The first question I always ask brands that want to expand is – what are you looking to gain here? Before anything else, it’s critical that you have a clear strategy for building out your brand beyond local and that you have clear goals that quantify what you stand to gain, when, where and how. The answers to these questions will help you decide what you should be prepared to invest and over what period of time. Too many brands are tempted to grow because they consider that a symbol of success. Perhaps it is, but if it costs you profitability and distracts owners and resources away from the local market, it can be a high price to pay for an ego-boost.

If you’ve done the groundwork, and expansion still beckons, here are five simple principles that will help you stay true as you take your brand to the world.

1. Understand What You’re Selling – if you’re looking to shift from a local market to an international presence, it’s critical to evaluate how your brand will translate, literally and culturally. Too often brands are simply looking to transpose what they have to somewhere else, particularly if they have been very successful in their country of origin. In reality a brand is often a spirit expressed in a product. So in addition to all the obvious viability factors (like demand, level of competition, access, regulation, distribution and organic growth), it’s important to know what changes if any you should make to your core line-up. Naming is a classic example of how a word or idea can have very different implications when used elsewhere.

2. Have A Single Philosophy But Tailor A Powerful Story – sometimes the story that you tell inside your local market is not the same as the one you can use beyond your borders. That’s because people in other countries may see your country differently, the market itself may have different expectations of participants (for example, a luxury market at home may be a more price-sensitive market elsewhere), customers may exhibit quite different behaviors based on different habits or attitudes, or there may just be aspects of how you came to be that take too much explaining for those not familiar with your original context. My advice in such circumstances is to adjust your story to the local market. It comes back to the previous point about understanding what you’re selling. In some markets, you may want to highlight some parts of what you’re about more than others. It’s a question I often ask brands when they are looking to reposition – where are you looking to go with this brand of yours, and what will people in other markets most want to hear in order to be convinced? Don’t get me wrong. This is not about lying or having a different story. You absolutely need to have a consistent philosophy, it’s more about emphasis – it’s about making sure that the narrative that underpins your brand has enough substance to enable you to highlight different things in different places.

3. Have A Progression Plan – most brands landing on foreign shores will need to think about how they use their new presence and their historic legacy to best advantage over time. New Zealand brands for example entering Europe or the Americas often lack the volumes to fulfill sizeable demand. Pacing yourself so that you align your brand with your ability to fulfill is critical. You might start out as a market outlier and look to become more mainstream over time and/or you might initially undercut the competition before looking to introduce more premium products and pricing over time. Chances are if you are a smaller brand, you also need to use the fact that people don’t know you to your best advantage – portray yourselves as a secret in order to create intrigue, market yourselves in non-traditional places in order to reframe what you offer or present yourselves as a challenger determined to bring a new spirit to a staid sector.

4. Embrace The Serendipity – sometimes you can over-think opportunities. This is an increasingly interconnected world after all and today, it can be customers, not companies, that make the decision around entering markets. As Nataly Kelly points out, Apple’s international expansion was actually started by international visitors buying their products at their US stores and taking them home. “While it’s true that many companies make a concerted decision to enter a given market, it’s actually more common to see the reverse scenario take place — their customers make the decision for them, or at the very least, these customers play a significant role in steering the company toward those decisions. As a result, more and more companies are going global without any sort of grand master plan.” Kelly’s advice if you find yourself in this situation? Translate key pages online, ease your way into in-market support, look at increasing sales and marketing in key locations and then decide whether to establish your own presence or use distributors and resellers.

5. Prepare For Neighborly Competition – The moment you take your local brand out of your own market and into another, the dynamics around your competitiveness change. Now the very things that enabled you to succeed against international brands in your home market are the very advantages that others have as you enter theirs.

