On reading the story that Kellogg’s acquired Pringles my initial reaction was; why would Kellogg’s, who are increasingly communicating the importance of healthy living, acquire a brand that is the other end of the spectrum? Health even has its own section on the Kellogg’s website and the association with the Governments Change4Life initiative is clearly displayed:

‘Because nothing’s more important in life than your health and wellbeing, we’ve teamed up with the Government’s Change4Life initiative to promote a balance of eating well, being more active and therefore living longer’ (http://www.kelloggs.co.uk/health/)

With consumers becoming increasingly savvy about what actually constitutes a healthy breakfast (low carbohydrate, high protein and fresh nutritious ingredients), we can assume that the threat to cereals ‘healthy’ perceptions will only increase …and for Kellogg’s, the acquisition of the Pringles brand surely won’t help with this perception?

However, if we look more broadly than the need for health, the acquisition of Pringles does start to make a lot more sense. Kellogg’s currently dominate the morning and daytime snacking occasions with their broad range of cereals and cereal bars. Strategically for Kellogg’s, Pringles takes them into a new category and new occasions. Pringles are for sharing, particularly centred round more afternoon/ evening occasions and more occasional than their current brand portfolio (which is much more habitual) – ultimately resulting in (almost) completely incremental growth for Kellogg’s. They also sit well together in terms of targeting a similar demographic of mainstream families, not particularly budget but not premium either.

I suppose the ultimate question therefore, is whether this acquisition will taint consumer perceptions of either brand… and having asked around my ‘non-marketing’ friends, Kellogg’s and Pringles are currently perceived as completely separate brands and as long as this continues the fact that they are owned by the same company won’t be widely acknowledged by the general public and therefore won’t actually make a difference to consumer perceptions.

I watched this programme on Tuesday night and thought it was worth sharing. It is part of a new BBC2 series on every Tuesday at 9am, which tells the story of how big businesses transform simple commodities into everyday necessities and highly profitable brands.

This episode talks about how cereal brands, such as Kellogg’s, have transformed the way we eat and the way we live (the original processed, convenience food). Cereals are cheap and abundant but the really interesting bit lies in the processing, advertising and marketing that goes into creating well-known cereal brands.

For example, unlike other categories where own label has taken a 50% share; branded products still have an 80% share of the cereal market. It shows the power of the brands and their advertising. We all grew up with brands such as Frosties, Coco Pops and Corn Flakes; they have such strong nostalgic value and provide a level of reassuring consistency that we are reluctant to let go of.

The programme carries the notion that the cereal business has helped shape the modern world of business and advertising we know today. Definitely worth a watch!

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.

Undoubtedly childhood obesity is a massive issue and one that should concern policy makers, brand owners and parents. However there is a distinct danger that an over simplistic approach to the problem may result in the wrong forms of behavioural change.

A recent survey by ‘Lacors’ (the local government regulatory body) has shown that nurseries are giving children too ‘much’ fruit and vegetables, often as a result of the pressures being placed by over anxious parents. In light of the constant media coverage on high fat/sugar/salt food, some parents are putting their young children on strict diets of low fat and low calorie foods. This is of course extremely dangerous for the well being of the child as their core development and growth needs necessitates the inclusion of fat and sugar as essential parts of their diets. The low calorie, high fibre diets being adopted by adults are simply unsuitable for children under the age of 5.

In a similar vein the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has recently rejected claims that a recent Coco Pops advert ‘Ever Thought of Coco Pops after school?’ was irresponsible. Those groups that lodged the complaints believed that it would encourage children to eat excessive amounts of sugary cereal during the day. As any parent knows however, after school, children frequently arrive home tired, in a very grumpy mood and in much need of a sugar boost until their evening meal is ready for them. In these situations children have typically been given sweet snacks such as biscuits & cake bars, and in this context, I believe that the potential provision of a bowl of Coco Pops served with ‘full fat’ milk would be a welcome and legitimate addition to the after school snacking repertoire. 

It is crucial that parents are made aware of the issues of healthy lifestyles however the current information that parents receive often leads them to conclude that some foods are bad and some are good. There is no such thing as bad food; there are however bad ‘diets’ and we need to ensure that this message is more clearly conveyed. If we do not, we risk the under-nourishment of  toddlers and a misguided displacement of alternative food consumption of older children.

The levees have finally broken. After over a year spent dipping its toe in the water with regional trials in the North and South-East, M&S is starting to sell branded grocery products at all of its stores in the UK.

Normally branding consultants might be tearing their hair out at this news: why are they undermining a point of difference?

But M&S is actually doing the right thing here. The only brands being introduced are in what it calls brand-led categories, e.g., Pantene, Coca Cola, Gordon’s, Marmite, Persil, Kit Kat, Kellogg’s and Heinz. In other words, however hard M&S might try to fabricate a localised monopoly within its stores, these are the kind of destination brands which even regular M&S shoppers would be going elsewhere to pick up. Interestingly, M&S (or rather John Dixon, their Executive Director of Food) divides the brands it’s introducing into two categories:

1. ‘Products that we could simply never compete with, like Marmite and Kit Kat,’ i.e. brands like Guinness which are very closely tied to their product format/flavour/some other intrinsic. While this quality is normally a hindrance to the brands in question because consumers don’t give them ‘permission’ to innovate away from their core, in this case, it’s a quality that means any mimic M&S produce won’t ever be seen as comparable by consumers.

2. ‘Other areas where, whilst we have a great M&S equivalent, the leading brand dominates the market,’ i.e. brands which embody their category and offer the generic, mass-market proposition, e.g. Gordon’s ‘the G in G&T’ and Heinz ‘Heinz Meanz Beanz.’ These are the kind of brands who truly can claim market leader status; all of the marketing muscle they can heft over their central ground makes them basically impossible to unseat. So, as an aside, being selected by M&S as one of these brands is a real accolade, and it’s interesting to think that being chosen and endorsed by M&S may become something brands fight for. And if this is the start of a flood of brands to M&S’s shelves, it may be something that even non-market leading brands may fight for if they believe they have a motivating proposition against the core M&S range in their category.

In any case because the brands being introduced at this stage will only cover 7% of its product range and because they’re the kind of brands M&S simply can’t compete with, I think it’s a smart move. Being brand-free has been a distinct point of difference for M&S, but because that has been to the exclusion of these destination brands, that differentiation has been the wrong kind; it’s been differentiation for its own sake. It’s left consumers frustrated that they either have to put up with a compromised, own-brand alternative they don’t want, or make a second trip to a rival store to pick up what they do want. It’s why The M&S Principle may be a useful short-hand for an important point about differentiation: what matters is owning a compelling position in consumers’ minds. So when it comes to differentiation, motivate, don’t aggravate.