Brand You
Sub brands, Mega brands and Flanker brands
by Lance Buckley & Pierce Mattie
In the beauty and health industry, there are hundreds of thousands of new products and services launched each year and yet there are only a handful of companies that stick out from the vast sea of wannabes. Whether you’re selling a new miracle cream or trying to market a new type of spa service, there are a few guidelines to ensure your success and the key to staying power starts with branding.
Branding is used by marketers to differentiate one company from another and distinguish quality, reputation and accountability. A brand can be defined as the combination of a word, design, a product or group of products, a label or an identifying mark. A company’s brand name is its trademark, and it is protected property. A brand is largely judged by its awareness level, also known as brand awareness — the measurement of how well a brand is recognized by its potential consumers.
Branding is not marketing, nor is it public relations. Branding is not having a lip-gloss line extension of numerous products that all seem alike. Nor is branding gathering celebrity names to promote a brand that has lost its edge. In general, companies that launch too many scu’s usually lose the market share of their brand. Thus they choose to not go deep, but wide covering too many bases and not covering them well. Buying a perfume from a medical line or a consumer going to get their hair colored at a skin care center are two signs of misbranding and often lead to losing credibility.
How does a spa, skin care product or cosmetic item become a brand? A household name? A common understanding of what it is with just the mention of the name, the brand, the title or the location.
Potential clients who reach out to my firm for a business analysis often say their main goal is to become a branded brand. Typically, there expectations are that this is possible through going on one media tour, placing one ad, organizing one spa service event or employing one year of a solid PR campaign. They are very much misled.
It is not a question of implementing public relations, advertising, media events, industry outreach programs, celebrity endorsements or direct mailings. These brand maintenance strategies are used to lengthen and strengthen the life of a brand and help it reach its fullest potential. These strategies should be utilized after the name of the brand, logo and an ownership in the marketplace have been well established.
Successful branding is highly correlated with going deep, not wide. If your spa’s specialty is aromatherapy, then a collection of every oil, aroma and plant in your aromatic library should be your platform for branding. If you limit yourself to a few oils and go wide by promoting your spa’s cosmeceutical and medi treatments, you lose focus and your branding of aromatherapy will diminish.
Looking at the most successful aromatherapy companies like Darphin, Decleor, Elemis and Academie, they offer an array of oils and numerous scus that go deep in their field of aromatherapy, making them successful brands of their category. When you go wide with a brand, chances are you disrupt the brand’s credibility. Therefore, men’s brands should not launch women’s products and vice versa.
Let’s look at some client examples:
Institut’ DERMed, a product line for the professional medi-clinical market, has two skin care clinics in the Atlanta, GA area. They largely support their professional market with trade advertising, industry outreach with trade shows, extensive direct mailer programs and industry education. They also have billboards in Atlanta’s metro area announcing the spa and its services. This is the journey of a cosmeceutical line becoming a branded brand.
Jane Iredale Mineral Cosmetics is a brand established as the leader in mineral makeup.
For the first few years Iredale Mineral Cosmetics was supported through trade shows and community outreach, followed by trade advertising in professional journals.
Both brands were founded in the 90’s and have kept their staying power, carrying them steadily through the 2000’s. Many competitors have come and gone, and yet they still have their feet planted firmly in the market. Why? Though cosmeceuticals and mineral makeup are not as branded as say, the cold cream niche, they are in their own right each becoming a branded brand.
Owning your own
Looking closer at these brands you can see that they both own their own vocabulary.
Owning your own word is a key to successful branding. Jane Iredale owns the words
Liquid Minerals and Amazing Base, and Institut’ DERMed owns the term MediClinical Spa and the slogan “A serious skin care product.”
In our spa world Georgette Klinger owns the term the “Nine Step Facial” and the slogan “The most trusted name in skin care.” Repechage owns the phrase “The Four Layer Facial” and Dermalogica owns “Face Mapping.” We use products that are named and branded daily in our treatment rooms. I use “Q-Tips” when I perform extractions. I use Reynolds Wrap when I do by body treatments. I remove the milk cleanser with a “Kleenex.” Q-Tips are owned by Unilever, while Reynolds Wrap is owned by Alcoa Consumer Products and Kleenex is owned by Kimberly-Clark Corporation.
These are branded brands that not only own their word, but today these terms are used by millions of people to describe a common noun.
Naming your brand
The biggest mistake you can make is to name your spa or product with a generic title. Keep your brand title original and try to envision it as a noun 50 years from now. When choosing a name, also avoid the overkill of common spa words or French titles. Using “Paris” in your name or “Spa,” though sometimes correct, can often hurt your brand.
Another creative way to create a brand name is to take a key word and cut it in half. For example, Institut’ DERMed has taken Dermatology or Dermis and then Medical or Medicine and combined the two to make DERMed. In the 70s, French leader Thalgo took their grass roots of Thalassotherapy and GO and created their name. The key to creating a strong brand name is to make sure it sounds crisp and clean in English. You should also translate your name into Spanish and French to see what they mean in their native tongue. Your name should be short, relevant to its category, simple, speakable, unique, personalized and shocking.
Your brands logo
The actual font of the logo and overall look play a small role in creating a brand. Ideally the logo should read horizontally and be easy to read. If the font’s typeface is illegible you will have small lasting impressions with the consumer. When choosing a font, keep in mind that bold typefaces look masculine, while light typefaces look feminine. Brands like Murad, have both a bold look of the word MURAD with a cursive script of M following. This gives both the element of masculine and feminine, appealing to both sexes.
