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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
IMC PERSPECTIVE 8-3
V. Developing the
Integrated Marketing
Communications Program
8. Creative Strategy:
Planning and Development
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
Advertising Agencies Find Ways to Build Stronger Brands
Branding has become more important than ever to
companies competing in today’s marketplace. At a
time when battered investors, customers, and even
employees are questioning whom they can trust, the
ability of a familiar brand to deliver proven value has
become extremely important. A belief in the power of
brands has spread beyond the traditional consumergoods
marketers, and branding has become a very
important part of the marketing strategy for companies
in almost every industry. Purveyors of products
ranging from Gillette razors to BMW automobiles to
Starbucks coffee have been able to use their strong
brands to keep growing without succumbing to the
pricing pressure of an intense promotional environment.
However, many of the traditional big-brand companies
are striving to reinvent themselves and to
restore value to their venerable brands. And as they do
so, many are looking to their advertising agencies to
help them determine the best way to build strong
brands and connect with their customers.
Advertising agencies often conduct research studies
for their clients, using techniques such as surveys,
focus groups, and ethnographic studies to help them
better understand their customers and determine the
best way to communicate with them. However, in
recent years a number of agencies have been conducting
branding research and developing proprietary
models to help better identify clients’ customers and
determine how they connect to their brands.
DDB Worldwide provides clients with branding
insights through its Brand Capital Study, which
amasses information on more than 500 brands ranging
from Wal-Mart to Yahoo and from Budweiser to
Michelin. The proprietary branding research is based
on a global marketing study consisting of quantitative
surveys conducted among 14,000 consumers in 14
countries. The surveys consist of a battery of questions
focusing on consumer attitudes, interests,
desired self-image, values, and product use as well as
various subjects and issues including family, religion,
politics, advertising, and brands. The agency uses the
information from the Brand Capital Study to compare
the desired self-images and lifestyles of consumers
who love a brand with those who have a less strong
connection. The study also measures brand magnetism,
which is the brand’s ability to strengthen its connection
with consumers and is based on four factors:
high quality, leadership in the category, growth in popularity,
and uniqueness in the category. According to
the agency’s worldwide brand planning director, the
success of a product or brand is tied to how it is per-
ceived in popular culture: “In category after category,
around the world, the evidence is clear. As a brand’s
breadth of connection with consumers increases, its
depth of connection increases exponentially.” DDB
describes this phenomenon of each consumer’s feelings
about a brand being directly affected by other
consumer’s feelings as “brand contagion.”
Young & Rubicam is another agency that has developed
a proprietary tool for building and managing
brands, a tool it refers to as the Brand Asset Valuator.
The agency has invested over $70 million and conducted
over 120 studies in building a comprehensive
global database of consumer perceptions of brands.
This tool views brands as developing through a very
specific progression of four consumer perceptions,
including differentiation, relevance, esteem, and
knowledge. Differentiation measures the strength of
the brand’s meaning, while relevance measures the
personal appropriateness of the brand to consumers.
These two measures together form brand strength,
which is viewed as an important indicator of future
performance and potential. Esteem is the extent to
which consumers like a brand and hold it in high
regard, while knowledge represents awareness of the
brand and what it stands for and is the culmination of
brand-building efforts. Esteem and knowledge form
brand stature, which is a more traditional measure of
the status of a brand and its current performance,
which is a strong strategic indicator of the health of a
brand. The Brand Asset Valuator uses measures of
these four factors to identify core issues for the
brand and to evaluate current brand performance and
potential.
The Leo Burnett agency relies on its Brand Belief
System to guide its global brand-building philosophy
and practice. This system focuses on the development
of the brand–believer bond, which is at the core of the
relationship between a brand and its believers, and
considers four fundamental questions. The first question
involves the category and asks, Where does the
brand truly belong? The second involves the content
and asks, How will the brand inspire belief? The third
question considers the culture and asks, What shapes
belief in the brand? The final question involves the
customer and asks, With whom and how will the brand
belong? Leo Burnett uses a set of proprietary research
tools to provide information that can be used as part
of the Brand Belief System and provide the agency
with a basis for brand analysis and planning.
Nearly all the major agencies are conducting branding
research and/or developing models or systems
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