How Amazon is Changing Branding

As some larger corporate brands have been slow to adapt to ever changing market opportunities, Amazon has opened its doors to allow new breed of nimble entrepreneurs to sell on their website that make a living importing and private labeling goods produced in China.

This is an advantage that Wal-Mart.com does not have - thousands of individual independent sellers rewarded by taking risks and making micro improvements to every business product category. 

But it’s not all easy for the sellers as competition is now fierce. Entrepreneurs scout for products they can sell and hope to make a profit on the spread. But Amazon seller fees are substantial and Amazon competes with its sellers and decides who gets into the all-important “Buy Box.” Amazon has also closed several categories to new vendors that it manages itself.

Many of these entrepreneurs are not concerned with developing a brand, as customer reviews have taken the place of the need for a brand as the provider of customer trust.

What does this all mean for branding? Customer reviews in many cases have become as important as a brand name in regards to delivering customer trust.

Learn More at ThatBrandGuy.com

How Snapchat Killed “Good Design”

The Apple brand comes quickly to mind when discussing the innate natural beauty of aesthetic design and how we interact with products and user interface that we encounter in everyday life. Apple gave us clean fonts, broad white backgrounds, product heroes, and simplicity in a world of visual chaos. Apple set the standard of beauty that the world could see, understand and emulate.

The same was true for others like Google, whose home page design set the bar for functional utility with its utter devotion to one simplistic task- a search bar that awaits your entry.

1998 was a big year for design. Apple launched its original iMac and Google debuted its iconic homepage. Average Americans without formal artistic or design training were exposed to this wave of great design in product and services. An innate sense of “good design” became more apparent and important to the masses.

This exposure and a celebration of great design became a topic of conversation in corporate boardrooms and with consumers alike. While many Americans may not have been able to verbalize the design principles behind their gut intuition, they “knew good design when they saw it.” We became a nation that understood the ability of "great design" to propel business and improve lives.

2017 changed all that when Snapchat introduced “World Lenses.” For those of you unfamiliar with Snapchat, think of the ability to place your Selfie into a Mario Bros. video game. It’s a scary place where dancing hotdogs, waterfalls of hearts and sparkling stars randomly appear, and people vomit rainbows while wearing dog face cartoon masks.

So where’s the harm in a little dysfunctional visual fun? Well it turns out that 158 million people are on Snapchat an average of 18 times a day placing hearts in their eyes and elongating their tongues. A generation of Millennials now solely communicates with one another by visual means - sharing silly facial exaggerations and flying OMG unicorns that puke rainbows and showers of stars.

From a cultural perspective, Snapchat alone has exposed a generation of young minds to the antithesis of design aesthetics, with massive daily doses of function-less visual chaos, where sparkles and glitter are showered upon us and cliché trite animated cartoon visual representations are repeated endlessly - until they become the accepted way we communicate, and hence, define "good” design.

A generation of Millennials is now growing up in a virtual world of visual chaos and mindless self-absorption. What Apple has given us – Snapchat has taken away.

Smith & Wesson: The Worst Branding Disaster Since New Coke

Smith & Wesson has a 164-year legacy as one of America’s most recognized and trusted brands. It’s firearm sales have set records in each of the last 19 months. So why did its stock earnings plunge 90% this quarter? For one simple reason: the management of Smith & Wesson did not understand branding and the value of their brand.

This week, the manufacturer of pistols and rifles decided to change the name of their parent company from Smith & Wesson to quite possibly the most bland, unmemorable and meaningless name ever devised in the history of poor management: “American Outdoor Brands.” Are you excited yet?

One of the reasons given by these branding rocket scientists for this stupefying move was the firm’s product expansion into the camping equipment arena. But this defies logic, as the Smith & Wesson brand has been synonymous with the rugged outdoors since 1852. Would you pay more for authentic Smith & Wesson camping gear, or for the generic name you never heard of… American Outdoor Brands camping gear?

Of course we would pay more for authentic Smith & Wesson gear, as this brand possesses generations of quality manufacturing, family traditions and historical significance. The fabric of this brand is woven into the US military as standard issue to police and armed forces throughout the world, including 800,000 .38 revolvers for the allied troops in WWII.

