Oh Tiger, what are you doing, man?! How can the biggest personal brand in sports, the best golfer ever, double-bogey like that (or nonuple-bogey, actually, presuming there are, in fact 10 mistresses and marriage is a par-one)?
Tiger makes $100 million or more per year from endorsements--more the result of his personal brand than his golf swing. His brand transcends the sport. He is The Natural, and he gives youth to a sport that skews old in its demos. His squeaky clean image made him a no-brainer for marketers and ad agencies.
None of this really changed when he smashed his car driving down a residential street he'd driven hundreds of times before or even because there was something fishy about the whole incident; it changed because he stonewalled.
In an era of social media, the table-stakes of branding are honesty, openness, and transparency. We all knew something happened, and we knew brand Woods should talk about it, explain it, let us forgive him for it. And we probably would have forgiven him, but now we can't even consider that without smirking and thinking of him as fodder for Letterman's top 10 and tabloid headlines about "the back nine."
I'm not sure why a big brand like Tiger didn't have better brand management. Tiger didn't say anything for a few days and then blogged, "This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible." Sorry, private citizens don't make tens of millions of dollars in endorsements. You are public. Brands exist in the mind of consumers that don't like being lied to.
Need a testament to people wanting and needing to know more? Tiger Woods was the number one source of traffic to news sites in December, according to New York research firm Experian Hitwise.
How brands respond in a crisis can be decisive. In 1990, Perrier was the coolest drink around, ordered by name as if it were an exotic mixed drink. Then laboratory technicians in North Carolina who regularly used Perrier as purified water in lab tests discovered an unacceptably high level of benzene (a carcinogen) in Perrier. According to the Economist in August 1991, Perrier broke the first rule in a crisis: "Don't play the problem down." Before they knew the real source of the problem, they announced it was "just one region (North America)," which turned out to be false. They joked at a press conference in Paris saying they were pulling the product off shelves worldwide because publicity is good! Net/net, management stonewalled the issue, market share plummeted, and the brand never recovered.
Contrast that with the Tylenol poisoning in the 1980s. J&J's response was quick and decisive, pulling all products off the shelf and eliminating capsules as a product form. I remember an article in The New York Times where experts were split on whether or not the brand name was still viable. Some need to surrender their expert badges; Tylenol maintained public trust because of how it responded and regained all of its market share.
Today, branding is about two-way loyalty; a consumer has a right to ask, "How will you show loyalty to me?" Loyalty is also about forgiveness. I think the public would have forgiven Tiger's transgressions, but I don't think the public will completely forgive him for not voluntarily coming clean ... for Tiger not showing loyalty back to his fan base.
In the world of athlete celebrity endorsements, an article in Promo Magazine (Sept. '07) talked about the need for careful 360-degree research on athletes, ensuring their "brand attributes" match those of the marketer to be endorsed and the need for an "exit strategy" in case things head south. The marketing research firm, Marketing Evaluations, Inc. The Q Scores Company (Manhasset, New York) tracks "Q scores" of roughly 1,800 celebrities. The scores are used to evaluate how positively or negatively the public feels about a celebrity and show how fast things can change after an incident. Two years after the rape charge, Kobe Bryant's unfavorable Q score was 53% (vs. 35% before the incident). Michael Phelps' unfavorable Q score went from 11 to 21 pre-post the bong photo. It used to be that this risk applied to most athletes, but not to Tiger; never to Tiger.
Now, Tiger has introduced risk into the equation and that will undoubtedly hurt his marketing value. Will he rebound? Will he conjure up unfavorable semi-conscious associations in the consumer mind? We just don't know for sure yet. We're all somewhat risk adverse so why take the chance? I can picture a marketer and their agency agreeing, "Maybe we better go with Jeter."
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
Great retailers know they must be in the rhythm of societal trends. We know how contemporary Apple stores, Abercrombie, Sephora's, and Coach stores feel. But I want to talk about plain old grocery shopping.
Like a CSI episode, where the evidence at first is invisible but then magically becomes apparent to the talented investigator throughout the crime scene, the forensic evidence about what people want from retail and what keeps them up at night is right there in their shopping cart.
Concern for our planet and our bodies. Ten years ago, grocery retailers didn't offer reusable, sustainable bags. Entenmann's cakes greeted the shopper while today, even in mainstream supermarkets, it's fresh organic produce. Now, concerns for the environment are built into mainstream offerings and their packaging.
