My last assignment was a Brand report assessing the value of the brand "RAF Recruitment" and what routes it could take in the next year or so. The critique of the brand was nothing special- that it seemed to be fulfilling its goals of reaching 13-24 year-olds through mediums which they use. I did discover one aspect that surprised me though. That most of the straight mass marketing that the RAF currently undertakes is not to recruit people, although that's what the call to action is at the end.
I stumbled across a thread in an RAF forum in which people who serve in the RAF were complaining that when the said they were in the RAF, but not pilots people looked confused. One went as far as to say people had no idea why we had an air force at all. This is when it struck me that the RAF was trying to save it's skin. People are paying taxes to pay for a service which they don't understand. So when the advertising appears to appeal solely to "white, middle-aged men" they are reaching their target audience, the tax payer.
The main focus of this report, however, was to ascertain where the brand could go next. Again I started with the fairly mundane reasoning that they should be trying to attract women to the force as 92% of roles are available to women, yet they only account for around 12% of these positions. It was when I was researching these figures that I stumbled across the Girl Guides UK
website and found that the values and skills they try and instil in their girls correlate directly to the values and skills that the RAF states on its website it looks for in potential recruits. It may not be ground breaking, but it is solid and it really does make sense.
This is what I think I had previously been missing. I saw branding as the be all and end all of a product, that without it there was no product, and that a good one would catapult it to the forefront of the market. I thought that it had to be all glitz and glam to appeal to anyone.
After I had finished my assignment it occurred to me that perhaps where I may have fallen down was in my lack of research into branding in general, so I will make up for that now. My tutor, Vic Davies, told us two stories about marketing at the beginning of the year which have stuck with me. The first, which The Good Agency has recently blogged about, is the Stick of Rock principle- that your brand/marketing message should run through your business like the message through a stick of rock.
The second is about a moon mission. The President of the United States goes to The Kennedy Space Centre to watch the shuttle take-off and is given a tour of the Centre. He gets separated from the party, so goes off in search of them. He comes across a man sweeping the floor and asks the man what he does here. The man replied, "I'm putting a man on the Moon." That's a powerful brand.
Wally Olins states that there are four parts to a brand; Products/Services, Environment, Communication and Behaviour. Marketingpower.com defines the brand as anything that distinguishes it from another product/service. To me it's synonymous with PR. Both are what your brand/company/product/service says and what is said about it. Simples.
According to a study carried out my Millward Brown Cisco is the 22nd most powerful global brand and the 7th most powerful technology brand. Business Week recently ranked Cisco as 14th most powerful brand. But what does that mean for Cisco? Especially as "anti-globalisation thinking is strong across Europe" and now that "human attention has become a global currency".
Marilyn Mersereau stated that Cisco is very good planning for now, but wants to get ahead of the game. She said that by acquiring Pure Digital, and with it the Flip Digital Camera, Cisco is moving towards its aim of becoming known for video; in the home, at work and on the go. She compared Cisco's "video experience" hope to that of Dolby and the "sound experience".
Jeremy Bulmore, in "Posh Spice and Persil" state that the global brand is not just a contradiction, but and "impossibility". This statement strikes a chord with me, as I have always had trouble with the idea of globalisation. In my mind a brand is only as real as the consumer perceives it, and as culture affects perception, then surely a brand could be perceived wildly differently in Jamaica to Mumbai, as has been well illustrated by the long running HSBC ads. Bulmer concurs that branding resides in the mind of the consumer. Holt, Quelch and Taylor, in The Harvard Business Press, assert that global brands, along with politicians and celebrities, have become a uniting lingua franca for consumers everywhere. As the brand is a corporate's most profitable asset there is so much more to be discussed on this topic, but I shall leave the topic, for now, with this final thought:
"A Brand that captures the mind gains behaviour; A Brand that captures your heart gains commitment."
