Revival strategies are for brands that have been going in the wrong direction at an accelerating pace. Revival strategies are for badly needed, urgent turnarounds. A turnaround strategy has a few critical steps. The first step is clear: Stop the bleeding. Of course, stopping the bleeding requires organizational and financial disciplines.

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Along with organizational and financial disciplines, stopping the bleeding requires a maniacal devotion to the brand core. The brand must defend the core of its enterprise. The brand must emphasize its core, enduring brand truths. Focus on the core equities: internal cultural equities and external customer equities. Focus on what makes this brand special, its brand strengths and then mobilize the organization around these strengths. Focus on the core customer.

When a brand is in need of revitalization, begin by focusing on the core.

Keeping the brand core strong is essential to taking care of the brand’s health. And vice versa: to take care of the brand’s health, keep the brand’s core strong. The brand core must be re-energized, protected and strengthened. It is the brand core that will profitably finance a turnaround and provide the platform for the future. Begin by focusing on what the brand’s core customers love about the brand.

There are reams of data showing the value of a core customer. Seminal research from Frederick Reichheld on the lifetime value of a loyal core customer essentially showed that as brand loyalty increases, the likelihood of defection decreases.  Mr. Reichheld concluded that reducing defections by 5% could increase profits by 25% and more. Other research indicates that loyal core customers are 8 times as valuable as those who just consider the brand.

The reverse is true as well. Losing a small percentage of core customers will account for a disproportionate amount of lost income.

Kohl’s and Target are learning this lesson at the moment. Loyal customers of Kohl’s want their Kohl’s back. Target customers may be yearning for a reignition of the brand’s provenance.

Stellantis, owner of Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler, is planning to bring back customer-favored vehicles ignored during the tenure of its previous CEO. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “Jeep is reviving its Cherokee-sized SUV. Dodge is bringing back the gas-engine version of its Charger muscle car. And Ram is hitting pause on its all-electric pickup truck.” The head of Jeep North America said, “It’s no secret, the relationships that we have with our dealers, our suppliers, the general people who have been associated with us for the last few years, that needs a lot of love and attention.” Data reported in the Wall Street Journal indicate that “Stellantis had only two of the top 20 models sold in the U.S., according to data from industry research firm Motor Intelligence. Jeep and Ram didn’t even crack the top 10 among brands.”

Core customers already know what is great about the brand. The goal is to restore and repair their relationship to the brand, reinforce what they like about the brand, and encourage them to frequent the brand more often. Past data show that It costs 3-4 times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep a customer loyal. Recently, data indicate that with multiple digital and platform options, these costs can range upwards of 7 times more to attract a new customer versus an existing customer.

It is easier to get a customer who already uses your brand to buy a little more often than to try to attract a new customer who does not use your brand at all. In a revitalization program, the brand’s objective must be to stop the shrinking of the customer base and to increase purchase frequency. A small increase in frequency can make a huge difference to brand viability and profitability. The road to enduring profitable growth rests on more customers who are more loyal and more profitable, generating more high-quality revenue growth leading to enduring profitable growth.

For example, in 2017, at a downward moment, craft website Etsy recognized the need to increase frequency among core customers. Etsy stated, “… we disclosed that about half of our buyers only buy once a year on Etsy. And, we really believe there’s an opportunity to bring those buyers, our existing buyers, back to buy more things on Etsy.  So making it so that our existing buyers come back more than once, I think, is a big opportunity. Because half of them only come back once.”

Starbucks is running newspaper ads right now that welcome back core customers lost during the last CEO’s tenure. The ad copy tells lost customers that “The Starbucks you love is ready.” The copy tells us that the services we loved and that were removed are now back. The ad ends with the line, “Hello Again.”

It is a cliché to say covet your core customers, but it is critical.

At CoverGirl, CEO Sue Nabi, asked her team “… to think about what was at the core of CoverGirl’s identity.” Born in the early 1960s by Noxzema, CoverGirl was a brand used by, well, cover girls. CoverGirl promoted itself as “clean makeup” creating that “girl-next-door” fresh, youthful look. It was the look of models such a Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Cybill Shepherd and epitomized in the faces of Breck Girls. Later CoverGirl faces included Tyra Banks, Rihanna and Taylor Swift, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Times change. The power of cover girl models is now transferred to Influencers. And, CoverGirl is using these influential persuaders to rejuvenate the CoverGirl brand. CEO Nab has directed the team to recruit “thousands of influencers” who use their visibility on TikTok and Instagram to both demo and endorse CoverGirl products. The CoverGirl premise is the same. CoverGirl has just modernized to match the changed mindsets of contemporary core customers.

