A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

20

A Challenge to Change Behaviour

By Neil Cassie, Founding Partner, The Cassie Partnership

 

 

 

 

 

My aim in this introduction to Stephen’s article “Brand Building in the 1990s” is to highlight the challenge I believe he was actually laying down for marketers and those of us in the world of marketing services.

In the midst of what are astonishingly far-sighted predictions of: “More Confident Consumers”, “New Concepts of Quality”, “The Competitive Screw Tightening”, “Side Effects of Technology” and more, Stephen made his real point.

He was challenging us – agencies and marketing clients alike – to behave differently so that together we could grow the value of the brands in our care. In fact, in the final section of what was his last published article he asks us to enjoy starting again from first principles and using ourselves and our experience as a research source.

As his thinking and arguments develop towards the concept of the company brand, the second element of his challenge was laid down. He asks of us to stop using the old classic fmcg brands as the models to which we should aspire.

And as Stephen looked at a future apparently so opaque to others, he laid down the third element of his challenge. He envisioned a future where consumer choice would be based, not on classic product or even service discriminators, but on the people of the company that provided these products or services. In fact, the discriminator would flow from the culture that their “collective being” stood ...