Concern for making ends meet. Wal-Mart gains market share. Coupon use is way up. Store brands are gaining share. Obviously, shoppers are worried about money and at retail, we can observe them making the tradeoffs to make ends meet.
The need for simplifying life. Convenience stores are how gas stations make money. Prepared meals in supermarkets make life grab n' go. Many people don't even enter the store, they order online.
Small indulgences. As we rush to get through a shopping trip as fast as possible, suddenly we slow down as we pass the artisan cheeses and breads. We stop at the olive bar. We can't pass up the tasting stations. We might buy the cheapest coffee but we also get a bag of something special.
The rise of multi-cultural America. Smart grocery retailers now have culturally relevant store formats. Publix stores in Hispanic and Anglo-white neighborhoods are designed to look nothing like each other.
Diversity of lifestyles. Out of the 40,000 products in a typical supermarket, an average shopper buys only 400 items in a year, so it's no surprise that no two market baskets are exactly alike.
DunnHumby is a consulting firm that turned shopper forensics into a high science. They code each product a shopper buys into life traits and then infer a lot about that shopper by analyzing their purchases over time. For example, it's easy to tell who the young mothers are and who is on a diet. This approach made U.K. also-ran Tesco number one by telling them much more about their shoppers than any retailer ever knew before.
While forensic analysis is good, retailers shouldn't only analyze the crime scene, they need to look for manufacturers who can help them anticipate society and translate that into merchandising action. For example, Kimberly-Clark partnered with Walgreens to help them understand the shopping experience for the elderly and what they can do about it. Executives wore glasses that blurred and yellowed their vision, and put tape on their hands in a way that mimicked the restrictions from arthritis. This program led to new merchandising concepts. I imagine we'll see products on lower shelving, big letter labeling, and perhaps personal shoppers.
Manufacturers and retailers must see people as the full human ... theatre in the round. It's all there if you know what to look for as during the course of a big shopping trip, a shopper's life is put on display. Ask Bill Peterson or Paco Underhill.
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
A little more than two years ago, just when online research had become a major source of data for marketers looking to keep their fingers on the pulse of consumers, Procter & Gamble's marketing research leadership dropped a bomb: They said that two online surveys from the same provider conducted a week apart delivered diametrically opposed results.
P&G is the world's biggest buyer of survey research, so this got the industry's attention! Then similar reports came from others. Suddenly, what had been taken for granted turned into a question: "Can marketers trust online research?"
Two years ago leading marketers (imagine Procter and Unilever in the same room) and research companies formed working committees at The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) in New York to address this showstopper. In Oct/Nov 2008, the industry supported a $1 million study, involving over 100,000 interviews among 17 different leading online panels, to understand under what conditions online research can produce inconsistent results.
The good news: Each of the 17 panels replicated their own results on benchmarking questions (like owning a home, or ever smoked) when testing the same survey a few weeks apart.
The bad news: There were big inconsistencies across the 17 panels.
Notable causes for differences:
How long someone was on a research panel affected their answers. "Newbies" were more favorable to a new product idea than those who were on the research panel longer. Some panels are filled with newbies; some are not.
While most fill out surveys to be heard, those who take surveys for the money turn out to be less diligent about filling out the survey. Certain research panels tend to give outright cash gifts which attract more of those people.
Because the same research supplier can actually vary where they get their respondents from (even if they have their own panel), this alone can blow data comparability out of the water. We asked buyers if they were explicitly controlling for this with their research suppliers. Mostly, they were not.
To provide needed structure to the conversation that research buyers and sellers have to manage data consistency, the ARF introduced something we are calling the "Quality Enhancement Process". QeP has a series of 10-plus templates to address how the online panel is generally recruited and run, the source of respondents for a given research program, and the survey itself.
Eight big companies are bullish on the QeP and plan to pilot test it. They are: Unilever, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, General Motors, Kraft Foods, General Mills, Bayer, and Capital One. They hope to find the path back to trust--assurance that online research results are comparable (e.g. did our new product idea get good scores?) and trendable (e.g. is my brand equity really changing?).
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Please visit his main blog, CRO-ing About Research, for more. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
Marketers focus on their brands and customers as the family jewels--and they are. But there is another kind of marketing asset that I call "runways" and if you don't have them, you will miss huge opportunities. In this ADD world of rapid-fire Twitter streams, long-tail options, and media multi-tasking, you must be in the right place at the right time or the moment is lost. Runways are relationships your company can create with trading partners and consumers that make your brands accessible, and give YOU access to markets and marketing options you otherwise would not have. Let me illustrate.