The color of your logo or brand’s image is just as important. Colors like red are focused behind the retinas permitting them to move toward your eye, whereas the color blue is in front of the retinas giving the illusion of the color to move away from you. Using colors that are opposite of your competitors rather than like colors is a good way to brand your company. Take for example Hormeta versus Method Physiodermie, two Swiss brands, and Babor versus Biodroga, two German brands. All offer an array of esthetic treatments using aromatherapy. Method Physiodermie and Babor use blue and white, giving a message of clinical, established and trust. Hormeta and Biodroga use red and white giving a message of warmth, while attracting attention. MD Skin Care, when first launched, wanted to stand out and gain attention from their competitors Jan Marini and MD Formulations, who both used silver in their packaging. To accomplish this, MD Skin Care chose green and orange. Talk about visible! Today they have repackaged and now use orange and silver. Orange is still not used by its competitor’s and keeps their branding ahead of the curve.
When branding your spa, product or service, keep the following things in mind:
Red is a retail color
Orange is like red
Yellow is neutral
Green is like blue and used for more of a holistic, natural, organic atmosphere
Blue is corporate and shows leadership
Purple is the color of royalty
Black is luxury
Two others factors come into play when becoming a branded brand: consistency and repetition. Brands have a better opportunity to become a branded brand when the sole image they project is consistent, meaning it does not change from day to day, it sticks to its core and it goes unmarked leaving its own. Remember that though the spa industry changes daily, your brand should not. If your niche is catering to the older clientele for anti-aging treatments and suddenly you begin using neon graphics that are geared toward teens, you will most likely be setting yourself up for failure.
I remember the days of working as a counter manager at the local department stores during a time when Lancôme, Estee Lauder, Clinique and Elizabeth Arden were the top four brands on the floor. Out of all the counters, they remained the most consistent with their message of providing a gift with purchase and the way their beauty advisors prospected their clients’ skin type or foundation color was done in harmony across the country. That is the internal marketing of a branded brand.
You can internally brand your company with your own namesake so when a consumer walks into your world he/she not only sees the brand, but also can live it. Take for example Robert Scott Face Body in West Hollywood. Whether you’re looking at Robert’s Web site or reading his service menu, the namesake of Robert is entwined in the mix. You have Scottreatments, Presscott, Scottshop and my favorite Scotttificates.
Robert Scott Face Body color is blue, the logo is a yin and yang and the slogan is “Health & Wellness for Face & Body.”
Branding is being the leader, not the follower
Branding is being #1 in the spa market, beauty or fitness arena. Marketing such claims as the #1 spa in San Francisco, or the first spa to offer chemical peels, is a form of branding yourself. Have you ever tried a product in the US market that you were always told was the #1 product in France, only to find out once arriving in Paris that no one has ever heard of that company? That company has branded itself in the US market as #1 in their parent market. Though faulty, this is pretty ingenious. You must launch your spa, gym or skin care product with the perception that it was the first, the pioneer, the original, etc. Remember consumers don’t care about new brands, they want new categories. In the spa world new categories over the past ten years include organics, cosmeceuticals, member only spas and tween brands. Keep your brand focused, expand your industry of spa, not the products or services you market, and dominate your niche in your area.
Brand Edit/Audit:
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. This is usually true, assuming that you have a successful brand. If your brand isn’t hot, not selling or it is in the way of the big picture, it’s time for an edit. Ask yourself the following questions. What is the potential of this treatment, product or diet? Will it reshape other aspects of our business? Can it enrich us? Will it reaffirm our preach while we reach?
Global Vision
If you are having difficulty finding your niche, turn to other industries and find out what the buzz is in their category. See if you can parallel that to your spa, gym or skin care product. That does not mean creating another at home microdermabrasion kit. This year alone 30 plus companies launched a kit including Bliss, Lancôme, L’Oreal and and Perscriptives.
Sub branding
Once your brand is established you need to keep things moving and begin sub branding. Take for example Marriott. They are a mega brand and have Renaissance, Courtyard and Residence Inn as their sub brands. Spa owners today are tweaking their flagship to branch out into airports, hotels and gyms, using the terms express, extend and fit. Sub-branding is more common in the nail polish and indoor tanning categories. OPI launched Nicole “the edgy side of OPI,” and California Tan created Heliotherapy. Peter Thomas Roth, a brand primarily known for acne, vitamin C and facial skin care, wanted to appeal to more of a luxury spa market with a feminine side. The flanker branding birth of June Jacobs shortly followed. June Jacobs, nicknamed by its peers as JJ, fits the gap that Peter Thomas Roth could not fill. Flanker branding is a new brand introduced into the market by a company that already has an established brand in the same product category. The new brand is designed to compete in the category without damaging the existing item’s market share by targeting a different group of consumers.
There is always going to be competition, especially in this industry. Whether you are branding a person, product or service, the bottom line is reputation, repetition and consistency. If you are dependable, your clients will always return.
Pierce Mattie is the CEO of Pierce Mattie Public Relations, Inc. The industries leading PR firm for beauty, health and fitness media. His clients have been seen on E! Entertainment, VH1, and in Vogue, Allure, “W” and many others.
Lance Buckley is the Executive National Director at Pierce Mattie Public Relations, Inc. He works in the firm’s consumer division with luxury products and services. Lance is active with the American Image Awards, Tribeca Film Festival and the MTV Movie Awards, just to name a few.
