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Ah, hello, Brand Manager. How are you? Good to see you. It is I, your virtual marketing professor. And this is our first QA session. I apologize. Normally it's a little bit better produced. I'm in Toronto, Canada, today, and therefore in a hotel room. Normally I'd be in a studio and it's a little bit better, as you'll see next time. But we got loads of interesting questions. It's our first QA. Let me just quickly remind you how this all works. So at any point in modules one and two, you can uh jump onto the QA tile, tap in a question, and then I pick them up on a Friday, normally a Friday morning in Australia, answer the questions, and then the tile where you've put your questions becomes the tile where we have the answers. I answer everyone's questions. Try and keep the questions tight, because I'll read them out as you'll see in a minute. Try and make them about the topics of one and two and the content. You don't have to, but you know, it's normally good. If there's anything else that's that that's troubling you, throw it in. Um I try and get the sessions down to about an hour. For that reason, we've split you. You're quite a large group, so we've split you into two cohorts. If you look up there on the website, you'll see that you're uh cohort A. So we've just arbitrarily split the class in half, just for the QA's to make uh the questions basically an hour long or less, ideally. And you can watch them either in video format um uh or in audio format, depending on what you want. I'm actually going to take my specs off because I don't need them uh fortunately, um, because I'm I'm short-sighted. Um and that's it. So um uh let's get into the questions. I'll peel through them pretty fast. If if it's the same question a couple of times, which normally happens, I'll just refer you back to the earlier question. Um let's get on with it. Uh Joss, hey Jos, from an agency perspective, one of the biggest challenges is moving clients away from vanity metrics like reach and impressions and towards more meaningful discussion about brand equity. Without access to internal data, what would be your quick and dirty approach to estimating brand equity from the outside? And what would you focus on to make that credible at a senior or board level? Yeah, I mean, I mean, vanity metrics, yeah, I mean, more superficial comms metrics, they may play a role. As we said in the module, uh, module one, that there's really two parts to a brand, yeah. There's this cognitive part, which is about do you know the brand exists? Does it come to mind? Are you aware of it? Yeah. Um, that's got to be in there. And then the second thing is, and then, you know, how do you perceive that brand? Yeah, what does it stand for? So you know it exists. This the follow-up question is, um, and in your mind, uh, you know, what what what does it represent to you? They're the two questions, yeah. Um, as to how you'd get that data, I mean, obviously, we'll get to it in module three with diagnosis. Um, increasingly the answer is cliched, but it's AI. I'm I'm a big fan of Claude. You you might have a different preference, but it's now possible to use synthetic research. Um, you can hire a big player like Evi Denza who do incredibly accurate synthetic research. And all that means is essentially using AI to do research on consumers without using consumers. We can very accurately now uh essentially do research without consumers. Very accurately. Even Claude, I have to say, is pretty good. It's not as good as the professional companies, but if you rather than asking Claude, you know, how strong is such and such brand, you actually prompt it with do some synthetic research on the following target market and give me a salient score and the top five brand associations, it will it will do it for you. And and I have to say, having done that kind of thing, it's pretty impressive. So, as ever, if you know what you're doing as you do in because you're doing the course, using AI then to feed that would be a you know a very credible approach. You just have to declare it as being synthetic research, and you know, you you therefore may want to have it checked with with later on with real data. But I'd say always, what we're saying is a a measure of salience and then a measure of associations is is ultimately what you want to throw in there. There are other proxy measures, we talked about them, you know, whether you'd pay more for the brand and so on, but they're the two big ones. Froca, regarding brand positioning, do you really define a specific brand position for each target group? Or is the general brand positioning only adapted to the respective target group? So the overall perception in mass market remains consistent. And shouldn't we try to maintain the positioning for a longer period rather than adjusting it every year? Yeah, yeah, all good questions, Froca. Um, I'm not gonna answer any of them because we have a huge module on brand positioning where we will get into this. And I'm not being lazy, I don't want to I can give you a quick on the hip answer, but it it won't be clear enough. So, what I want to do is just hold excellent questions. They will all be answered during the positioning session. Jade, how would you convince senior leadership to reduce reliance on promotions in favor of building long-term brand equity given the trade-off between short-term sales and long-term brand growth? Well, there's a couple of things here, Jade. Um, I've written an article which I haven't put in the readings this week because it will come up later. Um, and if you don't mind, I'd suggest you just read my article and I'll I'll spell out the title of the article. So if you Google search IMG F-U-C-K, uh, that specific combination of words, you'll pull an article up from me that's an acronym, uh, which stands for exactly your point, reducing promotions, and a few case studies from me. It's a marketing week article. Have a look at that. That's that's a you know, a long-drawn-out article about how to do exactly that. Um the the short summary of what that column says is you've got to understand just how bad promotions are, both for the brand and the business. And and and it really takes an enormous toll on a company. So have a look at that article. That's the that's the right one. Thibaut. In your first module, you mentioned that brands risk becoming commodities, especially when they stop investing in them. However, in some cases, brands become so dominant their name is used as the generic name, like BIC or Sopala. Would you consider this form of commoditization a success or a risk? No, no, it's a risk, Thibaut, and it's it's a very sort of paradoxical point. You build a brand so strongly, like Hoover or Bick or Jurex or Sellertape or Google, and it can become a commodity name. I know it did happen to Google, and Google spent, and it is a risk because if you say, Oh, I've Googled them, but you're not necessarily saying you're going to use the Google search engine. It there's a risk that you do still become a commodity. Um, and I know in the case of Google, when that was happening, they did spend a bit of money back in the day, more than 10 years ago now, trying to make it clear that Googling wasn't a verb, it was a uh whatever the word is, you know, noun or pronoun. My grammar's terrible. Um, so yeah, it it is a I wouldn't focus on it too much, Tebot. It's a very rare event, but if it happens to your brand, you do want to actually go back to differentiation. Mafalda, how do I quantify my percentage share of voice? Well, you work out all the brands in the category. Um, you define the category first, work out all the brands, and then get your your media agency or again artificial intelligence increasingly to estimate what they're all spending. That gives you the total percentage, and then you work out what your percent of that is based on what your budget spend is. Um, these days, again, I'm sorry to use AI so much so early, but synthetic data can very quickly give you excess share of voice estimates that are surprisingly