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Brand manager, how are you? How are you going? Uh, welcome to your first QA. Uh, I'll take my specs off. It's me, I promise. Look, I got my specs on. I'm taking my specs off. I'm short-sighted and I'm I'm in a strange place. So I'm in Dallas, Texas. Of course I am. Um, I've been in Canada this week, and uh I have to do this QA. I have an 18-hour flight in in a couple of hours from Dallas to Sydney back home. So that pretty much wipes out the day that I was meant to do your QA. So I've waited until you've uploaded the questions, and I'm now locked in a broom cupboard basically in Dallas doing your QA's. Uh it's a bad way to start. So next time we do them, it'll be much cooler. It'll be like green screen and stuff, and it won't be like, you know, it's 2012 and everything. Um, but it's important I get it done so you've got it when you want to look at it at some point uh going forward. So, first of all, a belated welcome to your QA. A quick reminder how this works. So, what we do in the QA's is um anytime in the two weeks, as I mentioned in the module introduction, you can bang the question into the tile. And then on normally on a Friday morning in Australia, I get on and just answer all the questions. Try and keep the uh try and keep the questions um uh tight. I read them all, we do them all, so try you know, get it in, but but don't get too loquacious. Um keep it about the topics of the modules, in this case one and two, if you can, but you can ask about other stuff too. I try and get them done in an hour. I think anything more than an hour is too long. And you can either watch this magnificent video, uh, or we also provide it in a in an audio podcast form that most people, because of this beautiful face, I think prefer. Um, and we split you up. You're a big class this time. So if you look at the website above, you'll see it says cohort B. We just split the class in half for two different sets of questions. Yeah. Um, and and that's it. It's I enjoy these very much. You'll see that the questions are great. I get through them pretty quick because I don't want you to, you know, it can get boring. Um, but I want to answer all of them. Um, just be aware that if you name something about your company, other people are listening. So you might want to keep it semi uh anonymous. But other than that, I think we uh we are ready to go. So let's get going. I'd like to do it in the hour if if I can. Uh, and we're gonna start with a question from Anik. I work in the spirits industry, you lucky person, uh, which has become increasingly promotion-driven, especially in more volatile periods. In practice, promotions can drive strong short-term results and keep performance stable, but over time they can erode brand equity. No shit. So, where is the tipping point? When does a well-managed promotion effectively become commoditization? And what are the earliest signals you'd look for? Look, I I I totally understand it. My line on promotions is very simple. Um, you can't avoid them, you know. I get it, Anique. You can't avoid them. But you must never celebrate a sale ever that was done at anything less than recommended resale price. It's you you've lost, yeah? You've lost. And I think you're being too gentle. Promotions do commoditize brand, they do a lot worse than that. They destroy profitability, they start price wars, they train customers to wait for the discount. They encourage your retailers to ask for less and less uh pricing. Uh, and the worst thing of all, Anique, they they pull most of the sales you're getting for your beautiful brand are just pulled forward. You would have got them anyway. So someone coming through and buying three for two stacks up your product and doesn't buy at a full price. So they're they're phenomenally bad. Always look for a non-price-based promotion. You know, Verve Clico are very good at this. You know, I mean, they'll give you a letterbox, but they won't give you a discount. And that's great. It's just great. Um, what's the earliest signal? There's one key metric. There's two metrics. The first is to look for um the proportion of unit products that are sold uh lower than recommended resale price. If that gets anywhere near 25% or more, you're in trouble and you'll see it play out. Uh, in your industry for sure, 25% is definitely the danger sign. Uh, the other one is asking consumers, uh, when you ask them in the brand research we'll talk about in module three, uh, is a brand that is often on promotion. So the consumer is starting to spot it, and and and that's a troubling sign too. Franziska, in a media environment dominated by platforms like TikTok, where consumers, creators, and algorithms actively shape brand narratives, how should brand managers think about controlling versus co-authoring brand meaning without losing strategic coherence? Also, if platforms like TikTok can make or break brands through trends, creators, and algorithmic amplification, are brand managers still the primary stewards of brand meaning or have they lost control? No, no, steady on, Francisco. I think you're raising a good point. Brand managers are still, you know, attempting to wrangle meaning. We're still the meaning architects. I take your point, it's harder and faster than it used to be. The key point I would make to you is, and we did talk about it a little bit in the module, I think we have to loosen our control. And we have to loosen our control because we have less control. And also, we talked a little bit about this idea of salience in the modules. You know, the the we've changed how we think about brands quite a lot. If a brand is, it comes to mind, 60-70% of the job is done. We're chasing more awareness than we used to. You know, the the equation has moved a little bit. We still want brand image, as we'll see in the modules to come, but the most important thing is the consumer thinks about our brand and it comes to mind. So I think for those reasons, yeah, we have to loosen our control a bit and go with the flow and let the brand go a little bit more. I mean, I was working on brands in the 90s and noughties. We were very controlled. We we didn't want our brand to ever be in a in a potentially risky environment. I think that's an old-fashioned approach now. Mathieu, uh, thanks for the first module. You mentioned in it the necessity for a brand to maintain share of voice that is equivalent to share of market. Yeah, excess share of voice. Is there any point where a brand is so dominant that it can afford to not meet this one-to-one ratio? There is, Mathieu. It's very well spotted. If you actually look at the ESLV curve, it's curve-linear. It isn't straight line. And that's because small brands have to spend a lot more in order to grow. So their share of media has to be much greater, uh, share of voice story has to be much greater than their share of market to grow. And it it curves the other way for big brands because big brands have such scale and benefits and strengths, they don't have to go one-to-one. They can significantly underspend their share of market and still grow or maintain. It depends on the competitors in the category what that ratio is. But you're right, it's not a 45-degree relationship, it's curvilinear, well spotted. Emma, in a house of brands architecture, oh, here we go. What are the key strategic advantages and disadvantages, particularly when all brands sit within the same category or application? Okay, now we're gonna do all of this, Emma, in the brand architecture module, and I'm gonna literally answer that question. So I'm tempted to move on in a category-led business where multiple products and positions, yeah, no, it's look, I I it's a great question. I promise you, I'm not, I'm not dodging it. I am gonna literally spend 25 minutes talking. I don't want to confuse everyone in week one, though. We haven't got there yet. Emma Stegles, if I don't answer this question, 11 out of 10 for you, I'll send you a bottle of champagne. But but we're not covering it yet. Is that okay? You can re-ask it of me in about three weeks, four weeks' time when we do brand architecture. I'm gonna go all over this. I don't want to go too early, okay? Catherine. I'm loving the