Olay, Nivea, Neutrogena and L’Oreal are all established beauty products brands with a broad array of medium-priced product lines and multiple product offerings in each.  More to the point, for purposes of this thought exercise of mine, is that each of them offers a range of good quality facial cleansers, a product I buy on average about once every two months.  The exercise was to determine what, if any, brand loyalty existed in my facial cleanser purchases over the last 2 years.  The answer appeared to be: none.  Nada.  At some point over those past 24 months and (give or take) 12 purchases, my domestic shelf space has been occupied by at least one representative facial cleanser SKU from each of those brands.  I wondered why this was the case.  And then I remembered that it was not always thus.  Long ago (more years than I care to disclose) there was a rather splendid product by Neutrogena called the Facial Cleansing Bar.

a simpler time for consumers

It was a large amber, translucent bar of pure goodness, I thought at the time, and for many years it was the only thing that would ever come to mind in association with facial cleansing. That product still exists, but the last time I bought a bar was back in an era when folks were marveling over the newfound wonders of that thing called email… I wondered: what had happened along this journey from the devoted, faithful me of old to this fickle consumer circa 2010?  What could any one of these companies do to win back my loyalty, and presumably that of many others like me?

Brand success depends on both walletshare and mindshare. If a brand manager wants to get to my wallet then he or she has to first get to my mind and convince me why, out of all the marketing messages that assault me with mind-numbing regularity throughout the changing venues and vistas of my daily routine, this is the one that is most worthy of my time and money.  The problem is that our economy is awash in multiple products, multiple messaging formats and multiple physical & digital marketing channels.  More brands than ever before vie for our attention and our dollars (or rupees, or renminbi); and in so doing the ability of any given brand to make a meaningful impact is diluted by the sheer magnitude and frequency of audio-visual-textual images clamoring to engage our senses.  This, it seems, is what happened to that wonderful amber cleansing bar by Neutrogena – it got lost in the proliferation of categories, products and beauty care messages that exploded into our lives over the last 20-odd years.  This proliferation explosion has engendered many results both positive and negative – one of the latter of which has been to weaken the brand’s ability to connect heart and mind.

If mindshare leads to walletshare, then heartshare leads to mindshare. I don’t believe this paradigm has changed – I think it is no less true today than it was in the golden age of brand advertising (see any episode of Mad Men for a useful reference point).  But the path to the heart is different today, and much trickier.  It’s not all about the brilliant ad that manages to imprint the differentiating qualities of its product so firmly in the cultural mindset that whole households could recite them in their sleep (it is still partly about that, but much less so than the days when the Don Drapers of the world dreamed up the copy over three-martini lunches).  In fact it is not about any one thing, but rather about multiple things – things that form a complex multi-dimensional mathematical equation that would have those ad men of old reaching for the Scotch bottles they kept in their office credenzas.  Namely: how do you match the right message with the right format, for the right geographic region and customer segment via the right marketing channel, for optimal effect? The answer to this equation is not obvious – in fact it is entirely unknowable to the unaided human brain.  To solve it requires vast computational power and advanced scientific methods for solving multivariable problems where many of the variables are interdependent (which adds several levels of complexity to the math needed to get to the solution).

To put it more mundanely, it requires disentangling the clues from that vast sea of transactional information that form a composite picture of the customer-product interaction leading to my walking to the CVS checkout counter with a particular facial cleanser in hand.  What are the demand chain activities that could make this customer-product interaction more predictable; and more personally satisfying for me, the customer?  Is it a pricing question, or a product mix question, or a channel promotions question or an image question?  Traditionally, marketing managers have viewed these as separate issues rather than forming an integrated portfolio of activities around which to optimize a particular objective (like brand value).  But they are not separate, and they cannot be optimally solved in the isolation tanks of marketing department silos.

Fortunately for the beleaguered brand decision-makers of the world there are holistic quantitative marketing solutions that can help them leverage the insights necessary to build and sustain their brand’s value by treating these questions as components of an integrated whole.  The starting point for these solutions is the recognition that what happens in one part of the demand chain affects things that happen in other parts.  As a consumer, my world is more complex now than it used to be and most likely my attention span for any one message is shorter.  But some configuration of activities undertaken by a company – or more than one company along a supply chain – can have a significant impact on me at that reinforces the value of the brand and gives it a meaning more closely aligned with how I actually make purchasing decisions today.

These solutions may lack the simple goodness of that old facial cleansing bar – but they may yet win the heartshare of facial cleanser (and many other) consumers all the world over.