Category vs. Brand: In which Doreen expresses surprise at the apparent ignorance thereof

Sorry about the title but couldn’t stop myself.  

As I gear up for Thursday’s drive to Atlanta and the first class of the Circus’ summer term, I’ve been thinking back to last quarter’s panels.  For those of you who aren’t Creative Circus students, each quarter ends with a review of every student’s work from all his classes that term.

 

I met many of this term’s students in last term’s panel.  Took notes about trends I saw in two days reviewing copy students’ work.  Since I only saw writers, I thought it’d offer guidance for what they’d need this term.

Most did not know the difference between writing for one distinct prospect and writing for one entirely different prospect.  Work which should have been targeted to other groups was all concepted/written for their own age group.  This one’s quite scary to me, but why I offer the Come One Come All Creative Strategy workshop at the beginning of each term.  If they haven’t attended one yet, whose fault is that? (You don’t have to be a Circus Student to attend.  PC, GA State, GA Tech, Emory, Arts Center and all other students interested in advertising are welcome.  It’s this Friday, 7/12, 9:30 a.m. in the Carol Vick Bynum Theater.  Tell the security guard you’re my guest.  If you can’t make it, read my blog entries from 9/28/10, Love Poem to our Prospect, 5/8/12, Sway – it’s also discussed in relation to other subjects in many other posts.)

I also saw a decided lack of creative risk taking.  Lots of good, safe work.  Very little that snapped my head around in envy, made me think Now he/she’s gonna be a star.  It’s about time students stopped worrying about being good and took the kind of risks that create lots of bad work – until it turns genius.  My husband’s boss repeats “Good is the enemy of Great,” usually coupled with other inspirational clichés.  This time he’s right.  (For this one, read any blog post that discusses the Kamikaze Key Fact.)

The other big problem was the one I’ll talk about today.  Category vs. Brand.  Sounds simple and it should be.  Like just about everything else, the answer to the problem can be found in a smart KCWP (Kamikaze Creative Work Plan – what I’ll be teaching Friday morning)

  

Before we get into the solution, let’s talk problem.  When asked, many students genuinely did not know the difference between Category and Brand.  As they were mostly lower Qs, I suppose I should cut them some slack.  Still, Category vs. Brand is a basic tenet of advertising creative.

Category is the general type of goods/products/services your client offers.  Banking and finance, fast food, fashion, retail, travel, breakfast foods, baby toys, furniture, copiers, printers, computers, software, beer, wine and spirits, automotive - all are Categories.  The list is endless.  Most have sub-categories as well.  In the travel category, sub-categories include trekking (on foot and on horse), cruising, resorting, camping, road trips, RVing, guided tours, etc.

Brand is one particular company, bank, brokerage, fast food joint, fashion line, retail store, travel destination or operator, toy, furniture line, named computer (Apple, Lenovo, HP, etc.), software (Microsoft, In Design, whatever), beer label, named resort, individual designer, etc.  A printer is something you need to produce hard copies of what you write with your computer.  A Hewlett Packard printer is a particular brand of printer, with many different models you usually discuss one at a time, or as one series of products/printers with similar attributes you promote as a group, at one time.

In other words, a category is a group of similar products/services, with many different Brands represented.  A brand is one particular make of the product/service, usually with many different models.  If we’re talking cereal and you sell category, you’re selling the need for/benefits of eating a good breakfast.  When you sell the Kellogg Brand, you’re selling the name Kellogg and all it represents (taste, USA, product variety, quality ingredients, history/heritage, brand within brand (Special K, Rice Crispies, etc.) on the parent brand’s merits.  When you sell Special K, you’re selling something even more specific – a specific product – on its own merits, under the brand umbrella.

Category = Breakfast foods

Brand = Kellogg’s

Product = Special K

Capice?

There are valid reasons to sell category – usually when it’s one you’ve invented (smart phones, for example).  People have to learn what the category is, does and why they should pay attention to it.  The problem, even if you try to position your brand within the category, or sell category over your brand’s name, the consumer isn’t motivated to any particular brand/model smart phone.  Just gets the idea it’s a product category that bears watching.

