Beyond Branding: Coherence®
An RHB/The Agency White Paper
By Richard H. Bailey and Elizabeth H. Hunt, Ph.D.
In the advertising class I teach at the University of Notre Dame, I bring a candy bar for each student on a certain day. As you can clearly tell by that, I am a very good teacher.
On the appointed day, I make sure that every student has a different candy bar brand, all the way down to Zagnut and Zero. I am usually rewarded for this by grins. I remove a crisp five-dollar bill (when I started teaching, I used to pull out a single dollar, but today’s students are far more demanding; they won’t play along for anything less than five bucks) from my wallet. I hold the bill up in the air and say to my students, “Let’s market.”
After a silent moment or two, a bold student will shout, “I have M & Ms. I’ll sell them for five bucks.”
Not to be outdone, other students join in, calling out the names of their candy bars.
I shake my head at each offer, but provide no other information. The students begin to think a little harder. They start to offer more. “This Hershey bar is king size,” one might say. Or, “This Kit Kat has several bars. You can have them all for five bucks.”
Still nothing from me. They grow confused, then a little frustrated. Finally, one of the students will ask—often just rhetorically—the million-dollar question. “Well, what DO you want?”
“Aha!” I say. “How can you find out?” A light goes on in the faces of these future ad men and women. From here, the class can take one of any number of forms. Sometimes they create a survey for me. Sometimes they open up an informal discussion. Sometimes they try to figure out my preferences based on what they already know about me. But eventually, they determine that I prefer almonds to peanuts, milk chocolate to dark, and that I have a soft spot for coconut.
After that, the kid with in the Almond Joy knows all she has to do is put it in my hand, and the five-dollar bill is hers. Instead of shouting out features and benefits or continually sweetening the pot, she can make the sale without saying a word.
That's coherence.
At its most basic level, Phillip Kotler tells us, marketing is exchange. Two parties each have something they want to provide and something they hope to receive. When both parties can see clearly what the other brings to the table, and what they expect to take away—when there is coherence between the two parties—the transaction is simple.
But parties to an exchange do not often find such clarity. Coherence demands a high level of shared understanding. The unit of currency, the standards for quality, even the vocabulary have to be the same. Both parties must cohere to—or maybe just "co-hear"—the same messages about what is being supplied and what is being demanded. If I had just said I liked nuts in my candy bar, instead of specifically mentioning my love of almonds and coconut, the guy with the Mr. Goodbar no doubt would have come forward. But that would not have been my meaning, and no matter how he argued his case, he wouldn’t have been able to make a sale. A lack of specificity would keep us from coherence.
It’s apparent coherence is no small task. It dwarfs, or more correctly, encompasses, branding. In other words, a brand may be one part of a shared understanding of an exchange. A buyer may have an interest in or a predilection for a particular brand. In some cases, based on that consumer’s perceptions, it can even be a deal-breaker. But today, given the broad accessibility to products and services, a brand is more likely to be incidental, an “add-on” or a “plus.” And keep in mind, consumers may be more fickle about brands than they are about any other aspect of exchange. For example, from one shopper to the next, preferred ways of buying will stay the same. Online buyers like to buy online, thrift-shop shoppers will continue to hunt used bargains. But the brands these buyers seek may change season after season, year after year.
Does that mean managing your branding isn’t a good investment? Of course it doesn’t mean that. Promoting your brand is still a relatively easy and powerful way to increase your market appeal. Taking a coherence perspective on marketing does mean, however, that we should consider “branding” the tail and not the dog.
And while we at RHB/The Agency are on the forefront of coherence marketing, we are by no means the only ones noticing that branding is just the tip of a massive marketing iceberg. “We have moved away from the time in which advertising’s main function was to create awareness and favorable attitudes for a product,” writes Daniel Morel, Chairman/CEO of Wunderman-NewYork. “We are smack in the middle of an era in which the focus is on the customer’s experiences with the brand and his or her subsequent behavior.”