Retail runways. A large consumer packaged goods company like Kraft or Unilever leverage relationships with retailers to make their products available where 80-90% of people shop (what other media deliver that size audience these days?). Because Starbuck's didn't have this runway, they needed to partner with these companies to sell ground coffee and specialty ice cream. Think about the omnipresent end-of-aisle display of Entenmann's baked goods in supermarkets. Another company, Mission Tortillas, has also created standing displays of their products in supermarkets. These displays are runways that can create instant trial (no need to advertise) for any new variety.
Social media runways. Starbuck's has a social graph of over 4MM across Facebook, Twitter, My Starbuck's idea, etc.; something Unilever does not have for food products. So, for Starbuck's ice cream, while Unilever provides the retail runway, Starbuck's provides the social media runway to build interest--great runway synergy for their joint venture. On the other hand, regarding the new Levis "go forth" campaign, sharing via social media would accelerate faster if the Levis social media runway had been previously built.
Account management runways. For many B2B marketers, their best runway is their own group of customer representatives. The biggest mistake B2B companies can make is to think that marketing is solely an externally focused activity and not align their own best asset--the client-facing ambassadors in their own company--to the new message or offering. Sounds obvious? I have actually lived through this battle with a marketing team at a prior company I worked at. Are you putting energy behind driving your marketing messages internally as well as externally?
Runways are only limited by marketers' imagination. Amazon just filed for a patent to deliver advertising via the Kindle. Gaming platforms beget game sales and can deliver advertising. Ducati motorcycles' sponsorship and hospitality presence (and winning record) at the Superbike World Championship events is a runway into enthusiast sports biking communities around the world.
Runways not only create access, they augment a brand's meaning and value. Brands are about expectations, so where customers expect a brand to be present becomes part of the brand. Marketers should direct innovation efforts towards building brand runways as well as building the brands themselves.
Like well-paved airport runways, building good brand runways will make the takeoffs and landings much smoother.
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
The old branding model is past its "sell by" date. It is a product-centered model that comes from packaged goods in the '70s and '80s; offer differentiated benefits that a particular consumer segment is thought to care about. "My peas are picked at the peak of sweetness"...that kind of thing. This model is breaking down as people try store brands and find they are "fit for purpose" at a better price. Now what?
Change the model.
People live life in four dimensions. We have functional needs, but we also are social creatures, have self-expressive needs, and crave content that we find to be entertaining and informative. Thinking this way reveals new ways of making your brand relevant:
Functional: go from "product feature" to "solution-based" thinking
Social: make your brand a celebrity that is fanned, friended, and followed. Or, create a thematic environment around a value shared by your brand and its customers (e.g. Dove and "the real meaning of beauty")
Self-expressive: the brand must stand for something so clearly understood, it is cultural currency
Content: become the logical and top of mind source for content centered on what your brand is about
But here's the catch; your competitive set will change as you offer new constructs…new ways to categorize. This takes us to the idea of a "mental marketplace" where your brand must vie for attention against other brands that are functionally unrelated. Product brands can even find they compete with celebrities and news publishers.
Noah Brier has created a freely available tool called brand tags. (You should also check out mattermeter.) Brandtags displays a logo and asks you to type the first thing that comes to mind when you see a particular brand's logo. You can then see what that brand means to everyone else.
3M competes with Apple in the mental marketplace of innovation but they express their brands differently. Experience the Apple store in SOHO. Apple has leveraged innovation, cool, and edginess into self-expression, a sense of belonging and maybe a little bit of "theme park" thrown in. Oh by the way, Apple stores reached $1 billion in sales faster than any other chain in history (previous record-holder was the Gap).
Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of health/fresh with Dannon, Kashi, and Subway (and others, of course). Whole Foods "competes" via brand community across social media (e.g. 800,000+ Twitter followers), has a wonderful blog and iPhone app about a wellness lifestyle from organic/fresh foods. A Whole Foods shopping bag is almost a clubhouse handshake.
When a brand wins in its mental marketplace it leverages multi-layered connections with people into spontaneous credibility that converts into sales. The unfamiliar new product becomes instantly familiar.
If store brands are going to dominate the mental marketplace for "affordable" where do you plan to play and win?
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
A reality check from Tina Turner for brand managers: most customer/brand relationships are marriages of convenience not finding a soul-mate. There are plenty of annulments, divorces, and lots of sleeping around.
