#professorgosling

I’ve been working on a biotech startup called LymeAlert, aimed at providing a quick at-home test for Lyme disease for the past year or so, and had been spending a good half of the year on market research to develop an insightful customer journey map. We had taken the usual business school classes that had ground us in the various methodologies that could help us develop this customer journey map, and they included:

Identifying our beachhead market and conducting primary (surveys, interviews etc.) and secondary research (reviewing existing data and needs related to health diagnostics) to understand the motivations, barriers and preferences of our target audience.

Developing and testing hypotheses about our customers’ needs, pain points and critical interactions in dealing with ticks and a Lyme disease diagnosis.

Mapping the customer journey and including all touchpoints from awareness, consideration, purchase, use, to loyalty and advocacy, and identifying the actions, motivations, questions and barriers at each stage.

Validating and refining the journey map, including with quantitative research like surveys, to help prioritize critical touchpoints for customers.

Deriving actionable insights on customers’ needs and pain points from their actual buying behaviour, and implement changes, iterate on the journey map and continuously improve on it.

Thus far, we have managed to work on steps 1-3, but while mass sending multiple-choice surveys have allowed us to gather more data in a shorter amount of time, they lack the insight and observable emotion attached to each step of our customers’ journey that a face-to-face interview provides. Firstly, our customers’ worry starts when they see a tick on them or on their pet, and conventional tests for Lyme disease can take up to 2 weeks for a lab result, during which they will go through frustrations and worries in waiting for that result. These are emotive aspects of a journey which Yes/No or dropdown menu answer in a survey cannot adequately capture. We have found that primary market research, mainly via interviews in relaxed settings (i.e. as they are going about their life) with potential customers, in the anecdotes of how they discovered ticks, experiences with lab tests etc. that we get to understand their thought process and pain points more. We also started with some hypotheses on which customer segments would be willing to pay more, and whether awareness of Lyme disease would result in a greater willingness to pay.

The first few initial interviews seemed disparate with no concrete conclusions we could draw, but as more interviews were conducted, common pain points, frustrations with existing processes emerged, and we started to see more customer experiences prove and disprove our hypotheses - in recounting their experiences, people continue to retain and display their memory of the event, which we have found very helpful in mapping the emotion to their customer journey. The benefit of going a little slower with this face-to-face process, was that it allowed us to go deeper than the numbers and aggregated data in our secondary research, and really understand a customer’s concerns and emotional journey as they discover a tick, and help us to plan at which stage we can try to intervene to alleviate this worry.

However, this customer interview method does take up a lot of time, and as we try to move on to develop the business and explore other new markets, we see it used more when we are trying to understand a new market and have no information or data on that, and need to understand what motivates or frustrates our customer. For existing markets that we have gathered enough data on, we would likely move on to try to refine the customer journey map and validate it with larger-scale quantitative research methods.

P.S. If you want to support us, we are at www.lymealert.info

“Beer is all marketing. People don’t drink beer, they drink marketing." (Michael Foley, Heineken USA Inc. CEO, from 1994-1999)

The Corona-Heineken rivalry is a case study on the importance of consistency in brand communications, especially when brand associations take a long time to build up.

Corona has always tried to conjure up “Fun, Sun, Beach” for its brand. This was built from its consumers experiences with the brand, usually on vacation in Mexico and enjoying the light beer in the sun and on the beach. When people grab a beer, it is usually in a setting where they want to kick back and relax, and be transported away to more relaxed times, so Corona’s brand fits with this consumer need - think about the conversations around the Corona as well, where consumers can start chatting about their fun times and wild experiences (there are bound to be a few) in Mexico, becoming the perfect social lubricant. Corona is also exported to other markets in its authentic Mexican form, so the consistent packaging draws the same emotional association with the relaxing Mexican holiday for the consumer. The added advantage for Corona was that its innovative brewing process eliminated the oxidative effect, more consistently preserving the taste of Corona to consumers as they remember on that sunny beach in Mexico. Advertising content and taglines (‘Change your latitude’ in 1994, ‘Find your beach’ in 2010s) and tie-ups with celebrities that embody the “party” like Jimmy Buffett in its early days to Snoop Dogg more recently, remain faithful to that initial branding vision, allowing the positive brand associations as a premium Mexican beer, to be cemented in consumers minds over time. From its advertising, product look, taste to price in global markets, Corona has executed high consistency in the way its beer is marketed, to guarantee that a strong positive cognitive association to the positive holiday is ingrained in consumers over time. They have also chosen a niche association that is difficult to replicate.

