SPEAKER_00 0:16

Brand manager, hello. Hello, how are you? Welcome to QA question session two. I hope you're well. Important sessions this week, uh last week, going through the end of diagnosis and understanding the brand, and then into the startup strategy with targeting. This week uh really is important because it really kicks off with that key question of who we're going after, and it's a more complex question than it used to be. And now we're going to carry on into the strategy sessions through positioning and codes and architecture and objectives for the next couple of weeks. Super important. This is the strategic part coming up. So lots of good questions. Uh, let's get into them and then at the end I'll talk about what's coming up next. Let's start with Francisca. Is it truly realistic to operate with a single global brand strategy when brand diagnosis is by nature market specific, or does this create an inherent structural tension within the brand plan? If diagnosis surfaces different drivers of consideration and preference, supported by local correlation analysis, can a brand still credibly claim global coherence? In that context, how should global brand teams respond when different attributes matter in different markets without diluting the core strategy? And ultimately, from your experience, what elements of a brand plan should remain global and never localized, even when local teams push back? Yeah, it's a shit fight, Francisca, as you know. Um, I've never ever seen brand data where where in as you go from country to country, the brand looks anything like the other brands. Yeah, it's always different. Uh and because it's always different, what that means is there's always a uh a tension between the countries and a tension with the brand teams as well. Yeah. Um, and there's no way around that tension, it it it's it's unavoidable, yeah. Um, having said that, there's a practicality that we have to also encompass, which is at the end of the day, we we you can't have 400 different brand plans. So, what's the answer? The answer is the long and the short. So the long and the short isn't just long and short, it's mass and target segment. And it's also, in my opinion, global and local. If you think about the mass brand building job, that's what global should do. Yeah. We should be laying out the global brand position for the mass. We should be going through the brand codes, we should be working on product, we should be doing obviously global execution, but we should also be empowering the local teams to do segmentation, uh, to do product positioning, the short of it, and the tactical activation stuff because that starts to vary a lot when you get on the ground. It's still not perfect, but for me, that's the closest you'll get. Everyone struggles with this. That's the closest you'll get. And then the other thing, which you know, it goes without saying, you need people in the global team that do two things. First of all, they've actually worked in a country, and second, they get their ass on a plane occasionally and hang out in the countries listening to the countries. You don't send out edicts from the global team. And the biggest problem we've got in global marketing right now is people that aren't global and don't really understand marketing, and and and it's a haven for them. They're lovely people, but they produce 300-page brand plans. Um, they don't go out to the markets, they don't get on the ground, they don't talk to customers, and they treat the countries like the countries work for them. And that's not always the case, yeah. So I think that's a big part of it as well. If I can put those two things together, I'm gonna cough. Uh Ola, if diagnosis shows a brand is strong on functional drivers like price and availability, but weaker on trust or emotional connection, is it smarter to double down on strengths or fix the weaker perceptions and why? Yeah, it's a great question. Um, it depends. I mean, the missing thing from your question, Ola, which is great, is how much these things are driving performance. So if you think about it, I've got a strength here uh on a functional driver price, but I'm weaker on emotional connection. It depends how much those things are driving preference or consideration or whatever it is we want to go after. So therein lies the answer. Generally speaking, though, and there's another level here, which is sometimes you may not really want to drive price perceptions, but if they're really weak and they're actually negatively correlating things, you might want to fix them just to the point where they're not a weakness anymore. So it depends on the correlations which come in and add that extra dimension. That's the answer. There isn't a generic answer. Nikki Barton, on the survey uh part of the diagnosis, how should we approach framing awareness questions when either our brand is very small in the category or there are so many in the category that we're unlikely to appear in the top of uh top of mind answers? I've been thinking about defining a subcategory. No, no, no, don't do that. So the way to do it, if you're going to do a proper questionnaire, Nikki, is you can do that first question, which is, you know, a that really the funnel questions, right? Most of the top of top of funnel questions from a represented sample. And as you say, you might only get in a sample of 400 consumers, you're a really small brand, you get, I don't know, let's really small, you get 25 who are aware of you. Yeah. What you do now is you end the questionnaire at that question for the 400, yeah. And you zoom into the 25 and you recruit, and then you do more and more of these questions at the top level to get more people who are aware of your brand. So you can get more and more of that data. So what you're effectively doing is using a quota to say, right, I've got enough consumers to populate the general sample. Let's now over, let's keep asking the question so I can recruit more people that know my brand. It only costs you a certain amount per question, yeah? That I can recruit people for