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In 1994, I was the main source for The Economist article on the Death of the Brand Manager. I spent the next year writing a book - Brand Chartering: how brand organisations learn living scripts - which explains how the new role of the company's greatest brand expert can be as the facilitator of brand knowledge sharing so that every employee sees how to action the essence of the brand. Bye bye Unique Selling Proposition, hello Unique Organising Purpose. Here reviewers mark Brand Chartering's card. I then add my review and nomination of best 20th Century book on brand: John Noel Kapferer's Strategic Brand Management.
Brand Chartering Handbook is mostly available online
Review in The Journal of Product & Brand Management, vol 6 #1 1997
In "Brand Chartering" lies a new idea "The brand is not something separate from the business itself". We have for all these years been looking at the brand as Walt Disney looks at a Grimm Brothers fairy story. Nice story, cute film. Yet the important challenges to the child's fears, hopes and futures are lost in the glitz and glamour. So it is with the brand.
The brand lies at the heart of every organisation. The brand informs, and is informed by, the corporate culture. How you organise your business reflects what the brand means to you - and this goes out to the wider world - and if you accept this, then Brand Chartering proves a core tool for your development of corporate strategy.
Managers should read Brand Chartering, consider its practical implications and act on them. At the same time accept the challenge to think about the relationship between your business and its brand or brands. You'll quickly find that the brand influenced everything you do. It suggests that the business not attending to its corporate good name should change its spots. The business that seeks anonymity behind many brands will in the end be unmasked. Ultimately, the holistic approach means that your service, your product, your corporate culture, and your ethics will all affect the success of your business. What might seem as a sensible decision based on a coherent strategy could, through a failure to see employees as contributing to the brand, prove a disaster for the company. If you forget these things you lay down the possibility of some future shock mortally wounding your brand. And without the brand you are nothing.
Financial Times Mastering Management Section, 14 June 1996. Reviewer Andrew Seth, formerly Chairman of Lever Brothers UK
Macrae grasps the key issues affecting the successful management of the brand. The leadership role is well recognised, the paradoxical nature of competition and simultaneous partnership well identified, and the strategic and teamworking skills required in mastering brand achievement explained and understood. The chief executive is correctly recognised as the ultimate brand owner, and his decision processes and knowledge shown as crucial to success. Global/local change makes it, Macrae suggests, "the most exciting time for marketing and branding."
Readers will emerge from "Brand Chartering" with a sense of commitment necessary to succeed, the range of skills needed to position and direct brands well, and some idea of the pitfalls which affect and continue to trouble western brand owners.
Why "chartering" anyway and what is it? It's a questioning thesis, a set of workshop frameworks or a summary of the brand's " top line living script on one updatable piece of paper" to use the author's own words. It's a process for directing brands across a range of specified "branding junctions". The author recommends it to companies, and to all concerned with branding as a rewarding and pain-free structure for identifying and maintaining brand strength.
The need for coherence in a world where complexity has grown primarily through global competitive forces, is undeniable.
Marketing Week Magazine, issue of 26 April 1996. Reviewer, Alan Mitchell
Ever since McKinsey published its article on marketing's mid-life crisis, doubts about the role and the future of the marketing department have, if anything, grown.
And with the flood of new and unsettling developments - from the globalisation of brands and marketing structures, through the burgeoning media revolution, to the rise of one-to-one marketing and the emergence of new disciplines like internal marketing - marketers know there's much they should be thinking about and doing. Yet somehow they never really have the time. Everyone knows the old marketing machine is broken. Many experts have suggested as what to do with various parts. But no-one yet knows how to fix the machine as the whole.
A powerful attempt to do so has now been made. In a new volume - The Brand Chartering Handbook - author Chris Macrae suggests a framework for companies to manage the current swirl of change and benefit from the energy it generates. He also develops a coherent and inspiring vision for marketing's future : as overseer of the company's brand architecture. Because brand architecture "interconnects with all other core business processes" This is "the ultimate megaprocess", he declares.
The classic brand management system has bred a non-entrepreneurial bias, spawned a proliferation of brands and accompanying power battles as managers fight over resources for each brand. It has also created what Macrae calls a value destroying syndrome, the main cause of which is the delegation of brand decisions to juniors whose time horizons are far too short.
Macrae also firmly believes that the fmcg standalone brand model has passed its sell by date. Throw out old ideas of targeting and selling based on fine product differences. And bring alive all the connections which a smart relationship can cultivate with the three C's: end consumers, company employees, customers (such as trade channels).
"The classic brand management system encouraged companies to brand products. Recently it has become far more important to brand businesses" he writes. "The focus of your brand equity needs to be changed to higher-level banner brands which represent brand organisations (not just brands) to consumer and customer."
