by Laura Ries
Trade papers called Heineken “The Green Standard.” Beer drinkers often asked for a “greenie.”
Today, the green bottle and the green label are a strong visual hammer for the Heineken brand.
But what is Heineken’s verbal nail?
Over the years, Heineken has explored ideas like: “Seek the truth.” And: “It’s all true.” And: “It’s all about the beer.” And: “Satisfy your thirst for the best.” And the latest slogan: “Open your world.” There’s also the U.K. slogan: “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”
These are all classic mistakes. A leader should emphasize its leadership.
At one point, Heineken had about 40 percent of the imported beer market, twice the share of Molson, the No.2 brand at the time, Then Corona from Mexico entered the market, with a powerful visual hammer, the lime on top of the bottle. By 1997, Heineken had fallen to second place.
At first, Heineken management disparaged the Corona brand, calling it “Mexican soda pop.” Then they did something inexplicable.
They redesigned the Heineken label to enlarge what previously was a tiny red star. Then they built an ad campaign around the idea. “Stare at this for a long time and you’ll see a red star.” Naturally, the beer drinker was confused. “What? Is this supposed to be a Russian beer?” And Heineken fell further behind Corona.
You can change “words,” but heaven help you if you try to change a “visual.”
If you succeed in establishing a strong visual hammer (the cowboy, the duck, the lime, the straw-in-the-orange and dozens of others), you cannot change your visual hammer without substantially damaging your brand.
So you’re stuck with your current visual hammer. But what an effective device it can be for decades to come.
The surprising thing is how few companies picture their visual hammers on the products themselves. Why doesn’t Corona use its lime on its label? And why doesn’t Budweiser use the Clydesdales on its label?
Companies spend millions of dollars to put visual and verbal ideas into consumers’ minds and then don’t bother to put them on their product labels.
One of the remarkable success stories in the beer business is Coors Light, now with an 8.5-percent market share. (What green did for Heineken, “silver” is doing for Coors Light.)
The Silver Bullet has already passed Miller Lite, the first light-beer brand, which has fallen to 7.5 percent.
(Massive line extensions have greatly weakened the Miller brand. Starting with Miller High Life, the brand has been extended with Miller regular, Miller Clear, Miller Chill, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Genuine Draft Light, Lite Ice, Miller Reserve, Miller Reserve Amber Ale, Lite Genuine Draft, Lite Ultra, Miller Genuine Draft 64 and others.)
Still, Coors Light is a long way from Bud Light which currently has a 19.1-percent market share.
But I predict the Coors Light brand will increase its lead over Miller Lite, thanks to its Silver Bullet hammer. And recently, Coors Light passed regular Budweiser to become the second-largest beer brand.
Budweiser, the King of Beers, struck back with a unique twist to reinforce its verbal nail.
The new Budweiser cans have a red pull tab with the “crown” symbol embedded in the tab. It’s a visual idea that is hard to miss.
On Budweiser bottles, the brewer has a new cap designed to keep oxygen out and flavor in.
Called “Flavor-lock crown,” the new cap uses a visual crown, but it’s not the same as the crown used on the red plastic pull tab.
That’s a mistake. Consistency in names, slogans and visual hammers is what builds brands. Not variety.
The same is true in colors. A single color is always superior to multiple colors. Compare Burger King with McDonald’s.
While McDonald’s seems to be everywhere, Burger King units are mostly out-of-sight.
What color are Burger King signs?
Most Burger King units have massive kids playgrounds. But that’s what McDonald’s is known for. So the logotype on the building is the only thing that differentiates a Burger King from a McDonald’s.
Two colors are difficult to remember, but three colors are impossible. The old Burger King logo at least looked like a hamburger. The new Burger King logo looks more like a piece of abstract art.
Sometimes the color a brand should use is obvious. Yet some companies even screw this up. Look at Virgin Blue, an Australian airline that actually painted its planes “red.”
How can it burn the name Virgin Blue in the mind with red planes? Red Bull made the same mistake. While Virgin Blue planes are red, Red Bull cans are primarily blue, except for Red Bull cola which is primarily red, the color of cola. (This is a line extension that won’t work.)
Quite often a brand starts off as a single color. Then management decides to line-extend the brand into a number of different categories.
So the problem arises, how does the brand differentiate itself between its various categories?
One of the most common ways is by using different colors. In the process, the brand’s original color is lost.
When it comes to color, retailers should not just try to associate a logotype with a single color. They should try to associate the entire store with a single color.
Years ago, Elizabeth Arden painted the front door of its New York City retail salon “red.”
The “red door” has become a trademark for the Elizabeth Arden brand, currently used on its 31 Red Door spas and also its line of Elizabeth Arden Red Door spa products.
Almost every newspaper in the world is printed on grey newsprint, except for the Financial Times which is printed on salmon-colored stock. In an era where newspapers have been losing money, the Financial Times is solidly profitable and claims a readership of about 2.1 million.
