The date is 13 May, 1931. Neil McElroy is writing a memo to his boss, RF Rogan. McElroy has already broken the rules. His memo lasts for three pages, not one. In it (displaying the sexism of his times), he lays out the case for 'Brand Man' (see box, below). His memo features a prescient phrase.
Brand Man should take 'a very heavy share of individual brand responsibility', he wrote. Soon, brand managers commanded a pivotal role within companies such as McElroy's, Procter & Gamble, as they restructured around their brands and 'brand management'. The brand manager was on his (and her) way to becoming a brand's mini-chief executive - a lynchpin at the heart of the business.
How things change. Globalisation, retailer power, the growing importance of customer experience, social media - over the past 20 years, transformational developments have challenged McElroy's neat job description. Indeed, according to a recent McKinsey* survey, these have 'stripped away' brand managers' authority, denying them the perspective and autonomy they once had.
One of the biggest shocks to brand management (in FMCG, at least) was the rise of retailer power. 'Brand wars' may be mesmerising for brand manufacturers, but if Brand A's success comes at the expense of Brand B, without increasing total sales, the war brings no benefit to the retailer. Newly powerful retailers demanded a rethink. 'What's in it for us? What are your brilliant marketing programmes doing to grow the category?'
This not only changed the definitions of brand success, it also prompted far-reaching changes to organisational structures as category managers, and category management, moved centre stage. Today, for example, Kraft's European operations are organised around a category model, with P&L responsibility held not by brand managers but 'category presidents' based in Zurich.
Globalisation has also done its bit to erode the powers of the local brand chief executive. When brands were mainly local/national constructs, each brand manager was a big fish in a small pond. But you can't have 50 or 60 national brand managers each 'managing' a global brand: the brand strategy and positioning has to be set centrally, with local brand managers reduced to implementing strategies set elsewhere. The resulting restructuring didn't always go down well locally.
The rising importance of customer experience - a more holistic view of the brand that takes it beyond the product and its communication to every possible touchpoint - has contributed to the dispersal of the brand manager's authority.
When much of the brand's value is delivered online or by frontline staff, it is simply not possible for one brand manager to oversee every aspect of delivery. And managing the brand can involve as much internal communication and engagement as external.
Then there's the explosion of social media. 'When I was brand manager for Smirnoff nine years ago, I produced one TV ad a year and perhaps two press ads. We spent huge amounts of time polishing the finished article,' recalls Julie Bramham, who is now Western Europe marketing director for gin at Diageo. Today, via social-networking platforms such as Facebook, the Smirnoff brand manager communicates with 1m people, twice a day - with instant feedback.
'When I was a brand manager, I was master of a few marketing disciplines: basically TV and press advertising,' agrees Roisin Donnelly, UK head of marketing for P&G. 'We test-marketed Head & Shoulders for months in Scotland. We used to wait months for market-share data. Now we have to be far more agile.'
So where do these developments leave the modern brand manager? Far from being stripped of authority and restricted to just a few specialisms, the brand manager's role is expanding again.
If power shifted to head-office brand strategists when building global brands was top of the agenda, today it's shifting back to front-line marketers, suggests Daryl Fielding, outgoing vice-president of marketing at Kraft. In the military, she observes, most plans don't survive first contact with the enemy. That's because of VUCA: the inherent volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the situation. The only way to cope with VUCA, argues Fielding, is to use different words: vision, understanding, clarity and agility.
Brand strategies may still be set centrally at a global or regional level, but now, says Fielding, 'in this fast-changing landscape, you have so many more elements to implement that it has to be played out locally. The balance is less highly centralised and more intelligent. As long as the brand's strategy is understood by local marketers, it can be brilliantly brought to life locally'.
To achieve this, brand managers have to keep many more balls in the air. 'Today's brand manager is more like a magazine editor, much more frequently creating and editing engaging content,' observes Bramham. 'We are now working very, very quickly. It's either spin it or bin it.'