accurate. Mitchell, can I do awareness salience for different target markets or audiences? Or does it need to be done for one key audience? No, you can do it, you can do that kind of work on whoever you want. The standard answer is whoever you're targeting, and we're going to cover targeting in in a couple of weeks. Whoever you're targeting, that is who you want to do the research on. And if you're targeting a specific segment, that's who you do the research on. If you're targeting the mass market, that's who you do the research on. So you can do it on anyone, and you should do it on whoever is the target. Michaela, how can I persuade my organization to shift focus from treating meta metrics as a silver bullet and instead prioritize building and measuring brand equity while also making a credible case for increased budget to invest in broader, higher impact advertising and relationship-driven strategies? And from an internal perspective, what practical approaches can I use to demonstrate the value of brand equity to senior uh stakeholders? Our budget is limited, research is expensive, and everything needs to be justified with a number, hence the silver bullet. Yeah, look, uh, there's a lot going on in that question, right? I mean, there's really two things. Don't move away from meta-metrics. You need them when it comes to assessing communications, but they're a tactical measure, is the point. And when we get onto brand strategy, one of the implications of brand strategy is we we are gonna be measuring at the strategic level, which means we're not gonna be looking at comms at all. We're gonna be looking at how does the consumer perceive the brand. So we're gonna get onto that measurement in module three in a lot of detail. Um, to demonstrate brand equity, I think, you know, again, it it's a it's a very, very uh customized argument. And what I mean by that is, and we talk about it right at the end of module two, you've really got to target your audience for justifications for brand equity. When you're talking to the head of HR, it's very different when you're talking to the sales director or to the marketing team. You know, and and I uh what my advice would be, Michaela, and I'm sorry to be so so specific, is I wouldn't say there's a general list of arguments. I would say we we cover all of them at the end of module two, but I wouldn't, you know, just unfurl them all. I would be more nuanced and targeted, and I'd I'd step back, as we said at the end of module two, and I'd say, Who am I talking to? What do they care about? Now let me show them how building a stronger brand will help with that mission. I think that's that's the best answer. There isn't one powerful list of things. It depends on who you're talking to. I think when you get to the end of module two, you'll see that argument. Uh, Alexandra, is there a tipping point where it pays off to track brand awareness or salience, i.e., first day of launch, 80% distribution, any other metric that will support justification of the spend? Um, yeah, look, I would say when to do it. I I always like to say to, particularly to founders, once you've reached a point of kind of profitability and the brand is it can be too early to do it in the first year or two because you the brand is still finding its feet. I think around about year three to five, when you've reached profitability and you have some loyal customers, is usually the time where that tracking process should begin. Before then, the brand is still very mutable. And you say, how does the 95-5 rule apply to impulse categories? Um, yeah, it it applies relative. I mean, it's a you know, it's it's more of a metaphor than an actual rule, but it applies just as well, right? You know, an in an impulse product like food, it's just the moments are shorter, but there's still 5% of people going, you know what, I need some soup. So I think it still applies, and and the principles and where it takes you certainly apply as well. Naomi, what is the best way to represent these terms and concepts to our business peers and organizational leadership, specifically at a company that isn't public and would be involved in mostly B2B interactions? Again, I think it's great to adjust the language based on where you are. I worked with a very smart guy called Justin Bissini many years ago. And Justin was working at Deutsche Bank as I think the head of brand, and he made the point that if he uses the B word, all the shutters come down and the bankers don't want to listen to him. And so he ended up saying, look, I'll use whatever words they would use, reputation, you know, uh, for example. Uh so again, I I'm not trying to be elusive, but I think there isn't, I'm not, I'm not going to give you the answer, Naomi. My answer is be more camouflage than that. Use the terminology that your target is using. Um, and yeah, beware words like brand and salience because you can lose your audience very quickly. Souraj. When you were talking about brands and commodities, I keep thinking how Aldi fits this. When Aldi creates a similarly branded version of a well-known brand, are they commoditizing their well-known brand? No, no, it's a good question, Suraj. The exception in all of this is retailers. So retailers um uh can discount away because they they're selling other people's products. And when they're doing private labels, there's a special kind of condition for retailers where they can discount and it doesn't hurt their brand. So they are the exception to the rule, and it's it's good that you bring them up. Vanessa, with the 95-5 rule, do you believe there are instances or times of year that this rule would go out the window? For example, leading up to New Year's Eve, the percentage of the target audience actively considering buying champagne would be more than 5%. Maybe, I've never thought about it. It's a very interesting point. Um, I suspect what happens is the the definition of the market will probably get a little bit tighter, you know? Um but I don't know. It's a lot, it's a it's a very interesting thought. I mean the 95.5 rule is is a more of a general principle than an actual marketing fact. Very helpful as we saw in the module to set things up. Um so I uh the the short answer is I don't know. It's a very interesting question. Rebecca, when used in images and copy, does AI enhance or erode brand equity? And under what conditions? What effect does AI generated content have on a brand's perception and value? Look, it's a very good question. It really depends on the brand. If you're a high-tech, uh human, future-focused brand, then you should use AI and it's entirely consistent. If you're an old-fashioned 19th-century traditional brand, you shouldn't go anywhere near it. And I think my answer, which is different from Frakas, but thanks for putting your answer in, is with brands, it depends, it depends. There's no such thing as brands in general, yeah? There's a specific brand and a specific answer for that brand. And I know that's annoying, but it's an important disciplinary point. Yeah. There isn't, you know, there's no such thing as brand small b, plural s. There's just capital B, no S. So it depends on the brand. Jordan, in module one, you talked about the why of branding and called out reduced search costs. But that left out the key point of price, especially in a volatile economic environment. We know that pricing plays an ever important role. Where a consumer once might have picked a brand of toilet paper they loved, now they're choosing the most cost-effective. How can we work this into our greater understanding of the role of brand? How can we use the power of brand to combat price sensitivity without falling into the trap of re-commodification? It's a good question. I I think we do cover it, and it'll come up a lot more in the program. Um, the reality is what you're describing is one of the functions of brand equity. Yeah? That strong brands are able to protect their perception of value. And as we talked about in the module as well, that makes them, you know, uh, it's one of the biggest advantages, is they justify that price