Lessons from world marketing guru Kevin Lane Keller

Lane Keller is the E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. Previously he was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he also served as the head of the marketing group. He has served as brand confidant to marketers for some of the world's most successful brands, including Disney, Ford, Intel, Levi Strauss, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Starbucks. Lane Keller's general area of expertise lies in consumer marketing, and with over thirty-five published papers, his research has been widely cited and has received numerous awards.

"Conventional wisdom says creating a brand is about differentiating your product. Think again," says Lane Keller in a paper published in the Harvard Business Review: September 2002. Expanding on this view, Lane Keller presented some lessons at GIBS on the world's strongest brands, expanding on the importance of customer-based brand equity and condensing the characteristics of a strong brand into eight concise points.

Lane Keller believes that brands are as important as ever, as they are a shorthand way for consumers to reduce risk. "As life gets more complicated and consumers have less time, the ability of a brand to be a predictable experience is important, in that consumers will automatically return to that same brand."

It is hard to create such brands, however, due to increased global competition within every category, more "savvy" consumers receiving widespread information from the media and the internet, decreased effectiveness of traditional marketing tools due to the proliferate number of vehicles diluting the impact of advertising, and complex product portfolios.

In this difficult environment, therefore, the challenge is for marketers to gain a keen understanding of their consumers, brands and the relationship between the two. The desired outcome is customer-based brand equity, vital because the power of the brand resides in the consumer's mind, with the promise and expectation they have built allowing marketers to build a strong brand.

The concept of customer-based brand equity is built on the differential effects that the consumer brand knowledge (thoughts, feelings, perceptions) has on the consumer's response to brand marketing activity. Determinants of customer-based brand equity are consumer awareness of, and familiarity with, the brand, and that they hold some strong, favourable and unique brand associations in their memory.

A product or service with positive brand equity will enjoy certain benefits, including greater brand loyalty and being less vulnerable to competitive marketing actions; commanding larger margins and more inelastic responses to price increases and elastic responses to price decreases; receive greater trade cooperation & support; increase marketing communication effectiveness; yield licensing opportunities; and support brand extensions, a massive issue considering that 90% of new products are line extensions.

Lane Keller then went on to cite eight specific characteristics of strong brands:

- A deep and visceral understanding of what their brand means to the consumer, allowing the custodians of that brand to market the appropriate products and market products appropriately.

- Properly positioning brands. As important as any points of difference one creates to individualise a brand, are the points of parity. Points of difference create a strong, favourable and/or unique brand association. Points of parity - issues on which the brand competes with its competitors - are just as necessary. There are two kinds of points of parity: the first is Category or Necessary types of parity (such as all banks offering ATM's); the second is Competitive points of parity, which involves negating the competitors' point of difference whilst creating one's own. Often the point of difference is established, it's the point of parity that needs to be strengthened.

- Providing superior delivery of desired benefits. This relates to new brands that have found the white space in the market that consumers are not getting, and then relentlessly delivering on that.

- Maintaining innovation and relevance for mature brands.

- Establishing credibility and creating appropriate brand personality and imagery. There are three key dimensions to credibility: expertise, trustworthiness and likeability. Lane Keller believes that few brands excel in all three areas, but those that do are very powerful.

- Communicating with a consistent voice at one point in time and over time.

- Employing a full range of complementary brand elements and supporting marketing activities, all of which ought to be integrated to achieve the best blend. But a brand is not just a name, it's also a logo, a symbol, packaging, and slogan. Often under-utilised, a slogan is a handle to your brand that synthesises the brand positioning into a short phrase, such as "Just Do It" (Nike), "It's Everywhere You Want To Be" (Visa), and "The Power to Be Your Best" (Apple).

- Strategically design and implement a brand hierarchy, as there are normally multiple brands associated with any one product. The two main basic principles here are those of relevance and differentiation. The principles of relevance argue that equity is created at the highest hierarchical level possible. Differentiation says that at any level down, differentiation must be sharply defined in order for the consumer to understand the differences between the various products. In short, the key to a portfolio is to maximise coverage but minimise overlap.

Tomorrow's branding necessities involve blending strategically top-down & tactically bottom-up brand management; living the brand charter (internal branding and directional documentation, delivering on the promise); leveraging brand partnerships (co-branding, with both services and products); integrating brand marketing (using diverse marketing vehicles whilst retaining brand consistency and synergy); and capturing brand value (return on brand equity, what the brand is worth).

In conclusion, says Lane Keller, branding is not rocket science but the marketplace is an incredibly complex place, so the key is brand equity, which helps to focus marketing efforts, and winning businesses in the 21st century will be those that successfully build, measure, and manage global brand equity. Marketers must do what the strong global brands do, and smart marketers will use every tool at their disposal and devise ones that are not yet available in their relentless pursuit of achieving brand pre-eminence.