Research by BrandZ shows that as brands compete in more countries, they attract less and less loyalty among shoppers. That’s not a reason to automatically dismiss expansion but rather a reminder that as you do so, you need to plan to counter the home-field advantages: understanding and meeting local needs and tastes; nostalgia; operational and logistical advantages for locals; strong community ties; and of course cultural identity. Factoring counter-measures to these advantages into each of the factors described above will help you find your footing and successfully build your brand in new places.

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Marketers often talk about competitive advantage as if it is one thing. In point of fact, I think there are a number of ways you can achieve a lead in a market. Each of these ways of standing apart from others can be used on its own or in combination with either or both of the other two to forge deeper resonance.

1. Find Your Emotional Advantage

What do you want consumers to feel about your brand that they don’t feel about other brands? Changing how and why people bond with what you stand for can be a powerful differentiator, especially in markets where emotive decisions are unusual or where there is a dominant emotion that everyone looks to.

In markets where sentiments are warm for example, what can you do to help people express themselves in other ways? In markets where decisions are normally logical and linear, how can you change the associative value of your brand so that potential customers are interested in you beyond just rational outputs?

It’s not necessarily a case of looking for the polar opposite of the mainstream mode – rather, finding an emotion to tap into that others haven’t tried or wouldn’t dare, then using that to position your brand in a different light. Apple for example have managed to combine the aesthetics of a luxury brand with the spirit of a challenger brand to put daylight between themselves and all the other tech brands. It doesn’t just look different. It feels different. Equally, Gecko introduced humor into the very serious insurance sector and got people smiling.

2. Find Your Distinctive Advantage

How are you going to do things in ways that stand apart from the industry standard? Sometimes, the very thing that works to make a market feel indistinguishable can be used to differentiate your brand from those around you. A different process in a sector swarming with process. A different color in a sector filled with variations of the same color. A different channel in a marketplace where so much happens in set plays. It doesn’t have to be something big. It does have to be something though that you can own and then project as important to others (even if it’s not different from what others do around you).

Secret recipes are a simple example of how brands like KFC and Coke have looked to separate what they offer from everyone around them. Are the herbs and spices really that different? Probably not – but combine them with the story of a Colonel, and you have a brand that has found a way to stand out in a market packed with poultry in a box.

Ownership is the key here rather than proprietorship – and I make that distinction because there are plenty of brands that own an idea that is not dependent on intellectual property protections. There are plenty of brands that tell stories for example – but Disney tells its stories in a particular way. There are many outlets that serve coffee but, in the US at least, Starbucks owns an idea around coffee that many have sought to emulate. The key to finding a distinctive advantage is answering a very simple question: “what’s our take here?”

3. Find Your Connective Advantage

How do you connect with people that is different from what others do? I had a great conversation with Chris Wren recently in which he talked about the fact that the battle for content would probably be matched, maybe even superseded, by the battle for reach. None of us know how the net neutrality issue is going to play out yet, but at the very least we can assume that brands with scale and clout are likely to do better in a deregulated provider space than those who lack that level of influence. Which begs the question – as consumers detox from social media addiction, and the over-supply of channels and content we have had to date looks set to consolidate, how does your brand intend to stay in touch? Are you looking at a community strategy for example, or are you opting to be an ecosystem? Will you partner, diversify, license or concentrate? How are you planning to keep people’s attention and focus?

For me, the key question here is not so much the tactics you will use to make your way onto people’s screens and into their lives, but rather why they will keep looking to connect with you. What will your brand bring by way of an opinion, purpose, ethical stance or whatever that will induce consumers to reach out to you because of how that connection influences their lives?

Once You’ve Found Your Advantage, Stick With It

As I said at the beginning, you can choose one or more of these advantages as ways to forge a distinctive path into tomorrow’s markets. The critical thing is, having done so, you need to commit to pursuing that advantage or combination of advantages without distraction for as long as they work for you. It takes inventiveness, courage and discipline to build powerful and intriguing variations on an advantageous theme, but the brands that get it right inject integrity, consistency and trustworthiness into what they stand for.

