Figure 4: 4Cs audit model — Figure 4 4Cs audit model

The 4Cs analysis tool

Customer

The way to maximize your chances of building a compelling brand is to build it on customer insight. A customer insight is an observation about the customer that can be acted upon. Some very successful brands have been founded on the basis of one very big insight. Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop on a big insight. She realized back in the late 1970s that customers were becoming more environmentally-conscious and that, importantly, those wanting to buy ethical cosmetics were being poorly served. Roddick launched a business to fill this gap and went on to build a highly successful ethical retail brand. Other brands have been built by executing against a series of smaller (but no less important insights). Spotify was not the first music streaming service, but by understanding the different ways in which customers enjoy music it has been able to build class-leading functionality, different levels of tiered access, high-resolution streaming services and seamless multi-device functionality. By understanding and acting upon what customers want they have been able to succeed by building a better mousetrap. The job of the brand practitioner is to take the time to really understand what you think the customer wants from your product or service. Importantly, customers don’t always know what they want; very often the job of the practitioner is to spot what isn’t being explicitly communicated and reading between the lines to extract genuine insight.

Qualitative and quantitative research methods are well known and can be useful tools in the practitioners’ toolbox but other methods for garnering insight are increasingly being used. Large-scale data analysis can reveal new or previously unseen patterns of behaviour. Ethnographic research can help the practitioner literally immerse themselves in their customers’ lives. Sophisticated web tools can search for opinion and sentiment and very often identify the precise activities that are shaping either a category or specific brand perceptions. It should also be remembered that in many sectors a company’s employees, distributors and partners all have the potential to act as ‘expert witnesses’ and unlock customer insight.

Competition

To build a compelling brand you generally have to have a good idea of what your competitors are doing. Whether you are creating a brand from scratch or looking to reposition an existing one, it is important to know where there are valuable and potentially under-served opportunities. Sometimes it will be obvious where the positioning territories are; sometimes it will be less obvious and more nuanced. Occasionally there are opportunities to completely reframe the competitive landscape. Perhaps, like supermarket Lidl, you realize that while the traditional food retailers are offering a trade-off between choice, price and quality you can completely disrupt the model by restricting choice and instead offer great quality and incredibly low prices? Perhaps you don’t see a single competitor as your enemy and instead you decide to invent one. Reebok famously did this with its iconic ad ‘Belly’s gonna get you!’ Apple, Coke and Subaru have variously challenged totalitarianism, disharmony and mediocrity. We didn’t know these were the enemies until these brands told us they were. When considering the competitive set it is also a good idea to consider both direct and indirect competitors. Did TomTom realize that its biggest competitors would turn out not to be other satnav manufacturers but Google and Apple? Did the private taxi business Addison Lee initially see a mobile-enabled app called Uber as a serious competitor?

Company

Most brand owners don’t take long enough to think about both their real and perceived strengths. What is it that is genuinely different or unique about their brand and is this uniqueness being effectively utilized? We make the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ because occasionally brands are ascribed leadership for facets that are not always class leading. We assume that Intel is a better class of chip than other manufacturers but most customers don’t actually know they are. By successfully branding their chips customers have come to believe that their performance is universally better. We assume that brands like Audi and BMW are full of superior engineering but do we actually know whether they are (or are not) less reliable than their far-eastern counterparts? Knowing your real and perceived strengths gives you a real insight into what your customers think and provides a genuine foundation for any future positioning or proposition.

Context

This is about understanding the macro and micro trends influencing the sectors in which you operate. For an automotive manufacturer increasing levels of concern about air quality are likely to impact its sector and its business. For a coffee chain or supermarket, increasing concerns about the level of plastics entering our environment and polluting our water are likely to have a direct impact on customer sentiment and eventually the importance given to fully recyclable materials. Similarly, our love of ease may have ramifications for retail businesses, or if you are a bank you have to deal with the challenges posed by the fast-evolving block-chain technologies. It is not always possible to foresee every trend but thinking deeply about the wider context often reveals what your customers are or will be really interested in and worried about.

