A recent story has hit a number of news outlets and got me thinking…

If a relatively inexpensive product and widely-regarded consumer packaged goods brand can be threatened by counterfeiting, what sort of long-term impact might bogus products have on marketing? While misleading claims and fake products may have given rise to modern discipline of branding over the past century, has our industry helped solve the problem or created easy targets for fraud and copyright infringement to run rampant?
Of course knock-offs have are understood to be an ongoing international threat within many luxury and high-priced categories—media products, cigarettes, and even pharmaceuticals, as well as apparel and accessories.

Hey buddy, do you wanna buy a watch?

But if a brand is a promise, what happens when that promise is broken by a third party? Is imitation the most sincere form of flattery, or just the latest (and one of the oldest) threat to marketing?

If Heinz Ketchup is at risk, what steps are you taking to keep pirates and scoundrels from blowing up your brand? Do we need more relation? More technology? More differentiation?

As a side note, the Heinz story appears to be a very isolated incident and has not impacted my opinion of what is perhaps the world’s greatest condiment.*

* The comments and opinions expressed in this discussion are of the individual author and/or members of this group and may not reflect the opinions of the rest of the world. Although many individuals may believe that Heinz Ketchup is in fact the world’s greatest condiment, others may prefer Hunt’s Catsup or even mustard. Hot sauce is also very popular. Regardless, Heinz Ketchup is a staple in my own kitchen and I have been known to exaggerate claims (but never in a misleading or criminal way).

Last week, I delivered a talk on motivating consumers to action. My formula for success boiled down to two simple fundamentals. Understand yourself, and understand your customer.

How hard could this be? There isn’t a brand manager alive who doesn’t understand their brand and target market, right?

Wrong. If my experience working with a spectrum of clients is any indicator, brand managers tend to look at their consumer and brand very rationally, in a way that is easily quantifiable. In the process, they miss is a deeper, more powerful undercurrent.

Understand Your Brand

As Simon Sinek argues, most brands know what they do, and how they do it. But they utterly fail to understand why they exist.

I’ve worked on some of the biggest, most sophisticated brands in the world. Even these guys usually  reflect their reason for existence back onto their consumer: We exist to give moms pride in their home, or We exist to provide you a refreshing pause in the day. Makes for a great tagline, but a lousy reason for existence.

I’m encouraged by the success of purpose-driven companies like Apple and Seventh Generation. Their company was an extension of their founders’ personal beliefs. Steve Jobs wanted to challenge the status quo in everything he did; Jeffrey Hollender wanted to create a world where humans and nature co-existed in harmony.

But what to do in the case of, say, a major label household cleaner? More often than not, the product was created by in-house chemists to fulfill a particular market niche. No personal belief in sight.

Complicating matters is the fact most of these products aren’t branded as extensions of their company. Few consumers know Mr. Clean is Procter, or Vim is Unilever.

But Unilever does seem to be unveiling a strategy to answer this dilemma. The packaged goods giant now ties product to company in advertising – for example, unfurling a small ‘U’ logo flag at the end of commercials. And Unilever the company has an extremely strong corporate belief system, complete with social and environmental platforms that are industry-leading.

Although it’s still more difficult for a Unilever brand manager to connect the dots between their product and their corporate beliefs than, say, a Seventh Generation employee, the giant packaged goods company is closing the product / belief gap.

Understand Your Consumer

It’s no secret consumers are looking for more than products. In fact, the more products are commoditized, the more consumers want brands with congruent beliefs to buy into.

Brands have always been about aligned beliefs, its true. Consumers defined themselves by the brands they kept – I’m a Harley guy, or I’m an Armani woman. These alignments, although heartfelt, seldom went deeper than the message the brands advertised to consumers – the ‘lifestyle’ they promised.

Today, consumers want brands that fulfill deeper emotional needs. Brands that are willing to be transparent and humble. Brands with sincere commitments to the environment, social equity and responsible governance.

This is a far cry from consumer needs just a decade ago. I believe it’s a reflection of the rising insecurities we all confront (I call them the four forces of chaos). And for brands, it means understanding – to paraphrase John Marshall Roberts – your consumer’s worldview as much as their rational, pragmatic needs.

The Intersection: Where Futureproof Brands Are Born

Your brand’s belief system will not align with your consumer’s emotional needs on every point. Even if you love the way Seventh Generation sees the world, chances are you’ll still see plenty of areas of disagreement.

However, if your beliefs are aligned on a few points, those anchors open the doors for a conversation. As Blair Enns says, they are the foundation upon which you inspire the interested.

And as your relationship deepens, these points of alignment can align your brand’s direction with your consumer’s vision of the future. Influencing your direction in areas like innovation.

And building that futureproof brand we all want.

AdAge reports that Australia has ruled in favor of plain packaging requirement across all tobacco brands. Regardless of how you feel about the product, is uniform packaging the end of big tobacco?

