A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

15

The Perfect Role Model for Researchers Today

By David Smith, Chairman and Chief Executive, DVL Smith Group

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen King linked together two evolutionary changes that were taking place in the early 1990s when he wrote this article. The first was the emergence of the concept of the company brand, and the second was the way new ever more complex service offerings were becoming available. Putting these observations together, Stephen went on to alert us to the way that, in the future, market researchers would need to be more adept at understanding the complexity of brands.

 

Looking Around the Corner at the Era to Come

Today, we are familiar with the complexity surrounding the way you research service-intensive company brands, such as Google and Amazon. But when Stephen wrote his article, marketing professionals and market researchers were still operating around the “classic” fmcg paradigm of the benefits of a top brand. We were then an industry tooled up to cope with traditional brands, such as Nescafé, masterminded by central command and control style marketing departments that were supported by market researchers thinking in a fairly orthodox way.

Today, we have to operate with less rigid marketing structures and employ more flexible and creative approaches to market research. How else could we deal with the concept of consumerto-consumer marketing and get to grips with brands, such as, ebay? But, when Stephen wrote his article “post-modern” marketing and market research ...