Get Real: The Return of the Product

Marketers have allowed an insidious myth to gain acceptance: that products are increasingly similar and because this is inevitable, emphasis needs to be placed on branding to differentiate. Sterenberg and Baker refute this as dangerous nonsense. Drawing on a major international study as well as the obvious success of many distinctive products, they conclude that the role of branding should be to amplify the product experience, not ignore it.

The broad history of consumer culture has been largely concerned with the evolution of goods from commodity status to the sophisticated constructs we now call brands. And in our relationships with these constructs there is often a natural tension between elements of the product and the surrounding construction of the brand.

If you had to pick one idea that underpinned the boom in branding in the last decade, ‘functional equivalence’ might be it. The idea that products lack meaningful performance differentiation has been widely accepted.

As a consequence marketers have turned to the emotional components of branding to give products their distinct identity. At times product performance has almost been ignored – left off the list at the branding party. Marketers often treat it as the hygiene factor – essential but hardly exciting. As Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide and creator of the Lovemarks concept ventured in a recent Frontline interview: ‘I think [a] brand’s role is not based on [its] product performance at all.’

Some support for the view that marketers have ignored product performance to their cost is provided by recent data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI). In spite of the broad adoption of quality programmes such as ISO, TQM and Six Sigma, the report card on customer satisfaction for the last 10-year period is very mixed.

While scores for fast-food brands and some automotive and personal computer brands have gone up, there have been broad declines in food manufacturing, apparel, personal care categories and many service sectors. In spite of investing tens of millions of dollars over this period in associating their brands with quality and desirability, companies such as Coca-Cola (down 2.4%), Nestlé (-5.7%), Hewlett-Packard (-9.0%), PepsiCo (-3.5%), Anheuser Busch (-6.0%), Nike (-4.9%) and many others have suffered.

Whether the products of such companies have actually declined in measures of objective quality is debatable, but they have clearly failed to keep up with rising consumer expectations at a time when they face increasing pressure from low-wage countries and high price-cutting pressure from global retailers.

The recent troubles at General Motors, the world’s largest automotive manufacturer, can be traced to a misplaced faith in the power of the brand at the expense of exciting and meaningful product differentiation.

Now, reporting from Research International’s 10th RIO study, there is powerful evidence from key global consumer segments that a renewed focus on the product side of the equation is needed. In this study we spoke with over 1,200 people in 43 countries, capturing individuals who had a ‘high intensity’ connection with at least one brand in their lives (incidence ranged from 20% to 40% depending upon the country). This sample and the descriptions provided yielded a database of over 3,000 high-intensity brand relationships.

Why the focus on ‘intensity’? Because there is strong evidence that intense brand relationships are key in maximising lifetime customer value and in generating the element of ‘buzz’ that is increasingly important in brand diffusion.

The value of sensory experiences
In asking people to describe their brand relationships and the key drivers behind them, what did we find? Did we hear about the mystery and intimacy of the brand connection? Or the warm feelings engendered by association with the brand?

While branding elements clearly have a key role to play in building and sustaining intensity, at the heart of the majority of these relationships sat an intensified product experience, often described in polysensory terms. Touch, smell, taste, feel, appearance, sound, great design – these are the modalities that frequently drive a great brand relationship, either separately or in powerful combinations. Above all, these consumers were focused on the product experience first, the brand relationship second (see box).

Understanding customers' experiences
Why are sensory and polysensory excellence so vital to creating brand experiences? For one thing a sensory touchpoint can confirm the experience, make it real. For one Norwegian, ‘the click from my Nikon is the sign that we have created something together’. Sensory pleasure is also often linked with the natural world by people, so for urban consumers it can turn brands into refuges from a virtual or industrialised environment.

A sensory touchpoint can act as the point of transmission for a brand’s communications – one Japanese consumer praised the ‘quiet and dignified’ sound Nikka whisky makes as it is poured. These attributes might be part of the brand image, and sensory excellence has made them real. Finally, consumers have a tendency to attribute human qualities to brands they feel connected to, and a polysensory experience can make a product seem more rounded and alive.

Great brand relationships begin with powerful product experiences. Marketers need to set the highest priority on understanding and improving the interface between the customer and the product. Steven Jobs’ obsession with this interface has led not only to the design triumphs of the iMac G5 and the increasingly iconic iPod but has also driven him to produce (to date) four different generations of iPod interface software, aimed at making a great product experience even greater.

Marketers who obsess about the customer experience, whether it be Apple, Jet Blue or Ikea, not only put the consumer at the heart of their innovation process, but also use multidisciplinary approaches to generate insights that will provide competitive advantage.

The California-based industrial design group, Ideo, uses sociologists and anthropologists to help it drive a product design process that is characterised by a rapid sequencing of observation, prototyping and fast implementation. Its design philosophy is underpinned by what founder Bill Moggridge calls ‘designing verbs not nouns’. (Brands are nouns, product experiences are verbs.)

Research International’s own Super Group process relies on highly creative consumer partners to ideate and dig deeply into the product experience, using tools such as accompanied shopping and other connections borrowed from ethnography – for example, consumer journals and cross-category ‘cool’ hunting.

All these approaches implicitly acknowledge the limitations of traditional innovation and research processes, which have relied too heavily upon the power of conversation and have not concentrated sufficiently upon behaviour. Serendipity and the observation and understanding of what the author Fulton Suri calls ‘Thoughtless Acts’ (in her book of the same name) are central to this development philosophy.

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2005 issue of Market Leader. To read the rest of this article on the BRS Group website, click here.

Malcolm Baker is Founding Partner at BRS Group, a San Rafael, Calif., research firm.