How To Align Business & Brand Strategy: A Behaviour Change Perspective
Ultimately every business growth challenge is also a challenge of human behaviour. Most brands have a stated ambition for the level of growth they are trying to achieve. Usually it is expressed in terms of revenue and profit forecasts and it’s easily identifiable as a line item in the annual report, budgets and plans. However, every financial target regarding business growth has embedded within it certain implied assumptions about human behaviour change. Growth targets are inevitably based on people undertaking certain forms of consumption behaviour - buying more of a product, buying something different or paying more for something, etc. The idea of explicitly linking financial growth targets for a business or brand to specific assumptions about human behaviour change is what we call defining the Brand Growth Theory. We see tremendous value in translating business growth into a human behaviour change task.
Surprisingly, the human behaviour change assumptions that underpin growth theory are often not stated explicitly and may not always be properly considered. The top down nature of much corporate strategy and business planning often produces a set of growth targets that seem like they have been materialised out of thin air. Or maybe it's a case of last year plus 10%. Either way, if you have ever felt like the targets you've been lumped with are out of touch with reality, you wouldn't be the first. We suggest it is an important discipline to think through how financial targets for the organisation translate into a theory of growth based on human behaviour change before they are carved into stone.
First, consideration of the behaviour change required can reveal how reasonable or otherwise a brand’s growth theory is in practice and this can allow an organisation to evaluate different strategic options for driving growth. Further, understanding the human behaviour that will create value for the brand is also vital for setting the direction for marketing and customer experience initiatives such as brand strategy and communication. One of the principle failings of brand strategy is a lack of clarity about how the strategy will create economic value for the organisation. If you are clear on the behaviour you want and how this delivers growth it ensures that those creating brand strategy and communication have a much clearer idea of exactly what they need to deliver.
Ultimately the task here is as simple as defining the business goal in human terms. It's the vital strategic thinking about the business problem even before you start thinking about insight and proposition for brand strategy. In most instances we work on these key questions with our clients and do the analysis required together. The work is normally based around addressing five key questions.
Growth Ambition - What Is The Rate, Nature & Source Of Growth?
The first question it is important to address is the rate, nature and origin of business growth. All of these factors can have vital implications for how to approach brand strategy. They will also help you confirm whether the underlying growth theory is realistic and achievable.
(a) The rate of business growth relative to category.
The level of ambition in a growth strategy is relevant to the type of brand strategy that you might want to pursue. For example, if the expectation for the business is that it will grow significantly above category this has clear implications for brand and marketing strategy. Brands aiming for above category growth will need to consider whether their share of voice (advertising spend as a proportion of category) is able to be dialled up accordingly (which can require significant media investment) and whether they may need a more disruptive brand and communication strategy to create the kind of impact and attention their growth ambition will require. Green And Black’s is an example of a brand that grew strongly off the back of a quite limited advertising budget with a disruptive communication campaign during its early days in the UK market that challenged expectations of what good chocolate should taste like.
The Green and Black's brand and campaign was so successful it was later purchased by Cadbury.
It’s also worth considering the stage of the category life cycle in which the brand is competing – more mature markets may require more disruptive brand strategies if growth is ambitious. New markets that are early on in their life cycle can often generate momentum that will let a brand ride along in the category slipstream. Streaming services such as Netflix are benefiting from this effect at the moment where the business model itself is disruptive enough to drive growth on its own.
(b) The nature of growth (e.g. premium pricing, market share, penetration, etc.)
This is about understanding whether growth is to be achieved based on stealing market share, driving penetration, increasing purchase frequency or achieving a price premium for the product or service in question. In 2005 Sainsbury’s in the UK effectively changed its Brand Growth Theory in a massive way by deciding that it was too difficult to try to win customers over from other supermarkets and that instead it could meet its growth targets by getting existing customers to simply purchase one more item each time they visited a store. Clearly for Sainsbury's the decision to drive additional purchases from existing customers was instrumental to the development of their new brand idea Try Something New Today. Sainsbury's delivered £2.5 billion extra revenue by asking customers to try new products, encouraging each shopper to spend an extra £1.14 every time they shopped. The success of this campaign generated £550 million in sales over two years.
(c) The source of growth (the geographies, markets, regions which will drive growth).