Burberry is taking a similar approach. The Burberry brand’s new CEO, Joshua Shulman, told The Wall Street Journal that in order to return to “sustainable, profitable growth” Burberry will be focusing on its core. “ Our recent underperformance has stemmed from several factors, including inconsistent brand execution and a lack of focus on our core outerwear category and our core customer segments.” According to comments from Burberry, The Wall Street Journal wrote that Burberry indicates the brand had “moved away from its core products over the past several years” resulting in “disappointing results.”

Yahoo finance reported these 2025 remarks from Burberry:

Burberry CEO, Joshua Schulman said: “Since launching Burberry Forward in November, we have moved at pace to advance our strategy to reignite brand desire, improve our performance and drive long-term value creation.

“We are encouraged by the response to our Always Burberry Weather outerwear campaign and Wrapped in Burberry festive campaign. These activations resonates with a broad range of luxury customers leading to an improvement in brand desirability and strength in outerwear and scarves.

“The acceleration of our core categories reinforces our belief that Burberry has the most opportunity where we have the most authenticity and that our strategic plan will deliver sustainable, profitable growth over time.””

Customers’ needs may alter. Markets may change. New products challenge the status quo. No matter how a brand landscape morphs, there are some evergreen brand marketing principles that must never be forgotten.

Adore the core is one of these essential principles: keep the brand core strong. A brand’s core must be continually re-energized, protected and strengthened. It is the brand core that will profitably finance a turnaround, keep a brand growing and provide a platform for enduring profitable growth. Ignore what core customers love about your brand at your peril.

Of course, brands must attract new customers while creating more brand loyalty among its core customer base. But, when a brand is in trouble, the first priority is to stop the hemorrhaging of the customer base. Love your core customers if you expect them to love you.  Ultimately, the brand is more customers, more often, more brand loyal, more revenues, and more profitability. When a brand is losing share and sales, the first focus must be to shore up the core customer base. In other words, adore the core or your brand is done for.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define or redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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• Consumers have changed
• The levers of a purchase decision have changed
• Consumer relationships with brands have changed
• The dynamics of influence has changed

Far too many brands remain tethered to a legacy philosophy of command-and-control, awareness-chasing marketing. This way of thinking interferes with the ability to form vibrant, healthy relationships with consumers who look for added meaning from the brands they care about.

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• Our mission is to provide the tools, thinking, and pathway to a more successful future of sustainable brand growth. Here, we summarize the elements of new brand marketing based on a more human-like approach to creating brand relevance and resonance.

This Didn’t Happen Overnight… A Decade Of Trial, Error And Refinement

For 10 years we have studied and worked to construct a new, improved brand building system, one that is grounded in the latest science-based understanding of consumer behavior and the prevailing impact of modern culture on business. You might agree culturally informed brands are the ones that will rise to dominance in their categories due to enhanced relevance and resonance.

This post is truly a call to action to let go of past beliefs and brand building behaviors, dominated mostly by transactional thinking and feature/benefit selling. The old way of doing things has inadvertently held brands back from what they desire most: attracting legions of devoted believers, ambassadors and evangelists.

The Truth About Brands In The Era Of Consumer Control

Sustainable, lasting brand relationships are built now on admiration and trust and will produce significant financial premiums. They also uniquely deliver higher margins and traffic. By virtue of their inherent stickiness, they work progressively to roll-back the costs of promotion while improving ROI and bottom-line performance.

Perhaps most important of all, they create the opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” the brand as members, not merely customers. It is that intersection between “why” and passion where people find affection and the basis for a relationship with brands they care about. We express it this way because the world has changed and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person.

Key insight: To secure the opportunity for sustainable brand relationships, we have a responsibility to bring added meaning, trust, and belief to the forefront of the relationship. Of note, we have been afforded an incredible opportunity to build deeper connections at a time when consumers are searching for guidance. What’s driving this openness to a relationship?

