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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The brand endorsement

Global brands have different delivery and meanings in the various markets and areas they operate in. This is often what we in branding are striving to curtail. It’s almost impossible for a brand to have a perfectly aligned international offering.

Coke may have a pretty similar meaning around the globe but due to local conditions such as advertising and promotion its meaning and consumer perceptions will differ from place to place. Perhaps in a small town that has a bottling plant certain perception of the local employer will creep into the brand. But with that said Coke must have of the best if not the best alignment considering the size of the brand and spread of its market but coke is an example of a fairly uncomplicated product.

What about brands that offer complicated, intricate products that require more information in purchasing decisions and more after sales service such as support, repairs or replacements? These products form part of offerings that are largely made up of personal interaction and service. This is surely where it really becomes a challenge to achieve global alignment of a brands offering and market perceptions. Infinite personal and cultural factors influence these offerings in ways that we are still striving understand.

For this type of brand to achieve a single meaning in a virtually infinite world is unattainable but it can have certain standards in place to create a greater congruency in its offering across the profoundly different regions of the world. I really don’t mean standards such as: “Hi welcome to happy burger home of the happiest…” but rather real deliverables that no matter what language they are carried out in or whether they were carried out by a customer service genius or a fumbling trainee they will secure a certain intrinsic benefit for the consumer.

Variation of standards
Did you know if you buy an HP notebook in the USA with the optional extra “international warranty” and take that notebook to South Africa and it is found to be faulty (from manufacture) they don’t cover those faults under warranty? Why would that be? How would a consumer know that when buying a product in a foreign country?

A similar example is my Nikon D50 camera which was purchased in Taiwan (where they are much cheaper… but not cheap). When I encountered a problem a week after I got the camera I took it to Nikon in South Africa. They were reluctant to work on a camera at all that was not purchased in South African; after some arm twisting they agreed to diagnose the fault but not repair it. The issue of who is liable for the warranty becomes less important when you are faced with a broken new product that no one is even willing to repair, let alone put up the bill.

The world has become truly a global marketplace, consumers travel and shop all over the globe and we buy on the net but the jurisdictional boundaries of many brands remain rigid and incompatible.

Brands are carried in various business forms around the world. Dealerships may be subsidiaries of a listed company in one country and franchises in another, which inevitably makes for more variation in offering. Geographic pricing strategies which are more an economic product of international policies than brand strategy may add further turbulence to global standards and perceptions (but are also a driving factor in making people search for bargains abroad).

Certain service standards depend very much on a regions environment and service infrastructure which support their ability to deliver services. You would expect better service from a computer brand in the USA or Taiwan than in South Africa, but many service deliverables don’t depend on the company’s local support system or conditions but simply on what they decide to deliver. Perhaps this area offers an opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves from competitors that still offer divergent global service deliverables?

Well polished symbols
Brands and branding people put tons of resources into making brands have well structured visual representations which are congruent in all markets. Much less is done to bring brands service deliverables in-line globally. Perhaps it’s an issue of measurement: seeing what a brand looks like in various countries is fairly simple in comparison to measuring complicated intangible characteristics such as service offerings.

A critical area of brand thinking now is how the logo’s and symbols that represent brands become vessels of brand meaning. There are the obvious conclusions that can be drawn from certain visuals but over time visuals soak up further meaning (through the brands performance and interaction with people) and the symbol’s meaning move beyond their generic meaning, to a point where it truly becomes an ownable vessel of meaning. If I say camel… in a brand context the animal probably isn’t the first thing to come to mind.

Semiotic analyses of brand visuals have shown that the visuals don’t ever exist without the brand meaning – if someone sees a visual of a brand that persons memory stores are triggered; the built up brand meaning for that person is “present” to some degree when seeing the symbol. This link is bidirectional; if someone hears the brand’s name, that person’s visual stores are activated and so they “see” that symbol at some level too.

So if this mark can have such profound meaning and every interaction that a brand has with a person affects that persons personal and eventually the societal meaning of that mark, then brands should look after their actions as much as they look after their visual brand equity.

Shouldn’t having the “Nikon” logo on your camera be enough of an endorsement to deem any consumer anywhere in the world with that camera in their hand worthy of standard international service basics?

A Brand fairytale
The opposite of the two previous cases is and example that is what brand fairytales are made of:

When I was a young teenager my father returned from a trip to New York with an Orvis rod (and reel) as a gift for me. Orvis is a premium fly fishing brand. I was mesmerized by my rod but I must admit I looked at it more that I fished with it.

Eventually I broke the rod and my only conciliation was that the rod has a 25 year unconditional guarantee! So I took the rod to a local fishing dealer and after some waiting I received a replacement and a personal letter wishing me the best. After a few years of doing very little fishing I broke the rod again and again they replaced it. Eventually in 2005 I lost the top quarter of the rod. I wrote an email to Orvis to see what could be done and, after some conversing I mailed my rod to them expecting a new segment and probably a bill. My rod’s model had been discontinued so they could not replace the lost segment. I received a brand new equivalent model with a fresh 25 year guarantee!

A brand manager may look at this romantic episode and think that Orvis have probably amongst other things made a loss off a single sale but I can’t help thinking of one day taking my son or daughter to get their first Orvis rod... and a couple more for me wont hurt.

Orvis is not a visual symbol that is strongly communicated but the meaning for me is rich, I have almost inferred visuals in my mind that are related to the good experiences I have shared with the brand and one key factor in all of this is that their guarantee (and core service deliverables) have never been compromised because of where I am. Their symbol is their promise regardless of where you may be.

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