my brand who are aware of my brand so I can ask more detailed questions. As long as you keep in mind you've got the general data for the whole market in one side, that's fine. So you're effectively trying to over-recruit people that know your brand so you can dig into them a bit more while keeping a representative sample as well. It does work. It's a pain in the ass, but it does work. Anik, you stressed that tactics without strategy are a waste of time. Oh look, they just don't do much, yeah? Or they don't do as much. But in reality, when volumes are under pressure, there's often strong commercial pressure to drive short-term tactical wins, pushing strategy down the line. Yeah, but look, think about what you said. All right, carry on, Anik. Working in brand management, this creates tension as the focus shifts from long-term brand building, yet it's difficult to ignore. How would you actually handle that in practice? Well, first of all, don't set up this idea that there's short-term tactics with short-term wins, and then there's long-term brand building that will take a long time to work. That's not how it goes, right? The the long-term brand building immediately makes all the short-term tactics work more work better and also often has an immediate market effect, which lasts a long time. We call it the long of it, not because it takes a very long time to work, because when it starts working, it works for a long time, unlike performance, which is gone the minute you take your foot off the pedal. So I think it's about going more strongly to the company and saying, if we spend more on brand, performance will work better. And also brand will also generate more money. And and and it's, you know, it's it's this stupidity of saying, you know, I I just about accept if the world ends by Christmas, we should probably dump all of our money into performance. But provided we're assuming the world isn't going to end by Christmas, it's the dumbest thing we could ever do. Yeah? Because brand's going to make us money and it's going to set us up for the long haul. And it's going to make performance work better. And look, when we get later into the course, we'll give you some numbers to arm you on showing. If you set an objective up here versus an objective down here, you can see which ones deliver the most and which ones play on which. So it's just about getting the numbers, and we we will get there. Olivia, kicking off week three, but can't resist asking a question on Moon. No, that's fine. Moon Moon is in play. Is there any way of convincing MW to reconsider the budget split? No. Okay. So Moon and Mojo get the same split. I agree with you, it's not fair. The only way you could do it, Olivia, is if you were ever promoted to CMO in charge of both, it would be up to you. But right now, no. McKenzie, building on the previous question, direct cremation funeral plans, a mech thank you. A major challenge in our category. Now listen, McKenzie, the one thing I've worked in the funeral business once before, and the one thing I do want you to do from now on is you need to you need to use the phrase we undertook as much as possible. Yeah. So we undertook a major challenge in our category, is that people only ever buy one funeral plan in their lifetime. Really? So there are no repeat purchases. Well, unless you're buying for your family, which is kind of spooky, right? How does this change the way we approach diagnosis, equity building, and consideration? Well, look, it's not that unusual, right? Funnily enough, I had a guy to what was he talking about in the other group? Uh it wasn't funerals, it was something else. Oh, it was like uh uh uh garage doors. Yeah, same thing. It just means when we build your funnel later on, McKinsey, it it isn't gonna go into relationships and everything else. When you undertake your funnel, all you're gonna do is basically go down through the depths and end it with purchase and then happy, happy death, you know. Maybe some advocacy, not from obviously the person in the coffin or who's been cremated, but those that attend. But yeah, basically the it just changes the funnel a little bit, it doesn't change much else. Boris, I've previously completed the mini MBA in marketing. Well done, Boris, which extensively covers market research. Yes, it does. How does general market research relate to the specific research conducted for a brand diagnosis? Are there in essence the same types of studies? And building on that, how does marketing strategy relate to brand strategy? Okay, okay. So the research point is it's all forms of research. I think the main difference between market research, as we taught it in the mini MBA in marketing and brand research, is brand research is more incestuous, it's more selfish, it's more about me. Market research is really about, as the name suggests, the whole market, our brand and everyone else's. Brand research takes a more selfish identity. When it comes to marketing strategy and brand strategy, it depends. So it depends a lot on brand architecture. If you're a branded house, then brand strategy and marketing strategy are the same. But if you're a house of brands and you've got four or five brands in a category, then obviously the overall marketing strategy then splits and diffracts into three or four other marketing, uh, three or four other brand plans. So there isn't some consistent uh way of understanding. It depends in each company how how it differs. Tara. Re module three and interviews with customers. The brand I work for is a holding company, so its primary targeted uh audience is investors. The investor manager will not allow us to carry out any brand research interviews with them as he thinks it will give them the impression that we don't know what we're doing. I'm sorry, Tara. I'm sorry, but that's that's really stupid. But not you, not your question, but honestly. Yeah. Don't talk to customers because they'll think we don't know what we're doing. And we will spook them, which will trigger a negative assessment of us and possibly a sell recommendation to