premium. Now, your point is in a tight economy, some customers trade down from some brands. It's true. But the stronger the brand, the less likely they are to do that. So your question is great, but yeah, the the question is not, you know, is is kind of uh inherent here. You you you create a strong brand, and then with pricing research, one of the ways you can assess that strength is that consumers perceive you to be worth more and they will pay more if you as a marketer are prepared to maintain or increase price. Ebba, Buffett's quote is basically saying if your brand is strong enough, you can raise prices, and customers accept it. No explanation needed. Apple does this all the time. If you need to justify it, your brand isn't as strong as you think. But today we're seeing two things happen. Some brands blame inflation and raise prices, while others go out of their way to explain why prices are going up. Which got me thinking, does explaining a price increase help your brand, or does it quietly reveal that you don't actually have real pricing power? Because a really strong brand like Omez or Apple never needs to explain. And there's a second problem. If you get into the habit of always giving customers a reason, do you end up training them to expect one? No, no, no, I love your thinking, Ebba, but you're wrong. Um, the research on this is very clear. When you when you change a price, increase or decrease, it always makes sense to manage the perceptions of that by communicating to consumers. And the reason that that that's so important, there's actually a science, but there's a way of doing this that I that I've written about before as well. I talk about Pret and Ranger doing it really, really well and letting their coffee club members know that the price, you know, it's a textbook example. They told them in advance the price was going up. They told them how much it was going up, they told them why it was going up, and finally they reminded them still what great value the product was. And when you do that, you take all the anger out of the price increase. And and the other great lesson, by the way, of price increases is call it a price increase. Don't call it a new opportunity to spend more on the brand. You know, Netflix do this very badly, and Predomanger do it very well. Be very clear and transparent. And when you do that, it takes the heat out of a price increase. So it it is, and there's research on this, it is the right thing to do. How you manage and communicate about price is just as important as the price itself. Pauline, the brand planning framework runs diagnostic strategy tactics. But when you manage multiple brands within the same category, shouldn't the process start one level up with a category diagnostic? That way we can ensure each brand is not just growing its slice of the pie, but collectively growing the category. How do you adapt the framework for portfolio management to maximize incrementally and minimize cannibalization? Oh, it's a big question. Yeah, look, you can look at the category. Um we're gonna get in about module aid to brand architecture and portfolio management in great detail, Pauline. But the short answer is there's two things there. When you have multiple brands, sometimes it's cannibalization, and sometimes you're deliberately doubling up and targeting the same consumer to give them the illusion of choice, but making sure you win in that business. You know, when I worked for Moat Hennessy, we had Verve Clico, we had Moa Teschandon, we had Don Perignon, we had Krug, and to some degree they were all targeting the same consumers. And that was good because they were choosing between one of the different four brands and we always kept them within. So it wasn't even cannibalization in some cases. But anyway, I take your question. Um and the short answer is yeah, if you're going to have a portfolio approach where the brands go after different parts of the market or different occasions, then it does make sense to look at the overall category. We'll talk about it a lot more when we get to brand architecture. For now, I'm just assuming one brand. You'll see it play out when we get to architecture, which is a huge topic for us. Joe, your explanation of diagnosis strategy tactics being equally important makes a lot of sense, but also made me realize I spend most of my time in tactics. Once a great brand plan has been built, would you expect a marketer to spend more of their time and resources on tactics? Yeah, that's fair. Look, I think what I'm trying to say is they're all equally important. I don't think they all cost you the same amount of money or suck up, you know, the equal amounts of your time. My bigger concern on all of this, Joe, is you do a diagnosis and you do strategy before you do tactics. I then take the point that most of the years is spent executing tactics, you know, that makes sense. But just make sure they're in the right sequence and they explicitly happen, would be my point. Maxim, how should a brand manager actually balance the Ehrenberg Bass salience obsession with more traditional approaches to brand management? Or is it a false choice? It's a big question. Um I I try and do this. I I really love the Ehrenberg Bass focus and work on salience. I think it's hugely important work. Uh, the most important new work in branding in a lifetime. But I'm always aware that I think Ehrenberg Bass overcooks their pancakes a little bit. They're always selling one concept at the expense of another. And as you'll see as we go through the course, as much as I really, really, really, really appreciate salience and think it's crucial. And the most important thing, I don't think we have to completely remove uh brand associations, brand image from the quest. Now, how I do that will be something you'll get from the course. I I think that to your point, you can put these two things together and you should put them together. And I'll show you how as we go through the program. But in a nutshell, at this stage, yes to brand salience, if that's the way you want to go. I think it is the best measure of awareness of the cognitive presence of the brand, but it isn't everything. I still think image plays a role. So when we get to positioning, we're going to talk about distinctiveness, but we're also going to still talk about differentiation. I believe you can be greedy and you can have both. Mafalda, would you mind explaining the reduced search costs within the Y of branding a bit more? I understand it's related to brand awareness, but don't really understand why. Yeah, so one of the benefits of a brand is it saves me time. Yeah? So I had to get a coffee this morning. I'm in uh Canada. And rather than going on the internet to see, you know, what are the Canadian brands of coffee and which cafes are there, and everything, I walked down the street and I found Tim Hortons. And I know very little about Canadian brands, but what I know about Canadian brands is Tim Hortons is kind of like the breakfast junk food staple of Canada. And so I didn't have to check, do they have coffee? You know, I knew that already. It saved me having to look around to Google search and you know who has good coffee. I assume Tim Hortons would have good coffee, it'd save me time. That's that's what we mean by brands reducing search costs. You know, you'd spend a hundred hours in a supermarket if you didn't have brand names guiding you and helping you make the decision. And Alex says, and I'm curious, would also like to ensure I understood it correctly. I believe reduced search costs relates to how brands serve consumers as a heuristic. That's it. That's all it is. We're saving customers time, and and time is a very important commodity. Katrina, many products and services build brand meaning through frequent use and visible experience. However, others derive value primarily from reassurance, where the brand is most appreciated when it doesn't need to be experienced directly. How should we think about brand meaning in those contexts? Yeah, I think there's two things there. If you think about that latter case