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Evaluating ads

Ajit Singh
Manager
Asha Advertising & Marketing Agency

In my opinion and experience, the best advertising happens when the agency and client work in tandem, with each partner understanding and respecting the role of the other.

Advertising and creativity being so subjective at times, what happens very often is a blurring of the roles between the agency and client, with the result being ‘out-of-focus’ advertising as opposed to cutting-edge advertising and ends up neither giving the brand a boost nor helping achieve the marketing objective. There is no point in later blaming each other for mediocrity when the same can be averted with a little discipline thus making the entire process an enjoyable one.
As such, I have penned down my observations on what steps can be taken when evaluating ads and ideas to ensure that creative and effective advertising sees the light of day.

Stick to the brief

The brief should be the guide against which any creative is evaluated. Any changes required in a creative should be made in order to adhere to the brief. Anyone who’s not certain about the strategy should not be involved in judging or evaluating the ad.

Committee-advertising

Nobody wants to make ineffective ads. The problem lies in multiple layers of ad-approvers, with everyone having a say. The more people there are in a hierarchy, the more likely it is that the ad will appear committee-written and thus lose its edge.

Researching the ad

Contrary to popular belief, showing the ad to colleagues can’t be construed as research. Neither does it shed any light or throw up anything that the agency can take back to work on. It generally becomes an insight into what everyone’s favourite colours are.

The original layout

Leave the original layout untouched to serve as a benchmark. Attach a photostat of the ad and anybody who wants to suggest a change should mark it on the photostat. By the time everyone involved has marked a change, the photostat would look different from the original. It should take conviction and absolute belief for someone to write what he ‘thinks’ the ad should be or contain. Top managers would be surprised at the kind of ‘value-addition’ their juniors recommend.

The value of subtraction

Simplify, focus, shorten. The more crisp and focal the communication, the greater the chances of it connecting with and being understood by consumers. There will always be more information that ‘can’ be put in an ad – but that only weakens the main, single message that needs to go out.

Symptoms vs cure

Tell the agency what results you want, not what creative execution you desire. Trust the agency to come up with fresh ideas and executions – but not if you’ve dictated colours, fonts and also ‘suggested’ a visual. Believe me, you would be surprised how cutting-edge solutions can be derived if the agency is given a direction as opposed to being directed.

Some of these points may seem to be quite obvious and others not so; the point in highlighting them is to ensure that at the end of the day, every piece of communication that sees the light of the day is effective and does the job for the brand and the client.

Build icons, not just brands

Rajesh Raman
Vice president - Oman for
Team Young & Rubicam, Wunderman and MediaEdge:cia

How do you manage a brand consistently and grow it to achieve iconic stature in the face of the challenges of modern times? Before we see how, let us look around and take heart in the fact that some of today’s great iconic brands have all taken root only in the last decade or so: iPod, google, Starbucks.

The first step in building a successful iconic brand is identifying a distinctive, differentiated and relevant promise that your brand would offer consumers vis-a-vis its competition. One of the best tools used for this is called the BrandAsset Valuator® (BAV), and was developed by the agency I work for, Young & Rubicam. BAV is based on the relationship between four brand pillars:

1. Differentiation – the brand’s point of difference to its competition
2. Relevance – how appropriate the brand is to the needs of consumers
3. Esteem – how a brand is regarded by consumers
4. Knowledge – how well the brand is understood by consumers

Iconic brands are developed by clearly defining each of these four pillars. The relationship between the first two pillars, namely a brand’s differentia-tion and its relevance to consumers is evaluated to determine brand strength. Differentiation without relevance is meaningless. Too much relevance without any real differentiation is also bad, as it indicates that the brand has in fact become homogenised with the rest of the category, and its price is the only real purchase motivator. The next two pillars, Esteem and Knowledge, constitute a brand’s stature. Iconic brands always have both great brand strength and stature.

