Reaching consumers with strong messages on frequent basis keep brands
in people's heads
Marketing can be summed up in the words that an exasperated mother says to an overwrought child who insists the pain from a minor cut is worse than it really is: "It's all in your head."
That's where marketers want to be. They bombard consumers with TV and radio spots, print ads, billboards, transit ads, freestanding inserts and direct mail to seize the elusive top-of-mind brand awareness.
Reach and frequency is the key: Send a brand message to as many consumers as possible as often as is economically feasible. If the message is clear and strong, it will convey the brand's positioning, the starting point in capturing consumers' imaginations and convincing them that this brand is different from, if not better than, any other brand in the category.
"Papa John's did it with 'Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,' " says Jack Trout, co-author with Al Ries of the groundbreaking book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind."
That was real positioning, based on product attributes that differentiated Papa John's from Pizza Hut and Domino's, Trout says. The same is true for Subway, positioned on the basis that its sandwiches are fresh and more healthful than sandwiches the competition offers.
Positioning is not easy. A product really does have to be different from that of competitors -- better taste, better ingredients, quicker delivery of the product -- or the game is lost, Trout says. "If you don't have something that separates you from competitors," he warns, "then you better have a pretty good price." But that's not necessarily a good way to position a brand. "Here's your problem with going cheap. Your competitors . . . can mark things down as fast as you can," Trout says.
Another problem with discounting is that once prices are set low, consumers expect them to stay low. Marketers generally agree that lowering prices for longer than a brief promotional period puts consumers into a frame of mind from which it's hard for operators to escape: They become conditioned to expect low prices, and when they don't get them, San Francisco-based NameLab takes a scientific approach restaurants, is the company developing the Olive Garden they'll shop around until they find them.
The next step is promoting a brand's differentiation. It's usually done through advertising, which theoretically contains a selling message that illustrates why the product is better or different. Theoretically.
"We have tested over 400 prime-time commercials, and we have found that the average level of communication of a selling message is about 7 percent," says Kevin Clancy, chairman and chief executive of Copernicus Marketing Consulting in Auburndale, Mass.
That means only 7 percent of the TV spots actually tried to sell the product.
Clancy doesn't buy into the belief, fostered by those he sarcastically calls "the geniuses in marketing," that selling propositions are irrelevant and that positioning is dead.
San Francisco-based NameLab
Inc., a firm that takes a scientific approach to creating
names for restaurants, is the company responsible for developing
the Olive Garden moniker. |
"The leading brands in America [are] in a radical decline," he
says. "People can no longer differentiate between the leading
brands. If you're not communicating a message about your brand,
why would they be able to see a difference? And if they can't
see a difference, then advertising effectiveness should diminish,
as it has."
Most advertising, Clancy grimly reports, is "goofy stuff." That could be why smaller restaurant chains devote more money to local-store marketing than they do to advertising. "It's all about what's going on in the store," says Ron Fuller, founder of a consultancy called EAT!, which stands for Energize, Analyze and Traffic building.
"Are the communications signals doing a good job?" he asks, by way of explaining that "energy points" are the "opportunities within the four walls to explain the concept and what it offers to the guest."
The "analyze" portion of his firm's name deals with delving into the minds of consumers to determine their spending habits. Through questionnaires, Fuller can place customers into psychological categories based on income and spending habits.
The categories are named whimsically. For example, the "Home Sweet Home" category consists of households of married couples with kids. They live in the suburbs and have average incomes. "Trying Metro Times" is a category of young, single parents and senior citizens. The consumers in "Blue Chip Blue" have disposable incomes, "but they buy pickup trucks," Fuller says.
Getting people to venture from their homes to sit within the four walls of a restaurant often is a result of how they respond to the restaurant's name, says Michael Barr, president of San Francisco-based NameLab Inc., which created the Olive Garden name.
The firm takes a scientific approach to developing names, employing such tools as constructional linguistics and morphemes, or words made by combining portions of other words. As explained by Barr -- but without the jargon -- here's a hypothetical name for a restaurant and why that name works:
It's called Fifth Street Pastaria, a name that accomplishes two goals. First, it describes the type of food served, because people initially decide what cuisine to eat. Next, it NameLab Inc., a firm that approach to creating names for company responsible for Garden moniker. says where the restaurant is, because diners make decisions based on the proximity of the restaurant.
An even better name would be Alfredo's Fifth Street Pastaria, because it accomplishes all of the above with the bonus of linking the restaurant to a chef or chef-owner who prepares homemade meals.
One minor problem is that the name is longer than it probably should be, but Barr says regular customers will call the restaurant "Alfredo's" anyway, "so the length won't matter. For new customers you still have a good name."
Chain restaurants, however, require short names. Taco Bell and Red Lobster are good names, Barr says, because they're not only short but also convey the type of food served. Regardless of whether a restaurant is a small independent or part of a larger chain, all restaurant names have to be "visible and memorable and energetic,"
Barr says, to make an impression in the minds of consumers.
And now smashcut, as they say in Hollywood, to, well, Hollywood and the topic of product placement in movies and TV shows.
"Product placement, along with the conventional ways of promoting in the media, is extremely successful," says Jay May, president of Feature This! -- a Los Angeles productplacement agency that has found movie and TV roles for The Coffee Beanery.
Product placement is successful because it's one more product impression in a consumer's mind, he says. Consumers see the product in a TV spot, in a print ad, in a movie and again in the DVD version if they liked the film enough to rent it.
That's saturation coverage, embedding the brand into the consumers' minds. The Coffee Beanery's "greatest hit," as May calls it, was being featured on movie posters for "Erin Brockovich."
The movie was a smash, and "we lost track of the number of impressions" the brand made on people, May says.
The syndicated TV show "Blind Date" also is a good vehicle to make an impression on consumers, May believes. The show, a televised matchmaking service, always shows the couple going to a restaurant, with the name featured prominently.
"A classy guy goes to a classy restaurant," May explains. "That says a lot about the restaurant."
