Is there a Tactical Gap?

We now set out to define the brand challenge for Happy Pills' entry into Singapore. We do this by first observing whether there's a tactical gap between their desired identity and the image that's actually held by consumers (later on, we'll go further by seeing if there is a strategic gap between their desired identity, and what they actually ought to be like).

In Assignment 1 we've noted that Happy Pills' target identity is to be a brand known for sharing joy and happiness, customization and personalization, and the act of gift-giving. Tasting nice is, of course, important (and is actually important for any business in which customers put stuff in their mouth), but this is ultimately secondary to the happy, social-focused identity that they want to develop. So do consumers view Happy Pills in this way?

Recall in Assignment 2 that we split up our interviewees and respondents largely on the basis of whether they had actual prior contact with the brand before. In our exploratory studies, of those who had prior contact with the brand (mostly Spaniards in Singapore, they were likely to have visited Happy Pills retail outlets, seen Happy Pills TVCs, and/or received Happy Pills as a gift before) generally tended to associate Happy Pills with it's desired personality traits - they mentioned words like "fun", "different", "original", and "suitable as a gift". In the surveys, those who had prior contact with the brand gave Happy Pills a very good score on "suitable as a gift" (this trait was one of the highest-rated amongst all other traits), further showing the littleness, if any, of the tactical gap.

However, it is worth noting that the brand's score on extroversion and social-ness, while not bad, could be better. So we would say that Happy Pills could be doing slightly better by really focusing more on social exchanges in their marketing communications, but that is a really minor discrepancy. On the whole, they are still okay.

Off-topic, it's also interesting to look at the responses of consumers who lacked prior exposure to the brand. They form a pretty good benchmark for comparison, since anything they say can be largely isolated to product and packaging. This means that the difference between those with and without prior exposure can be largely attributed to marketing communications and their physical retail store touchpoints.

Furthermore, non-exposed interviewees raised many associations about the bottle presented to them looking "girly" (although this may have had to do more with our choice of sweets when filling up the sample bottle). Thankfully, this was not reflected by those who had prior exposure, but Happy Pills might just want to ensure that their product variety is sufficiently diverse, and their selection does not appear gender-biased in any way.

More importantly, many non-exposure interviewees and respondents brought up their opinions that Happy Pills felt "medicinal", and that this was not desirable. This medicinal image could thus be a negative POD. To overcome this challenge Happy Pills has a few options: separate the attribute, leverage equity of another entity, or redefine the relationship.

Separating the attribute would be contradicting the brand’s identity, so this is not a viable option, as Happy Pills would merely be another candy product with no POD. As noted by our good friend, Mr. Keller, “…one of the strongest associations consumers have with a brand is inspired by the look of its packaging.”

Leveraging the equity of another identity is something Happy Pills could consider. Perhaps they could have an actor/actress who plays a doctor in a movie or television show appear in advertisements to build a positive relationship to this medicinal image.

This could work in tandem with the third option for overcoming the problem. Happy Pills could work to redefine the relationship. Happy Pills could attempt to educate Singaporeans regarding the novelty factor of gifting a candy product in medicinal containers to friends and family.

In sum, we would say that aside from the potential problem of the medicinal association being negative when coming to Singapore (which we note is not much of a problem in markets in which Happy Pills is more well-established), the tactical gap between desired brand identity and actual consumer image is not too wide, and is not a big problem for us, as long as we take the necessary precautions already listed out above. We now turn towards the strategic gap so that we can finally draft out the complete brand challenge.