Customers are suspicious. They tend to disbelieve most product claims. Your brand might last longer, require less maintenance, and be easier to use, but who will accept claims like these?
There is one claim, however, that should take precedence over every other claim. It’s the one claim that elevates the brand above the competition. And makes every other claim much more believable.
It’s the real thing. It’s the claim to authenticity.
When Coca-Cola first made this claim customers instantly responded. “Yes,” they agreed. “Coke is the real thing. Everything else is an imitation.”
Even though the last “real thing” advertising ran almost thirty years ago, the concept has become closely associated with Coca-Cola. It’s the brand’s credentials.
Even today, “the real thing” is so closely associated with Coca-Cola that newspaper and magazine reporters will try to work these words into almost every article written about the company.
Credentials are the collateral you put up to guarantee the performance of your brand. When you have the right credentials, your prospect is likely to believe almost anything you say about your brand.
Leadership is the most direct way to establish the credentials of a brand. Coca-Cola, Hertz, Heinz, Visa, and Kodak all have credentials because they are widely perceived to be the leading brands in their categories. When you don’t have the leading brand, your best strategy is to create a new category in which you can claim leadership.
Which is what Polaroid did when it became the leader in the new category of instant photography. Yet when it tried to tackle Kodak in conventional photographic film, Polaroid failed miserably.
Many marketers attribute Polaroid’s failure to the fact that the brand couldn’t be “stretched” from instant to conventional 35mm film. While true, this conclusion doesn’t really describe the dynamics involved.
The simple fact is that Polaroid has no credentials in conventional 35mm film. Why buy your conventional film from Polaroid when Kodak is the expert in this category? Only if you want instant film will you buy Polaroid; it’s the company that knows instant photography.
A number of years ago, Patrick Sullivan (currently CEO of SalesLogix) arrived in our offices with a software product called Act. “What does Act do?” we asked.
“Everything,” Pat replied. “Act keeps track of your calendar, your correspondence, your mailing lists, and your expense accounts. Act literally does everything.”
Not a good direction. We wanted to find the one thing we could use to build a new category. After much discussion the group decided that the new software could best be described as “contact” software. In other words, software designed for salespeople and others who do contact work.
“The largest-selling contact software” became the credentials for the new brand. Everywhere the brand name was used, the credentials were also used. In publicity, advertising, brochures, letterheads, calling cards. Even on the product box itself.
Today, Act has 70 percent of the contact software market and has become the dominant brand in the category.
Credentials are particularly important in the publicity process. Reporters and editors are quick to dismiss advertising claims as puffery. But they readily acknowledge leadership and other aspects related to a brand’s credentials.
Many companies run branding programs almost devoid of credentials. If you leaf through a stack of print ads or watch a series of television commercials, you’ll find an endless parade of almost meaningless benefits: Tastes great, saves money, whitens teeth, easy assembly, bigger, smaller, lighter, faster, cheaper. While many of these benefits may be of general interest to prospective customers, they each lack credibility so they are generally ignored. “That’s what they all say.”
When the benefits, however, are structured around some aspect of a brand’s credentials, they carry much more weight.
If Act claims to make you more productive on the road and cut your paperwork in half, then you tend to believe these claims because “Act is the largest-selling contact software.”
Datastream did the same thing in maintenance software. Early on, Datastream found itself with 32 percent of the market. Granted the market was small. Very, very small.
No matter. Datastream promoted itself as “the leader in maintenance software.” This same leadership theme was used in all of Datastream’s literature. Today, the market has exploded and Datastream still dominates the category. It truly is the leader in maintenance software.
Conventional thinking would have it otherwise. “The market is small. Nobody cares that we’re the leader. They don’t even care about maintenance software itself, otherwise they would be buying more of this kind of product. Forget leadership. We have to concentrate all of our efforts on selling the benefits of the category.”
Never forget leadership. No matter how small the market, don’t get duped into simply selling the benefits of the category early in the branding process.
There are also the long-term benefits of leadership. Because once you get on top, it’s hard to lose your spot. A widely publicized study of twenty-five leading brands in twenty-five different product categories in the year 1923 showed that twenty of the same twenty-five brands are still the leaders in their categories today. In seventy-five years only five brands lost their leadership.
Never assume that people know which brand is the leader. This is especially true in fast-growing, new categories like contact software and maintenance software. Most new prospects have no experience with the category and little knowledge of available brands, so they naturally gravitate to the leading brand.
As the category matures, customers become more adventuresome and more willing to try different brands that offer seemingly unique advantages. Leaders often have to write off the more sophisticated customers who will go out of their way not to buy the leading brand.
Write them off. You can’t appeal to everybody.
Not all brands can be leaders, although every category offers a wealth of possibilities. Take beer, for example. Here are some categories for beer leadership credentials:
For almost all of the hundreds of companies we have worked with around the world, we have found some credentials that could be exploited. If not, we created the credentials by inventing a new category.
You see credentials at work in everyday life. How many times have you walked away from a new restaurant because it was almost empty? Most people prefer to wait for a table at a restaurant that is crowded, rather than eat in an empty one. If this place was really good (goes the thinking), there would be a line out the door.