And what of the brand’s heritage? In 1857 Smith & Wesson created the first practical cartridge revolver, and the .44 Magnum, popularized by the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” films. The Model S&W500 revolver is the biggest, heaviest, most-powerful factory production, double action revolver in the world. And with $903 Million in sales last year, you’d think someone in management at Smith & Wesson would have said – hey, wait a minute…what would it cost to build a brand name like Smith & Wesson that owns global recognition and a 164-year-old legacy – and why are we changing success?

But tragically, that didn’t happen. What did happen is Smith & Wesson’s self-inflicted head wound - probably the worst branding disaster since New Coke.

Florida’s Natural: A Slight Branding Change = Big Success

Florida’s Natural is a farmer’s agricultural cooperative that built themselves from a small group of farms in 1933 into a global powerhouse in the citrus business.

You’ll recall their highly memorable TV spot, the image of a shopping mom reaching through the retail shelf into an orange grove where a friendly-gloved farmer passes the product directly from the orange grove into her hands.

But research showed that customers were not associating the TV spot with the product package on shelf. While everyone knew of the famous TV spot, no one realized that this spot was connected to our package. The magic of the TV spot was disconnected at the point of sale.

Once we had identified the problem, the solution was self evident, and we created a visual icon of the famous farmer/customer hand-off that was placed front and center on all our new products that would visually connected the dots for our customers from the TV spot to the package on shelf.

The results were astounding. We grabbed an 18.1% market share in the ready-to-drink not-from-concentrate category – the largest market share gain in the firm’s history, and Florida’s Natural NFC became the best selling chilled juice in airports across the nation.

The brand was 99% there before we started work, but that 1% difference we added by identifying the problem and adjusting the packaging to connect the brand to the iconic TV spots added dramatically to the firm's’ bottom line.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can do for your brand.

A Non-Traditional Sales Approach That Built a Category Leader

Today the Lansinoh brand dominates the breastfeeding category with $80M in sales across 80 countries – but it wasn’t always that way. When I met the Founder, Resheda Hagan, Lansinoh was a one-product brand. Literally, her first product batches were mixed up in her bathtub. But Resheda had a vision and a passion that she would build a world-class brand sold in Walmart - one day soon.

Our challenge was simply to figure out how to make that happen. Walmart does not make small brands large; they make big brands even bigger, so starting out with the challenge to get a Walmart buyer ‘s interest was difficult to say the least.

Buyers buy from established brands, and Walmart has a policy that they alone cannot be more than 40% of your business, which is almost impossible with the growth and distribution power of Walmart. Walmart buyers are like any other, the more they buy from the big proven brands, the less paperwork they have to fill out and manage. Jumping through the hoops to get a new brand up and on the system is simply extra work that no one has time for.

So our challenge was this, why would a buyer who purchases tens of millions of dollars from competitive firms talk to a little one-product firm like Lansinoh when they can create a similar product in their own factories in China?

The solution that built the Lansinoh brand was out-of-the-box and a non-traditional pitch. We capitalized on a newspaper article of a Floridian woman who was removed from a Walmart store for breastfeeding her newborn in public. So after hitting a wall with the product buyers, we took this article in hand and went directly to the HR department, requesting an emergency meeting to discuss the ramifications of an anti-breastfeeding story that took place inside a Walmart – before the story went viral.

The phone rang back immediately and we got our meeting. We shared the article that HR was familiar with, and lamented the irony of America’s family store not supporting the basic bonding of a mother and her child. We then countered with a proposition to resolve the entire issue. We could together build the world’s first breastfeeding category in Walmart to counteract this story.

We shared our research that showed Lansinoh as the leading recognized brand in the yet to be breastfeeding category, and by the time we left, we were given 6 feet of shelf space and asked to brand 40 non-branded related breastfeeding products that were made in China under the Lansinoh name.

In one meeting, the Lansinoh brand was born and we had a line of 40 products under our brand. Never would this have happened if we had approached the buyers in the traditional manner. Sometimes it pays to draw outside the lines.

Without this non-traditional approach, this category leader would never have existed.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.

A Sales Gimmick That Killed A Profitable Category

Coppertone had been the suncare category leader for decades. Competitive innovation was stiffening, and for the first time in its history, Coppertone was losing market share.

So Coppertones' sales force came up with a brilliant sales scheme to vastly increase their sales orders one year - they would offer retailers a guaranteed post-season buy-back that would vastly boost their initial annual sell-in numbers. Retailers went nuts over the guaranteed sales idea. The Coppertone sales force exceeded their all-time sales records and were off to Hawaii for an all-expense paid trip to celebrate their best sell-in numbers in the history of the firm.

