When Nigel Hollis visited a traditional market in China, he saw a range of sellers offering identical goods. “There was no way you could differentiate between produce on one stall or the next. Who you bought from depended on whether you liked the look of the guy at the stall and how trustworthy they looked.”
Mr Hollis, the chief global analyst at the marketing and advertising firm Millward Brown, says this is not a good way to compete against your rivals – especially if your competitors are not nearby market stalls, but multinational corporations.
“A brand has to be meaningfully different. It gives people a basis on which to make a choice. It helps people to justify a choice. And it helps people to feel good about the decision they’ve made.”
Originally from Ipswich, eastern England, Mr Hollis has spent 30 years in marketing at Millward Brown, and previously Cadbury Schweppes, after studying economics and marketing at Lancaster University. He is also the author of The Global Brand, and, more recently, The Meaningful Brand: How Strong Brands Make More Money.
“I was lucky enough to start at Cadbury,” he says. “It was expected that, as part of the marketing department, you would spend time with the research and development team, even if [that meant] tasting instant mash potato on a Monday morning”
It was this grounding that helped Mr Hollis to become one of the world’s leading authorities on branding – knowledge that he recently applied to the Middle East during a promotional tour of his latest book.
Here, he says, there are fewer brands with the same popularity as in the United States and Europe.”[That means] there’s the potential to grow and command a price premium.”
The argument of his latest book is simple: well-branded products sell more. They can justify a price premium, command greater market share and sell more to repeat customers.
This is true no matter how big your business is, he says, or where it’s located.
There are two main ways brands can stand out, says Mr Hollis: “Innovation, where the differentiating benefit is perceived as a real benefit by the customer or consumer. Or, failing that, it’s about values: tone of voice, and the way you present yourself to marketing.
“Marketing should be involved at a very early stage in the product development process”, he says, adding that if it’s not connected to innovation or engineering, it’s likely to be ineffective.
However, Mr Hollis, who nows lives in the US state of Vermont, accepts that marketing for small businesses with limited budgets can be challenging. “One of the exercises we do with our clients is to use teams to work out how to advertise for little money. If you put your mind to it, you can usually come up with something.
The biggest challenge is to make people stop and think. To pause to reconsider why they’re buying the brand they already buy, or to look beyond the more established and salient brand.”
Mr Hollis believes that in the UAE smaller companies have an important advantage. “It’s sometimes easier for small companies to create a coherent view of their purpose. This requires someone to focus on [the company’s purpose], in a way that is almost inherent to entrepreneurs.” Start-ups can identify and satisfy consumer’s unmet needs.
“If you can do that, amplify that, and continue to deliver a repeated good experience, people will start warming to you and enthusing about you.”
As to the importance of social media for modern branding, Mr Hollis agrees it has had a transformative effect, but says: “it’s no different from traditional media challenges. The brands who are successful figure out how to make content that resonates with their audience.
“It’s not a case of getting onto Twitter, and blasting out tweets about why people should buy your brand.
“An awful lot of the companies that have benefited are small. The most familiar example is various food vans and local bakeries in New York. People want to know where the food van is parked, and what they’ve got for sale.”
He believes these types of small companies use social media to offer something useful to consumers. “It’s not just about entertainment.”
For those doubtful of the difference branding can make to a company’s success, Mr Hollis cites the US yoghurt firm Chobani. Before it launched in 2006, the American yoghurt category was deadlocked, with market shares not changing much and all products health-focused.
But then came Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant to the US with a feta cheese business. “This guy says: it tastes awful.” So he launches Greek-style yoghurt, which tastes better than all the mainstream products, with a US$1 price point,” Mr Hollis says.
“The guy has grown a $1.5 billion brand. [Yoghurt companies] were missing the core benefit. They seemed to have forgotten that people might like something that tastes good.”
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