If the product becomes stripped of brand equity and visual recognition, is there a need to compensate a company for lost revenue and lower overall brand valuation? What about all that lost tax revenue? What about piracy concerns?

Certainly this will have implication in other countries and regions, but what about other product categories? Are candy bars and fast food next? Is consumer packaged goods branding and packaging a public health concern?

What do you think? Is this the end of branding as we know it?

AdAge Article: Australia Is First Country to Require Plain, Logo-Free Cigarette Packaging

Image courtesy of AdAge and Bloomberg

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By describing how to turn customer information into customer intimacy, Bryan provides both compelling examples and actionable tools to make better sense of data and build better relationships.

Read an adapted excerpt from The Loyalty Leap, by Bryan Pearson at CPG Branding’s book section.

It is not hard to see how rigid enactment of this principle would lead to a culture of aversion and stagnation, where the mere potential of a negative would lead to positives unrealized. Where risks become something to be avoided instead of opportunities to be seized.

• Medication that could cure a terminal illness would be eschewed due to possible side effects.
• New technologies would be forsaken for fear of malfunction.
• Cars wouldn’t have been invented for the risk of a crash.
• Surgical procedures wouldn’t exist for risk of damage to the patient.
• Fire wouldn’t have been discovered for risk of burning down the house.

The point is, by looking to remove any possibility of harm you create an environment where gain is snuffed out, resulting in net greater harm than that which you were attempting to prevent.

There is another, more simple phrase to describe this dynamic; it is called being “penny smart and dollar foolish”, and it is a prevalent force within the corporate world. It permeates an organization and trickles down to the individual to create a culture of fear that stifles innovation.

• Fear of disrupting the status quo, so you do what has always been done regardless of the result.
• Fear of alienating with your message, so you make it palatable to all and relevant to none.
• Fear of standing by your beliefs, so you acquiesce to management’s requests even if you disagree.
• Fear of challenging the competition, so you play it safe even if there is potential gain in making direct claims against them.
• Fear of transparency, so you dance around an issue instead of getting directly to its core.
• Fear of being ill perceived, so you remain silent instead of adding to the dialogue.
• Fear of losing your job…fear of being wrong…fear of failure…fear of being different…

At a certain point the fear of taking risks becomes riskier than the risks themselves.

So don’t fear failure. Fear the ordinary, commonplace and unimaginative. Fear the mediocre, unmemorable and uneventful. Let those fears haunt and drive you to be disruptive and impactful. To be meaningful and magical.

Because as Harvey Weinstein once said at a conference I attended, “The only thing middle of the road gets you is hit by a car.”

Leveraging the Games, P&G has been airing a series of commercials featuring moms supporting their athletes.  Proud dads felt left out.

This points to how today’s society is changing, which can greatly impact our marketing.  Targeting Moms may not longer be enough.  Male shoppers are becoming more and more important in our society.  Numbers ranging from 35% to upwards of 51% has been cited as men contributing to today’s grocery shopping.  As this trend continues to grow, purely demographic factors (such as gender) will become less and less effective.  More sophisticated targeting tactics would need to be leveraged, and more sophisticated marketing messages would need to be crafted.

New York Magazine cited a fantastic example in a recent article, The Money-Empathy Gap.  Certain car brands target the rich, while other car brand target the poor.  Psychologically, the rich are more antisocial (read: it’s lonely at the top).  Therefore, luxury sport car commercials usually feature a lone car racing down a highway.  Conversely, a truck, targeting the masses, shows up in a full parking lot with a group of peers having a great time.

While demographics would remain as one of the tools in the targeting toolbox, marketing does need to evolve to reflect our evolving society.  Our lifestyle is no longer defined by demographics.  Therefore, neither should our marketing.

Photo credit: Herald Post

The Client and Agency relationship is typically an evolving, and at times, interesting dynamic in its mix of corporate political formality and genuine human interaction. At its best the relationship is a true partnership built on mutual respect. At its worst it is frustrating and even toxic.

Having worked from both the client and agency perspective, and having managed both wonderful and challenging agencies and clients alike, here is my short list of advice on how to develop a true partnership with your agency/client partners.

To The Agencies

Do What Is Right, Not Necessarily What Is Asked

• Detailed and flawless execution is the cost of entry. It is easy to find an agency that follows orders, but the agency who has a point of view and who isn’t afraid to challenge directions that don’t make sense is the one I want to work with. Just make sure you have a strong rationale backing your point of view. I may not always agree, but I will respect and value you for your opinion.

I Want To Speak To The People Who Are Actually Doing The Work

• Nothing makes me want to staple my head to the table more than when an agency doesn’t include their creative staff in a meeting because of some absurd notion that they need protection from the criticism or differing points of view involved in strategic dialogue. If your only role is to record my feedback and water it down so that it is more easily digested by the people who are really doing the thinking then you are as useful as the Segway. It is imperative that the client speak directly to the people whose thought went into whatever it is that is being discussed, not only to get their point of view per point 1 above, but to also work through any challenges together.

