Grow the Core: How to Focus on your Core Business for Brand Success

Chapter 8

Workout 3: Communicate with cut-through

 Headlines

Many communication campaigns fail to grow the core as they change too often, lack distinctiveness and miss a strong link to the brand. To be more effective, communication needs to deliver fresh consistency. Consistency comes from both a unifying brand story and the creation and amplification of distinctive brand properties that build memory structure. Freshness comes from updating the execution to bring news in the form of chapters of marketing activity. Creating a distinctive communication campaign can be done from scratch or by rejuvenating an old campaign.

Communication breakdown

Communication can play a leading role in creating the distinctiveness needed to drive penetration of your core brand and business. Many of the great examples of renovating or revitalising the core feature strong advertising. Unfortunately, much of the time, effort and money spent on advertising fails to deliver in this way. This reflects some fundamental problems in the way communication is briefed, developed and executed.

Chopping and changing

For most brands, looking at a 15–20 year advertising history is almost like looking at three, four or more different brands. There is a chopping and changing of both the message and the executional ...