58: Water Nerd’s Guide to Branding the Value of Water with Dr. Glenn Griffin

 


Dr. Glenn Griffin (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin; M.A., B.A., The University of Alabama) has taught courses in creativity and portfolio development for more than 20 years and is also an author and researcher. His research, focused primarily on the subject of advertising creativity, has appeared in the Journal of Advertising, Psychology and Marketing, the Journal of Interactive Advertising and the Journal of Advertising Education, among other publications. He has also written for Campaign (UK) and HOW magazines. In September 2010, his co-authored book, The Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising’s Big Ideas Are Born (with Deborah Morrison), was published and became a top 10 best-selling book on advertising creativity. Dr. Griffin’s students’ work has been featured in both national and international press, including Advertising Age, Adweek, Archive and CMYK magazines and recognized by The One Club, the Art Directors Club and the Clio Awards, among other organizations. In 2015, he was honored to receive the Donald G. Hileman Educator of the Year award from the American Advertising Federation’s 7th District.
He has been invited to speak about the creative process and the power of ideas at events such as the SXSW Interactive and EDU Festivals, the HOW Design Conference and in consultation with a variety of corporate and academic organizations.
Top Takeaways:

The idea of “rounding up” is how brands can do business while also doing good.
Millennials and Gen X go out of their way to do business with brands that include doing good as part of their business model. This is a huge untapped opportunity for water utilities.
Doing good has to become a part of modern branding and it has to be authentic. It can’t be lip service.
Branding isn’t a logo, a tagline, or something only relevant to consumer products. A brand is your face to your audience, and we all have a face.
You don’t have to be Coca Cola, you just have to be relevant to your customers and having water and wastewater service is pretty relevant to the lives of customers.
There are three phases to brand reputation.

Attention generation—telling your audience who you are, what you do, and what you’re about. This is the beginning of your brand’s life cycle.

You should leave this stage as soon as you can when you recognize that your audience knows who you are and what you care about.
If you find yourself stuck here, you may be doing something wrong.


Uncertainty reduction—reminding your audience who you are. Repeat, reiterate, delve into specifics. Maintain certainty and assurance.

Most brands spend their lives in this phase.


Transcendence—brands in this phase have an audience so confident about who they are they can use their brand power to explore other related issues or areas i.e. Stella Artois partnering with water.org to help the global water crisis.


Some strategies for each phase:

Attention generation is an ideal time to use traditional advertising.
Once brands move on to uncertainty reduction, brands should be proactive and not reactive.
If the only time the communication team springs into action is to put out fires or deal with disruptions, you’re doing it wrong.
Proactive work will soften the blow because you’ve built trust with your audience and they will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Brands in the transcendence phase can use their power to solicit help or gain partners to engage in social causes.


Established brands should shift the mindset from having to defend the brand...