PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

The case study of marketing the Bahamas, a 600-mile-long string of 700 islands, offers several valuable lessons in marketing a network of businesses under one brand. This case study is also a chapter in Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage, by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn of star marketers Fallon Worldwide.

Some of the lessons they offer on getting to unified positions in our merger and acquisition-mad times:

• Uncover the gap between perception and reality. Fallon preaches “relentless reductionism” in solving problems, often by asking this question: How well do the perception and reality of your company match or not match? Often, the two are far apart. If you can address the fundamental misconceptions about a brand, then you can better figure out how to craft the right marketing message to close the perception-reality gap.
   
• Dig into how different audiences (in the case of the Bahamas, different vacation groups) see you. Often, the research you do will both confirm your worst fears and give you helpful insights; for example, what kind of audience do you have? Are they behind or ahead of the trend curve? What can you do with that intelligence to close to perception-reality gap?
• Practice early collaboration among planning, copy, design and interactive to solve problems faster and from unexpected angles. Like Fallon, we view early collaboration among media, creative and planning as an opportunity to do our best. For the Bahamas, the early solution was a new graphic identity for the whole country that addressed the misperception that the Bahamas were just three or four islands. It always helps, in other words, to create a common framework that the different ‘divisions’ of a country/company can use to market its diverse offerings. A common framework helps people to see the power of the brand and their role in it. It helps people to identify their point of difference, and advantage. And it helps individual businesses to start thinking like a brand, with one voice versus 700.

Best line in the chapter, possibly the book: “We believe there is an essential truth about every brand that gives it the right to exist and prosper in the marketplace.”

What a wonderful and hopeful way to state a fact that is often lost on companies, especially the #3 and #4 contenders lost in the middle of a pack of 10 competitors. Maybe I resonate with it because this is what we do as B2B marketers: ferret out the essential truth of a client and its brand, then delve into the essential truths of its business problem.

What is most often missing on the executional side? It sounds clichéd, but in so many cases (and in the case of the Bahamas), it was “a Web site…so easy to navigate that you couldn’t help digging deeper.” With everyone spending more and more time online, the site should help you experience the richness of the whole company at the pace you want.

Thanks for our hotshot ACD Rebecca Rivera for bringing this book to my continuous partial attention.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Branding, Corporate Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.