Four assumptions that (often) kill brands and how to avoid them

Successful drinks brands tend to create legends which attribute success to thoughtful planning, logical decision making, timely insights and inspirational leadership. This exercise of joining the dots backwards can feel comforting and flattering for those involved in the success, but often disguise the real reasons why a certain product succeeded where others failed.

If success has many vocal parents, far less attention is given to the failures – a classic human characteristic that the writer and philosopher Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile, critiques at length in his books. Finding out why things didn’t work is more useful than making up a narrative about why things did, but, in Taleb’s words, “no one sees the cemetery”.

Instead, our brains are tuned to nicely-wrapped stories and happy endings. Taleb calls this the “narrative fallacy”, where the human need for cause-and-effect stories to explain how and why things happened tend to ignore inconvenient statistical evidence or mis-steps. Those who have experienced the real world of brand development know that these stories are just that – stories. Success is neither inevitable nor neat, however clever your team is and however much work you put in.

So how do we improve the odds of success? We could do worse than see what patterns exist in the failures – or maybe to give them a better PR spin, “near-successes”. Underlying all these projects were assumptions about markets, products and consumer behaviour. What patterns of assumptions do unsuccessful brand developments share? And what steps should we take to avoid them?

Assumption 1: We need to follow market trends

As someone who has thought about, researched, written about and been paid to advise on market trends in drinks, this would seem to be a bit of a strange assumption to call out. To be clear, I am not proposing we ignore market trends. Comprehensive understanding of what’s happening in a given market, and why it’s happening, represents the basic homework of any brand development or positioning project. People are drinking less, and less often. Younger adult consumers are redefining drinking occasions and rituals to suit the world they find. This homework enables brand owners to ask two important questions: what is going to happen next? And what should I be doing about it?

Note that neither of these questions involves how we as a brand owner might follow a market trend. Producing some kind of reactive, me-too product might get us a hearing at the point where we need to convince a supermarket buyer or equivalent gatekeeper to put our product on a shelf or a drinks list – see also Assumption 3 below. However choosing to go down the road of “follow-ship” immediately reduces any claim we might have to distinctive positioning, and most likely will doom our proposition when whatever trend we were following starts to shift (which also might happen before we even get the product to market).

Nor does it mean we should ignore market trends entirely. Instead we should interrogate them closely. Why are people drinking less? What are these new occasions? Why is x selling well? What occasion or need state might be driving this? What else might fit? Why would a consumer switch? What type of consumer would be more likely to switch, or be recruited in the first place?

This is a harder road in terms of cost, time and intellectual effort, which is often why the follow-the-market assumption is so tempting. Close scrutiny of the underlying drivers might also produce a less clear picture of market need which then requires a more involved sell to the C-suite. For the same reason, it is also harder to sell downstream to the key gatekeepers. The narrative fallacy is a factor here too – everyone wants a neat story, even if it is not true. The follow-the-market assumption is an easy shortcut for everyone.

Assumption 2: Our product quality will make it a success

I have lost count of the number of times I have sat around boardroom tables with talented and hard-working executive teams and unsuccessfully challenged this massive assumption. Part of the issue is that the notion of “we are successful because we make the best quality X” is so deeply ingrained in the legend of a company’s existence that it is very difficult for an outsider to challenge without coming across as ignorant, rude, or both. It is even harder when the CEO or owner is also the guardian of product quality within the business, and their name is above the door.

The only way I have managed to address this (and even then with limited success) is to deconstruct this assumption into two components: a) we make the best quality, and b) the fact we make the best quality will make our product/brand a success. There is no point in challenging component a): beyond a basic chemical analysis to establish that the product is what it says it is, there is no way to prove or disprove its “best quality” claim because it is entirely subjective. Questioning it in the boardroom also threatens to get the questioner fired, or at least not invited back.

There is slightly more mileage in challenging component b), that this “best quality” will be the reason for a product/brand’s success.  In the world of drinks, where taste buds get a vote, consumers will have preferences that in their minds at least are a proxy for quality. Plus there are many other reasons why they might be choosing a given brand. We might produce the best quality X, but to what extent do our consumers agree? And how motivated are they by this alone?

Assumption 3: Our brand is what the gatekeepers have been waiting for

Being a buyer for a supermarket or a chain of restaurants can be a bruising experience. In retail, one is only as good as the previous week’s trading figures, and this environment tends to favour the tried and tested over the new and adventurous. Being successful in this world is a function of making lots of incrementally good calls over the long term, and therefore buyers by their nature will need a lot of reassurance before they take on anything new. It doesn’t help that their currency of choice is past sales within their own universe. Brands leading with Assumption 2 (quality) generally don’t get far – it’s a so what, a qualifier as far as the buyer is concerned. Paradoxically, Assumption 1 (following trends) can be a more effective selling point, though shaky if that trend hasn’t manifested in the buyer’s own business in the form of strong measurable sales. Even if it has, more experienced buyers will require a lot more convincing that the trend will remain relevant and the product will meet a need not already served.

The best challenge to this assumption often comes from listening to the brand owner’s own sales function. The best sales teams I have worked with have three fundamental attributes: they really understand their customers (in this case the trade buyers) and can authentically represent their views; they are therefore incredibly hard to convince (because they know their customers are a sceptical bunch) and will grill brand teams without mercy; and once they do believe, they become the product/brand’s most resourceful advocates and successfully handle objections.

Assumption 4: Ordinary consumers will think about our brand in the same way we do

My 25 years of listening to consumers reinforces what marketing guru Mark Ritson has consistently pointed out: they just don’t care. Unlike a brand manager, or a CEO, consumers don’t think about our brand until they absolutely have to, and even then they may not be thinking the “correct” thoughts about it. I’m pretty sure that when the Perrin family launched their wine brand La Vieille Ferme in the UK, they were not expecting consumers to christen it “the Chicken Wine” after its pen-and-ink depiction of chickens on the label.

At best, drinks brands solve a small problem in a very finite space: occasion is friends coming round, need is a drink they can all be ok with. A thought process that takes seconds at best, and is quickly forgotten. If brand owners are humble enough to recognise this, and work with the small opening they have in a consumer’s mind to build some awareness, familiarity and reassurance, in a way that works for the consumer (and which might cause the brand manager to cry), they will have gone a long way to improving their chances. This seems to be the case with Famille Perrin, who have now leant in to the adoptive name of their (very successful) wine brand, to the point where their online shop now sells a version of their red and white which is actually called “The Chicken Wine”.

Are these four assumptions the only traps to avoid?

Sadly no. Successfully challenging inherent assumptions about market opportunities, company capabilities and consumer needs will go a long way towards improving the odds that a brand or product will find a market. However it can’t answer for all attributes for success. Drinks brands mostly operate in highly competitive environments where every aspect of marketing strategy  - the four Ps of product, place, price and promotion – has to function well, or at least better than enough of the competition, to ensure sustained success. It is a brutal environment. And of course consumer and market needs evolve, which will influence gatekeeper needs, so the process of building new products, or repositioning brands, is a near-constant feature of the drinks industry. And then there is the annoying X factor of luck or timing, which most success narratives try to avoid.

If our realistic ambition with brand or product innovation is to improve our chances of success, a good starting point is to challenge some conventional assumptions at the outset of the innovation cycle by a clear-eyed analysis of the cemetery of unsuccessful efforts, and not just try to replicate the comforting narrative fallacies of success.