Brand Premium: How Smart Brands Make More Money

226 Pages·2013·1.538 MB·English

by  Nigel Hollis (auth.)

BRAND PREMIUM
Also by Nigel Hollis
The Global Brand (2008)
BRAND PREMIUM
How Smart Brands Make
More Money
Nigel Hollis
Chief Global Analyst
Millward Brown
brand premium
Copyright © Nigel Hollis, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the U.S.—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-137-27991-0 ISBN 978-1-137-51038-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-51038-9
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Hollis, Nigel.
Brand premium : how smart brands make more money /
Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst, Millward Brown.
pages cm
ISBN 978–1–137–27991–0 (alk. paper)
1. Brand name products. 2. Branding (Marketing) 3. Product
management. I. Title.
HD69.B7H6463 2013
658.8(cid:2)27—dc23 2013008881
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Gordon Brown
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Preface xiii
PART I WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? 1
1 How Marketing Adds Financial Value to a Business 9
2 How Brands Influence Purchase Decisions 25
3 What Makes Your Brand Meaningfully Different? 39
4 Linking Meaningful Difference to Financial Outcomes 53
PART II CREATING A MEANINGFULLY
DIFFERENT BRAND 69
5 Clarity of Purpose 71
6 Effective Delivery 83
7 Resonance 95
8 Differentiation 105
9 Defining a Meaningfully Different Experience 121
PART III AMPLIFYING A MEANINGFULLY
DIFFERENT BRAND 131
10 Findability 133
11 Credibility 145
12 Vitality 155
13 Affordability at a Price Point 171
vii
viii Contents
14 Extendability 183
15 Make the Most of Your Brand 193
Notes 207
Index 219
Foreword
I can trace my digital footsteps back to a flurry of emails between Nigel and
me in March 2010, when this whole adventure kicked off. We had decided
that we should do more to share our wider learning about brands with our
clients. In particular, we wanted to use this broader knowledge to tackle the
specific challenges and opportunities of individual brands. We have always
believed that we should be helping businesses, not just through the applica-
tion of findings from a single piece of research, but by harnessing all of
Millward Brown’s accumulated learning. Over 40 years, we have collected
data in over 70 markets and across thousands of brands; we discuss brands
with marketing people and work with their agencies every day of the year.
More than this, we tie what we know to financial success in the market.
Back in 2010, there was an established view within the company about
how brands worked, but it hadn’t been revisited for some time. We felt that
if we were going to take our brand knowledge out to clients, then we should
be taking them the very latest insights. So we began reexamining all of our
datasets, talking to colleagues inside and outside the company, and then
refining and reworking the models that we had. There was no talk about
writing a book back then—or even about influencing the kind of measures
we use on a day-to-day basis; instead, we simply aimed to pull together our
best understanding of how brands work in order to help our clients. Six
months later, we had our model and began road testing it. That meant pre-
senting it at conferences, using it as a framework to analyze real brand pre-
dicaments, and talking about it to clients whenever we could. A year later,
by the end of 2011, the model had developed considerably. It had become a
bit more complex and a lot more robust. The idea of building a more formal
workshop that could be run by senior people in the company started to
form at that point, as did the idea of writing a book.
Nigel’s first book, The Global Brand, was published to great acclaim in
2008, so enough water had flowed under the bridge for the idea of writing
on this scale to be appealing once more. When you know you’re going to
write something, you become a hoarder of articles, quotes, ideas, and snip-
pets of conversation in the hope that you can weave all these elements into
a wonderful tapestry. So Nigel had another year of running workshops,
ix
x Foreword
talking at conferences, discussing ideas with clients, and generally collect-
ing the anecdotal material and insights needed to help add richness and
texture to the story.
This book is particularly powerful because it operates on three levels. First
of all, it’s based on robust analysis from some of the biggest databases in the
world, populated with data on consumer loyalty and how it is affected by com-
munications and other activity of all kinds. Second, it provides a layer of anec-
dotes and examples culled from the two years during which this model was
incubated and developed. Third, it offers Nigel’s own passionate take on the
importance of brands, uncovering and explaining all the levers that can be
pushed and pulled to make a brand financially successful. He cares not only
about brands being successful but also about marketers being successful; he
wants the discipline of marketing to be recognized for what it can contribute to
business success. A subtext of the book is the need for marketers to become
more central to the running of businesses, because they are fulfilling one of the
most vital roles in wealth creation. We have encountered too many examples
(even in some of the world’s biggest companies) in which the brand assets of
the company are poorly understood; these brands would benefit hugely from
the kind of thinking captured in these pages.
Many marketing books take one particular aspect of marketing success
and elaborate on it. This book is different; it provides a dynamic model that
describes all the influences that are (or should be) under the control of the
marketing team. It lays out an overall plan, a checklist that any brand owner
can use to understand how well his or her brand is performing on each
dimension that leads to financial growth.
We are at the end of one adventure but the beginning of another. All of the
thinking in this book has led us to reflect upon the metrics we use in all our
work, on the questions we ask, and on the analyses we conduct to provide rec-
ommendations to brand owners. In a way, this reflection was the ultimate test
of the ideas in this book. We devised new approaches based on this thinking
that would only have had merit if they more accurately predicted and explained
current market share and future share growth. Nine months of intensive
research and development explored whether these ideas could concretely be
tied to financial outcomes. The fact is, they can. They even provide a method for
understanding how strong brands can command a price premium, and that is
the ultimate validation of these ideas.
Now we have the excitement of knowing that the ideas Nigel captures in
this book are both practical and powerful; this book is a state-of-the-art
guide for marketers to grow their company’s financial success.
—Gordon Pincott,
Chairman, Global Solutions, Millward Brown