Brand spells opportunity

Coca-cola promises refreshment, always. Pepsi-Cola promises the same, but for hormonally volatile denizens of a generation called "Next." Visa promises its club is bigger, while American Express promises its club is the right size and that you'll impress more people if you're in it than Visa's. FedEx promises to take the worry out of worldwide packaged delivery. Kodak promises special moments, renewable on demand. Chevrolet's promise? You can get there; but BMW promises that getting "there" is less the point than the fun on the way.

Which is more important--to make a promise, or to keep it?

For companies competing for profitable shares of consumers' pocketbooks today, the answer is both. Both sides of the promise equation are equally and critically important. "The brand" is no more and no less than a promise made and a promise kept; it is the cause and effect in a relationship between a marketer and a customer.

When an individual buys Coke, American Express, Kodak or any number of other brands, he or she is not buying a logo, but the emotional experience of refreshment, of financial freedom and stature, of warmth and connection to family or friends. The individual buys brands because they speak trust. Only the brand fits the emotion of those experiences like a glove, and delivers on the promise.

In a marketplace full of metoos and look-alikes on the shelf or in the showroom, the ability to capture again and again and again the emotional experience of refreshment, joy, pleasure, warmth, status, freedom and power is an invaluable asset, particularly amid today's worldwide information revolution. So valuable, in fact, that last October brand guru Scott Miller told the audience at the Association of National Advertisers meeting that today "branding is immensely more important and immensely more precarious" than at any time in history.

This is good news for magazines because there's no clearer connection between the boardroom and the living room. As media and sales options proliferate, magazines make sense to chief executive and consumer alike as an anchor of brand values. The database may indeed be a gold mine, and that new ad campaign may be a creative winner, but there's nothing like the promise of a brand delivered in print to compel both senior management and a consumer to feel they're making a sound, smart investment.

To Wall Street plaudits, companies have spent most of the 1990s learning to cost-manage their way to profitability, even in the face of fiercer competition, massive consolidation in distribution channels, and increasing sophistication among consumers. The grail now is sustainable profitability, and that comes through quality revenue growth--not the bottom line, but the top line.

The result? A greater percentage of the $186 billion marketers will spend on advertising in the United States this year is going toward developing "brand-building" strategies. That means identifying and developing ways to reinforce the wisdom of purchase behavior of loyal customers.

Between 5 and 15 percent of purchasers can be counted as a major product's "enthusiasts" group, according to Larry Light, president of Stamford, Connecticut-based brand consultancy, Arcature. Enthusiasts, says Light, show a willingness to pay more and to go to greater lengths to buy. These "best customers" feel they're getting a good value and represent word-of-mouth support. Sales to enthusiasts (that 5 to 15 percent) represent eight- to 10-times more profitability than sales to non-enthusiasts, Light's research shows.

"Mass marketing is a mass miss," Light concludes. "There should be a media-buying bias toward print because not only can magazine creative work so that the medium becomes the message, but you can get more from the medium in terms of attention value and use its targeted readership as a way toward building customer enthusiasm, instead of just preference."

Investing in the enthusiasm that accompanies delivering on a promise is branding. Magazine advertising's effectiveness in cultivating that enthusiasm by reinforcing the wisdom of a particular purchase is a smart investment. That's the good news about branding for magazines.

John McManus was Brandweek editor from 1992 to 1997, and was recently named editorial director of American Demographics. He can be contacted at dcmcmanus@aol.com.

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