Contrast this to Heineken, where we have a Dutch pilsner in a green bottle. The oxidative effect can cause a sulphurous taste, which commonly leads to a “skunky beer” when left for too long. It is traditionally viewed as a premium beer, associated with quality, heritage and sophistication - but this also happens to be the same values that many foreign imported beer brands also focus on building - meaning that the association to quality can be easily replaced by many other competitor beers as well, those coming from heritage, European type brands, as with many brands under another competitor brewer, Anheuser-Busch. In the 1990s, the changing demographics in the US saw the population in Southern and Western US outpace that in the Northeast and Midwest, alongside the growth of the Hispanic population exceeding that of other ethnic groups. Heineken’s advertising strategy through the 1980s-90s focused on product quality, but this was not necessarily the desired value in the beer that they’re young consumers that they were trying to attract - the conversation revolving around the Heineken would be very different; you are less likely to hear younger consumers waxing poetic about the quality of the Dutch pilsner or the Van Gogh museum they visited in the Netherlands. Heineken also changed its packaging in the mid-90s in the US, and its “personality”, trying to introduce humour to the brand, but this ran the risk of deviating from the values that drew its core customers to it. This switch also requires Heineken to have to rebuild brand associations again.

Burberry’s rich heritage and iconic check pattern is a remarkable foundation of resources upon which to build a sustainable brand. Rose Marie Bravo was effective in her ability to identify the best path to exploiting those assets to strengthen and expand Burberry’s market positioning. 

When Bravo joined Burberry the brand had deteriorated largely due to improper management of licensing and distribution which led to inconsistency in quality, design, and price, and the ability to buy Burberry products in retail environments that conflicted with the historic positioning. Burberry also faced an aging target market that projected a conservative image, and unhealthy concentration of sales in Asian markets. The changes Bravo made revived the brand and I believed positioned it for long-term growth. Bravo aimed to reposition Burberry as an innovative, aspirational, stylish brand that attracted a younger, slightly edgy target audience. The aim of affordable but functional luxury was apparent. She identified her niche segment among competing design houses, regained control of the licensing and distribution efforts to reinstate quality and consistency, and invested in advertising campaigns to attract this new audience.

Burberry Today 

Burberry has seen several new CEO’s come and go, including Angela Ahrendts (now at Apple) and Christopher Bailey (also the creative director) who will soon be succeeded by Marco Gobbetti (currently Celine CEO).  These leaders continued to push for a younger contemporary audience, embraced digital transformation and are consistently proactive about changes in the fashion industry. For example, in February 2016 Burberry was the first major fashion house to announce that they were moving to a “see now, buy now” model. Instead of designing a collection, having a seasonal fashion show and releasing products to the market 6 months later, they would be producing seasonless shows twice a year with products ready to go to market immediately following the presentation. They were later joining by several other fashion houses.

Bailey said about the new approach - “It’s always felt a little alien, inviting people from around the world to tune in and to watch, to Instagram, share and like and all of those things, but then not be able to buy it, or look at it, until four to six months [later]. I found [the shift to fashion immediacy] great — a natural thing.” (1)

Burberry appears to be thriving today. They are expected to finish their fiscal year with about £665 million ($819 million) net cash, and their shares rose 25% in 2016 (compared to their peer group’s 7% increase). They have managed to uphold their core heritage of luxury, durability and notably British, but have also provided a fresh face to the world. 

Spring 2017 campaign below. (I think this is interesting because it still has the romantic, modern yet classic, British feel of Burberry, but is also whimsical, fun, and slightly edgy. I think its really effective at moving Burberry to a slightly younger segment of aspirational, unique, consumers.) 

(1) https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/see-now-buy-now-fashion-immediacy-burberry-tommy-hilfiger

Everyone love vacation, they are relaxing, fun, something to look forward to. For many people, vacations prominently feature beach time. Corona’s “Fun, Sun, Beach” theme effectively lodged the brand in American’s minds right next to our most fond memories. Corona advertisements promote the ethos of fun in the sun and they even manage to make their signature lime-topped, slim bottle look sexy in the sand. Modelo’s reservation of the right to approve all advertising content created remarkable consistency across regions in the US, and the strategic emphasis on distribution made sure that a Corona was always within arm’s reach.

By contrast, Heineken’s brand focuses on product quality, doesn’t exactly translate in the new-world method of reaching consumers through emotion and storytelling pioneered by Apple. Heineken’s print advertisements feature, almost exclusively, a simple bottle of beer against a green background, and video advertisements align more with sports, or men losing it over their favorite beer.

Another brand story worth consideration is Dos Equis, which was acquired by Heineken in 2010 along with the rest of Femsa for $5.4 billion (1). The acquisition instilled Heineken as the number two brewer of beer in Mexico, and Dos Equis has become a shining star thanks to its advertising effectiveness. Dos Equis’s brand ambassador is the Most Interesting Man in the World, a bearded, debonair, attractive man who engages in ridiculous globetrotting adventures. The advertisements were quirky, hilarious and perfectly targeted to millennials. They went viral and spawned more memes than is healthy.