Brand Evolution, Equity, and Positioning Strategies
The history of brand has quickly evolved from a relatively simple approach taken by companies to differentiate their products and services by name or graphical representation alone to highly targeted, effective, emotive approaches to communicating value. Brands have evolved from fairly generic approaches to communicating the functional value of a product or service to evoking emotions customers attain when using them. An example of this is the progression of Proctor & Gamble (P&G) to communicate the utilitarian values of soap in the previous centuries of their branding to the psychographic benefits to parents of providing clean clothes for their children. P&G continues to excel on this progression from the utilitarian or functional value their products deliver to the psychographic and emotive nature of them. Today the branding and positioning from P&G and other consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers concentrate on the contributory value of their products to the roles of consumers using them. In other words, using P&G soap and cleansers are marketed to imply a mother is more capable and caring for their family by using these products.
The progression of the Coca-Cola brand is also a case in point. This company is masterful at the evolution of brands, progressing across over 150 nations with their branding strategies, creating a highly positive, energy-charge persona of their customer. All of these factors are orchestrated to create a highly effective strategy of reinforcing the core messaging and differentiated value of Coca-Cola.
Archie Norman's Change Management at Asda
Norman's success as a change agent will depend largely on his ability to execute the requisite culture change at Asda. He made an excellent choice when he recruited Allen Leighton as VP of Marketing, who appears to be the sort of individual that associates will look to for confirmation that they are moving in the right direction. Norman's credibility will rest in the financial success of the company that is a result of the cost-cutting and structural changes he implemented early, and the backdrop of the softer attributes of the renewal effort. The shifts that are necessary for robust culture change include coordination of the change efforts in each of the stores, taking down the communication and functional silos, and establishing a rigorous training and development plan for internal managers. Some of this effort will be directed toward back-filling where spots of resistance to change have sprung up and where associates identify areas with which they would like more involvement—this is the work of the mutual engagement of the core, and it will not be unfamiliar to a former McKinsey & Company consultant.