyond transforming themselves into something that people will love again.

I remember growing up in the 60’s and shopping at Sears and Kmart with my Mother. She loved shopping in both those stores. Dad too. It seemed to me both these brands represented the idea that the good life was accessible to just about everyone everywhere. My family was no exception. My parents made all their major purchases at a Sears or Kmart store. They wouldn’t consider alternatives.  I grew up with a deep belief that these stores were somehow sacred places for a thriving middle class living the American dream.

Times change, Sears and Kmart didn’t.

Now executives at Sears Holdings find themselves in a scramble to figure out what to do with these brands that have become dinosaurs from a lost world–relics from a time when things were simple and uncomplicated.

Retail knowledge and expertise is not the core problem for Sears– it’s the investment banker management culture that has over time sucked the value out of these brands.

Profit has been placed above serving people with experiences they care about. As I have written in previous posts, iconic brands begin to die long before the cash they generate dries up.

Of course, there are many highly skilled and experienced people within the Sears organization that know the retail business inside and out, with far more depth than I will ever know in a hundred lifetimes. It’s time for the folks at Sears Holdings to transform the brand into something worthy of its heritage and a brighter future.

Sears’ brighter future is in the parts not the whole.

Despite tired merchandising and dingy looking stores, Sears store brands are a shining pot of gold that can pave the way forward to a brighter future. Craftsman, DieHard, Kenmore and Lands End are all highly valued brands that still matter to consumers. Trouble is, one has to go into a crappy Sears stores to buy them.

Maybe a tough decision could be made to sell these coveted brands through other retail channels. According to a recent post on Store Brand Decisions, that may already be happening as there is speculation the retailer may be getting serious about new channel strategies for its legacy hardline private label brands.

According to the post, Sears has made moves to expand its store brands beyond its own stores. Sears recently struck deals to sell Craftsman tools at Costco stores and is expanding this program to include Ace Hardware stores. This past September, Sears announced plans to sell its DieHard Gold auto batteries at Meijer discount stores. However, there have been no announcements about selling Kenmore appliances at other retailers, but there’s plenty of speculation.

That seems like selling off the “seeds” of their brighter future. Indeed it’s a logical short-term strategy for revenue and keeping the stock price up, but these coveted store brands own all the cache! When you can buy them somewhere else, who needs Sears?

Seems to me, reinventing the Sears experience by leveraging the valuable equity in these private brands through more effective and creative merchandising in smaller retail footprints and online is the smarter move. Get rid of everything else–including Kmart. Who needs a Kmart today when Target, Wal-Mart and a host of other discount retailers have that space covered in spades.

Create experiences people love.

The entire Sears customer experience must be purposefully reinvented and designed.  This is what IKEA accomplished. Despite the fact that people hate shopping for furniture, IKEA reinvented the entire furniture shopping experience–and did it in a manner that’s contrary to the conventional wisdom about furniture retailing.

Unlike most furniture retailers, IKEA does not deliver, and you have to set-up your stuff once you cart it home. And despite all this hassle, people love IKEA. It is one of the most beloved retail brands. People don’t buy furniture at IKEA they buy into an idea, an ethos, a certain way of living.

Sears could learn a thing or two about the value of designed experiences to differentiate itself from other big box competitors. To do this will require a tremendous culture shift within the ranks of executive management.  To people concerned more about short-term profits, it’s far easier to close down non-performing stores than create ones people love to shop in.

Leverage the iconic Sears mail-order heritage into a richer digital experience.

Back in the day when people cared about Sears, they also loved the Sears Catalog. Sears invented the mail order catalog. With online retailing now common, Sears seemingly missed the boat translating their iconic catalog into a rich online experience consumers crave today.

On the current site, there are over two dozen product categories offered with thousands of items. You can buy everything imaginable. Why?  Why not focus the Sears online shopping experience around the valuable and much loved store brands. Leave everything else to Amazon who does a much better job.

