It’s not surprising then that replica guitars are good business. Guitar brand Gibson have made replicas of legendary Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page’s favourite guitars, and charged a premium for the first 50, each signed by the man himself. Now Gibson have made a limited edition of fifty copies of his famous double-necked Gibson Les Paul guitar, complete with the scratches and marks of his original. It’s what happens next that is novel.  Jimmy plays a Led Zeppelin riff on each one. Then he signs it. The pick he used is taped to the neck of the guitar, though perhaps not by him.

Page says a bit of his DNA is in each one. For this, the price goes up to $50,000. You get a guitar that Jimmy played, not on stage, not with the band, just in the Gibson showroom for a matter of seconds, as he demonstrates in the promotional film.

It is simultaneously real and contrived. It is not Jimmy Page’s guitar, but he did play it. This feels like a brilliant way to create value, by letting the customer feel close to his guitar hero. If you can’t meet Jimmy Page, still less afford to buy one of his actual guitars, this is a sort of shadow version of that. He was there, and now you are there. This guitar, your guitar, was in his hands.

Now I’m musing on what else could get the Gibson/ Jimmy Page treatment. If guitars aren’t your thing, how about a limited edition tennis racquet that Roger Federer or Serena Williams had served a few balls with? Not one of their racquets, but a brand new one which they took a few swings with before signing it and putting it down. Or a pair of football boots that Lionel Messi slipped his feet into – one of fifty pairs, of course, each of which he wore for a minute or two and maybe kicked one ball with.

This is transparently a commercial transaction. Jimmy picked out a few notes so that the guitar can cost ten times as much as if he had not. Guitar fans tell me they think it is worth it. His touch has created value. He’s been paid for an hour of strumming, Gibson have taken $2.5 million for fifty guitars that probably cost less than a thousand dollars each to make, and there are fifty contented, starstruck buyers. It’s a glorious example of value creation in which everyone wins.

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Parkrun’s growth has been phenomenal. Their mission is “to transform health & happiness by empowering people to come together, to be active, social & outdoors.”  They want to reach more people. Commendable. They say critics don’t understand parkrun – it’s a community event not a race, they tell us. They see inactive or socially isolated people as the ones who need parkrun most. So it is important that people don’t fear that they will be too slow or will feel unwelcome.

Over the years the parkrun team have looked for ways to make it less intimidating for the inactive, with initiatives like tail walkers so a newcomer won’t be last, and parkwalk to legitimise the participation of people who don’t run at all. Notice that those are things that happen in real life, at the events – they are nothing to do with the published results. What matters is whether you turn up, and whether you have a good experience. That happens between 8.30 and 10am on a Saturday in a park. It’s likely that word of mouth is the biggest factor in getting people there, and volunteers being welcoming and tolerant of slowness determine whether nervous newbies come back.

Now parkrun says that “insight”, by which they probably mean market research, has told them that the statistics are a deterrent for those who are new to exercise. They want to “present data in a way that is not off-putting and doesn’t imply that parkrun is a race.” So they have removed course records, along with lists of who’s had most first finishes, sub-17 minute men and sub-20 minute women, and age grade or category records.

Will that help parkrun to keep growing? You had to look hard to find where the course records (male and female) were listed at the bottom of a page along with other stats for each parkrun. Hard to spot, unlike the ‘latest results’ page, which always has someone pretty fast (and male) in first place. Is that a deterrent? If it is, it’s still there. Seeing that someone else once ran it in 16 minutes is hardly relevant, though watching speedy runners can be quite exciting. Might not some people be motivated that they can be part of the same event as an Olympian?

What about the other information that’s now been hidden – fastest men and women, age-grade records and the rest. Newcomers to parkrun will have been completely unaware of those extra tabs on the website. Some parkrunners, on the other hand, find them interesting and motivating. There’s a Facebook group called parkrun statsgeek with thirteen thousand members. Most of them are pretty upset about the loss of access to the statistics. A poll shows 82% of them disagree with parkrun’s decision, 66% strongly. These are the people who run parkrun most weeks. Many of them are volunteers without whom the weekly events could not run.