Context operates at the micro level too. What is happening within your sector may have a direct impact on how you choose to position your brand. For example, is new technology driving the development of your sector and if so are you best placed to lead on this? Are customers placing a greater value on freedom and flexibility and if so are you best placed to lead on this? The UK energy market is becoming more competitive and price sensitive; if you are a fledgling new entrant how do you meet this challenge? Do you seek a price leadership position or do you seek to build a different kind of sustainable advantage?

A thorough understanding of each of the 4Cs will give you a comprehensive foundation on which to build or develop your brand. A distillation may also help you identify a sweet spot, a rewarding territory on which to build your brand. Importantly, though, this model is not a replacement for the hard work and creative thinking that must accompany any brand-building activity. You will need to identify genuine insight, a tangible positioning space, real capability and a thorough understanding of the forces impacting upon or influencing your sector.

So now that we have identified a definitive brand model and explained a little about the groundwork needed to help you create or develop your brand, it is probably worth highlighting some of the other branding processes and where you can go to find out more about them.

Brand naming

Creating a brand name is still an essentially creative exercise, but there are many things to consider if you want to do it properly. It is often helpful to start by looking at the usefulness of the trademarks you already own, before definitively embarking on the quest for a new name. It is also helpful to have a reasonable idea of the type of name you want. For example, do you want a purely abstract name like Diageo which will be easier to create but expensive to build? Do you want something more associative like Uber or alternatively something much more descriptive (but potentially difficult to register) like comparethemarket.com? (One of the reasons the famous Compare the Meerkat advertising campaign was devised for this brand was precisely to help customers differentiate it from other similarly named competing businesses such as Go Compare). Once you are clear about the type of name you want to create then make sure you are clear about what trademark classes and territories you will be seeking to register your name in, as well as the process you will follow for creating a viable shortlist and undertaking the necessary searches and linguistic/cultural checks. Of course if you are a small brand just starting out in a single territory you will approach this differently from a large multinational brand owner operating in multiple jurisdictions, but many of the initial questions posed here are useful to think about.

Brand naming has not fundamentally changed as a process since John Murphy codified it in the early 1980s. You can find excellent chapters on the subject in a number of books, including Trade Marks and Brand Strategy (see Further reading).

Brand architecture

Depending on the situation and number of brands involved, creating an optimum portfolio of brands can be a complex endeavour – at the same time it is frequently overcomplicated and misunderstood. Brand architecture is really about finding the optimum way of structuring a portfolio of brands. Most of the time the job of a brand architecture is to make it easy for a customer to navigate the totality of what’s on offer. When I buy a bar of Toblerone, for example, I am likely to be unconcerned or even unaware that it is ultimately owned by the American conglomerate Kraft. As a consequence, Toblerone receives a very light on-pack endorsement from its owner.

When I buy a car I am often much more interested in who the manufacturer is and consequently there is often a more obvious connection between the manufacturer and the model of car under consideration. BMW, Mercedes and Ford all major on the parent brand and use numbers or names to help customers navigate the ranges. Often a brand owner will use a range of brands within a portfolio to delineate price or different levels of experience. VW sells a range of cars under its own brand but it also sells premium vehicles under the Audi brand and cheaper vehicles under the Skoda brand. Often a new brand is required when the entry into a new market or new price point stretches the credibility of the existing brand too far.

Conversely, sometimes architecture is deliberately deployed to help build the corporate brand. Unilever is using its product brands to help build its corporate brand because it felt it was important to increase corporate transparency and sustainability. Architecture gets complicated because sometimes decisions need to be made about which brands to divest and which to keep or evolve and in other instances owners are constrained by historic associations or things peculiar to one specific market.

For further information about brand architecture we recommend the chapter in Don’t Mess with the Logo, and you will find an excellent chapter on the subject in Advanced Brand Management.

Brand management

A difficult subject to capture in just a few paragraphs, brand management is about sustaining a distinctive and relevant offer, such that it stimulates demand and sustains loyalty. Brand management necessitates that you are measuring your brand performance over time using salient and helpful indicators. While we recognize the value that can be derived from tracking studies, we would also pay close attention to leading indicators, things that help you be predictive – customer conversations, advocacy scores, promoter scores, brand recognition and sentiment. As brands are primarily judged on what they do, it is important to be able to see and predict the commercial consequences of any changes that are made.

