People make emotional connections to brands, so it’s not surprising that some of the most popular definitions of brands are ‘emotional’ too. One such example is, “a brand is a promise”.

As a definition it’s beautifully short, ‘sweet’ and so very memorable.

However, analysing it a bit more thoroughly, its strength is that it combines the notion of the brand proposition – that the role of a brand is to make an  offer to its customers -  with one of the original definitions of a brand as a guarantee of quality. In other words, what this definition is saying is that a brand is not just an offer but something more – a promise.

And it is this thought taken a bit further that has led to the variation of the definition which I personally prefer, namely, “a brand is not just a promise, it’s a responsibility”.

This definition therefore reflects the fact that brands aren’t just externally focused  on ‘selling’ to customers but on building and maintaining these relationships. The point of purchase is not the end of a sale but the beginning of a relationship and it is the ‘responsibility’ of the brand to deliver on its promises. Otherwise how can it expect to retain its customers?

As one of my colleagues Tim Kaner puts it, “a brand is the promise you make, the customer experience is the promise you must keep”.

It is also a definition that should help remind marketers about the difference between over-promising and under-delivering, and, under-promising and over-delivering.

• “The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity” – Al Reis and Laura Reis
• “CSR is not a marketing tool.  It is a value which requires belief and commitment” – Anon
• “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it” – Warren Buffet
• “Ethics is the new competitive environment” – Peter Robinson, CEO Mountain Equipment Co-op
• “The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive” – Paul Hawken
• “Always do what is right.  This will gratify some people and astonish the rest” – Mark Twain

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

If you asked a cowboy what a brand was, he would talk about the permanent marks made on his cow hides by a hot iron shaped in a particular way to denote  his ownership of those cows.

In short, for him a brand would be a mark of ownership.

Indeed this definition goes back to the earliest known incidence of branding I am aware of. It comes from over 2,000 years ago, when one oil lamp maker in Rome started stamping the word ‘Fortis’ onto his lamps. It showed that he had made them and they were his lamps, well at least until he sold them in the market.

Which raises some interesting questions about this definition in relation to marketing. Is a brand a mark of ownership or a mark of manufacturing or creation? And who does own a brand?
 
On the ownership of brands my personal opinion is that an abdication has taken place. “The company brand owner is dead, and the consumer is the new king.” Over the last few years, many marketing people have handed over ‘ownership’ of their brand to their consumers. It is now increasingly accepted that  as consumers have their own ‘perceptions’ of the brand and can shape its future, they are the ‘owners’.

Without trying to dispute either the importance of consumers, the notion that an individual’s perception of brand is personal, or indeed the inability of companies to control every aspect of what will shape brand perceptions, I would like to state the case for the old kings – the brand owners – to reclaim ownership of their brands

Firstly, I am no lawyer, but the notion that a (marketing) director of a company which legally ‘owns’ a brand – and that is in turn valued highly on the company’s balance sheet – can publicly proclaim that they do not really ‘own’ that brand, seems patently dangerous to me.

If companies do not ‘own’ their brands, how can they expect to defend their rights over them? Giving up ownership could have unwanted consequences. Is it giving a green light to counterfeiters to reproduce, replicate and trade-off brands? If challenged, the counterfeiters can simply refute any claims of damages. You don’t own the brand, they do.

Secondarily, it is undoubtedly true that we all have individual perceptions and experiences of the brands we know, and we can even feel like we ‘own’ at least a part of those brands. But do we really own the object, the brand in question?

As consumers, they may be able to influence the brand, and even control it to some extent. They are perhaps the most powerful influencing force or pressure group. But they are not, and never will be, the owners. We can stop buying a brand, we can ignore it, we can suggest and influence alterations, but we do not enact change or final control.

I would draw a parallel with the Mona Lisa, which enjoys ‘awareness’ or fame in the way a brand does, and which engenders a wide range of different perceptions. In other words, everyone has a perception of the painting in our mind, but it would seem foolish for me to suggest that any or all of us actually own the Mona Lisa.

Thirdly I believe it is vital that marketers continue to recognise the importance of their role as brand owners. Individual perceptions are crucial, but branding is all about the creation and management of meaning en masse. Branding is a social phenomenon. Brands – particularly the ‘big’ national and global brands – are fundamentally ‘mass’ tools. Brands aren’t about single transactions: they work in multiplicity, with many people, and on many occasions. Brands are a means by which their owners do their best to manage multiple relationships simultaneously.

It is the role of the brand owner, through their brand and all its points of interface, to try to create and then manage the best perceptions of that brand.

Finally I would suggest we should be deeply concerned if  consumers were completely in charge. Sometimes consumers don’t know what they want, or at last don’t know until they are offered it. Brand ownership and creation is often about innovation, changing what already exists and creating new things. If the consumers owned the brand and their word was final, then many, many brand innovations would be killed before they started. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the consumer what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse”.
 
A brand owner should have ‘that vision thing’. That is, the belief that what you are doing is right, and that it should be done even if those around you don’t always agree. Walt Disney, W.K. Kellogg, Richard Branson, Phil Knight (the founder of Nike) and Anita Roddick (the founder of The Body Shop) believed in what they were doing. They believed in creating something that existed in their minds long before it existed in the minds of what were often, at first, very dubious consumers.

