7 Rules for Great Marketing

For marketing executives seeking to build their brand in today’s frenzied, message-cluttered jungle, resting on their laurels seemed to be enough until not long ago — especially if they were meeting their goals, seamlessly executing ambitious programs, and keeping staff members happy enough to ward off corporate raiders. Nowadays, conditions are vastly different. To prove your worth as a marketer and brand builder, you need to tap into your entrepreneurial side.

Seven rules for marketing and brand building, based on a fundamental for entrepreneurial success, are now essential for compelling customers to embrace your brand.

Embrace 3-D marketing

Entrepreneurs are obsessed with building lasting, face-to-face relationships, a principle that only 3-D marketers can leverage to full advantage. 3-D marketing—encompassing events, exhibits, displays, merchandising, premiums, target market research, prospect follow-up and much more—enables marketers to truly “touch” their customers in ways that traditional mass marketing does not. It’s the most powerful tool in the marketing arsenal for creating customer relationships and building brand image on a face-to-face basis.

Make ROI your mantra

Entrepreneurs are notoriously impatient to maximize the return on every investment they make. Amazingly, in the world of 3D marketing, executives often forgo measuring ROI until called to the carpet — and by then, they have no assurance that they are looking at meaningful indicators of brand participation or brand loyalty.

Dive into your industry

Stellar entrepreneurs study their target industries in minute detail, zero in on the marketplace needs they’re uniquely positioned to fill, and develop brands that showcase their added value. Do you know what your brand is, what it isn’t, and what it needs to be? How should you be promoting your brand so that it resonates with a changing marketplace of prospects and buyers?

Focus resources through end-to-end planning

In the new world of 3-D marketing, you must champion end-to-end planning processes—beginning with market research and message development, graduating to creative conceptualization and implementation, and ending with customer follow-up and results measurement. As part of your marketing effort, you should be spearheading an end-to-end planning approach for each one.

Remember the vision

Entrepreneurs are “big idea” people with a compelling vision and the drive to see it through. Too often, marketing executives lose their dedication to understanding their corporation’s vision and strategy—and advancing them through several integrated tactics with a common set of underlying messages.

Seek new paradigms for achieving teamwork and synergy

The teambuilding spirit typical of entrepreneurs is a requirement for marketers, who should be taking it to the next level. Do you, for instance, organize on-site “pep-rally briefings” of your sales team just before major events—reinforcing the brand messages most likely to draw customers in? While sales would normally lead these meetings, your intimate branding knowledge should be compelling you to initiate this out-of-the-box approach.

Honor the team members

Like entrepreneurs, you depend on your team to help you shine. Learn to nurture and empower the people who work with you every day—encouraging them to take your ideas further, to continually focus on overall returns, and to develop new approaches. As the rules for brand-building success take a dramatic turn, you’ll need their talents to help you capitalize on future opportunities—and to maintain the luster of your brand.

via MarketingProfs.

Brand Extension – 4 Steps Strategy

I mentioned here before the major types of brands extensions as well as basic principles to consider before running into a brand extensions process.

Most companies know how to extend their brands by leveraging organizational competencies and determining unmet customer needs. However, surprisingly few have a strategic approach briefing in place to ensure that potential new product areas are consistent with a brand’s identity. Even an outstanding new product concept, satisfying a significant unmet customer need, will not succeed in the market if it is launched under the wrong brand identity.

Here is a four-step road map to make sure that future new products or services complement, or better, enhance the current equities of the brand.

1. Determine brand and category associations.

The first step in determining brand relevance is to begin with a comprehensive assessment of what your brand and those of key competitors in the category currently stand for in the minds of customers.

Even an outstanding new product concept, satisfying a significant unmet customer need, will not succeed in the market if it is launched under a brand identity for which it is a poor fit. The foundation of this assessment is qualitative customer research (e.g., focus groups and in-depth interviews), which provides the richness and depth of response needed to construct an accurate portrait of your brand and the category. The research should focus on uncovering the key associations customers link to the brand and competitive brands in the categories (e.g., product or service features, functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits, and personality).

2. Develop brand extendibility proxies.

Once the six to eight key associations have been identified for the brand and category, proxies should be carefully chosen for each one. To accomplish this, turn each association into a continuum of attributes and benefits that range from “close in” to “far out” relative to where customers perceive the brand to be today.