A shorthand method for brand custodians is to follow the ABC of good brandbuilding. This is by no means a ‘one size fits all’ solution, but rather an easy-to-remember set of pointers to help in brand development. Follow these and you too, can perhaps take pride in creating an iconic brand that may become ubiquitous in our lifetime.

Achieve a unique Brand Promise: Achieve a real difference in your brand’s promise that resonates with the consumer. In the last century, consumer choice was based on distinctive differences like price and performance, and the choice itself was limited. Today the choices are endless, and all brands seem to look the same. The \consumers’ emotional attachment to the brand now assumes primary importance. For example, ask consumers to choose from similar models of wristwatches based on their price and performance, and they will struggle with their choices. But reveal that beautiful logo on the face, and you instantly trigger an array of emotional attachments to the brand, which will enable them to make their choice easily.

Be single-minded: Every brand needs a central thought that is single-minded – what is often called ‘a Big Idea’. The Big Idea must of course meet a real consumer need. If the Big Idea is nurtured consistently by all its stakeholders speaking the same brand language, without the danger of its message becoming diffused across time or location, it will undoubtedly prosper.

Create a total Brand Experience: Make sure that the brand promise is expressed and delivered across all customer touch points. 360- degree customer experience is key to success.

And always remember to treat your customer as you would your own family. David Ogilvy famously said, ”The consumer is not a moron, but your wife”. Never take them for granted, and always strive to earn and keep their trust. Be faithful to them, and they in turn will reward your brand with a lifetime of loyalty.

Exploit the potential

Dominic Healey
General manager
Concept

On what scale do you judge the power of your brand? While having a discussion with some of my colleagues the other day about local influential brands, we found it amazing that probably one of the most successful brands, Zain, no longer exists. We all remembered its quality products, packaging and marketing and of course that wonderful name, Zain… it was light years ahead of the local market.

But what’s really interesting is that despite a year or so having passed since the company went into liquidation, the brand lives on in our minds. I’m sure with the all the kudos surrounding the brand and its name, it could have been sold or even put up for auction. It seems cruel to measure or realise the effectiveness of brand this way, but nevertheless it’s a good example of how a successfully built brand like Zain can even outlive its creators.

Not everyone will become a Zain, and it is true that most small businesses in Oman will probably never have a globally recognised brand simply because they don't have, or for that matter don't need, the marketing drive to fuel that level of awareness. Even so, when building a brand, we need to take it extremely seriously, do it right. It’s in a way something like having a subordinate who you are training and you slowly realising that he or she is so good that he/ she may one day become your boss, or in this case, the powerful face of your company.

All it takes is to figure out the brand image that you want to project and having the commitment and discipline to project your brand well, while allocating what is necessary to get your message to the right market. And, importantly, make sure you manage your strategy so that it makes a consistent impression, leaving the desired brand image in the minds of your audience.

A good example is The Wave. It defined its target audience, intelligently avoiding advertising like an estate agent, and instead projecting an image of ‘lifestyle’ which has effectively built up an ethos in the minds of potential customers. Clever, understated and extremely effective marketing, with enough market spend to keep it in the public eye. Not forgetting for most part, what they are selling hasn’t even been constructed. The Wave is fast becoming a part of local culture, and the power of the brand I have no doubt will also assist the parent company in its next venture.

Consistency builds brands. When you communicate, it makes sense to create a single, focused impression for your business. Stay consistent in your marketing by projecting a coherent look and tone in your communications with a consistent level of quality, backed by consistent communications, consistent products, and consistent service.

Stick with your brand. Don't try to change your brand image unless you're certain that it's no longer appropriate for the market. And if that is the case, you should be prepared to fine-tune your business – because, don’t forget, your brand is the public face of your business.

So whatever realm you operate on, whether you are local, regional or international, your brand is one of the most powerful tools you can wield – when handled with awareness, intelligence and sensitivity.