Online, Sears is a me-too generic site. If people don’t shop in your brick and mortar stores that represent an experience they love, why would they shop online in the face of other more capable alternatives?  If you visit the site, there is no visual merchandising of the beloved trade names, only generic descriptors like “refrigerator” or “washers and dryers”. You have to really dive deep to find the brand name Kenmore. In the desire to sell everything under the sun, Sears no longer means anything to anybody.  In the online world, Sears should leverage its mail order heritage and be the exception not the rule.

Focus and the art of sacrifice.

The toughest thing for an iconic brand to do is focus and sacrifice. To thrive, Sears must do both. Sears needs to focus on a compelling positioning that sacrifices a “be all things to all people” business with gigantic scale, and transform itself into a business that offers a highly relevant value proposition narrowly targeted to select high value customers.

Less is more. Put the marketing and merchandising focus on the much loved store brands. Get rid of all the other the soft lines. Retire or sell the Kmart brand.  Design a compelling retail experience in smaller footprint stores. Reinvent the online experience. Target higher value customers.

Can they pull it off? Time will tell.

In many business organizations, there is still much confusion about the role of strategic brand development and brand management and who within the organization should lead it. Brand strategy and brand management is too important to be left to marketing people.

That’s my spin on the famous David Packard quote (as in Hewlett Packard) about marketing being too important an activity to the well-being of a business enterprise to be left in the hands of marketing people alone.

Business leaders have notoriously looked at marketing with a critical eye. Marketing is not a “hard discipline” like engineering, sales and finance. Business leaders love quantified activities that facilitate a predictable return. Marketing doesn’t provide predictable returns. And in today’s social media, permission and privacy driven world, marketing is even more suspect by consumers. Customers want real, authentic connections and engagement to brands, not more marketing and selling.

Brand strategy and brand management is not a sub-discipline of marketing.

As brand strategy and brand management becomes more essential for marketplace success, enlightened business leaders have moved it further away (and upstream) from the core competencies within marketing organizations.

Yet for many organizations, brand strategy and brand management is an activity mostly managed within the marketing discipline. Consequently everybody in the marketing profession does “branding” these days. Branding gets bundled into a plethora of tactical marketing activities like PR, advertising, social media, sales promotion, packaging and marketing communications. Brand strategy and brand management is not marketing, advertising or communications.

This by no means diminishes the essential role of marketing for creating awareness and demand. Brand strategy and brand management is not about creating awareness, it’s about guiding the quality and relevance of organizational behavior in serving a specific group of customers/consumers. It’s a more sacred and strategic process defining the who, the what, and why an organization or a product exists in the first place – beyond money making. Brand strategy and brand management is about the soul of the thing–the intangible, the unseen, the meaning rather than the physical.

Brands make promises to people. Break the sacred promise and no amount of clever marketing will rebuild lost trust. Just ask Netflix or Tropicana what can happen to your business when the bonds of trust breaks. The value of brands lies in the perception customers have in their minds about what makes a brand matter to them. To matter nowadays, requires brands build deeply rooted emotional connections and never fail to deliver on the promise.

The discipline of brand strategy and brand management is centered in creating a set of unchanging, universal principles that guides the behavior of organizations and the products they bring to the marketplace over the life of the enterprise. It’s not about informing the next advertising campaign.

Brand strategy and brand management is a top down discipline.

The principles that guide the strategy and management of a brand have to be driven by the leadership of the organization. Brand leadership begins with business leadership.

Business strategy informs brand strategy which, in turn, informs marketing tactics.

When marketing organizations (or worse their advertising agencies) attempt to define and lead brand strategy, it becomes more marketing. Consumers / customers loathe marketing. Marketing now gets in the way of real engagement with a brand. Marketing needs to be baked into brand strategy, not the other way around.

Business leaders must drive brand strategy. Leaders determine the higher purpose, vision and values of the business enterprise, not their marketing organizations. Consequently, when leaders have clarity on “why” their brand exists, it’s much easier and more effective to weave the elements of brand strategy into the fabric of the organizational culture and guide the behavior of the organization at every customer touch point in the value chain.

Brand strategy and brand management is internal, marketing is external.