It took a bit of courage to introduce a heartburn-relief pharmaceutical drug in a purple pill. At one point, Nexium, the purple pill, was the second-largest prescription drug in dollar sales in the U.S. market. AstraZenica, the maker of Nexium, even runs a website called (naturally) PurplePill.com.
Red is the color that demands the most attention. As in a stop sign. Something unusual is often called a “red flag” even though it has nothing to do with color or flags.
That’s why red is the most-used retail color. But that’s outside the stores.
Inside the stores, it’s a different matter. Retailers generally prefer laid-back colors like greens and blues to encourage consumers to focus on the products and not on the stores’ décor.
Enter Redbox, the big, garish, red-colored DVD-rental kiosks that are revolutionizing the video industry.
Inside a supermarket, they are hard to miss and their $1-a-night rental price is hard to resist.
While Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, Redbox’s owner, Coinstar, has been consistently profitable. Annual Redbox sales are approximately $1 billion.
Many old established brands use multiple colors. They were designed to look good, but not necessarily to stand out from the crowd. That puts them at a disadvantage in today’s crowded marketplace.
What colors do MasterCard and Visa use? You probably don’t remember.
Steven Streit had an idea to compete with the established credit-card companies. His idea was a prepaid debit card for people without a bank account or access to credit. What color should such a card use?
When you are first in a new category, forget artistic taste and expensive designers. The obvious color is green, the color of money. And what is the simplest symbol you can use?
A circle, obviously. So the name became Green Dot, the first prepaid debit card and a big success.
In four years of operations, sales have grown to $364 million annually with $42 million in net profits. Green Dot’s recent market cap was a hefty $2.4 billion.
Look at the success of Green Mountain Coffee. Thanks to the increasing use of single-serve K-cups, the Green Mountain brand has grown rapidly. Sales in 2001 were $96.6 million. Ten years later, Green Mountain sales had
jumped to $1.4 billion.
Sometimes you can also be successful by picking a color that is functionally less effective.
Look what an effective hammer the white earbuds have been for the Apple iPod. Personal products, especially clothing and products you wear with clothing like watches, are particularly good targets for visual hammers.
The iPod has 74 percent of the MP3-player market with nobody in second place unless you count SanDisk with its 7-percent share.
Electric wires traditionally have been black. Since wires are a necessary evil, the idea was to make them disappear. And nothing disappears better than black.
Apple did the opposite, always a good strategy for developing a visual hammer.
On the other hand, why call attention to the least important part of an MP3 player?
The white earbuds might be unimportant, but they let your friends and relatives know that you own an iPod, not some “imitation” brand.
The white earbuds, the contour bottle, the swoosh and many other visual hammers mine the same conceptual field. They visualize a brand’s authenticity.
It’s a shame that many leader brands ignore the easiest way to maintain their dominant market shares.
One leader brand that has done exceptionally well with a visual hammer is Campbell’s soup, the leading brand of canned soup ever since records have been kept.
Campbell’s red-and-white cans are an American icon, celebrated by Andy Warhol’s 1960 silk-screen prints. But as you can see, the pressure for change was apparently too much to resist. The red half is getting pushed off the can. How long will it take for Campbell to turn a red-and-white icon into just another can of soup?
At least Campbell has managed to resist what many companies have not. That is, using color to differentiate its varieties, rather than to differentiate its brand.
I wonder how many consultants have advised Campbell to put its pea soup into green-and-white cans, its chicken-noodle soup into yellow-and-white cans and its French onion soup into brown-and-white cans?
Any trip down a supermarket aisle will demonstrate that color is used primarily to help consumers pick the right flavor from a single product line.
A desirable goal, but secondary to the primary goal of identifying the brand in the first place.
And look at the effectiveness of Apple’s stark white trademark. Originally, Apple used a trademark in six colors. When you compare the two marks, you might think the old six-color mark is much more attractive and it is. But “identity” is more important than attractiveness.
Apple’s “white” visual is unusually effective in identifying Apple products even at a distance. Apple also went the extra step in having the mark illuminated on its laptops. Also brilliant is the added touch of having a bite missing.
Compare BlackBerry with Apple. BlackBerry is a great name. It’s unusual, it’s alliterative and, in truth, BlackBerry is an even better name for a high-tech company than Apple.
One problem, however. But how do you visualize a “blackberry?"
BlackBerry’s attempt to use blackberry seeds as an identifying device for its brand is pretty lame. The odd shapes don’t look like much of anything.
Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar is the largest casual-dining chain in America with 1,862 units and 2010 sales of $4.3 billion.
The Applebee’s name was apparently created by combining a number of different words in order to find a euphonious pair. In the alphabet, “a” is first and “b” is second so Applebee’s sounds like a natural combination whereas Beeapple’s sounds weird.
