Brand Journalism

Andy Bull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136185984
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Responding to the newly-emerging trend of organisations hiring journalists to create content on their behalf, Brand Journalism is the first comprehensive, practical guide to this hybrid form of traditional journalism, marketing and public relations.

This textbook takes a direct and practical approach to the subject, showing journalists and journalism students how they can apply their skills to working for a brand, and showing those who work for non-media organisations how their organisation can acquire the skills necessary to become a multimedia publisher.

Areas covered include:

• Establishing the audience your brand wants to engage with

• Identifying your organisation's business goals

• Developing a brand journalism strategy to help deliver those business goals

• Measuring the results of your brand journalism strategy

The book also features a wealth of case studies on the subject and offers an invaluable companion website - www.brand-journalism.co.uk.

Part I
How to Develop a Brand Journalism Strategy

In Part I we begin by demonstrating the development of brand journalism as a discipline before covering the key stages in the development and implementation of a brand journalism strategy. We don’t look in any detail at content creation – that comes later. First we need to analyse the elements that make up a strategy. In Parts II and III we will look at many examples of the kind of brand journalism that is created in support of that strategy.

Chapters in Part I will cover:

• how brand journalism was invented and has developed
• researching audiences - deciding whom you want to talk to and how to reach them
• assessing your business and marketing goals
• developing a brand journalism strategy to support those business goals
• creating the infrastructure and skill set you need to achieve your brand journalism strategy
• learning the storytelling skills that will enable you or your brand journalism team to implement the strategy; and
• the ethics of brand journalism.

You’ll find this learning most valuable if you are able to apply what we cover to a real-life brand journalism operation or to a brand-specific project you are working on.

1 How McDonald's Invented Brand Journalism, and How Brand Journalism Saved McDonald's

Goals of this module

• Examine the coining of the phrase "brand journalism" and the development of the concept.
• Map the development of the brand journalism strategy at McDonald's.
• Show that brand journalism was a key part of an almost total reinvention of McDonald's as a company.
• Outline how adopting a brand journalism strategy brought the end of brand positioning for McDonald's and a move to market segmentation.
• Demonstrate how the brand journalism approach transforms marketing and makes a marketer akin to the editor-in-chief of a magazine.
• Provide a detailed demonstration of what brand journalism means in practice for the marketing of McDonald's, with key case studies.

On the website

Find further resources, updates and links to all the sources quoted here.

In 2003, McDonald’s was a global corporation in decline. A brand that had built its reputation on the simple slogan that it was a happy place to be, and which had democratized eating out, had forgotten what it was about.

Its restaurants were scruffy and tired, its staff poorly trained and demoralized, its food produced with an eye to economy, not quality. That food had become anachronistic at a time when consciousness about good diet and health were growing rapidly. What was worse, its senior management didn’t see a problem. In a BusinessWeek article, Michael Quinlan, then chairman and CEO, said: “Do we have to change? No, we don’t have to change. We have the most successful brand in the world.”¹

As sales in each restaurant fell, McDonald’s responded not by improving those restaurants, and what it sold in them, but by opening more and more new ones. When regular evaluations showed that the brand experience was declining, McDonald’s dropped the evaluations. Instead of making the brand better, it just made it bigger.

In March 2003, BusinessWeek wrote about these problems under the headline “Hamburger Hell”. There were plenty more reports like it. As Larry Light, then McDonald’s chief marketing officer, recalls in his book Six Rules for Brand Revitalization: “Article after article described the unfortunate conditions of McDonald’s. Reporters, analysts, observers, activists, franchisees, employees, marketing consultants, everyone had something negative to say: McDonald’s was ‘out of date’; ‘too large to be turned around’; ‘its time is passed’.”²

And yet ... a year later everything had changed.

When Larry Light spoke at an Economist conference in 2004, he was able to quote headlines such as: “‘The Sizzle Is Back’; ‘Eye Popping Performance’; and ‘McDonald’s Leaves Analysts Upbeat on Prospects’. And after another year, McDonald’s was being described as an incredible turnaround business case.” What had happened in the meantime? Light had initiated a transformation of the company. Just about everything had changed – from staff training to restaurant refurbishment; the food that was sold and the way in which McDonald’s was advertised and marketed. That marketing now followed what Light said was something very new: a brand journalism approach.

The McDonald's transformation

Why did everything have to change? Because everything communicates. Light says that all the changes he initiated were in pursuit of one central goal: McDonald’s had to be demand rather than supply driven. He says: “The mindset had to change from selling what we want to provide, to providing the brand experience customers want.” In taking this approach to restoring the brand, he was rejecting the then current orthodoxy of brand positioning in favour of a multifaceted approach involving market segmentation.

The outmoded brand positioning approach saw a brand as having one USP (unique selling point) that was relevant to everyone who used that brand. For McDonald’s, that brand positioning approach would translate to the slogan: “Burgers and fries for everyone.” That no longer worked, he said, because brands actually appealed to many different markets in many different ways. So a revolutionary new approach to marketing was needed.

