It's wonderful to feature four important brand strategy questions from customer experience strategy and innovation expert Woody Bendle. In the course of his typical daily routine, Woody has a more than healthy commute by Kansas City standards. Woody texted me about this brand strategy lesson on the way home one recent evening and followed it up the next day with this post reminding those responsible for brand strategy to think about what will happen when our ideas actually meet up with customers. Here's Woody!
Brand Strategy - When "Good Enough" Isn't by Woody Bendle
“The enemy of the good is great.”
Have you heard this expression before?
If you haven’t, the sentiment behind this expression is this: If you are continually reluctant to move forward until you have something that is great or perfect, you might sometimes fail to make valuable progress by getting something out there that is pretty darned good – but not great.
In many situations, I wholeheartedly subscribe to this philosophy.
But, there are occasions when you absolutely need to be better than “good enough.”
One of those occasions involves your brand strategy and every time you are presenting your brand.
Brand Strategy Isn't the Place for Good Enough
I recently pulled off the interstate to fuel up at a truck stop. As I was fueling, I happened to notice, for some reason, a display attached to the pump about never paying full price for gas again.
I really didn’t think too much about this display until I went around to the end of the pump to grab the squeegee and clean off my windshield. This is what I saw.
OOPS!
The original message that got my interest about never paying full price again didn't come through on the Shell brochure holder.
There, thanks to the application holder lid's placement, the "Never pay full price again" card became the "pay full price again" card.
I actually did a double-take, shook my head and wondered to myself if anyone had even thought about trying to stick some brochures in the holders to see what it looked like before they had a gazillion of them printed and sent all over the country. The sad thing is if they had just taken the two logos at the bottom of the brochure and moved them to the very top and shifted the rest of the content down, the message would've been read very clearly.
Lessons learned, and it's a great reminder that design and layout matters.
A Brand Strategy that is "Good Enough" Isn't
I have no idea if anyone at Shell is even aware of this issue. It did, however, serve as a valuable reminder that every time you are putting your brand in the marketplace, you need to ask yourself several important brand strategy questions:
- What am I trying to convey / communicate about my brand or my brand’s promotion?
- Is the message clear and compelling – not to me but to the customer?
- How will the message be put in front of the customer?
- What exactly will the customer see, hear, think, and feel when my message is put in front of them?
And finally, as you are working through the above questions, you’d be well served to think like my Missouri neighbors and just say “Show-Me” a little more often. - Woody Bendle