of reassurance, brand meaning is working um as a reassurance, first of all, and then it's being reaffirmed should we ever need a breakdown service or home insurance to come into play. So I think meaning is working in exactly the same way. I I think your point is it's it's it's more about a um it's something we hopefully don't need to directly experience, but there's still meaning in that. Yeah. Nina, does brand equity apply to a certification label or mark? Going back to the start of the module, a certification label is in fact a literal mark of assurance, vegan sustainability. Where does the equity flow from the mark, assuming it's credible and recognizable, when it's applied to the product? Is it adding brand value to the products that then carry it to society? Look, it can do. It wouldn't be seen directly as a brand, as we use the term in the course. Um it's a certificational symbol. Uh uh it can absolutely confer meaning, it can influence purchase, but because it's an organizational stamp, it's a different kind of thing. That's where it sits. But I wouldn't have it as a uh as directly as a brand as we call them here. Ted Fraser. Hi, Mark. Good to be back. Quick question related to objective setting. When setting marketing objectives, while custom funnels are preferred for mapping the customer journey, they don't always clearly pinpoint where performance problems exist. Can you use a generic funnel, unprompted awareness, of those would then consider, prefer, as a diagnostic tool first to identify the stage in your focus and then apply those findings? Yeah, yeah, you could, you could. So Ted is a former graduate of the Mini MBA marketing. He's asking me a mini MBA marketing question, and the answer is you could do that, Ted. It would make perfect sense. Everyone else is now trying to work out what Ted is on about. We'll get to it when we do the objectives part of this course. And Ted, we'll talk a lot more in a more advanced way about funnels and how you find out which stage to focus on, but not yet. Kevin Webb, can you touch briefly on the concept of salience in the context of B2B? While it's complexities of longer buying cycles, multiple decision makers, buyer groups, does salience become more relevant or less relevant? Or is its importance unchanged? Yeah, unchanged, Kevin. There's some very good research that says basically it works just the same. A lot of B2B marketers go, you know, ah, that's for like buying toilet paper and soda. It doesn't work that way in B2B. It absolutely works that way. If you look at the data from the B2B Marketing Institute, somewhere around 70% to 80% of the. So let's say I'm getting corporate insurance for my company. The brand that I thought of first, that came to mind first, before I even engage the sales force and I do a review and all that stuff, is the one that I will end up buying at the end of the buying journey in B2B. So salience is just as important. What happens is B2B customers rationalize their decision. Yeah. Um, much better than B2C consumers, but that rationalization hides the fact that salience has tilted the wheel towards certain brands. Lauren, I'm a brand manager with a portfolio of three brands. Lucky woman, same commodity, different brands. How should the organization approach employer branding when we have multiple brands with different positions as well as non-brand functions like private label? Ahaha. I'll give you a short answer and then I'm going to tell you to go on to hang on a few weeks till we do brand. This is a brand architecture question. You may not realize it yet, but you soon will. It's about how you structure the whole thing, yeah? And it will depend on how those brands are structured in terms of what the correct answer is. But generally, most companies tend to play the corporate brand in their HR. Um and they go up to the top. You don't have to. But unless you're a house of brands, and we'll get to that term in a couple of weeks, it makes sense to play the corporate brand. But let's hold on, let's do brand architecture, and it's all then going to make a lot more sense. Valdemar. In module one, we see that a brand is essentially a shorthand that adds meaning to a product. For the last few years, I've been using 3D and recently AI to render that shorthand for private labels. In a mobile first word, a six-inch screen render is often the only point of perception. If we can perfectly mimic the premium visual codes of legacy leaders and our sales are consistently growing, does it prove that branding is becoming purely a battle of perception on a screen? Or is there something in the meaning of a brand that a perfect digital asset simply cannot replicate? Well, again, it depends, Valdemar. It's true that at the weaker level, you can digitally copy and replicate and maybe compete with brands. But ultimately, the strongest brands, yeah, are certainly more than just a digital asset. They do stand for things, they do mean things, and consumers perceive them to be different. It comes down to the amount of brand equity. If you look, for example, I mean, what's a good example? Heinz Ketchup is a great example. Man, you can make private equity uh private label copycats of kind of Heinz Ketchup. Many retailers have. You can put them right next to Heinz Ketchup, you can price them at a third of Heinz Ketchup's um price. And yeah, ketchup, you know, Heinz's domination of that ketchup curry runs between 75 and 85% in most countries. So, yeah, if there's strong brand equity, digital replication is still not going to touch on the brand. If Hassan, how do you build a proper brand for a bank where the brand is not a single product, but a portfolio of services delivered across different moments and channels? Most examples in brand management are products. So I'd really value an example from banking, especially how to manage the master brand versus individual retail services. I'm from Iraq, by the way, and the banking system there is a little outdated. Okay. Um, good to have you. Um we you may be our first Iraqi, I'm not sure. We'll have to check, Hassan. Um, we'll give you a lot more examples, and there will be service-based examples, fear not. I I'm gonna be very um brutal with all of you on this. The principles of brand management aren't gonna change from product to service. They're not gonna change from B2B to B to C. I mean, they do in tactical execution, but every brand is different there. And I'm not being lazy when I say that. I really don't like the idea that we have some kind of different system or beliefs for sit for services versus products. And I don't accept that B2B has different principles in brand management either. It's the same. Now, it's always different because all the brands are different. So Hassan, I really think you don't need to worry about it. If if if you want an example, we'll talk about Westpac, an Australian bank in a couple of weeks. But you know, uh intangible services still have exactly the same process. And we will cover many examples. And Hassan again. In Module One, you mentioned that sales promotions are one of the weakest ways to drive growth because they mainly create short-term effects. Yeah, that's that's just the start of it. I mean, most of the sales they generate are just sales you would have got anyway, but you're getting them at a much lower price. That's the big problem. Anyway, you carry on. In banking, would card cashback and merchant discounts fall into the same category? And if a bank does not yet have the infrastructure for a proper always-on loyalty program, is it still strategically sound to run limited seasonal cashback campaigns such as Eid or Summer Offers? Or does that risk training customers to respond to promotions? Yeah, I think that's true, Hassan. I mean, I think the zero percent credit card game is great for recruiting customers until you then want, you know, to actually make more money out of them and they move on to another 0% credit card. I think it's less damaging than a 30% free. Um, but yeah, I think the short answer is there are smarter ways to build brands and promote products