Uncertainty – people crave certainty in their lives, we can help provide it
Disconnection and isolation – inadvertent consequence of over-indulgence in social media
Absence of trust – bad business behaviors are writ large for all to see, all too often
Fear of the unknown – climate change deniers scoff at California wildfires – how is that possible?
Existential threats – heat waves, floods, weather anomalies, fires, droughts
Lack of control – we want to restore a sense of control in our lives
Financial and time pressures – mental health challenges are at an all-time high

However, many brands are not positioned correctly, and remain focused on transactional ‘better than’ stories. They lack higher purpose and a defined mission that should inform their positioning. Thus, they are not truly differentiated and focus instead on trivial points of bitterness. Consequently, they are not set up to provide deeper meaning to their customers and in so doing fail to attract evangelists and advocates who would otherwise “join” the company’s mission.

In Sum, Where Things Can Go Off The Rails:

Focus on ‘better than’ thinking vs. uniqueness and differentiation
Chasing awareness over relevance and deeper meaning
Absence of customer centricity
Higher purpose is missing or mis-applied
Brand narrative is not emotionally compelling
At risk of commoditizing their own category through competitive comparisons

An Improved Path:

1. Build stronger more engaging and profitable brands that are better positioned, more relevant and purposeful.
2. Discover/enhance/strengthen the strategic foundation, install customer centricity and higher purpose, while refining and improving the brand story.
3. Translate a highly differentiated brand into a transformational business by focusing on the customer and building emotional connections through the brand’s core “why” and related value proposition.

Resulting In A Healthy Brand:

• Defined higher purpose, value system, and deeper meaning
• Has cultivated a deeply resonant brand “why” that influences its core strategies
• Customer centricity and focus on enabling core user lifestyle aspirations and values
• Not pre-occupied with selling product features and benefits
• Recognizes the power of emotion to inform brand choice and purchase decisions
• Experiences sustainable growth and rapid acceptance of innovations
• Attracts a vibrant base of evangelists, enthusiasts, and ambassadors

What Is Customer Centricity?

Perhaps the most important characteristic of a healthy brand is the priority given to consumers who sit at the center of strategic planning, while all actions and activities operate in service of a devotion to serving the consumer’s needs.

If you ask marketers if the consumer is their top priority, many will say yes. Yet on closer examination we find the consumer is buried under other imperatives that put greater emphasis on brand self-promotion and a priority on balance sheet imperatives. This usually results in a transactional type view of consumers as audiences to be “sold” on product features. Brand storytelling is often inward-facing and the consumer — their hopes, beliefs and aspirations – remain secondary.

Creating “Vows” To The Consumer

However, consumer centricity is the strategic fuel that powers all successful brand-to-consumer relationships. To help enable this dynamic we believe brands should consider making vows much like the ones we tell our spouses at the start of a marriage.

The promises we make during a marriage ceremony are intended to be binding and foundational. Here are five areas of commitment – vows — that brands can deploy to build a relationship with consumers that reinforces the practice of consumer centricity:

Truth – fundamental to any trusted relationship is a commitment to honor the truth at all times
Honesty – disclosure and openness are critical to a long-term healthy relationship
Priority – when consumers matter, their priority in the business plan is always number one
Faithfulness – steadfast and unshakeable in the resolute commitment the consumer’s wellbeing
Devotion – helping people achieve their dreams and aspirations as an enabler of their journey

Can you make these vows to the consumer and endeavor to keep them? The expression of these commitments goes a long way to codifying the priority consumers receive at the center of your business universe.  This is how transformational relationships are formed with your customers. The focus on consumer priorities becomes a flywheel that sets everything else in motion. Vows represent a deeper and heartfelt commitment. It’s how you felt on the day you made them to your better half.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

These are some questions that perhaps Wall Street is asking about Target. While Walmart has performed admirably and is suggesting a rosier future, Target is in the corner with Macy’s and other retail establishments with less happy results and guidance.

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The New York Times described Target’s November 2024 earnings call with analysts as follows:

“Target rattled Wall Street on Wednesday with a downbeat earnings report showing a sales decline, lower profit and an unwelcome buildup of unsold inventory. The company also cut its forecast for the full year, a bad omen ahead of the critical holiday shopping season.