Brand strategy informs everyone within the organization why they exist and matter to people, what values they share, what markets they serve, what products they innovate and bring to market, what processes they use, and what experiences they are to create for customers and the community at large. Without this solid foundation firmly established, marketing organizations (and their agency partners) have nothing to go on – no map, no guidance, and no discipline – an aimless ship adrift without a rudder.

Brand strategy and brand management is the rudder that steers the ship.

Building successful brands is not a one-size fits all activity. Brand building is both art and science, and the method of creating brand strategy is never the same for every brand.

Brand strategy is an obsessive and often the most misunderstood discipline in marketing. It’s of critical importance to know beforehand what will be the most effective strategy for building your brand. Brand owners and managers who desire brand innovation often end up with brand imitation. In a world predisposed to sameness, there’s nothing worse than clawing your way to the middle with a brand strategy that doesn’t fit the realities of your business strategy.

It’s extremely difficult to build a brand that breaks through the slush pile of images and messages consumers are drowning in today. Not only must brand strategy differentiate your proposition from others, but more importantly, this differentiation must also be highly valued.

Most contemporary brand managers would agree– we’re way past the traditional thinking and point of view that brand building is an activity that endows a product or service with a catchy name, snappy slogan, pretty logo, compelling packaging and advertising.

Brand strategy is like creating mythology– stories people care about and remember. People don’t buy products, they buy personalities and meanings associated with the story of those products. People will only find meanings in brands with personality.

A brand strategy worth investing money in over the long haul has to tap into the emotions and feelings of your target segment in ways that transcend the functional and rational benefits associated with using the product. Depending on the nature and culture of your organization, and the reason your brand exists in the first place, here are four different methods for brand strategy development you may consider useful to your strategic and creative thinking:

Branding Strategy by Centralized Planning
In this method, brand strategy is approached in a rigorous, centralized and formal business planning process. Typically this approach is used by companies with large and diverse product portfolios that are defined as a  “house of brands”.  Each brand within the portfolio has it’s own management team, customer segment, product life cycle, supply chain, performance metrics, market share, and profit contribution mandated by centralized planning and tons of data.

Companies like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Gillette and GM favor centralized planning as the cornerstone of their brand strategy.

Branding Strategy by Image
This method is usually driven by creatives within advertising agencies in a leading brand development role and linked to creative execution of various ad campaigns. Marketers and their agencies closely link the brand to imagery driven by latest trends and fads in the culture.  Brand strategy is developed in a more tactical manner driven by the various cultural associations customers have that are surrounding the brand image.

Image conscious brands like Abercrombie & Finch, Calvin Klein, BMW, Absolut, Tag Heur are brilliant at this type of strategy.

Branding Strategy by User Experience
In this method, customers perceive product quality, functional benefits and brand image as a given. What these customers are after is an experience that dazzles the senses, touches the heart and stimulates the mind.  In this method the customer is the most important component of the brand. Brand managers focus on service design and usability, which are at the very core of these experiences, to drive brand strategy.

Brands built on user experience include Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Disney, IKEA, xbox, Costco, and Tiffany.

Branding Strategy by Self Expression
In this method, marketers place the role of brand building as a collaboration with their customers. Marketers innovate new meanings rather than products. Customers are actively participating in creating the meanings associated with the brand that are a reflection or a symbolic representation of their own personal identity or inner self. Here the strategy is centered on “brand as badge”.

Brand examples that are built on self expression include Swatch, Apple, Mini, Uggs, Louis Vuitton and Herman Miller.

All over the world, humans are drowning in data and information. As information and our collective intelligence becomes more automated in the goo of the internet, human beings will value more of what can not be automated- emotion, imagination, connection and engagement.  Brands will live and die on the ability of their stories and meanings to deliver what is highly valued by the marketplace.

At the end of the day, regardless of the method used to drive your brand strategy, the question remains “what does your brand stand for that matters to people and makes a difference”?  Brands that lead markets know the answer and build accordingly.

Consumer Products: Women’s Apparel & Accesssories
Icon Footwear
Strategic Brand Development

Targeting younger women consumers who value everyday originality, we collaborated with this early stage couture footwear brand to rejuvenate its brand positioning and visual expression for greater US market penetration in leading department stores.