In addition, Applebee’s wisely uses a red apple as a visual symbol for the brand. But why use a symbol that visualizes only half of the chain’s brand name?
Applebee’s could have used two symbols, a bee and an apple. That sounds logical, but visually it's wrong. One symbol is memorable; two symbols are confusing. .
Another fruit brand name is “Pinkberry,” a rapidly growing chain of upscale frozen desserts. Currently there are some 135 units selling tart desserts to a groupie-like following who often call the product “Crackberry.”
Blueberries are blue, blackberries are black, but pinkberries are green?
That’s not a good idea because it can easily cause mental confusion. The entire logo should have been pink.
One of Pinkberry competitors, Red Mango, a frozen yogurt and smoothie brand, was actually first in the market, but has grown at a slower pace with only some 100 units to date.
But Red Mango’s signage uses a fluorescent-red circle which is not only visually distinctive, but also reinforces the brand name.
Using a color as part of your brand name is often a good idea, especially in a category that lacks “color” names. But keep in mind that consumers take brand names quite literally. Your “color” brand needs a visual hammer that uses the same color as your brand name.
CHAPTER 5
PRODUCT
THE IDEAL HAMMER.
If you can design your product so that it incorporates a visual hammer, you can have a huge advantage in the marketplace.
Being first, of course, is particularly helpful. When you are first, a distinctive design is living proof of your leadership in the category.
No brand has exploited this advantage as well as the Swiss watch, Rolex.
Its unique watchband is a status symbol as well as a visual hammer that positions the brand in consumers’ minds as the leader in luxury watches.
As is true with many brands, Rolex was not the first luxury watch brand in the market. But it was the first luxury watch brand in the mind.
The arrival of a new category is usually marked by an avalanche of new brands.
There have been hundreds of brands of personal computers, for example. And thousands of brands of energy drinks.
Take the latest high-technology product, the tablet computer. In January of 2011, more than 80 such devices were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show.
With so many brands in every category, it’s highly unlikely that the leading brand will be the “best” product.
A good product perhaps, but not necessarily better than many other brands in the same category.
“Life is unfair,” said John F. Kennedy. That’s true, in marketing as well as in politics.
In spite of much evidence to the contrary, many marketing people assume the leading brand is the better product. Not true.
In the consumer field, for example, Consumer Reports, one of the few independent organizations that exhaustively tests products, often finds that secondary brands are clearly superior to market leaders.
In its coffee tests, McDonald’s surprisingly beat Starbucks on taste.
What makes a brand a winner is the perception that it is the market leader. It’s a battle of perception rather than a battle of product quality.
As the market leader in high-end coffee, Starbucks is perceived to be better than all other coffee brands.
In an emerging category with many brands fighting for a share of the consumer’s mind, the brand that gets in the mind first and establishes a leadership position is almost impossible to dislodge. (Whether or not the brand was actually first is irrelevant.)
Kleenex in tissue. Heinz in ketchup. Hellmann’s in mayonnaise.
Take the issue of words versus visuals. Words are weak. They’re not very memorable and they lack credibility. Conversely, visual hammers are strong, memorable and emotional.
It’s odd. Exaggeration works in visuals, but seldom works in verbals. “Ralph Lauren is the brand that polo players wear,” would generate nothing but yawns among consumers.
On the other hand, the polo-player visual symbol which communicates exactly the same thing is a powerful device. It says that Ralph Lauren is the upscale brand, the leader in the category.
After all, next to yacht racing, polo is probably the world’s most expensive sport, played mostly by millionaires and royalty.
What does the alligator say about the Lacoste brand?
/> Nothing, except that the brand is Lacoste. In essence, the alligator is a rebus, a picture that stands for a word. The polo player is a hammer that identifies Ralph Lauren as the market leader.
Visuals are powerful because people tend to believe what they see and are skeptical of what they hear. Typical remark: “I know it’s true, I saw it with my own eyes.”
A hammer creates visibility for a brand far beyond what can be achieved by words alone.
Consider Rolls-Royce automobiles. Rolls-Royce does almost no advertising in the American market and it gets little publicity. Yet the brand is well-known and is often considered the best automobile brand in the world.
And it’s not because America is being overrun by Rolls-Royce wheels. In 2011, only 348 of them were sold in the U.S. market. Yet the grille of a Rolls is an unrivaled visual hammer. Even though the average consumer sees very few Rolls-Royces each year, the few that he or she does see make a lasting impression.
When you notice that unique grille, you don’t say, what car is that? You say, that’s a Rolls.
(That same year, 2011, there were 250,426 Mazda vehicles sold in America. How many Mazdas do you remember seeing on the road? No visual hammer and your brand becomes almost invisible.)
Porsche, Ferrari and Mini Cooper have taken the same approach as Rolls. Design a visual difference into the product and then maintain that difference over decades, not years.
