4 More Strategies From 4 of the World's Most Valuable Brands

Author

Aaron Shields
June 25, 2024 • Reading Time: 12 minutes

In last week’s newsletter, I covered three brand strategies from leaders from some brands that recently appeared in Kantar’s 2024 Most Valuable Global Brands report.

Here are four more brand strategies from these customer-obsessed leaders.

Clothes drying outside hung on a rope between two buildings.

Every aspect of your brand must include your customers.

Strategy #4: Solve Real Customer Tensions at Every Touchpoint (P&G)

It’s easy to get lost in what your product can do and forget about what it can do for your customers.

Not everything you see is meaningful for customers. Some things you’re proud of may be less meaningful for them. And when you focus on what you see rather than what they believe, you may miss something highly relevant to your category.

Not only that, but your competitors are likely missing it too.

I’ve seen it happen many times over the years in my work. Things like:

  • Long-standing taglines that don’t resonate with customers.

  • Thinking something is relevant to their customers because they focus on the ideal customers they want instead of the customers they actually have.

  • Missing opportunities to get more money from customers with new products that they want and that would enhance their experience and trust.

Figuring out what you’re missing and what you can do more of starts with interacting with your customers. It helps you figure out what to do more of. What to do less of. And what else you can do to improve the experience and your relationship with your customers.

It starts with putting understanding your customers ahead of your own wants and desires.

Kiriti Singh, Chief Analytics, Insights, and Media Office of P&G , gets this. P&G has four brands on this year’s Most Valuable Brands list: Pampers, Gillette, Pantene Pro-V, and Olay.

He understands that every aspect of your brand must include your customers.

Singh describes how P&G goes about it with one of their UK fabric enhancer brands, Lenor:

I’ll give you an example in Lenor, which is one of our fabric enhancers brands in UK. And one of the challenges that we were having on that brand was that it was growing but not as much as we would want it to.

P&Gers in UK went to the consumers’ homes to really figure out what is happening from that standpoint. And what they discovered was that the gold standard for freshness in UK is the ability to dry your clothes outdoors on a nice, sunny day. And that was the gold standard.

The problem with that is that doesn’t happen very often. So that is what they were struggling for. So it led us to really going back to the drawing board designing the chemistry, the products that work in that context and then really bringing it alive in our communication and in all forms of our content, whether it’s from a packaging standpoint … whether it’s from a copy and advertising standpoint, which really brings [it] alive.

We call it outdoorables, but it really brings alive the ability of Lenor, even when you’re not able to dry outside, it [adds] that outdoor freshness to your clothes. And that’s really what the entire content strategy is around.

So it really, again, gets back to what the brand stands for, what consumer problem we are trying to solve, and the consumer insights in some ways become the red thread through which we think about the product, the package, the communication, the retail execution, and finally making it worth it for our consumers.

Overhead shot of a man swimming in a pool.

Brands are at their best when they fit into the context, reinforce existing behaviors, and also provide a new benefit.

Strategy #5: Figure Out Where Your Brand Is Most Relevant (Corona)

Your products and services need to naturally integrate into your customers' lives.

However, marketers often try to force their products on their customers. They attempt to get their products into customers' hands by interrupting them where they are. They ignore the context.

And when something interrupts you, it becomes hard to see how that product fits into your life. It tries to get you to consider a product when you'd rather be doing something else.

It feels off. It's hard to pay attention. You just want to get back to doing something else.

As Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message."

In other words, what you offer customers has to be considered in the context you're introducing it. It has to be a natural part of the medium.

You wouldn't put a print ad on television.

But this is exactly what happens when you try to introduce products by interrupting an experience. When your message is incongruent with the medium, it puts people on guard. It makes them feel like they're being forcefully sold.

And nobody's got time for that.

Marcel Marcondes, global CMO of AB InBev, gets. AB InBev owns Corona ((#100 Most Valuable Brand Overall and #2 in Alcohol).

He gets that brands are at their best when they fit into the context. And they reinforce existing behaviors but also provide a new benefit.

Marcondes gives a great example of introducing a nonalcoholic version of Corona at the Olympic Games:

Then we were looking for a way to really help us accelerate the meaningful, the meaning and the difference that we can bring Corona Zero to consumers. And this is what led us to have a conversation with the International Olympic Committee prior to the Paris games.

And it was a great match. …

Given that the Games, they happen throughout the day, this is the perfect opportunity for us to showcase how non-alc beer can unlock new consumption occasions. Consumers declare that beer is their beverage of choice while they're watching sports.

So now, with Corona Zero, they can watch the Olympic Games throughout the day, in more occasions, because it's nonalcoholic.

So it's the perfect match. It makes a lot of sense for consumers to be able to enjoy their beer in much more occasions. It makes a lot of sense for the brand because it's all about fulfilling its promise of helping people to disconnect, to reconnect with their best selves.

