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Hooked on a Feeling
Inspire Consumers to Choose Your Brand With a Compelling Positioning Strategy
By Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg
Spring 2006, Marketing Health Services
As David Ogilvy frequently
complained, advertising used to be about selling products and services
in the short run. Today it's more about linking emotional messages, images,
and feelings to a brand in the hope (he would say improbable hope) that
sales will rise in the long run. These days, at least once a week, we
read about a company that wants to be known as cool, chic, or innovative.
Kodak, for instance, wants to shed its warm, reliable, fuzzy brand image
for hip and cool. And Wal-Mart wants to be chic and trendsetting, not
"everyday low prices." At struggling Ford, "innovation
is leading the way." These brands and many others across a wide spectrum
of categories (e.g., pizzas, hospitals, cars, prescription drugs) have
adopted an imaged-based, or intangible, positioning strategy—the
reason buyers should choose the marketer's brand and not a competitor's.
Derived from content analyses of advertising from 1950 to date, marketing communications programs founded on an intangible positioning strategy—about 60% of brands today—attempt to reinforce the perceptions it would like buyers to have of its brands. The feeling a consumer has about a brand—as opposed to functional attributes or benefits of its products/services—becomes the implicit reason to buy.
By all appearances,
Coach, Coke, JetBlue, McDonald's, Starbucks, W Hotels, and XBox have adopted
an intangible strategy. So have New England Baptist Hospital, "official
hospital of the Boston Celtics," and Cedars-Sinai, "leading
the quest for health."
Unfortunately, as noted in the table above, econometric analyses reveal that the majority of marketing communications campaigns rooted in intangible positioning produce zero or negative returns on investment. This occurs because intangible, some would say ethereal messages, fail to imprint a strong reason to buy. They are, moreover, hard to remember. Again, the goal of these campaigns is to evoke a feeling or attitude and relate it to a brand, thereby inspiring a purchase. This is a far more difficult feat than citing a product/service's ability to solve a serious consumer problem as the reason to buy—particularly when buyers are saturated with marketing information and have increasingly less time or inclinations to sort through it all.
Resurrecting a
Relic
Marketers claim that tangible positionings, those based on functional
attributes and benefits, worked well back in the '50s and '60s—when
buyers were generally more open to marketing and advertising, there were
fewer brands and less marketing clutter, and positioning possibilities
were limitless. They argue that intangible positionings were born out
of necessity in the '90s when product differences seemed to disappear
in many categories and all brands started to look the same. And they maintain
that marketing communications rooted in an intangible positioning can
be just as effective as tangible positionings were decades ago. We don't
argue that intangible positionings are by definition problematic, but
we do argue that marketers are missing significant opportunities if they
a priori eliminate tangible positionings from consideration. It
is a misguided notion that they aren't relevant any more.
n fact, some of the most powerful, category dominating brands have tangible positionings: Disney with wholesome family entertainment, ExxonMobil with fast and friendly service, FedEx with guaranteed next-day delivery, Grey Goose with the best-tasting vodka, and Southwest with no frills/low priced air travel. Other challenger brands are the envy of their competition: Apple with easy-to-use products, Citizens Bank with rapid and responsive service, Green Mountain Energy with clean and green power, and Target with fashionable but affordable goods. Marketing communications founded on a tangible positioning can yield a return on investment of 10%-15% and higher (significantly higher than we've seen with intangible campaigns), exactly as it did in the '50s and '60s.
The Real Deal
The question isn't whether marketers should pursue a tangible or intangible
strategy, but what positioning of all the tangible/intangible options
will inspire consumers to choose their brands (e.g., hospital, medical
practice, hospice, home care, visiting nurses group, healthcare service)
instead of their competitors' brands. Four steps are required to develop
a compelling positioning.
Compile an inspired
list of tangible/intangible attributes and benefits.
A hospital's tangible attributes might be "well-trained nurses,"
"conveniently located," and "doctors from the best medical
schools." Its tangible benefits might be "personalized attention
and treatment" and "does everything to make you feel comfortable."
A hospital's intangible
attributes might be "recommended by friends and relatives,"
"in the U.S. News & World Report top 50," and "treating
people for 100 years." Its intangible benefits might be "makes
you feel in control of your disease" and "makes you feel important."
The list shouldn't
be limited under any circumstance. Even consider seemingly nutty ideas
such as "impresses my neighbors" and "official hospital
of the Pittsburgh Steelers."
Conduct research
among your target buyers, to determine which attributes and benefits are
the most motivating. What rises to the top will differ by health services
category. Although consumers might rank "new and modern facilities"
and "cutting edge medical technology" as the most motivating
attributes for an orthopedic hospital, "recommended by friends and
relatives" and "specializes in treating the most difficult conditions"
will prove most motivating for a pediatric cancer treatment center.
At this stage, don't
mistake what people state is important for motivating power; they are
different. Researchers often ask respondents to rate characteristics of
a hospital or medical practice on a 5-point scale, ranging from (1) not
important at all to (5) extremely important. This is a surefire way to
a marketing misfire. The reason is simple: People tend to grade the most
generic, tangible, rational, socially acceptable characteristics (e.g.,
"has four wheels" for a car, "has doctors who really care"
for a hospital) as the most important. Using importance scores as a guide
to positioning will more often than not send marketers in the wrong direction.
We recommend an alternate three component approach to measuring motivating power. It begins by asking people about desirability, not importance. "How desirable is it that a car go from zero to 60 miles per hour within six seconds?" Or, "How desirable is it that a hospital have doctors from the top medical schools?" A desirability scale such as the following one encourages respondents to think "outside the box," without biases.
+4 Extremely desirable
+3 Very desirable
+2 Somewhat desirable
+1 Slightly desirable
0 Neither desirable nor undesirable
-1 Slightly undesirable
-2 Somewhat undesirable
-3 Very undesirable
-4 Extremely undesirable
Compare your brand with your competitors' brands, on the most motivating attributes and benefits. The best positioning opportunities are those that are highly motivating and on which a brand enjoys advantages relative to competitors. The brand strategy matrix below illustrates how to use motivating power and brand perceptions to identify the best opportunities. The value of the strategy is ranked from 1 (the most valuable) to 7 (the least valuable).
Evaluate the feasibility
and profitability of different opportunities. Carefully go through
the short list of positioning options that emerges from the analysis,
and assess each one in these terms. Having "doctors from the best
medical schools" might be highly motivating, but not affordable or
realistic for a hospital to implement.
Without a strong positioning, health services firms risk becoming just another indistinguishable drop in a sea of choices. Developing a positioning guided by consumers' insights—not conventional wisdom about what kind of strategy works best in today's marketplace—is the key to moving them toward your brand.