Brand Verbs - Home Run or Strike Out?
The financial news networks have been inundated lately with new Vanguard commercials heralding a new way of investing called "Vanguarding." The spots catch your attention because they are so different and unexpected for the category, and are in conflict with Vanguard's bedrock position of low fund management fees and sound investment strategies. Turning a brand into a brand action - transitioning to a brand verb is risky business.
The brandscape is littered with more failures than successes that employ the brand verb niche strategy. When done right, brand verbs can be a homerun. FedEx, probably the poster child for how a brand verb strategy should work, immediately comes to mind. As does Xerox. Even if we have a DVR, the response is often "Tivo" it. Or even Rollerblading. Online searches are all about "Google It."
The common thread to all of these brand verb evolutions is that they were born out of user experiences, not a marketing campaign. They just happened organically on their own. No external orchestration was needed; users were the drivers behind it. It's hard to believe that at one point FedEx was known as Federal Express. Changing the name to FedEx took big money and guts. The threat of turning FedEx into a generic category like Kleenex was huge. The gamble certainly paid off. What a novel idea - a branding and naming convention driven by customers.
"Vanguarding" seems forced and contrived. The campaign tagline doesn't make any connection to the investor - "Stop just investing and start Vanguarding." Isn't the name of the game investing? Is "Vanguarding" the new way of investing post-recession?
The definition of "Vanguarding" has a lot of strategic elements to it. Here is how it is defined on Vanguard's web site. "Vanguarding is a different approach to investing. It's looking at the long term, investing at cost and choosing a company that treats you like an owner." It's asking a lot of the individual investor to grasp. Can Vanguard carve out this position so that it is believable? Are we truly owners, or just investors in a mutual fund? What's missing is the single-minded business premise that made Vanguard relevant and differentiated.
Vanguard has owned the low-cost mutual fund position for years. It is the go-to mutual fund when low management fees are the priority investment selection criteria. Couple that with sound investment strategies and fundamental thinking and investors and financial advisors alike understood where Vanguard fit into their consideration set. Both distinctive and differentiated, Vanguard carved out investor mind space.
Does "Vanguarding" reach and address the truths of investing - risk, cost, time and emotion? To achieve success, "Vanguarding" has to become a way of investing life. It speaks to investors' hearts with the "guarding" element. Who doesn't want help protecting your assets today? From an overall perspective, it seems forced and contrived. "Vanguarding" needs to be the deliverable that audiences derive from investing with Vanguard. What happened to the simple premise of return on investment?
Brand verbs can't be manufactured. It happens through user experience, day after day. You can't force them. Will the term "investing" be replaced by "Vanguarding?" It's highly doubtful.
Love the topic. It's safe to say we won't be 'Prudentializing' anytime soon in our messaging...
Verbing your own brand can be likened to creating a video with expectations of it going viral and being #1 on YouTube, or giving yourself a nickname. The verbing trend is making a come back with last names, most obvious in the sports world. Thanks to Reebok and the Celtics playoff success, I' ve heard "you got Rondo'd" too many times in the past few days.
While "Vanguarding"does transition nicely from Vanguard and has potential to catch-on, there is a forced, Ochocinco-esque feeling when the organic element is removed from the story and the brand verbs itself.
Great post. I agree...Verbalizing one's brand is definitely an organic process.
The process does not happen overnight, nor can it be contrived by "Madison Avenue." As volatile as investing is, this can have an adverse effect as well.
What if their customers mutual funds tanked? "I was Vangarded into a fund and now I have nothing to show for it."
Another great topic, Bill!
Verbing a brand is risky, but if the gamble pays off, the brand assumes a potent sense of energy and dynamism. Done right, it conveys a sense of action and gives consumers a sense of empowerment.
I think "Vanguarding" is done less right than it could have been, and my reasons are writerly ones:
First is the "-ing" ending on the word, which undercuts the verb's power. In a high school English sense, "Vanguarding" isn't strictly a verb, it's a gerund -- a verb ("to Vanguard") converted to noun form by the addition of "-ing". They verbed a noun, but then re-nouned it! The equivalent would render Nike's tagline as "Just be doing it." Sucks the juice right out of it, doesn't it?
Furthermore, they made "Vanguard" a passive verb -- what English teachers call intransitive. "Vanguarding" is something you can do, but it's not something you can do *to* anything else. The most powerful brand verbs are transitive -- they act *on* things, and give their customers the power to do the same: You can Google search terms, FedEx packages, and Xerox documents. You can *be* Vanguarding but, at least the way the word is used in the campaign, you can't "Vanguard" something else.
So what's the fix? Drop the "-ing", and make "Vanguard" active. Here are a couple of (tossed-off) examples of how that might work:
Don't just manage your financial future. Vanguard it.
Don't worry about your portfolio. Vanguard it.
Vanguard your [retirement/investments/dreams].
Etc., etc.
Thanks for the discussion, and for indulging while I got my English-major freak on for a minute or two. :)
Cheers,
Jim