What comes to mind when you think about owning a
Mercedes-Benz?
If you could pry open the mind of the typical automobile buyer, you would probably find the word “prestige” closely identified with the brand. Tell the truth, don’t you associate prestige with the Mercedes-Benz brand? Most people do.
You might also associate attributes like expensive, German, well engineered, and reliable with the brand, but the core differentiation is prestige. Lamborghinis are expensive, Audis are German, Hondas are well engineered, and Toyotas are reliable, but none of these brands conveys the prestige of a Mercedes.
If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns.
What prestige is to Mercedes, safety is to Volvo.
Volvo owns the word “safety” in the mind of the automobile buyer. And, as a result, over the past decade Volvo has become the largest-selling European luxury car in America.
Once a brand owns a word, it’s almost impossible for a competitor to take that word away from the brand. Could you build a safer car than a Volvo? Probably. Many brands have already claimed to do so, including Saab, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. Could one of these other brands own the word “safety” in the mind? Probably not.
What comes to mind when you think about owning a BMW?
A car that’s fun to drive. The ultimate driving machine. BMW owns the word “driving” in the mind. And, as a result, BMW has become the second-largest-selling European luxury car in America.
Yet none of these three brands (Mercedes, Volvo, and BMW) is a perfect example of the law of the word since they have all recently violated the law. Mercedes has moved into less expensive, less prestigious cars. Volvo into sporty cars. And BMW into more luxurious cars.
And so it goes. The minute a brand begins to stand for something in the mind, the company that owns the brand looks for ways to broaden the base, to get into other markets, to capture other attributes. This is a serious error and one of the most common mistakes in branding.
What’s a Kleenex? What word do you associate with the Kleenex brand?
On the surface, Kleenex seems unfocused. It’s soft and pops up; it’s well known and comes in many different forms. There are sport Kleenexes, family-size Kleenexes, psychedelic Kleenexes. Kleenex is by far the leading brand of pocket tissue.
What word does Kleenex own in the mind? Kleenex owns the category word. Kleenex is tissue.
Kleenex was the first pocket tissue. Before Kimberly-Clark introduced Kleenex, there was no market for a pocket tissue. But instead of expanding to toilet tissue and paper towels, Kleenex kept hammering away at its original focus.
“Don’t put a cold in your pocket,” was the marketing message for many years. The pocket handkerchief virtually disappeared from the market, replaced by Kleenex tissues in their many variations.
Why don’t the many varieties of tissue dilute the Kleenex brand? Because when a person looks across a room, sees a box of Scott tissue, and says: “Please hand me a Kleenex,” you know you have a solid brand locked into the mind of the consumer.
In the same way that Kleenex owns tissue, Jell-O owns gelatin dessert, Coca-Cola owns cola, Band-Aid owns adhesive bandage, Saran Wrap owns plastic food film, and Rollerblade owns in-line skates.
You know your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically.
“Make me a Xerox copy.”
“I need a Q-Tip.”
“Cover the plate with Reynolds Wrap.”
“Hand me the Scotch tape.”
Nor is it any secret how these brands managed to own the category word. They were first, plain and simple.
Here’s the catch: You can’t become generic by overtaking the leader. Pepsi won’t become generic for cola even if the brand outsells Coke (as it once did in the supermarket distribution channel). You can only become generic by being the first brand and establishing the category.
So what do you do if you weren’t the first in a category? Quite often you can create a new category by simply narrowing your focus.
Emery Air Freight, started in 1946, was the first air cargo carrier. But Emery fell into the Chevrolet trap. Instead of focusing on one type of service, it offered everything. Overnight, inexpensive two- or three-day service, small packages, large packages. “Whatever you want to ship, Emery can handle it.”
What did Federal Express do? In the early seventies, it was a struggling player in the delivery business. But in a streak of brilliance, CEO Fred Smith decided to narrow its focus to overnight delivery only. “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
Today Federal Express is a much larger company than Emery (now called Emery Worldwide). And “FedEx” has become the generic term for overnight delivery.
“FedEx this package to the Coast.”
What word does Federal Express own in the mind? “Overnight,” of course.
So what did Federal Express do next? It went global, where the very thing it had become known for, overnight delivery, is impossible. (Five o’clock in the afternoon in New York is already tomorrow morning in Singapore.) And it got into less expensive two-and three-day delivery. And it recently bought a trucking company.