The beauty of the pitch was that suncare products were shelf-stable with a 12-month expiration date, so they figured that any returned US products at the end of the year could be resold to the South American market as their summer was just heating up when fall and winter are arriving in the US.

But that’s not how things worked out. Retail buyer’s overstocked Coppertone product due to the buy-back guarantee that caused a huge amount of returns of unsold stock that began to fill their warehouses. In fact, much more US product was returned than could be sold in South America.

Meanwhile the scheme was taking a toll across the entire category that became a giant net loss. As the 800lb gorilla of the category, if Coppertone offered a guaranteed buyback, certainly the retailer's expected the same from the rest of the manufacturer’s in the category. The result was that retailers no longer took any sales risk.

By the end of the year, all the manufacturer's profit was stripped from the category, and that cat could never go back into the bag. Retailers to this day demand a guaranteed buyback in the suncare category, and only those who play the game will get the retailer’s business. No longer is branded suncare a highly profitable business, and with the advent of private label brands taking the lion’s share of sales, category innovation and new players are scarce.

The profitable suncare category was killed by sales team willing to give away the core long-term profit center of a business in order to make their short-term sales numbers.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.

Brand America

Branding A Great Nation

When one thinks about branding in terms of our great nation, America has built an amazing brand. In fact, Brand America has become one of the grand brands of all time.

To prove my posit, I will define the key parts of a brand below and endeavor to enlighten readers with supporting historical evidence regarding exactly how each element serves to establish Brand America and delivers on it’s promise, as stated in The Declaration of Independence.

Brand Name:

Brand America

Product:

Freedom and The American Way

Brand Legend: (The story behind the brand)

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“… And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” - The Declaration of Independence

Brand Overview: (Introduce the brand)

Brand America is universally acknowledged as the world’s flag of freedom. Brand America is the beacon of prosperity, welcoming all who cherish the spirit of liberty and the self-government of humanity.

First in Category:

The Original Source of Human Freedom

Brand Positioning: (Where our brand resides in the customer mind map)

“Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” - God Bless America

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”

– The Declaration of Independence

Brand Promise: (The promise our brand delivers that competitors do not)

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” – The Declaration of Independence

Brand Unique Selling Proposition: (What differentiates our brand from others)

“Government of the People, By the People, and For the People”

– The Gettysburg Address

Brand Mantra: (The genetic code for the brand - Three words that define the fundamental core values of the brand)

Liberty, Freedom, Self-Rule

Brand Personality: (What the brand would tell the customer if it could speak)

“We are the champions of democracy.”, “America: Love it or Leave it.”

“Let Freedom Ring.”

Customer Mind Set: (Where the customer perceives your brand against competitive set)

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to

breathe free.” – Emma Lazarus (Statue of Liberty plaque)

Competitive Set: (List competition)

Communism, Dictatorship, Autocracy, Fascism, Monarchy, Theocracy

Product Channels: (Where the product will be available)

Currently distributed in North America with various points of worldwide distribution, with significant expansion post WWII; repatriating France, and the conversion of Germany and Japan.

Brand Touchpoints:

Related American cultural exports: Hollywood, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, FedEx, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Boeing, Starbucks

Primary Brand Conceptual Messages: (Commonly utilized advertising copy points - prioritized)

“We the People”– The U.S. Constitution

“In God We Trust.” – Motto

“E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many; One.) – The Great Seal of the United States

Target Audience: (The core target market)

All humanity and its tired masses yearning to breathe free.

Competitive Positioning: (Our position against the category leader)

“One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

– The Pledge of Allegiance

Brand Leadership Positions: (Where we will lead the category)

Technology, Medicine, Entertainment, Software, Military, Humanitarianism, Philanthropy, Cultural Exports

Brand Awareness:

230 years of spreading freedom worldwide

Brand Icons:

The US Flag, The Great Seal, The Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, The Bald Eagle, US Currency, The US Capitol, The White House.

Why We Will Win vs. the Competition

“It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights” – The Declaration of Independence

Therefore Brand America will succeed to inspire and attract the best and the brightest minds in the world. 

Excerpt from the book “Secrets of Branding” by Tim Ransom

Available on Amazon

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.

