How brands (such as Optimel) are growing

In order to give this brand a boost, Optimel and Blauw together started working with Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow philosophy. In order to get a clear picture of what Optimel needs to invest in to keep building as a brand.

Why Byron Sharp?

'How Brands Grow' is a controversial book. It contains things that clash with how we learned marketing (Kotler) and how we do marketing. That takes some getting used to. But once you've read the book, you can't just put it aside.

Briefly, a few key highlights from the book:

So much about loyalty: Customers are loyal, but not necessarily monogamous. Don't invest in loyal customers, invest in new customers.

Growth is in the long tail: Focus mainly on your non-customers and light users. This is because the group of light users is much larger than the group of heavy users.

Waste is not waste: Don't select, but go for the greatest possible reach in 1x. Don't worry too much about waste. Don't try to reach a certain target group as often as possible, but as large a group as possible at least 1x.

Be distinct, not different: Brands are similar, therefore choose distinctiveness. It is not wrong to be better or different from your competitors (it just so often fails, brands are very similar in people's eyes), but the most important criterion is: stand out.

You see all the same birds here, yet immediately one stands out. It is not different, it stands out because it DOES something different.

I love my mum most; Of course your own mother is the sweetest in the world, because it is YOUR mother. It works the same way with brands. You value the brand you use the most. Attitude follows behavior, rather than the other way around.

Physical availability

Furthermore, Byron Sharp also talks about physical and mental availability. With physical availability, as a brand you have to make sure that there are as many opportunities to buy as possible and as few barriers as possible. Make it easy to buy. That sounds very logical and like an open door, but it's not. Because that's how a lot of brands think or thought they shouldn't go into Action because it detracted from their image.

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Mental availibility

Mental availability is all about how you sit in the consumer's brain. This revolves around two components:

• Distinctive Brand Assets: brand elements (meaningless in themselves) that people associate with your brand specifically (logo, color, jingle, shape, font, etc.). Big brands have more and/or stronger and more unique brand elements.
• Category Entry Points: when you say 4 o'clock, you say ... cup-a-soup. There is no better way to explain it. CEPs are moments, situations you want to be linked to as a brand, moments when you want them to think of you precisely.

Optimel: from theory to practice

Marieke Rentmeester (brand leader Optimel and Vifit): "It takes 'getting used to' to discover that your brand is actually just like other brands. You try to derive your right to exist from, among other things, a unique proposition and a unique target group.

At Optimel, the assumption was that our Light users would really have a different profile than the heavy users. But they weren't that different, nor were they that different based on their attitudes toward sugar, fat and sweeteners, for example."

"And branding had become a bit of a dirty word within the organization. Now we are focusing on it again. The brand and brand elements have to be recognizable in images. And they are even in people's personal goals. Because, we discovered that our brand assets were much less uniquely associated with the brand than we thought."

A confrontational exercise to check how your brand specifically sits in the consumer's mind.

0% came out clearly every time. Incidentally, the concrete meaning of this still wanted to change, 0% fat, 0% sugar, 0% = not messed with....

So the 0% is definitely a brand asset, but further research showed it was also strongly linked to other brands, which have very cleverly started copying or hijacking that 0%. This means that you can never communicate 0% in isolation, without your brand name or other assets attached to it, otherwise you are also advertising your competitor.

The "T" in the logo was a surprise.

Who never saw Optimel as a real brand asset. But the research clearly showed that this asset has much more potential. People sometimes spontaneously stood up to imitate that T, the movement of the puppet.

This analysis also sparked the portfolio discussion regarding the position of Vifit and Optimel (two Friesland Campina brands) in relation to each other. In terms of brand assets they are close to each other and also for consumers these brands are more or less the same.

Category Entry Points: looking at your brand differently

As a marketer, you're always focused on: core values, positioning, image, etc. That's important too, but a big advantage of Byron Sharp is that you look at your brand differently. Looking at Category Entry Points is the way to ensure renewed growth, the way to boost your brand. In Optimel's case, it created a huge list of moments and situations that consumers associate with the brand. They were not so happy about that at first... Because then there is no specific moment that consumers link Optimel to.

So is their positioning not sharp enough? Are they like -if you look at it from Kotler's point of view: a gray mouse, stuck-in-the-middle? No, Optimel turns out to be mainstream. Stuck-in-the-middle is just about nothing of everything, and mainstream is just enough of everything. A few of those entry points have now become central to commercials and advertisements. Optimel now sits much more on certain in-between moments, for example.

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