[MUSIC] So we just talked about brand positioning, which is the strategic part of brand position and if you really think about brands you'll realize that although you know some great crisp brands it's very hard to get to that positioning. You can have lots of different thoughts. You an have different points of differences. Different target segments, different frames of reference. Lots and lots and lots and lots of different choices but then you want to hone in to the right choice, that's the trick of marketing. To explain marketing, the concepts aren't that difficult to grasp, but they are very, very hard to do right. There's lots and lots of ways to do marketing wrong, and only a few ways to do marketing precisely right. And the next concept that I'm going to talk about is a brand mantra, or an elevator speech. This, the elevator speech, you may have heard of that. This is the way you define a brand in 30 seconds. So we're talking about 30 seconds worth of material. It sounds so easy, 30 seconds, but the truth of the matter is to get the right, critical 30 seconds, the right brand mantra, that takes lots and lots of analysis and and a lot of wrong turns and a lot of wrong ways. If you come up with a brand mantra right away or an elevator speech right away, maybe you're lucky, but chances are you haven't given it enough thought. You really do need to think about lots of the different positions. So what I'm going to suggest here, what I'm going to talk about is a relatively easy concept to get. But it's very hard to do well. So let me tell where we want to end up and I'll talk about how we get to it. We want to end up with a 30 second speech, as I said, the elevator speech. Or a brand mantra and a brand mantra may be three words. But I want to get down to the right three words. And so, one of the things you do is when you're creating a brand and thinking about a brand or thinking about a product category, there's a lot of market research that you can do to try to figure out what's going on in customer's heads, and how do they think about the category and how do they think about different brands. And one way you can think about it, in order to figure out again what's the essence of the brand, what's the brand mantra, is to develop what's called a mental map. And what a mental map is, kind of a graphic, with circles and arrows and things like that, of what the brand is. And it's kind of a thought association process, you ask the consumer, what comes to mind when you think of the brand? And then, there's lots of different ways to do this and I'll just show you one but there are lot of different ways and you write down what the brand is with the essence of the brand is from the consumer point of view. What the different associations are and how those associations lead to other associations. Some people call this mental math, some people call them schemas and there's a lot of different techniques you can do in these mental maps. The size of the circle can be how often that association is named by different people. The lines that connect one circle to another circle can be the strength of those associations, but essentially what you're developing is sometimes it's called a semantic associative network, or a mental map. You're developing a picture of the thought associations that come up with the brand. And so, what I'm going to show you here is a mental map of McDonald's. You start out with what differentiate McDonald's. You think about the golden arches, the brand name. And then, and this is just one person's thought process, you come up with things that are characteristic of the category. And so, those are the red circles. So McDonald's makes meal, it provides services. It's family, food, family, fun. It's good value. And then, the yellow circles here are the associations with each one of these points of parity actually. Frame of reference characteristics that are unique to McDonald's. So McDonald's has certain meals. What are the meals that McDonald's has? Well, it gives hamburgers. It has breakfast. It has fries. What are the brands associated with those meals? Egg mcmuffin, a big mac. What's the quality? Well, it's always consistent, it's fresh, it's good tasting. And this is one example of a mental map. There's lots of other ones that you can come up with. But you can see the idea here is that you have circles and lines that connect these associations. You can do this in a lot of different ways. You can do it the closest ones to the core are the ones that are top of mind, that come up first. The ones that are further away, come up after a time. And so, there are a lot of things, but what I'm trying to get here is all of the thought associations that come up with a brand. And then, what you want to do is, do this over several customers, and do it in market research, states it several different ways, and essentially you want to take all these different abstract phrases and concepts that are out there, and figure out which are the most important. Maybe five to ten, which are the very most important. And so, what you're doing is, you're starting with the mental map, or the associations that people have with the brand, or maybe with the category. Depending upon how well known the brand is, you might do it at a category level, you might do it at a what if level, you might do it at a prototype level, a concept level, or the brand level. But you have this big mental map, and then you want to hold down that mental map to the core brand values which are the five or ten critical brand values that are important to that brand. And from that you then want to reduce those five or ten to the key concepts that are going to be the DNA of the brand, the Brand Mantra. So the brand mantra is defined as the heart and soul of the brand, the DNA. It's the brand essence. The brand promise. And it's, again, goes back to that elevator speech, it's just really what people think of as the core of the brand. It's very important know this brand mantra because everything you do within this brand mantra, all your products that you come out with, all your new products, all your advertising, has to all fit within the essence. The customer's going to know the brand mantra, the employees are going to know the brand mantra. If you have a very, very strong brand, it's very crystal clear what that brand is and what it means. And it characterizes everything that's done under the brand name. And that's very, very important and it's particularly important nowadays as you go online, offline, websites, phones. Your brand is on lots of different things, and you really want to make sure that the heart and the soul of the brand is consistent. Across all of these different media, these different platforms, these different products. So what is the essence of the Brand Mantra? It has three basic parts. One part is the brand function, it describes the nature of the product or service, it describes the type of experiences, the benefits that the brand provides. Then, there's the descriptive modifier that further classifies or clarifies the nature of what the brand is delivering. And then, there's an emotional qualifier that kind of explains exactly what those benefits are and in what way the brand delivers on those. Those probably easiest to give you some examples. Before I do that, though, let me just again what the brand mantra is used for. It's used internally to guide decisions. And I think I already mentioned this, it's what the brand should and should not be. By the way, that's a very important idea. A brand mantra not only says what a brand is, but as importantly, it says what a brand is not. And you really want to have, almost black and white, that idea. This is a Nike, this is not a Nike. That kind of idea. And it communicates the boundaries of the brand. It has to be short, simple. And it should be inspirational. So now we have the examples. These are very famous ones. Nike, they're global brands. Nike, Disney, McDonald's. So Nike is authentic, athletic, performance. Just do it, be real, that's authentic. It's very much an athletic brand. It's not just shoes, it's clothing, but when you think of Nike, you think about athletic, and it's about performance. The technique or the ability, that again, just do it. That kind of notion. Disney and McDonald's are kind of interesting because they both are about family fun, and they actually both have a lot of things in common, but the brand mantra is different. Disney is about entertainment. Now, that is not to say that Disney doesn't have food. Disney sells quite a bit of food at their parks and different places that they have. But when you think Disney, you think fun family entertainment. And even the food comes within that brand mantra of Disney, of entertainment, McDonald's on the other hand, is fun and family, but it's food, and even if you have a McDonald's playground or something like that, you still think of it as the food first. And so, although these are similar and in some sense, you can see they're actually also quite, quite different. And I don't think you'd ever get Disney and McDonald's confused. Even though they're going after similar target markets and they're offering similar emotional benefits, they really are quite, quite distinct different brands and they have very different brand mantras. [MUSIC]