“Target’s stock plunged more than 21 percent for the day, a loss of nearly $12 billion in market value and its biggest slide in two and a half years.

“Sales at Target stores last quarter fell 1.9 percent from the same period last year, offset somewhat by a 10.8 percent rise in online sales. The company said it expected sales to be flat this quarter and cut its forecast for full-year profit, almost entirely reversing an increase announced just three months ago.”

Since November, Target performed well over the holidays. Target executives announced that holiday sales were better than expected. But, Target did not alter its outlook. This is probably due to the fact that even with nice sales over the holidays, Target warned investors that profit would be under pressure. As Barron’s, the financial newspaper, stated, the fact that was a “… stronger top-line performance won’t necessarily trickle down to the bottom line this quarter.”

When Target was a shopping mecca, its draw was the ability of anyone to own stylish, timeless design at affordable prices. Anyone could buy a few items and make a room look as if that room walked off the pages of House and Garden magazine. Design for the masses made Target. The iconic product was the Alessi teapot.

If you think the idea of design for the masses is irrelevant, think again. The Franklin Mint made a mint focusing on art for the masses. Paintings, Princess Diana memorabilia, elaborately-carved chess sets and American Eagle sculptures were highly prized, bringing art lovers with tiny budgets great joy.

Target won customers of all incomes because its promise of stylish design at affordable prices was relevant and differentiating, something neither Walmart nor Costco could promise. And, Target had a reputation for quality, leadership and trustworthiness. Buying an item from Target announced to others that you had taste, that you knew style and that you were a rather smart shopper. It was not an embarrassment to have a designer item from Target, rather a badge of honor. People were OK with saying that they had been shopping at Target.

All of Target’s brand promise is now gone.

Now, Target’s promise is more generic. According to executives responding to analyst questions on the November earnings call, Target promises, “…affordability, newness, seasonal relevance and ease.

Furthermore, the concept of Target value is now price and deals rather than the worth of owning something incredibly stylish and coveted at a great price. Target executives indicated the following: “a singular focus on value that includes low prices and compelling deals, combined with an elevated assortment and experience.  …. we’ll continue to lean into innovation and newness and value.”

The New York Times wrote about Target’s laser focus on price and deals:

“Target’s troubles have come as it focuses on cutting prices to win over shoppers squeezed by inflation. Last month, the company said that it would lower prices on more than 2,000 items, including Crisco vegetable oil, cat litter and a Bluey toy fire truck, and that it would have to cut prices on 10,000 items by the end of the year. Although the number of visits to Target increased 2.4 percent last quarter, the average amount that customers spent decreased 2 percent.”

Target’s improved holiday 2024 season belies the fact that Target’s growth was unprofitable growth. All of these sales and discounts negatively affected Target’s margins. Even with all of the holiday sales, Target did not change, and could not change, its profit guidance. CNBC reported this unprofitable growth as follows:

“Discounts and sales events have remained a significant sales driver as consumers emerge from a more than two-year stretch of high inflation. It’s unclear how much those deals will cut into Target’s … profit margins, and whether sales will keep improving if promotions fade away.”

Deals create deal loyal customers, not real loyal customers. And, deals mean less profit and lower margins. Wall Street understands and punished Target by sending Target’s shares downward almost 3%. One thing Wall Street watches is a brand’s margins.

Target was never about deals. Target’s promise was always about great brand with great prices. And, that great brand promise was relevant and differentiated.

Somewhere along the retail road, Target decided to compete with Walmart and Costco where varieties, groceries and low prices rule the roost. Target lost its brand promise. When it came to design, especially in fashion, Target gave away stylish for trendy. Target went all-in on trendy. Target CEO, Brian Cornell, focused on trendy, current fashion over Target’s heritage of “affordable” stylish fashion.

Trendy and Stylish are two very different things. The difference? Trends are temporary. Style is eternal.

