Advantage Performance Group - Building the Skills That Build the Brand

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Building the Skills That Build the Brand
Brown-Forman Builds Brand Equity

by Jeff Tucker


	improved the decision-making of brand and trade marketing professionals improved the ability of brand teams to work effectively with each other and with retailers

You’re really dealing with balance,” explains Bob Hausladen, Vice President of Leadership and Development for the North American group of Brown-Forman Beverages Worldwide. “The challenge is to continue to build equity with consumers while simultaneously working to execute brand strategy through retailers. The former is our end-user, but the latter is our most frequent point of consumer contact. Both are key aspects of brand equity.”

Hausladen and his counterpart Bob LaMontagne (Wine Group Director of Performance and Learning Development) wanted to apply global best practices to the efforts of corporate headquarters and field brand management managers in both the Wine and Spirits Groups. Their learning objectives for brand managers were to:

Learn the importance of building brand equity, how to formulate and execute brand strategy appropriate to that objective, and how to protect brand equity.
Better understand how to meet customer (retailer) requirements.
Improve their ability to work in concert to execute brand strategy. This applied to both brand managers located at corporate headquarters and managers out in the field.

Designing Complementary Training
Advantage partner Jeff Tucker helped develop and implement a four-day training event. “We wanted Columbia University professor Don Sexton of the Association of National Advertisers to set the stage with his seminar on building brand equity. I knew that Marketplace Livon, the experiential marketing simulation from Advantage alliance partner Celemi, would provide a great follow-on by allowing the managers to try out what they learned in a real-world market environment. The capstone would be a day during which managers could meet back in their groups to work on real brand equity, strategy, teamwork, and customer issues.”

Experiencing the Market with Livon
All brand managers attended Sexton’s seminar in which they learned the importance of brand equity, what enhances it, and what hurts it. Then they went through the Marketplace Livon simulation, with Celemi’s Bill Albert and Advantage consultant Dan Murphy facilitating. The Livon simulation was based on the same brand-equity principles as Sexton’s session. As “company” teams competed for revenue, profit, and market share, “There was a definite increase in the decibel level as customers were won and lost. Livon gets pretty wild,” says Tucker.

Hausladen explains, “Experiential learning is very exciting because it’s like discovery. Often, that’s the kind of learning that stays with us the best. I knew the managers were really engaged when they told me afterwards, ‘You should take this to other people!’” LaMontagne adds, “Retail trade opportunities are ripe for companies that have a business process that supports it. That’s one of the reasons we chose Livon. It had a lot of value for us, and our brand and trade marketing people enhanced their decision making ability as a result.” Brand manager Jon Kragh was a participant. “Livon was a great exercise in learning how to focus on the needs of customers and how to stay flexible as those needs change from year to year,” he says.

Applying Brand Best Practices
The training initiative provided world-class knowledge and tools to help Brown-Forman brand managers drive brand strategy more effectively, while improving the value they brought to retailer relationships. For Hausladen, the key to success was training that was not only powerful, but complementary.

“The value of this was really the way it combined three elements—basic brand equity knowledge, the Livon experience of working cooperatively to execute strategy, and then applying all of that learning to real situations,” he says. “Now our brand managers have the understanding and the best-practice tools, as well as the greater teamwork with the brand teams, to partner much more effectively with retailers.”

Livon employs a marketplace challenge simulation to help organizations communicate a consistent marketing message internally, and among retailers and distributors.