 

Most of the work I saw sold category, even when the problem should have been one of brand.  But you’re rarely hired to sell just any old banana.  You’re hired to sell Chiquita bananas, Dole bananas, Mom’s Organic bananas, etc.

If your category is bananas, your brand could be Chiquita.  But unless you give your prospect a reason to prefer Chiquita, they’ll buy any old banana they find in the supermarket.

This harks back to the KCWP (Kamikaze Creative Work Plan).  The Kamikaze Promise and Reasons Why.  What promise/claim of benefit can Chiquita make over its competitors?  How about the Chiquita brand IS bananas.  Any other brands of bananas don’t take the care, have the growers, the varieties, health awareness, food handling safety, etc., your family deserves. 

Why can Chiquita make that claim?  It’s the oldest US banana brand (I made that up, but it may be true).  They’ve been buying and selling bananas for x years, so they know what works, what doesn’t, what varieties taste best, last longest, how to get them to market faster.   Those are your KCWP’s Reasons Why.

 

What I saw in the student work was, for conversation’s sake, an ad for Chiquita that gave me no reason to seek out Chiquita branded bananas.  Lots of reasons to eat any old banana, with no mention of brand other than the logo.  Maybe mentioning it once in body copy.  This can also be solved in the KCWP’s Kamikaze Competition section.  There, you should not only give the various competing brands (Dole is the only one that comes to mind, I’m sure there are others.)  The competitive info should always be a direct comparison to your client’s product (Chiquita Bananas):

Dole – widely distributed, depending upon where purchased can be lower priced than Chiquita but the brand is not as well known for fresh bananas as Chiquita.  Dole is usually sold in discount stores and supermarkets (Wal-Mart, Food Lion, convenience stores, etc.) vs. the more upscale markets (Harris Teeter (in Charlotte, the deluxe supermarket) and specialty food stores, which usually trade on the Chiquita brand.  Perceived as quality canned goods, Dole fresh foods have yet to attain the cachet of Chiquita.

Know that + the perceived value of the Chiquita brand, its history (I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say…) and perceived quality difference over other banana brands = a compelling concept/campaign/individual marketing piece that motivates people to seek and buy Chiquita, no matter where they shop.

Granted, this is all pretty elementary and far from a treatise on branding (a huge subject in itself).  It does, however, illustrate how to deal with Brand in product advertising.

 

Back in the dark ages, McCann hired Bill Cosby to sell PCs.  It was the advent of the PC revolution, long before Apple and IBM owned the category.  Cosby had to sell category – back then, people didn’t know what a PC (Personal Computer) was for, techno fear was rampant.  He did it under the Texas Instruments brand, but because the market had to be educated as to why they needed a PC before telling them why the TI machine would be better for them, he talked personal computing, not why TI made a better product.

Those kinds of opportunities are rare in this business.  Sure there are new tech products and brands coming out all the time.  But the PC and computing are now engrained into our collective consciousness.  No need to sell people on the idea of a home computer at all.  But they would like to know which brand computer is best for their needs.  Today, we can talk brand.  Back then, even if you were IBM (known for mainframes), brand was a second thought. 

There you have it.  No excuses, now. Time to sell brand, assuming the Prospect understands the category.  If your assignment is for a Toshiba laptop, you sell it on the merits of that particular product – not on the merits of having a laptop, period.  As in everything else, knowledge is power (4/6/12, Do your own input).  The more you know about your own product and its brand, the more you know about the competition in comparison to your product, the more specific to it you can be.    

A little historic perspective.  In the 60s, Alka Seltzer and Bromo Seltzer were neck and neck in the ad wars.  Both had some great spots – RA Blechman’s (sic) arguing stomach, prisoners in the dining room banging on tables after a meal, chanting “Bromo Seltzer, Bromo Seltzer, Bromo Seltzer” in time.  Problem was, even with great ads, no one remembered the brand.

Bromo Seltzer ads sold Alka Seltzer and vice versa.  Today, w/many parity products, communicating the brand name and proprietary message/positioning is more important than ever.  Do a smart KCWP.  Sell the heck out of the brand/product.  With so many imitators out there, so many products with no real difference, pushing brand over category is more important than ever.