and attract customers that don't involve paying for it. There was a great quote from the Starbucks CEO, Nickel, recently. He got rid of a lot of these promotions and cashback offers at Starbucks, and he said, well, you know, we're gonna win our customers by reminding them why they love us, not by bribing them. Yeah, and I think that's the right mentality, I have to say. Wren, in the planning document, you listed annualized value for each tactic. It seems that the assumption is that money invested for the tactics must must be viewed relative to incremental growth. Marketing tactics play a large role in reducing attrition and maintaining market share. Would you suggest that we only compare tactical investments to incremental revenue, or is there a place for showing the executive board the value if a tactic is not implemented? Yeah, it's a great point, Red. That we will be able to do that later. So, what you're missing at the moment is in that brand planning document, if you, for example, I've worked on clients where we expected a famous case in surgery where an American competitor came into Australia and we projected that we would lose 50% of our sales for a product because this guy was going to come in and take them. Once I take that out of the budget and I go, next year our organic figure is down $20 million because of this entrance. I can then show with my tactics, but if I do this, this, and this, I will win it back. And that's the simplest way to show that defensive uh value of a tactic. Take it out, show what will happen if we don't do it, and then put it back in again. We'll get to it. We will get to it. Yasmin, I'm loving all the content. I would love your advice on where to start when working on a brand that doesn't exist, that is yet to properly launch, and any advice or resources that you'd point to. Look, the stay with me on the course, Jasmine. I'm very keen that you just learn about the whole brand management game, and then we can talk at the end of the course for more resources on this. My advice for the for the for the launching bit one very solid piece of advice. Just create one brand. Don't be tempted to create four or five brands and a portfolio from the start. One brand will do it for the first five years. And then the second thing is let it find its place. It's kind of like having kids. You know, when you have kids, you think they're all going to be doctors and you know, surgeons, and you know, then they come out and they're they're they're their own people. My my my daughter's gonna be a car thief or something. You know, I mean it's it's who she is, right? And what you learn, I think, is to let them find their own way. And it's the same with brands. You, you know, you'll have some strategy for it, but it will very quickly, if it's successful, find its own place. In those early years, let it have room to maneuver until it finds its place. But look, let's do the course, and then I think we can look back at the end and really plot a course for your brand. Maria, thank you for including the brand equity gravy this early. I was expecting it to show up much later. I'm in vertical B2B software, managing several business units under a very finance finance-led MD. You said marketers should avoid brand speak with finance and focus on commercial language. In your experience, what actually earns a marketer a permanent seat at the board table? Well, really that, Maria. I mean, I, you know, I think there are two things I would play and that I have seen from good board level marketers. Number one, not selling the rainbow, but but selling the pot of gold. Marketers have a terrible tendency to talk about consistency and positioning and brand architecture. Get to the money, yeah. If we do X, Y, and Z or make as more this much money next year. Now I can show you how, or we can just focus on the returns. Yeah. You gotta make sure those returns are true. And then um the second thing, weirdly, is almost the opposite. Bring the voice of the customer into the boardroom. So many marketers don't do that because they're just like, oh, I've got to talk about finance, which you do. But the other superpower marketers have is everyone else in the company talks about sales and profit and cost. We're the only ones that follow the money to the actual consumer. So I think inherent in all of this as well is the requirement, the absolute requirement to bring in actual quotes and actual data to the executives. They will be entranced by that data, trust me. So bring the data in. You'll be amazed at how powerful that is. Maria again. For senior brand side marketers who want to add consulting, what's the smartest way to build credibility with CEOs and boards without distracting from the day job based on your experience teaching and consulting simultaneously? I mean, it's for me, it was an interesting uh consulting life. Um initially, I you know, I got gigs from teaching when I was a young professor. I would teach a room of executives, and one of them would ask me if I could come and work on the thing we were we were doing. That's how it started. At some point, it migrates into from from fame. I mean, there's no way around it. If you really want to do proper consulting, you have to be famous for something. Uh and it's really word of mouth from other clients. Uh, and and the good thing is that second stage of your career is much easier because only certain clients that want a certain thing will approach you because they know that's what you do. So there's no chance you you're given jobs that you aren't capable of or a good fit with. So I think, yeah, if I could give you one unhelpful answer, it it's probably fame. And and and if you're starting out as a non-famous marketer, I think specialization in one area is really useful. And then a couple of famous clients really helps too. Uh Maria again, we're rolling out value-based pricing and value-based selling in a vertical B2B software business. From your point of view, what would be a Ritson approved stack look like to build a killer sales playbook? Any specific books, methodologies, or trainers? Well, I don't look for me, I'm not a great sales playbook expert, Maria. So, you know, for I I don't want to give you a bad steer. It's out of my remit. Um, is there anything I know about this area that would be useful? I'd love to give you a Richson approved stack. Um, but I but it's not my wheelhouse. So I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna say I don't know that one. And my apologies. If I did, I would love to help. Kate, the optional reading for module two, set aside time for brand strategy. Oh, the link isn't working. Okay. No, no, thanks for flagging it. We'll get onto that immediately. Um, I'll talk to I'll talk to Carl. Sometimes these these links disappear. We'll we'll get onto it straight away. I'll shoot someone because they're meant to check every day and then I'll get it up there. Um, Pauline, I read the article on brand salience, but I'm a bit unclear on the methodology to measure it. Personally, I've never seen any research or test where salience was properly measured. Uh, would you have a real life example on how salience is measured? In a brand health tracking, would you say the best proxy is consideration? No, Pauline, it's really interesting. It really, if you do the salience work, it takes out everything all the way through to preference. It's, you know, if you imagine the whole top of funnel and awareness consideration, preference, it disappears and you've got salience, purchase, repurchase. So the way to do say, I mean, and it's not you, by the way. An annoying thing about Aaron Rogebass is they push everyone on salience. But when you really uh, you know, when you really want to study measuring salience, it's like we have to join our institute to understand how to do it, which is a little bit, you know, in a nutshell, what you do is you first of all identify, there's three stages. You identify the category entry points that lead to purchase in your category, right? That's normally done with qualitative research. Then the second stage