Judy Hopelain, managing partner of Prophet Consulting.

On October 6, Judy Hopelain and Greg Sieck of Prophet Consulting shared their views about brand positioning with members of the Retail Consortium for Management Education.

Prophet is a management consultancy that helps companies achieve competitive advantage by integrating their business, marketing, and brand strategies.

Through lively discussions and creative group exercises, the pair illustrated the direct connection between brand performance and business performance, discussed the discipline involved in the development of brand positions, and revealed insight into consumer behavior and how various customer touchpoints can be managed to maximize marketing effectiveness.

Touchpoints
Touchpoints are the places where the consumer interacts with the brand. In retail, customer touchpoints are abundant: on the phone, in the store, picking up and touching a product, in the checkout line, through e-mail or Web site ordering, or receiving a package at home.

It’s not just the job of the marketing department to represent the brand. According to Sieck, a dirty restroom negates millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. “A lot of times, people go to advertising… but there’s so much more impact from a smiling employee, or some hot food, or some well-folded clothes put in a bag. We want to think about the total impact of the brand and the customer experience,” he said.

A brand is more than an ad, a logo, a jingle, a symbol, a spokesperson, a product, a slogan, or a name.

“For us, the simplest way to talk about brand is that it’s the collective perceptions of the people who matter…a brand is an asset, but a different type of asset. It lives in the minds of the people who are inside and outside the company,” said Hopelain. A different type of asset requires a different type of asset management.

Angela Caltagirone, RMI alum '92, marketing services manager of Williams-Sonoma, applies Hopelain's theories to her group at RCME program.

The ‘people who matter’ could be customers, employees, analysts, institutions, business partners, or the media. “Your current brand image is how you are currently perceived by people who matter,” said Hopelain.

Retailers should ask themselves, “What does my brand need to be able to do to support my business strategies? Five or ten years from now, what do I need people to think about my brand in order to be successful in my business? What do I have to become good at?”

Effective brand management focuses on identifying and optimizing high-impact customer touchpoints. A brand only has value if it affects behavior.

“Brand positioning is the vehicle for moving from the current brand image to the aspiration brand identity,” said Hopelain. “A positioning statement identifies the key messages for specific audiences. It helps ensure consistency in messaging and serves as a vehicle to help make the brand relevant and differentiated from the competition.”

Purchase Funnel
All companies have a series of stages through which they want consumers to move. The goal is to convert as many target customers as possible down the purchase funnel, from one stage to the next. These stages move progressively from awareness, consideration, preference, purchase and finally, loyalty to commitment.

“How do you drive consumers from being aware of to preferring your brand, to actually buying it, and then becoming loyal to it over time?” asked Hopelain. Every employee has a part in moving customers through the funnel.

"Brands generate business value by increasing demand, increasing margins, reducing costs, and reducing risk." - Judy Hopelain

As a customer moves down the purchase funnel, there are a number of potential bottlenecks that cause drop-off. “There are bottlenecks all over the place,” said Hopelain. Overcoming bottlenecks requires identification and optimization of high-impact customer touchpoints. Each stage of the purchase process has different activities that drive success.

Brands generate business value by increasing demand, increasing margins, reducing costs, and reducing risk. Hopelain and Sieck described their process for measuring and assessing brand positioning, including brand tracking studies.

“Am I going to spend money to have a place for kids to play in the store? If in fact that drove people into the Committed column (of the purchase funnel), you could monetize how much it cost you to have that space and how much return you got for it. So you can literally build a case for putting 100 square feet of non-revenue generating space on the floor. You can really start to look at the decisions you make and what the impact is on the customer experience and on the ability to move them through the funnel,” said Sieck.

“Advertising is very expensive; floor space is very expensive. Having one more employee on the floor…may be a lower cost item. So those are the things you can look at,” he said.

Hopelain advised RCME members to think about their customer touchpoints and their competition’s touchpoints, and to continue to gain insight about those differences to drive success.

Retail Management Institute - Santa Clara University
rmi.scu.edu