Chapter brand

roopesh bhatnagar
General manager
NPA

First, a few fundamentals.
Brands are not logos or names that we see on letterheads, company signboards, or signatures in advertising These are only Brand Marks, Symbols or Brand Names. Brands are a lot more holistic and they manifest themselves in the consumer’s mind… this is where perceptions and preferences are built. I believe there are two types of brands. The first one is ‘Brand’ and this is where it lives…

But even for brands there is higher ground and I call them ‘Super Brands’. This is where they live……in the hearts of the consumers. It is here they form bonds and relationships that are enduring and beyond all rational debates and preferences.
And, to get there every brand has a journey. From a start as a new entity to becoming a brand is a considerable distance in itself… for everything in between I see them as just product/ service/organisation. Becoming a Super Brand is making that quantum leap.
Brands are built over time and while brands can have a clear-cut conduct, purpose, vision and maintain consistency… they at times become boring. And what becomes very important is while staying on a brand how do you keep it fresh and how do you infuse new ideas so that you always keep it present, relevant, differentiated and alive… in order to maintain ongoing brand leadership.

To create Super Brands, branding works on many finer levels and goes to great depths. Some great examples are Benetton, quite literally uniting colours of the human races, Economist with its unmistakable wit in the typographical ads on Red.

Sensory branding – the sound of reassurance from the pop of the Viagra blister pack, the thump in the Honda Acura door, the smell of a new car - eau de Rolls Royce, or the Singapore Airlines’ hostesses’ make-up are all part of a sensory branding strategy. The Nokia and Windows tune or the Harley and Mustang engine rev… these are unmistakable and not sounds that you hear as sound mnemonics in ads but ingrained in the product, with people – and millions of them.

Even brand naming in a sub brand architecture: ‘We are making a new car it’s called 503’ and voilà Peugeot comes straight to mind. The Peugeot zero is subliminal, it is kind of brought up from memory to relate and prompt the answer. By the same token the iPod ‘I’ this, ‘I’ that, is interesting but in your face – obvious branding but great in its simplicity with just the personal ‘I’.

Experience Brands – Starbucks… the hollering of your order… these are all purposeful, all brand. Oman as it progresses to mature as a market needs to learn from these examples and create its own Super Brands.

Brand power? Or consumer power?

RADHA MUKHERJI
Executive director
DDB Oman

‘Double tall, light iced, 2 pump sugar-free-vanilla, non-fat, no whip, white chocolate mocha, to go’. Behind every successful brand is a consumer placing tall orders. One who won’t settle for the usual, but instead goad his brand to push its limits. The age of the consumer being audience, a receptive ‘target’ of communications is over. Today, he not just calls the shots but is actively engaged in the process of defining and creating value. Starbucks will serve coffee exactly the way he likes it. iPod will be customised to her unique listening pleasure. Banking will adapt to his hours. And a mobile phone without WiFi just won’t do anymore.

The power equation has changed. The brand, more than the consumer, strives to ‘belong’. Product performance is not good enough. Brand experience has extended consumer territory of control. In an increasingly connected world, the reputation of a brand can teeter on suspicion of animal rights violation, political leanings, or environmental damage. Brutal, unforgiving and hard to reverse judgment. This is as true for a brand of breakfast cereal as it is for financial software. Coca Cola, one of the world’s best-loved brands, attracted howls of betrayal with its reformulation of New Coke and had to hastily back track. The customer has taken control.

Yet all around, we still see brands that persist in self-adulation. Headlines that still proclaim being no.1, the first, the only, the biggest, the largest, the best and so on to an audience who has no time for such puffery and draws conclusions based on what it chooses to see. The fine print behind an ’It’s so easy to own’ claim. An unkempt delivery boy of ‘pure mineral water’. Sloppy service.

A refusal to refund. An ignored job application. A disgruntled ex-employee. An unhappy vendor…every action and inaction communicates. And blogs and Internet forums hammer in the last nails. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ‘What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.’

The implications for companies?