And here’s where Morel hits it right on the head: “Customers today ask: ‘This is what I need; can you make it? And will you communicate to me about it in a particular way?’”
Pick up just about any marketing book off the shelf and you’ll notice a similar trend. Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz, addresses this shift in our relationships with customers: “Marketing’s purpose is to involve customers, helping them to understand the value of an organization or product to their wants and needs. The metaphor of marketing is no longer an advertising and brochure marketing plant. It is more like a blue ribbon school. Like great teaching, the goal of marketing is not to assert conclusions but to engage an audience in a dialogue, which leads people to discoveries on their own.”
From what these marketers have said, and from my opening example of the candy bars, it should be apparent that research plays a key role in developing coherence. That’s true. But the kind of research that leads to coherence isn’t always a simple matter. All too often, marketing research aims solely to discover what consumers want, in a very narrow sense. That may be fine if you are just hawking a candy bar, and your candy bar is at least a little different than everyone else’s. But if you are hoping to sell consumers on something much more complex, enduring andlife-changing—say, a college education, for example—you want to know much more. You want to know what your prospective customers expect, and even where those expectations came from. You want to know what misconceptions they have about what you are offering, and which of those misconceptions can be changed. When your customers are teens, you want to know which of their predilections are developmental and which are generational. You want to know who influences them and how—and if they even realize it. You have to know where your prospective customer is coming from. Even more important, you have to know where she hopes to go. You have to know how she imagines her life will change once she has bought what you or your competition is selling.
It’s heady stuff. And believe it or not, it’s only one side of the marketing-research equation. That’s because you don’t want to limit your research to finding out about your customers. You also want to research ways of allowing customers to find out about you and what you bring to the market. To do that, you have to know who you really are, and I’ll even go one step further. You have to be willing to consider change too.
Let me explain. Remember that old chestnut of a marketing model we all studied in college, the 4 Ps? They were: Product, Placement, Promotion and Price; and we were told that successful marketing is a workable mix of all four.
Well, everything old is new again, because you can consider the 4 Ps an outline (albeit a rather skeletal one) for the kind of self-research you ought to consider as a part of your marketing efforts. Too often, we let marketing efforts focus exclusively on the Promotion aspect of the Ps. But if I had to single one out as most important, it’s Product. You need to take an unflinching look at your product as an absolute prerequisite to a coherent exchange. If your customer wants a peanut-butter Twix, he’s not going to be fooled by the caramel version you’re offering. And if it turns out all your customers share his preference, you better consider changing the recipe, and quick. You can still love what you sell, and see its special merits and distinctions. But you can sell it more easily and successfully if you’ve explored those qualities in a deeper context and arewilling to question your own presuppositions and dearly held beliefs about your product.
The other Ps are important too, and it bears a moment of explanation to describe how a marketing model developed for widgets can translate to higher education, or other intangibles. Placement, for example, may mean deciding on a tabletop display versus an endcap if you’re in the widget business. But what does it mean in higher education? Think more broadly about how you reach your would-be market, not with your message, but with your actual product. Some obvious “delivery” considerations may come to mind: should you offer evening courses or an online degree program? But delve a little more deeply into the issue of how an even wider segment of students could have access to your programs, and you may start thinking along even more profound lines. Do you need a different mix of majors? Are you reaching Latino teens? Is your mission too exclusive? Think of the Placement P as the one that explores access in all its forms, the one that places your education within reach of ever-better constituencies.
When you think of it that way, it's easy to see how the P of Price is related, too. It’s possible to lose access to a key segment of your prospective customers by pricing them out of the market. It’s also possible to underprice what you are offering. The role of tuition discounting alone could merit (no pun intended) an entire dissertation exploring how it affects student recruitment. Many of the factors at play may be unique to your situation, and certainly a volatile market and dwindling capital bases complicate the issue even further. My point is not to encourage you to take a particular stance on pricing matters. Rather, I want you to recognize its central role in marketing and its interrelationships with the other factors at play.