course already. Steady, Catherine. I work for a large private equity-owned premium travel organization in a shiny, newly created role, head of brand strategy. That sounds good. Uh, I'm an alumni of the mini MBA in marketing, cool. And so I've been banging the sales promotions are bad for our brand profitability drum for quite some time. Yeah, we cover it a lot in the mini MBA in marketing. However, my C-suite are obsessed with running sales. Yeah, okay. And despite my highly professional, well-configured arguments, they seem to run a new promotion, trashy tactical offer weekly. It just won't stop. Any tips on how you can start to shift the behavior, given this is, as you say, the most damaging way to commodify your brand? I think the one thing you can do if they're this obsessed is allow them the promotions, but aim for non-price-based promotions. Yeah? I mean, we talked about Verve Clico. Verve Clico will never drop their pants on price, but they'll often give you a yellow frisbee if you're buying it at Miami Airport, right? And it's much cooler to have a $2 manufacturing cost, Verve Clico colored yellow frisbee, than to get $12 off your off your champagne. So for me, that would be the way. Push them to remember, promotions don't have to be price-based, and and they work much better uh when they're not. Stephen, I understand the value of category entry points in measuring brand salience. Good man. But can a brand own or measure too many CEPs? Is there a point where breadth dilutes? No, no, there isn't a point where breadth of salience dilutes the brand. That's not possible. Um, there is a point, I think, where you're you focus on too many category entry points. I think that's your point. I think Jenny Romanuk's work is very clear that you can find there might be a hundred category entry points. It's unlikely, it's possible. But you're gonna find that four or five of them are gonna explain 80, 90% of all purchases in the category. And they're the ones you worry about. So that's the point. There is an element of targeting in category entry points. Claire, from all of the learnings in module one and two, do any of them differ in a B2B context? If yes, what and how? No, and I'm I'm again, I'm not being lazy, Claire, and we'll get more into this as we go. There is no such thing as B2B and B2C in my world. Let me explain. And by the way, Claire, if if I was impressed with you and a B2C brand came to look for a decent brand manager, I would recommend you just as quickly as a B2C marketer. So I really mean this, yeah? What happens when we get obsessed with B2B? And it Amazon people go, well, you know, there aren't so many B2B examples. How is this different in B2B? How's it different in services? It's not, right? Everything we're doing in brand management is applicable across all sectors, yeah? Because there isn't any one single norm. So when people in B2B go, well, it's yeah, okay, okay, I see how this works in B2C, but B2B is different. What they've done when they've created that B2C is just make stuff up. Inside B2C, we could be selling uh holidays, banks, cars, carrots, wart cream, watches, water, TVs, you know, banking. It's all different. And so is B2B. And so what I'd like us to do is just put it all down. Clearly, there are some aspects of B2B, the buying committee, the emphasis on the sales team that make them different. But no more so than the difference between selling wart cream and cinema tickets, if you see what I mean. So trust me when I say this, the syllabus will stretch across it all. Don't look for the differences. It's like chimpanzees and humans were 98.9% the same, go with the same. It's holding B2B back, this obsession with how it's different. It isn't that different. It's certainly no more different than someone who's selling uh again, you know, cars versus vacations. Mackenzie, you highlighted that the surveys predicting Corona's downfall fell because they applied a rational system two measure to a system one buying situation. As we prepare to spend our 500k planning budget diagnosing what the savvies and trendies want from a sonite, how do we structure our brand surveys to avoid capturing the exact same rationalized system two garbage? Right, that's a very good question. Uh, to be honest, given I designed all that research, uh, you can assume that it's very accurate. In the real world, there are some neat ways that when you design surveys, you can capture more system one intuition uh and more accurately. It's partly how you construct the scales and it's partly, you know, like for example, showing faces that capture the degree to which you agree is a much more system one appropriate manner than when we look at, you know, rate it from one to five on the Likert scale. Stuff like that will work. Um, there is a book, but I've forgotten the name who wrote it on how you do this. If I remember, I'll plug it into LinkedIn. But Mackenzie, just for the sake of clarity, when we work on Moon, you can assume all the data is amazing. Sam, do you have some good B2B examples you can share? Will there be more B2B examples? There'll be there'll be some, Sam, but to my point, I'm, you know, they're harder to find, they're harder to explain. I'm not being lazy, and I swear to you, it's all the same. But yes, we will get into some decent B2B jibba jabba as we go through the program. Gareth, I'm halfway through, I'm halfway through module two as I type, and the content is very focused on existing established brands. Yeah. What adaptations to thinking uh approach should you suggest for us working on startup challenger brands? We'll get a little bit more to it. The reality is though, Gareth, it it the focus, you know, in your in your brand manager life, if you get 30 years of it, uh 20 29 will be spent.

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This is the joy. I'm in the uh I'm in the American Airlines lounge, yeah. I've got to move that out of the way. Sorry, my my internet disappeared for a second. Um in in the 30 years you spend, you know, 26 of them are gonna be spent working in and around existing brands. So what I'm very confident, having done this course before, if we get through all the examples, you will be able to then work backwards into what a startup challenger brand should do to build towards it. Some things will be relevant, heritage, etc. So we will get there and you can backward engineer it, and I will talk to it later as well. Mackenzie, Marketing Week officially operates a MW, sorry, officially operates a house of brands architecture with Merjo and Moon. Yet the CEO forced a corporate green and gold delivery onto the Moon brand, stripping away Max Moon's historical monochrome codes. Since a true House of Brands should isolate product brands from the corporate entity, is MW committing a fundamental architecture error? I think you may have a point there, Mackenzie, and it's something to ponder as you uh plan your strategy. Anik, I work on American whiskey. Again, you're a lucky person. And in the current volatile environment, we're seeing geographical factors start shaping brand associations. No should, I was in Canada drinking heavily all week. I can see what's going on with the Americans and the Canadians, right? Uh in practice, you can't control or easily shift those associations. So in a situation like this, what's the more effective strategic response? Actively try to counter it or deliberately staying consistent and trusting that your core brand associations will outweigh it over time. Yeah, um it's the latter. I mean, I think what I've learned from, in some cases, working on Spirits brands is this too will pass. I think we have to be tactically uh agile but strategically consistent for the long haul with things like positioning and targeting. So I think you you have to acknowledge there are changes. I think you have to see that. But I would be very loath to alter things because it will change back and it will change again. So I think you're looking for a position that has the capability to survive the ups and downs of culture. I think tactically, where you spend your money and how you respond to events year on year needs to be shorter term and agile. But we'll get to that big difference between strategy