Being stylish about expressing your personal taste is about your own authenticity; being  true to who you are. Trends come and go. Style does not. It is just not inspiring to see people wearing the latest trendy item promoted on Tik Tok. To be stylish, a person chooses fashion that reflects their own preferences and tastes. To be trendy, means, choosing clothing based on what is popular at the moment. Trendy dressers choose the identity reflected by the clothing. Stylish dressers choose clothes that reflect their own identity. Claire’s, the tween-teen mecca, is an extraordinary example of self-expression of one’s personal style. Claire’s promise is all about being who you are and being self-expressive.

A brand promise is not a theoretical construct; not an arty, ad agency visualization. A brand promise is a brand’s direction. A brand promise summarizes in a brief sentence (or two) the special contract that exists between a brand and its customers. A brand promise describes what a brand is intended to stand for in the mind of a specific group of guests and/or prospects. By consistently living up to the brand’s brand promise, brand owners ensure that a brand will be relevant and distinctive. A powerful brand will have a powerful brand promise. A powerful brand creates brand value. Without brand value, there is no shareholder value. Perhaps this is what Wall Street is waking up to now when listening to Target’s earnings call.

Target not only decided to compete on groceries and large-scale items like Walmart and Costco, but in fast fashion trends like H&M and Zara. As Target’s Chief Commercial officer told analysts, “I do think what differentiates Target is our multi-category business.”

To be fair, Kohl’s is in a similar situation.  Under its previous CEO, Kohl’s decided to ignore its current customers and its promised experience while catering to new customers who did not shop there and did not love Kohl’s. The new Kohl’s approach was to remove inventory that drew its long-time loyalists while substituting Sephora stores and Babies R’ Us stores inside Kohl’s. The idea was to attract younger customers. Instead of modernizing the brand promise, Kohl’s decided to ditch its promise for one that would be attractive to new customers: customers who care for Sephora and Babies R’Us rather than Kohl’s. Sales tanked. And, as Kohl’s learned, it is more expensive to attract new customers than to keep current customers.

Of course, brands must have loyal customers and new customers. But, focusing on new customers at the expense of existing customers is a mistake. This is why it is always necessary to keep a brand promise updated. A brand cannot afford to lose loyal customers. Target’s loyalty program demonstrates how critical the loyal group is for brand profitability and stability.

Trying to be what you are not while not being who you are not only turns off your core base of customers but makes your brand a poor follower, even a commodity. You will have customers who like you a little. But, you have lost the customers who love you a lot. This is a recipe for unprofitable growth, as Target is experiencing.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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Most of the brand messaging they see will be analytical and based on assertions of “better-ness” in the form of ingredient comparisons, quality assertions, or claims of formulation and taste superiority. What’s missing is the type of beneficial distinctiveness that sets a brand far enough apart that such comparisons become moot.

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Moreover, we know that consumer actions and decisions to buy are governed by the brain’s Limbic System, a part of our physiology that is influenced through emotion and not rational messages. Humans are not hard-wired to function as fact-based decision-making machines. It’s always heart-over-head. Surprising to be sure because we all like to think of ourselves as rationally informed beings. In reality, preferences are influenced by how people feel in the presence of your brand.

• The battle for market share, sales velocity, and sustainable business results resides in the six inches of grey matter between both ears of your brand’s core and prospective customer base. Your real marketplace challenge is how to secure and maintain mental real estate.

However, many brands are preoccupied with trumpeting their product features and benefits. Ultimately, your business success will be proportional to how greatly (or not) your brand matters to its intended audience. Mattering is an outcome of occupying a unique and positive frame inside your consumers’ minds. When your brand is distinctively positioned with users in a relevant way, you can secure a place in the brain that continuously emerges to reinforce brand preference and purchase.

Take the best-positioned brand in the beer industry. Much to the chagrin of all other large beer manufacturers, Corona is in a class by itself, having honed and invested in its association with beach, surf, sun, and vacation-in-a-bottle vibes. Even the lime ritual helps fortify the mental associations of wanting to relax in that sunny beach locale while enjoying a cold bottle of Corona. Notice the brand never talks about its liquid, brewing credentials, or quality of ingredients. It’s an emotional proposition and distinctively owned by Corona as a desirable lifestyle image association. This is positioning at its finest in a business where brands routinely fly over this important work by running a clever ad campaign featuring a catchy slogan.

