Create fun and a little weirdness for marketing

Create fun and a little weirdness for marketing

With rare exceptions, marketing designed to create or enhance brand preference over competitors in established product categories changes nothing. No matter how big the budget or how clever the execution, “my brand is better than your brand” marketing rarely results in sales growth.
Look at any product category over a long time period and you will see that changes in market position rarely occurred unless there was a substantial or transformational innovation. Innovation drives customer “must haves.” These, in turn, define a new subcategory in which competitors are either weak or nonexistent, resulting in meaningful sales change.
I studied the Japanese beer industry for more than 40 years and found that the sales trajectory of the leading brands changed only four times. On three of those occasions, a new subcategory got traction: dry beer, Ichiban, or Happoshu (low- malt and low-tax beer); in the fourth, two subcategories (dry and lager) were simultaneously repositioned. It is striking that four decades of enormous new product vitality, marketing budgets and promotional activity had little impact.
A similar story would play out if you looked at bottled water, ice cream, , computers, financial services, automobiles, fast-food restaurants, hotels, canned soup, candy, airlines, airplanes or almost any other category. You would assume that the recipe for success would be products or services that are reliable and deliver on their promise, improved each year with a program of incremental innovation, and supported by well-funded and executed marketing. Instead, with rare exceptions, such efforts simply result in running in place and preserving the status quo.
In contrast, substantial or transformational innovation that creates an offering for which competitors aren’t relevant can have a huge impact. Consider, for example, the Chrysler minivan introduced in 1983: It had 16 years with no viable competitor and sold more than 12 million units. Or take Enterprise Rent-A-Car: It went three decades with little real competition, keeping its focus on customers who needed a replacement vehicle as theirs was being repaired, and was able to surpass Hertz (HTZ) in sales and profits.
Over-the-top execution: The online shoe store Zappos.com Inc. is an example of a company that sets a high bar for a potential competitor, with its 24/7 call center that famously found a pizza-delivery service in the middle of the night for one customer, its policy of taking back shoes and its 10 Core Values that include a mission to “create fun and a little weirdness.”