and tactics as we go through the program. Franziska, if brand choice is driven primarily by mental availability rather than objective product superiority, yeah, I wouldn't go that far. I would say product is seen through the lens of mental availability and perception. But carry on. And consumers tend to select brands they recognize and trust. To what extent are superior product claims strategically necessary as opposed to investments in building brand salience and meaning? Ooh, but that's a great point. Um, yeah, I think we only get so far with product claims. Um, I think at the end of the day, they're relatively, we'll talk about it when we talk about positioning, they're relatively far down the benefit ladder. It's better to get to a benefit, it's better to get to an emotional association, um, and it's better, as you say, to drive salience and familiarity. I I don't think it's an either-or, is all I would also say, Francisco. Christina, how should a complex B2B brand like Siemens, with multiple divisions spanning very different industries, approach brand building? Specifically, how do you create strong mental availability when your audience isn't one broad market, but a collection of distinct, specialized segments across multiple industries? Should the focus be on a unified master brand or more targeted division and industry level brands? Good question. Again, I think you'll find it it's it's not dissimilar for many B2C brands with different segments. When we get to module four, Christina, I'm gonna talk to you about two-speed targeting. And it's the idea that we build the brand to the whole market. Yeah? As we define it. And then when I'm activating it, I'm gonna go to more segments or buying groups. Yeah. I think hold that thought for another week because that's the answer for Siemens. I'm building Siemens to everyone, the corporate brand. Then I'm activating its various product divisions to the various target buying committees with sales-driven position-based activation. And the two things can exist mass marketing and targeting together, as we will see. Patrick Gyang. If your company only has one brand, for us, a small research firm, we have different tools we sell, but all under the same brand. You say that like it's a bad thing. I actually like having that single brand approach, right? I really think it's it's it's probably the superior upgrade. Um, that's how I would do it anyway. Um, I don't want more than one brand, but anyway, carry on. Um could you replace brand and brand management with company? I.e., diagnosis, strategy, and tactics would be relevant for the company as a whole. I say this because I see implications of the brand management strategy impacting HR and finance. I realize it's oversimplifying it somewhat. But the brand and company size business brand strategy should dictate the whole strategy. I think yes, as long as you haven't got an overveiling corporate strategy that this is going to bump into. And as long as when we get to brand architecture, you acknowledge you are a branded house, which is coming and you'll see it shortly. I want to apologize for the room I'm in. It makes me look like I've tried I've lit this room like I think I'm, you know, the second coming. Uh, it's just a large ceiling light that just happens to be shining a halo. It's not how we normally do it. Eve, the calculation of brand awareness is based on the assumption that a brand is not frowned upon or that people are willing to admit to consuming or knowing your brand. That's true. How does one measure brand awareness or the brand's mental availability if social desirability constantly skews the results? Take a tabloid newspaper. Many people read it, but nobody wants to admit it. Yeah, it's unavoidable to some degree, Eve. And I think you still have to go with the relativity of the data, right? But it's true that we see many areas where it's uh social desirability changes the results. We've seen it with purpose and ethics. And you know, if you have an attractive young person asking, is it important, you know, how a company pays its employees, you'll get 85% saying yes. And if you actually look at when it comes up in the actual decision making, it's 6%. So I think you've got to look at survey design um as a way of getting around it and triangulating it. You can control in surveys, you can put in an honesty bias at the start. Um, and the way you ask the questions can also drive it as well. So the secret is in how you design questionnaires. Um, it's one of the interesting things about synthetic data and using AI to run your research, is it strips that all away. And it's actually one of the reasons synthetics are getting much more accurate often than consumer research. They don't have that bias. Louisa, it's great to be part of this intake of brand management. I'm really enjoying the modules. My question may be a little premature, okay? But in module two, you mentioned the importance of killing projects, not creating more. I love and abide by this as much as I can. And there's a common request in my work do less better. Excellent. But often it's not the reality. Working in an international role with lots of stakeholders and big cross-functional teams. Any advice on how to suggest initiatives to coal? Now, so first of all, I I totally agree. But yes, it's premature. Let's build and then we will kill. When we get to brand architecture, we're gonna talk a lot about killing products, but really killing brands. And I'm gonna take you through a couple of examples. So let's hold it till then. All I want to say at this point, Louisa, is I support your killing instincts for everyone else's benefit. Once we finish building stuff, we're gonna kill stuff. Because if you don't kill and build in a Shiva-like way, in a balanced way, you end up with too much. The sheep keeps growing wool. So we will talk about brand extension and diversification, but we'll also talk about killing. Uh Leandra, hello, Mark. If I understood well, the Interbrand Best Global Brands Report is often used as a benchmark for brand value, despite being a PR-oriented ranking based on public third party data and not the detailed valuation work Interbrand conducts for clients. Couldn't have said it better myself. Knowing this, should marketers really trust it? No. Uh, is it role more about education and signaling than accuracy? And where do you see its true strategic purpose? I I love your. Question, Leandra, and the answer is basically yes. I think Interbrand do a very good job when they actually do a valuation for over three months for a company using actual data. Um, I think brand finance do an even better job. I think when they publish these lead tables, it's really an understandable, very inaccurate attempt to generate headlines. And I think we should leave it at that. Anastasia, thank you for the first module. What are your thoughts on the importance of brand saliency depending on the channel where the brand plays? E.g., for FMCG, BioN Sharp saliency approach makes sense. But I'm thinking for a D2C only brand, would brand awareness and brand image matter more? Not really. I mean, I know in B2B, salience is just as important and the data's proven that. I don't think you can get away from it. And I think it we don't want to, Anastasia. Salience is such a driver and it can be such an advantage. We need to manage with it in our in our in our focus. No, no, I don't think it's a I think it is saliency uber alias. Um, and it's you know, don't fight it. Anastasia again. What is the balance between linking your brand to different attributes in category entry points and brand positioning? Byron Sharp says in his article that you need to link your brand to many attributes, cues, so your brand can have higher probability to be remembered in the buying situation of that cue. However, that goes against the brand positioning and brings brand to commodification. Yeah. Um it's it's one of the differences in the Ehrenberg-Bass approach versus the classic uh, I would say American brand uh management approach. And you're gonna have to decide, as I said to you in that first module, what you believe makes for strong brand and build it accordingly. For me, as we'll see later in the course, my