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January 5th, 2012

Do great brand stories come from within - or from focus groups?

The other day I had lunch with a big-budget marketing consultant and we got to talking about one of his clients.

"I spent most of last week in focus groups," he said.  "We're rebranding and repositioning the product and looking for insights from our customers as to which way we should go."

It got me thinking:  When you're looking to invent, reinvent, transform or migrate your brand, should your direction come from your employees or your customers?  Should your brand be created from the inside out, or the outside in?

I'm coming down firmly on the side of branding from the inside out.

First of all, you know how I feel about focus groups:  Most people, who don't work in marketing or communications, don't give a whole lot of thought to their feelings about brand loyalty.  That doesn't mean they don't have strong and complex feelings about the brands they choose to buy, use and love - it just means they haven't spent a lot of time analyzing how they got to these feelings.  

People go to therapy for years to understand why they've made various choices in their lives.  It's a bit much to ask them to explain why they're buying your brand of margarine, or how they'd feel about your margarine if you replaced the blue mountaintop design with a green forest design.

Not having your own vision virtually guarantees a parity product.

As a marketing 'expert', on the other hand, your job is to think about your product, the marketplace, the gaps in that marketplace, and more about what's possible than your customer does.  You're supposed to be able to make the creative leaps that non-marketing types can't make.  Most of the time, the customer's frame of reference is only their own limited interaction with margarine or butter-substitutes, so the best they can come up with (at least in a focus group environment) is "Well, I really don't like X...", not "What I've really always wanted is a brand of margarine that made me feel the way Godiva chocolate does, from the purchasing experience to the consumption experience..."

That doesn't mean customers are dumb or unimaginative - it just means that when you rely on non-experts to guide your vision for a brand, you're less likely to come up with the Big Idea that will give you a brand story that stands out.

Tagged under : branding focus groups rebranding research