Improving Decision Making: Brand Personality

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In this series of posts we are investigating strategic and tactical decision-making processes in common use today, versus optimized decision making processes to which we should be transitioning. Each brand has a personality and the creative agency is often referred to as the keeper of the brand personality. A significant part of the brand's appeal is its personality, although research has not identified the exact contribution that the personality – apart from habit, product characteristics, price and other factors – makes to sales, loyalty, and brand equity. As we enter the new era of ROI-based marketing for brand advertisers, it becomes essential to quantify everything in terms of ROI contribution.

A brand rolls out in an S curve following Rogers principle of the diffusion of innovations. A brand can start a whole new S curve and therefore restart a whole new growth cycle primarily by refreshing the brand personality, as Buick has recently done. But such changes must be made cautiously so as to not lose more than is gained by jarring the relationship with those customers most attached to the brand personality, as Coke once did with an innovation that went too far, from which they quickly recovered by using the name "Classic Coke" to give back the original personality to those who clung to it.

Any brand that has seemingly stopped growing in the U.S. needs to study the option of a change in brand personality. This can be cautiously AB tested in tiny bits of geography the way one tests a stain remover on a tiny corner of the fabric. In normative decision making there is no systematic process in place for this. It's left to chance as to whether anyone with sufficient power is going to even bring this option up. A marketer's checklist approach triggered by a timetable would be a process based management answer to this need. How does one research such things? As we've said, behavior and ROI-based research such as AB testing is the ultimate measure. But as one is gathering preliminary information as a springboard for ideas and therefore uses the blunter instruments of surveys, this bluntness can be sharpened if the surveys are taken among homes whose crossmedia ad exposure and purchases are being passively measured, so that the survey data can be evaluated based on its relationship with purchase response to ad/brand native stimuli. TiVo Research (TRA) which I co-founded in 2007 has a panel about the size of the Nielsen national panel, a subset of its multi-million household national sample measuring crossmedia plus granular purchase transactions, in which online surveys are available monthly, called Power||Watch, useful for this combined behavioral/attitudinal work.

My new company RMT has a system called DriverTagsTM which studies people's subconscious motivations based on the programs they watch. People tend to gravitate to brands and programs and ads whose personalities link to the person's ideal self-image. The vertical in which changing brand personality might be most crucial is political advertising, where one's brand image is often created as much or more by what the competition says about you than by what you do. An obvious example is Hillary Clinton, who has received a lot of engineered bad press in her career, and therefore understandably could benefit enormously from a well-executed brand personality shift, which we see is already underway as evidenced by the personality-focused recent cover story about Hillary in Us Magazine. As an exercise RMT recently selected Chris Christie and analyzed 13 of his ads to develop a DriverTagsTM based plan. DriverTagsTM revealed an opportunity to refocus his brand personality on straight talk and inclusive cooperation to get things done. The plan included recommended ideas for new ads and recommended program environments for specific existing Christie ads to maximize the priming effect of context-ad resonance and was aimed at a campaign to put Christie in third position in the outcome of the New Hampshire primary. Of course, the plan was not used and the result in New Hampshire put the contender out of the race. Had the brand personality been changed in time, the outcome could have been different.

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