attitude is very sort of Catholic. I like, I like both. And I when I when I work on positioning, and I've done it throughout my career, I'm very happy positioning on a particular category entry point, being what our brand is all about. And often, in addition, I've also added a particular attribute or association as well. And I see them as very good bedfellows when the situation allows. But you have to work out how you want to play it. Leo, you present brand salience and traditional brand awareness as complementary but distinct. Ah, or a choice, that's the or you choose, yeah? With Keller treating salience as a gateway to image building and Sharp treating it as nearly the end goal. It's a good summary. In the context of the 95-5 rule, could the optimal weighting between these two models actually vary systematically by market penetration? For a nascent category like Sernides, where most of the market is in the 95% and brand knowledge is thin, might Sharp's salience, heavy approach be more appropriate while Keller's image depth becomes more critical as penetration matures. Well, you know what, Leo? You're actually right. Um, it's not hugely different, but it is different. We've got good data showing that uh when a brand is, actually it's the other way around from what you've suggested, when a brand is younger, it is more about differentiation and image. And as it matures, the value of distinctiveness and salience grows uh exponentially. So it's actually the other way around. Again, I wouldn't fight it, I wouldn't look for exceptions. Come with me on the same journey. We need a cognitive construct, salience, awareness. I know you exist, you come to mind. Um, we need some form then of associative image, and I think of you as this and this and this. That's it. That's that's the simplicity we're seeking. Sam, how do underdogs do it? Meaning, if you're in a competitive market but you don't have as much resource, uh, what tips would you give? Oh, look, normally you get smashed. I mean, branding isn't fair. The game of brand management is incredibly tilted towards big brands. Let's be very clear on that. They just have it easier, better, more profitable. Um, getting big is the best thing you can do to get big. Yeah, you can quote me. Having said that, there's a couple of things. You can be more creative when you're a smaller brand, you can take more risks, you can position against the big boys is always a good play. And the other one, which David Ark has always been keen on, is you can you can move into a subcategory, you know. So you find something that's been underserved in the main category by the big boys. Greek yogurt is the great example. So the yoga guy stitched up yogurt 40 years ago. Chobani comes along and goes, Yeah, okay, but I'm gonna create this little sub-room called Greek yoga and I'm gonna own that. And eventually Greek yogurt will get bigger as a subcategory than the main category. That's a very clever play, too. They're they're the standard plays. Sam, you mentioned in it the necessity for a brand to maintain a share of voice equivalent to share of market. What happens if you're a scale-up and you don't have sales or share of market? Um, yeah, you you struggle, Sam. And I don't want to I don't want to give you this David and Goliath bullshit story because I don't think it's right. Uh you normally don't grow because you haven't got the money uh uh to grow. And if you do, the big boys just out shout you again. And I have to be honest with you, that's the story, the real story of brands. They're just the small ones can't break through. Katie, the organizational benefits of brand are clear, but not always understood by other business units. Combined with increased pressure to cut costs, the ROI and long-term brand growth activity is not immediately seen. And therefore, first on the cutting lock. In my organization, brand plans require approval from a wide number of teams, often in the same room. While speaking of changing and individual conversations, uh uh what would be effective? How would you manage this in a group setting of senior leaders? At the end of module two, K. You may not have got to meet you. I think the key lesson uh in all of this um is link brands to the benefits of those in the room and not just sell brand on its on it on its inherent benefits that marketers see. Uh, you know, and we talked about it at the end of module two. If you're in a room with the head of sales, talk to them about how brand will make their completion rates go up because they're not interested in brand consistency, you know, or even price premium. You know what I mean? So I think it's about targeting and positioning arguments in the right way and linking it always back to benefits rather than the process. For me, they're the things that have worked the best. Boris, I have a question about the brand plan. In module two, you discussed the annualized value of achieving a comms objective. How do you estimate this value? I know this topic will be covered later. However, I'm currently dealing with an urgent client request. Their management team wants to quantify the revenue uplift they can expect from increasing ad investment at the top of the funnel. Okay. It's very hard, but we will cover this and you will do this, but I need to build a couple of weeks of knowledge. Uh like literally, I can answer your question, but it's going to take me three modules to go through the value and then the annualized value. Um if you can't wait three weeks, Boris, uh, reach out to me through LinkedIn and I'll try and I'll walk you through it. I don't want to walk everyone through it because it's just going to confuse everyone, and we want to do it at the right pace. We're going to cover this three weeks from now perfectly. If you can hang on, um, hang on. If not, reach out and I'll I'll give you a private tour. Maria, I love module two. I work on a strong market leading B2B brand where one core segment dominates volume of profit, which makes it very easy to default to defend the core as the organizing principle. What I found particularly interesting in module two was your point about how strong brands can successfully bridge into adjacent categories or segments to save themselves from shrinking channels or categories. Something that feels especially relevant in B2B. My question is: how would you advise brand managers to judge when expansion beyond the core is a sound brand building strategy versus when it's simply uh a reaction to short-term growth? Um, again, we were we'll talk about diversification in a couple of modules. The short answer is uh there's a lot of answers to this question. You you first of all have to make sure you're killing stuff, as we said earlier, so you're not just creating more and more. You've also got to be sure that the money being spent on the core is not gonna give you a better return, or even worse, than taking the money from the core and the and the organizational time onto the expense uh brand extensions or diversifications aren't going to cause you more pain as a result. They're the calculations you have to make, Maria, but you've got to do them in a case-by-case way. Obviously, growth is good, but but I think the key point with branding is it's often growth at the expense of more growth. And that's the thing to be conscious of, you know. Most brand extensions fail, and that's fine. They don't, as we'll see, they don't damage the core brand, but they they damage the organizational resources and leech from them. And you have to be very worried about that. And we we will get on to it. Sarah, in a B2B category where a dominant competitor owns most of the salience and budgets are limited. How should marketers build mental availability? Especially when my brand is very famous in consumer markets, but strongly associated, but not strongly associated in B2B. Well, there's some good news. The good news is consumers don't care. And B2B buyers, turns out, are also B2C buyers. I learned this the hard way. I worked for Ericsson many, many years ago, and we were doing a really good job in B2B with our branding, and our B2C colleagues were doing a really crap job with handsets, and we couldn't work out why we were struggling, and the answer