Four Lessons From Oprah

Over the course of her career, Oprah Winfrey has turned books into best-sellers, made unknown self-help gurus household names and she’s even affected the price of commodities with just a few words.

In fact, Oprah is such an influential force that Harvard Business School Professor Nancy F. Koehn says, “I’m hard-pressed to think of a stronger brand than Oprah and I’ve studied 200 years of brands.”

Oprah hasn’t become one of the strongest brands in the world by accident. She has built an image of authenticity, but what set Oprah apart is the fact that her brand is about something everyone is looking for, happiness.

So what can a marketer learn from Oprah?

Differentiate Yourself
Oprah differentiated herself from other talk show hosts by refusing to cater to the lowest common denominator, instead making her show uplifting and positive but when you look deeper you see how she has used that positive message to make a real economic impact.

Promote Only What You Believe In
It’s obvious in the most popular episodes of her show, her “Favorite Things” episode where she chooses a slew of items she loves and then gives them to her studio audience. Oprah never promotes in item she doesn’t love and really use. And the items featured inevitably see a huge rise in both their brand image and their sales.

Companies like Greenburg Smoked Turkey literally doubled their annual sales after appearing on the episode in 2003 and they are just one of dozens of companies that have benefitted from appearing on the special episode for less than a minute of actual screen time.

If a person were to buy each of Oprah’s favorite things from 2002 through 2010, they would’ve spent a total of $81,000 and you can be sure some people did just that.

What makes Oprah’s influence even more interesting is that she is anything but a conventional brand.

Celebrate Your Uniqueness
According to Forbes, Oprah is the world’s first female, black billionaire and she is the only black person to rank among the top 400 Richest People in America every year since 1995.

But Oprah had an acute awareness of the role she could fill to make the biggest impact. And she did it be accentuating the positive.

“Winfrey’s entire empire is built on the idea that miracles — not just good fortune or persistence or community but honest-to-God miracles — are within our reach every day,” Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote recently on Salon.com.

“There’s a reason her voice still stands out, even in a media world that’s been exponentially diluted by cable and Internet. It’s because unlike the Jerrys and the Maurys she began with — and unlike the reality show divas and intervention-needing hoarders who came after — Oprah traffics in just one commodity: happiness,” said Williams.

Understand What Your Customers Are Really Buying
Not only does Oprah fill a real need by selling happiness, but she does it in a way that is authentic and connects with her target market.

It’s a terrific lesson for anyone that wants to use the power of marketing to grow their own business.

Building a thriving business and a recognizable brand isn’t about selling products, it’s about filling needs.

When you understand what you customer is really looking for, whether it’s happiness, stability, leisure, freedom or any other need, you’ve gone a long way to connecting with them. Selling your products is a natural extension of the process and something those customers need to do.

This is what accomplished marketers understand and the reason Oprah is, arguably, the most recognizable brand in the world today.

Is Seattle’s Best Good Enough?

When I first began with ActionCOACH, one of my first tasks was to oversee the rebranding of the company from Action International to ActionCOACH.

We did a lot of work to finally decide on the new company name, logo and colors, surveying 100,000 business owners and letting them choose the company’s new image.

I don’t believe in focus groups and we didn’t use them for our rebrand for a number of reasons.

Participants often try to please the moderator or the other members of the group, so they may hold back or say what they think others want to hear rather than give their real opinion.

Companies have less control over focus groups than they do over a one on one interview, where they can ask focused questions and get real answers.

A focus group is a small group. I chose to find out opinions and hedge my bets by talking to a target audience of 100,000.

“They (focus groups) just ensure that you don’t offend anyone and produce bland, inoffensive products,” Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive says and I think he’s on the mark.

A big part of rebranding is the company’s new logo but typically logos are designed by creative people who aren’t necessarily interested in creating the best logo or design for generating leads or sales.

Instead they want to create something that feeds their inner artist and many businesses have lost a lot of money by doing just that. Award-winning logos that nobody connects with and don’t stimulate people to buy happens when art wins out over proper research.

Ideally, rebranding is done to build recognition and better connect with a company’s customer base and target market. But too often rebranding seems to be nothing more than an excuse to undertake another project, or, to put it bluntly, busy work.

