Don't Make Positioning a 'Small Boy Story' That Undermines Loyalty to Your Brand
By Jayne C. Eastman, Managing Director

This is the first of a series of articles describing critical failures of decision-making that destroy Brands. Strategically-focused decision-makers can avoid these mistakes.

 A "small boy story" is Brand positioning that is so complicated that you need to send a small boy along to explain it.  It is lazy marketing. It is filling up the consumer's time with too much information and too many product signals. The result? You are essentially asking them to do the hard work of understanding what really is important about your Brand, and why they should care about it.

Consumer loyalty depends on developing and sustaining a clear, definitive understanding of your Brand's differentiated benefits versus the alternatives the way the consumer actually sees them.

"Small boy stories" make it so complicated that the consumer ceases caring. Such positioning is often the result of a lack of clarity about what is truly important to your target consumers, what will firmly attract and then attach them to your Brand, versus what is irrelevant.  We have become victims of too much information. We have learned so much about a market, a consumer, a need or a Brand's equity. It all ends up getting jammed into the positioning – and calls for a small boy to go along to explain it.

Unfortunately, consumers can't absorb that much. They need one main, distinctive benefit, supported by a credible reason why. They need one overriding personality directed against a well- defined target consumer. This clear and definitive understanding has to be reflected in everything – in the way we construct the product, the way we package and label it, and every part of our communication.

Let's take an example. A leading coffee maker developed a new product intended to appeal to younger users who had not yet fully adopted the a.m. coffee habit. The marketer knew that these younger users preferred their morning jolt to be a sweeter beverage. They liked to mask their coffees with flavors, especially chocolate, and were willing to trade off flavor intensity for preparation convenience.

The marketers also knew there was a second target of older coffee lovers who liked the idea of a "break" beverage with a different flavor and caffeine level than their regular cup of Joe. This target liked stronger flavors in general and less sweetness. They didn't want to replace their morning coffee, but instead wanted a different tasting addition to their coffee repertoire.

Unhappily, all of this information was translated into a single product and squeezed into a single positioning. The product, whose tag line was "A first, a find, a one of a kind" certainly was a one of a kind and aptly described. It was gone from test market almost before the first advertising flight was over. Confused consumers couldn't figure out exactly what its differentiating benefit was and who it was for.

So, what do we concentrate on – a list of reasons why, or just one? A functional attribute or an emotional end benefit?  The problem is that all of your information about target, Brand, needs, benefits and reasons why is likely to be correct.  It becomes critical to sort out what must be communicated and what must be true for the Brand to succeed and then just as critical to be confident about leaving the rest behind.  That last point – leaving the rest behind – is the essence of proper decisionmaking. But deliberately ignoring facts about the consumer or the Brand can cause even confident marketers to pause.

The solution is to understand how the market is organized, where your Brand lies in it, and what it may be able to evolve to. This enables making decisions on what to focus on in your Brand's positioning. Marketers need to have a holistic theory of how their markets operate, putting the full range of variables that drive product and Brand choice in order of importance, statistically linking behaviors with specific consumer targets, the precise benefits the exact target seeks, and how well (or not) existing Brands satisfy them. HRCP calls this the MarketMap.  When we have that understanding, we can make fact-based decisions on where and how to drive Brands – and where and how we can safely leave the "small boy story" behind.

Quick! What's the nighttime sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, fever, best-sleep-you-ever-got cold medicine? Chances are that both as marketer and consumer you could name NyQuil, which is a great example of a Brand that knows what it is and isn't afraid to stick to it.  NyQuil understands the order of importance – getting rest -- and knows how it helps – by relieving symptoms.  Package and product line up are equally clear.  The focus is on the benefit; then, after that, the focus is on specific conditions that its target might require (alcohol free, severe cough versus cold and flu relief).  While the product comes in two forms, liquid, and liquid-caps, and several flavors, these are consistently 3rd and 4th level communications.  What a relief!

The "order of importance" point has multiple applications. One Brand we worked on was positioned as a high taste and satisfaction alternative to common eat-alone solutions. In Year Two, Brand marketing had focused considerable R&D efforts on bringing down the fat content of its products, based on their belief that the consumer was trading off to "low fat" labeled products.  R&D was successful at reducing fat by approximately 20%, although there was a noticeable taste trade off and a cost up-charge to do so.  The issue was that even the 20% reduction did not enable the product to claim "low fat." "Almost low fat" simply wasn't good enough for the part of the consumer base that marketing folks were concerned about.  A huge on-package flag shouting "Now! Lower in Fat!" did nothing except call attention to the fact that the Brand did not quite match the low-fat characteristics of neighboring products. At the same time, an alternate target – while liking the idea of low fat – prioritized the taste and satiation benefits that the Brand had originally been known for far above any wellness attributes.

After HRCP created the MarketMap, identifying how this market worked, and attached exact desired benefits and required attributes to the exact targets, the Brand was able to re-focus on the target that the Brand could highly satisfy. In the process of clarifying and simplifying the positioning to emphasize its taste advantages, the Brand re-introduced its original, slightly higher-fat formulas and saved the time, effort, cost – and risk from poorer taste delivery to the central target – of reducing fat by a meaningless amount.

Here's a good test to find "small boy stories." Look at the store shelf and at product labels.  If a category or Brand seems confusing to you as a consumer, then it is likely a reflection of the marketer's own uncertainty about what the target consumer really cares about.  Then examine your own reaction:  are you likely to stand at the shelf and ponder the meaning of all the information the marketer is trying to load onto you? Do you pick up labels and carefully read each one to determine how one product offering is different from another? Not likely.  That, in a microcosm, is how "small boy stories" negatively affect Brand loyalty.  You – and the consumer – simply walk away.