was because our brand was looking real bad in B2C, and B2B buyers don't have some magic curtain between the two. So the good news is the salience from B2C carries across to B2B. The bad news is it can sometimes come with associations that aren't appropriate for your category. So for me, it would be as much as possible go with whatever the B2C brand has built and then segue it into B2B and essentially jockey off it because it's one of your key strengths. Don't fight it. Alison, I'm enjoying the content and wondered about your thoughts on the recent Nike Walker's tolerated campaign. In your view, is it on the Peloton wife end of the scale or the Burger King mold end of the scale? No, no, it's very rare you get the Burger King end of the scale. I think it's absolutely uh I should write a column about it. You're making me think now. It's absolutely gonna be good news. If you look at the sort of checklist of what you need to do to really have a problematic negative result, it really doesn't tick enough of the boxes. Yeah, I think it's gonna do them a little bit of good. Holly, I can see there are already a few questions added and upvoted regarding commoditizing your brand with price promotions. I also found your section in module two about the orgs benefits of having a price premium very interesting. Oh yeah, man. I'm all about price premiums, Holly. In the macroeconomic environment, the topic of affordability is at the forefront of our C-suite's minds. Cost is a top barrier of category usage. How should we therefore, in our category, online food delivery, so how should we therefore be balancing this with the need to protect the brand and avoid commoditization? It's got to be research, Holly. If you do proper research, you can find out where your price needs to be. The problem I have with most pricing and most promotional pricing is it's done by senior managers who know nothing about pricing, know nothing about consumers, know nothing about research, know nothing about brands, and they end up doing real harm. The old McKinsey study is right, you know, 90% of the time companies get pricing wrong, they underprice. We overvalue volume. Yeah? And one of the great joys of doing conjoint or doing a Van Vestendorp analysis is it will give you not only the right price level, it'll normally be higher than you think. And you've got proof then to show the rest of the organization. The answer is research from the consumers on what they are prepared to pay, which, if it's done correctly with proper methods, isn't like, what would you pay? Would you like a promotion? If it's done properly and look up Conjoint and Van Vestendorp, these are two great cheap techniques that will give you answers. Heidi. Brand associations live in shoppers' minds and can sometimes be different from how brand managers and founders see their brand. No shit. If certain brand values are held in high esteem within the business, but research shows they're not currently translating into desired brand associations, how would you judge when to stop building on the value versus new ways to build? Yeah, look, it's the it's the question of positioning. Very often you'll find a company's positioning is crap, which is what you're describing, right? It isn't what consumers want, it isn't what they deliver, and it isn't something that differentiates them. And so it comes back again to doing the research, seeing what the consumers want and how you are perceived, and working through it from there. Let's get through positioning and then we'll come back to your question of should you change it? Because repositioning has its problems. Nick, sports sponsorship and branding. This is an issue that I've been wondering about for a couple of years. I know it's a general question, but it could be useful. In what situations would sports sponsorship work? What is the danger? What's your point of view? What is your take on being a Jersey sponsor of a mediocre Bundesliga team? And besides that, not doing a lot of other branding. Right, so sponsorship is a bit of a dodgy game. Um, it has real value, but I've worked with several big companies where there's there's literally two lists for the sponsorship. There's things we're sponsoring for strategic reasons, and there are things we're sponsoring because the CEO really likes rugby. Yeah? And I've seen that more than once. So there's a lot of dodginess there. Having said that, on the strategic side, um it is incredibly good at driving salience. Um, it is incredibly good when the association with the brand in question, with the team in question is is is productive. My bigger concern with sponsorship is when you know you see Formula One and there's 78 logos on one car. Not only does that not break through, it really makes you look just like another logo and just another brand. I think it's almost commoditizing. But when it's done well, I remember when I worked for Oblow, the watch brand, we sponsored, remember the the clocks for a million euros at the World Cup. So you hold up the clocks and you know, you've got five minutes of extra time. Everyone, I mean, that's how clever Ublow were, right? It was on brand. You had an audience of a billion people looking directly at the clock, going, Oh my god, the stream it's left, Ublow, right? And the return was phenomenal. And then still to this day, we see footage of the World Cup eight years ago, and there's Ublow again, you know, in the highlights. It's incredibly valuable. So it can be good, can also be ego-based. Let me do a time check. We're 36 minutes in. That's the good news. And I've got to work out where we are in terms of what did I just do? Yeah, we're at we'll just about make the hour if I keep my speed up. Pricing and turning a brand into a commodity. What's the relationship between price and value? Can you share some examples of how premium or successful brands are signaling value? E.g., the payback for the customer. Uh a la buy cheap, buy twice. There are a few new challenger brands that seem to be winning on brand love, trust, credibility, and price, like GiftCaff. Any insights into why and how this is working for them? Yeah, it's it's an interesting question. And one that I'm not um it's it's not at the moment in my wheelhouse, but you you're making me want to look at it a bit more. The argument for value is to almost climb down the benefit ladder. So we're all about getting up to emotional benefits, but the argument of economic crisis is actually you've done lots of that. Why don't you come back down and show us that we're all good at this and this and this and these emotional things? Also, to your gift gaff example, we work twice as long as the as the as the private label uh rivals and so on. So it's a move back down. My only point to you, Rachel, and I love your question, is I think we overdo it sometimes when we're facing an economic crisis. I mean, oh, every consumer now needs a value argument. Maybe, but between salience and image and a bit of distribution, we can normally sail through. And I think it might be an overresponse. Olivia, where a single brand operates across multiple product portfolios in different categories, targeting distinct segments with varying levels of brand equity but consistent brand code, should planning be conducted as one unified brand plan or a separate portfolio level plan? It depends. I've seen both work beautifully well. I think it comes down to the degree to which the consumers are the same across these different categories. In B2B, it's pretty easy because if we've got a different sales force uh in in different medical categories and disease states, for example, it's pretty easy to go. We need different brand plans. In B2C, it's a little harder. Um, in cosmetics, for example, you'll see brands will have a single brand plan, but it will break into chunks. It will go, right, now we'll do the moisturizer category with a bit of work here. Now we're gonna move over into fragrance and so on and so on. So it really depends, Olivia. My preference is to have as as much focus on a single plan as possible. But sometimes the best structure is here's the brand, here's the research, here's the tracking, here's the overall performance. Now we're gonna break it up into these