In business terms, parkrun is prioritising non-customers over its most loyal customers. What’s more, it won’t address either of the issues that have triggered this change. Non-runners won’t have known about these lists but will still see the weekly results that look very much like race results. Meanwhile, the parkrun regulars feel they have lost something, and that they are not valued. From the Facebook statsgeek group:

“I tried to see most runs in my age group at Huddersfield. Including friends who are now in older age groups. Not a time thing. First time in 12 plus years I could not see anything. I feel robbed”

“My reading of the situation is that parkrun don’t want this kind of thing at their events so if my purpose for being there is to race or chase records then I am not welcome at their events.”

“I get really motivated and inspired by looking at performances from older females in my Age Cat and above.”

So to the elephant here. Parkrun was getting a lot of criticism for letting male runners who identify as women register as female, taking First Female finishes, age-grade records and female course records. Since the weekly results are not changing, this doesn’t change either. It’s just harder to track. Meanwhile the males registered as female (twenty or so in the UK) can continue to feature in the female placings.

Parkrun changed the product hoping to make it less unappealing to non-customers, but they have succeeded in upsetting many of their existing customers, especially the most committed, and there are certainly more than twenty of them. It has also made many more people aware of parkrun’s self-ID policy, which runners know is counter to that of World Athletics and UK Athletics because it is unfair to female runners. It’s even possible that for every non-runner who is pleased the stats have gone, there’s one who is deterred by an organisation that seems to put trans-identifying males before women.

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Many a brand manager claims that success will come from building a small but immensely loyal following. Marmite embraced the fact that some people can’t stand the stuff with its “Love it or hate it” advertising. But don’t be fooled. This isn’t like picking a president. Even people who love Marmite don’t eat it exclusively in their sandwiches or on their toast. In any category where there is regular repeat purchase, such as grocery products, big brands are bought by more people, more of the time. Small brands don’t have a tiny cadre of devoted followers; they are bought some of the time by some people. The idea that aiming to be perfectly appealing to a small segment is a winning strategy for a grocery brand was debunked by the work of English academic Andrew Ehrenberg and popularised by his Australian protégé Byron Sharp in his book How Brands Grow. Instead, they argue, market penetration is the key to success for fmcg brands.

It is different in categories where you can only use one at a time, and buy infrequently. Few people who have an Apple iphone considers Samsung when it’s time to upgrade, or vice versa. Even where we are not tied in by familiarity with a system, a strongly defined position that some will love and many will reject can still work, especially if it’s at a price premium. Farrow & Ball, the upmarket paint brand, is easy to mock for its quintessential Englishness and its cutsey names. (The title of this piece uses two of the mildest.) But they don’t seem to mind. Enough people are willing to sport out two and a half times the price of a gallon of B&Q white for a can of Farrow & Ball Old White™ – and it’s not even white.

The universal truth, for all categories, is that brands grow in one of three ways. More people buy them, or people buy them more often, or they use more. There is a parallel with voting here: getting the vote out can be a winning strategy. Brands that stimulate purchase, consumption, and ultimately regular repeat purchase, will thrive. Here, lateral-thinking marketers have a huge advantage over the politicos. We can expand the market. We can even compete in different markets – not just new geographies but new sectors. A breakthrough in thinking at the Coca Cola Company was when they stopped thinking about share of the cola market or even the fizzy drinks market and started thinking about share of throat, i.e. all drinks consumption. It’s said of Colman’s mustard powder that all the profit comes from what we throw away. This is not a good place to be. Marmite is trying to stimulate consumption by teaming up with grocery and food delivery companies to be included in their recipes, a tactic used by many a condiment and now being imitated by others.

Bottom line? Don’t start with your product or even your category. Start with users, and think about all the ways your category, product and brand can fit into their lives. From there, you can build great communications campaigns, and you will find opportunities to innovate in product, packaging and distribution, just as Coke did.

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1. There’s no need to obsess about a name

Was there ever a more mundane brand name than Quality Street? It’s not even original – it was copied from a J.M. Barrie play that was big at the time, now long forgotten. All the rich associations and warm feelings now conjured up by those two words are nothing to do with a clever name or even with persuasive advertising. A name can be a shortcut to meaning but it won’t compensate for lack of meaning. Our brand associations build over time, so a name may be a signal but it’s no substitute for substance in the product. Of course, a name can be actively unhelpful – the Nova car seemingly wasn’t that appealing to the world’s 400 million Spanish speakers. But once you have established a name, even an indifferent one, you change it at your peril, because sometimes it doesn’t go too well.