Light said: “We need to reinvent the concept of brand positioning by instituting the new concept of brand journalism. Mega brands are multidimensional, multisegment, multifaceted brands. No one communication can tell the whole, multifaceted megabrand story.”³ In essence, he explains: “The process of market segmentation is about dividing people into different markets that share common needs and are differentiated from people in other segments who share different needs.”

The end of mass marketing and mass media

Light explained that mass marketing no longer worked: “We no longer live in a world where mass marketing to masses of consumers with a mass message delivered through mass media makes money. In fact, mass marketing as we know it is dead.”

That’s just as true for mass journalism. Journalism has always been seen as serving a mass audience. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio – they are all mass media. Or they were. Now journalists are facing just the challenge that Light defined for marketers.

How Larry Light used the language and concepts of journalism to shape his concept of brand marketing

One of the first things journalists learn as they begin to write news is to apply what Kipling, its originator, called his “six little friends”, or six questions. Six questions that everyone wants answered when they read a news story are: who, what, when, where, why and how. Answering those questions is essential if a news story is to deliver the essential information the reader wants. They provide the framework for writing that story.

Light took the language of journalism, and core concepts about structuring a story, identifying and serving a particular audience’s interest in a given subject, and editing a journalistic product, and applied these concepts to marketing, making what he did immediately recognizable and comprehensible to journalists. While Light’s brand journalism is actually about a new way to market a brand, and was addressed to marketers rather than journalists, it very neatly fits journalists’ way of working. This is why journalists are just as good at creating content for brands as they are doing it for publishing and media companies.

How Larry Light adapted the who, what, when, where, why and how from journalism to marketing

Whereas journalists use the formula to shape a story, Light uses it to shape a marketing strategy – to help marketers identify market segments in order to determine their needs and serve them. In traditional journalism, the elements are these:

• What: is happening (or has happened or will happen)?
• Who: is it happening to?
• Why: has it happened?
• How: will it happen?
• When: will it happen?
• Where: will it happen?

Light adapts this approach to give what he calls the brand segmentation, brand marketing or brand journalism approach. First, you must understand a customer’s needs by asking:

• Why: does the customer use this product or service?
• What: are the wants that using the product or service satisfy?

And:

• What: are the problems with what the customer currently uses?
• Who: are the people with these needs?

How Larry Light's brand journalism approach to serving an audience draws from journalistic concepts of adapting information to fit any given audience

So far Light has adapted the five whys and how (5Ws and H) to look at needs and who has them. Next he defines the context of those needs. According to him, marketers must ask:

• How
• When
• Where

do these different needs exist?

Light’s brand journalism approach to serving an audience draws from journalistic concepts of adapting information to fit any given audience. It uses journalists’ understanding of writing for niche audiences, and for adapting information to not just the people consuming it, but to how, when and where they are consuming it.

It’s like a multimedia journalist deciding what content should go in a print product, what is relevant to Twitter or Facebook, where video will be useful, how content can be served by location, via a smartphone app and so on. This, in Light’s terms, is “needs-based segmentation”.

Here’s how Light explains the change. As we mentioned, before it took this new approach, McDonald’s was a “Burgers and fries for everyone” brand. Light says: “This [description] is wrong. It is product categorization, not needs-based segmentation. And brands cannot appeal to every person for every occasion. By trying to appeal to an undefined mass market, the result is inevitably a mass message of mediocrity.” With segmentation you get to identify key audiences, with clearly defined needs. Light says: “We [created] a multidimensional view of the market: what people buy and use is a function of why they need it, who they are, context of use (how, when and where).”

Here is how McDonald’s identified some consumer segments, the needs it could fulfil, and when and where it could fulfil them. It decided to focus on three key segments with different needs:

• "Great tasting food and fun for kids,"
• "Healthful eating for young adult moms."
• "Satisfying food for young adult males."

And it decided on four key contexts in which it could satisfy those needs:

• lunch
• breakfast
• late hours; and
• snacking.

Let’s bring this back to journalism – specifically, brand journalism – for a moment. This process gives the person who is creating content for a brand a clear idea of who the audience is, and what they are interested in, in a range of contexts and situations. Every journalist needs to know this context in order to do their job as well as possible. In media companies, such research is rarely available to content creators. With brands, it can be.

How McDonald's got a new tag line

The tag line usually appears beneath the title of a magazine or website, and it acts to explain exactly what the title is about. For example, the magazine Country Living has the tag “For when your heart’s in the country”. That suggests to me an audience which may actually live in town, but which love the idea of country life and aspire to share in it. So if you are creating content for this audience, items about achieving the switch to country living – achieving the dream they’ve bought into by purchasing the magazine – are highly relevant.

At McDonald’s, Light didn’t talk about a tag line, he talked about brand essence, but it amounts to the same thing. McDonald’s developed, as a key part of its rejuvenation, a brand essence which was “to appeal to the child in our hearts”...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I How to Develop a Brand Journalism Strategy
• Part II The Publishing Platforms to Use
• Part III Brand Journalism Storytelling Paths
• Part IV Measuring the Results of Your Brand Journalism Strategy
• Index