three subcategories, and you get kind of three subplans for seven or six or seven slides, and then back in, unify it with the budget at the end. That's probably the best balance. Patrick, I work for a market research company. So our customers are B2B. What's your advice for trying to sample a market of marketers who use us? It's easy to get feedback from existing clients, but hard to get a balanced sample of the marketing population. We've done a lot of in-depth with trusted clients. That's great. Is that the best you think we can do? Oh my goodness, this is a this is a tricky question, Patrick. You may not like the answer. There is an answer. So, yeah, I think you're doing the right thing, first of all. When you're in B2B, um, there is great difficulty getting a representative sample of the market. So talking to your existing clients and doing qualitative work was traditionally where we stopped. As I'm sure you know, Patrick, we now have the potential with synthetic research to revolutionize that approach. And, you know, companies like Every Denzer in the States, even using, you know, just using Claude. You know, when you when you work with your with a decent, and I think Claude is very decent, AI system, it's a it's a different thing from saying, what do you think, do you think this will work, to literally prompting them with run some synthetic research, describe the method, and three minutes later you'll get the results. And in B2B, this is changing the world. Getting a sample of CEOs together has almost been impossible for even Goldman Sachs in the past. The the area where synthetic data is having its biggest revolution is in B2B because suddenly we can do it at the turn of a hat and it's it's accurate, unfortunately, Patrick. It's very accurate. So I I would I would suggest keep doing the qual on clients, keep doing exit surveys and so on, but to get the whole market a little bit of synthetic would be good. Francisca, based on the idea that building a brand means establishing and maintaining brand knowledge, and that salien should be assessed across multiple buying queues, what are the most practical levers you'd prioritize in comms and touch points to increase the brand's likelihood of being thought of in real buying situation? I can't tell you that, Francisca. I can tell you the process by which we'll work it out. Yeah? Um, I wish I could just rhythm it out. It will vary by brand, by category, by target, by position. Um, but the process we're going to go through will enable you to answer those questions by the end of the course. I wish I could give you an answer. Here's a list of the most important touch points that will work. I'll give you the process by which you can work it out. Tara. The salience questions in brand awareness reference the example when celebrating a big event instead of when buying champagne. The answer could be brands from different categories, for example, Interflora. So very broad and could give data on brands that are not direct competitors. Yeah, but you say that, but what is this not a problem and trying then to get the meaning from the results? It is and it isn't. I mean, I think what it's doing, if I'm honest with you, Tara, is it's giving you a proper sense of competition and making the the results more realistic and complex because the reality is complex, yeah? If if I am trying to find a present to celebrate my wedding anniversary, uh it's true that flowers compete with champagne, yeah? And so it I think it's appropriate. Does it make it messier? It does. It doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't do it. Uh reference to interbrand and measuring brand value. Is it possible to measure the brand equity of a holding company that doesn't have any direct customers beyond investors? Uh I don't think so. But I'm not an expert in valuation. If you asked David Haig at brand finance, who's a mate of mine, and will definitely sniff out the chance to maybe get some work from you, he would tell you in a heartbeat. I suspect the answer is no. Harrison, I don't fully understand the share of uh voice equals share of market graph. Is share of market how much of the market is dominated by brand? What does share of voice mean? Um, it's a it's a very standard calculation, Harrison. We we cover it a lot more in the mini MBA marketing. All it means is you calculate all the brands in your category and what they spend and what your spend is versus the total spend. That's your share of voice as a percentage. And share of market is in the category, what's your you know, unit sales or dollar sales, what share of the market do you have? We're gonna give you some of that data for the moon brands. You're gonna work with it and you'll see how it works. If you want a more uh detailed example, if you Search for Ritson and you search for Lidl L I D L. I did a quite famous video case on the very topic, uh, and I walk you through it in 10 minutes. And it's there on YouTube in eternity. Have a look at that. I uh it's a 10-minute kind of get you up to speed thing. Sarah Owen. This is a very functional question compared to others. No problem. But on slide 10 of the Moon case study, the segmentation colour brands aren't particularly clear. This could be very well being my crappy laptop. It is. But please can you let me know where Moon sits against the three segments versus competitors? Many thanks. All right, I will dig it out, and if it's not clear at my end, I will, I will, I will clarify it, Sarah. I think it's your laptop. Sam, is there an example of a brand report card for B2B brands? I appreciate the card will be the same. It's just the examples given. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta blame Keller for that. I haven't seen one. I'll have a look. I'm sure someone out there, let me make a note. I'm sure someone out there has got one. And if I make a note to myself, B2B brand report card. Um if I make a note to myself to do that, I'm sure the I think the B2B Institute uh actually did exactly that. So I'll have a look for you. Pre Prena, I work in an industry with raw material inflation going through the roof and only a small part of it being passed on to the consumer. Hence, even though we're absorbing maximum impact of costs, our consumer prices are already the highest in our category. In such times, is it wise to do a tactical campaign and inform consumers? Yes. So the data is very clear on this, Prena. You you want what you want to do is basically reach out to consumers. You want to put the price up, you want to do it in such a way you don't have to do it again. You want to communicate consumers. You want there's there's a playbook on this, right? First thing is call it a price increase. Don't use a euphemism. Tell them it's going to happen in advance. Um, tell them what you know essentially what it means for them in terms of where the prices are going, then explain why. Yeah, give with a really simple example from your costs. And then, this is the crucial bit, remind them of the value that you still generate at the new price. The research says if you do all of that, people don't like a price increase, but they accept it for the most part. If you don't do that, uh you either don't increase your price and it's struggling profitability-wise, or you do it quietly and consumers hate it. So the research is very clear. That's that's how to do it. Brenner again. How can we run brand plans with zero diagnostics available for new country entries, specifically if no category information exists for these countries? Well, up until last year, the answer was you can't. You can't be a brand manager without some research. The good news is synthetic data, um, even Dana of a common uh you know, uh Chat GPT source, or working with one of the synthetic firms, which they are very cheap and quick, does allow you now to get some diagnostic data. The key thing is you have to know what you want so you can prompt it, which is what module three next week is all about. Laura, thanks to the first two modules. It's super interesting and great to hear all those practical examples and your analysis on them. The one that stuck with me was for Burger King. Listening to all the materials so far, I have a question about brand