their investor managers. Any advice on what alternative is in this scenario? There are other analysts that cover our sector. Do you know of any panel companies to cover this? Nah, you're better off using synthetics. We're gonna do a special module at the end of the course on synthetic data. I'm just working on it now. I can't do it until we get, you know, at the start of the year, which is only what, four or five months ago, we've already moved about four different things forward on synthetics. So I made the decision when we get to the end of module 10, I'll do a special module which looks at where we are with AI and specifically with synthetic data. So we'll put that in then. But basically, I would have a long hard look at using synthetic data if your boss is going to block doing this kind of thing. You can get the data without talking to consumers using synthetics, and it's pretty accurate now as well. I I mean I've got a compromise because I own a tiny amount of Evidenza shares, but Evidenza for me, I used them this week on a big job. Uh client, a big B2B services client, the big rebrand, using exclusively Evidenza data. It's phenomenal. I mean, you you know, it's amazing what you can get. So I'd have a look at that as a route there, Tara. Uh, Anique, when building brand codes, how do you balance consistency with staying relevant over time? Oh, they're often pressure to refresh assets. All right, all right. I love your question, Anique. We're gonna go into codes in two weeks' time with so much focus, and we're gonna answer your question 400 different ways. Do I even want to go in there now? Uh the simple answer, as you'll see when we get to the module on codes, is unless your brand codes are 40 years old, just don't mess with them. If your brand's older, there is a case for that. Let's handle it in the module. I've got lots of lovely examples. You'll get it, you'll get it. It's fun. Mackenzie Thorne. I work in the yes, we know about the funeral industry, McKenzie. We launched, no, you didn't, we undertook a direct cremation challenger brand in November 2025 against a dominant incumbent with a 10-year head start and significantly larger budgets. In the UK, death is a taboo topic, and direct cremation plans are widely viewed as a commodity. How do we conduct a proper diagnosis, understanding perceptions, mental availability, and distinctive assets while still driving short-term growth and building brand equity? Is there a practical sequence or framework you recommend when you're significantly behind the market leader and operating in a highly commoditized, emotionally avoided market? Yeah, just follow the course, Mackenzie. We're gonna get there. Just do the course, okay? We got seven weeks to go. Do the course. It'll all become apparent what you're gonna do, all right? Do the do the moon simulation. It will train you up and then you'll go in and you'll smash it, okay? The one piece of advice I'll give you at this point, though, is don't call it highly commoditized. You you're already kind of going, look, it's very commoditized. Maybe it is, or maybe you guys haven't done a good job. Yeah? Let's see. Let's see. The market is the market. There'll be brands and there's room for brands, especially in things like that. But you need to let's go through the program together. I swear you're gonna get all the things you need by the end. Mathieu, projective research looks interesting and new to me, but isn't there a risk of influencing the answers with the material you present? Ah, interesting question. How do you build a neutral set from which to prompt respondents? But I love the fact, Mathieu, you've called them respondin'. Incidentally, how long are you are usually these kinds of interviews? Yeah, so it's a it's not as common as it used to be, projective. It doesn't matter what images you use, Mathieu. It really doesn't matter. Um uh and there's even an old uh paper somewhere where they just use arbitrary images. It's it's the meaning that comes from the images. The images themselves literally don't matter, it's what we take from the interview. And normally you're having a 20 to 30 minute interview at the end where you say, Okay, you've picked that image, that's interesting. Why did you pick that image? Yeah, what does that represent? And it's actually the follow-up questions, you know. It's not the oh, you picked a sheep, it's oh, and you said the sheep calming. Why do you find it calming? And that's where the insights come. So don't worry, you could literally have it's just images of anything, right? Lots of them, and off they go. If you're really worried about it, you can ask the consumer to find their own images, it just takes a lot more time. Um, it it's about the projection, not the not the not the uh image. Sophie, I attended an event recently where an interesting theme came up about the number of consumers who are deferring product research and brand purchase to AI tools. In this context, I think brand saliency, differentiation, and preference could become even more influential. On the flip side, a relentless focus on performance and optimizing within LMMs could devalue brand. What is your take? Do you think the current impact upon brands is overstated? I don't know. So if I've thought about the same thing, I'm a huge Claude lover. Claude is my best friend. I talk to him on my bike now. I mean, you know, I'm he does everything for me. Um and yeah, what did I do? Oh, hair. So I have a shampoo. I I use a shampoo that stops my hair looking too grey. It's not quite a hair dye. Um, I I I stopped short of hair dyes, as you can see, but I do like it if it can make my hair slightly less grey. And so I've got two products, and I took a photo of them in the shower, and I said, which of these is any good? And it told me one of them was good and the other one was shit, which is interesting because it's the exact counter of what I would have said in my experience. So I ignored Claude and carried on with what my shit one is. Uh, but if I knew less and I hadn't experienced them, I would have bought that