But the core of Macrae's contribution is the brand charter. Marketing's key task, he argues, is to manage brand junctions, where many people's inputs come together to create the brand's added value and where consumers experience (or fail to experience) a brand's relationship holistically.
Macrae codifies 12 main brand junctions. Not all companies need to focus on all of them, he stresses. Though, he adds, it's a pretty good idea to know whether you have developed an awful black spot with any of them.
Some of them are quite familiar. Under the creating heading, for example, Macrae gathers brand essence, identity, heritage/friendship, and future news - issues which loom large for all those dealing with the traditional marketing, advertising, design, PR etc. Under managing, he puts other familiar issues such as masterbriefing (use and deployment of different media) and the quality and value balance along with newer themes such as "umbrella connections" (the revolutionary topic of umbrella branding), and flow/networking.
This is the management task of making sure that all contributors to the creation of the brand's value really understand what the brand stands for and where it is going. It also ensures that the company has an organisational structure capable of giving consistency over time and through changes - so that the "brand process flows reassuringly as smart service relationships with consumers and customers".
The third level is directing. Included under this is directing brand architecture, with the aim of integrating and maximising a company's total goodwill and leadership capabilities. According to Macrae, this involves going beyond fragmented brand portfolios to get the most out of potential linkages, either by presenting two brands together in ways which offer the consumers the best of both worlds, or cultivating valuable alliances with other organisations.
An overview of the whole brand portfolio is essential to see how each brand brick fits to create the whole brand building, he points out. Only then can sensible decisions be made as to whether it should be a traditional standalone brand, a product sub-brand, a corporate sub-brand, or umbrella brand; a local, regional or global brand; a tactical or strategic brand.
Other directing junctions include being a strategy architect (moving beyond brand planning to invent/build the brand's longer-term future); being an organisation architect (where banner brands become a Unique Organising Purpose for global companies); and the drama of leadership. "Strong brands are never managed," says Macrae "They are always led." They cultivate a sense of purpose, especially internally. And they use this sense of purpose to drive forward, to "accelerate the future", often by creating discontinuity in competitors' supply chains.
Review of Strategic Brand Management, J-N Kapferer, 1997 (Second Edition, Kogan Page). By Chris Macrae
Today, branding, more than any other business concept, provides the greatest leverage - make or break - for growing the organisation. One reason for this is that branding is so poorly understood. Another reason is that in a short-termist world, the brand is often the company's only commercial licence - and leadership process - for investing in the medium term. By which I mean a time span a tad longer than the next book-keeping period measured by accountants, and opined on by financial analysts.
In the late 1980s, accountants decided that the intangible black hole in their balance sheets was branding and set out to measure this greatest corporate asset. They did so with flat earth tools geared to the religious principles of the balance sheet such as the proof of past performance. They were prepared to assume for example, that the brand's worth went up the higher the price premium taxed, where as anyone who has studied consumers knows and as Marlboro Friday showed, you can take such short term profit hikes for a while but eventually you break the poor consumers' back or let in new competition.
Most academic book-writers up to Marlboro Friday towed the flat earth line on brand equity - with authoritative texts on this is how the flat earth works. One, Jean-Noel Kapferer, stood out daring to write a book - first published in English by Kogan Page in 1992 - which started to question many dogmas about branding. Could it be that the brand's strength depends not just on flat brand images and past sales that can be measured, but on the organisational integrity of its identity? Did big companies who were buying up brands by the trolley load in the late eighties realise that their two biggest problems were: owning too many brands and hosting them in a managerial culture which was not even neutral to good branding practice but "negative"?
Five years later, Kapferer's Strategic Brand Management has been updated. Most of the book is new to the English-speaking reader, and Kapferer is now fully into his stride as the strongest and wisest of brand gurus. Before we can ever believe again in the power of brand image and positioning, we need to understand fundamental leadership frames like: identity, purpose, vision, architecture and charter. Try out these sample extracts of Kapferer for a flavour of why you may need to read this book urgently.
page 425 - The emphasis that we placed on the financial value of brands in the 1980s has given us a wrong idea of what they actually are. We saw them as short-term speculative values. The famous goodwill is the result of continuous efforts. This is the price that has to be paid if a brand is to be able to reconquer a market. The future lies in the hands of those companies which understand brands and are able to instil this understanding throughout their organisation. Even if a company's culture is internally focused, what the brand stands for reminds us of the competitive priorities and the need for continuous improvement in serving the market...