Nike doesn’t sell running shoes. It’s an emotional and aspirational brand. One that inspires passion and commitment to athletic endeavor and achievement. ‘Just Do It’ is a more than memorable call to action. It’s a state of mind and purpose. It works to plant a positive association in the consumer’s mind by surfacing their quest for self-improvement. The predominant voice of Nike’s brand is decidedly not about running shoe design and engineering, advanced materials, or other product feature details. Nike owns the emotional context around a powerful desire for personal achievement.

• Do you see where this is going when you rise above self-promoting product features and focus on the consumer and their lives and how you can operate as an enabler of their hopes and dreams. Suddenly, you find yourself in rarified territory, exploring a path to uniquely position your brand in a more powerful way – creating a meaningful correlation that can take root in the consumer’s brain.

Far too many brands don’t labor at this. Instead, they focus squarely on themselves — through a circular story about product bona fides and feature advantages. It’s important to consider that consumers no longer buy products. A purchase is now a flag and symbol of what they believe in, their values, and who they are. Want to have a deeper relationship with your core users? Then, imbue your brand with deeper meaning. Give them something larger than themselves to embrace and advocate for.

• By doing so, you open an incredibly important strategic examination of how to create a memorable, sticky brand position. Consumers are naturally drawn to a brand with a higher purpose and belief system that aligns with their own.

Just be careful not to conflate a strong brand position with an advertising campaign. Creating emotional context around your brand and its “why” is a more demanding exercise. We refer to it as curating your Brand Stand — a decisive view about why your brand exists and its human-relevant purpose. It will serve as an anchor for every business decision coming after it, the value you create and how you do what you do.

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We won’t devote space here to examining all the prescriptive details around brand positioning discovery. Perhaps the most important guidance we can offer is embracing uniqueness and differentiation—especially important in business categories where sameness (most of them) is a systemic problem.

A Good Place To Start…

• “We are the only brand that delivers _____________.” What does the consumer get from you that they can’t get anywhere else? This is one of the toughest questions your brand will face. Remember, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on a trivial distinction that won’t deliver a genuine path to differentiation.
• What are your core customers’ beliefs and lifestyle aspirations? How can you further support and enable their hopes and dreams as your brand’s superpower? Suddenly, you are marketing something more vital to them than the table stakes expectation of a well-designed and produced product.

Positioning Is Most Effective When Trust Breaks Out

Trust is essential to unlocking the business value of a unique brand positioning. Trusted brands retain loyalty, motivate repeat purchases, and deliver a receptive audience for the trial of innovations. That said, trust can only be earned. Here’s a six-point checklist to help you think about trust:

1. Values and beliefs – a higher purpose brand that has a belief system beyond transactional considerations is immediately trustworthy
2. Consistency – when the experience with your brand across all points of contact is reinforced through repeat performances, you earn trust
3. Keeping promises (walking the walk) – when earning trust, efforts to demonstrate dependability through actions and behaviors are more powerful than words
4. Social proof – validation and verification of your competence through the testimonials of real people is powerful affirmation of trustworthiness
5. Transparency – another form of validation is taking consumers behind the corporate curtain for an unfiltered look at what you do and how you do it. Showing extraordinary openness is  characteristic of a trusted brand
6. Help rather than hype – If you truly care about your customer’s well-being and success, you will operate unselfishly as an enabler of their lifestyle goals and wishes, earning their trust along the way

A uniquely positioned and trusted brand is your organization’s most powerful business-building asset. Your devotion and energy to creating emotional connectivity and trustworthiness are the formula for rising above the competition and driving sustainable, profitable growth. Positioning creates a memorable place in the brain, while trust seals the deal. Together, they deliver a formidable and powerful business-building platform.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

Now more than ever before CPG and retail brands are suffering an existential challenge to the very essence of advantage that was once responsible for their success. Simply stated, we observe a proliferation of business categories where too many brands are failing to make much of an inspirational impression. The consumers’ eyes are starting to glaze over.

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Why? Because uniformity and conformity have taken root, pushing brand behavior collectively by efforts to match competitive “one-ups-manship” moves over time. The irony of ironies: competitive competence will eventually submerge brand distinctions because like the laws of gravity, feature mirroring and spec creep inexorably push products closer to each other.