Icon Footwear is a couture manufacturer and marketer of printed leather woman’s footwear, handbags and accessories.  Icon footwear had experienced early marketing success through it’s offering of classic and comfortable printed leather footwear designs targeted to woman over forty. Icon products were primarily sold through small fashion boutiques and specialty apparel retailers in the US.

The brand owners desired to expand the business by developing new product designs that appealed to a younger, more fashion conscious consumer, and to increase their opportunities to penetrate major department store distribution in stores like Nordstrom’s and Macy’s.

The new product designs offered women consumers more stylish designs presented in fresh, colorful and artful printed leather patterns of contemporary and master paintings and prints. These footwear designs afforded consumers an opportunity to express their individuality in a spirited, lighthearted way.

Through qualitative research, we learned the Icon women highly-valued practical, comfortable and wearable footwear, but also appealed to their playful, individualist, expressive, non-conformist nature. The brand mantra of “step lively” became a call to action for the Icon consumer to explore and express her individuality and leave an indelible impression on those around her. The Icon women valued practical comfort without sacrificing stylish, everyday originality.

To bring this strategic brand positioning to life for retail buyers, we developed a brand messaging platform, and provided creative direction and guidance for the development of a new trademark, brand guidelines, retail packaging, merchandising elements, collateral sales materials and consumer web site.

No doubt about it change is hard. Humans resist change until they absolutely have to. Like a bad habit, you won’t kick it until it threatens your very existence. So it is with changing a brand’s perception in the minds of customers.

Once a customer’s mind is made up about a brand it’s next to impossible to change it. Marketers embarking on the journey of brand transformation must recognize it’s an inside-out process not for the faint of heart.

Brands become what they have proven themselves to be. Mental perceptions are hardened by experience. People can’t form new perceptions without a new experience. Like the chicken or the egg, what comes first?

Brand owners are the first to resist change.

There is a long period of denial before brand owners will change their own thinking. It can take years of sales declines before brand owners will wake up and deal honestly with a brand that is losing ground. This is especially true of iconic brands that once were leaders.

There’s a sense of complacency that cripples organizational action. Long before the cash starts drying up, iconic brands lose relevancy and customers. It’s hard to see this happening in real time. The dynamics of organizational thinking tend to favor the status quo.

If you’re going to change brand perceptions, the process begins by changing from within.

For many brand owners, the default button for changing brand perception is a new ad agency, creating a different slogan or new ad campaign. Truth is, saying it’s so won’t make it so.

Consumer’s perceptions only change through a changed experience. For consumers, experiencing new advertising (assuming they’re even listening) can never be a substitute for experiencing new and more relevant value from your brand.

Meaningful change in brand perceptions first requires honest internal assessment and deep introspection. This is difficult for brand teams to do these days– especially when their performance is judged by management on a quarterly basis. Brand teams hyper-focus on the urgent work (running the business) rather than the important work (creating new value that represents a bigger future).

The first question that requires a solid answer is “what must change within our organization that will enable us to create a greater experience of value our customers will care about”? You can’t begin the journey of changing outside perceptions without internal clarity, confidence and consensus on what defines your brand’s value proposition and why it will continue matter to people. If your brand where gone tomorrow, would anybody care?

There are only two options to consider.

Assuming your brand team has the necessary internal clarity, confidence and consensus about what must change and where the greatest opportunities for success are found, there are only two strategic options available:

1)    continue to invest in the current brand

2)    invent a new brand

There are positives and negatives associated with both alternatives, but both will require lots of time, hard work and money. Let’s take a top-line view of these options.

Continue to invest in the current brand:
If the strategic decision is made to continue to invest and turn around an under-performing brand, one thing must be understood–what created initial success may no longer insure future success. The key to successful transformation is how willing you are in helping consumers “unlearn” the associations they have with the current brand before you embed new associations and create more relevant experiences the target consumer segment cares about.

Iconic heritage brands that have abundant awareness but little relevance with a new generation of consumers are very difficult to change. Managers of iconic brands are naturally boxed in by the heritage the brand represents in people’s minds. Along the way it’s easy to blur the brand’s identity and value proposition attempting to stretch its meaning and value to new consumer segments.