So I believe that there has been a significant shift of power in the relationship between brand owners and consumers and that we have now reached a position where branding is an organic and ‘negotiated’ unit of social and economic currency. However I would still argue that companies own their brands and so brands can and should still be defined as a mark of ownership.

Cast your mind back to the idea of an after-work drink in the early 20th century, and the picture that comes to mind is heavily focused around the local pub. Bitter, porter and stout were the drinks of choice, produced by one of hundreds of local breweries.

Fast forward a hundred years and the picture is very different. In those areas where the local boozer still exists, fighting off rising prices and increasing legislation, the taps are more likely to be a series of international lager brands than locally produced bitters.

The reasons for the change are manifold: evolving class boundaries and demographics; tastes moving from bitter to lager; and perhaps most of all, a shift among younger drinks from a pub- to a bar culture. In a world where everyone’s aspirational, young people are looking for opportunities to see and be seen, to show off the evidence of disposable income in their clothing and footwear, choice of drinks and self-branding – desires for which the bar comes into its own. While pubs have traditionally been used for conversation among pairs and groups, lubricated but not wholly driven by alcohol, the new breed of chain bars and pubs revolve around music, dancing and heavy drinking. Behaviour and expectations have shifted, with a concomitant effect on the local pub trade.

The arrival of lager at the forefront of British advertising budgets and trade sales saw it promoted as the drink of aspiration, with associations drawn between individual lager brands and social popularity, increased sex appeal, international culture and wealth. For evidence of this, see the link between lager and football – the sport of the masses meets the (would-be) drink of the masses.

In contrast, real ale became associated with heritage, tradition, nostalgia; its roots in local community – the drink with which generations of working class men ‘celebrated an honest day’s toil’. Such values have been of less interest to today’s young people than the high-income, high-gloss lifestyle promoted by lager brands.

But perhaps the balance is shifting back again. Last week, the publication of the new edition of the Good Beer Guide revealed that the UK now has more than 700 real ale breweries – more than any time since World War II. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, real ale saw its market share rise by 0.3% to 6.1% of the £17bn beer market in 2009. The increase might sound insignificant, but it’s the first of its kind for decades – in a market that’s seen an estimated four pubs close in the UK every day.

More obviously significant is the increase in younger and female drinkers. Research by Camra found that the proportion of women who’ve tried real ale doubled in 2009 from 16% to 32%, while 25-34 year old trialists increased from 38% to 50%.

Managing director of the Purity Brewing Company Paul Halsey attributes this rise to communications, in a recent statement to The Guardian: “The marketing is a lot better now, much cooler and cleaner, so people in their 20s　and 30s have more of an interest in it”.

While we at The Value Engineers would never underestimate the power of marketing, I believe there’s a wider story behind the return of real ales.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing group of consumers wanting more sophisticated experiences, tastes and brands. Traditionally the province of the older, high-wealth consumer, this so-called ‘connoisseur culture’ now encompasses younger singles and couples with disposable income and an increasing aversion to mass-market consumption. It’s brought with it an increased interest in authenticity and heritage; a desire to connect with brands that have more to offer than a one-size-fits-all ‘glocational’ positioning.

It’s a desire of which real ale is strongly positioned to take advantage. Small-scale, ‘artisanal’ producers are thriving, aided by their local provenance and the strong narratives or personalities that underpin brewers and brands. From the Hog’s Back Brewery’s bottle conditioned ‘Wobble in a Bottle’ to Brew Dog founders Martin Dickie and James Watt, the UK’s real ale market is capitalising on its assets.

The recession has also had its impact – with something of a positive effect for once. Where lager brands and bars have suffered from consumers shifting their drinking in-home, real ale and craft beers have long been the drink of choice for those seeking quality rather than quantity. The result is that pubs catering to these ‘civilised drinking’ occasions have suffered less than their mass-market counterparts.

However one chooses to attribute the causes, it’s clear is that it’s increasingly the young professionals who are discovering the appeal of bitter, with its ties to place and the image of a gentler, friendlier time. They enjoy the passion and individuality of their local breweries and micro-brewers – and long may these continue. So the next time you’re in a pub stocking real ale, why not raise a glass to the sector that’s refusing to accept its traditional position as the footnote of the UK beer market?

We are very proud to announce the arrival of Tim Kaner as Associate Director focusing on Capabilities and Customer Experience.

After graduating from Cambridge with a degree in Modern & Medieval languages, Tim spent the first part of his career in advertising at BMP and then Leo Burnett on categories ranging from beer to banks, shampoo to cereal and trains to Tropicana.

In 1999 he moved client side to Sony Europe, taking responsibility for the development of regional brand and product advertising and the management of creative and media agency relationships. He also worked with a global team to relaunch Aiwa as a youth-targeted brand. In 2004 Tim was appointed Director of Marketing Communications and from 2006 ran the Marketing Strategy Office with a mission to help Sony Europe build a more customer-centric sales and marketing culture. He led a change programme whose scope covered marketing capability, designing and embedding common processes and developing and implementing tools such as customer segmentation. Amongst all of this he also found time to complete an MBA, act as an adviser to the Young Enterprise scheme, be on judging panels for Account Planning Group and IPA effectiveness awards and speak at various conferences.

Tim is passionate about helping organisations understand how they are seen through their customers’ eyes and about using these insights to identify where value can be created through customer experience improvement. He and his wife have two teenage children to keep them on their toes. He tries to find time to improve his sushi making skills and enjoys skiing and scuba diving!