Stop your Brands' Internal War!

The “battle” analogy that marketers love to use describes the fierce and constant struggle for market share against competing brands. In this fierce battle, multi-brand marketing leaders need to realize the existence of a different war and stop it in order to be stronger in this war; their own brand's civil war.

As an analogy, Brand Civil Wars, which you will probably hear for the first time, is one of the most critical factors that prevent you from reaching maximum power in your war against rival brands. Just like in real wars, combining your forces and focusing on your strong opponent gives you an advantage, in a marketing war; Putting the critical resource, effort and focus behind your brand(s) with the highest potential against the competitor puts you ahead significantly. Especially in this period in which our country is in and we need to use all kinds of resources much more effectively, companies need to focus on this issue more than ever.

In this context, the marketing leader can take 3 critical steps to stop the civil war between their brands.

1) Realizing that there is a civil war

2) Convincing all stakeholders, especially sales and marketing teams, that this war is harmful

3) Realizing the strategic portfolio transformation from the brand point of view

1) Is there a civil war between your brands?

As a marketing leader who has been doing research on this subject for a long time, I think it is difficult to directly answer "Yes" to this question. As in the history of politics from which I borrowed the analogy, a civil war is equally difficult to recognize, accept and act on. Therefore, below, I have listed the symptoms of this civil war first. Your objective answers to these symptoms will make it easier for you to diagnose your teams and brands.

If you answer “Yes” to 4 or more of the symptoms in this list, you are experiencing a civil war between your brands. At this point, I would like to put your mind at ease; Many companies, especially in sectors that have completed their growth and reached brand/product saturation, are in a similar situation. The root cause of this problem; It is believing that while the market you are in is in the development stage, product and brand launches that bring growth one after the other will bring growth in a similar way when the market reaches saturation. However, the more likely any new product is to gain market share as the market grows, the lower the market saturation point. Moves should be chosen much more carefully and focused so that maximum resources and effort can be put behind the new product in order to increase the chances of success. The basic principle that marketing leaders may miss at this point is that now is the time to simplify and focus the portfolio in the opposite direction, instead of new product penetration.

2) Making your teams aware of the existence of civil war

As the marketing leader, you have detected the inter-brand civil war in the saturation market. Now another challenging process awaits you; to explain to your brand teams that some of these efforts are unnecessary, even harmful, because they have worked day and night on the brands they are responsible for. The most critical point that will strengthen your hand on this path will be to make them believe instead of trying to persuade them. After all, it will not be easy for them to question the efforts of your teams and their reasons for existence. In order to make it easier for them to believe, you can make your teams realize their symptoms and the difficulties they are experiencing due to the civil war in a meeting or workshop where you will have them speak. After all, the most effective method of persuasion is to ask powerful questions that will lead the other person to think more deeply.

You can start with open and bold questions; Are our brand strategies real strategies? Discuss how realistic the strategy your brands create and update is at the beginning of each year or term. In fact, go further and discuss whether these statements are a strategy or a heartfelt goal statement that you want to achieve. At this stage, you can benefit from my previous articles published in HBR Turkey to be a source for you.

- What strategy is not?

- Test your strategy before you execute it!

Continue your meeting with more compelling questions; How divergent are the goals and strategies of each brand? Are strategies reflections of similar content with different words and phrases? Why do we need different brands if the segments and consumer groups they target are starting to resemble each other?

It is a serious symptom that the targets and strategies of the brands are similar to each other and tend towards similar product features. It is the general art of marketing to be able to choose the segment that is the most critical front for the war, within the brand and product density in the saturated market, and to determine the brand that will bring you victory in this segment. How the marketing leader can get to this level of generality is the subject of the last article.

3) Brand Portfolio Transformation: From Individual Brands to Focused Portfolio

Player and product density in a saturated market brings the market to a deadlock point. Especially in the FMCG industry, including the big brands of the past, this game now starts to fight for survival. The next step of the marketing leader, who has identified the problem with his team, is to transform the brand and product portfolio in line with this purpose.

I believe that the following fiction will fill the relative gap in the literature on the "portfolio strategy", which means "collective brand perspective" in the marketing literature, where a single brand strategy is heavily covered, and aims to extract the maximum value from the total portfolio;

1) Selection of the critical product segment(s) that will be the focus of the marketing battle

2) Determination of the main marketing strategy according to the market position in the selected segment

3) Selection of the strongest (potential) brand that can continue the war in the chosen strategy

4) Simplification of the remaining portfolio to focus all the company's resources on the determined strategy

5) Anticipating the opponent's strongest possible move against your strategy

6) Determining the right success criteria to measure the effectiveness of the strategy

While performing all these items, avoiding subjectivity as much as possible and using scientific methods and frameworks rather than "I think" makes the hand of the marketing leader much stronger. War history and science are full of examples and approaches that can inspire and guide this transformation. Wouldn't it be more accurate to use the "War" analogy, which is used only to motivate the teams, to learn and apply the art of strategy from the generals who achieved impossible victories, to do justice to the analogy?

In the next article, we will cover all the steps of portfolio transformation, the details of the frameworks derived from the history of science and war, which will enable you to focus all your resources and efforts with the right strategy, by ending the war between your brands in the era of transformations where transformations are experienced intertwined and constantly