Posts tonen met het label brand problems. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label brand problems. Alle posts tonen

zondag 10 mei 2015

Solving brand issues from a systems perspective

Everybody agrees that brands are important as they represent high economic, sociological and psychological values. Brands are trustworthy icons allowing people to express their identity. Brands are juridically owned by companies, but psychologically and sociologically by their fans. However, how to solve brand issues by taking the appropriate branding actions is a major knowledge gap. This is beautifully illustrated by New Coke.  


In 1983, the Coca-Cola Company replaced Coca Cola by New Coke to stop its market share from declining. Four million dollars and two years of research were spent to validate this decision. But as it brought New Coke to the market on 23 April 1985, the ‘real’ Coke-drinkers immediately wanted ‘their product’ back, and sued The Company for ‘neglecting the American legacy.’ ‘We have heard you,’ apologized CEO Goizueta in the six o’clock news on 11 July 1985, as they brought back the original Coke formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic. Ending this initially poor decision into a fairy tale as the steady decline was turned around into a solid rise in market share.

The Company misidentified Coca Cola’s declining market share as a stand-alone flavor problem. However, changing the flavor contradicted the cultural meaning of Coca-Cola communicated implicitly in slogans such as ‘The original’, ‘Always Coca-Cola’, and ‘The real thing’. The last word people wanted to associate with Coca-Cola was ‘new’. Thus, proudly hiding a ‘secret formula’ in a safe for almost a century, conflicted with pompously announcing the revision of this formula. Thus, the change in taste was experienced by Coca-Cola fans as betrayal of what America stands for.

The New Coke story illustrates that solving brand issues requires a systems perspective: brands stand for more than the sum of their elements. Brand systems are sets of interrelated elements in which the whole is revealed in its individual fractions, but cannot be traced back to specific properties. A change in flavor should not only improve its taste, but should also fit the values it represents.

Fortunately, however, like the Coca Cola branders, more and more branders prefer to release their implicit narrow-bounded subsets of possible brand solutions when facing problems and explicitly including a broader picture and taking their 99% (!) tacit knowledge into account. They prefer paying attention to issues that lie beneath the surface rather than tackle symptoms. As their brand issues are well-defined, it is likely that their branding actions will solve these issues.

Brand problems cover situations in which branders perceive gaps between their brands’ current values and their possible values, while they have no branding options in mind that might close these gaps. Solving brand problems starts with problem identification: awareness of a problem that you as a brander must attend to. Next, this awareness needs to be untangled it into a clear-cut statement of a core brand issue. This is an extremely difficult process as 99% of our human knowledge is tacit.

Solving these brand issues from a systems perspective means you unravel the positive and/or negative feedback loops caused by considered branding options based on your implicit model of the brand system: the expected constructive and/or destructive reactions of brand elements on the actualization of these options. Fortunately, most of the time only a small change is needed to initiate positive feedback loops in your brand system. And even more opportunely, a new systems technique has recently been developed and validated that employs a systems perspective to solve brand issues: branding constellations.

Solving your brand issue?
Take a first step and call MoveYourMarket to assist you in defining your brand issue: wim@moveyourmarket.com.