is you work out the frequency of those entry points. So how many of them lead to how many purchases? And normally you find that a small number, three, four, five category entry points are the main ones that deliver 80% of category sales. You then cue those category entry points to a representative sample of consumers and ask them when you're thinking about advancing your career in marketing, uh, when you're thinking about uh what's not a good example of our category entry points of getting promoted of companies and brands that will help you get promoted or becoming more confident in your marketing skills, which products and brands come to mind? And what you're effectively doing is you're measuring across those entry points uh whether you're salient or not, whether you come up. That's essentially how it's done. Pauline, again, to maintain memory structure and not erode brand equity, you mentioned at some point a rough guide that investment should aim at ensuring share of voice is greater than market share. However, often within a portfolio of brands, we need to be more choiceful and can't invest behind every brand. Will we cover portfolio planning? We will, we will. But I have to tell you, Pauline, it it when you say things like that to me, you know, you can't invest in every brand. It's not a signal that you need more money or that we need to talk about portfolio. It's a it's a signal that you have too many brands. And we will talk a lot about killing brands when we get to that section on brand architecture. Laura, when making your brand strategy out of your diagnosis, what would your recommendation be in creating objectives, focusing on segments where you're losing or accelerating segments where you're winning? Oh no, no, you're jumping way ahead, Laura. My answer is it will depend on the data. I will show you how to do this, how to set the objectives, how to work that out. The answer is it will depend. Let me show you how to do it, and it'll take a few weeks, but you will know how to do it. David Clapcott, thanks. Really enjoyed this so far. Love the brand plan. We'll be keen to implement within our business. However, I'm wondering how this connects with the marketing plan, where in execution we have four Ps. I know this is one session on execution, but I'm keen to get on early on this. Yeah, look, it's an eternal question. There is um I I I from my perspective, and and you're, you know, you're buying mine, so I'm going to give it to you. The marketing plan and the brand plan are the same thing. Um it varies from organization to organization, what they call it. And it varies a lot based on brand architecture. So if you have, as somebody does in the class, three brands, sometimes the marketing plan breaks into then three brand plans within it. So it can get a bit more complex. But I would not ever endorse having a brand plan and a marketing plan for the same brand. Just call it one or the other. It's the same thing. And the brand plan should happily touch on the four piece. So it'll be up to you, David, to work out how to integrate your marketing plan and your brand plan or choose one over the other. At the end of the day, don't get too wound up in it. You need a strategy for each of your brands and all of your products, and you need an execution, uh, tactical execution plan and a budget. Um, that's all we're doing. So I think get through the course, and then I think you'll be able to integrate it. But you don't need two things. It's not like I've got my brand plan over here, my marketing plan over here. Brand management tends to have a distinct way of doing it. I'm going to teach you that, and then it'll be for you to decide how to play it. David, in your history of branding presentation, you talk about the future AI and a 10 year horizon. How can we benefit from the everyday AI tools today? Um, well, there's there's an obvious way. Um, we we've been developing an AI tool for Mini MBA for a year and a half in America. Uh, we will beta test it in September. And you will be absolutely invited to come and do that with us. I don't think AI replaces you, David, as a brand manager. I do think it's a massive tool for building your brand plan and doing all kinds of things. So you know, I think it's 10 years before it fully drops in, but I think 2027 is the last year where you can do brand management without AI playing a central role. I'm sure that's true. So yeah, we will have an amazing brand planning tool uh built on synthetic data, which you will have access to. It's coming. Let's do the course. I'm very keen on you knowing brand management, and then we will bring in AI as a tool to help you do brand management. Arthur, you mentioned in lecture one that essentially two elements form brand equity, salience and associations. But reading the paper by Roman Yuken Sharp, it seems that salience itself contains elements of associations. Can you help me map them together? Yeah, look, you're gonna get two differences of opinion here. Uh Aaron Bogass are pretty greedy, and they want, yeah, salience is basically the mental availability, and it, as you say, it kind of has these category associations. Now, they're not very symbolic, that's the one thing to say. They stay very much rooted in more practical associations, you know, works quickly, is the economy brand, whatever it might be. Um, but yeah, you're absolutely right. If you play the Ehrenberg Bass card purely, there's no room for differentiation or brand associations. Now, clearly, I don't do that. I think you can have both, as we said earlier. But it'll be for you to decide, Arthur. You can certainly go down a pure Ehrenberg bass route. I I think it misses a lot of the stuff that we need. I love I I'm a gin and tonic guy, as I once said to Byron himself. You know, he's pure gin. I'm gin and tonic. I think it tastes better, and I don't see the need just to have salience. But you'll have to decide, as we said in the module, you you'll have to decide your definition at the end of the day. Yeah? Okay, let me do a time check to see where we are. Okay, we're 45 minutes in. We're gonna just about get in in the hour, which is the target time. Lana, how would you approach researching or quantifying brand awareness and brand associations which are in a pitch to win the client? So you don't have access to their data, nor do you have the budget or time to set up your own research. Would you trust AI? Yeah, yeah, I would. The point I made earlier, Lana, uh you're not just asking Claude or OpenAI to, you know, to tell you what it is. You have to specify and prompt it that you want to do some synthetic research. Uh, you want to measure the following things from the following target market. And, you know, Claude will do a pretty good job. I would wait one more week because we're going to do brand diagnosis and I would see how that all works, and then I would basically prompt Claude to do the same. And it'll get you pretty close, to be fair. John, I'm curious about the rigor required for quantifying annualized value in the brand plan objectives. Are these rough calculations based on the known size of the current category, or are they expected to be a true quantitative projection from research testing? I asked because I work on a beverage alcohol brand that doubled the size of the segment, which no one expected to happen. The first brand plan projected a very modest revenue in line with the rest of the brands. Over a few short years, that brand became the dominant brand. Setting revenue objectives became a lot easier, but most brands that I've seen overestimate the size of the prize and underdeliver. Yeah, no, absolutely. Um no, no, no, we're not we're not gonna do it in a haphazard way. It's always a projection, John, as you know, and it's always an estimate, a future forward estimate. So it it's always slightly inaccurate. The way we will set um our objectives and their value will be yeah, it's quite empirical, and we'll get into it. In a nutshell, we're gonna work off your objectives on the funnel and assume you achieve your objective, work out what it will be