Stoke

Finding the Reason to Be:
Creating a Durable Brand Identity

by Dave Miller

from Ideas

On a recent return trip to Seattle, the grave condition of newspaper branding came into stark relief. I received five separate national or major metropolitan newspapers, in five hours.

All of them handed to me.

For free.

One at my hotel door. One from the car service. In the airport sky lounge. At the concourse. One on the carpark shuttle.

When did these journalistic legacies start getting handed around like nightclub circulars? What happened to paid circulation? Where did price integrity go? What happened to newspaper branding?

Or perhaps: What hasn’t happened with newspaper branding?

It has been roughly a decade since newspaper branding became salve for the wound of declining readership. Brands were the new imperative. And “branding” would save us all. But we need not detail the persistence of declining readership trends to see the unmet promise of branding the daily newspaper.

But has branding failed publishers, or have publishers failed it?

Search the Internet for the term “newspaper branding” and you’ll see that for as much as has been said about branding, newspapers seemed to be talking about quite different things. Branding was loosely and variously assigned to the tactics of market awareness, image advertising, logo design, employee orientation and product extensions. In this land rush to branding, the rigor of strategy was perverted by sketchy terms like “exploring our brand spirit,” and the discipline of positioning was co-opted by agencies with slogans to sell.

So it seems unfitting to make any assessment of the past 10 years of newspaper positioning strategy - branding - without first re-setting the anchor with an assertion of the full meaning of branding.

THE CORE OF BRAND

Much, and perhaps too much, has been written about branding. One more dreamy anecdote about Starbucks and Nike is enough to make any of us hurl expensive coffee on our high-status running shoes.

At its core, the objective of branding is to create a differentiating and durable strategic position of relevant value, whether real or perceived, that is difficult for your competitors to replicate. You’ll have a brand when people pay more, stay loyal, are predisposed to purchase from you, and refer their friends. Folks, that’s branding, in two sentences.

So any reflection on the effectiveness of newspaper branding invites these questions: How specific are the promises made in your newspaper’s brand position? How relevant are those promises to information consumers and advertisers? And how different are those promises relative to other newspapers, information sources, or any other competition for a reader’s time, money and attention?

If your private answers to these questions would differ in the company of certain colleagues, you’ll appreciate the frustrating lack of progress in the strategic positioning of newspapers.

WHAT’S GOING ON AT NEWSPAPERS?

The epitaph for newspapers may one day read: “Here lies daily print journalism, killed by a thousand toothpicks.” The competitive pressures on daily newspapers are enormous and all too well documented. Readership, revenue, and distribution are under attack from nearly every quarter. So it is bitterly paradoxical that newspapering - an industry clearly compelled to stand-up and fight - seems culturally and organizationally incapable of mustering the troops.

At its core, the objective of branding is to create a differentiating and durable strategic position of relevant value, whether real or perceived, that is difficult for your competitors to replicate.

The entrenchment of traditional print journalism, coupled with the capital investment in presses and trucks, has encumbered any significant changes in positioning strategy. In many newspapers there remains an implicit directive that whatever brand position is developed, it must reflect an approach to news provision (old-line journalism), revenue (display and classified advertising) and distribution (print) that has remained substantially unchanged for decades. As a result, the branding process has devolved into a load-balancing exercise, diluting specific promises to specific audiences in the interests of preserving the historical order.

In the best of times strategic repositioning can challenge an organization’s ability to recognize the cancer of complacency, tackle issues, realize opportunity, and embrace change. Compounded by the pressure of their current times, newspapers seem to face other systemic issues that, until addressed, may limit their return to winning strategic positions.

BRAND AND THE NEWSPAPER CULTURE

Getting to a strategic brand position first requires the development of a brand identity: the underlying values, culture and strategic intent of a company.

The failure to develop and commit to a clear and meaningful brand identity - a reason to be - is our single best predictor for the weakness of a brand.

Does everyone at Apple know and understand that decisions about product and service development will be made on the basis of design, simplicity and enabling the creative expression of users? Guaranteed. Do employees at Patagonia know and understand that the locus of decision-making is product durability and versatility, global citizenship and environmental stewardship? Certainly.

So what would your newspaper’s employees, company-wide, say are the unique and defining principles of your brand? Is their cause clear and consistent?

Such is the challenge of developing brand identity.

Brand identity is an organizational process that requires broad participation, firm resolve and constant reinforcement. Without the guidance of brand identity, product planning, organizational development and marketing lack the bearing points to make truly strategic choices. Because a clearly developed brand identity requires strategic courage and sustained commitment, it is not an easy proposition.

