Brand Success Depends on Four Key Factors

Brand success depends on four broad drivers, and marketing visibility has a strong part to play in adding to a brand's equity. These messages were at the core of a client breakfast seminar organised by Millward Brown UK earlier this week entitled "World Brands".

The event was held to share Millward Brown's latest findings based on data from thousands of brands and campaigns the company has tracked, copy tested and studied using BrandDynamics(tm), and also to provide a glimpse of how Millward Brown views the responsibilities faced by large corporations in ensuring future brand health.

The morning began with Gordon Pincott, Executive Head of Client Service, Millward Brown UK, talking about the evolution of brands. Today's brands, said Pincott, are about experience and meaning. They have values and they can offer the consumer an experience well beyond the functionality of the product and the presence of a personality. Which means that they have become more difficult to manaMRS Conference 2002 Info & Registrationthe same time, more important to companies that own them because they are the cornerstones of corporate wealth.

Clients then heard how Millward Brown believes that four broad factors drive brand success. Graham Page, Director Group Research and Development, explained to the audience that the first driver involves ensuring that all the right things are in place for marketing to leverage. In other words, getting the Business Basics in place - ensuring the organisation is sound, can make decisions quickly, has a flexible supply chain, appropriate pricing of offerings, and maximised distribution etc.

The second factor involves ensuring that you have a Great Product - something the marketing programme can leverage. Or a product that is good, meets emerging consumer needs and has widespread distribution.

The third, continued Page, is the ability to project a clear positioning and set of values. Such clarity comes from consistency of associations and message over time, and across all points of contact consumers have with the brand, ie, the advertising, the packaging, where the brand is sold, etc, and the product itself.

The final broad characteristic of many successful brands is that they project a sense of leadership. Brands displaying Projected Leadership are not necessarily the biggest brands: often, they are those that are seen as leading the category. Either they have created this positioning through genuine innovation, and especially promoted innovation, or through brand visibility, especially through visible marketing. The importance of a sense of leadership, and the fact that nearly all successful brands appear to project a clear positioning and set of benefits underlines the importance of visible copy that communicates relevant values.

Millward Brown has always argued that visibility creates the opportunity to communicate and to create clear values and positioning. But the findings from this latest work, concluded Page, demonstrate that marketing visibility per se has the potential to add to a brand's equity.

Page then handed the floor back to Pincott, who closed the seminar by talking about changing consumer attitudes. Pincott argued that in an era where accountability is a key global trend, consumers are looking for shortcuts to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and so big companies are going to have to get serious about their social and environmental responsibility. "Those brands that understand their consumers, are adept at envisioning future developments and know how to communicate with their customers," said Pincott "will be able to reap even greater rewards. Brands that fail to understand will be subject to greater pressures and risk extinction."

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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