Brand Makeovers: Daniel Brian Cobb Of Daniel Brian Advertising On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Change the name or add a sub-branded name: We worked with American Speedy Printing Centers to adapt to the digital world that was threatening the very existence of a printing press. Changing the name to Allegra Print & Imaging, each franchise location was given the option to upgrade the name if they would upgrade their services for digital capabilities. To this day, some remain American Speedy Printing Centers, but the locations that changed to Allegra Print & Imaging are named among the top-performing locations for the franchise and the industry.

As part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” I had the pleasure to interview Dan Cobb.

Daniel Brian Cobb is the CEO and Chief Strategy Officer of Daniel Brian Advertising. Dan leads branding and performance marketing campaigns for retail and financial brands, franchise chains, and health systems toward digital and social transformation.

As a marketing innovator, thought leadership expert, and social media marketer, Dan developed some of the first prime-time branded TV shows accompanied by live web chats in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Dan’s team introduced social media apps and influencer engagement to the retail brands including Hungry Howies and Chick-fil-A, as well as Hollywood film studios, Disney and Warner Bros. In 2021, Dan’s company launched the first branded video game for a hospital in partnership with Valley Children’s Hospital, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and Xbox.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

For me, advertising is a passion that comes from the fact that I’m an artist at heart. I feel like I was born to make things and tell stories. That desire came with a passion to make a difference for the people who found us in their search for passionate creative people who could make amazing things and have their stories told well.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing or branding mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

It was a TV commercial for a hospital. I had cast a married couple who had both survived cancer together. It was written and storyboarded as an emotional story of unity and love. The studio was rented, and the camera was loaded with film when the wife called us to inform us she was leaving her husband that morning. My first reaction was to ask, “Can’t the divorce wait until the campaign is over?” But, after regaining my senses, I asked if they had any other special events taking place in their life. Luckily, her daughter was graduating that week, so minutes later we put her daughter in cap and gown with her mother. And, the commercial was a welcomed surprise, filled with emotion and a great story.

The lesson is that there is no stressful situation worth worrying about. Never give up. Creativity can solve anything.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?

We were at risk of losing our largest account and more than half our business. We needed a big idea to retain physician talent and grow patient volumes for Henry Ford Health System. We introduced the concept of a reality TV show called “The Minds of Medicine.” It would retain and recruit new physicians by making them the stars of the show. It would grow patient volumes by positioning the hospital as a thought leader and introducing innovative patient solutions. It would create measurable results by creating an online chat with the physicians after the show.

The concept of a branded docudrama introduced DBA to a national audience, Hollywood entertainment projects and national franchise chains of every kind. Our business multiplied by 300% and we never went back to business as usual.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

DBA just launched the first branded video game for a children’s hospital.

Brands are moving toward virtual community, because that’s where the people are.

We need to find a new way to engage with a new kind of consumer. One inventive way we found to engage is through a video game, which can both offer entertainment and branding, as well as healing benefits.

We’ve been working with Valley Children’s Healthcare to build meaningful patient experiences. Watch the video below to learn more.

https://youtu.be/lYpwRAOz7KE

Our research showed that engaged patients respond better to treatment, so we explored digital media as a form of therapy. We created Castle on the Coast, a video game featuring hospital mascot George the Giraffe, to help patients have fun. Valley Children’s is now the first children’s hospital with its own video game, and it’s getting exciting coverage in the press as well as incredible reviews from the gaming community.

We’re excited to see where this project goes. Click the link below to see the full case study of George, Valley Children’s Hospital, and the video game.

Valley Children’s Hospital Magical Pediatric Experience

What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?

Burnout is a reality in an industry that is driven by great passion. In fact, I’ve seen that most department heads of most companies tend to have great passion to get involved in marketing. That’s a powerful thing if it’s used for good. However, when we get a lot of criticism after long hours of effort, it can be tiring and even deflating. To keep things in perspective, I’ve realized people only want to help. Their desire to help can often be viewed as criticism, but perhaps they are merely trying to add value.

The best way to avoid burnout is to actually listen and think the best thoughts about the people around us. But most of all, don’t take any input personally. That way you won’t take your stress home with you, adding the heavy lift of worry long after you are done with your work.

Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

Advertising tells the consumer what the product is and how the features will make the consumer’s life better, but branding tells the consumer why they should trust one brand over another. At DBA, our philosophy is that advertising is a left-brain function that focuses on features and benefits, while brand building is a right-brain function that focuses on values and vision.

In short, advertising promotes the “what” to build sales, but branding goes deeper into the “why” to build a long-term relationship with the buyers. Often, building an emotional connection with a community will require more than proving competency. Communities are built on values and vision to build trust based on character. This is why branding is more than what is said by a company. It’s best represented by what the company does.

Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

Low-cost performance marketing does not work in a vacuum. In our study of brand building, a company that invests in branding will achieve up to 240% higher return on advertising spend. Specifically, companies that build a strong brand at the top of the marketing funnel will have better performance for every dollar spent on the bottom funnel. This is not merely important for optimization. In fact, many mature industries have already been optimized through strong branding among the leader brands. Unknown entrants to an industry with strong brands will have difficulty surviving — because they will have to pay more than double the cost of advertising to achieve each and every sale. For mature industries, the high cost of performance marketing for an unbranded product will dip too deeply into the margin of the product itself. Without a brand, it will become nearly impossible to make a profit.

Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?

I remember advising friends on the Kmart marketing team regarding a pop culture phrase that would eventually become a threat. “You wear Kmart clothes” had become a popular and sticky bully phrase since grade school. My recommendation was to rebrand and start over. The brand name was doing more harm than good. Unfortunately, their answer was to double down on the problem and name the new brand “Big Kmart”, thinking this would help them compete with the Walmart big-box model.

Sometimes a rebrand can be dramatic without changing the name. Changing design can do similar work. For example, when Cadillac DeVille and Eldorado were being referred to as “boats”, one of the executives at Cadillac told me they compiled a study that showed, “the average age of a Cadillac buyer is dead.” Trying to appeal to a younger small car buyer, the Cimarron was an unforgivable branding mistake, merely slapping a Cadillac logo on a mild-mannered Chevrolet Cavalier. The brand had nearly become lost by 2000. But in 2008, Cadillac reshaped its future by putting a souped-up Corvette engine in what looked like a stealth bomber on wheels, and the XLR was born, followed by the CTS and the edgy Escalade refresh that attracted a new generation of rap artists and professional athletes to the brand. In the end, most of the Cadillacs purchased were not the souped-up XLRs that paved the way, but mild-mannered smaller vehicles that were covered in a new skin. It was not the ad agency that refreshed the brand, but the body design department. The ads merely showed off the new brand well.

The best rebranding is not about creating a new brand position, but unlocking the brand position which had been lost. Cadillac had always been the brand of innovation. Somehow, the stodgy brand had grown out of a lack of design innovation. Going back to the roots of the brand can be like a revival experience. Somehow brands lose their way because the custodians of the brand think branding is about the “what,” and they forget the all-important “why.”

For, example, when we rebranded Henry Ford Health System, it had become old and stodgy. Focus groups said they would be afraid to be killed on their way to the hospital from the look of the neighborhood that surrounded it. We had to explore the history of innovation, driven by Henry Ford himself, so we could help the health system see a future of leadership and high-tech care for its patients today.

For the Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan, there was a need to look at the brand which stood among the top 10 in the country. It seemed potentially a waste of energy to rebrand a leader, with patient waiting lists and beds at full capacity. However, looking deeper into the data, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins were pulling away to a distant top three in brand preference. This threatened the long-standing position of Michigan Medicine leadership in gaining NIH grants, philanthropic support, recruitment, and retention of top talent. The rebrand was critical to building internal culture and support for a long-term vision of discovery for better patient care.

In short, rebranding is important in several key situations:

1. If a brand does more harm than good, it’s time to refresh the brand.
2. If a brand has become stale and the buyer has aged out, it’s time to refresh for a new buyer.
3. If a brand has lost its way, it’s good to go back to the “why” and refresh the “what.”
4. If a brand is successful, it’s still important to explore areas of weakness for a potential refresh.

Typically, we advise a brand refresh every 3 to 5 years. Brands that refresh more often than that can look schizophrenic, so don’t shift too far or too often. A brand is not an ad campaign, but a promise kept. Brand building done properly is culture building, so if your culture has become stale, if it lacks innovation or if the passion has become lost, now is a good time to refresh the brand.

Are there downsides of rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?

Often a rebrand is likely to happen with a new marketing director or CMO. That is a natural pattern because the new brand leader feels immediate pressure to change the brand for the better. That is their job, after all. The problem is that the average tenure of a CMO is less than three years. Therefore, brands often change too frequently. If the goal is to refresh the brand no more than 3 to 5 years, then it’s important to keep brand leadership for a minimum of 3 to 5 years as well.

Here are the downsides of changing the brand too often:

1. FAILURE TO LAUNCH: It can take up to a full year to build a new brand platform. After it’s launched, it takes a minimum of 2 years for a single ad campaign to create critical mass in awareness and behavior. If the brand goes through a refresh every year or two, the clock constantly starts over before any brand campaign can start to reach critical mass.
2. ALL STRATEGY, NO EXECUTION: A rebranding process done well should be expensive. Not just in dollars, but in the investment of executive time and talent within the marketing department and the leadership team. Often, a rebranding effort can take up to one-third of the marketing budget for a fiscal year. This cost should be amortized over 3 to 5 years minimum, or the investment would have been better used toward performance marketing.
3. DIMINISHING RETURN ON BRAND INVESTMENT: A strong brand does not necessarily need to be refreshed. Performance campaigns are improved by better branding, but there is a limit to this ROI. For example, a strong brand investment can return 3X to 5X better results in performance marketing. However, a strong brand is not likely to return 10X better results, so an unnatural balance of branding should not be used to build unrealistic expectations.