And it makes a lot of sense for the Olympics because you can have consumers and fans more engaged and with a greater level of celebration of the Olympic Games as the biggest event on earth.

Parents pushing a shopping cart down a store aisle. Their two children are standing inside the cart.

One of the easiest ways to decrease resistance to purchase is to be easily available.

Strategy #6: Be Available Physically and Mentally Wherever Your Customers Are (P&G)

This strategy is a straightforward one. But it often gets overlooked.

Many brands spend a lot of time, money, and energy focusing on increasing the chance that customers think of them. But then forget to be where customers are most likely to purchase them.

Great brands understand that branding is about increasing preference. Part of increasing preference is to decrease resistance to purchase. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to ensure you’re easily available.

Kirti Singh from P&G gets it. He understands that doing everything you can to facilitate the movement of the product into the customers’ hands is critical for creating a strong brand.

In Singh’s words:

The core strategy that our brands follow is to be available from both a mental availability standpoint, which happens through communication, it happens through media, as well as physical availability, which is where distribution comes in.

And it is critical for our brands to become available wherever consumers are going to be shopping them. Whether that is in an offline context or whether that’s in an online context.

And again, what we are trying to do is make sure that when consumers are making that shopping choice, that we are providing them as the best shopping experience, which lets them select the best, not just the best brand, but the best version of that brand that meets their needs and do it as quickly and as simply as possible.

But that distribution and the quality of that distribution is very fundamental to our brand strategy.

Neon pepsi sign on a waterfront.

Scenario planning enables you to quickly react to market changes.

Strategy #7: Shape Your Category by Predicting the Future (Pepsi)

I’ve saved a doozy for last.

It’s the most advanced strategy and the least widely used of all seven strategies I’ve covered. But it’s incredibly powerful. I know that from personal experience using it.

During and after the Great Recession, I consulted Kohl’s on brand strategy. And, in a few years, during challenging economic conditions, we overtook our two nearest competitors, JCPenney and Macy’s, in market share. And we added over 3 billion a year in annual recurring revenue over five years.

One of the major tools we used to win market share during the Great Recession was scenario planning.

Scenario planning helps you prepare for the future by exploring multiple possible outcomes.

For marketing, this means looking at macroeconomic trends, category trends, and your customers’ behavior. And then using that information to develop possible future scenarios.

You capture multiple possible outcomes depending on which way a trend goes. Then, devise plans for how you’ll react when they become a reality.

It gives you a playbook for possible futures. It makes you ready to quickly react strategically to market trends. At the same time, your competitors are likely still trying to figure out what’s going on and reacting out of fear.

Jane Wakely, Chief Consumer and Marketing Officer at Pepsico (#4 Most Valuable Brand in Food and Beverages), understands the power of this process.

She gets that scenario planning for possible futures is the closest thing you can have to a crystal ball for ensuring future success.

In Wakely’s words:

It’s about projecting the future of demand. The future of your category. …

This is where we have something at Pepsico called The Change Compass. And I really love it because it takes a mixture of macro forces, social listening that uses many data sources from Sprinkler to Black Swan, to basically create foresight that starts to help us have a crystal ball.

And I always say there’s only one thing you can guarantee when you predict the future is that you’re gonna be wrong.

So, don’t predict too firm a future.

What we do is we scenario plan. We actually look at the macro forces, look at the foresight, and when we’re at our best, what we do is we literally push the corner on the envelope. Really understand different possible futures that this could create.

And I think that the power of that exercise is if you use really diverse thinkers, people with diverse backgrounds, diverse skills, diverse cultural paradigms. Actually you really get to push the boundaries of what the future could create. And then, as a category leader, a category shaper, you start to say, ok, so in that scenario, how could our business flourish, how could we delight the consumer, how could we shape the future of our category to even meet unmet needs that are here today.

And I think that’s the mark of leading brands that really lead and shape their categories. They don’t just hold the mirror up to the current reality and be reactive.

So that’s a really exciting part of defining the demand growth of the future.

Recap of All 7 Strategies

So, there you have it: seven strategies from some of the world’s most valuable brands.

They are:

  1. To Become Valuable, Be Consistent (Pepsi)

  2. Integrate Functional and Emotional Dimensions. (Corona)

  3. To Deliver on Your Promise, Stay Up to Date (Infosys)

  4. Solve Real Customer Tensions at Every Touchpoint (P&G)

  5. Figure Out Where Your Brand Is Most Relevant (Corona)

  6. Be Available Physically and Mentally Wherever Your Customers Are (P&G)

  7. Shape Your Category by Predicting the Future (Pepsi)

These are all strategies I’ve used over my 19-year career. And they work for brands of any size.

Start using them to become the choice for high-value customers.

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