This continuum begins with a proxy that’s relatively close in and ends with one that is a significant stretch from how customers perceive the brand today, with several points in between. It’s important to remember that these proxies were strategically chosen to represent distinct points on a continuum. The proxies chosen may or may not represent good new product opportunities for the brand (i.e., customer unmet needs). What’s more important at this point is that they provide the basis for rich conversations with customers as to how the brand can and cannot be extended in the future (i.e., brand relevance).

3. Conduct brand extendibility research.

Once brand and category associations have been determined and representative proxies selected, it is imperative to go back to customers to solicit their input.

A variety of stimuli can be used for the chosen proxies to facilitate brand extendibility research discussions, including white paper concepts, representative images, and actual products or prototypes. During focus group customers are asked for their opinion as to how well each product, service, feature, or benefit fits with the brand in question.

Once again, it’s important to remember that we are mostly interested in understanding customer rationales for why something does or does not fit with the brand.

4. Create brand extendibility guidelines.

The final step of this approach is to take the insights obtained in the previous step’s customer research and develop guidelines detailing how the brand can and cannot be effectively extended. Customer feedback (i.e., which proxies are in, which are out, and the reasons why) needs to be interpreted and translated into guidelines for extendibility.

Once an adequate number of guidelines has been established, it’s helpful to prioritize them because they won’t all be of equal importance. One way to think about this is to establish several guidelines that are imperatives. What this means is that unless a potential new product or service opportunity satisfies these guidelines, it should not be considered for marketplace introduction. Other guidelines would be deemed important but not mandatory. In other words, if a potential new product or service opportunity satisfies this guideline, it should be considered favorable.

Read more on the subject, from Amazon.com:

Brand Extensions: Keys to success in international marketing

Brand Stretch: Why 1 in 2 extensions fail, and how to beat the odds: A brandgym workout

5 Branding Misconceptions

The mass-market, advertising-agency model still influential in brand management, is fast becoming obsolete. Brands are changing in many ways and the traditional role of brand as a proxy for quality has diminished. Branding remains crucially important, yet it increasingly finds its power through a tighter integration with business design. Overcoming five widespread misconceptions and myths about branding can help organisation to win in the brand-building game.

1. Brands are built mainly through advertising.

In today’s increasingly service-oriented economy,something has replaced advertising as the key to brand building: the customer experience. This represents the sum of a customer’s numerous interactions with a company, each of which is a moment of truth that can, to varying degrees, enhance or erode the brand. And a positive customer experience, so crucial to the health of brands in service industries, also plays an increasingly important role in product businesses. The purchase of a product, which used to be the final interaction between company and customer, now is often only the beginning of an ongoing relationship that includes after-market service or the creation of customer “solutions” that incorporate but overshadow the physical product.

2. Brands are used primarily to influence customers.

Although most brand strategies are developed, quite naturally, with the customer front and center, they will fail to generate sustained growth in profitability and shareholder value unless they target not only customers but also investors and current and prospective employees.

Besides the three primary stakeholders—customers,investors,and talent – there is a fourth constituency that,although it plays no direct role in driving profitability or value growth, is crucial to a company’s health. This is the group of regulators, media, and public interest organizations that can affect a company’s real or de facto license to operate.A company that ignores this audience in positioning its brand risks a hostile response when it seeks their support.

3. The key to successful brand management involves understanding the effectiveness of the brand in today’s marketplace

While achieving such an understanding is a worthwhile aim, on its own it risks creating a dangerously complacent view of a brand’s health. More important is being able to anticipate a brand’s relevance to the most valuable customers of tomorrow. One way to look over the horizon and glimpse future brand pitfalls and opportunities is through the discipline of pattern recognition. Analyzing a library of brand patterns that have played out in the past can suggest how and when a brand should evolve.

4. Brands are symbolic and emotive and therefore are managed primarily through creativity rather than analysis.

While brands appeal to the heart as well as to the head, they can be quantified and analyzed with much the same economic rigor as other business assets. One means of doing this involves a detailed assessment of something we call brand equity.

5. Brands are the responsibility of the marketing department

Because brands derive their power from the value that they symbolically represent, there must be real value in the branded products or services.Otherwise,a brand will simply create false promises — a surefire way to erode its strength. It has long been true that a product must deliver on the brand promise. But in an increasingly service-intensive economy, employees, not just the product, determine a company’s success in delivering on the brand promise. Giving employees the tools and leeway to satisfy the customer across the entire customer experience can tremendously protect or enhance a brand’s strength. Delivering on the brand’s promises requires the involvement of virtually every employee in all areas of the organization, even those who have no direct customer

Branding News Roundup – 10/05/05

KGB: The Brand You Can Trust
Who knew secret police were so attached to branding principles? Next thing you know, the Belarussians will sue Green Bay Packer DE Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila for unauthorized use of their initials as a nickname.