Depending on the industry and long-term goals of the organization, we recommend investing a minimum of 1/3rd of the marketing budget, but no more than 2/3rds of the marketing budget into branding efforts. Ultimately, the goal of any marketing campaign should not be brand awareness or preference alone, but growth.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image”? Please tell us a story or an example for each.

1. Change the name or add a sub-branded name: We worked with American Speedy Printing Centers to adapt to the digital world that was threatening the very existence of a printing press. Changing the name to Allegra Print & Imaging, each franchise location was given the option to upgrade the name if they would upgrade their services for digital capabilities. To this day, some remain American Speedy Printing Centers, but the locations that changed to Allegra Print & Imaging are named among the top-performing locations for the franchise and the industry. Also, see the Kmart example above.
2. Co-create the brand and re-energize culture: One of the most important aspects of branding is not the output, but the process itself. Consider how people think. The human brain is engineered to support the ideas it creates, however, it tends to reject ideas imposed upon it. This is why we love our own children but feel little responsibility for the children of others. Keeping this mentality in mind, always engage key stakeholders of the brand in the brand-building process. Done properly, this branding process should re-energize the culture as you re-energize the brand. When we re-energized the brand at Hungry Howie’s Pizza, the culture drove the brand to become the fastest-growing pizza chain in the country. See the full case study here: https://danielbrian.com/work/fastest-growing-pizza-chain/
3. Don’t benchmark your industry, benchmark brands you admire: In our brand refresh of the legendary University of Michigan health system, we didn’t view other local hospitals as competition. We didn’t even view other national leading health systems as the standard for branding. After all, U of M was already a top national brand, by any industry standard. We began our study by looking at the top brands of all time and from every industry. Using Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Amazon as the benchmark for emotional engagement, we created an engagement matrix that would guide our branding process beyond the health care industry. See the full case study here: https://danielbrian.com/work/michiganmedicine/
4. Start with your “Why”: As stated in the previous answers above, we’ve discovered that branding is not an advertising message, but the meaning behind why an organization exists. The message becomes easy to explain after you understand the reason why consumers will engage with your brand’s passionate purpose. If you don’t have a passionate purpose, you will not engage with the modern buyer who is looking for your meaning. If you can connect your brand with the “why” that creates an emotional momentum, your consumers will promote your brand better than you can promote yourself. We did a study and offer an annual report on the findings of this process. It’s called the “Irrational Advocacy Index.” See https://danielbrian.com/landing_pages/social-media-research/
5. Get innovative. Sometimes the medium is the message: Recently, we developed a Giraffe as a mascot for children’s care and invented a video game to promote a children’s hospital in Fresno California. The video game positioned Valley Children’s Hospital as a leader in patient experience, gaining significant earned media, social media, reviews and promotion for the leading care offered to their patients. Learn more: https://danielbrian.com/work/video-game-marketing/

In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job doing a “Brand Makeover”. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?

As stated above, Cadillac did a good job of saving a dying brand. What specifically impressed me was their willingness to lose the core older generation on their path to appeal to the next generation. As it turned out, the older generation never left the brand but adapted to the innovative designs that would eventually remain associated with mature buyers of all kinds.

In a brand refresh, we should not fear the loss of connection to our core audience over design features, but rather retain our core audience by going back to the core values and vision. Customers are not loyal to designs and features, but values and vision. Cadillac went back to innovation without fear, and the core customers rewarded them for it as new customers joined the revolution.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Interesting question. Our Mission is “Better Brands for a Better Human Condition.”

What does that mean to us? When a purpose-driven brand stands for values greater than its features and benefits, the best advertising comes from its passionate fans, who promote the brand better than it can promote itself. These values matter. Beyond the warm fuzzies, purpose-driven brands retain bigger profits — yep, 400% higher than the market. Let’s dream together and make more than advertising. Let’s build a social movement and make a difference.

We say on our website, “We are neighbors & families serving neighbors & families.” That means we like finding companies that have a greater purpose, so we can scale it. But, even more rewarding is when we find an organization that is lacking purpose. Helping people within an organization discover their meaning, then going on to fulfill that purpose is the most rewarding thing we can do in this business.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“In all work there is profit.” — Solomon

Some say you can work hard, while others say you can work smart. I believe in getting smart by working hard. As Nelson Mandela said, “I never lose, I either win or learn.”

Innovation is a win or learning process that has given me a life of interesting moments. I wouldn’t trade it for the safety of a boring life without lessons.

How can our readers follow you online?

Subscribe to my newsletter and video blog at the DBA contact page: https://danielbrian.com/contact-us/

Thank you so much for these excellent insights! We wish you continued success in your work.