Brand what you are really selling

Vistage Speaker Chris Hughes came to Dublin recently to explain to Vistage Members how to make every marketing cent count….

Chris Hughes has established a reputation as an expert in brands and marketing.

He has held senior positions at Mars and Pillsbury UK. He later set up Prince Sportsgroup UK, which he later sold on to the Italian group, Benetton.

Chris describes himself as a “classically trained marketing guy” who is now a ‘value proposition specialist.’  His core message is straightforward :

We have been through a long period of expansion, when consumers were splashing the cash, allowing companies without ‘ real points of difference’ to survive, and even thrive.

However, we are now in a completely different situation , in an era of austerity when only the best placed will survive.

“Eighty per cent of the companies I work with do not have a focused value proposition and are essentially commodity producers, driven by price .. This is the last place where you want to be.”

“The work I do through Vistage is in getting people to understand the need for a differentiated proposition.”

But what if the product, or service, is not capable of differentiation ?

“Very few products are in that position.”

‘Volvo do not just sell cars, they sell safety…what are YOU selling?’

The key to the conundrum lies in “that which you deliver beyond the product, or service that you offer. Volvo does not just sell cars, they sell safety. Coca Cola is selling tradition, heritage and authenticity,.”

“The value proposition is usually centered round an emotional intangible.”

There are three questions which one should put top oneself :

” What am I selling ? to whom ? from what emotional platform ?”

In recent years, much has been written about the prospective ‘death of the brand’. Chris’s quick response is : “God, No !.. Absolutely not ! ”

In his view, the real problem starts when people start tampering with well established brands.

“Brands get screwed up by marketing people who come in for a short time..”

“True brands guard their position .. I worked at Mars for seven years. What I was told was the following : ‘Chris, you are temporary .. the brand is permanent !”

Lessons from Guinness..

Guinness has long had a winning proposition, ‘Guinness is Good for You’, a proposition linked to the perceived health benefits of stout.

The product was introduced in an era when products such as gin and whiskey dominated, with often very serious consequences for the health of individuals, families and communities.

Guinness, the product, became associated with communities as a solidifying factor, the Guinness family involved in acts of patronage, gifting parks and establishing housing associations. 

However, Chris believes that during the Sixties, the brand was tampered with by people who developed sophisticated award winning Ads. The problem was that it lost the support of many long established customers in the process. He welcomes the return of Guinness, in his view, to its core values.

He points to other great mistakes such as the switch to New Coke, a switch which had to be reversed. Woolworths in the UK, he argues, made a fundamental mistake when it tried to move up into the middle market, away from its core, value proposition. It might still exist had it not made that mistake.”

Hughes accepts that a message of change, as opposed to continuity, can be equally valuable, depending on the circumstances.

“The contest between Barak Obama and John McCain was a battle of brands, of  ‘change’ ( Obama ) versus ‘experience’ ( McCain ). Obama was able to encapsulate his message in the slogan: ‘Yes, we Can !’, but McCain lost his way : What was his strapline ?”

“Obama understood the new media, raising €150m through the Internet.

We have old style marketing, 1.0, from the Fifties where people are interrupted by Ads, shouted at, told what to do, but now we have new style ‘marketing 2.0′ where you have interaction, and not interruption.”

‘Marketing your brand does not need a large budget if you know what you are selling…’

“If you know exactly what your message is, you do not require a large budget. Using ‘2.0′ you can micro budget – what could previously only be applied to large companies, can now be applied to everyone.”

“There is a strict, hierarchical relationship between the creation of the core message, marketing and selling it .. you should not spend a penny on the latter two ( marketing and selling ) until you have developed a focused value proposition.”

Chris Hughes has a longtime involvement with Vistage UK. He recalls taking a call from a CEO who had attended a presentation. The Chief executive rang him up and said : “I have decided to do the maths and have allocated a €25,000 budget .. My response was: ‘absolutely not !’ .. my advice to him was to go back to the structured approach of defining his value proposition, as a first step. Only when this was done could he start allocating funds..”

He recalls spending a day in a company in the health and safety field. “There were twelve to fifteen people in the room, most of whom resented me. By lunchtime, we were flying. I worked with the sales guys, asking them about what they were pitching. Due to a lack of guidance from the centre, the sales guys had carved out a niche for themselves. They had come up with the slogan : ‘there are no short cuts to safety !’ They were defining the value proposition.”

The slogan was reworked as ‘Safety: Absolute.’ It had been put into the form of a positive statement.

“The CEO went to see a major customer. Afterwards he said to me: ‘Crikey ( not the exact word used )  .. It Works ! ”

The customer’s response was: “I like your values. The only problem is that you are €20,000 more expensive.. ( than the rival supplier ). The CEO said to me : ‘Every fibre in me led me to cut the price.” However, he held his nerve and the customer laughed, and signed up.

Chris believes that the business of promoting a product or service has changed fundamentally.

“The days of massive Ad agencies & heavy research .. are gone.”

He insists on the importance of the subliminal in brand building: “We buy out of the emotional side of our brains..”

And he admits: “I do not like working with Corporates.. I find that the marketing people in corporations are more in the service of their own agendas.. The average length of tenure of a chief marketing officer is very short.. given the sort of characters they are,  they want to make their mark .. they mess up the brand.”

The target market has changed just as fundamentally as the means of communication of the core branding messages. The customer of 2010 is a very different individual to those of say, 1960.

“They are massively more demanding, more critical. They demand a relationship with the brand.. It is very much of a two way dialogue. You now have blogs, fora, clubs. ‘Pampers’ is a classic example. If you look at their promotions, there is not a single word about product .. what they are selling is a partnership in pregnancy and parenting..”

“What they are saying is this: ‘We will share with you our information, our guidance .. and we would like you to buy our products..”

Chris accepts that old fashioned price based selling ( of the Ben Dunne ‘Better Value Beats Them All’ variety ) still has its place. “But you have to be the best to do it.”

He points to the sophisticated approaches adopted by Tesco, with their “Every Little Helps” approach to customer attraction & retention.

“Tesco were the first people to open up new checkouts where they saw that more than three people were queuing at existing checkouts..”

“They ( Tesco) are an integrated part of my life. I use their insurance. They have built a relationship with me. You can argue about their dominance, ( but ) Tesco are brilliant marketeers.”

Chris Hughes on Vistage…

So what about the Chris Hughes brand ?

After years as a senior marketing director with Mars and Pilsbury, Chris went out on his own. He joined Vistage as a chairman, helping to develop a network of contacts.  

“Vistage has helped me enormously by giving me access to some very open minds, to people who hear what I am saying. If I have done anything, it is that I demystify..”

“My value proposition is to make marketing simple. That resonates with Vistage people.. There is a whole industry out there whose agenda is to make it seem incredibly complex.”

“People in Vistage do not buy the bullshit .. they do want to be talked to in non patronising language.”      

“You are already seeing fundamental changes in Advertising spend, a lot more of which is moving online. A huge percentage of marketing spend is wasted. What is the most cost effective way of reaching a customer?  Probably not an Advert anymore.  It is more likely to be positive use of a website which does not cost a huge amount when compared with a €1m Ad campaign.”