one. And I've certainly used it a lot for nutrition. I'm big into nutrition these days and not dying. And um, I use I used to use Thorn Nutrition because I pretty much trusted them on everything. I now find that Claude advises me three times out of four that there's a better product than Thorn. So yeah, uh look, the jury's out, but I think it's more and more going to be part of the thing. Uh I wrote a column last week about how Reddit is so, so interesting now. One of the reasons is because it is driving a lot of the AI information at the moment comes from Reddit groups because they're straight, honest discussions of products, and that's what AI loves, right? So I don't know yet. It's moving so much. Boris, I'm loving the modules and the moon case so far. Good. If creating mental availability is 80% of the marketer's job, why are we unable to access category entry point research for the moon case or am I missing something? It's sort of there in the positioning, but again, we're into Erenberg Pass territory. When I say mental availability is 80%, it's it it's in the broader sense, right? Does it come into my mind? So for at least for the purposes of moon, you can take any of that awareness data as being instrumental in it. Yeah. And I would go that way. There is data on on how uh consumers use the the sonides. You could use it that way, but I wouldn't. I would just go with a more broad mental availability awareness model being, you know, do I come to mind generally? Is the question you should be thinking about. Francisca, how would you prioritize brand investment when short-term commercial pressures conflict with long-term brand building? Um, I would just go with the budgeting uh influence of Field and Banet. I would just go with what my model teaches me later when I build my funnel. And I would go with the idea that it isn't brand versus performance. The single best way to make performance marketing work is to have a strong brand and invest in brand. They're not separate entities here, right? But, you know, ultimately, I and I and everyone else believes in what Field and Burnett have discovered because it's based on empirical work and you should believe in it too. And you should use it as empirical data to convince others. Anastasia, do you have any tips on how to use AI to get insights about a brand? Are there any AI tools or prompts we can use to gain brand insights? We'll talk about it extensively in a special module 11 on AI that we'll do at the end of the course. I'm a big fan of it, of doing projected, uh, of doing synthetic research DIY, synthetic research using AI. Let's save it for the end of the course though. We're going to cover it in a lot. It's still moving. Peter, as you showed, Les and Les and Binett. Okay. Les and Binett saw best effects of brand activations with targeting existing buyers of the brand. That makes sense because buyers are closer to buying the brand anyway. They have the mental availability for the brand, and others might even see the brand activation. What kind of evidence is there to prove that one should go even deeper in targeting, e.g., specific segments of buyers? It varies, Pete. It depends on the segments, it depends on the category. Sometimes you can make a very strong case, and even Aaron Bergbass would accept this, that you want to go after a specific segment differently from others. The point that Ehrenberg Bass have made is that often that's been overdone. We've been too obsessed with segments, too interested in partitioning up the market, and that's true too. But it depends on each case. You need to be open to saying, I think there are different segments here that need different treatments, and you need to be open to saying, all right, are they really that different or can we offer them the same thing? I work with a very big food company here in Australia where over the years I've gone, look, at the end of the day, when we're selling potato chips, there are slightly different groups, but we can get them all the same way. And I think that's that's the right way, that's the right way to do it. James Kay, in practice, how do you protect long term brand equity when short term commercial pressures are constantly pushing teams towards tactical decisions? Decisions. Uh, you have a good brand plan, James, and the brand plan has a series of objectives that are built from data. We're gonna do that, and then you're gonna put budget against it, and you're gonna stay with that budgetary investment. Uh, and you're gonna protect your plan because it's for the best interest of the company to make more money that way. And that's that's the narrative we'll go on, especially when we get to setting objectives. Laurie, in brand tracking and survey work, how reliable are panel providers when your target audience is extremely narrow? For example, a small global cohort of senior decision makers. At what point does sample quality break down? And how should marketers adapt their approach in those cases? Look, my my take on panel providers is pretty good. They're professional, that's what they do, right? They test their panels. If they say they've got a panel, I believe it. It's more when they say we can't give you a panel in that area that you've got a problem. So yeah, I would trust them. If you get to a point where a panel company can't do it for you, then I think you're in the position where you have to go off to a synthetics or across to qualitative and trade off at that point. But if a panel company comes to you and says, we've got a panel of marketers who work in IT, um, I I would believe, I would believe in that. Laurie, as AI becomes more embedded in marketing, what parts of brand management do you see being augmented or automated? And which elements remain distinctly human? Well, my take nobody knows for sure. My take on it is you still we still will need brand managers in the age of AI. They're 100 years old and we still need them to manage, to protect, to make the case for brand building, to do the research, to shepherd the plan, to brief the agency. We're still going