heat in today's marketing. We often hear about how brands need to drive brand heat to make themselves stand out in the market. I'd be curious to hear where you see brand heat and how should brand managers take it into account. I attribute brand heat with many things, amongst them image and fame. Um, I do see a driving driving brand heat as a catalyst for driving equity. Yeah, I've never heard the phrase before, so beware using it in public circles. Um, it's not very commonly known, Laura, but I get what you're saying. I think it's the early point I was making. Um, I think modern brand managers have to accept the value of salience, the orbis on nature of culture, and have to recognize that we have to measure, manage brands with a little less control, a little more risk, and a little more sense of adventure that if there is a bit of heat around our brand and it isn't always positive, unless it's very, very rare, it will be it will be good news for the brand. Yeah? And it's certainly a principle I've seen play out many, many times. Minya, can you please expand further on how to best apply our learning to a branded house approach? You spoke to this briefly when referring to Google and how they use their brand to build a strong employee value proposition, which moves the brand away from product to a more holistic position. Excuse me. Yes, but not yet, Minya. We're gonna cover it in brand architecture. In a nutshell, there is what's called a brand architecture spectrum, from a house of brands where the holding company does nothing to a branded house where it does everything. There are many positions in between, and they all have different implications. I'm gonna take you through all of them. Stay with me. I'm doing it in a certain order for a certain reason. We will definitely cover it in extensive detail, I promise. Katherine, in Module One and the Harvard piece, brand is positioned as social glue, but algorithm-driven platforms have splintered communities. People are gravitating towards Reddit and niche spaces where peer connection feels more authentic, while branded experiences like running clubs, Nike, are losing appeal. How do brand managers build genuine community when the shift is away from brand-done spaces? No, no, no. I'm not having this, Katrine, right? Come on. Do you see the error in your question? Yeah, I love it. I love your question. Do you see the error in it though? What you're saying is people are leaving running clubs, like Nike's running club, and they're going to these Reddit communities instead. They're just communities built around brands, yeah? And within Reddit, there are there are branded communities within the branded community on Reddit. It's just different, but it's the same, yeah? So I think you've just got to follow the the changes of what community looks like. But don't drink too much of the, you know, society is completely changing Kool-Aid, the pornography of change. I think it does change, but it changes in ways that aren't quite as radical as we might think. Rossio, when managing a brand with market leading categories and a global player enters the space, leveraging both robust brand equity and aggressive penetration pricing strategy to quickly capture consideration, what is the most sustainable response? Is it healthier to shield the category through technical promotional pricing? No, no, no. Or should we prioritize long-term brand equity investment to protect our leadership? Definitely the latter. The problem is, Rossio, as you're now discovering, you should have been doing this two years ago. You need to build your brand quickly, but it would have been better if you did it two years ago and you would have been in a much better place. There's a lesson there. Additionally, for new product introductions, what is your recommended timeframe for the awareness phase? And do you suggest launching with a combined awareness and consideration budget or a staggered sequential funnel? That's a very specific question, Russia. In my experience, I can't give you a time frame, it depends, it depends. I think awareness and consideration, if they're what you want to do, can be done simultaneously. Aya. In your video, you spoke about customer-based brand equity. I represent an investment bank in the Baltic communist. Love the Baltic countries, which is a relatively small and highly competitive market. Regardless of size, whether a large retail bank or a smaller, I nearly married a girl from Tallinn. Oh, happy days. We're all competing for audience attention. At the moment, our marketing and communication teams, KPIs, to grow overall brand awareness in society. However, since we do not have retail products, our brand development is largely driven by business relationships. My question, what would you suggest organizations like ours do to shift from primarily business-driven brand equity towards stronger customer-based brand equity, especially in a niche B2B financial market? Yeah, look, I think we'll cover it in targeting. I think the short answer is I you have to decide in targeting what is my sophisticated mass market? Yeah. Who are the people that I consider to be in my market? And it may be at the moment you've gone too broad, yeah. You've gone too wide. But who are all the people I want to target? And that's the group you build your brand to. No one can give you the answer or size or definition but you. And so many companies don't do it. Who do you consider the target for your brand? I don't think you've answered that. And we will talk about it a lot when we get to targeting. Again, one more question about positioning. In my country, there are only about 10 banks, and half of them, including mine, position as a local brand bank for entrepreneurs. We chose this position because research showed that our brand is perceived as a foreign bank. We've been working to change this perception for three years, but progress is gradual. In a market where competitors use very similar narratives, what would you recommend is the most effective way to differentiate a brand? No, no, no. It's a great question. Let's get through positioning. I think there's a lot of questions about your positioning that will become apparent when we get to positioning. So let's just get to positioning and then we'll cover it. Nikki, thanks for a great start of the course. Like many others, I'm interested in how the concepts apply in the context I work in, which is higher education. How should we adjust our thinking and planning when a purchase is low frequency, maybe once in a lifetime and involves high levels of research and consideration? I understand we should think about advocacy rather than repeat purchase at the end of the funnel. Great. What other implications might there be? Similarly with the 95-5 rule, should we adapt this to a category where, for example, exam dates and application deadlines take a core hold through an application cycle? I was struck by the point that big brands have an advantage by being just big, that they have more share of voice, more trust, more customers. It's very hard for smaller competitors to move past them. Yeah. Does this effectively mean we're running to standstill? Yeah, to some degree. Unless you really master a strategy that will work around that, yeah, it's much harder. If we're aiming to grow market share, share a voice, what are the opportunities to do so that we need to be alerted to? And finally, as leaders, should we operate when there is ambiguity or lack of direction about the purpose and vision of the organization? Do we as brand marketers leapfrog them and say, I'll determine a position myself? Yeah, no, look, um, lots of questions. I think you got the funnel down, that's great. I think the 95-5 rule still applies. Um, yes, as a smaller brand, I have to be honest with you, it's harder. But listen to what I said earlier to those other questions. Position against a competitor, choose a niche and specialise, find a subcategory. These are the classic plays of the smaller brand. You know, IMD, um, which is a business school in Switzerland, is is a great case study, Nikki, of a business school that really was nowhere. And one man who was a genius, the Dean, essentially did all of those three things and did them brilliantly. So I I would say to you that, you know, case studies like that are really where where we should be. Um I'm just checking something because I'm getting a message. My apologies here. This is very inappropriate. I'm getting a message that says we're bordering a temperature, it's fine, it doesn't matter. Um, and yes, the leapfrogging question, I I I really would like you to take into account the purpose and philosophy of the university, but make it but come up with your own position which is more uh functional and that works for you, and that we can run through our module on positioning. Senny, I hope you had a glorious week. Uh I was in Canada, it was good. Two questions. I enjoyed learning about McElroy's memo. Would it be recommended that if you have multiple brands, you have a separate brand manager for each? Normally, yes, Seni. And if a brand isn't big enough to justify a brand manager, it's probably not big enough to justify its existence. Uh, two, I used to work in a charity with zero marketing budget, but big ambition. Phase one of brand management, diagnosis, feels like it could be expensive. Are there tiers of diagnosis you have for brand managers with limited resources? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, a lot of the qualitative you can do yourself. Synthetic data has given us a quantitative angle that can also be done almost for free. And I think, you know, my message next week will be it doesn't have to be perfect, but get insight. And we'll talk about different methods and approaches. And so, yeah, the key thing is I meet all these brand managers and they're always bemoaning that they don't have any research, but they're sitting there on their asses, you know, go and get some, do it yourself. You'll see next week. It, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect, get on with it. Alyssa, in module two, there's an emphasis on the importance of building and securing approval for a full annual brand plan ahead of the financial year to enable consistent execution. Yeah. I work for a VC bagged scale-up without an established annual planning cycle. We currently operate largely on a monthly, quarterly cadence. God help you, God help you, Alyssa. The primary constraint is not just time, but decision-making speed. Alignment is diffuse. And as a result, attempts to step out of execution and build a forward-looking brand plan repeatedly fail to land. There's been repeated attempts to plan in advance, but before we know it, the deadlines to execute have passed. Or so much time has passed that the avenues still open to us have become limited. God, it sounds like chaos. Big ideas down the toilet. As the first dedicated brand hire, I now have responsibility for driving this process, but limited formal authority to enforce alignment. From your experience, what are the most effective ways to break the execution trap? Yeah, I've seen this before. Um I would say to you, you need to have a brand plan. You need to, so first of all, strategic consistency over 12 months, tactical, fluid uh agility. They do sit together very nicely. And we'll talk about them as we go through the course. But for your strategy, you need an annual strategy. You don't need to execute it through everyone else. You can execute that quarterly, but but you need to have it on your desk, what the plan is, so that you can drive everyone else on the plan. Yeah? And I think that's the thing. You're not going to get them to buy into the annual plan, but you've got your annual plan and you're running it. I think the discipline has to be for you in this case, if that makes sense, Alyssa. Uh, Marcus, I've been reflecting on the personal challenge of market orientation, the idea that we must acknowledge we're in the dark and know nothing. At the same time, we're seeing the rise of synthetic data that can predict human responses with a 95% correlation. Hence my question: if we rely on AI personas that are built on existing data, do we risk losing that searchlight of discovery? Is it possible for synthetic data to ever truly reveal the dissatisfaction that consumers don't even know they have yet? Or does it just mirror our own existing biases? No, I'm sorry, but my experience of a lovely question, Marcos. My experience of it is it's superior to most consumer research because it doesn't mirror weirdly. I, you know, I think it's cheaper, I think it's faster. And I have to say, when it's done properly, I think it's now more accurate because of the biases that are inherent in questionnaire design and sampling and social desirability bias. Um, no, and as you know, I work with the guys at Evidenza and as uh Pete, the one of the founders, always says, and this is as bad as it's ever going to be, and it's already very good. So I still think you need market orientation. I still think you need to know you're in the dark, but we've now got an extra light switch in synthetic data, which I think is phenomenally useful. Alexia, how can brands realistically maintain a 60% investment in long-term brand building when they're under constant pressure to deliver short-term sales targets? Uh, I call this one, Alexia, the question. It comes up all the time. I've written a column uh called The Question a few years ago for Marketing Week, where I say, someone, in this case, you always ask the question, and I got so sick of trying to give you a good answer. I interviewed six big CMOs who'd gone into companies that were underspending uh on brand building and had fixed it and were successful. And I asked them your question: how did you get to 60% investment on brand or more? How did you pull it off? And so what I recommend you do is just Google search. Mark Ritson Marketing Week, the question. It's a very good column because I didn't write it. Six very smart CMOs wrote it for me and it contains lots of tips. We we will use the question as a reading later in the course, but you might want to look at it earlier. Alexia, in categories with long purchase cycles like automotive, is it more effective to invest in loyalty among existing customers or in building interest among future buyers? Oh, that's a great question. And the answer is both. So one of the things about Ehrenberg-Bass is they're so dogmatic. Yeah, they're like, you mean you know loyalty doesn't exist. Never invest in loyalty. You know, invest in penetration in new markets. My point has always been, man, I wouldn't mind doing both, right? Especially in a business like automotive. So let's apply bothism here. I think if the data supports it, I wouldn't see these as a choice. I would see these as two parallel strategies that both deserve investment. And our final question from Alexia. In low penetration but growing markets, what should we prioritize to drive future growth, increasing brand salience, or improving brand consideration? No, no, no. I I'm not the wizard of oz. I can't go, you are the best thing to do here is it depends, it depends, it depends. And what it depends on is a funnel. What it depends on is the data inside the funnel, and what it depends is the conversion rate. I am going to train you how to do it, Alexia. You can be confident of that, but not for another two weeks. Okay. Brilliant questions this week. I have to tell you, most of you are asking questions that we are definitely going to answer, just not yet. And forgive me if I'm frustrating you. You need to do it in a certain way. Trust me, okay? I can tell you every question we've got here will be answered beautifully by the course, but in its own due time. So stay focused. Next week, we are moving to something you're already asking about, which is research. So we're going to look at brand diagnosis in detail. And the week after, we'll move to strategy and the start of strategy, which is targeting. Try and get each week the course completed. Um, you'll you, you know, you don't have to do everything. And I will I will see you next week for brand diagnosis. It's a big module, but it's a good one. Bring the notebook. Um, and we'll do a proper QA from Sydney in a studio in two weeks' time. So keep the questions coming. Okay. Right, we're off and running, brand managers. See you in class uh next week. I gotta get in a plane now.