All airlines have frequent flier benefits
All detergents offer stain fighting formulas
All delivery is fast
All retailers have loyalty card programs
Should the Hummer slide towards the larger addressable market of a family friendly ride or remain the “toughest motherf____er” on the planet?

Take pet food and the impact of category premiumization. In herd-like fashion many premium pet brands have moved to mirror each other on:

• High quality animal protein ingredients
• Biologically appropriate standards of nutrition
• Low impact, minimal processing
• Customization to specific need states like food sensitivities or aging

Once a higher bar is set, pet brands across the business spectrum rise to it and differentiation quickly dissipates with it.

Build Brand Passion And Investment?

Competitive differentiation is increasingly a rarity. It is being replaced by the mastery of imitation and similarity. Eventually, uniqueness begins to exist only in the minds of some marketers while the reality is lost on consumers who simply don’t see it. In the absence of authentic distinction brands begin to collapse on top of each other because the differences between them is ever more trivial.

Connoisseurship, devotion, passion and inspiration is the hallmark of brands that matter to their core user base. This is a top priority for brand owners because of an increasingly demanding challenge: what comes next when consumers decide the differences between brands are too narrow and don’t matter anymore? We know the ability to compete successfully over time is dependent on a brand’s efforts to create and maintain meaningful separation from everything else. To be a category of one.

When Mavericks Become Champions

Sustainable differentiation is never an outcome of well roundedness but rather lopsidedness, intentional tradeoffs, taking stands and decisions to fight conformity. There’s just too much preoccupation with solving for competitive moves that leads to regression towards the mean. Over time categories start to slice and dice into ever smaller segments that hunt for unique appeals to narrower targets of interest. Until — the profusion of alternatives gets less meaningful — and then the rust of category commoditization starts to spread rapidly.

Trying to squeeze differentiation out of minuscule discrepancies is essentially the marketing version of making mountains out of a mole hill. Our calling as marketers is to build a process and strategy that leads people to be more discriminating and picky about what they buy. The villain we fight is purchase behavior based on routine rather than passionate commitment. If a person publicizes their affinity for a brand, it means the connection has gone a whole lot deeper.

• When brands pay too much attention to adjacent competitor changes and keeping up with those feature adjustments, the business eventually becomes incompatible with consumer devotion to it. Instead, we strive to continually earn a foundation of loyalists who retain a stubborn passion for the brand – a fanatical hard core fan base.

You know when brand fidelity starts to shrink, something is definitely amiss. Usually, the result of accentuating non-essential differences. Until — a brand comes along that does something unpredictable, shaking people out of their complacency and enticing them to move away from entrenched consumption patterns. This also means a planned escape from focusing on the competition altogether.

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Celebration Of Outliers And Iconoclasts

When you’re too consumed with tracking competitors you lose the bandwidth to generate real inspiration. It’s just…

• Harder to be an outlier
• Harder to develop a market disrupting strategy
• Harder to imbue a brand with deeper meaning that invokes conversation

Unafraid brands will put a stake in the ground, take a point of view and fight overblown promises and spurious claims. When other brands go north, the outliers head south. Instead of conformity and uniformity, these disruptive brands are preoccupied with unearthing unique ideas because they are more interested in separation than comparison. They know real differences can be truly charismatic and magnetic.

How To Escape The Competitive Herd

• Differentiation – a way of thinking, a mindset and commitment to pursuing a unique journey
• Subtraction – removal of some common features in a declared move towards specialization
• Polarization – taking sides by narrowing the preferred target audience cohort

Marketing is the intersection of where business meets up with real human beings. Consumers don’t organize their worlds with charts and graphs.  They are unpredictable, disorganized and make emotional decisions. Then we task them with selecting products in a sea of similarity – the differences diminished to package graphics or a compelling image.

We want them to be advocates and ambassadors but then refuse to offer any deeper meaning they can attach to and believe in. Said one marketing advisor, “the mockery quotient of a category is directly correlated to the amount of meaningless differentiation in it.” What’s missing are meaningful grooves of separation enhanced by a higher purpose and mission that touches the hearts of people who want to be part of something greater than themselves.

We should be laser focused on that agenda rather than relentlessly tracking competitors to make sure we aren’t outgunned on the feature playlist. It’s time to get off this comparison merry-go-round to work on genuine emotional relevance and resonance.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education