So what are the challenges to brand identity at newspapers? To be certain, newspaper cultures have a peculiar ecology. The purpose, interests and cultures of newsrooms, circulation and advertising are often dissonant. The revenue mindset of advertising must coexist with the altruistic calling of journalism. Toss-in the blue collar sensibilities of circulation and you’ve got a stew of priorities, values and personalities that would offer a field day for the best clinical psychiatrists.

While there are many newspapers where these cultures thrive, the silo-ed structure and semi-autonomous nature of these business units continues to wreak havoc with the ability of many newspapers to realize a shared organizational identity. In turn, it has become difficult to align resources around clearly articulated brands, and their resultant market strategies.

So, in too many cases newspaper branding has been relegated to image creation - logo-ing and sloganeering - without addressing the coordinated shifts in product/service strategy and organizational structure to compete in a high-velocity, competitive media market.

ALIGNMENT TO THE READER

Where newspaper branding gets significantly sideways is in the disposition towards the reader.

One of the singular truths in strategy is that brand doesn’t belong to the newspaper. Brand is owned by its customers. And many newspaper organizations have yet to fully reconcile the dominant market force of our time: Consumers are now in control, and brands must account to their interests.

Gone are the days when mass manufacturers could dictate product and terms, distributors could regulate supply and retailers could set margins. While the evolution of management culture has been slow and painful, prospering companies now put customers at the center of decision-making. In today’s markets, consumers rule!

Did your branding process put consumers at the center of your strategy? Are new reader products more likely to be developed in response to market insights, or because other newspapers are doing them? Are products more influenced by the measured response of readership, or by the authority of professional symposiums?

Much of newspaper product strategy still centers on the noble cause of journalism, to serve the un-knowing public. Newspapers use the principles of journalism - a surrogate, but not quite the same as, market demand - as the basis of decision-making. And depending on the temperament of the newsroom, the gap between serving the journalistic purpose and meeting reader interests can be slight, or massive. There is a pervasive air that newspapers know what readers really need to know, and are in the best position to tell them. But with all due respect to the skills of some great editors, given the abundance of competition in the information market, can newspaper brand positions be supported by anything other than products which reflect precisely what readers want?

While news content is influenced by readership studies, circulation trend-lines, and advertising revenue projections, it largely remains the domain of journalists. Is there another industry where the procurement and manufacturing divisions, without ultimate profit-&-loss responsibility, can so substantially direct the origination of product?

I’m aware that simply posing this question draws the ire of the corduroy jackets at Institute X and Journalism School Y. Will academics leap to say that service to community and the independence from commercial interests makes news content the province of trained journalists? Certainly. Stewardship of the public trust remains central to the identity of most newsrooms. But perhaps newspapers are now structured on promises of value - independence and objectivity - that fail to substantially exist in the minds of consumers. And even if it were a perception that could be re-kindled, how much additional purchase intent would it generate? There is market skepticism as to whether newspapers have a credible basis of differentiation in this regard. And as a basis for brand strategy, this position may be necessary, but not sufficient to prevail.

I won’t restrain the right of newspaper purists to continue playing their game on their terms, but the readership results of the past 10 years suggests that exploring this area isn’t unwarranted. Unless there is a greater level of accountability to the interests of readers in the selection and development of content, the noble tradition of print editors may die with its boots on.

Finally, much critical attention has been paid to the commitment of large publicly-traded news corporations to invest in local news and value enterprise journalism. But perhaps the greater threat to newspaper brands stems from the short-term margin orientation of large companies, public and private. The changes required to re-imagine newspaper brands will be enormous undertakings, with uncertain outcomes - and it is likely to be expensive. With a steady stream of confident MBA’s and fresh journalists ready to step-in and teach the old dog new tricks, the environment for developing long-term, meaningful re-positioning strategies is inhospitable to today’s salarymen.

BRAND AND CONTENT

The state of metropolitan daily newspapers can be summarized in four words: “No Time to Read.” It represents a significant share of the erosion of brand relationship with readers. But while the industry has quite favorably positioned the issue as a matter of available time, other market data argues a convincing counterpoint: Reading remains a very significant share of consumers’ leisure time. Book clubs abound. Amazon.com book revenues boom. New magazine titles proliferate. Alternative weeklies are in every coffee shop.

No time to read? Really?

By now surely every strategist realizes that time is the most precious currency of consumers. We can’t give readers more time, but they will pay a premium for brands that add value to their time. Any service that can save them time is manna from heaven. Any experience which concentrates quality in time is a magical brand elixir. While it is certainly true that readers are time-pressured, the collapsing base of daily readership is a greater refection of the lack of value that consumers receive from their time with the newspaper.