2. Packaging can be as important as product

Packaging can be part of the product. The first breakthrough of the Mackintosh family business was a product innovation, when Violet Mackintosh mixed brittle butterscotch with runny caramel to make a new kind of toffee. She and her husband John did well. By the time their son Harold took over in the 1930s, Mackintoshes was an international toffee and chocolate business. At that time, chocolates came in expensive boxes, with prices to match. Harold had the idea of wrapping individual sweets in coloured paper instead of laying them out in a fancy tray. Cheaper packaging made chocolates affordable to many more people, creating a virtuous circle of production and distribution efficiency. He even invented a paper twist wrapping machine to automate the process.

3. Consumers make the brand

Now you know that the exciting burst of colour which promises so much as the lid comes off came from a cost reduction effort, not some marketing brainstorm. The enjoyable, noisy rituals of rummaging through the tin and unwrapping the little beauties have grown over time to be part of the pleasure, but these too came about largely by chance. Family battles over favourites, whether empty wrappers go back in the tin (NO!) and when to pass the tin – consumers, not marketing people, have made those connections with Quality Street.

4. Nostalgia doesn’t have to stymie innovation

I’d be shocked if they took away the toffee penny, and I don’t even like it. It feels like the heart of Quality Street. But there has been plenty of innovation over the years. Inspired by consumer language, the Big Purple One and the Green Triangle now exist as giant individual sweets and a chocolate bar. Other flavours have been swapped in and out, sometimes to the dismay of consumers. At one stage people complained there were too many toffees, then complained again when one of them was replaced with something different. Look how the brand team responded: they listened and put it back. (This is also a reminder that listening to customers is not the same as taking instruction from them.) As of 2018 you can buy a personalised selection with your name on the tin. Other packaging changes have been driven by cost or sustainability, such as separating the sweet wrappers into foil and paper for easier recycling.

Quality Street is such an institution that changes in the mix can provoke outrage, and polls have been conducted to determine which are the best. We don’t all have the luxury of a brand built on a lifetime of quiet reliability with some serendipitous decisions thrown in. But we can all make sure we know what people feel about the product and the brand, how they use it, what it means to them, how it fits into their lives. That understanding can unlock great potential.

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Waitrose had to take action to reclaim the offer for genuine customers, and to cut down footfall that was only cluttering up stores. They declared that you could only have one drink a day, and had to show your loyalty card in order to pick up a cup from the customer service desk.

Roll forward to 2018, and everyone’s feeling bad about single-use plastic and packaging waste. Now the problem is the 1m cups being handed out every week. Another rule change. You can still have your free hot drink but you have to bring your own cup.

That will have cut down both spurious visitors and overall use of the machines. But at a price in management time and customer goodwill. Every change has to be worked through, communicated to stores, implemented and supervised. Disgruntled customers have to be advised that “we don?t do that any more” – or worse, “you can’t have that any more”. This one bright idea has generated at least two subsequent rounds of bad news to be dispensed by email and by unfortunate “partners” instore.

One wonders how this came to be top of their list of ways to reward customers in the first place. Who chooses a grocery store based on getting a free hot drink? Indeed, who wants coffee with their shopping trolley? (There’s nowhere to sit.) If you think about what Waitrose stands for, this feels dissonant and always did. Yes it offers some value, perhaps countering perceptions of being expensive. But value that is peripheral to the core isn’t worth much. If it were, taking it away would be a lot harder.