to need them. We'll probably need less people in the marketing team, I think that's for sure. Um, and I think at the end of the day, the augmented automated stuff you speak of will be the brand planning process. We will launch uh a brand planning tool that as an alumnus you'll have access to at the end of this year, which basically takes synthetic data, builds the brand plan that you're building manually here, and gives you that automated option. I'd still like you to be an expert in brand to understand it, to change it, to second guess it, to tweak it. But for me, I that's how I see this playing out. I see you as a jockey. I see AI as a robotic horse that runs faster than normal horses, but I still want a jockey to sit on top of the horse. That's how I see it playing out. More on the AI tool as we go through the year. Laurie, the rapid rise of brands like Jaco achieving scale in under two years, despite competing with decolds, old premium marks, suggests something beyond just price arbitrage. What do you think is really driving that shift? And does it signal a weakening of traditional brand equity? No, no, no, no, no. It signals what's always happened, Laurie. There will always be entrants, there will always be rapid changes. The rules of marketing aren't changing, the the role of brand isn't changing. It's altering over time, but we're always too keen in marketing. Go, this changes everything. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. We're always going to see these brands that move quick and brands that stay at the top of the mountain. You know, we're we are obsessed with changing the rules and the dynamics. Everything's still, you know, everything's different in the same way that it always was, to summarize. And Laurie says in a B2B category like professional services, where awareness and consideration are saturated, with only a handful of credible providers and sales cycles are long, how should marketing effectiveness be measured when its primary influence is on conversion rather than demand creation? Well, you've answered your question. If if your funnel really shows that, then what it's going to be, marketing effectiveness is showing that and then coming up with the objective and then achieving the objective and driving the business. It's, you know, I don't disagree, but it marketing effectiveness is many different flavors, and that's one of the flavors. Angela, how would we approach diagnosis if we're launching a completely new brand with no existing awareness or associations? What should we focus on? Yeah, I mean, I don't work in new brands uh very much, if at all, um, ever. Uh, I think the smallest brand I ever worked on was 30 million bucks. So I it's a weakness of mine, um, and certainly nothing new. Um, I think what it means for you, Angela, is you focus on on product positioning, targeting segments. And I think after two or three years, if you're successful, if you have a product that's working, I think it's time to then do a bit more brand work and begin to look at it. But for the first two or three years, just concentrate on getting the product out there, albeit in branded form, and then stepping back. Two, three years is a good time to begin to do that. Uh McKenzie, do the same rules apply for startups? Subsequently, when does a new business start to feel the impact of brand equity? Again, two to three years. Uh Nick, hello, Mark. How would you divide marketing responsibilities between HQ and country-based offices? Um, and Nikki says, uh, can I go about how would you balance universal consistency to local conditions? All right. Well, I'll do a couple of follow-ups this week. And one of them is I wrote a nice column about how the long and the short transposes onto global local. And so I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write that up and put it as a LinkedIn link on Monday. Okay. We had a couple of questions about salience earlier, a question about naming rights. I'm gonna link to a Trek Suit site that gives you some long and short data, and I'll do the global local column. Yeah, they're all good things, and this it's a good bit of data there. Orimas, brand strategy assumes competition. What's its role in a monopoly where customers don't choose you, they endure you? A national telco. Uh, yeah, there's a couple of things. First of all, you want to build the brand so that if anyone does come into monopoly later on, you're in a better place. And you've absolutely right, the other reason is you want to you want to drive up pricing and pricing sensitivity by ensuring there's a bit of brand equity there as well. It's it's harder to make a bigger case for it, but those two arguments are pretty strong. Tara done. Module two, the main brand I look after is a holding company with no customers, so no direct revenue. Advice on what to do, including revenue impact in a brand plan. Uh it really depends. I'm trying to work out how uh how what you're doing there, Tara, right? There's a lot, there's a lot of potential reasons. Uh yeah, you wouldn't have revenue in the brand plan, but you look, let's get through the whole brand plan and then we'll see what we can cut out. But yeah, you you your budget is going to be trickier to to answer. You're going to get a fixed allocated amount, I imagine, and then you're going to show what you're going to invest in. But it's hard because I can't, the context is unclear there. Harrison, I'm a graphic designer and I'm trying to reinterpret this framework for the early stages of brand development. Would you can recommend continuing to use diagnosis strategy tactics? Yeah. Or is there an alternative approach? Can this model be effectively scaled up and down? Yeah, yeah, no, it can. You still need to diagnose the market. You may not have much in the form of brand equity at that stage. You still need the strategy questions answered, Harrison, before you do tactics. So the general answer there without being defensive is yes. Sarah O'Brien, in FMCG, when a declining brand has become reliant on price mark packs and tactical activity to