The importance of Keller’s performance and judgements

This is a technical column. Stick with it, reread it, use it to best effect and you will be rewarded.

The psychosocial brand facets have entered the realm of fantasy. If you enter into a harmonious engagement with the consumer, match and project the psychosocial elements of personal transformation and / or tribal belonging to your market, the road ahead will be paved with gold and lined with consumers throwing money at the product.

Is this true? Only partially.

Kevin Lane Keller posits a second set of brand facets that are often overlooked in the rush to enter the state of a love-in with the consumer. They are performance and judgements. Performance is the projection of product attributes and benefits. This obtains judgements from the consumer. The consumer forms opinions and makes decisions on the basis of quality, credibility, superiority and relevance to needs.

If the attributes and benefits fall short, the consumer will not repeat the trial. In the first place, the personal transformation will be tenuous, and the purchase may be subliminally experienced as a grudge purchase. In this case the product runs the risk of substitution when a more suitable product comes along. Secondly, the brand manager will be pushed towards using tribalism. Tribalism becomes doubtful as the consumer evolves and moves on to new social groups.

This scenario leads to push marketing, the expensive and repetitive exercise of cajoling the consumer with calls to action to make the purchase rather than pull marketing, in which the consumer voluntarily repeats the purchase with limited prompting.

The symptoms of poor performance and judgements will be high budget marketing with a high degree of internal effort and a high degree of churn. They will also include diminishing returns on calls to action.

Although expensive in the Namibian context, the logical step is to engage in a design thinking process prior to product implementation, with a relatively high degree of focus on attributes and benefits. The delay will be far less expensive than the lost opportunity cost of a failed or underperforming product. The design thinking process must also lead to very clear positioning and either identify a new, unfilled niche or reduce the impact of cannibalization relative to the enterprise and the market consideration sets.

If the expense of the process cannot be formalized, it should at least be a process of informal questioning in which the knowledge is gradually assembled until a conclusion can be drawn.

The consideration set, the range of choices available to the consumer across all brands, will evolve and consumers will churn as new products enter the market. One possible way to deal with this is to idealize the product lifecycle on a curve and track actual adoption and volumes against this. On this basis, use the net promoter score tailored to benefits and attributes, then follow through with formal or informal qualitative elements of the design thinking process.

A further consideration, very noteworthy on the Namibian context, is the quality and quantity of calls to action. In general, Namibian brand managers and marketers do not favour strong calls to action. Yet if the product attributes and benefits are sufficiently strong calls to action should promote trial and repeat use. For an example of this compare South African communication to local communication. This is evident in retail and at trade shows.

In conclusion, the brand is not just a psychosocial phenomenon, but also very dependent on a feedback loop between performance and judgements. Develop the thinking and use it to best effect.