Time – Space – Revenue
I was recently helping to lead a presentation introducing a new custom publication to a client, and was asked to provide framing remarks to ‘set the tone’ for the meeting. This client is under immense pressure to launch a big new brand while staying on budget, so it was important to remind the room why we were spending valuable time and money on a thing like a magazine. But I found that this simple framework is relevant to far more than producing a publication. It applies to all brands in some way.
Time
One of the measures of the success of a brand – is how much Time fans choose to spend with it. The more quality time you spend together, you and your beloved brand, the better. The value of content (and if you’re in retail, the in store experience) is to increase the quantity and quality of time spent. When done right, familiarity and attachment will ensue – which are the holy grails of branding and marketing.
Bentley extends their presence beyond the road with a branded picnic hamper included in this concept SUV
Space
As well, the amount of Space (both literally and figuratively) that a brand occupies in one’s life – is money. In a literal sense, brands that have infiltrated different rooms of the house and different parts of your life, from home to car to office to your digital screens, stand a great chance of becoming the default choice. And we know that busy people like default choices they can trust. So when I recently bought a french press for making coffee, I promptly walked over to Starbucks to buy coffee beans, and now the brand occupies shelf space in our apartment. As if it needed more prominence in my life. Good grief.
Bugatti infiltrates new aspects of their customers’ lives while staying true to the refined character of their brand through their new fashion line
Revenue
Smart brands these days are finding ways to monetize their properties in new ways. When it comes to a magazine, the revenue opportunity is obvious: Ad revenue. For others, marketers have to be more inventive. For example, a transport brand I worked with for several years turns out to have world-class expertise in customer service. This expertise can be converted into valuable consulting services that not only bring in revenue, but enhance the brand’s reputation in markets where it normally does not communicate. The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center takes the chain’s renowned training program in customer service and sells it to brands “that wish to benchmark the award-winning business practices of The Ritz-Carlton”. Good for revenue, great for the brand.
With The Lego Movie, Lego infiltrated theatres and living rooms, speaking to their customers in a new way while remaining true to the spirit of Lego
A brand/marketing/communications team working on behalf of a brand would do well to think through all decisions through this kind of framework. Does this idea encourage more Time spent? Does this result in our occupying more valuable Space? And what kind of Revenue opportunities can we develop, that also elevate the brand?
– W