In 1901 when the Quaker Oats Co. was founded in New Jersey
they used the trademark that they had previously acquired for the innovative
product of packaged cereal. Notably, the company was not run by Quakers or
associated with Quakers. In fact the guy who trademarked the symbol had simply
read about them. I suspect he knew that people thought of Quakers as principled
and honest folk - the kind of people who would put out a high-quality box of
oatmeal.
It’s fair to say that in the 114 years since Mr. Quaker
appeared consumers have been trying to see through the hype and manufactured
imagery that brand owners have been flinging at them. The consumer’s challenge
to suss out authenticity is not new. It has, however, been amped up. The first
big change is brand proliferation. The shopper has many more choices available
in most categories. The second obvious influence is the information fire hose
online – manufacturer sites, social, experts, consolidated ratings and reviews
etc.
Until recently, there was a well-established brand strategy approach
that was applied by most disciplined marketers and is still in use today. Put
simply: identify the consumer need, articulate how your brand fulfills that need
as a benefit and provide one or two nuggets that support your benefit claim.
These “nuggets” are often called “support points” or “reasons to believe” or
“proof points”. Mass media, especially
TV, only has room for one support point. A critical decision has always been
what the winning support point for that benefit should be. In a classic sense
it is an ingredient (Trident with Dentec) or a formulation (11 herbs and
spices) and so on.
The opportunity for brand owners now is to exploit the
new found dialogue with consumers to expose them to multiple support points in
whatever ways are appropriate. Marketers rarely concentrate intensely enough on
discovering and polishing these potentially valuable gems. They don’t always
know what they are looking for and they don’t necessarily know how to look.
That is why I developed a collaborative approach to doing that called Build
Belief™.
Build Belief starts from a model of four key areas to
uncover Belief Assets: Recognition, Observation, Intention and Action and roughly
20 specific triggers among those areas. The approach is a series of workshops
and quantitative research to determine the best array of support points for a
brand’s desired benefit.
I think the Build
Belief method is rigorous and valuable but if you prefer not to hire help I
think that you can still make gains “going it alone”. Get a
broad array of operations, R&D and sales people who are intimate with the
brand into a room with some facilitation and, chances are, you will discover
assets you didn’t know were there.
Pepsico acquired Quaker in 2001. It was really Gatorade that
they wanted, not so much the oatmeal.
I buy my grains, including oatmeal, from Bob’s Red Mill.
There is a Bob; he wears a bolo tie. There are a lot of reasons to believe that
he sells high-quality grains. You can read about them here.