It is not unfair to say that the average daily newspaper is painfully predictable, and generates the same intellectual capital as a good high school book report. Despite branding’s invocation to be different, most newspapers offer similar content in a constellation of dull illuminations. (And while sharpening your knives, please recall that I’m one of those people who loves newspapers…)

Editors ought to ask themselves: How often does columnist Molly Ivins invite an original thought? Yet there she is, twice a week! What share of readers, (other than the Pulitzer committee, for whom they are clearly targeted), actually reads those lengthy quasi-investigative series? And what share of readers come away saying “Wow, that writing style was compelling?”

Ask most of us now middle-aged Gen-Xers if they read a newspaper, and their likely response is a resigned “Why?” not “I don’t have time.”

At the end of the day, the only winnable brand position will be manifested by highly relevant content, an engaging writing style, provocative columnists and intuitive design. At the point that you think that US dailies are topical, well-written and engaging, go read The Irish Times online.

The vapid qualities of many metro newspapers are indicative of the strain on their traditional mass market strategy. The relentless quest to serve the widest base of readers appears to have undermined the exceptional qualities of good writers. Great brands have a reason to be, and the apparent reason of today’s metros is to offer lessons in remedial everything, absent good adjectives. An information source that strains to serve everyone, appeals to increasingly few of anyone.

Behind every product strategy lies the principle of positioning. As it has been famously said: The essence of positioning is sacrifice. Newspapers will have to give up elements of their position in order to make a more focused, credible and consistent claim for other positions.

Daily newspapers generally do an excellent job in city politics, schools, civic affairs, restaurant reviews, etc. My local daily newspaper has astonishingly good local sports coverage and columnists. But fashion? Travel? Gardening? Relative to other abundant and more credible brands in these interest areas, (on cable, Internet, magazines) from what basis are metro dailies even trying to compete on these topics?

In the world of branding, less is more. The more things you try to be, the more diluted a brand becomes. Volvo is safety, not sexy. McDonalds is consistency, not culinary. But re-focusing a brand often requires saying “no” to short-term tactical opportunities in the interests of long-term strategic gain. And a shrinking revenue and readership base doesn’t create a hospitable climate for people saying “No” to a few new readers and some incremental ad revenue.

“BLAH, BLAH BRANDING”

The continued erosion of news franchises, and the relative inefficiency of pulp as a distribution medium, should be inviting some fairly fierce conversations in the newspaper business. But this process will not be fully and honestly engaged until there is the modest acknowledgment that raw information is now a commodity, and that market forces will always favor distribution efficiencies.

With that recognition, newspapers will ultimately develop brand positions that promise something more than being “news” on “paper.”

Newspapers are spectacular opportunities. What their brands could achieve is astounding; Vast information archives. Brand awareness and trust, for the credible endorsement of new properties. Extensive distribution networks. Information for the segmentation of consumer interests at the household level. A dynamic platform for the efficient interaction of direct, online and mass media.

Powerful stuff.

Yet their brand strategies favor the perpetuation of industry convention, merely reflecting the position of their newspaper peers. Far too much time is spent thinking like a newspaper. Frankly, being an ‘accessible, valued, credible and trusted source of local news and information’ isn’t a brand position. These are table stakes, an attribute-laden digest of what a newspaper does (in fact, what most news media does), without regard to the explicit benefit of an individual newspaper to a specific audience. Without specific commitment to a promise of value, it is all just blah, blah branding.

To advance their brands newspapers must shift the orientation of their strategic positioning from “what we do,” to “what purpose do we serve?”

The immediacy of cable TV, and the accessibility of the Internet are not new news. But today’s newspapers still seem resigned to play-out their last hand with strategic plans that don’t look appreciably different today than a dozen years ago.

Yes, the Internet has become an essential complement to overall newspaper strategy. The proliferation of online “newspaper” brands succeeds in large part by the endorsement of their print siblings, and the economies of scale in content and advertising sales. But it would be unfortunate for newspapers to think that their brands will be secure simply in their transfer from print to the Internet. The barriers to entry for online brands are far lower than in print media, so competition will be more fierce and frequent.

Traditionally, Marketing (the one with the big M) has been defined as a process by which we obtain what we need through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value to others.

But modern marketing has become a more fully integrative process of anticipating consumer needs (or wants) and aligning organizational resources behind the fulfillment of those needs. Yet in many newspapers, marketing (small “m”) remains centered on sales and promotion tactics, executed at the level of the independent operating units. As a result, “branding” has been relegated to its end-stage, communications and messaging, instead of the transformation of products and services requiring profound change in the way we see the business. Given the calcification of the current strategies, and no-end-in-sight pressure from competitors, those from outside the industry have to wonder where is the urgency and the fight in newspapers?

Branding hasn’t yet failed newspapers. In fact it may be the only thing that will save them.

If newspapers will let it.