Find your Emotional, Distinctive and Connective Advantage, Contact The Blake Project.

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We are a well established heritage brand with a strong presence across North America. We’ve recognized that we need to make changes, but there is reluctance from many in the organization to change too much in case we evolve our brand into one our traditional customers don’t like. My own view though is that we can’t be competitive if we stay as we are. How do we reconcile these ideas and move our brand forward in a way that everyone buys into?

Thanks for your question Mary. Yes, these can be difficult decisions. The good news is that consumers take considerable comfort from brands with genuine history and authenticity. They see in them qualities they can rely upon and look to in a world of so much change and so much choice. As Jennifer Aaker has pointed out, heritage brands display powerful “sincerity characteristics” – meaning they are down-to-earth, honest, wholesome and optimistic. They have delivered over time, and consumers are deeply drawn to that.

The danger that heritage brands can face, and that you have rightly identified, is that they can get caught up in their own traditions and these can become barriers to necessary change. In fact, change itself can be seen as a threat. That’s because, as I pointed out in this article, heritage brands derive much of their appeal from their legend and their mythology. “They deliver because they carefully work their history to link buyers to an often romantic view of the world as it was or as we would have liked it to have been.”

The key to navigating your way forward is to take your cues from what’s got you to where you are. What is the core characteristic that consumers have come to trust you for? Keep that. But look for ways to maybe adapt the conversation around it, so that your take is timely and interesting. If you are a family-focused brand, for example, how can you talk about family and what it means to be a family today in ways that engage people? The biggest challenge for established brands is to continue to evolve their story without losing sight of what people most treasure about the brand.

As Mark Ritson has pointed out, the most important judgment is understanding how to use your provenance, heritage and history to your advantage. Tesco, he suggested, should have looked to their origins for proof of why their private label brands should be trusted. Equally, Burberry were able to leverage their history to take themselves upmarket because the brand hailed from a draper who made overcoats for the King of England. Knowing your origins and using them adds both powerful story and compelling proof. It gives you a back story that you can draw on.

From your note, I don’t know what sector you’re in, who your target audience is, and whether you consider yourselves a premium brand or not, so I can only talk generally about some of the other things you will need to consider.

What are your customers’ priorities now? For example, today’s younger consumers are looking for transparency and honesty and they want the relationships they have with brands to be fun. They also have a deep mistrust of what they see as ‘the establishment’ and big institutions in particular, and they are much more fickle in their relationships. With those characteristics in mind, how should you change how you communicate in order to engage and include them? Do you need to update your identity? Do you need to introduce new communications channels or update your product lines? As Alex Bolen, CEO of Oscar de la Renta once observed, “People think of innovation and heritage as opposed ideas but I disagree. If we are heritage brands, we stood the test of time because we have [a] tradition of successfully innovating. Innovative companies should aspire to become heritage brands.”

Secondly, the industry itself may be changing – in which case, you need to make sure that you are up to date with what consumers now expect. If you are a heritage meat or poultry brand, for example, you will need to find ways to acknowledge and respond to public interest in how you farm your animals, whether you use antibiotics, how big your animals grow, what they are fed etc. These changes should be reflected in your packaging and communications.

Finally, and not withstanding the points made earlier about holding onto your core idea, don’t be afraid to kill off something you still hold dear if it will liberate your brand to explore new territory and pave the way for new growth. As Thomson Dawson pointed out, Sears should have applied the principles of mail order to flourish in today’s world of personalization and connection to become the dominant online retailer. Instead, they got overtaken.

Three questions to help you move forward responsibly:

• What do we keep because it is an intractable part not just of our history but also of our reputation?
• What do we sell or let go of so that we can clearly signal we have changed? How will doing that free us up to pursue new relationships and new areas of growth?
• What signature elements do we update so that people see a ‘new side’ of us that refreshes how they value us?

We hope this is helpful Mary.