The latest company to undertake a major rebranding that is completely underwhelming is Seattle’s Best coffee.

Seattle’s Best is in a difficult position because they are owned by the same parent company that owns Starbucks, so they are competing for wallet share within the same four walls as one of its biggest competitors.

So how do you build a brand when you’re in that position? They began by naming Michelle Gass President.

Gass is no stranger to the corporation as she had been brand manager and global strategy chief at Starbucks. Her goal was to bring focus to Seattle’s Best, which hadn’t been performing as expected.

Gass has made some significant changes to the brand, including separating the five basic styles of coffee the company sells into numbered packaging to help explain the differences between them to customers.

But if you look closer at the new packaging, you will see their new logo, which I simply don’t like. I know I can’t be the only one that looks at that logo and wants to donate blood.

You can find plenty of other people who don’t like the new look by just looking for Seattle’s Best on Amazon. Included among the comments were two that stood out to me.

“Seattle’s Best has obviously been taken over by idiots. That’s the only explanation for this new change in product look… Are they trying to market coffee to grade school children? The new product presentation in bright colored, ugly bags with huge numbers on them is so unsophisticated and juvenile that it boggles the mind as to how this piece of rubbish got rubber-stamped by any executive who loves coffee,” said one comment.

Meanwhile, another brought back visions of one of the greatest rebranding fiascos in history, saying, “…it makes me wonder if corporate is purposely trying to kill off SBC (Seattle’s Best Coffee) or create a media fiasco like Coca-Cola did with ‘New Coke’ in the 80′s.”

As you can see, the new logo is sterile and simple and who, exactly is it supposed to appeal to? Is it a logo for a premium brand or does the logo and new packaging make the brand look like any generic brand one finds at the local supermarket?

“People don’t drink no-name colas,” Gass said, “But lots of people drink no-name coffee. That’s because no one’s come in and said, ‘Don’t accept a bad cup of coffee’.”

I find that statement perplexing to say the least, especially when the new look is generic and has removed the traditional aspect from the look and feel of the brand.

(Also, I don’t believe people choose no-name coffees. We ran out of a premium brand at our office recently and my team definitely knew they weren’t drinking the good stuff.)

Rather than a new logo, I think Seattle’s Best needs to find a better way to differentiate itself from Starbucks and other major coffee brands.

Brands, especially food retail brands, need to concentrate on brand experience as much as taste profiling.

In Australia, coffee shops are influenced by European cafes. You can go there to eat a real meal and even take a client there. There don’t seem to be many places like that in America and that would seem to be a perfect niche for Seattle’s Best. In fact, McDonalds is testing this with their McCafe line of coffees.

So rather than changing what was an effective and attractive logo, change the customer’s experience at Seattle’s Best.

Tuesday’s Answer … Branding or leads? What do you think?

So … what’s more important for a company (including yours) … branding?

Or leads?

Many creative types who work in ad agencies (and who love to spend an owner’s money) would say branding.

After all, without a brand, how do you drive customers to your business?

But think of it another way …

Without leads … how do you build a brand?

In the world of ActionCOACH, marketing isn’t creative or high concept layouts.

Marketing the ActionCOACH way is simply math.

If an ad generates cost effective leads for your business, it’s a good ad.

If it doesn’t, it’s not.

This is a hard lesson for a lot of marketing people and agency types to deal with in working with our company (or even in our company!) … and our clients.

Because as a marketing-driven CEO, I only care about tactics and strategies that drive leads into a company … at a profit.

That’s the only way to turn your marketing “expenses” into “investments”.

After all, could you afford to continually buy a share of stock for $10 and sell it for $5?

So … why would you continue to buy an ad or run a marketing campaign that doesn’t make you money?

Branding or leads …

Which is more important for you?

Jodie Shaw

Friday morning quiz: Branding or leads?

Here’s one we throw at our marketing TEAM and “creatives” every once in a while …

What is more important to a business … building a brand?

 Or getting more leads?

I’ll give you my take on this in a later post …

In the meantime, I’d be interested in your thoughts …

Jodie Shaw