Keep a brand diary for a day of every brand you use; you don't have to include brand messages, just what you use. I bet you'll record using over 100 brands in a day. (I got to 77 by 2 p.m. and got too tired to continue). For example, when I make coffee in the morning, the faucet, countertop, coffee maker, filter, coffee, cup, and silverware all have brand names so the number of brands gets big real fast. Now also record how many of those you really care about, where you would grieve if the brand were no longer available. Don't be surprised if it is only a handful. Over the course of the day, I recorded that I really cared about only 10% of the brands I used.
That 10% number might be a magic number. While everyone knows about the bell curve, and while the long-tail power distribution is flavor of the month, the most important curve of all might be the U-shape (a beta distribution for fellow geeks.) The U-shape describes the distribution of preferences. It tells us that most people will never consider you, there is an uptick of those who do, in fact, love you, but most of your buyers are distributed in-between. They might or might not buy you on a given purchase; it depends. The U-shape is amazingly accurate at relating brands' market shares to their purchase loyalty and it tells us that for most brands only 10% to 15% of buyers are really loyal or engaged with a brand.
Can this be right? I mean Coke has 3.5 million fans on Facebook and Starbucks has 2.5 million. But think about those numbers relative to how many drink a Coke in a week or go into a Starbucks. That 10% number is starting to make a lot of sense, right?
For 85% to 90% of your customers, your brand image, salience, familiarity are important ways to simplify their choices and you will get picked sometimes but not always. It's more "the dating game" than love. Nothing wrong with that, but is your marketing program paying attention to those customers that I'll call the "silent majority" or just the ones who want to friend you, tweet you, and blog about you?
These really loyal buyers are certainly worth more; the math of the U-shape tells us they probably account for 50% or so of sales (and maybe more considering word of mouth) but you can't ignore the "silent majority." Is your marketing program multi-layered and also geared to grow that sales base?
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
There's a problem with the theory of the long-tail: people want choice, but they don't want too many choices. People DO want options so they can indulge their individuality but then 90% or more of the irrelevant options fade away, becoming "out of sight, out of mind". The most dramatic example of what cognitive psychologists call "inattentional blindness" is the gorilla video. The audience is asked to concentrate on how many times six teenagers pass and bounce two basketballs. Shockingly but true, almost no one sees the person in a gorilla suit walking through the video. You are blinded by your attention to counting (try it on your friends).
A typical supermarket carries 40,000 items, but a typical shopper buys 15 to 20 things on a given shopping trip and only 400 in a year. The average number of TV channels people have access to increased from 10 to 106 in 25 years, yet on average, people only watch 14 channels in a week.
People want choice but not too many choices--or the mind will just simplify the task by becoming blind to them.
The new wave of economists, called BEHAVIORAL economists, studies how people actually make decisions and it is very different from what most marketers and researchers think. People use simple heuristics. Some think we are "predictably irrational" (Ariely); some believe these "fast and frugal" heuristics lead to BETTER decisions (Gigerenzer), but all agree we use them.
Students in Germany were asked which city had a bigger population, San Diego or San Antonio. Not knowing too much about many U.S. cities was an advantage! All they had to go on was recognition and they were more accurate in their guesses than U.S. students who "knew too much." By the way, the U.S. students beat the German students when the test was about two cities in Germany. With recognition heuristics, marketers should think "brand familiarity."
As the long-tail gets longer on purchase choices, media viewing, social networking...basically everything...the need for simplification will become even more acute. Enter the opportunity for simplification marketing.
We're seeing simplification via small format, 10,000-foot stores with fewer brand choices, digital wish lists, and targeted recommendations. It is also a main reason that advertising still works. It makes brands familiar to you, which takes risk out, and orients you to a manageable number of choices. Many simplify navigating the Web by typing domains into Google. I use automated pay whenever I can. Most of my morning until 10 a.m. is ritualized--I don't want to think until my third cup of coffee. There is a reason the magazine Real Simple is a success.
Marketers should work with their research teams to study opportunities to simplify people's lives. Use innovation to find a way to offer simplification rather than more choices...that would be a real "value-add".
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
Traditionally, new product development has been a linear process. The "new product" team creates many alternative versions of the core idea, winnows them down in various stages of testing and re-development until a winner emerges and gets launched.
And then expect 4 out of 5 to fail.
Things are changing. Great ideas are not only coming top-down; they're coming from interns, they're coming from customers sharing their best ideas out of love for your brand (like Dell Idea Storm), from ethnography in third world countries. Innovation is about inspiration coming from continuously listening for the unexpected which can come at anytime from anywhere; nothing linear about that!
