Well, Christmas season is upon us and that means warm, heartfelt wishes all around. This spot from Wal-Mart caught our eye as a message of gratitude to the soldiers serving in the Middle East. I’m sure there will be more to come before the magic day.

The case against cheap

While discounting can be healthy part of the strategy needed to survive the recession, according to a new study by Nielson, repositioning your brand to include value-based messages is not effective.

In a review of TV ad recall, Nielsen IAG found that value-message and recession-themed ads did not breakthrough TV ad clutter at higher rates than ordinary ads.

Brands that include value-for-money components in their brand narrative like Wal-Mart, Top Shop and LG will continue to do well due to down shifting and cautious customers. However, if your brand does not already include an emphasis on value-for-money notions, now is not the time time to begin introducing such ideas. Likewise, be cautious about the amount of discounting done and the contracts arranged with distributors. Leonard Lodish has written one of my favourite articles on the subject for Harvard Business Review back in 2007.

The case for good.

Instead, marketers should use this time to deepen their strategic positioning taking into account long-term shifts in society and markets for adding meaning to their brands. This time should be used to understand social media and how your brand can become more relevant to the issues society cares about. Unlike the economic downturn, creating more civil brands is not a cyclical trend, it is a long-term shift in our marketing reality.

The Edelman Trust Barometer finds that customers express a preference of civil and trusted brands – even during a recession. Over half of people surveyed indicate that they would pay a premium for these brands.

Since economic indicators are once again on the climb, this is the last call for many companies to consider the social dimension of their brands before getting back to business and usual and having to defend themselves from challenger brands who have been using this time to strategise and create new threats for market leaders for the past year.

Starbucks is trialling a new coffee shop brand called 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea. At the heart of the concept is a local look and feel including distressed furniture, tea samplings, poetry readings and the like.

Andrew Hetzel, a coffee consultant says: “Starbucks may be renaming its stores to provide a testing ground for changes and, possibly, to bring in a new brand of consumer. It looks to me that they are testing a specialty (sic) sub-brand to see if they can capture some other segment of the market that would otherwise be disillusioned by a large corporate chain.”

It will be interesting to see whether Starbucks can develop a successful format that will compete directly with the Starbucks alternatives. Will customers care whether the coffee house is actually local so long as it looks and operates in a semi-local fashion? Are customers dogmatic local business supporters or is there a trade-off point between quality, awareness, design, ambience and community involvement?

Whether successful or not, this move demonstrates once again that global corporations are seriously concerned about promoting the idea of being local and providing forums for community participation. Bigger is no longer necessarily better, if it means taking on the image of homogenising neighbourhoods like Wal-Mart, when it comes to an involved experience like sitting and having a cup of coffee.

The paper that outlines our civil branding effort and explains a technique for creating more civil brands is now ready for download. Inside, you will find the following:

[1] Synopsis of the civil branding idea and its importance to marketers and society.
[2] Step-by-step process for creating more differentiated, more civil brands.
[3] Case studies from Citibank, Dove, Benetton, HSBC and others.

+ Download here