Branded Blog

I live in a new city. Or rather, I live in a city new to me. In November last year I moved from Joburg to Cape Town, a move most Capetonians applaud in the same spirit as one would applaud a rescue from the arctic.

What this means, other than being welcomed like a reclaimed soul, is that many of the places I go to on a daily or weekly basis are new to me, and this makes for interesting viewing, as it were.

And for interesting perspectives on things that the locals hold as self evident.

My first experience of Silvermine, for example, was novel on a number of levels. First, as a true Vrystaater who grew up in a gold mining town, I was fascinated to discover that there was never actually a successful silver mine here at all, there being no silver anywhere in the area bar the jewelery shops in town. It seems that there was some enthusiasm for the idea and an attempt was made to find silver in the area, but the only real contribution in the grand scheme of things was a meaningless, but quite engaging name.

The second and third reasons that my first visit to Silvermine was novel are related. The second reason being that I was there to go rock-climbing. Really. Serious rock-climbing – the kind that requires ropes, ATC’s, carabiners and someone to belay you on climbs that actually have grades attached to them. Se-ri-ous rock climbing. And the inspiration for this uncharacteristic behaviour by my then very corporate, very Sandton self was reason #3: the barefoot mountain guide. Yes, this was where we spent what turned out to be our first date. Climbing grade 13 & 14 faces on Muizenberg cliffs at Silvermine. I kid you not.

It was a chilly winter day in July and when I turned up at his abode in Little Mowbray kitted out in tight fitting yoga pants and top with fleece (tight because it’s better for climbing, obviously – what were you thinking?) we were supposedly expecting other novice climbers to join us, but they seemed to have baled out at the last minute. Really. And so the two of us headed out to Ou Kaapse Weg with much previously detailed equipment, and not a little bit of anticipation, terror & heart palpitations in the mix. Luckily the conversation never dried up, and I was far too interested to let a little abseiling and rock climbing put me (or him) off, so when we dropped over the top edge and got down to the base of the cliff on the city side of Silvermine, the view was truly spectacular. And the city & countryside below, with the sweeping length of Muizenberg beach reaching round the right, were not too bad either!

So this was my introduction to Silvermine – spectacular view, real rock climbing and a bit of a bundu bash round the side of the cliff if you don’t feel like climbing back up the last time. Not really a family outing for toddlers one would think.

Hence my concern when, a couple of months & some radical new life choices later, the selfsame Barefoot Mountain guide informs me that as a Saturday morning outing we will be taking his 18 month and 5 year old daughters out to meet other such toddler-laden friends for an outing at – you guessed it – Silvermine.

Mmmh, perhaps all the fresh air had gotten to him finally.

Nonetheless, on said Saturday morning armed with a picnic basket, sun hats, and pink fishing net we headed off once again up Ou Kaapse Weg, into the Silvermine nature reserve. Still concerned by the strange equipment (pink fishing net instead of climbing ropes) and troubled by the potential abseiling issues a toddler might face we drove past the cliffs, having herded all the babbling net-carrying squeakiness that constitutes a gathering of kids under 5 and their various parental / adult gear & food providers, we then proceeded up a beautifully kept pathway and up to the unexpected loveliness of a reservoir that was built in 1898 to supply water to the growing Cape metropolis of the time. We ambled around the edge of the water, slowly making our way to the wooden walkways that also, I was informed, are the single best place on the Silvermine reservoir to catch the little fish that live here and are easily tempted to the surface by bread crumbs – hence the necessity of the pink fishing net!

And once the thrill of fishing had gone, there were still the delights of picnic food and naked swimming in the blackness of the reservoir to be enjoyed – the water being dark brown from Fynbos run-off (so literally rooibos tea water) and the black rock of the area finishing off the effect.

Anyway, the long roundabout point I’m actually getting to is this: most Capetonians probably know of all the wonderful pastimes that Silvermine has to offer. I, however, not being substantially local yet, did not know after my first adrenalin fuelled visit to the cliffs that there was more to Silvermine than that, and so was mightily confused by the prospect of a kiddie adventure there.