Sneak Preview: Ogilvy PR BlogFeeds
The Ogilvy PR BlogFeeds which we are distributing and publicizing at the conference tomorrow are an attempt for us to share a list of blogs that we consider influential …

The Yin and Yang of Car Naming and Car Sales
I am sure you are all aware of the sharp fall off of SUV sales and the corresponding rise in subcompact sales due to rising gas prices…

Marketing lessons learned at Starbucks
Developing a loyal customer base at Starbucks is not overly complicated. As Howard Schultz says, it’s nothing more than greeting customers in a friendly manner and making a drink exactly to their desires…

The ABC of Great Brands
Great brands encompass three characteristics that possess a winning combination when executed correctly. The road to branding success requires a unique discernment of the value proposition being offered followed by vision, patience, and perseverance.

Tag:

8 Reasons for Branding

Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and ten other books hailed for outstanding creativity has an interesting post, presenting eight reasons for which even the smallest of enterprises have to jump in the branding wagon, and get back great rewards out of it.

Branding is the process of creating distinctive and durable perceptions in the minds of consumers. A brand is a persistent, unique business identity intertwined with associations of personality, quality, origin, liking and more.

Time, money and effort spent on branding comes back many times over when the process plays out intelligently. Here’s why:

  1. Memorability. It’s easier to remember the branded company than the “what’s its name?” one.
  2. Loyalty. When people have a positive experience with a memorable brand, they’re more likely to buy that product or service again than competing brands.
  3. Familiarity. Psychologists have shown that familiarity induces liking, and this makes even non-customers more likely to recommend a brand they know.
  4. Premium image, premium price. Branding can lift what you sell out of the realm of a commodity, with customers willing to pay more for the well-branded product or service.
  5. Extensions. With a well-established brand, you can spread the respect you’ve earned to a related new product, service or location more easily
  6. Greater company equity. Making your company into a brand usually means that you can get more money for the company when you decide to sell it.
  7. Lower marketing expenses. Although you must invest money to create a brand, once it’s created you get a bigger bang for every marketing buck using it.
  8. For consumers, less risk. People tend to choose the brand-name supplier over the no-name one when afraid of the consequences of a messup

Tag: Branding

3 Important Elements of a Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is one of the most fraught areas of marketing, though clearly also one of the most important. There are many problems with definition. The key point is you can’t have a strategy without a clear objective. Restating a goal is not strategy, execution is not strategy, and tactics are not strategy. A brand cannot function without a strategy and the function of brand management is to implement brand strategy.

A brand’s longevity and strength has to be built less on price and more on differentiation. In markets cluttered with messages, and where a certain level of quality of product and/or service is expected by customers, brand owners have to find ever new ways to foster loyalty.

Targeting

In order to decide how best to choose target customers for your brand, you need to answer questions, such as:

  • Which customers are important to the market?
  • Which are important to my brand?
  • How can I get more customers or do more business with each of them?

The current preoccupation, rightly, is analysing which customers deliver the most value and hence profit the company most. These may not necessarily be the largest number of the brand’s customers – in fact it rarely is. In most brands, there is some variation of an 80/20 rule, where the minority of most loyal customers deliver most value to the company.

Advances in technology have made it easier to collect, store and utilise more reliable data on who your customers are, how much and how often they buy from you, what else they buy etc. The key strategic choice to make here is whether you are targeting the most valuable customers to keep their custom, targeting infrequent customers to make them more brand loyal, or trying to gain new customers?

All those targeting objectives are important to building a strong brand, but the emphasis may vary depending on the lifecycle of the brand. A new brand needs to establish itself in the marketplace, but over time customer loyalty will grow and the brand should reward its most valuable customers. Recruiting new customers, however, is a never-ending task and one which will ensure the brand’s longevity.

Values

Consumers buy brands because their values align with the brands’ values.
To keep brands fresh, relevant and at the forefront of customers’ minds, it is vital to be able to have strong links between core brand values and positive customer experiences,which are brought to life in innovative
products using the best technologies.

Core brand values are what differentiate you from your competitors and can be expressed in a small number of words, although the words have to be meaningful in terms of the context of the brand. Positive customer experiences are the fulfilment of the brand promises. To maximise the impact you make on customers, it is important to explore the full richness of the context in which the product is being used, focusing particularly on the benefits which customers experience.