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The principle driving more choice in interactions is straight-forward. Savvy digital consumers want/expect greater access to brands in every way. But does building out channels to engage with consumers actually work? Or does it just bewilder a complex environment even further?

Two pieces of research by McKinsey point to the learning that more channels are needed to a point, but also that co-ordination between interaction points is critical to success.

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The first piece of McKinsey research looks at interactions pre-sale. When a regional bank mapped its customer journeys, they found that 80% of prospective loan customers started at the website, but from there they sought answers in a range of ways. About 20% stayed online, another 20% called, 15% went to a branch, and the remainder abandoned. Of those that stayed with the process, more than 20% of those who went to a branch took out a loan, underpinning the point that for all the talk about digital convenience, human-to-human interactions are still highly effective. Of those who stayed online, less than 1% took out a loan. In fact, almost 80% opted out rather than fill in a form. Of those that called the contact center, only 2% even requested an offer and just 0.1% ended up with a loan.

The bank quickly recognized that the ways they had historically organized their interactions had led to customers pursuing a channel of interaction without the rest of the bank knowing that they had done so. To close this gap, the bank looked to match customer interactions with interactions between channels within the bank. That meant simplifying forms, revising policies to allow different channels to take the lead and forging new links between online and contact centers to allow personal follow-up when customers left forms unfinished.

Once these gaps were closed, successful fulfillment on inquiries increased considerably.

In the other study, which focused on interactions post-sale, McKinsey looked at the channels consumers value in the health sector. The results revealed that while access to interactive options absolutely matters, more access is not always better. In fact, the research showed that interactions out-ranked brand as a consideration factor, and that consumers were willing to pay more, and at a margin that exceeded cost to supply, to gain more access to more options. But there were limits.

Consumers wanted to be able to speak with a ‘real’ person at a service center rather than receiving back an anonymous response online. Specifically, they wanted to be able to interact through a combination of phone and mail as well as digital channels such as online, apps or video, and that combination was much more valuable to them than digital service alone. However, when more services were added, the inclination to pay more flatlined, suggesting that customers only recognized added value to a point and not beyond that.

Four key take-aways for those looking at how they organize their interactions to deliver more effective customer experiences:

1. Access is not conversion – it’s easy to get caught up in throwing a wider net when in fact, as the bank example shows, that may only lead to a higher cost-per-serve overall. I suspect that’s because while digital interactions are easy, they are not necessarily as ‘sticky’ as when people invest the time to seek out face-to-face help. Investment bias would suggest that the more people invest, the more likely they are to stay. And therefore, counter-intuitively in this age of convenience, one option that brands should look at is how they can offer interactions that require greater consumer ‘investment’ in exchange for greater experiential returns for the shopper and higher margins for the brand.

2. At a time when everyone is struggling to find ways to stand out, value-adding interactions offer opportunities to elevate brand interest – the McKinsey research shows a clear distinction between the helpful and timely interactions that customers now just expect to be delivered to them vs those that they see as value-added and worth paying more for. It’s important that brands distinguish between these different levels of interaction, keep the choice set limited and be clear about what interactions customers will pay more for, and why. In other words, match channel options with clear value propositions.

3. Convenience is convenience – Marketers may see new technology such as chatbots as a significant opportunity to inject automated personalization into their interactions. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines for example use a chatbot to text a full range of flight details. But while such software has a high convenience factor and meets consumers’ needs for quick digital interactions, chatbots are still automated tools and have some way to go before they could be considered a replacement for the human-to-human value-adding interactions identified above.

4. While most brands will want to keep their channel initiatives within their own ecosystem, the option to partner between brands may be one worth exploring. When my colleague Chris Wren looked at the take-over of Whole Foods by Amazon, he noted that both parties stood to gain from what their different backgrounds would bring to the ability for customers to interact. “What’s most interesting about all of this is the convergence of traditional brands and digital brands along an axis that is focused on utility, not merely expansion or acquisition. In order to be more strongly competitive in the growing food delivery segment, Amazon needed that crucial supply-chain piece that Whole Foods provides. And in order to stay competitive, Whole Foods needed technology infrastructure that could take the brand deeper into the digital space.” Other brands may also find they have much to gain from pursuing greater interaction together.

