With the growth of Tesco’s venture brands Yoo and Chokablok taking up a fair amount of page space of late, my roommates and I got to thinking about which will be the next category to feel the pressures of own label in not only the traditional sense, but also from an equally well branded incumbent.

One of the brands we identified that may find itself under threat is Gü who currently sit in the specialised category of premium puddings. Familiar with the threats and pressures that playing in an own-label dominated category bring with it, most of their recent advertising suggests that they have been looking to increase their frequency of consumption by positioning Gü as a permissible temptation. In their journey from ‘just for dinner parties with important friends’ to the ‘everyday indulgence’, we have seen the rich and premium brand go from strength to strength in both hearts and minds.

Whilst seeming like a fairly straightforward strategy the dilution of premium into every day is not something that will necessarily affect a brand positively. Not only this but with supermarket venture brands seemingly in the assurgency how long will it be before the likes of Tesco attack with an equally quirky and personable me Tü?

So what to do for Gü?

Having sampled many of their products in numerous client workshops and dinner parties over the years we made the following two observations:

• Frü is not as good as Gü or indeed many OL products
• Gü is great at chocolate

So for us the way forward for a brand like Gü and others who may soon come under threat from venture brands is simple; identify what it is that makes your brand or product great and leverage it in as many new ways as your brand allows, thus insuring yourself against any major category plays from retailers. For Gü this would mean proliferation into hot chocolate through a potential JV with Starbucks, ice creams, yoghurts, biscuits, cookie dough, confectionary, RTD milkshakes and many more.

We want to see Gü taking chocolate and running with it; deep diving into the seasonality of flavours that can be combined with chocolate and tapping into new occasions. Personally I’m really looking forward to trying a rich and smooth Gü hot chocolate and if it’s anything like the puds it will be pure liquid perfection in a mug…that is of course if they do ever get round to making one.

A few weeks ago, we published the first in a series of papers looking at some of the meaty issues facing marketers today.   Each paper was first presented at our 25th Anniversary conference in London in June 2011:  ‘Back to the future of branding - A look at what the past 25 years of brand marketing tell us about what the next 25 may have in store’. 

Our aim was to encourage new thinking, make a few predictions and perhaps even challenge some of today’s orthodoxies.  We wanted to show that we remain as committed as ever to helping our clients out-think, out-compete and out-perform their competition.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend the conference, I’m delighted to present the second
of our anniversary papers, entitled ‘Variations On The Role & Measurement of Brand’.

Co-authored by Sony Ericsson’s Nigel Turner and The Value Engineers’ Paul Durrant, the paper examines how marketers can provide consistent brand cues to help people navigate the exploding universe of mobile technology, while measuring the effect of their activities with discrete, purpose-built tools.

We hope you enjoy it.  If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised in the paper, why not submit a comment below, or get in touch with us directly?

In an ideal world we simply would never use concepts, we’d produce prototypes of everything because there’s clearly no substitute for the real thing. However, businesses can’t work that way. Ideas must be made to fight their corner and to jump through hoops to justify every level of investment – which therefore makes great concepts and concept writing unbelievably important.

Here are a few tips on how to avoid writing bad concepts and how to write good concepts!

TIPS TO AVOID WRITING BAD CONCEPTS

1.’THE KITCHEN SINK’ PRINCIPLE

Don’t load every thought you have into one concept so there is no central idea

2.HARD SELL

Don’t try too hard and over-claim your product or service. Consumers will see straight through it

3.BORING

Concepts can often be too functional and flat and the language fails to inspire and engage your audience.

TIPS FOR WRITING GOOD CONCEPTs

1.LESS IS MORE

You don’t have to spell everything out literally! Consumers can infer a benefit.

2. TELL A CONSISTENT STORY

An insight, proposition & RTB that fits together to create a meaningful story

3. BE BOLD

The concept should be able to provoke a reaction and a POV that people can react to.