Star Trek & A Common Cultural Fabric

Multiple Streaming Platforms Are Diluting Our Shared Experiences

Our ever-diversifying world of shared content continues to lead us into a realm of cultural disassociation, where we no longer have shared and unified content experiences to discuss over the company water cooler.

Growing up in the late 1970’s, (Millennials feel free to skip ahead) “Saturday Night Live” was the topic of every Monday morning discussion in the halls of my high school alma mater. We all shared a common experience, meeting the Coneheads, a land shark, Roseanne Roseannadanna, and of course we watched Mr. Bill destroy yet another set – “OH-Nooo”. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Jane Curtin’s work dominated our conversations, delivering a shared cultural fabric that provided a common starting point for conversation.

Star Trek and Mork & Mindy gave us new words like warp speed, tricorder, shazbot! and Nanu Nanu that deepened our shared cultural bonds. The Phrases “Beam me up Scotty”, “Live Long and Prosper” and “Dammit Jim, I'm a Doctor not a ....” provided a semantic foundation that bound us together.

In the 1990’s it was “Seinfeld,” and Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer that enlightened us to the absurdities of everyday life in the city. And then in the early 2000’s, Carrie Bradshaw and friends gave us “Sex in the City” with plenty to talk about.

But today we are beginning to experience a cultural rift in the shared content we experience. As TV morphs into multiple streaming platforms and more great original content abounds, friends no longer experience a shared perspective. Some of us become Roku or Netflix binge watchers, while others prefer Amazon Prime or live in a Hulu bubble, and soon our very language is no longer shared, nor our content common.

We now find our friends more frequently speaking a different language and living inside a different world. Huluites will dwell on “The Mindy Project” and “Casual”, while your Amazonian Prime friends gather around to share "The Man in the High Castle" and ‘Transparent” scenes. And our Netflix buddies discuss the latest “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black” episodes. 

Sports has become the only savings grace, continuing to provide us with a shared cultural fabric on Monday nights – that is if you’re a sports fan.

So the challenge to advertisers and marketing professionals becomes this- it’s a new world out there, and we need to become a market niche specialist, speaking the language and understanding the culture of the streaming platform most favored by your target audience.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.

How to Build a Profitable Branded Business Within a Commodity Category

If you think about it, every grocery category has branded product and private label (store brand) products. Take the deli meat case in Walmart for example. There are national brands like Hillshire Farms, Oscar Meyer and Jennie-O, regional brands like Boar's Head and Tennessee Pride, and Walmart’s own price-sensitive private-label brand; Great Value.

Why is there no national brand in the egg category?

This brand & private label scenario plays out across every category in every grocery store across the nation – except in one category: Fresh Eggs. Now Fresh eggs are sold everywhere, but why is there no national brand?

Limited shelf life

For one reason, egg distribution is a regional business, where local farmers supply local grocers. Eggs of course have brittle shells and are difficult to ship. Their limited shelf life of 3-5 weeks if refrigerated, prevents the distribution of a national brand. National branding only arrived in the dairy case 20 years ago when two technologies came together: aseptic packaging and refrigerated trucks.

Eggs are a commodity item

There is no better quality of egg, so no price or quality tiers exist. In the business, there are what we call “specialty eggs,” that consist of organic product, and the cage-free option that everyone surveyed is a proponent of but few are willing to actually pay a premium for. So brands do not exist in the fresh egg category because customers know that there is no difference between a branded higher priced egg and a non-branded lower priced egg, and see no reason to pay a premium.

So what is a farmer to do?

Selling a commodity-based product is a no-win scenario, as price is the only customer motivation. Eggs are the cheapest form of protein in the store. I just bought a dozen for $1.18 – or 9 cents per egg, a ridiculously low price for what it takes to produce, package, ship and display the product. Currently we have an overproduction of eggs, so manufacturers are dumping their eggs at below cost and even selling the higher cost organic eggs in non-organic packages at non-organic prices, just to move them out the door.

So how do you build a profitable branded business in the egg category?

You do this by taking several steps:

1.   Remove the customer irritations from the product

Cracking eggs is messy and shipping fragile eggs are difficult.

Just as the ready-to-drink category revitalized the beverage category, we start by selling a better product that is “ready-to-pour”. No one needs to crack eggs anymore, and there are many producers of liquid eggs.

