Two strategists break down brand building from the ground up: start by defining what you want to achieve and who needs it, then find the gap competitors like Axe miss. They use the brand ladder to move from product features through emotional benefits to self-actualization, showing how the best ads now tell stories about who you become, not what the product does.
How do you think through what would be a good message? Is it very much like a quantitative approach or more qualitative approach or both?
So brand strategy is super fun. So you'll start with like, what do you want to achieve as a brand? Who are you trying to attract?
Is there anything other than make money in that equation?
I mean, you have to break it down. You have to go— I mean, like in any industry, make money is a bit broad.
Step 1, sell brands. Step 2, whatever. And step 3, profit. You know, it's like the middle part.
That's where you want to end up. But it's like who, you know, if If I want someone to hire a brand, right? I want you to bring Quaker Oats into your kitchen. Well, what am I firing, right? Because you have to imagine that they're eating Quaker Oats or they're using Speed Stick instead of something else. So what's differentiating you, right? And then if you really want to be good, you want to understand what's missing in their lives, right? So you could take an example of Speed Stick and Axe, right? You want people to buy Speed Stick over Axe. Well, what does Axe not fulfill for your consumer? Or is maybe there's a different segment you should be talking to? But it starts very heavily like, who is your audience? What are the pain points in their life? What are the things that they're looking for? And it could be super emotional, right? There's a brand ladder that can start, usually starts with like basic product benefits, goes up to feature, features, and goes up to emotional benefits. You can go all the way up into like self-actualization if you really work through that brand ladder. It's a while since I've done that work in depth. I used to do a lot of it. Now I've become a general manager, so I don't get to do it all the time. But it's, it's very cool when an insight can lead to really great advertising.
Right, because You know, if you take a— if I take a step back and I watch advertisements, they've shifted over the years, and you can kind of notice it if you pay attention. It's like they shifted from like describing what the thing is to the features of the thing, and then to like— you'll see an entire advertisement that doesn't talk about the product at all. It's like a guy, a man playing with his son, catch, and then it's like some brand has nothing to do with anything. It's like, so self-act— that's more the self-actualization, right?
Some brands can go there and, and it works for them. Sometimes brands have nothing really to talk about on the product side, so they have to go into the emotional side of it. But there's always been a history of having very emotional advertising and very functional advertising. And sometimes you can blur the lines, right? You can show off product features in a way, but it comes through emotionally in, let's say, a setting of a mother serving her daughter breakfast and she's going off to hockey practice. Like, you can create the scenario, but really you're also talking about how that breakfast is creating, you know, giving the daughter the nourishment she needs to have, you know, a healthy morning.