Branding starts within. Corporate identity is not about consistency in house style, font and baselines. It’s about consistency in behaviour. There are ‘Brand ambassadors’ lurking everywhere you look (and don’t!). Shareholders, consultants, business associates, employees, vendors, dealers, job hopefuls and even the spouse and children. The world knows about Google’s fun and inspiring workspace which includes massage, yoga, on-site day care, shoreline running trails and free gourmet lunches – these add buzz and shine to an already greatly admired company. To live a brand promise calls for brutal introspection and continuous investment in internal communication to ensure that those representing it embrace the proclaimed values and no mixed messages go out. To hire, if need be, for attitude over skill, to ensure that everyone breathes the same language.

Time also to bow to consumer power. To build a brand is to create a unique brand experience that draws the customer deep into the process of co-creating value. It calls for opening doors wide, listening, talking, absorbing and responding constantly. Websites need to move away from being corporate brochures in cyberspace to living, breathing forums for two-way interaction.

A brand has truly arrived when all forces, working within and without, come together to generate an energy and momentum that propels it forward. And earns it votes for being the ‘Best brand’ in its category.

How can you future-proof a brand?

nitin puri
Vice president
ADINC

Many would argue, ‘With a big idea, and with a focus on growth and profits”.
This piece attempts to dispel this notion and introduce a new way of thinking for brands and businesses in today’s world. According to Darwin, “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change”. The phrase Darwinians use for this is ‘ecologically naive’.

And brands today cannot afford to be ecologically naive given the rapidly changing business environment, be it the channel fragmentation, blogosphere, Internet, mobile etc.

The answer is simply for brands to commit themselves to and then identify themselves with some cause of enduring importance so that the heritable qualities of a brand are no longer passed on merely through a positioning, a tone of voice, a visual identity or a big idea – but through its actions and words in support of something bigger than all of these. This something is called The Big Ideal.
‘A great brand is where a business’ founding principles can outlive its founding principals’: IBM is as relevant in today’s high-tech world as it was when their computer filled a room and took an hour to start up.

Great brands are caused by a cause
Paradoxical, but true. Viktor Frankl, a pre-eminent psychiatrist, puts it quite well. He says, “don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the uninten-ded side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself”.

George Merck once said, “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for profits”. Merck’s P/E is twice that of its competitors and they outperformed the market by a factor of ten for 50 years straight from 1950 to 2000.

As at 2006, Dove doubled its business in five years. This was not achieved by saying ‘Let’s grow our business by 100 per cent’. This was done by moving from a brand built on selling more soap to a brand built around providing more meaning to women, a core ideology of ‘beauty is real’.

People want to work for a cause

Toyota’s purpose of helping to rebuild post war Japan has made them the world’s most valuable automobile company. They receive two million staff suggestions in a year of which around 85 per cent are adopted.

There are substantial benefits for brands whose staff are engaged, who know ‘why’ they exist and ‘why’ they work. ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how’.
This true anecdote says it all about the notion of The Big Ideal. A janitor at NASA was once asked what he did. His response: “I am helping to put a man on the moon”.

Employees = branding

MOHAMMED FAREI
General manager
TBWA/Zeenah

How to keep both old and new brands relevant; the hand that marketers, as well as customers, have in corporate innovation; the extent to which agencies should be compensated for their ideas; whether it is possible to crack the link between marketing and brand equity; why authenticity in brand messaging is absolutely vital; and what role employees play in that pursuit?

With so many unproven new tools and the re-examination of traditional ones, companies must adopt a new philosophy, or get a scalable number of target consumers to experience a product or service in a way that delivers a significant return on investment.

You have heard that brands are around for a long time. And the reason why they are around for a long time and will continue to be around for a long time is because they are consistently reinventing themselves. Marketers have to be thinking about reinventing the way they generate revenue, manage costs, manage their time and manage their people. And in order to be able to do that, they have to consistently look at themselves in a fresh way. And the whole reason why innovation is so important for branding is because it is essentially responsible for driving the brand equity and driving revenue.