Virtually every marketing move Federal Express has made in the last dozen years has moved the company further away from the overnight concept.
Does this expansion hurt the brand? Yes. Does it hurt the company? Maybe not, as long as there are no competitors astute enough to narrow the focus and put the same squeeze on Federal Express that Federal Express put on Emery Air Freight.
Look at what Prego did to Ragú. For years Ragú was the leading brand of spaghetti sauce with a market share in excess of 50 percent. Like Emery Air Freight, Ragú had many different varieties.
So what did Prego do? The brand narrowed its focus to one variety, “thick” spaghetti sauce. With this one type of sauce Prego won 27 percent of the market. Prego owns the word “thick” in the mind of the spaghetti sauce buyer.
The same principle holds true in many different categories, no matter how narrow or obscure the industry. In the financial world, a “Bloomberg” is a terminal that provides analytical tools as well as instant business news and stock prices. Bloomberg LP was the first company to introduce a device that would help money managers contrast and compare financial data.
Words are the key to brand building. Reality, of course, rests in a visual world of shapes, colors, textures, and dimensions. But reality has no meaning without the context provided by the human mind. The mind gives meaning to visual reality by using words. Only when the mind thinks that an object is large or small, beautiful or ugly, dark or light, does that meaning arise.
The same is true of the product or service you are selling. The product itself might have a visual reality. But it’s the brand name and its associations that give the product meaning in the consumer’s mind.
So you can forget about the laundry list of wonderful attributes your product has. You can’t possibly associate them all with your brand name in a human mind. To get into the consumer’s mind you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
The average adult knows the meanings of perhaps 50,000 words. Yet there are about 2.5 million registered trademarks in the United States. And you want your trademark to stand for how many different attributes in the mind?
Until science figures out a way to replace human brain tissue with silicon chips, it’s a physical impossibility for most brands to go beyond a single word. Consider yourself lucky if your brand can own a word like “safety” or “driving” or “thick” or “overnight.”
Many marketers know this and they still look to expand the meanings of their brands. Why?
Growth. They feel trapped in their present positions. They want to grow, so they think they have no choice but to expand their brands.
But what works is not expanding the brand, but expanding the market. In other words, instead of moving from overnight to two- or three-day delivery, Federal Express expanded the market for overnight delivery.
By focusing on overnight, Federal Express was able to make overnight the in thing among business executives. As a result of its high price and flashy packaging, people thought, “Hey, this package must be important because it came via Federal Express.”
And overnight deliveries boomed along with the fortunes of FedEx.
Mercedes employed a similar strategy. What was the market for expensive automobiles before Mercedes-Benz? Teeny-tiny.
Mercedes built the market for expensive cars by using prestige as its strategy. But you need subtlety in dealing with a word like “prestige.” Its connotations may work in brand building, but the word itself does not. It’s not that people aren’t dying to own prestige brands. They just hate to admit it.
To be successful in branding a “prestige” product or service, you need to do two things:
The first part was easy. Mercedes-Benz priced its vehicles at about twice the price of a comparable Cadillac. “Mercedes cars must be better than Cadillacs,” thinks the buyer, “because they are twice as expensive.”
Mercedes also found a powerful code word for prestige. “Engineered like no other car in the world.”
What overnight did for Federal Express, engineering did for Mercedes. It expanded the market by giving the owner an excuse to buy an expensive, prestigious car. Instead of a Cadillac, the car of choice for the country-club crowd became a Mercedes.
But like Federal Express, Mercedes has also started expanding the brand with cheap sports cars, inexpensive sedans, and sport-utility vehicles. With a name like Mercedes-Benz, a reputation like Mercedes-Benz, and a history like Mercedes-Benz (the company invented the automobile), the brand should be the largest-selling luxury car in America. But it’s not.
Go back in history. By far the most successful brands are those that kept a narrow focus and then expanded the category as opposed to those brands that tried to expand their names into other categories.
What was the market for expensive pens before Montblanc? Minuscule.
What was the market for expensive vodka before Stolichnaya and Absolut? Nil.
What was the market for safe cars before Volvo? Zip.
If “what is the size of the market?” is the first question your company asks itself, then you are taking the wrong road to success.
Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve, ask how large a market your brand can create by narrowing its focus and owning a word in the mind.