The degree of geographic diversity of markets across country, ethnicity and culture (or even across the globe) has important implications for subsequent brand strategy too. Typically the more diverse the audience the more it makes sense to consider more universal human insights when it comes to brand strategy - insights that have the ability to appeal to deeper truths beyond what might be relevant to a specific culture, market or geography. Persil's 'Dirt Is Good' or Johnnie Walker's "Keep Walking" campaigns come to mind as examples of brands that have growth ambitions right around the world and therefore developed campaigns that tapped into more universal ideas.
The Audience To Win – Is The Audience Viable And What Is Their Mindset?
This seems like an obvious thing to consider of course, and yes it is – but audiences are too often identified without proper business analysis, defined too broadly or described just in purely demographic terms.
Ideally this decision on what audience to target is based on a systematic analysis of two key questions – First, the attractiveness of the audience (based on size, growth, value, profit potential, etc.). Second, the ability of the brand to actually win share with the audience in question (existing brand strength, presence of strong competitors, access to the right channels, etc). Do we have a realistic shot at winning these customers over? A lot of work with our clients involves answering these key questions in order to finalise target audience definition. Further, while demographic information can be useful when getting to grips with a target audience it’s helpful when you can define the audience in terms of an overall mindset or attitude as well.
When Unilever first launched its hugely successful Knorr Stock Gel in the UK in 2008 there were a number of possibilities when looking at how to define the audience to win – but Unilever specifically focused on “Time Poor Foodies’. Focusing on people with a foodie mindset was critical as the audience had the income to afford the 250% price premium the new product required. Further, the product’s key strength, its similarity to real stock, was vital to overcoming the barrier this foodie audience had historically showed towards the artificiality of normal stock cubes that are often seen as high in salt. "Time Poor Foodies" were both an attractive segment financially and the product's authenticity had a good chance of winning them over. Their mindset of looking for authenticity and real food values was also critical in developing the strategy for the new brand - that Knorr Stock Gel is 'Just Like Real Stock'.
Desired Behaviour – What Exactly Do We Expect People To Do?
The desired behaviour is, yes of course, to ultimately achieve a sale, but it’s always about much more than this when you look beneath the surface. What is the actual shift in behaviour and what is the psychology involved. Rather than thinking about driving a one off transaction it’s useful to think in terms of behaviour change. This might be to purchase the product more often, to pay more for the product or to use the product at a new occasion. I have always loved the Got Milk campaign by Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco for milk for the way it approached selecting the behaviour change task.
Rather than asking people who don’t drink milk to start drinking it or telling people milk is healthy, the campaign instead reminds people how bad it is to run out of milk. It’s asking people to stock up on milk, which it assumes they already drink, so they don’t experience the feeling of not having milk and running out when they really need it. This is a much more realistic behaviour change than, for example, asking non-milk drinkers to start drinking it or asking people to increase the frequency of their milk occasions. The campaign is an example of nuanced thinking about what we want people to do rather than simplistically assuming the answer is to buy more milk or increase frequency of purchase. The campaign shows it is worthwhile thinking through and identifying the most easily achievable behaviour change that can also deliver the required level of business growth.
The Behaviour Barrier or Trigger - What Is Holding Your Audience Back?
The next consideration is to identify an attitude, belief, perception or capability gap that is holding the audience back from the behaviour desired by the brand. Or alternatively whether there is a trigger that might be applied to similar effect. Sometimes barriers and triggers may be evident when you start working on a brand strategy or communication and other times they may not. I have always liked the strategic understanding of barrier and trigger in the awarded campaign created by DLKW and the planner, Charlie Snow, for literacy in the UK. The key barrier was that parents are often too tired to read to their children after a long day at work and children can be reluctant to read as well. The potential trigger was the idea of using signs, notices and even outdoor advertising in the world around us as opportunities to get kids reading. Brilliant.
The Challenge In Human Terms - What Change Will Unlock Brand Growth?
Lastly, it is good to try to sum up the challenge faced by the brand in overcoming any barriers or capitalising on and driving the required behaviour change. Some years ago I developed the strategy for the Wolf Blass brand and helped the creative agency JWT develop the 'Here's To The Chase' campaign that has no been running for over five years. The original task was to reinforce the diminishing prestige of the brand by addressing the perception that the brand was outdated - a relic from its heyday in the 1980s but not so in touch with the values of today. The challenge in human terms was to make the brand stand for a more contemporary expression of triumph - which was achieved by focusing on the pursuit of triumph (the 'chase') rather than the destination.
In summing up, it's always useful to consider the implied assumptions about human behaviour that underpin business, brand and organisation growth. Not only does it give you an insight into whether the Brand Growth Theory is realistic, it helps set critical direction for the marketing and brand strategy work to follow.