Setting a clear strategy for your brand

At The Marketing Show in Johannesburg yesterday, Monday, 4 May 2009, Buckie shared the experiences of Clorox (one of the main producers of bleach, among other cleaning products), which was concerned with flagging product growth, and which wanted to increase market share of its products.

Clorox studied the common strategic methods of hundreds of high growth brands from outside its own stable, and identified nine fundamental characteristics:

Each high growth brand had:

1. Single-minded growth idea
   
2. Senior-management-led strategy
   
3. Product superiority (you can't advertise your way to success for a mediocre product)
   
4. Strong value proposition
   
5. Consistent positioning
   
6. Disciplined broadening (always sustainable)
   
7. Long-term innovation strategy (even when very long term, this is always seen as the Holy Grail)
   
8. Mass-plus-one approach (marketed through mass media, plus other channels where it made sense)
   
9. Retail win (the success of the brand translated into higher earnings for the retailers carrying thebrand)
   

At first it may seem as the above points are simplistic, obvious and perhaps even somewhat boring. But as Clorox used the points to evaluate its own approach to its products, it realised that it was seriously lacking on a lot of these points, and that changes would have to be made.

Clorox realised that committing to a strategy is more important than finding the perfect strategy. It began to focus on a single growth idea, which would hold for 3 - 5 years.

There were three principles that were applied to the core strategy:

1. Understand and challenge the conventional wisdom. Look for historical stalwarts in the brand's history, and identify possible organisational barriers to success.
   
2. Identify strategic alternatives. Ask yourself what you do well, and what your competitors do well. Learn from all experiences.
   
3. Force single-minded concensus.
   

Although Corex declined to make any statistics and numbers available, it did provide graphs that clearly showed that this approach reversed the downward market share of its brands, and in all cases caused marketshare, ROI and profits to soar.

• Bizcommunity.com is a media partner for The Marketing Show.