compete with stronger brands, how do you turn it around? If the plan is now all about innovation and distribution, how do you convince leadership to reinvest in long-term brand building? Yeah, okay, there's another recommendation. So I wrote an article about this. It's more about getting away from tactics and price promotions and how you sell it upstairs. But I'm gonna put that in as a follow-up as well. The short answer is it depends, but there's a couple of good case studies where they've done just that, Sarah. So let me put that in specifically for you. Florence, I'm working for a group which is several brands under the group. I'm working on a relatively smaller brand in the group where it allows me to have stronger ownership and flex, pretty much a one-man band. But in other words, lack of resources and support from the company. Can you advise on how we decide what the brand should not do when resources are limited? The brand is still in brand awareness building stage. I'd love to hear from you. I look it's very hard to answer that one, Florence. Um, I mean, you can't do a big diagnosis without money, but the rest of this should still be doable and you should still be able to build the brand plan. The thing is, you know, you're not going to have a lot of money for diagnosis, so you have to do it yourself. Everything else should be doable, though. I mean, it really, really should be doable. So you do you do it in your own way, but you still, I don't, I don't think you should not be doing any of this stuff, right? If the brand's big enough to have a brand manager, you it's big enough to have a proper brand plan. Tara, is it possible to get a refund in any of the research if you're not happy with it? No, no, no, no, no. You're stuck with it. Learn by the shitness of some of the research. It's a very big part of your learnings. If those of you haven't dipped in yet, get in there. A lot of it's shit. Uh Dazilla, when setting up a brand health tracker for a brand that is often referred to as the category, would it be better to filter out brand confusion, to measure brand strength index? Reason I ask is because when we do filter out brand confusion, brand strength is coming in at lower while salience is higher. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, the way to do it is to say, um, do I would measure it still as you do, and then I'd have a second question that pulls out whether they're referring to the category or whether they're referring to the brand. And then you've got both measures, is the best way to do it. Taha, from an e-commerce perspective, when we look at diagnosing performance, it's clear that that with how customer experiences evolve, brands need strong insight to build positive correlation between awareness, perception, capability, positioning. Have you come across similar situations before? If so, what are the key areas of research or analysis you would focus on from an e-commerce standpoint to better understand and improve performance? Oh, look, I think the path we're on is pretty good, Tat. Um, stay with it. You'll see when we get to objectives, we're gonna look at it in a lot of detail. And and the funnel for you is gonna be very, very useful. Anastasia, does a funnel matter in a modern world? Yes, it does. We've recently done a full funnel Amazon activation. Yeah, yeah. I went to I would Amazon got me to do their kickoff in Sydney, and it was kind of everyone's going to oh, funnels don't matter anymore. And here's Amazon going full funnel, where we had brand equity content on Prime Video, product banners at Amazon, social media ads in Meta, and other assets across awareness, consideration, and purchase. We revealed that there were more than a hundred ways we were how we converted a consumer into a purchase. It seems it's not possible to create one detailed purchase purchase funnel. What do you think? No, no, that's not true. So you're mixing up there the tactics with what the funnel is. The funnel has got nothing to do initially with tactics, and we will cover it in the objectives module. The funnel is a photograph of the marker at any one moment in time with where they are. Yeah. Well, how proximate they are to purchase. That's it. You can then assign tools and everything else, but you still need the funnel to set those objectives of what you need to do. You can use funnels for tactics and execution as Amazon do, but it's a different thing. So don't worry, by the time we do objectives, you'll be a funnel believer. Trust me. Mathieu! Bonjour, Marc. Bonjour, Mathieu. Do you have any specific clues to help us distinguish between brand and product? When the brand is carried by a single product. In the moon case, should we try to distinguish what is carried by Moon as a brand and focus on that? Or include our brand thinking whatever is carried by our product. Inversely, is any association carried by the product something the brand must carry as well? Okay, okay, okay. I can answer this one. Uh, tout de suite, Mathieu. Um, it's all the same. Don't strip them out. Don't try and look at it from this rational attributes from the product and the symbolic associations from the brand. Here's what it is it's a big mess. Yeah. So what you want to do is keep it like that, as a gestalt, and and just keep looking at it as being, I don't know whether this is product or brand or this or that, or a bit of both. It's both. Keep it that way. Don't try and separate. Oh, that's brand, that's product. That way lies madness. Trust me, it's all together. Measure attributes, measure associations, measure them together. There's no, they're intractable, trust me. Shannon, I'm noticing a growing trend in my organization where brand and performance are being blended into a single hybrid approach. Yeah, almost like the distinction doesn't matter. The result is that neither discipline is being given the focus it needs to be truly effective. Are you seeing this across the industry? It feels like an internal compromise designed to satisfy multiple stakeholders, but it's ultimately undermining both