Many brands are experiencing identity crises today, when the consumer seems to be moving faster than marketers can pivot.
Stewards for established brands need to reconsider their place in the market, and sometimes that requires outside help, says Andrew Miller, Chief Growth Officer of BeenThereDoneThat, a platform to support marketers.
“Consumer expectations are moving faster than business,” says Miller. “Competition has never been more fierce and a lot of the old rules and tools no longer apply.”
Legacy brands and established players are having to work harder to hold onto their place in the market. “What has gotten you where you are isn’t what will get you to where you want to be,” says Miller.
New challenger brands are refreshing existing products and ingredients to meet consumer needs and wants, while budget-conscious consumers are reconsidering their relationship with major brands, opting for low-cost private label brands or value brands.
“It takes ever more to convince consumers that a more expensive product is a necessity, rather than a nice-to-have,” says Miller.
The popularity of protein as an ingredient is case in point, says Miller. It tapped into a relevant cultural moment with consumers; now new products have emerged and almost every CPG brand has launched a protein-forward product.
“It has never been more important to be culturally relevant,” said Miller. “It’s on the tip of the tongue of almost every CMO that I speak to.“
In any brand refresh or reinvention, the first step should always be a rigorous assessment of the category, consumers, competitors, and of course the brand itself, says Miller. This “Reframe” phase helps to clarify the situation and gain a holistic view of the obstacles and landscape the brand faces in its pivot. This will help develop a point of view and “frame the real question that has to be asked and answered” by a new strategy, says Miller.
Once a client has a clear understanding, it can begin working on a strategy that will make an impact on the business. This is the stage where brands have to find opportunities and white spaces to develop by using consumer testing to prioritize ideas and initiatives, says Miller.
It also requires strategic imagination, which “can be challenging for client organizations that are faced with tremendous financial pressure to deliver results from the short term,” says Miller.
“If you’re that brand steward, you need a mix of logic and magic, a mix of function and emotion, of provocation and pragmatism,” he said. “It’s not easy to hold these two opposing forces in harmony, but that’s what it takes, from our experience.“
Defining a clear strategic goal with a measurable outcome should always be the starting point of efforts, said Miller. Everything that follows is in service of that “North Star“ and can justify enduring backlash or backtracking if necessary, as the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel recently found out.
Miller recalled working on the rebranding of the football club Juventus, “one of the most abhorrent responses that we’ve ever seen,” he said.
“The fan base was livid. They were shocked. They were appalled. But this was predicted. This kind of response was absolutely expected,” he said. The club was able to survive the backlash because the client and agency both understood they were reinventing a sports franchise as a lifestyle brand involved in music and food along with gameplay. They had done rigorous analysis to have the confidence to ride the wave of “vehement disdain” from fans, and in time the decision was proved right.
That confidence comes from bringing together brand and product marketers, along with insight leads and R&D to align the KPIs for the program, said Miller. “We need to come to a real alignment on what the necessary shift is so it can become that North star,“ he said.
Fast-acting strategy
BeenThereDoneThat applies its proven SOLVE™ methodology—a flexible, expert-led problem-definition system refined across hundreds of brand and innovation challenges—to unlock new routes to growth. It starts by rigorously interrogating the Situation a brand is in today versus the future it wants to create. It then surfaces the real Obstacles holding the business back and maps the broader Landscape of consumers, competitors and cultural dynamics. With this foundation, SOLVE sharpens a distinctive brand Viewpoint that reframes the tension between where the brand is and where it needs to go. Finally, it aligns teams around a compelling End Frame—the precise problem to solve and the outcomes that will drive meaningful progress. The result is a shared strategic springboard that accelerates decision-making and unlocks bigger, more exciting opportunities.
Using this methodology, BeenThereDoneThat runs an accelerated process that can in days or weeks achieve strategic clarity where clients may have needed far longer to do the same. Clients don’t have time or money to spend many months trying to figure this out, he said.
“There is no one-and-done solution for brands today. Consumers and culture are moving too fast,“ says Miller. “There’s no one consulting approach that’s going to work for every company.” What brands need is “a freedom within frameworks“ and a test-and-learn approach with measurable objectives built into the process from the start, he said.
“While there’s so many great brands, great companies out there that are led by incredible marketing and innovation folks, the headwinds they face are intense and growing. The pressure has never been greater. No one person, and no one team can address and plan for it all.“
Other times, “organizational inertia” can keep companies in what are risk-averse environments from taking the bolder steps. Businesses facing quarterly reviews tend to adapt to risk aversion and short-term thinking, said Miller. Meanwhile, brand innovation professionals are looking for ways to get the business to see the potential of developing something new and different. “Sometimes it helps to have outside folks with specialized expertise“ to advocate for these more novel approaches, said Miller.
The risk of inaction can be a greater danger to business than any potential backlash from efforts, said Miller.
“It goes to the classic idiom: “No risk, no reward,“ said Miller. “If you’re a person who is part of a business looking to create a significant impact, to take meaningful leaps over the competition, then you have to create the conditions to be a part of helping the business to actually take those bolder actions. Otherwise you risk inevitable decline.”
