BrandDigital | BrandSimple: The Blog

What do women want? Forget Freud. According to a recent study undertaken by Frito-Lay, they don’t want to snack like their husbands or boyfriends or brothers or fathers or sons. In addition to not favoring salty foods, they don’t want to snack on foods that, according to a female colleague “you might as well apply directly to your thighs.” Though the company has made attempts to advertise its brands of snack food as guilt-free it hasn’t had much success in ridding Fritos and Cheetos and Doritos of the calorie-unconscious male imagery. Ergo, the launch of the company’s newest branding initiative aimed directly at women, a soup-to-nuts, uh, chips, overhaul that includes redesigned packaging along with sassy webisode, television, and print advertising featuring sassy cartoon characters. As a branding guy, I applaud the fact that Frito-Lay saw their challenge not simply as a pink and girly repackaging effort, but as a bold repositioning move meant to get consumers to rethink the snack category from a female point of view. Getting women to think differently about the brand, free from images of couch-hugging, bag-clutching, crumb producing fellows is smart. But, while it’s a great example of branding from the inside out, only time will tell if it’s what women want, from a snack food that is.

image from www.awomansworld.com

Is everything on sale or am I just imagining it? In this period of economic doom and gloom, I’ve yet to find a brand that isn’t promising downsized pricing to its down and out customer base. The two questions every brand manager should be asking during the price-value fisticuffs are first, what we can do to differentiate our promise of value from all the others. The second, how can we convince consumers that our brand will actually be in existence a month from now given this era of vaporizing institutions. The smart folks at Geico turned to one of their own (actually their owner) to help them differentiate their promise of financial stability and good value – Mr. Warren E. Buffett. As reported in the New York Times, Mr. Buffet is mentioned, along with his company Berkshire Hathaway, in a campaign that offers a strong message to assuage consumer anxiety over the economic situation, both in words and in the guise of the familiar gecko wearing Buffett-like eyeglasses. In typical Geico manner, this campaign does a great job of getting its promise across with the wry humor of its little green icon. More important, it does a great job of differentiating itself from the myriad other promises of price-savings by using one of the most trusted icons of trust in the financial world; Mr. Buffett himself.

Among the many questions being asked of brand professionals during this crisis of confidence and commerce is whether companies can afford to be good. That is, with all the cost-cutting and down-sizing, should companies shelve initiatives relating to social responsibility until better times return? My short answer is, no. In fact, at this time of distrust and missteps, consumers will look even harder at the totality of the brand promise as they ponder the value of potential purchases. What they’ll consider as things continue to get tougher is that value cannot just be measured in price-value, but in corporate values, ethics-wise, humanity-wise, or green-wise. While some may think that getting through this economic tsunami alive requires belt-tightening and belt-tightening only, I believe just the opposite. It’s precisely during times of scandal, bogus bonuses and breaches of trust that organizations must demonstrate that offering a good product is only half the reason for consumers to buy in; the other is the character of the brand doing the offering. This is not the time to break down the wall between the business side and the brand side of the equation, but the time to shore it up. Pushing aside all endeavors that don’t directly keep the lights on will, in my opinion, simply turn consumers off.

While in the past it was okay if do-good activities were merely a reflection of the CEO’s favorite philanthropic cause, this is no longer the case. In today’s transparent world, with money squeezed so tight and consumer confidence so low, it’s critical that companies do everything possible to draw attention to what makes their brand’s promise meaningfully different from the competition’s. Aligning social initiatives with the brand promise is not just the responsible thing to do; it makes good business sense for bad times.

The redesigned Tropicana packaging has raised questions by lots of people who think its clean, but generic new graphics don’t do a whole lot to distinguish the brand from its competition. In fact, by eliminating the simple, little straw-in-the-orange visual, which conveyed without words where we could get our daily dose of Vitamin C, the brand eliminated a key, not to mention proprietary, branding element that set it apart. Not to be left in the blur of choices, however, the company came up with a totally unique way to differentiate its brand from the others in the juice aisle – the cap!

image from Tropicana.com

A branding touch point completely overlooked in the category. The company has replaced the generic cap found on every carton of liquid refreshment with a funny, inventive cap shaped like an orange. Transforming this literal point of touch into a little orange is a perfect example of finding a smart, new way to differentiate a brand in a BrandSimple way.