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Kodak and the Tyranny of Brand-Centrism - A post by Kevin Clancy

Kodak and the Tyranny of Brand-Centrism - a post by Kevin Clancy (Brand ManageCamp 2005 speaker, Chairman/CEO of Copernicus Marketing and author of Couterintuitive Marketing)

In a recent piece for Ad Age, marketing guru Al Ries made the statement: “Fundamentally there are two ways to increase sales: (1) Expand the brand, or (2) expand the brand’s market share....While it’s more difficult to expand a brand’s market share, this is the better way to go. The larger the market share,” Ries writes, “the more powerful a brand becomes. Unfortunately, he laments, “Overwhelmingly, marketing managers believe in the expand-the-brand philosophy.”

I’d substitute market share for customer base, but commiserate with venerable Al. When it comes to taking actions to grow the bottom-line in the short- and long-term, the discussion more often than not is what are we going to do with the brand, not what are we going to do with customers.

Take the recent marketing efforts by Eastman Kodak. “Most corporate marketers would be overjoyed if consumers considered their brand to be a loyal, reliable, trustworthy old friend,” reported The New York Times. With its film business in decline, Kodak began building its digital business where it could channel its vast capabilities and customer relationships, developing new service offerings (digital radiography, internet archiving, commercial digital print runs) and products (the EasyShare). The company seemed to be taking the customer-centered approach, but then brand-centrism reared its ugly head.

“I told Carl [Gustin, Kodak’s CMO], ‘Keep the trust and the warmth, but make the brand innovative and cool and digital’,” Antonio Perez, Kodak’s CEO, told The New York Times. “The only thing we’re keeping constant is the red and yellow colors, and the Kodak name,” added Mr. Gustin. The company points to research conducted by its ad agency that consumers around the world think that Kodak is not only not cool, but also that when it comes to digital, “they perceive the brand as lacking momentum, credentials, or innovation stripes,” according to Kodak’s agency account chief. Now Kodak’s digital business is growing at an impressive 35+ percent annual rate and the Kodak EasyShare camera occupies the top spot on the world’s best-seller list, so one might ask the question how critical “coolness” and “innovation stripes” really are to Kodak customers who seem to gravitate to the brand even though by all accounts it’s pretty dull and basic. One might also ask the question what kind of new products and innovations is the company coming up with to substantively address this apparent hole in its image—according to the Times article, there have been design changes, but it doesn’t sound like truly innovative, leading edge new products. Instead, there’s a new ad campaign, potentially a new logo, and a PR effort with consumer electronics folks.

As an alternative to Kodak’s approach, take a look at American Express, “the 155-year-old financial-services firm long known for catering to gray-haired executives with expense accounts,” courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, in “a high-stakes hunt for young customers.” Rather than try to convince anyone that American Express isn’t for corporate suits, it introduced a new series of no-fee credit cards, “for urbanites who are single, age 25 to 35, dine out often, like to drink and aspire to be hip,” the first of which it dubbed “In:NYC,” with “In:Chicago,” and “In:LA” cards planned for later this year. Like other Amex cards, it plays up the benefits of membership (holders can earn points toward a private booth at an ultra-hip bar and discounts at trendy restaurants), the common denominator among all of its card marketing efforts, and it’s clear it’s an Amex card. Yet marketing efforts focus on building membership for In:NYC—ads tout the “über-glam lifestyle you’ll easily become accustom to” not American Express. Amex reports 90% of the people who have signed up for the card have never had any type of American Express card before and more than half are under age 35.

The tyranny of brand-centrism continues to undermine otherwise healthy brands and companies will continue to struggle with expanding into new business areas and/or attracting a new segment of customer if they put brands before customers.

BK Goes for Broke in Bid to Win America's Worst Marketer Award - A Post by Kevin J. Clancy, Ph. D.

(Here's another spirited post by Brand ManageCamp 2005 speaker Kevin Clancy. While the views expressed by our guest bloggers are their own and not necessarily those of Brand ManageCamp, I must admit I've been stumped by this whole "COQ ROQ" BK thing - and not stumped in the way that makes me intrigued enough to check out the website or even hungry enough to go get chicken fries, just stumped in a way that annoys me and makes me want to change the channel. Check back for more no-holds-barred posts by Kevin, or, better yet, come hear him speak at Brand ManageCamp 2005 ! - Len)

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BK Goes for Broke in Bid to Win America’s Worst Marketer Award

By Kevin J. Clancy, Ph. D.

Examples of God-awful marketing and business decision-making come out of Burger King seemingly on a weekly basis. The latest object of our ridicule: The “COQ ROQ” campaign promoting BK’s new chicken fries. I only know it’s for chicken fries because I read an article about it; I certainly couldn’t tell from the ad itself and almost missed it the first time I visited the website.

The TV spots and a website are centered around the fictional COQ ROQ band. The first TV ad opens at a concert where screaming fans gyrate and body surf while performers dressed in (frightening) headgear, which I only later realized was bird-like, sing on stage. This goes on for awhile: people dancing—I hate to sound like a Puritan but it’s true—some in sexually suggestive ways, the band singing, and finally there’s a product shot, though no mention of what the product is. Crowd surfers shove some fries in their mouth and the whole thing ends with a shot of the chicken fries in a box. There’s no voiceover offering a clarification on the product and the first time I saw the ad I just thought it was promoting regular fries. So I visited the website listed on the ad, www.coqroq.com, designed to look like an authentic rock band website, and just happened on the link to Chicken Fries information at the very bottom of the table of contents on the home page.