2.   Make it shelf stable

Aseptic containers are readily available. Select a package with a large pour spout and shrink-wrap the closure to offer safety and security and it creates a great artistic pallet for branding and graphics.

3.   Deliver added-value

If we add-value; adding unique flavors and omelet ingredients, we differentiate ourselves as a ready-to-pour product and added value products can be branded and sold above commodity margins, making your product an impulse-based product with a higher perceived value.

This allows you to you eliminate the risk of commodity price fluctuations and enter the marketplace with a brand you can own that possesses a unique and valued difference at a higher price point. With a customer-valued point of difference, you no longer fight the commodity price war and can make reasonable profitable margins.

4.   Large particulate filling capability

Now if you have access to a large particulate filling line, you can add tiny bits of sausage, pepper and onion to your liquid egg base and you have a ready-to-pour liquid omelet.

5.   Add flavor profiles

From here all we do is to select several flavor profiles for our “Ready-to-Pour” omelet product line. We’d make them with real cheese, real eggs and premium pork sausage. Think of a Mexican Chorizo with jalapeno peppers, sausage egg and cheese, a Cajun sausage, egg and rice, or a Texas style eggs, bacon potatoes, sausage and cheddar. 

6.   Now brand the line and go to market

To wrap it up we simply name, brand and position the product and take it to market.

The Formula for Success

This is how to take an unprofitable commodity product and turn it into a profitable impulse-driven value-added product and go from the red to the black on your balance sheet.

We did the same thing for Jimmy Dean Foods, converting the price-volatile raw pork sausage business into a stable and higher profit margin business by selling prepared value-added food items as opposed to selling just the commodity raw meat. The brand grew from $300M to $1B+ following this formula.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.

The Predictable Failure of Sears and Kmart

Customers Don’t Buy Stores - They Buy Brands

When I was a kid, every household had a Sears catalogue. It was as fat as two phone books and filled with everything a kid could wish for at Christmas time. Sears was America’s most iconic store chain for half a century, originating the mail order catalogue business in 1896.

They sold watches, sewing machines and clothing. You could order a motorcar from their catalogue and it was shipped to your house or farm in a crate. Over the decades, Sears built hundreds of major nationally recognized brands: Kenmore in 1913, Craftsman in 1927 and Diehard in 1967 to name a few. This was Sears heyday, when Sears owned the brands America trusted, and America shopped at Sears. Every shopping mall was pinned with a Sears big box outlet, and things were good. So it was no surprise that Sears headquarters was the world’s tallest building.

But today things are different. Decades of focus on building stores as opposed to building brands has bleed red ink for the big box retailer, who is now closing another 150 stores and selling off its family jewels. The Craftsman Tool brand was recently sold for $900 million, and Diehard and Kenmore are on the block for the highest bidder. According to Moody's, Sears must raise $1.5 billion to stay in business through 2017. Recently Sears (SHLD) reported a loss of $471 million in the first quarter, worse than a year ago. Sales fell more than 8%. The company said it is looking at strategic alternatives for its Home Services installation and repair businesses as well.

But history repeats itself. Enter rival Kmart, who bought Sears for $11B in 2004. Aside from their “Blue Light Specials” where flashing blue lights inside Kmart stores would alert customers to limited time savings on isle 2, Kmart was most famous for launching and building The Martha Stewart Living brand.

Kmart gave away the distribution, shelf space and feature displays to help launch the Martha Stewart brand, converting Martha from a cooking TV show hostess into a blockbuster national retailer of consumer products goods overnight.

The Martha Stewart Living brand brought customers to Kmart in droves, but the store-focused Kmart didn’t see the value in owning the brand. Eventually the MSL brand outgrew the retailer itself. And Martha was out courting larger and more prestigious retailers like Macy’s. While Kmart was focused on building stores and traffic, Martha was building a brand. The home goods mogul said she regrets not buying Kmart before the discount chain went south.

You see, customers don’t buy stores- they buy brands. But both Sears and Kmart are failing because they were focused on building retail stores and generating store traffic, when they should have been focused on building the brands that were the reason customers walked through their doors.

Customers went to Kmart to buy Martha Stewart products. They went to Sears specifically to buy a Diehard battery, a Kenmore washer or Craftsman tool. Many Millennials have never stepped foot inside a Kmart or Sears store. Without these and other great brands, they never will.

Contact us at ThatBrandGuy.com to see what we can to for your brand.