Leave Your Puns At The Office

• Another thing that I have no tolerance for is a glossy presentation laced with pithy copy and clever puns but completely lacking in strategic thought. Window dressing is easily seen through and makes me feel like you are trying to slip something by me. I don’t want used car salesmen, I want strategic marketers.

Take Initiative

• If there is a bigger need than what I am specifically asking you to do then solve for it. If you do a good job you will get more business than what was originally in the offering. I once worked with a PR agency that was asked to develop a tactical outreach plan. Instead of giving me that plan they provided a well thought out PR strategy, and in doing so they got 3X the budget to execute than what was originally allocated for PR.

To The Clients

Don’t Be An A-Hole

• This is pretty straight forward, and you assume it would be obvious, harkening back to the golden rule circa kindergarten, yet there are horror stories of hellish clients circling around almost every agency. Look, I am sorry if you weren’t allowed to eat chocolate as a kid and had to take an ugly date to the prom, but that doesn’t mean you have the right, now that you are in somewhat of a position of authority, to exorcise those demons by treating your agency partners like crap. There is a reason why you get a new account lead every six months, it’s because your agency hates you and spends the first half of every internal meeting making fun of you. If you want good work out of your agency then treat them respectfully and they will more likely than not bend over backwards for you.

Be Hard But Be Fair

• Push your agencies, demand inspired thinking and don’t settle if you aren’t getting what you want, but at the same time be fair and reasonable in your approach. If you are only allowing two days to develop a creative strategy then you have no right to expect the next Old Spice campaign. If you continually beat up your agency about price without compromise on the deliverable then you shouldn’t expect the top people on your business. And if you don’t put any thought, time or effort into the initial brand strategy and creative brief how can you expect your agency to be inspired to do great work?

Be Transparent & Inclusive

• The more informed your agency is about your business and the more insight they have into why and how the decisions are made the more effective they will be. Don’t beat around the bush, get to the heart of an issue even if it is a difficult one. Your agency will appreciate it, will be better informed to make smart decisions about your business and will have clearer direction to do it with. Get them invested in your business and they will invest in your business.

Remove Obstacles

• In my mind one of the most important things a client can do for an agency is quickly identify and remove any obstacle in the way of their progress, and often this starts with the client themselves. If you are not getting the work you want out of your agency look internally before you point the finger at them. Is your strategy too broad or unclear so that it is preventing the development of a distinct point of view in your marketing ideas? Are you being lead by tactics before strategy, which is causing things to get forced fit and thus is impairing the expansion of an idea? There are many things that can cause work to get stuck in the mud and it is your job to identify and solve for them, and that doesn’t always mean getting a new agency.

Just like any relationship, Client & Agency relationships take work and require communication, respect and mutual understanding, even if you don’t always agree, in order to prosper. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it should lay a good foundation to build upon.

Michael Giardina has been a CPG marketer since 2000 and has worked on both the agency and client side—putting together integrated marketing programs for brands such as Dove Unilever, Kraft Foods, and most recently, Bazooka Candy Brands. You can follow Michael’s blog at beyondreachblog.blogspot.com/ or via Facebook and Twitter @BeyondReachBlog.

Consumers are beginning to express their desire for more sustainable products. But by and large, green products are not making themselves easy to love.

Lance Hosey, who keynoted at the recent Sustainable Brands conference, believes there’s still a fundamental disconnect between form and function in green product design . Simply put, products that are more sustainable tend to telegraph sensible, not sexy.

This attribute was personified by Seventh Generation, a company with an incredible line of products that suffered from generic ‘Brand X’ packaging.

So I was excited to hear about the partnership between Seventh Generation and Ecologic Brands, a packaging company that balances low-impact materials with eye-popping design.

Milk Pouch, Meet iPhone

Julie Corbett, CEO of Ecologic Brands, grew up in Quebec, Canada. As it turns out, her background had a great deal to do with the inspiration behind her product.

For a start, her childhood home was deep in pulp and paper country. This imbued an appreciation of pulp’s sustainability and design potential. Fast forward a few years, when Corbett purchased her first iPhone and was struck by the high-tech, yet warmly familiar molded pulp packaging. It was, in her own words, ‘comfort food’ for her senses.

Another inspiration was the humble milk pouch. Essentially a sealed plastic bag holding a litre of milk, this pouch was a staple of Quebec supermarkets in the 70’s. Drop one of the bags in a special re-usable jug, snip the top, and you had fresh milk with virtually no packaging.