Starbucks is a great example of a successful turn around of an under-performing brand. After twenty years of ubiquitous expansion, the very thing that made the brand great was contributing to its demise. In addition, the brand faced growing threats from unlikely competitors such as McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts who offered more convenience and lower prices. Starbucks responded by changing nearly every aspect of its operations and core store experience from the inside out. Today the brand is once again enjoying the fruits of its leadership position. But it was a very expensive journey.

Invent a new brand:
In the long run, inventing a new brand from scratch may be a more prudent decision than attempting to change customer perceptions of an under-performing brand. This is particularly true if the current brand’s positioning has boxed it into a market segment that has no future.

If the determination is made that the current brand associations by consumers bear too heavy a weight on the brand’s future expansion, inventing a new brand may be the only recourse for a fresh start.

Black & Decker faced this very challenge. As the market for consumer power tools began to get more competitive and saturated, Black & Decker brand owners decided to expand into the construction products market. Of course, the construction professional perceived the Black & Decker brand good enough for sporadic odd jobs, but not the kind of product that could stand up to prolonged, rigorous professional use. No amount of product design or advertising would change this perception.

To enter this market, Black & Decker invented the DeWalt brand. DeWalt has been an enormous success for Black & Decker. One of the benefits of this strategy is the Dewalt brand commands far higher price points. Plus a good part of the market doesn’t even realize Dewalt is even made by Black and Decker (and that’s just fine with Black and Decker).

To enter a new market, it may be necessary to invent a new brand.  By doing so, along with fundamental changes in product functions and features, positioning and pricing that are more attuned to a new target consumer segment, and you may be able to have the best of both worlds.

At the end of the day, there are no absolutes or easy choices. Changing customer perceptions about a brand’s value and relevance is dicey at best.  It’s worth repeating the process requires brand owners have a clear purpose and vision, the determination to stay the course, and lots of time and money.

No one will dispute the fact that information about consumer trends, attitudes and behaviors is necessary and useful to gain insight on determining the basis of planning marketing tactics. Like a sharp knife, data is both useful and dangerous.

Marketers love data. They can’t get enough of it even as they drown in it. And there is no shortage of resources for marketers to get more and more data on consumer trends they believe will influence their marketing effectiveness. It may be time for marketers to recognize data as too much of a good thing. Paradoxically the more data marketers gather on consumer behavior, the more removed they are from knowing what really matters to people.

Data (in and of itself) has no value whatsoever. Add to that consumer’s growing resistance to providing information to marketers, and its easy to see why the proliferation of data driven marketing is reaching a tipping point where so much data simply becomes useless white noise in the background of a crowded marketplace.

Consumers believe data tracking is stalking.

Tracking the behavior of consumers online is an activity marketers love. Placing ads as a result of contextual browser behavior is all the rage right now for marketers. Trouble is consumers resent the fact that their browser behavior can be tracked by marketers seeking to dish up advertising that reflects their so-called interests.

According to a recent Consumer Reports study, the majority of consumers don’t want to be tracked online. Here are some statistics to think about:

78% of American consumers are uncomfortable receiving ads based on their internet browsing and online purchasing behavior.

67% think the government should protect their online privacy.

75% regularly erase cookies to thwart marketers who want to track them.

40% believe their personal information is shared with marketers without their consent.

Brands are built on trust not data.

You can gather all the data in the world about consumers and it won’t help you one bit if people don’t trust what your brand represents. Trust is something so basic and fundamental to building relationships with people, it’s difficult to understand why so many marketers ignore this fact in their data-gathering tactics?

The way to build trust is to contribute something of value first. If your marketing activities do not have trust baked in, then you will be alienating buyers. Contributing value starts with building a community by contributing to the community. For the most part, consumers are deaf and blind to marketing. Marketing has a smell to it that evokes a response “oh yeah, they’re trying to sell me something and it’s annoying”. Nobody wants to be sold anything, but people love to buy things. People buy things that matter to them.

In the long run, those marketers who invest time, talent and money contributing value to their tribe rather than obsessively collecting data about them are usually the market leaders.