Summary of Scott Bedbury's conference on the importance of a Brand in the competitive economy of the 21st century.
Scott Bedbury, responsible for Niké's successful “Just do it” campaign, has presented two case studies: Niké and Starbucks.
Discussed based on the 8 Basic Principles for achieving brand leadership.
The beginning of a new age
Something has changed in the way consumers look at companies and brands. It must also change the way companies look at their consumers.
For Bedbury, we are at the end of a whole series of decades in which business has only been measured by its financial results and, therefore, the entire organization of a company revolved around these results. This is changing. Financial results are very important to certain areas of the company, but they are not something that should move the entire company.
Branding is above any business strategy
A good brand is the Holy Grail of a company.
According to Bedbury, we can all position our brand well.
The positioning of a brand, as an organizing principle, informs and inspires any member of an organization about what to do, not only in terms of goals at the end of years, but also in terms of what it is that our clients and in general the world around us, feel about our company or our brand. If the brand is powerful and attracts employees and customers, the rest of the numbers come alone.
The secret to positioning a brand well: knowing the customer well and generating emotional ties with him.
Scott Bedbury emphasized that the key to any company is to know its customer perfectly: to know the tastes, habits and needs of the people to whom one directs its products. If the customer is well known, Bedbury argues that then advertising campaigns will always be successful and it is only by omitting the customer that mistakes are made.
Bedbury, like Tom Peters and Richard Teerlink, also insists that emotional connection with the client is essential.
Bedbury reminds us that the world is full of good services and good products. And that it is necessary to focus on what our products or services make the consumer feel.
The concept of "Brand Image" is complex today. In other times, physical terms were used to define it, for example: faster, brighter, more durable, better quality. Now, the image of a brand has to do with its behavior in the environment, with the services it performs with its community, with reports of financial integrity or with the morale of the company's senior managers. Bedbury indicates that we should substitute the word "image" for "karma" and go on to call the "Brand Image" as "Brand Karma", it further conveys the depth of the term.
What kind of aura does our company have?
The Niké case
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Scott Bedbury is the one who devised Niké's “Just do it” campaign. With this motto, what Niké wants to convey through her ads is: “don't wait any longer, just do it. Dare yourself. Do what you have always wanted to do. " He managed to increase his sales by 600%.
"Just do it": The 3-word alchemy
These three words were spoken only once in each of the nearly 200 announcements that occurred. But once uttered, they became almost an order: "Come on, do it now."
"The power of suggestion should not be underestimated when it is suggested in the right way," said Scout Bedbury. The “Just do it” campaign directly attacks people's feelings. Everyone wants to be in better physical shape and have more control over their lives. Niké just gave them a little more strength.
Bedbury comments that the campaign was especially powerful among women.
In the same campaign it was shown that Niké knows what it is to be a working woman with a lazy husband, a lazy boss, with children in kindergarten, and no time for herself. The campaign focused on “empathy” reflected through special announcements with messages such as:
"Hey, we know life is tough. But we understand the challenge you have set for yourself and we believe that being physically fit is part of the solution. ”
14 years later, the campaign continues because false promises were never made, never went beyond what Niké could offer.
Although not everything has been successful in Niké, Scout Bedbury also told us some of the mistakes that were made: the first was a complete blunder that almost cost them the effort of months of campaign and basically consisted of including a phrase at the end of An advertisement where an aerobics teacher told the camera to encourage you to play sports in order to be in a mood. The phrase that was added at the end of "Just do it" was jokingly and said: "… and incidentally, stop eating like a seal." Obviously the latter bothered all the women who saw the ad… and that which had been tested before being broadcast, but Bedbury explained that it had been tested among female athletes, not among non-athletes who should be encouraged to play sports.
The second mistake he commented was more anecdotal than anything else: in a Niké advertising campaign shot in Kenya where a group of Massays are dancing their traditional dances using Niké shoes as footwear, at the end of the spot, one of the Massay addressing the camera says a few words in Swahili that Niké translates as “Just do it”.
In reality, Massay is saying "these sneakers hurt my feet," but no one knew until the ad came out on television and a linguist reported it to the press.
The Starbucks case
This case illustrates how powerful alliances and a suitable marketing strategy manage to place a brand in a dominant position in the United States market, and guarantee it global reach. Scott Bedbury made Starbucks go from 1,000 points of sale to 7,000 points of sale in just 5 years.
As it did? Again emotionally connecting with the customer.
Starbucks are coffee shops inspired by classic village cafes. What Starbucks wanted was to create a place between work and people's home, where they felt comfortable and comfortable, whether they had coffee or read a book.
For this, all Starbucks are similar and employees have the primary mission of making people feel comfortable.
Bedbury confessed that the resounding success came suddenly when in the series Ally Mac Beal one of the protagonists proposed to go find a coffee at Starbucks and drink it in the office, relaxing to feel "the true aroma of coffee."
It seems that it was something thought by the writers of Ally McBeal, without being agreed with Starbucks. From that moment on, several scenes were filmed in Starbucks itself, until one day Starbucks called the producer of Ally McBeal and proposed to mount a Starbucks on the set to stop them from collapsing their coffee shops. Since then they have not stopped collaborating.
If the writers of Ally McBeal had not really felt that Starbucks was the place to know "the true aroma of coffee", they surely would not have included it in their series and now Starbucks would not be so famous. Starbucks emotionally connected with the people who were part of the writing team and they in turn wanted to convey what it feels like to drink coffee in a Starbucks to thousands of viewers.
To finish this article, I include a brief summary of the 8 key factors of the book written by Scott Bedbury and on which this conference was based.
New Brand World: 8 Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century
(I don't translate it because it loses the grace of the pun that is made with “brand” and “brand new” (figuratively speaking, to highlight something that is really new))
1. Being aware of your own brand is not easy: people often confuse the resonance of a brand with the relevance of a brand. What matters is relevance.
2. You have to know the brand well before growing it: many brands do not know who they are, where they come from or where they are going. And of course, they don't know who their clients really are.
3. Watch out for expansion out of measure: just because you think you can do something doesn't mean you should.
4. Big brands establish long-lasting relationships with their customers: relationships that have more to do with emotions and trust than with shoes with an inner tube or with the way the coffee is roasted.
5. Everything counts (including the role of the toilet in your establishment). (Here I make a parenthesis and tell an anecdote that Scott Bedbury shared with those who attended his conference at Expomanagement. It is seen that during the first weeks of Bedbury working for Starbucks, a finance manager proposed to change the role of the toilet of all Starbucks coffee shops, because of those little pieces that you are throwing and are already cut. Bedbury found it horrible that someone could, in favor of reducing expenses, make a Starbucks customer when he was sitting in the toilet,relate that establishment to a gas station (it must be typical of the US gas stations that have this type of paper… here we would settle for having paper when you need it…) In the end Bedbury won and Starbucks customers can continue to use the toilets without remember, while they relieve themselves, the American gas stations.)
6. All brands need good parents: but unfortunately most brands come from busy homes.
7. Being great is not an excuse to be bad: really great brands use their "superpowers" to do good and put people and principles ahead of profits.
8. Relevance, simplicity and humanity, before technology, will distinguish brands in the future.