We believe that there are lots of great ideas in businesses but they’ve never seen the light of day due to badly written concepts. As part of an innovation process we think good practice is to review past concepts to understand why they failed and see if there is any ‘hidden gems’ that got lost in concept translation!

We’ve written an ‘A-Z of concept writing’ to provide guidance on how to make the most of concepts. To find out more, please contact The Value Engineers

Brand tracking often gets a bad press. However it’s still something that lots of companies do.

Some feel they are lacking market knowledge and need to do it, others feel they have to do it as it’s a traditional part of the budget but for many it’s a necessary evil.  It’s akin to a trip to the dentists for a check-up, which tells you that everything is ok… but comes with a large bill.

Tracking can be seen a bit like Inspector Lestrade – The metropolitan police inspector who crops up in many of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels.

Portrayals of Lestrade have been very different over the years. He can seem bumbling or inept; he can be seen as conventional and lacking in imagination and often out of his depth.

Brand tracking shouldn’t been seen like this. It could and should be central to the marketing strategy development and activity.

Brand tracking should be more like Sherlock Holmes – Inquisitive, confident, reasoned and reasoning, forward thinking, with an understanding of history & human nature and the ability to look through and beyond the face value data to reveal the true culprit.

So the obvious question dear Marketer is how do you become Holmesian?

Some key points to follow:

1. Solve the crime: Brand tracking has to address and feed the marketing strategy and help affect business change but as he said in The Adventure of the Copper Beaches: “Data! Data! Data! …I can’t make bricks without clay.” –  analysis starts with information
2. Everyone is a suspect: Tracking must be broad and outward looking – it’s important always to compare yourself to the competition, so it’s worth remembering Holmes’ advice in The Adventure of the Dancing Man: “What one man can invent another can discover.”
3. Use deductive reasoning: You need to build logical stories and link them to clear; practical and actionable KPI’s in order to address business challenges. You may need to work with the data and see things others might miss. As the famous exchange from Silver Blaze suggests, you may even need to deduce things from the absence of it rather than its presence – “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
4. Vary your line of questioning: Holmes quoted in The Sign of Four “The main thing with people of that sort is to never let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you. If you do they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are likely to get what you want.” Remember who you are talking to – language is very important!!! It must be in consumer language and not marketing speak – most consumers do not speak marketing  jargon 1.0 or 2.0 – so perhaps Lestrade does have his uses after all.
5. Moriarty is almost as smart: You want to track key image or behavioural attributes which reflect the true market position, not just your view of the world because as Holmes notes “Everything in this world is relative, my dear Watson.”
6. Work with others, your own Dr. Watson: Bring different perspectives to bear on the analysis because as the great detective said in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes “Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.”

So in the end at its best, brand tracking is both elementary and complicated – it deals with the elements and first principles upon which marketing strategy can be built but getting the best out of it may be a little more complicated and as Holmes said in A Study In Scarlet “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.”

Happy detecting!

“We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.”

In 1986, among other world events, The Value Engineers first opened its doors for business. In 2011, we celebrated 25 years of helping our clients build successful, profitable brands.

For us, it was never a time to look back, but rather a time to look forward and think about the coming challenges and fresh opportunities presented by an ever-changing and increasingly competitive landscape.

On 9th June, 2011, we hosted a seminar in London, entitled: ‘Back to the future of branding - A look at what the past 25 years of brand marketing tell us about what the next 25 may have in store’. 

During the seminar, we presented six papers alongside some of our past and present clients, addressing a few of what we felt were the big issues facing branding and marketing. Our aim was to encourage new thinking, make a few predictions and perhaps even challenge
some of today’s orthodoxies. We wanted to show that we remain as committed as ever to helping our clients out-think, out-compete and out-perform their competition. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some of the papers that were presented that day.

Here you’ll find the first of these papers, co-authored by The Value Engineers’ Katy Mousinho and Confused.com’s Mike Hoban. In a time when every market research company is repositioning itself as an insight provider, their paper asks: ‘What’s beyond insight?’

We hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised in the paper, why not submit a comment below, or get in touch with us directly?