Three take-aways for brands

1. Prioritise the things your business does which matter most to customers. Paradoxically, we tend not to notice when brands get it right, as Waitrose usually does. It’s more important to deliver the basics well, and consistently, than to offer flashy add-ons. It’s usually harder, though, as it is enterprise-wide, whereas promotions can be dreamed up and delivered from the marketing department. But when the add-on becomes more valuable than the core, trouble follows. Ask Hoover.
2. Check the fit between brand and promotion. Waitrose’s free hot drinks stood out in part because even having an extrinsic rewards scheme feels anomalous for them. Businesses have to keep pace with market expectations, like rewarding loyalty. They don’t have to offer loyalty schemes. Laddering up to higher-order benefits will help identify brand-appropriate ways to deliver rewards. Priority booking is a big draw for arts memberships, yet costs theatres and galleries nothing.
3. Offer added value in ways that are accessible to customers only. Avoid instant rewards, unless linked to spend. Waitrose’s free newspapers are linked to a minimum spend instore, so have never had the profile or the problems of the hot drinks offer. Most retail loyalty schemes, like Boots Advantage or Waterstones plus, offer points that take time to accumulate to a worthwhile level. They’re of dubious value to occasional customers, but they capture share of wallet, and prompt discretionary spend.

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Brands should be used sparingly. They are meaningless unless communicated and supported, and that’s expensive to do. The rationale should be external not internal – necessary for the customer, rather than because the business thinks it can benefit. Creating brands may seem like a smart way to justify different prices, or to signal customisation to a different target market. But if the prospective customer has to work to decode the brands, they’re a hindrance to purchase, not a help. If that decoding reveals that the difference is superficial – or a cover for no meaningful difference at all – the customer is unlikely to be impressed.

Who does this well? The world of fashion, being all about image and branding, uses diffusion lines, or sub-brands, to extend to lower price points without diluting the original. Armani Collezione, Emporio Armani and Armani Exchange are clearly not real Italian high fashion, but real enough to someone who can’t afford Armani black. The prices and the very different retail environments reinforce each other so there’s no chance of confusion. Unlike Tesco, parent Armani is comfortable being the expensive one.

Levi’s is at it too, but it’s confusing. Levi’s used to be simple. Now, even classic Levi’s come in dozens of finishes and colours. The website is a perfect illustration of the paradox of choice. Nothing so mundane as Dark Blue, and to my eye Tumbled Rigid and Yokohama Nights look so similar.

Then there are the multiple brands. I know what Levi Strauss is, but Wellthread, Outerknown and Supima? Yes, all on the same jeans. Diligent research will reveal that Wellthread is the name Levi’s have given to their sustainability initiatives, some of which have their own names too, like Levi’s “Water<Less” fabric. By naming it, however, they create a barrier. Tell me you are adopting good working practices, and I might register the fact. But what is this extra label attached to my jeans? I don’t know and I probably don’t care.

Brands are supposed to simplify choice, by making clear what you can expect. If the brand proposition also guides internal decision-making, expectations will be met and customers will be satisfied. That usually enables a branded product to command a price premium. But it doesn’t work the other way round: branding a thing doesn’t automatically make it worth paying more for. Levi’s are still Levi’s. Tesco is still Tesco. And Jack’s? So far, that’s nothing much.

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On the other hand, the share price fell on the news of anti-Nike protests, and brand tracking data has shown a dramatic drop-off in brand regard, among brand buyers and non-buyers alike, and across the political divide. Even people who support the Take A Knee protest think less positively of Nike now, though their view may change, and their behaviour may not.

Both these positions are about whether the decision Nike took – to get involved with a controversial, arguably political, issue and figure – is good or bad for business. What puzzles me is why people at Nike thought this had anything to do with their brand and needed a response in their advertising. Whether it’s naïve to think your consumers must share your political beliefs, or self-important to think brands should use their reach and clout for whatever their version of good is, or cynical to piggyback for profit on someone else’s principled stand, which cost him money, it’s a long way from “Just do it”. Given they are about sport it’s not surprising that taking a knee was talked about in Portland. But why make it a consumer issue?

Nike is about participation. Wearing Nike helps me feel I can perform and compete. Nike-sponsored athletes embody this attitude, and the achievement it can bring. I can’t see that the brand needed to adopt a position on TAK. There are social issues on which brands have to be clear. If you buy Nike, you are in effect endorsing its sourcing practices, so you may want reassurance that it doesn’t use sweatshops or child labour. The company is also defending lawsuits alleging horribly sexist practices in its US offices. But now they’re making me take a stand (knee) on US civil rights. Even people who agree with the take a knee campaign may want their leisure choices to be apolitical.

