Smart Strategies for Simplifying Your News Brand
by Graeme Newell
gnewell@602communications.com
http://www.602communications.com

In the past, most of our news products could easily be confined to one brand position.  We had a morning, noon, five, six and eleven news.  Although they were different shows with different styles, they all fit nicely into the basic product category of "newscast."  The standard branding routine has been to identify the exemplary features of your show, then tell the world why your product is superior.

As revenue from traditional broadcast channels continues to shrink,  product expansion is the order of the day.  New media, new channels and diversification are at the top of a marketing director's challenges. There is a desperation in the air.  The charge -  to develop new products and new revenue streams.  The trend is clear - traditional 5, 6 & 11 newscasts are slowly losing altitude and could be headed for a financial crash.

Suddenly, our brands must include a lot of stuff that isn't traditional "news."   News directors are asked to market unfamiliar new products they often don't understand.  Many times these new web sites and channels are treated with contempt, and seen as a distraction from the main job of traditional news gathering.

Suddenly news branding just got a whole lot more complicated.  How can you position a station's teen football web site and fishing cell phone alerts under one brand?  How can you have "live, late breaking" pet pages?  How exactly do you brand a lawyer referral page if you are the weather station?

I was talking to a news director who was getting some heat from his manager about not allocating resources to some of the station's new web pages.   The news director looked me straight in the eye and said, "If the web site isn't successful, my boss will just be mad.  But if the numbers slip on the newscast, my boss will fire me.  Where do you think I'm going to put my resources?"  His plan - bluff on the web site stuff and put his resources into the traditional newscasts.

Promoting so many different products dilutes the message for your highly profitable main channel.  What can you do?  Should all your internet, cell phone and broadcast be one brand, or should you have different brands for different platforms and audiences?

Developing a brand strategy for a single product line is exponentially easier.  Brand positions such as "the weather station," "breaking news," or "on your side" work fine when they are used to market a traditional newscast.

Unfortunately many of these single-product brand positions are so narrowly defined that they tend to crumble when expanded beyond the basics of conventional journalism.  Evidence of this thorny branding problem has been showing up in our morning shows for years.

For example, a station clearly lives its "breaking news" brand at 5, 6 and 11, but content for the morning show seems to annoyingly contradict the station's news brand position.  They just can't seem to slap that breaking news brand on a show that features "adopt a pet" segments, fun live shots and other clearly lighter show fare. 

Stations try to soothe their guilty brand conscience by producing "breaking news from overnight" morning promos that feature an endless string of yellow tape surrounding drug killings, traffic accidents, and bad live shots from vacant dark lots.  Bleary-eyed overnight reporters are featured in promos that vainly try to convince the audience that exciting breaking news abounds, no matter how desolate the live shot.

In reality, their morning newscast is a smiley, approachable and comfortable place with an easy-going tone and style.  The "breaking news" coverage is clearly one of the weakest components of their morning show, but the station vainly tries to move it to the forefront because it matches the brand for the other newscasts.  They try to stay on brand with ominous "running with cameras" promos that ignore the reality of the actual morning show content.  In these situations, different branding tactics are clearly required.  The viewer sees the breaking news promo and expects an abundance of morning excitement and drama.  They tune in to find exactly the opposite.  In marketing, we have a special name for this phenomenon.  We call it lying.

I am constantly amazed at how stations will kid themselves when it comes to staying on brand.  They will jump through some pretty bizarre hoops to convince themselves that their brand is consistent across all shows.

Some stations have a lot of brand consistency between morning and evening shows.  Certain news brands tend to do a better job at weathering the content disparity between AM and PM shows.  For example, an "on your side" advocacy station can more easily stay on brand because advocacy content tends to work well in both morning and evening shows.  The "weather station" brand works well too.  Weather is an important part of both types of shows. 

But morning shows and evening shows are often two very different products.  When this happens, it means stations should clearly make the choice between the two options for branding products with wildly different product features:

1) Create separate brands that sell the unique features of the AM and PM shows, or
2) Create a single unified brand that does not heavily rely on obviously contradictory product features.  Sell by using the audience's core emotional drivers.  Don't talk about yourself, talk about your customer.

Proctor and Gamble takes the first strategy.  They NEVER crossbrand different products.  Each product is a separate brand - Tide, Crest, Downy, Pampers, Duracell,  Pepto Bismol.  One brand for each product.  You don't want the people who mix up large vats of acid for Duracell batteries to be the same people who make Pampers for your child.  P&G has separate brands and they never try to sell different brands together.  This brand strategy provides maximum flexibility.  Problem is - it costs a zillion bucks to execute.

Virgin takes the second strategy.  It has WILDLY different products that are gathered under a single integrated brand position - record stores, spas, airlines, cell phones, even stem cells.  Its business model has diametrically opposed  products that are magically unified through the customer emotional connection.  They follow the rule of brand expansion.  Don't rely solely on product features.  Instead, brand by connecting with your audience through their values and lifestyle.

Virgin brands all its ridiculously different products with one emotion - rebellion.   When I get off a Virgin flight, I fully expect to be greeted by a hot chick on a Harley, waiting at the bottom of the ramp.  She will whisk me away to the Virgin spa for a sex-soaked, bad-boy weekend of rock & roll (from Virgin records), trash talking with my homeboys (on my Virgin phone), and slamming down Virgin vodka martinis.  I'll charge it all on my Virgin credit card, and who knows, Richard Branson may join us for a 4000-foot champagne toast in the Virgin hot air balloon.  If there's time, we may take another shot at the around-the-world ballooning record.

TV brands are being stretched to the breaking point as we all diversify our product lines.  The days of marketing one specific product to one specific audience are quickly coming to an end.  All of us are being asked to promote more channels on more platforms than ever before.  Our brands must now work for highly specialized and wildly diverse audiences. 

So take a hard look at your brand position.  Can it grow?  Does it work with all the products your station creates?  For a generation, stations have operated on the sacred premise that it is one brand for one station.  As we add products to our line up that have little or nothing in common, we will be forced to rethink that strategy.

But don't let this be an excuse for sloppy branding.  The temptation is always there to simply slap another brand on the same tired products, but this will hopelessly dilute your brand image.

At its recent conference, Promax asked me to do a presentation on these questions.  You can view the 30 minute on-line presentation by clicking on this link.

Graeme Newell is broadcast and web marketing specialists who works for 602 Communications.