worth, and we will analyze them too, which is the reason why, as you say, most brand plans overpromise. We'll get to it, but no, they're not, they're not, it's not gonna be done in a very short-handed way. There's a specific approach we're gonna use, and you're gonna do it for your brand plan. Alex, if you don't have the ability to pay for research, how do you triangulate and decide what are the most commercially attractive attributes to focus on? I've seen the common practice of poorly done brand health trackers that tracks a battery of attributes, sometimes informed by poor qual research, but uh oftentimes are just based off attributes the research team or management team believes are important. Occasionally a driver analysis is added to prioritize the attributes, most likely to impact consideration preference. This is especially tricky for B2B brands, both to prioritize the most meaningful attributes to focus on and to measure progress. Pardon me if this is getting ahead. It is getting ahead, Alex, but it's a great question. We will cover this in module three. The short answer is you need qualitative research to find out what the attributes really are, and then you need a correlation coefficient to look at which of those attributes is most correlated with consideration, preference, repurchase. And if you have that data, you can make some, I think, some pretty guided choices. We'll cover it next week, and we'll also cover it in positioning too. Davina, how should brand managers respond to senior leaders' pressure for short-term ROI when investing in brand building, where returns are longer term and less directly measurable? Um, we're gonna cover it a lot when we get to targeting uh Davina. Um I the the short answer is I'll give you one answer here and then we'll we'll get more into detail in it. Remember that when uh Field and Burnett called it the long and the short, and they called it long, they didn't mean that it takes a long time to work. They meant that it it works quickly and then it lasts a long time. And I think that's a very good defense. If you run a great TV ad, people start buying the product the next morning. Yeah, it just endures for longer, is the point. I think that's a good place to start. We'll get into a lot more detail on this as we go through the weeks. And Davina again. Beyond share of voice, are there practical benchmarks for how much brands should reinvest in advertising, such as percentage of revenue? No, no, no, no. It's gonna be excess share of voice, Davina, and we're gonna cover it when we get to budgeting. Um, don't look at share of uh share of revenue, don't look at different stages of growth. We're gonna we're gonna produce the investment from proper strategic thinking, but it'll come uh over a few weeks. And Davina, how should brand managers decide when to prioritize broad reach over targeted marketing? We'll get there, we'll get there. In targeting in a couple of weeks, I'm gonna talk to you about it and you're gonna make some choices. Pauline, you we may cover this more in modules four and five, but Byron Sharp argues that targeting is largely a myth and that growth comes from maximizing reach. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see. Again, I half agree, I half disagree. You're gonna do with me what's called two-speed targeting. I agree that at the brand building level, we want to target the sophisticated mass market. However, at the activation level for the products for short-term sales, we're gonna go at the segment and micro-segment level, and both make sense to me. So we'll get to it, Pauline, and we will address it in great detail. Toma. Hi Mark, a question that sparked quite a bit of debate in our LinkedIn cohort. From your Corona piece, I got the impression you're not a huge fan of Burger King's communication strategy, that it's essentially just whacking clowns. And I get the argument, but I keep coming back to this. Aren't those McDonald's versus Burger King fights actually doing the salience job really effectively? People talk about them, it deepens fan loyalty, and unlike Muldy Whopper, it does contra it doesn't contradict the brand's core. How do you see those kind of managed rivalries? Look, the only time I wanna I want to play the versus game, which is what's happening with the whack the clown thing, is when I'm a really, really much smaller player. Yeah, which I don't think Burger King was at that time. Yeah, it it you know I and and you're saying that the you know it gets the debate going. Maybe, maybe, but also mostly in the marketing community, not in the customer world. But but the whacking the clown thing was was not, I think, as you say, as problematic as Moldy Burger. I think it was at the end of the day, I think my ul my my ultimate objection to it as a strategic work, you know, what does the burger do for me? Do you know what I mean? What why why are you talking about a competitor? You're giving, yes, you're getting some salience, you're giving half of it to my competitor. So when you spend all your money on an ad and half of it's about McDonald's, you know, you haven't really helped yourself much there. Um and does your burger taste good? Do you know what I mean? Like, can we, you know, it was a bit too clever. That that was my point. That was my point. But it's a good debate, right? Tierra. I previously worked on a smartphone brand that ended the UK market with limited investment in brand building. After a few years, the business became heavily reliant on promotions to hit short-term sales, driven by sales channel pressure and KPIs set by headquarters. Unsurprisingly, it turned into a race to the bottom. You said promotions are one of the fastest ways to commodify a brand. So my question is, are promotions ever compatible with building brand equity, or is it simply the trade-off short-term volume at the expense of long-term brand building? Is there ever a middle ground? No, I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give it to you, Tara. There might be, but I think it's too dangerous. I am very hard on discounting on sales promotions because they're a disease. And and I think my line to every brand I've worked for, which I would encourage you to take, is that we we can't you can't avoid price promotions. Every brand ends up doing them. But every time your product sells beneath the recommended resale price, you've failed and you can't celebrate the sale. Yeah, I think that's a that that's the right way. So is there ever a time when they're good? No. Do we have to accept them? Yes. But we accept them knowing that it's a failure on our part. That's the right attitude. Amy, how can challenger brand startups with limited capital effectively track brand perception? What are the most reliable, low-cost, high-signal proxies for understanding customer sentiment? When formal research budgets are non-existent, how can we make sure we're speaking to our target customers and measure this? Look, uh again, I'm I'm gonna sound like a broken record. I think this year, for the first time, the emergence of synthetic research, either from a firm for not much money, um or or from Claude or Chat GPT or whatever, um, allows us to get, I think, a s a significant uh access to data, right? Uh and access to customer sentiment in in a way that formal research can do, but but as you say, it can be can be expensive. I think the answer is synthetic data. It's remarkably good and close now, if not better, Amy. Tina. Share of voice should be higher than share of market if we want to grow our brand. Yep. Can we reliably define the share of voice today, given all the digital marketing activities? Yeah, you can. I mean, I talked to Les Bonett about this a lot. Les is of the opinion that because you're right, there's a lot of stuff behind Walled Gardens, so it's very hard to estimate the 100% spend. But his point is most of it is it's proportionate across brands. So the bits that we can analyze still give us good, predictable uh excess share of voice calculations. And again, broken record, AI is now giving us some very nice calculations