Years later, Corbett tapped these influences to create her breakthrough packaging: a lightweight plastic bag surrounded by a protective molded pulp shell. She sensed her product would answer a nascent demand for eco-packaging that had shelf appeal.  But first, it had to make it to market.

Insight + Design = Success

In our conversation, Corbett emphasized the rigours her container needed to withstand in order to pass North American certification. “Our packaging had to hold up under extreme heat and cold, wilting humidity, drops and shakes, you name it.”

The packaging held up well and was certified. But then came an equally daunting task: finding champions to back the innovative container.

“The Straus Family Creamery in Northern California agreed to use our packaging for their non-fat milk so we could track market impact. Turns out non-fat milk in our bottle saw a 72% upswing in sales.” says Corbett.

Based on these results, Packaging Digest Magazine did a story on Ecologic. A story Peter Swaine of Seventh Generation saw.

Seventh Generation became Ecologic Brands’ first major brand customer, using the unique container for its 4x concentrated liquid laundry detergent.

At this point, the power of the package design became obvious. Grocery stores, notoriously difficult about new packaging, welcomed the new container. In fact, new stores clamoured to get the packaging on their shelves.

Corbett is especially proud that the new container helped expand the previously limited Canadian market for Seventh Generation.

Today, the product is among the ten best-selling detergents in the natural grocery channel, a statistic that can at least in part be attributed to the shelf appeal of the packaging. Over a million bottles have been produced.

As Corbett says, “Our bottle telegraphs reliable, trusted, and ‘feel good’ – not to mention subliminally alleviating consumer guilt. It brings a smile.”

In other words, it’s a great example of intuitive and innovative design drivingsustainability forward.

Lessons for Innovators

1. Design is key – Sustainability and packaging experts tend to push either utility or logistics. But design appeal must be kept in central focus – it’s what consumers intuitively respond to.
2. Take the consumer’s perspective – When she was inspired to create the Ecologic bottle, Corbett was thinking as a consumer, not a manufacturer. Manufacturers innovate based on what their equipment can do. Consumers innovate based on what they want. What consumers want, is what sells.
3. Hybridize – Innovation doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Milk pouches and iPhone trays are known entities. Sometimes success simply means connecting the dots.

Among these attributes, insight has a special place. Get it right, and your brand lines up with what tomorrow’s consumers demand. Get it wrong, and you become the next Segway scooter.

I’ve often used BMW i, the new BMW sub-brand as an example of great futureproof insight. More than great cars like the BMW i3 and BMW i8,  the project is based on making mobility – not just driving – exciting in the future.

To this end, the company founded BMW i Ventures, a group funding entrepreneurs with groundbreaking ideas on getting around urban areas using all available transport – whether it’s the subway, a bike or walking.

The big insight here? With the rise of megacities, consumers will most likely drive less. But they’ll continue to search out exciting ways of getting around. By intersecting this need with BMW’s expertise in creating exciting transport, the car manufacturer is today cornering a market that – to many other companies – is still invisible. It’s futureproofing its brand.

A New Consumer

Speaking with BMW i Brand Manager Uwe Dreher, I got a glimpse of another surprising insight the carmaker is tapping into.

Dreher, who is speaking at this year’s Sustainable Brands conference , told me about research the company had conducted as part of the new sub-brand’s development process.

The team discovered a group of affluent consumers – particularly in the San Francisco area –  who were expressing their green allegiance by driving seemingly downmarket cars.

As Dreher said, “It seemed incongruous for someone to live in a $5 million home and drive a $35,000 Prius instead of a Porsche or Ferrari. But that’s what’s happening.”

Dreher conceded these green affluents were a small niche. But BMW is betting they’re a strong predicator of future luxury trends. And the carmaker is developing BMW i to answer their need for authentic, sustainable driving excitement.

A Brand Built From The Ground Up

When I questioned Dreher on the wisdom of launching i as a sub-brand, he said the decision hinged on two points.

First, being arm’s length from the master brand allowed the team to engage in a complete rethink, as opposed to incrementally changing existing BMW models. Because of this, radical innovations like an aluminum frame and carbon fibre body were incorporated.

Second, the separation from the master brand allowed BMW i to brand itself as an authentic departure from the status quo. This wasn’t just a tweak, but a new idea with integrity. A crucial consideration for consumers hypersensitive to greenwash.

Lessons To Innovators

• Insight, insight, insight – The BMW i project isn’t just a flight of fancy, but a business venture grounded in the needs of consumers. What makes it exciting is that the insights are based on consumers of tomorrow. But they are solid insights nonetheless.
• The future exists today – BMW discovered the green affluents – even though they’re just a whisper of a demographic today. By learning how to serve this group today, the carmaker will help build a strong brand tomorrow.
• New brand, new momentum – BMW created BMW i as a sub-brand, unencumbered by tradition. After all, you can’t race forward if the master brand won’t let you go.

This story first appeared in Fast Company April 26th, 2012.