page 46 - Many companies have forgotten the fundamental purpose of their brands. A great deal of attention is devoted to the branding activity itself, which involves designers, graphic artists and advertising agencies. This activity thus becomes a means in itself. In so doing, we forget that it is just a means. Branding (should be) a process that involves the company's resources and all of its functions, focusing them on one strategic intent: creating a difference. Only by mobilising all of its internal sources of added value can a company set itself apart from its competitors.
page 90/92 - Few brands actually know who they are, what they stand for and what makes them unique. Classic marketing tools do not help answer such questions. Every advertising campaign is, of course, based on a copy strategy, which varies from one campaign to another. However, very few brands actually have a brand charter defining the brand's long-term identity and uniqueness. Nor can the answers be found in any graphic guidelines, which often focus only on the brand's outward appearance. Yet understanding what the brand truly represents is not a graphic exercise. It is an examination of the brand's innermost substance and of the different facets of its identity....Having an identity means being true to yourself...(requiring) the following questions to be answered: What is the brand's particular vision and aim? What makes it different? What need is the brand fulfilling? What is its permanent nature? What are its value or values? What are the signs which make it recognisable?
page 68/9 - Proliferation of brands has so far worked against many Western companies. It is true that any product manager in charge of launching a new product is tempted to give it a name of its own: its own brand name. Often the naming process is the way for both manager and new product to gain instant recognition from all. That is why companies registered bucket-loads of brand names for new products, encouraged by the classical Procterian ideology of the product brand. Those times are over. For example, at Danone product brands are now history - product line brands and the corporate brand are the future. In a similar way, Nestle has selected a limited number of master brands, each acting as a source brand for a wide range of products and sub-brands. At 3M a document entitled 'Brand Asset Management' enabled 3M to reduce its brands from 1500 to 700 in its first two years of operation, and to cut down the annual creation of new brands from 73 to four. Seen from a distance these rules may seem to limit and restrict the creative drive. From within, they have proven to be the only means of renewing existing brands, enhancing both their value and their worldwide impact. Product managers who would prefer to launch innovations under their own new brand name deprive existing brands of the opportunity to grow by renewing themselves.
page 17 - Brand management is still in its early stages...in many cases, the tendency is to manage products which happen to have a name. Marketing bibles and management books have not yet assimilated the full implication of the brand revolution. Marketing books focus on the process of launching new products, when marketing the brand is considered merely as a tactical and final decision which is developed through communication such as advertising, packaging and the logo. Yet the reality of the situation is very different. From now on companies will be faced with the strategic issue of whether or not growth should come through existing brands by developing their sphere of activity or through new brands (either created or bought). Classic strategic models talk about product portfolios, whereas in reality companies have to manage their brand portfolios...
page 125 - Unlike the product launch, the brand launch is, from the very start, a long-term project. Such an approach thus upsets the existing order, values and market shares of the category. It aims both at establishing a new order and different values and at impacting on the market for a long time. This can only be achieved if people are convinced of the brand's absolute necessity and are ready to give it all they have. In order to keep staff, management, bankers, clients, opinion leaders and sales people mobilised for the long term, the company must be driven by a real brand project and a true vision. The latter will indeed serve to justify, internally and externally, why the brand is being launched and what its essential purpose is.
page 58 - A brand is a contract. This implies constraints. First of all that the various functions of the organisation converge: R&D, production, methods, logistics, marketing, finance, service. Strong brands bring about internal mobilisation and external federalisation. They create the company's panache and impetus. That is why some companies switch their name for that of one of their star brands: eg BSN became Danone. The impact of strong brands extends far beyond most corporate strategies, which only last while they are in the making after which they vanish or end up as pompous phrases ('a passion for excellence') posted in the hallways. A brands' slogan and signature are meant to embody a brand's contract. A good slogan is therefore often rejected by managing directors because it means too much commitment for the company and may backfire if the products/services do not match the expectations the brand has created so far. In reality, a brand's organisational purpose should be demanding and determined to constantly outdo itself, to aim ever higher.
I will end this review with a second opinion and a piece of hearsay. The second opinion - according to Philip Kotler on the backcover of the book: "After reading Kapferer you'll never again think of a brand as just a name. Several exciting new ideas and perspectives on brand building are offered that have been absent from our literature".
The hearsay emanates from a telephone conversation which I had with Gary Hamel soon after the publication of the book "Competing for the Future". In this book, Hamel & Prahalad picture the future organisation as a house built on a floor of core competences, a roof of banner brands, and pillars of core products and business units. Gary told me that of these four continuous building blocks, the importance of brands grew on the authors' minds as they completed their book. They put their team of researchers onto scanning the literature but found little that matched the vision and purpose of branding as an organisation-wide construct. You have probably already read more about that in the extracts quoted in this review than the whole of the literature search available to Hamel. You can certainly find more by reading Kapferer from cover to cover.
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