The CTO of Hulu (formerly from Microsoft) said in April at Ad:Tech in San Francisco, "90% of what we learn comes AFTER we launch a new product."
At the recent ARF conference, Procter and Nielsen Online told us how listening to the blogosphere gave them totally new insights (vs. surveys) into the relationship between resurgence in cloth diapering and re-emerging values in American society.
I asked the head of research for a major media company what a bad idea looks like in a continuous and circular innovation process. He said, "It's not about a score. It's based on whether or not the premise proves faulty, or impractical as a business."
3M told a great innovation story at the ARF annual conference about a new product that started with a complaint call into customer care. The representative did his own research online, came up with a solution, filmed a video that he put on YouTube and re-contacted the customer to see if that is what he was looking for. 3M reaps the rewards of creating a culture where innovation can come from anyone and anywhere and giving employees a little breathing room to explore.
Think broadly, because innovation might come as a media, servicing or engagement concept and not a product. For example, Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, Beinggirl, and the Obama campaign are examples of amazing innovation without creating new products in search of high uniqueness scores.
If consumers are in control, then re-center your thinking on how people live their lives and what THEY want to talk about. Respond favorably when your research and insights team asks for resources to broaden beyond surveys to mine social media, search terms, retail, digital behaviors, and customer care. Don't pigeonhole innovation to a team or a project; commit your company to a culture of listening for the unexpected.
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
Let's start with what we know about media habits, structural changes in advertising practices, and advertising effectiveness.
Credit: Paul Carlon
Media habits
People are NOT watching less TV. Over 95% of video watching hours still occur on TV. However, many multitask and use DVRs. People are moving away from print toward digital. Time spent on social networking sites continues to explode; up 83% vs. last year according to Nielsen Online. Mobile is a main device for connecting to the Internet in many countries and is increasing here; apps and text messages bring brand messages right to the point of purchase.
Advertising practices
While Advertising spending is down because of the recession, TV, digital, and shopper marketing appear to be gaining share at the expense of radio and print (based on latest reports from TNS media). My guess is that spending on creating Web sites, communities, widgets, staff needed to participate in social media, etc., is growing but we don't really know since it isn't reported. Print is challenged, especially by classified advertising moving online. While print media now all have digital versions, they find that their audiences and ad revenues do not automatically transfer.
Structural changes
It's about integration. Media companies are putting their content on multiple platforms, making content rather than medium the organizing principle. Advertisers are creating integrated marketing teams. Advertisers and media companies are directly negotiating cross-platform relationships with deep integration of the advertiser into the program content (so people can't fast forward past the message).
Ad effectiveness
Despite people saying in surveys they don't like advertising, it still works. Perhaps the biggest surprise to some is the evidence that TV advertising works as well as ever. Even display ads and search are proven to translate into business without a click.
At the ARF, our planning scenarios about advertising include:
Both push and pull advertising will continue to work and will show growth once the economy rebounds.
TV will remain an attractive advertising option.
Media companies will create synergy for properties across platforms (e.g. watch the TV show, interact with the show on TV or online) and offer integrated sponsorships to advertisers.
Advertisers will form integrated marketing teams and choose from a broad range of media strategies, sometimes driven by reach, sometimes driven by digitally-enabled targeted engagement approaches.
Marketers will embrace social media as the integration of advertising, PR, customer care, and research.
Retail will become increasingly powerful, encouraging more shopper marketing.
Advertisers will continue to think globally and will become increasingly multi-cultural in the U.S.
The evidence does not support the "advertising is dead" view that some express. Both push and pull advertising brings value to people's lives and continues to help marketers build great brands.
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson
Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization's priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
Two years ago leading marketers (imagine Procter and Unilever in the same room) and research companies formed working committees at 
The old branding model is past its "sell by" date. It is a product-centered model that comes from packaged goods in the '70s and '80s; offer differentiated benefits that a particular consumer segment is thought to care about. "My peas are picked at the peak of sweetness"...that kind of thing. This model is breaking down as people try store brands and find they are "fit for purpose" at a better price. Now what?
Noah Brier has created a freely available tool called 
A reality check from Tina Turner for brand managers: most customer/brand relationships are marriages of convenience not finding a soul-mate. There are plenty of annulments, divorces, and lots of sleeping around.
Can this be right? I mean Coke has 3.5 million fans on Facebook and Starbucks has 2.5 million. But think about those numbers relative to how many drink a Coke in a week or go into a Starbucks. That 10% number is starting to make a lot of sense, right?
