A cautionary tale from Neil Pendock about what the (expensive) marketing gurus have to offer (and take from) hard-pressed wine producers

The Rolling Stones are not the only media superstars to embark on world tours. Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, who coincidentally looks like a refugee from an Irish boy band, recently brought his ‘BRAND sense Symposium’ road show to South Africa as part of a global tour. ‘It’s taking this extraordinary research and conference project to 51 cities in 31 countries, making this the largest branding conference in history.’ From Latvia and Estonia to Bahrain and Kuwait, he plays all the global brand stadiums in a black jump suit.

South Africa is a needy destination. With wine producers so desperate to move product in a saturated market (Wine International publishing editor Robert Joseph estimates a new winery opens somewhere on the planet every hour) that they’re queuing up to go back to business school, Mr. Lindstrom is clearly onto a good thing. But is consumer marketing anything more than common sense? Consider Mr. Lindstrom and his travelling circus. His qualifications are undeniably impressive, if somewhat unconventional: born in 1970 he ‘founded his own advertising agency at the age of 12.’ With Disney listed as a client, that must have been useful.

Lindstrom is the author of many articles with provocative titles such as ‘Can truth kill brands?’, ‘Eat dust, dot-coms’, ‘Give your brand away’ and ‘Branding without a brand.’ His personal website (www.martinlindstrom.com) goes on to note that ‘over the course of twenty years of hands-on marketing experience, Lindstrom has conceived a revolutionary set of principles that transform marketing strategies into positive business results.’ Such as mis-spelling your brand name, presumably something he discovered at an early age.

As an example, he notes that www.googel.com or www.gogle.com will both direct you to the homepage of internet search engine Google (which could explain why Hannes Myburgh, owner of Meerlust, was so concerned that Franschhoek producer Meerrust change their name to the bizarre Allée Bleue – and there was I thinking it was on account of concern for his Japanese customers). Although there are limits: www.oggle.com takes you to a camera observing a park bench set up by the Bury St. Edmunds Borough Council…

The aims of the Lindstrom symposium are five in number:

• To help you transform a brand from a two-sense product into a five-sense phenomenon;

• To identify the exciting new sensory potential of your brand;

• To take you through a six-step process that will see your brand cross the vital sensory threshold, and equip you with the tools to evaluate your brand from a multi-sensory perspective;

• To present tools to optimize your existing marketing program – in most cases without any additional investment required; and

• To put you on the very cutting edge of branding

And to do all this in Cape Town took one day at a cost of R3000 (plus VAT). In Johannesburg, twice as long was necessary at a cost of R5000 (plus VAT) while in London, seventy five minutes was sufficient at a pricey £1000 (plus VAT).

Sensory brand management obviously makes a lot of sense for wine producers punting a product usually designed with sensory gratification in mind. Mr. Lindstrom devised his material by leading a team of 600 people at Millward Brown ‘the seventh largest research institute in the world’ and has come up with some startling results: apparently ‘80% of all consumers think that the smell of newness is one of the most satisfying moments when purchasing a new car, 60% of all consumers state that it’s the sound of a cell phone – not the look or its features – that distinguishes one brand from another’. Furthermore, ‘72% of our emotions are based on what we smell rather than what we see and hear’ – a finding that will dismay music composers and film directors, I suspect. The accuracy of such statements as ‘72% of …’ does, however,  bring to mind British wine critic Robert Joseph’s observation that 38.2% of all statistics are made up by the person citing them.

Rejecting the old rules of branding as ‘an art form composed of vague commercials and awareness messages’, Lindstrom proposes a ‘unique scientific vision’ of branding as ‘the driver of sales and profits and consequently the centerpiece of business’. Which could explain his use of mathematics to communicate a marketing message, or the ‘2 + 2 = 5 equation’ as he calls it. For ‘five-dimensional marketing’ making use of all five senses, the secret formula is ‘sound + vision + touch + smell + taste = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 20’ which leads to ‘a positive synergy across and between each of our five senses’.

Lindstrom goes on to note that ‘we are all intimately familiar with our senses. In combination, they fully inform the picture of our daily life’ – an observation so banal it must surely warrant further academic investigation at a Business School. With insights such as these on offer, wine producers would be wise to use their common sense before enrolling in brand sense symposia and other special offers from the consumer marketing fraternity.