Levi Strauss has recently announced donations to, and participation in, gun control campaigns in the USA. This is no closer to its core business than civil rights for Nike, but at least it’s a corporate move, in that it’s their behaviour as a business that’s changing, not their marketing messaging. One wonders what behaviour from Nike would legitimise its use of Colin Kaepernick in its advertising. A demonstrable commitment to equality of employment opportunities and practices, perhaps?

Those cynical that Nike has suddenly found a social conscience say this is a hard-nosed commercial decision which indicates Nike’s confidence that non-racists are in the majority – or at least spend more on “athleisure”. But which side of the political divide is commercially best for brands like these isn’t the point. It’s whether marketers are getting it wrong in embracing every social and political issue out there, instead of focusing on, and fixing, the ones that connect to their business, on which their customers need to know where they stand.

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These are important social issues that play out in the workplace. Businesses need to have clear policies, and some people, especially employees and investors, want to know where they stand. But for the most part customers don’t care. This is not marketing.

But shouldn’t brands use their reach, their budgets and their influence for good? Yes, and there are many ways to do this, not all of them with that unflattering bandwagon look. It’s risky, too. Unless the brand is living the values it will emerge as inauthentic. It’s not just the glaringly obvious gaffes like Pepsi’s with Kendall Jenner. Some say that Airbnb is contributing to making life miserable for many social housing tenants who find themselves living next to party flats in big cities because it won’t cooperate with councils to reduce illegal and frequent subletting. Yet the affected tenants may well be the poor, recently-arrived people Airbnb’s inclusive stance purports to embrace. Paperchase ended up looking totally unprincipled recently when it denounced its chosen promotional partner, the Daily Mail, in the face of criticism of the Mail’s politics, which were surely not a surprise revelation.

Brands are a shorthand for a set of values, sure, but first they’re a signal of an offer, something that fulfils a purpose. That purpose is usually mundane and personal. It’s fashionable to reach for a world-changing purpose, but that’s no substitute for meeting a consumer need. Brands can have both but relying on the altruistic one is for charities and other “good causes”. The rest of the world wants something for their money. Employees want to know their work is worthwhile but that can be about little things that are helpful or enjoyable – it doesn?t have to be changing the world. Besides, satisfaction at work comes in many forms, with simple recognition perhaps the most important. People leave bad bosses more than bad jobs.

In these turbulent times it’s worth remembering that virtue-signalling brands are nothing new. Likewise brands that try to shock – think Benetton – or to campaign on political issues. It works when brands choose their own agenda, and set it out proactively. Cosmetics retailer Lush got into trouble this year for its spy cops campaign, which really has nothing to do with its products. Contrast that with The Body Shop, which was driven by issues of sustainability and fairness forty years ago. It was built into their sourcing, product development and distribution practices, not just a few radical tweets and ads. This was true brand activism, and it has lasted. The outdoor brand Patagonia encourages people to repair their garments rather than replace them; it has earned the right to comment on environmental issues, sometimes very boldly. By contrast, the new wave of brand activism seems to be about ensuring the brand is not open to criticism by failing to endorse social issues. As we saw with Paperchase, this can really get your wrapping paper in a twist, because there’s no pleasing everyone.

“There’s no pleasing everyone” is of course a sound starting point for any brand to position itself and create a marketing strategy. It’s the basis of market segmentation, which is still a marketer’s best friend. A brand that is confident of its target market and how it is relevant to them doesn’t have to worry about other people. Focus and consistency will win out over virtue-signalling in the long run.

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1. Forget about building a brand

As an end in itself, it’s pure vanity. Think about brands you know and admire, and why. A great brand is synonymous with a great proposition, not something separate. Even the world’s most valuable brands, like Google and Apple, set out to build a business by solving a problem or meeting a need. Do that well, and you will have a brand.

2. The name’s not that important

Plenty of successful brand names were created accidentally, and plenty of carefully-created ones were disastrous. Good names sometimes refer to the proposition (the Trainline) but this can also be limiting (Carphone Warehouse). I’m fairly sure Coca Cola no longer has any ingredients derived from the poppy plant, nor does Pepsi Cola position itself as a digestive aid. Steve Jobs chose Apple because he liked apples.