efficient performance and long-term brand building. Yeah, no, there's a bit of that. There's a lot of keeping it separate too much. There's a lot, as you say, of kind of you know, branded performance, which is a you know a dog with two heads. The reality is, you know, they are separate things. I really believe in the long and the short of it. Long and short, uh, they have to work together, but long is more than just long. Yeah, it's about brand, it's about mass, it's about emotion, it's about top of funnel. And performance, which is equally important, is about target segments, it's about activation, it's about product, it's more rational, it's more shorter ROI. They're both essential, but but they aren't the same. And you're absolutely right. We want them to work together, but we don't want them turning into this, you know, this camel. Meg, can you let me know if we can swap out a research agency if we buy one method, then decide later we want to change it to something else. I'd like to understand more about what the simulation involves. Yeah, so when we get to the simulation, it gets a lot simpler. I'm I want you to build a brand plan in a more complex way. When we get to the simulation, we'll make it a lot more simple and you'll just run the years one at a time. Don't worry about that, we'll get to it. Just build a good brand plan, as good as you can, and then we'll have fun getting into the simulation and playing it a lot faster. Lydia, what would be the best ways to find brand loyalists for the diagnostic stage research? Uh, look, there's no one method. You can dig around in your, if you've got any existing survey data, you can reach back out to them. You can talk to your local retailers uh or or or or you know B2B offices. They normally literally have the names. You can look at social media, because the the loyalists are always on there as well. They're pr they should be pretty easy to find, but I can't give you a prescriptive route to do it. Hi Mark, using the Donna Karan example you mentioned, how should brand managers navigate situations where a founder's identity, values, and lifestage have changed since the brand was created? Is brand consistency best protected by staying close to the founder's worldview? No. Or can aligning with the founder's later evolution distort the brand's meaning? The latter point, Leandra. Now there's no general rule here, but my point with with Donna in mind was I I valued Donna's, well, first of all, you respect Donna as a walking, living god, of course. But what you really value from Donna is her recollections of how it was done, what made it successful, what were the key precepts, how she approached all these things. And 40 years later, what we don't want is Donna saying, I want to design this, right? It's tricky, but and that may work, but she's probably well, she is a billionaire now, you know what I mean? So rather than an up-and-coming girl from from you know New Jersey. Um so for me, it's uh it's about using them and respecting them always. That you know, they're they're incredibly important, but asking them to talk about the foundation of the brand more than what they want to do right now, that's not always, but often the right way. Tricky. Alexia, loving the course. My question is: how do you determine whether a brand's problem is salience, positioning, or product competitiveness, and which of these has the biggest impact on growth? We'll get there with the funnel, Alexia. You'll find out where the issues are. Wait for a couple more weeks. Alexia, I'm also starting on the moon case, and I'm wondering what's the most important question you'd want our research to answer before setting brand strategy. Look at the class on market research, on diagnosis, and apply the class is good advice. Millie, I've understood that the outcomes differ between long and short-term strategies. However, I find it challenging to apply this understanding to brand plans. Is it correct to understand that long-term strategies are used for objectives like awareness, while short-term strategies are used for objectives like sales? Yet generally, they're all going to be annual objectives, Millie. Some of them are going to go top of funnel, some of them are going to go bottom of funnel, and they're going to have benchmarks. We'll get to this in a couple of weeks. When awareness is the objective, what is the time frame to calculate it the estimated revenue? My advice is always do it within a financial year. That's the beat of the company. Three, in a brand plan, I consider the budget to be for the fiscal year and the business impact to be seen in the years following. In this case, how can it be estimated? That may be true, but we're only going to account for the financial year merely. You'll see how we do it later in the course. We're always going to focus on the next financial year in terms of setting goals, objectives, and working out budgets. And then there'll be other years to follow, but we're going to account for that year, as you'll see. Eugene, I've recently started a new role managing a portfolio of four brands. And due to resource pressures, I've been thrown in at the deep end. While balancing day-to-day delivery, I'm trying to step back and focus on diagnosis and strategy. Good. Any advice on how to realistically balance these priorities early in my role while still influencing positive change within the team? Yeah, look, there's the trick, I think, Eugene, as I'm sure you're working out, is you've got to manage the current tactical hoo-ha, but don't neglect that longer-term plan for next year. Diagnosis isn't a full-time job, get it done. Building your strategy towards the end of the year, get it done. And then getting into the tactical stuff. So this is this year, which you're managing and it's on fire. Next year comes in and we're a bit more clear on what we need to do. You've got to do both. Angela, I work as a brand strategist for luxury real estate agencies where the brand's value proposition is technically tied less to product and more to perceived quality of