Brand valuation

A number of businesses offer methodologies and tools for valuing brands and taking a valuation-led approach to the management of a brand or branded portfolio. While many of these approaches are financially robust, nearly all involve some element of subjective opinion or assessment. In practice it is often difficult to divorce the pure contribution of brand from the rest of the business and so the final number is probably best regarded as indicative of the relative value of the brand rather than an absolute number. Nevertheless brand valuation is recognized by the accounting profession and is used to help determine things such as royalty rates and the price that should be paid for the brand as part of an acquisition or merger.

Whatever your view on the precise merits of brand valuation, nearly all of the associated methodologies involve some assessment of both a) the role of brand and b) brand strength. Role of brand attempts to determine the relative importance of a brand in any given category. For example, the role of brand in petrol retailing is relatively low but much higher in categories like luxury clothing and apparel. Brand strength attempts to look at how well-managed your brand is and therefore how likely it is to survive into the medium term. For example, a brand like Coca-Cola is likely to be extremely well managed and will therefore be highly likely to generate future healthy returns.

Of the two elements central to the methodology, we believe the most useful is brand strength. Most brand owners struggle to create an objective tool for the active measurement of their brand performance, but brand strength can be used as an objective framework across categories and geographies. It can comprise a mixture of indicators and is particularly useful for brand owners managing more complex portfolios.

Brand experience

As we reference in other chapters, brands are everything to do with the experiences they offer to their customers. If management tends towards measurement then measuring the customer experience and its impact on preference and loyalty is a good way of ensuring active management of the brand. Of course, in categories where the role of brand is considered to be very high, it is likely that the brand will have a greater sphere of influence in terms of its ability to shape behaviour and delivery, but as we have seen all businesses are increasingly measured on their ability to achieve high levels of organizational coherence.

Delivering a distinctive, appealing and memorable customer experience involves making decisions about what to prioritize. It necessitates a thorough understanding of your customer and the willingness to align investment behind the key touchpoints. easyJet is an example of a business that has made a clear decision to automate its booking and check-in processes and to make these as friction-free as possible. The mobile app makes it possible to manage all aspects of your journey; it keeps you updated and alerts you early if there are any problems with your flight. At Gatwick the bag drop process is almost entirely automated; consequently check-in is less stressful and queues are shorter. As well as being a good experience, all of this is congruent with easyJet’s positioning as a low-cost carrier. As a satisfied customer, I simply don’t care that I have to do much of the legwork.

Brand experience is a big subject but for those seeking a definitive perspective on how to create a great customer experience we would point you in the direction of the Harvard academic Frances Frei. Much of her thinking can be found online. In addition, On Purpose explores how purpose can be used to create distinctive and purposeful experiences that customers love. Managing the Customer Experience is probably the seminal work.

In addition to the specific subject areas we have listed here we have also identified a number of books that contain useful perspectives and tools that may be useful for those in engaged in the science and art of brand building. Some are briefly reviewed below. All are included in the list of Further reading at the end of the chapter.

Good to Great

Explores how businesses can become category-leading and world-class.

Aaker on Branding and Brand Portfolio Strategy

Explore the 20 principles for building effective brands and developing a portfolio strategy.

How Brands Grow (Parts 1 and 2)

While we may not agree with the all of the content in these books makes for a stimulating read, debunking popular misconceptions and offering a perspective on the impact of digital on brands.

We would also point you in the direction of the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey, both of which publish regular research and articles on the subject of brands and branding.

So as we have hopefully demonstrated, there are some definitive tools, some great thinking and a range of effective processes available to support the practitioner but, importantly, none of these should be considered as a replacement for genuine insight and creative thinking. Brands should be built on clear insight; they should be relevant and distinctive and they should excite and empower the customer. Creating them is hard work and involves a melding of IQ and EQ. There are tools to guide the practitioner and to provide shortcuts but they should never replace the human factor that sits at the heart of every successful brand.

The 4Cs analysis tool

Customer

Competition

Company

Context

Brand naming

Brand architecture

Brand management

Brand valuation

Brand experience

Further reading

Brand architecture

Brand building

Brand experience

Brand naming

Brand valuation