30 Years of Building Equity
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of BEES® — Sterling’s Brand Equity Evaluation System — which has helped hundreds of brands identify their visual equities and create a vision for leveraging these assets in the future.
We’ve shopped with consumers for everything from diapers to donuts, trash cans to tissues, sandwiches to shoes… and we’ve experienced firsthand the power of some of the world’s most iconic and loved brands.
30 Years of BEES®
Over these 30 years, I have personally spent countless hours with consumers learning about what delights them and distresses them about brand equity. Here are my biggest takeaways about the keys to powerful brand equity.
What Constitutes Powerful Equity?
1. Powerful Equity Is Universal
Great equity transcends age, gender, cultures because it taps into universal human sensibilities. One of the UK’s most famous brand icons, the Andrex Puppy, is a symbol that Kimberly-Clark has adopted across other regional toilet paper brands including Lily in Israel. The feelings of love and softness this icon elicits is incredibly powerful no matter where or who you are. Just ask the Israeli soldier who questioned us as we arrived at Tel Aviv Airport to research the brand there. “Don’t get rid of the puppy,” were his parting words as he let us through passport control.
The Andrex Puppy (so famous there is a waxwork at Madame Tussauds in London) / Andrex Packaging for UK, Switzerland, Israel.
2. Powerful Equity Is Pragmatic
Powerful equity is a practical workhorse because it creates distinct visual markers for brands that make them instantly recognizable. In crowded brick-and-mortar stores or endless Amazon pages, brands that stand out from 10 feet away or within a crowd of 90 page items command attention. When shopping with moms for Goldfish Crackers, we saw they could spot the brand’s distinctive orange and white color scheme from as far away as 30 feet. It became a clear beacon for them in the cacophony of the snack aisle. With markers like this, any brand competing in crowded environments has a head start in the decision process.
Consumer Drawings
3. Powerful Equity Is Intuitive
System 1 thinking is defined as fast, instinctive, and emotional. Tapping into this thinking has become a holy grail of branding. Powerful equity works at a System 1 level because it is straightforward, focused, and highly evocative.
Consider Tropicana’s iconic orange straw, or Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime bear. These symbols are not complex or subtle. They are direct and often very literal, triggering instinctive and emotional connections that drive brand affinity.
Consumer Drawing
4. Powerful Equity Needs Feeding
Every brand wants a Nike Swoosh, an icon that represents the brand without any other info required. The Swoosh is the embodiment of powerful equity for many reasons:
Practical: Part of the brief for design was that it had to be easily visible from the stands of an athletic track.
Universal: The grace and movement of the symbol is universally evocative of performance.
Simple. The swoosh’s meaning is easily implied. But what the Swoosh also benefits from is relentless and substantial investment that has kept it front and center in consumers’ minds for decades.
You can’t expect to develop true equity without leveraging and investing in it across all touch points.
5. Powerful Equity Is Ever-Evolving
All too often, brands assume that because they have assets they have used over time that these are valuable and sacred equities. As a result, marketers often fear that evolving or ditching them would spell disaster. Debacles like the Tropicana re-design still stoke this paranoia for change. While this mishap is a prime example of reckless disregard for the power of valuable equities, you really don’t know your equity until you go out and learn from your audience. Our BEES® process has taught me that this learning comes in two parts:
Diagnose what you have now. Identify what is a marker, what adds meaning and value, and what is redundant or negative.
Stretch to learn. Evaluate what you must keep, what you can evolve, what you should add, and what you can lose.
Alka Seltzer’s reprisal of Sir Speedy is an example of brand evolution done right. All of its equity lay in the product—its fizz and its decades old tagline and character—not in its graphics. By reimplementing Sir Speedy and the affiliated tagline in their advertising, the product became the hero of the brand identity. In this case, the brand didn’t actually appreciate the power of these equities until we unearthed and activated them.
Alka Seltzer’s Speedy retired in 1964, but was still loved in 2010 and reprised in ads as a result
Consumer drawings and our design stretch exercise indicated all the equity and potential lay in the effervescent tablets, which became the focal point of the new identity
Even with strong visual brand identity in place, there is always room to grow. Everyone at Krispy Kreme, for example, was rightly convinced there was tremendous equity in its unique logotype and white, red, and green livery. What they had failed to realize was the incredible power in the “Hot Now” sign that graces every outlet and signals fresh donuts are hot and ready! Only by inviting people to recount their associations with the brand did we learn the latent power of this symbol. As a result, it became an integral part of the new visual identity system we created for the brand.
It’s not just the donuts or the name; it’s the “Hot Now” sign: Instant memories and instant mouth watering
Over the last 30 years, the fundamental principles of BEES® have remained the same: diagnose what works today, and imagine where you can go in the future. However, the depth and breadth of the process has expanded beyond recognition from its earliest days. What was once US, Focus Group, CPG, and Packaging-Centric now encompasses global qualitative and quantitative studies across multiple products and services. Addressing visual equity across multiple touch points has also become essential in the dawn of the global digital era. It will be interesting to see how the power of equity and the tools to measure it evolve over the next 30 years.
Image Sources:
https://www.provokemedia.com/latest/article/mhp-consolidates-uk-consumer-pr-duties-for-kimberly-clark-brands
https://www.galaxus.ch/en/brand/hakle-1047
https://www.azrieli.com/o/b568e91c-47ef-4f44-8e20-8751a7dd3657
https://cristianoronaldoinstagramnews.blogspot.com/2019/12/cristiano-ronaldo-celebration-portugal.html