Managing complexity
Creating this content, and managing the feedback, is now a big task. At Sainsbury's, former head of brand communications Claire Harrison-Church built a specialist content team devoted to just this: fleshing out the full possibilities of core brand positionings and initiatives such as 'Live well for less' and 'Feed the family for £50'. The team's primary focus isn't paid-for media but 'owned and earned space', she says. Harrison-Church adds that the core question - 'how to develop content for owned/earned space, to create integrated communications across all channels' - is far more complex (especially considering the thousands of emails, letters and phone calls the company receives every week).
To help manage this speed and complexity, companies are evolving. 'We are recruiting different people,' says Donnelly. 'They are much more innovative and are managing more - much bigger teams of agencies, for example.'
To get by, they need the support of much smarter IT systems. Kraft, for example, has developed a proprietary 'customer journey tool' that is designed to integrate all decision-points and 'the relative contributions and opportunities from a complex web of levers' including social media, in-store and shopper marketing.
The software is designed to help Kraft marketers, in any role, to 'help us make a joined up world', says Fielding. 'As things become more fragmented, joining it all up becomes much harder and more important.'
There are still many pitfalls. Trends such as retailer power, globalisation, the rise of peer-to-peer and bottom-up information flows, speed of feedback, fragmentation and complexity have resulted in 'seemingly endless rounds of reorganisation, complains McKinsey*. One result can be that many brand managers 'spend more time in meetings than in doing their jobs'. With media in a state of permanent revolution, Fielding warns that agencies risk being reduced to offering 'a random collection of cool stuff' rather than 'better tools to make sense of a complex and fast-changing world'.
Underneath it all, however, the brand manager's job remains remarkably similar to that outlined by McElroy in 1931. 'I'm surprised how much things have changed,' says Bramham, 'yet the nuts and bolts are the same. It's still about building brand equity. The way we do it is different.'
'The core is the same,' agrees Donnelly. 'The primary job is to understand your consumers better than your competitors do, and to focus everything on delighting them. It's still about being the general manager for the brand.'
* 'A New World for Brand Managers', McKinsey Quarterly (April 2010) by Stacey Haas, Monica McGurk and Liz Mihas
THE CASE FOR 'BRAND MAN'
A 'Brand Man', said McElroy, in his famous memo (right, click to enlarge), should:
- Study carefully shipments of his brands by units.
- Where brand development is heavy and where it is progressing, examine carefully the combination of effort that seems to be clicking, and try to apply this same treatment to other territories.Where brand development is light:
- Study the advertising and promotion history of the brand.
- After uncovering our weakness, develop a plan that can be applied to this local sore spot.
- Outline this plan in detail to the division manager.
- Prepare sales helps and all other necessary material for carrying out the plan.
- Keep whatever records are necessary and make whatever field studies are necessary to determine whether the plan has produced the expected results. - Take full responsibility ... for the general printed word plans for his brands.
In short, when the brand men have approached their fullest responsibilities, they should be able to take from the shoulders of the division managers a very heavy share of individual brand responsibility.
McElroy also laid out the role of the 'Assistant Brand Man', who takes care of much of the office work, carries out the field work and so on.
Brand Manager's Today
Isabelle Maratier (right) has been Guinness' Western Europe brand manager for a few years. The biggest part of her job, she says, is 'nailing what motivates' Guinness consumers. That involves a lot of research, working hand-in-hand with planners.
Maratier also makes a point of meeting consumers two or three times a year, to talk about the brand.
Next on the to-do list is acting as a project leader: getting the details of brand activities and strategies right and bringing key people into the project, from the internal supply chain to creative agencies working on imagery and core messages. This covers the gamut of brand activities including innovation, new ads, packaging and PR. 'The types of activity can be very different,' says Maratier. 'One of the key things is to bring the right people from different backgrounds to work together.'
The third main facet of Maratier's job is 'fighting the brand's corner within the company, making sure it gets the right share of voice'. If you work for a small brand, you can get overlooked, she notes, although this is not a problem for Guinness. 'But you still have to make sure your brand gets the attention it needs, and the right support.'
Among her key challenges are budget constraints and keeping to deadlines. And the biggest buzz?
'The people contact,' she says. 'Brand management is all about people management: finding the right people and getting them working together as a team. I was attracted to brand management by the glamour - the advertising, that sort of thing. But the people side is something I discovered along the way. Now it's the most rewarding thing. It's why I've continued.'