Proposition

A proposition is what you choose to communicate about your brand to the market and various stakeholders in your brand.

This communication entails more than just the physical product or advertising. All the intangible communications of the brand, its customer service, its availability, its pricing policy, have a bearing on how the overall brand proposition is viewed by customers.

Tag: Brand Strategy

5 Dimensions of Brand Identity

Brand identity is composed of various shares that trigger particular responses in consumers in addition to filling the afore-mentioned functions. These shares build on one another; the more shares a brand has, the stronger and more positive the relationship with consumers.

Mind

At the very lowest level, mind share must be created in the consumer consciousness (cognitive level). This means that, as a complex perceptual and conceptual construct, the brand evokes an internal neural representation in the minds of consumers, leaving behind certain brand impressions.

Heart

This refers to the emotional relationship a consumer should develop with a brand. Heart share is less a matter of a product’s functional utility and more a matter of its symbolic attributes. The buyer of a Ferrari, for instance, will not develop an affection for the car based purely on functional attributes, but rather as a result of the values associated with the brand and the brand environment it operates in.

Buying intentions

Brand identity must trigger a buying intention share in consumers. After all, despite the importance of a brand’s mind and heart share, it only makes sense for a supplier to invest in brand identity if consumers will also want to buy the brand.

Self

Brand identity contributes to self share, which means that the brand functions as a manifestation of the self, a tangible expression of self-image within the social environment. In this context, brands serve self-expression and self-design purposes, differentiating the individual within the social group. Brands can easily serve similar ends in the realm of business-to-business, where they bolster self-image in terms of a company and its functions.

Legend

Here, the brand shares in the existential search for meaning conducted by a consumer in a world enlightened to the point of meaning-lessness and takes on a virtually religious character. This aspect sheds light on the cultural-sociological proposition that brand management is worshiping the customer. Brands allow consumers to achieve social position or status, to partake of cultural expression, to create mythology and shape meaning, and as a result, to weave themselves into the social and metaphysical fabric of the world. In this context, a loyal customer is a member of a community and an individual loyal to that community not just a customer who makes repeat purchases. A brand is a tool for building a sense of community and belonging, for building the community itself.

Branding’s “Periodic” Table

Talking about elements in the previous post just sent me straight to a nice visual periodic table of brand elements. It is bassically a small branding glossary and here are some quotes out of it:

20 – Brand Evolution – Adapting a brand to align a company’s promise, or value proposition, with its growth over time; a company’s brand must reflect its current position to ensure that it keeps its promises and is accurately “known” by customers

36 – Brand Identity – The outward manifestation of a corporate brand, product brand, service brand or branded environment including name and visual appearance.

37 – Brand Integration Plan – A proactive, structured and disciplined plan, with clear strategic objectives and detailed implementation steps that helps merged companies build a new, integrated brand and value proposition. Ideally this planning begins prior to completion of merger or aquisition

See full branding “periodic” table.

Brand Elements

Martin Jelsema, marketing consultant and freelance promotional writer, graphics designer and founder of Signature Strategies has an interesting list of elements that should be considered and incorporated into any company’s branding strategy. They will take on a different mix of importance depending on factors such as product life cycles, competitive activity, importance to consumers, loyalty patterns of consumers, commodity/custom perception and others. But within this product environment, these elements will all have to be addressed.

  • Existing perceptions of the product category by target market segments.
  • Existing structure and infrastructure in this product category.
  • Competition for the same dollar from other product categories.
  • Product attributes deemed important to target market segments.
  • The positions currently occupied by you and your competitors in the collective minds of target market segments.
  • Product differentials, real or perceived by target market segments.
  • Corporate images of the marketers of products in your category.
  • Expectations of buyers about products in your category.
  • The programs, activities and policies in support of your brand. They include names, logos, packaging, slogans, ad content, ad media, ad specialties, trade shows, contests sponsored, public relations, literature, promotions, events sponsored, distribution channels used, charities and causes supported, web site activity, guarantees, return policies, co-branding activities, graphic standards, customer relations policies and personnel, audio symbols/themes, trade association and standards committee participation, and any other activities that provide exposure of the brand to your markets by you and by your competitors.
  • Relation of a particular brand with other brands from the same company (line extensions, brand adaptations, co-offerings etc.).
  • Budget and financial considerations.
  • Product expectations for volume, profit, longevity.