Of course the real issue was that I had only seen one aspect of Silvermine, and had no way of knowing that it was a vast expansive part of the Table Mountain National Park that offers not only climbing and the easy amble around the reservoir, but also hiking, trail running, and mountain biking options, and even has a tented camp which is used as an overnight stop on the Hoerikwaggo trail (a beautiful but poorly thought through 5 day hiking trail around the Table-mountain reserve). So I was basing my understanding of the Silvermine brand, as it were, on one encounter of a very specific aspect of the place.

And it reminded me of an obvious fact about brands: that sometimes both brand builders and consumers focus only on one aspect of a brand. While this can be ok for the consumer, I think it’s far more dangerous for the brand builder because in order to build it properly we need to hold together all the various strands that constitute it.

One of my favourite things to say about brands (and I’m quite sure I didn’t make this up, but also don’t remember if it’s an accumulation of ideas or whether I heard someone smarter say it somewhere along the line!) is that they only actually ever really exist in the minds of the consumer. The company and brand team can own the product, the trade-marks, the copyrights, the designs, the research, the insights, even the colours and shapes of the logo – but not actually the brand. The brand itself is an enigmatic, elusive animal that exists only at the point at which the consumer engages with the product & imbues it with meaning through their experience and expression of the identity that has been projected onto and around it. This means that as brand people we cannot really own brands. But it also means that each experience of a brand is different, and unique and each consumer can only really know their own experience of that brand, whereas the brand manager (if they’re doing the job they get paid to do) through research and insight and paying attention can get an idea of all the different experiences consumers have of their brand. And some of these will be overtly transformed into products / experiences / adverts / ideas that are presented on the brand; and some will simply remain individual consumer uses & instances of that brand.

And making those choices correctly can make or break a brand. And a brand manager.

Bad choices by brand custodians can lead to brand dissonance and confusion for consumers. And I do think that there are far too many consumer experiences of brands that are one-sided or single-faceted not by choice, but by dint of poor or ill-informed or short-sighted choices by brand custodians.

So here are the once again quite obvious (and yet heartbreakingly lacking in use) things I think we could do to better manage complex brands (and most brands are complex!):

Rule #1: Don’t just think about the climbers (aka. Know thy consumer)
Yes, seems very obvious, but do you know your brand as every consumer knows it? Do you know that you can rock-climb AND use pink fishing nets at Silvermine? Think about it carefully, you may find you actually have more than one target market and that they may each be accessing a very specific benefit from your brand. And they may be of equitable importance to you financially or on a volume basis or from a loyalty point of view. Know your brands consumers – all of them – well enough to know what each of them is getting from you, and what you get from each of them. And then try your best not to confuse or alienate or annoy the ones that really count.

Rule #2: Get to the heart of the matter (aka. Know thy brand)
Again, as obvious as it gets, but as a new consumer I really didn’t know that Silvermine was not actually a rock-climbing paradise – or rather, not exclusively a rock-climbing paradise, but actually a nature reserve. Or more poetically, a place for people to go and experience the beauty of the Table mountain reserve in a myriad of ways. Make sure you know what your brand really offers – really understand what your brand offers at all levels, what sets it apart and what lies at the heart of it. If you can’t easily complete a Value Proposition or tell someone what the Essence of your brand is, you need to make a plan and do the work. It’s not good enough to kind of know, you have to be clear. Crystal clear, not rooibos tea water clear.

Rule #3: Say what you need to say (with thanks to John Meyer & the Bucket List)
And pretty much all basic lessons on brands eventually come down to communication. This should be the easy part, but often ends up being the place the most damage is done because if you don’t apply rules 1 & 2 relentlessly, you don’t have a hope on rule 3. If you don’t know that parents needing to entertain toddlers happen to love Silvermine as much as climbers do, and you start communicating the wonders of climbing as eloquently as you know how, you could easily end up sending the happy families off to Noordhoek farm village instead – because they don’t know what you’re not telling them. And again, if you’re not clear on rules 1 & 2, then you may never even know that you’re losing the plot with a critical target market and you don’t really know the heart of your brand well enough to communicate it consistently & clearly to all target markets without playing them off against each other.

So take a step back, look at the view from the top of your brand and look for the climbing ropes and the pink fishing nets before you say a word. You may just be surprised how beautiful it is when they all come together.

(Beautiful final landscape pic c/o © Ian Junor aka ifijay on the Cape Town Travel blog: http://www.capetown.travel/blog )