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. 