Once you have learned all you can about your customer AND have explored the other three Ps (Product, Placement and Price), you can begin to look at the P of Promotion with the information you need to be effective. A common misperception is that promotion IS marketing. But while it may be the most visible aspect of marketing, without minding the other Ps, promotion is empty or even wasteful. And only when you have all four Ps together does coherence become possible.
I know it sounds complicated. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at this point to know that you were wondering if coherence even exists. Maybe it’s just a fiction, a platonic ideal to which to aspire? That’s a fair question, to be sure, and one with an easy answer. Coherence absolutely exists, and you can watch it in action, firsthand, thousands of times a day.Where? On eBay.
That’s right. eBay is one of the best examples, or at least the most copious, of coherence in marketing today. Here are sellers, offering items from the ridiculous to the sublime, nearly perfectly aligned with buyers seeking same. A rare first edition of Hemingway. A Flying Nun lunchbox. A Tiffany lampshade. An Elvis poster. White elephants, whatnots, almost everything under the sun. And somewhere, someday, maybe today, a buyer for all of it. As coherent as can be.
What makes eBay work? What makes its buyers and sellers cohere? Several factors:
- Frankness
- Respect for a discerning consumer
I might add that the issue of what a consumer can or cannot be assumed to know definitely looms in higher education, particularly in recruitment marketing. It’s commonplace to hear that “Kids don’t know what’s good for them, or even what they want from a college education.” And after all, the very premise of education is that those who know are teaching those who don’t know.
Far be it for me to suggest that seventeen-year-olds (or even their parents) are truly sophisticated and savvy consumers of college educations. And certainly college is a complex, complicated subject to have to sell. But while I believe that college reps do have a role to play in educating consumers about higher-ed choices, I don’t think this education should take place at the cost of a thorough understanding of and appreciation for those consumers’ goals, interests, aspirations and values. A little respect, or a lot, is always in order.
- Accountability
Finally, eBay works because it’s a pretty solidly accountable system. Of all the checks and balances in place to ensure that buyers and sellers meet each other’s expectations, none is more powerful than the rating system eBay uses. Fail to mention that missing piece in your vintage Clue game, and earn yourself a dismal evaluation from your buyer. Send a late payment for your newest treasure, and your seller will pan you, too. Then, ever after, anyone on eBay can check your rating and decide if you’re the kind of party with whom they wish to do business. Yikes—what if the real world were like that?
There may be many more reasons for the highly coherent exchange that takes place on eBay, but these are among the most significant for marketing in general. And while the specifics of how these factors play out in cyberspace may not transfer to our worlds, most of us can take some lessons here. A brand can’t help you if you are deficient, dishonest, disrespectful or unaccountable for your end of a bargain. In fact, in those cases, a brand can even work against you, since a reputation for poor quality, poor communication or poor reliability can become a part of a brand, just as positive characteristics can.
Think of “integrity” as another word for “coherence” in marketing. It’s an appropriate word in two senses. First, in its less common and broader meaning, “integrity” denotes “wholeness.” And coherence demands this as well. It requires us to look at the entire picture of our exchange with others, not just the moment of sale, and certainly not just the promotional side of the transaction. For coherence to occur in a higher-education market (or even more broadly, in the service-rendering arena), it’s necessary to look at all the facets of exchange we’ve discussed here, and maybe even more. Now, before you panic, be assured that not every facet will be in need of major (or even minor) adjustment. You may already know a great deal about your prospective customers, maybe even more than you think. Likewise, your Ps may be just fine, but you need to mind all of them—along with your Qs—to create coherence in your marketing transactions.
The second and more common meaning of integrity—a sense of rectitude or ethics—is also pertinent to the concept of marketing coherence we’ve put forward here. Central to what we’ve been discussing are several important commitments: to present our interests as “sellers” honestly, to respect our customers, and to seek a fair exchange for both parties. Far from complicating market transactions, these commitments will reduce them to their simplest and truest form, and they will almost always guarantee an interaction that is marked by a level of coherence that goes well beyond a brand.