3. Don’t focus on creating brand awareness

Advertising is expensive. Even “free” social media is effortful. You’re competing with everything else that can grab attention. Most of the time, most people are not potential customers – even your real customers. Sometimes brands get lucky and get a wave of free publicity, which feels great, but awareness gained this way falls away just as fast. (When did you last think about the brand that had that beach-body-ready woman in the yellow bikini? How many people who did the ice bucket challenge still support that charity? Which charity?) Sustained awareness in the minds of potential customers comes from delivering to them over time, not buying their attention.

Here’s how to get ready to invest in a brand in a way that will be good for your business.

1. Sort out your proposition first

Start with what the business can offer, to whom, and why it’s useful to them. Sounds obvious but when businesses get caught up in a brand-centric approach, it’s easy to lose sight of the customer. Brand values, purpose, ambition, all have a place but they are secondary to the core benefit-led proposition that states who the customer is, in terms of their need, and what you do for them. It’s not about your business, it’s about what your business can do for the customer.

2. Make sure the WIIFM (What’s in it for me) is crystal clear to everyone

The customer has to know what makes your offer good for them. People in the business need to know too so they can deliver on it, and innovate against it to maintain competitive advantage. A clear WIIFM statement – from the customer’s point of view – helps a business to spot competitive threats wherever they come from.

3. Keep your eyes on the customer

Worrying about intermediate goals like awareness, or having a higher purpose, can obscure the fundamentals. Clarity about the need you meet or problem you solve, and for whom, keeps the focus on the customer. This is really going to help to make the business successful. Any good marketing services agency will also want a rich understanding of the target customer, so if they don’t ask, go elsewhere.

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Paperchase is a mass market purveyor of stationery and tat. The Daily Mail is a mass market purveyor of news and tittle-tattle. Seems like a pretty good fit to me. The Daily Mail is read by three million people a day. That’s a lot of people who could be popping into one of Paperchase’s 130 stores in the UK to pick up their free gift wrap. Yet Paperchase has now effectively said, we don’t like you if you’re a Daily Mail reader.

The row was orchestrated by a campaign group called Stop Funding Hate, which exists to “change the media” by taking on “the divisive hate campaigns of the Sun, Daily Mail & Daily Express”. Full marks to them for a crystal-clear proposition. It’s foolish of Paperchase to respond as if their customers are synonymous with this campaign group. This is totally different from advertisers pulling campaigns from Google and YouTube where there was no control over what sort of material might appear alongside their ads. Like it or loathe it, the Daily Mail is nothing if not predictable, which is excellent for its own brand value and for advertisers. If a tie-up with the Daily Mail seemed like a good idea beforehand, it probably still is.

If a brand has no standards or values by which to screen its plans in advance, it must live in fear of doing the “wrong” thing and being criticised by the Twitter mob. But criticism per se is not a problem. Brands should care about the company they keep – that includes where they advertise, what issues matter to them, and also what they choose to ignore. Brands have to decide what they stand for, and build it in to their activity in advance. Then they can, and should, stand their ground when someone else tries to lean on them for their own ends.

Campaign groups have always tried to throw their weight around. Twitter lets some punch above their weight. It can seem like a lot of people feel very strongly about an issue. Brands that panic, and seem to cave easily to such single-issue groups, may relieve short term pressure but they won’t earn respect. Most Daily Mail readers won’t boycott Paperchase, any more than Daily Mail-hating Paperchase shoppers were ready to give it up. Most of us are not in either of these groups; we just see a business that issued a grovelling apology for a harmless promotion in a national newspaper some people don’t like.

The irony is that the Daily Mail has long been used in business as a reference point. To assess whether something one says or writes at work could cause negative PR if it got out, I was told to imagine how it would look on the front page of the Daily Mail – that being the epitome of outraged middle-England sensibilities. Write a dodgy email, even as a joke, and it could look bad if taken out of context and blasted across the news-stands in fifty-point type. What strange times we live in, when the words “Free gift wrap” on that front page can be an incendiary issue for a brand.

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