That’s the tagline we want every woman in central Ohio to remember and live by. Fahlgren recently launched our first brand campaign with The Charles Penzone Salons, and we’re excited to see our creative hit the market.
Charles Penzone Salons came to us a few months ago with a challenge — drive guests into The Charles Penzone Grand Salons and make the brand high-fashion but attainable. After working closely with the Charles Penzone team, including Mr. Charles Penzone himself, we came up with a plan to target young professionals who were going through changes in their lives: getting married, having babies, and taking their life and career to the next level. These women were focused on beauty and confidence, and we saw them as the perfect audience for the brand.
By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director
I’d like to welcome Alden Schutte to our blog as a guest author. Alden is a brand strategist with Fahlgren’s healthcare group and brings a wealth of experience to our agency. For more than 35 years, his belief in the power of simple, meaningful brand stories has meant big results for his many clients.
What’s your brand story?
By Alden Schutte
Over the years we’ve asked that question to executives of all types of brands - including companies and organizations - and what continues to surprise us is the inability of most to easily deliver a succinct answer.
One of the most basic ways we make sense of our lives, our world and our place in it is through stories. It’s also true with brands. Brand stories that connect are always written around a strategic foundation, building each subsequent chapter around a powerful core idea or truth.
At Fahlgren, our brand stories succinctly sum up a client’s unique product or service benefit and why it matters to the target audience. However, before we can determine the core idea, a lot of research, market intelligence and analysis must take place. So how do we craft a brand story that’s coherent and compelling?
Our brand stories revolve around Brand Truths, Insights and Inspiration.
Truths: First we determine the essence of the brand and why it exists. We look to understand why someone would make the decision to purchase the brand or product and why it’s different or better than anything else in the marketplace.
Insights: We work to isolate the most meaningful and provocative brand truths about your consumers’ behaviors’, your category and your company. As blogger Peter Merholz says, it’s not who your customers are, it’s how they behave. Along the way we discard a lot of strong ideas to let the most powerful insights shine through. Insights that provide inspiration for concise creative solutions that work in concert with brand goals and objectives
Inspiration: The insights allow us to derive the inspiration for great strategy, audience segmentation, messaging and engagement. We develop a simplified creative message that turns desire into action. Our current campaign for Riverside Methodist Hospital has generated a 149% increase in patient visits since it began last year.
We believe that the best way to communicate a brand’s reason for existence is through storytelling. Stories, as we’ve all learned over the years, help us understand and work to clarify our lives.
Our stories drive a brand’s interaction with its selected target audiences, generating awareness, consideration, trial and purchase. Our brand stories work to create repetition of the selling process, leading to long-term brand loyalty, growth and profitability.
I was killing time the other day thumbing through the Valentines Day cards at a local grocery store. (I say “killing time” because I’m cynical … and because I have no need to purchase a card since there’s no one other than my dog and he has no use for paper cards, regardless of the “holiday”.)
As I was reviewing the plethora of cards, I took notice of the various headings separating them. For Him; For Her; For Husband; For Wife; For Dad From Kids; For Pre-teen Boy… And it struck me: How many ways do we need to say Happy Valentines Day? On the whole, it’s all so overwhelming and “noisy”. Valentines Day, as a brand, has gone overboard! But then I realized, in the context of a single card, in an envelope in my own hands away from everything else and the message is more digestible, easier to understand. I realized, there’s a marketing lesson in this love-overload experience.
In my work, I’m often challenged by ads that want to say everything in one creative execution, presumably to make it “work harder”. It appears as though the company is looking for a silver bullet that delivers their entire pitch instead of building the conversation one selling point at a time. Like the wall of Valentines Day cards, they’re trying to force their brands to be all things to all people - at the same time.
Brands and even products are umbrellas for communications.
Features and benefits, the selling points, become the subjects of individual creative executions, not support-points shoehorned into one ad. Consider the iPhone commercials, a product that seemingly is all things to all people.
In the first year, we saw variations on a single theme: One device for all your needs. Sure the spots showcased the picture functionality, the email, contacts and, of course, the phone; but the single focus was the same: one device for all your needs.
As the public became familiar with the device’s capabilities, we saw more specific spots focused and drilling down on key features and benefits such as the Internet or more recently the App Store.
Again, the new spots showcase a diversity of applications in action, but focus on the one overriding message of the ad - the App Store, a unique benefit to the iPhone, provides endless convenience to the user.
In fact, if you go online and search for iPhone commercials (be careful, there’s some spoofs out there), you’ll find there are tens and hundreds of individual executions, each singly focused on one key message point, distilled to be understood almost universally. Clarity of message - a single focus, a feature and benefit fully explained to its basic and universal conclusion - is more effective at engaging and penetrating an audience than giving all the reasons to buy a product up front.
To make an execution work harder is to narrow the message to a pin point, not widen the scope and diffuse its potency. In this case, the message is, “Happy Valentines Day.” Expressed either as a pre-teen rockin’ V-day or just a simple, “with love…”
The message doesn’t change, how we say it might, but the take-away rings clear.
It’s 6:30am and my toddler is letting me know she’s ready to start the day.
We do the same thing every morning. I put her oatmeal in the microwave and like clock work, she points to the TV and says, “Dorda.” Only a mother would know baby talk, but my daughter wants to watch Dora the Explorer while she eats her breakfast.
Every morning we watch Dora the Explorer on Nick Jr. She’s only a toddler but already my daughter is a creature of habit and knows when she eats breakfast she gets to watch TV. And she already has a favorite brand - Dora the Explorer.
The funny thing is I don’t mind one bit. I have found myself indulging in her desire to have everything Dora. Because I think it’s cute every time she sees something Dora and says “Dorda,” I end up purchasing that product for her. Our last trip to the grocery store was an event; we got Dora crackers, soup, bandages and an electric toothbrush - all things that we already had at home but she didn’t care about that.
Her choice of consumer products is based on whose face is on the packaging. She asked for crackers the other day and wouldn’t eat the normal box of animal crackers because she wanted the Dora animal crackers instead. The animal crackers tasted exactly the same but the package was different and my toddler knew it.
She also knew the difference between her regular pink toothbrush and her new Dora toothbrush - both Colgate products but one was the definite winner in my toddler’s eyes. Colgate and Nick Jr.’s Dora the Explorer, both well-known brands, partnered together to produce a toddler’s dream toothbrush.
Colgate transformed their child’s electric toothbrush and gave it new appeal reaching a very important audience - moms of toddlers.
Brand Extensions
Brand extensions have helped companies build their brands and become top-of-mind in consumer purchasing behavior for decades. In 1979, Edward M. Tauber coined the term “brand extensions” to describe leveraging a well-known brand name in one category to launch a new product in a different category.
That’s the tagline we want every woman in central Ohio to remember and live by. Fahlgren recently launched our first brand campaign with The Charles Penzone Salons, and we’re excited to see our creative hit the market.