As expectations continue to rise, brands will naturally be tempted to respond by trying to do more. But more is not necessarily the answer and within the interactions that they do choose, there are clear baselines and ceilings. Baselines are the absolute minimum interaction points that customers expect – often digital, often free. Ceilings are where interactions hit critical mass. You can add more if you want to, but doing so may just incur cost rather than securing greater engagement.

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Professor Kyle Murray of the University of Alberta says that the failure of Crystal Pepsi is a classic example of what happens when new products fail to align with the characteristics that consumers know. Launched in 1993, with much hoopla, Crystal Pepsi was a colorless soda that was expected to become a billion dollar brand. It was discontinued two years later, having failed to fire.

A key reason for that failure, explains Professor Murray, was that Pepsi simply never said why a drink people had come to expect to be a rich caramel color was suddenly clear. And that spooked buyers. Nor is Crystal Pepsi an isolated case. Each year, hundreds of thousands of products are introduced into the consumer packaged goods sector alone, and a huge number of them fail. Timing, competitiveness and lack of effective distribution can all play their part, but, says Murray, the expectations that come with brand recognition also have an important role.

“We tend to resist products that fall too far outside the familiar. As a result, even though companies are constantly innovating, people struggle to keep up with the many changes that innovation can bring … consumers tend to be curious when products are different from what they expect. However, when the new product is extremely incongruent with what consumers think is typical of the category, it creates anxiety.”

The Sweet Spot Between Curiosity And Anxiety

There’s the tension right there – finding the sweet spot between curiosity and anxiety. And getting that right is about ensuring that product developers are very clear about the core associations that come with the brand, and that are therefore indelible, and those that are more flexible, and therefore open to improvement and innovation. In the case of Crystal Pepsi, I’m sure that many consumers didn’t see how a clear drink that looked like water could be a cola. They literally didn’t recognize what they were being asked to buy.

Kyle Murray, Theodore Noseworthy and Fabrizio Di Muro concluded that where brands do look to introduce changes that fall outside that sweet spot, they also need to introduce some form of enabler to help consumers make sense of what is happening. For example, when Murray and his colleagues tested the Crystal Pepsi product recently, telling those prepared to taste that the cola was clear because it was made with spring water, they saw acceptance jump. “Our findings reveal how minor design or promotional changes can significantly improve evaluations when it helps consumers make sense of otherwise unappealing innovations.”

Linking Recognition And Innovation

Of course no brand should simply press ahead with lateral innovations and rely on design or promotion to engender acceptance. What Murray, Noseworthy and Di Muro’s findings do reinforce is that expectations can be changed if the explanation for the change fits with what consumers feel they ‘know’. And one way to do that is to marry an idea that consumers recognize, and that has its own associations, with the brand innovation in order to lift overall interest, acceptance and curiosity.

Getting that right is about:

• leveraging the trust factors that consumers have with the brand itself;
• using story to normalize new ideas; and
• making the brand’s high-level intentions clear so that people can connect where the brand is going with the products it releases.

Too many brands rely on the novelty of brand extension or improvement to sell itself. What the work of Professor Murray and his team shows though is that buyers may say they embrace the new, but in reality innovation can work to a brand’s disadvantage. Just as no brand should innovate for its own sake, neither should it introduce changes that it simply expects consumers to change their attitudes around.

So the irony of innovation and indeed diversification is that if you want to move people to try new versions of your brand, you need to firmly embed what the core brand stands for. Brand recognition in that sense – knowing what a brand means to consumers in comparison to all the other options available to them – underpins the ability to successfully innovate. Without that sense of reassurance, shoppers just won’t pick it up.

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