It is absolutely essential marketers have a hand in corporate innovation, because really what an innovation is based on is, "What does a brand stand for?" And usually, the marketer in a company is responsible for, "What does this brand stand for in the consumer's mind? What is the equity?" That really defines everything else the company will do. Forward-thinking and innovation are the expectations of any brand. Customers expect the brand to be forward-thinking and innovative.

Employees know that the best way to make a sale is to help the customer with what they came in for that day, and connect with them to find out what they really need. If you want loyalty from the customers, you need to show them loyalty, you need to thank them, you need to look them in the eye and say, "Thank you for coming today; how can I help you?" They want to be recognised, and that is when they will be ready to pay a premium, because they genuinely feel that they are getting more.

Lastly, we should view our employee base as part of our customer base. They are closer to the customer than the management and we should rely more on that input. An engaged team member leads to a more engaged customer who is more willing to place more of their assets with you and actually recommend your brand. So the employees are literally physical representations of the brand.

Basic ingredients

atulya SHARMA
AGM, Advertising & Interactive
United Media Services

What are the basic ingredients that make a brand tick and help it become a Superbrand?

A combination of elements are responsible for making a brand what it is, and these are:
Name: The name by which a company or its products are known
Logo: The symbol which represents a brand
Company: The corporate entity of a brand
Image: What a brand has come to represent
Customers: Those whom a brand serves
Product and Services: What a brand offers in a market place
Promise: What a brand stands for – its vision, mission, goals, and objectives.
Building a brand involves emphasising its key benefits and attributes for consumers.

To do so, marketers must recognise that a brand consists of more than a bundle of tangible, functional attributes. Its intangible, emotional benefits along with its ‘identity’ frequently serve as the basis for long-term competitive differentiation and sustained loyalty. The most successful brands emphasise features that are both important to consumers and differentiated from those of competitors. We refer to these features as ‘brand drivers.’

But building strong brands isn’t getting any easier on account of an explosion in both, the number of brands and ways to communicate them. Today there is a proliferation of print publications, FM is seeing the introduction of new channels, outdoors is gaining its long overdue share-of-voice, commercial SMS messaging is on the rise as is Internet usage. What’s more, TV is getting increasingly competitive, not to mention the plethora of business and entertainment events.

Given this market scenario, I see the need for two strategic initiatives for brand-building in Oman. One is the realisation amongst marketers about the convergence of product performance and service levels. A lot of brands here would do well to imbibe this principle. From showroom ambience to a smile on the face of the counter salesmen, his product knowledge about own and competing brands, and most importantly, good after sales service are critical in determining initial purchase and continued loyalty for the brand.

Today, cost-effective brand building depends on knowing precisely what consumers care about and tailoring accordingly. We need to have conceptual clarity in first defining a brand and then actually delivering it through a variety of what marketers call ‘touchpoints,’ the sites where consumers interact with it.

The second success principle is about getting brands noticed amidst the media clutter. I feel that in our market, a lot of brand communication efforts are repetitive and imitative. There is over-dependence on mass media to communicate key messages, which by its very definition is ‘mass’ in nature. Instead, I see the need for narrowcasting of customised messages for specific target segments and an effective use of an appropriate media mix for maximum impact.

An effective media plan has to take into account, the segmentation of the market on parameters such as the size, income, age and ethnicity of target populations; estimates of their consumption and loyalty; and information about their locations, lifestyles, needs, and attitudes.

To elucidate, we at UMS have worked with Shell Oman to use the brand’s extensive network of service stations across the country to conduct road shows and engage customers with the brand in their own neighbourhood. Given the success of this initiative, we started using other high footfall areas like shopping malls for similar interaction with the target audiences. Similarly, when it comes to the mechanics and lube shops, we have gone and conducted roadshows at the high-street, where all the garages and lube shops are located.

All in all, we as marketers have to spot meaningful trends and determine their probable impact on the customer landscape. The Oman market is dynamic and buoyant and for strong brands to be sustainable, they need to evolve continuously.