service. Since the agency sells properties but doesn't produce them directly, at the same time, many of the strongest brand associations are linked to the properties themselves. How would I approach measuring brand equity? Would it make sense to focus on traditional brand strength when differentiation is driven primarily by reputation? No, no, look, I you don't need product service, it doesn't matter, Angela. And absolutely, Keller's report cards are interesting, but you want the brand perceptions of the real estate agencies. Whether they're tangible or not, it doesn't matter, right? It's about doing the qualitative work, doing the, you know, doing the assessment and plugging them in and then working out how how the brand is perceived versus competitors. Don't worry about it. It's the same, it's absolutely the same. Yeah, the attributes will change, but it's still very, very, very relevant. Sarah, I work in a niche industry, office design and fit out in Ireland. We target professional services and tech firms with pharma and logistics as secondary segments. Um in the office medium sector who have a headcount of 50 to 300 employees. Okay. As you can imagine, with this type of offering, the sales cycle is long and there are multiple stakeholders. We network a lot with influencers who have a strong traditional business development approach. Short-term campaigns, activations focus on lead nurture and our value ads, never offers or discounted. Due to the nature of our offering, high involvement, high consideration, and the buying environment, often pitching alongside others, lead generation is not something we drive through marketing. The challenge I have is convincing internal stakeholders of the need to invest in long-term brand building. Any suggestions? Yeah, and we've talked about it a bit. I think you need your funnel, Sarah, because what's happening is they're all down the bottom of the funnel looking at the where the business is. What they're missing is the bit at the top that generates that through leads. So let's build a proper funnel for you when we get to objectives, and you'll see that you're able to show that to them and go, look, you're doing this and then it turns into that. If we do that, this turns into that. And there's very good ways to do that. Let's focus on that for you. It will work. Orimas, uh, brand image works for things people enjoy buying. Okay. How does it work for a category people actively avoid thinking about? Telcos can be romantic, delivering intimacy. But do could to consumers there a grudge? Can an ultimate utility own emotional territory? Maybe not, Orimas, but it doesn't matter, right? At the end of the day, brand image doesn't have to be romantic, it doesn't have to be emotional much. It can be slow, it can be fast, it could be boring, it could be competitive, it could be gets the job done. My point again, similar to the previous question, is just go with it, man. Just find out what the associations are. You'll find there's an image that you can work with. And Orima, again, borderless distributors like Starlink ignore politics, culture, brand. They just need to work. How does a heritage national operator defend against that? Do local roots and heritage mean anything? You tell me, do the research, compare the brands, look at the correlations, use the instrument. You tell me. I don't know. But the data knows a hundred years of heritage and deep cultural roots in a category that's obsessed with speed, innovation, progress. Is that an asset or an anchor? Can heritage become a liability? You tell me, Oliver. You've got to do the research. You've got to say the more this segment um knows that we're old and thinks that we have heritage, does it increase or decrease preference? You tell me. Senny, morning Mark. I hope you've settled back in after Canada. Oh shit, Canada was 10 days ago. I'm about to fly to Italy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My question this week is about the diagnosis. For brands that have changed owners and been renamed, but the commodity is the same. Do you research the old brand? No, no, no. If you're presenting a new brand, Sani, it's got to be the new brand. The old brand's gone, right? Is it whatever you're presenting to consumers? And we're going to end with Roccio. Hey Roccio. Hey, Mark, is it possible to conduct focus groups on your own, or is it better to have conducted them by a company? Oh, that's a big one. As for projective research, is it a technique that's used on its own or is it done within a focus group? So I get in trouble about this. What I really like it when you run your own focus groups. Uh and you do them in a more casual saying. And everyone who works in market research gets really pissed off at me, but I think you can run your own group. As long as you can record it, I think it's useful. Um, so yeah, in theory, I mean professionals bring a lot, not least a good facility and videos and everything, but you can do it yourself as well. It's just a conversation. Let's not over-eg this, right? And yeah, projective can be done online, but it's also done in groups sometimes as a really good projective technique to get the group talking. So that's it's not a bad idea to include that as part of the session. Right, brilliant questions. I have I've done it under the hour. Um, so uh this uh this coming week, we're gonna head into positioning and then we're gonna go into codes. Differentiation, distinctiveness. Huge sessions for you guys. So take your time and go through them. Keep doing now that that 30-minute application into Moon, right? You should do your targeting this week. You can keep buying research throughout the process, and then next week do positioning in the week after pick codes. You can't go wrong, you're allowed to make mistakes. That's the whole point of Moon. And I'll see you next week for positioning in class. I've got a bunch of follow-ups. So on Monday, check in on LinkedIn and you'll see there's a bunch of stuff there too. Have a lovely weekend.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Bye.