too. So, yeah, it's still a reliable metric, TNET, not as reliable as it once was. Joe, in categories that are considered at the point of need, how can you tell whether the real constraint on growth is lack of mental availability or negative weak category associations? What evidence distinguishes between the two? Um I I'm not sure you can often distinguish it. I think what you find out, Joe, is that you know, us, you know, our our salience is low versus competitors or our perceptions on the perceptual map are bad, and also our sales are poor. You know, you you need to fix both, is my point. So um I don't know whether you can directly attribute it's one or the other. I think that's driving it. I think what you're doing is setting targets for awareness or salience, you're setting targets for brand perception, and that's what you're doing. You're focusing on that. Attributing which ones are more or less important can be tricky. That said, you can look at the some correlations and it can give you some pretty good insights, and we'll talk about that next week. Nishta, my question is on module one in the podcast. In your podcast, you mentioned that negative publicity is good till the point it increases brand salience without hampering the core of brand image. But don't you think this defies the 95-5 rule? The rule highlights that only about 5% of buyers are actively in market at any given time, while 95% of future buyers, negative publicity can damage brand memory among the 95%, making it harder to convert them years later. Yeah, maybe, but at the same time, it it you know, those memories that are created can stay with the 95% until they purchase. So, okay, you're creating some negative image, but the salience can actually stay with them as well. So I think it works both ways. Two, isn't it important to build brands for the long run? And as such, publicity creates short-lived salience. Yeah, you've got to do both. I mean, we're absolutely doing the long run stuff, but the long run is a lot of series of short episodes. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should attract negative publicity. What I'm saying is the ideal would be lots of salience and positive publicity. But my point on undermining all of this is as a brand manager, uh Nishta, I really want to encourage you to take more risks, not worry as much about brand perception as we once did in order to drive salience and attention to the brand. It's the balance is changing. That's my point. Ted, another question about ESOV. Referring to Paul Dyson's profitability multiplier, he rates creative as a 12 times multiplier. Is the quality of the creative a factor when it comes to excess share of voice? Surely, though, the quality of creative executions must have an impact here. A stronger, more creative ad times excess share of voice should deliver better results. No, absolutely true, Ted. By the same token, uh getting the price right, the product plays a role, everything else plays a role too. But with all that said, at the end of the day, excess share of voice is the most predictive thing of all. That's what we've got. And you know, creative quality definitely plays a role. But I've found to my cost over the years, the best ads in the world, without the right amount of media behind them, work. And if you look at Dyson's work, which I'm a huge fan of, yeah, creative isn't, you know, is as you say, what was it? I think it was a 12 times multiplier. He breaks up media into four or five different things. When you add them all together, it's basically as important as creative. But yeah, we shouldn't forget about creative, but excess share of voice is an amazing predictor. Arunima. Hey, my name is Arunima. I am part of the insights team in Puffetti van Mela. Hello. My question is: how definition of brand equity has evolved over the years? Could you help us with an example? What was it for Koch earlier and now? Look, it's only in the last 30 years with David Aker that we've really had the concept of brand equity in its sort of modern form. Before that, brands re believe it or not, even Coke really didn't define this stuff. And you've got to remember brand management as a discipline. Yes, it was invented by PG, as we said in module two, but the modern version of it that we're teaching here is really no more than 30 years old. So it didn't exist before. Uh, it's it's been very much a modern creation. Alina, I've got a few questions related to objectives. All right, well, we've got a whole module on that coming up, but let's try. In your experience, is it more effective to define objectives based on demographics, behaviors, or mindset? Um, none of those, because it's not really objectives. Targeting Alina, and targeting is always better focused on behavioral segments. Two, let's say different target segments require significantly different objectives, yep, and the brand starts to lose its sense of coherence and feel like multiple separate brands rather than a single unified identity. What are the warning signs of this happening? Maybe you've seen some cases in your in your practice. Can you can a brand realign itself? Look, the the thing here, Alina, and we will talk about this in targeting, is I I think you need to target, as you'll see in the targeting module, module four, you have to target everyone in the category for the brand. And that's how you keep it unified. When it comes to activation, there may be smaller segments that you go after. You know, our example of you know, buying a nice champagne for New Year's Eve becomes a segment that you activate specifically. But I'm a big fan of that Aaron Bass approach of saying, look, we're not building the brand to different segments. We build the brand to the whole market, we activate it maybe to different segments. Let's cover it in module four. Tamana, I might be missing something. Um, module one question: how do you measure the RBI percentage and BSS for a B2B brand? Ah, you're talking about the um the Interbrand calculation. Um, you well, the same way Interbrand do it for for any for any brand in any in any category, B2B or B2C, you you have um you have specific estimates and you do customer research on B2B customers across the decision makers in the company. So it's done in the same way. It's just a lot more difficult to do it. Module two question. If one of your goals is to increase brand consideration, how do you measure this at the end of the year? Uh the answer is your brand tracking is kind of the start and the end of the process, as you'll see. So you measure it at the start to set your benchmarks, you you measure it a year later to set your benchmarks, but also to see whether you achieved your goals. You'll see when we do brand tracking. Tamano again. Uh, great to be back. Module one question. Most of the time there's no budget to do research. And if there is, it's hard to convince the leadership. How do I go about diagnosis and understanding brand awareness without it? Well, you can't. Again, broken record, we're seeing more and more marketers using synthetic research. But the better answer here is Tamana is you need to find some money to do a little bit of research because it's too important. You can't do a diagnosis without customer research. You can't be a brand manager without speaking to customers. And let's end with Cecile. I think we did it within the hour almost. Once positioning is established, what are the most effective ways to express and communicate it? In a B2B context, does further formalizing elements such as brand promise genuinely add value? No, I don't think so, but we'll get to it in module five. We've got a huge module on positioning coming up, Cecile. Let's cover it there. Right, wonderful questions. We're moving on to many of the things you're already asking me about. Next week we'll cover diagnosis. The week after we'll cover targeting. Um, get into that rhythm of learning. Um, try and get each module done uh within the week, and our brand management journey has begun. I'll see you for the next QA, but I'll see you in class next week for diagnosis. Uh, see you in class.