As BK’s global marketing officer Russ Klein explained, “COQ ROQ has a rebellious, new rock sound, and we’ve got a rebellious, new way to eat chicken on the go. The two come together in our new ads, which are going to have music and chicken fans head-banging like it’s 1985 in no time.” Is he serious? Was there some nostalgia among...well, I can’t even tell who the ad is targeted to so it must be people who can remember back to 1985 for this kind of a bird-version of KISS? A rebellious way to eat chicken? I know when I want to thumb my nose at the establishment nothing says screw you like eating chicken in a french fry format. It seems a bit of a stretch to connect this product—a highly convenient and, in all likelihood because what fried food isn’t, tasty one—with a revival heavy metal band, even one with a chicken theme.

I can just hear the creatives who came up with COQ ROQ—the same folks who brought us the colossally over-hyped, equally as unappetizing subservient chicken campaign—laughing at all the inside jokes they came up with. Apparently COQ ROQ is a play on words for the term used to describe cheesy hair metal bands in the 80’s (I also read this in an article). All the chicken-themed songs like “Bob Your Head” and “Nice Box” (unintelligibly) mention the chicken fries. The fictional names of band members including the lead singer Fowl Mouth intertwine the chicken theme. And they probably thought they earn some street creds for hiring the same guy who directs Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Eminem, and Marilyn Manson videos to shoot the commercials.

But most of these inside jokes clearly went over the heads of most folks who took offense at the name of the band (clearly thinking it was a double entendre for male anatomy—which obviously the creatives knew and likely welcomed) and the photos of young female band groupies on the website which originally ran with the captions “Groupies love the Coq,” and “Groupies love Coq.” According to BK these captions were a “computer glitch” and have since been updated with less offensive remarks,” but it had Ad Age and some women’s groups incensed about stereotyping and was likely another ploy to grab attention.

While I wasn’t personally offended by the jokes, I didn’t exactly get them either. Furthermore, the sweaty concert scenes and band members in costumes reminiscent of the rock band KISS which gave me the creeps in the 80s didn’t exactly whet my appetite even if I had gotten the message about chicken fries. No clear target, what’s the positioning, strange creative. Call it edgy if you want, but COQ ROQ is Zero Sigma advertising at it’s finest.

More Crazy Talk from the Anti-Positionites

(below is our first post from Kevin Clancy - an upcoming Brand ManageCamp 2005 speaker, best-selling author of Counterintuitive Marketing and CEO of Copernicus Marketing . Kevin's post focuses squarely on one of my biggest pet-peeves: advertising that doesn't communicate a positioning. Or, as I like to call it, 'a big waste of millions of dollars.' Kevin's a brilliant mind and I can't wait to hear him speak about Six Sigma Marketing at the conference. Enjoy the post. - Len)

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More Crazy Talk from the Anti-Positionites
by Kevin J. Clancy

Not too long ago, I, along with some ad experts, sat through a reel of 100 award-winning ads from the UK. Seemingly each commercial we watched included 27 seconds of irrelevant humor followed by 3 seconds of disassociated branding. Not brand connections; not brand meaning; just simply brand mention. For weeks after the meeting, I wondered to myself, how could the British advertising industry be so confused? The mystery was solved when we started hearing more and more about the theory on which the campaigns I saw were clearly based; a theory which makes even less sense than the commercials: you don’t need a positioning, it’s an out-dated concept, or as self-proclaimed futurist Faith Popcorn put it, “differentiation is beside the point.”

Adding even more fuel to the anti-positionites fire, Patrick Barwise and Séan Meehan in the summer edition of the quarterly magazine Marketing Research (“Simply Better”) directly challenge Jack Trout’s monumental pronouncement that you must “differentiate or die.” They acknowledge the growing similarity of leading brands and contend it’s the result of consumers becoming, “increasingly resistant to marketers’ attempts to differentiate their brands through advertising.” The two made a similar case in a 2004 piece for the MIT Sloan Management Review, that, though conventional wisdom holds that brands must offer buyers something truly unique to generate a purchase and engender loyalty, “what customers want is not more differentiation but products and services that are simply better at providing generic ‘category benefits’—those routine benefits customers expect to get when they make a purchase.”

Barwise and Meehan’s assertion about growing consumer resistance to differentiation in advertising is based on the ridiculous assumption that marketers today are consistently delivering a clear and persuasive reason to buy message, in other words a positioning, to consumers in their advertising. Meanwhile, only one in every 16 primetime TV commercials in the U.S. communicates anything that could remotely be considered a positioning. A stunning 93% of brands remain completely unpositioned! If, as Barwise and Meehan maintain, research shows that “the marketing obsession with unique brand differentiators goes largely unnoticed by customers—and even when noticed, it rarely convinces them,” it’s because marketers are not offering them anything particularly unique or, more importantly, compelling that motivates them to buy. And proof of this failed strategy is in the new ROI flying out of the marketing files of corporate America. Advertising ROI is negative. I repeat, NEGATIVE! What we’re doing doesn’t work!

I say Popcorn spent five minutes too long in the microwave and Barwise and Meehan’s “simply better” is a sure fire way to guarantee simply mediocre marketing performance. Jack Trout’s former partner Al Ries recently wrote, “powerful, long-lasting brands are built by owning a word in the mind.” Brands need a positioning. Just ask the major American beer brewers—beer consumption is down and growth in beer volume is expected to increase at a paltry rate of .5% for the next five years because, according to Advertising Age, “brewers served a steady stream of humorous ads where entertainment value frequently overshadowed any effort to build or differentiate brands.” Just ask GM—CEO Rick Wagoner recently said: “If we had a chance to rerun the last five years, we probably would have done a little more thinking about making sure each product was distinctive and had a chance to be successful.” In this day and age, to think you don’t need one is a zero sigma notion.