Category: Strategy

Make a National Brand Local

Make a national brand local, that’s the new Bank of America branding strategy.

Consumers interact with brands locally every hour of every day. With expanded creativity around media from agencies, brands and media owners, these media touchpoints are expanding rapidly. How do large organizations managing a brand across different regions, markets and locations do so while ensuring flexibility across their local markets?

Once upon a branding time, local branches were free-wheeling with their marketing practices and the Bank of America logo was “wantonly” emblazoned on diverse products. When a national marketing exec saw the Bank of America logo stamped on a “piece of cake,” a memo went out advising: Local branches will no longer be allowed to “eat the brand!”

Bank of America’s solution? Centralize the development of consistent, national brand messaging and collateral and enable local markets to “attach” them to local marketing initiatives and sponsorships.

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7 Reasons to Brand Your Business

A business without a brand name is like a product that does not have a name. You’ve got to ensure a high impact branding strategy that will help your customer to remember you, your products and your services. In this case, it is your articles and your quality of writing are what should be remembered the most.

Jason has put up a list of 7 reasons why you should brand your name:

  1. Branding creates product awareness
  2. Branding can relay your product’s performance.
  3. Branding is your mark as the maker.
  4. Name branding ensures your customers will remember you.
  5. Branding completes your overall marketing strategy.
  6. Branding makes marketing so much easier.
  7. Branding promotes sales.
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Eleven Killer Tactics To Create a Strong Brand

Karen Post‘s excellent book Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick in Your Customers’ Minds is presenting eleven tatoo tactics that speak loudly even when you whisper.

 

The strategy is set. You clearly know who you are, you’ve decided on your brand difference, you’ve found folks who want what you have, and you’ve mapped out the great experience you will deliver. Now you must employ the big brand bang and let your message resonate through every point of market contact.

The next step in building your brand is tactical. What specific weapons are you going to launch, at whom, and with what frequency? How will you be heard, noticed, and remembered in a crowded, chaotic playing field, possibly working with less money than your competitors? I refer to this engine as ‘‘speaking loudly even when you whisper,’’ by which I mean making sure that even your smallest effort is on target, relevant, and working to build the brand.

 

Tactic 1: Visual Identity

The footprint of a brand—your corporate identity, graphic system, or visual voice—can take your brand many good places. It can also head you straight into a wall if it does not accurately project what the brand is and consistently stick to the story.
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A Brand Comeback

There is an interesting article on Influx pointing out six key learning points behind the Lacoste brand comeback.

Lacoste has coming roaring back from obscurity to become one of the hottest sports/apparel brands around. The company’s US sales grew in the US of 1000% in 5 years. Not bad for a brand that was once languishing under General Mills’s ownership.

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Trends in Loyalty Marketing

Brand loyalty will diminish as the defining metric of success. Marketing strategies will become more varied.

Brand loyalty reduces customer loss, which improves business growth. You are not replacing lost customers to stay at the same sales volume. Customers must have a favorable attitude toward the product to develop loyalty.

Looking at the future of [tag]loyalty[/tag]-[tag]marketing[/tag] [tag]innovation[/tag], three major trends will emerge.
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Trump’s 10 Commandments of Branding

Don Sexton, co-author along with the more famous Donald Trump of Trump University Marketing 101: How to Use the Most Powerful Ideas in Marketing to Get More Customers have an interesting free White paper on 10 Commandments of Branding:

Commandment 1: Establish a Clear Brand Position
A brand position is a clear, unambiguous statement that communicates what your company stands for and what it offers. You should choose one or two benefits that make up your brand position. These are the key benefits that your target market cares about and that you have the capabilities to produce. Why one or two? Because people generally can’t remember more than that.

Commandment 2: Build Your Brand on an Emotional Benefit
Your goal is to find an emotional benefit that is far superior to that of your competitors and to associate that benefit with your brand. In other words, you want to own that benefit.

Commandment 3: Build Your Brand as Early as Possible
If you don’t build your brand as quickly as possible, someone else may take the position that you want.

Commandment 4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets
Marketing strategies need to focus on the attributes of the product or service so that they are effectively positioned in the marketplace. Brand strategies must do that too, but a branding strategy must also focus on the associations and identifiers.

Commandment 5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position
You want all the touch-points in your company to reflect your brand. For example, if your brand is built on “friendliness,” everything in your company must embody that, from the employees to the logo to the company lobby.

Commandment 6: Make Sure All Your Products and Services Embody Your Brand
If you come up with a brand position and your product or service doesn’t embody it, your brand will have no credibility and will quickly fail.

Commandment 7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position
If your product or service embodies your brand and your customers don’t know it, it’s useless. You must always remind customers of what you do well, and then remind them again.

Commandment 8: Don’t Dilute Your Brand
Once you have established a clear brand position, don’t dilute it. What this means is that you shouldn’t keep extending your brand or adding to it indefinitely. If you extend it, you might actually hurt it. In particular, you should never extend your brand to products and services where customers won’t let it go. Remember, branding is about what customers will let you do.

Commandment 9: Always Monitor Your BrandYou need to continually monitor your brand position to make sure it remains relevant to your customers. Trends change. Your brand needs to change with them.

Commandment 10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organization’s Most Valuable Asset
Maintaining your brand involves everything we have talked about in this report. It means maintaining consistency, communicating and monitoring. It means putting Commandments 1-9 into practice every single day

Download full PDF file here.

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5 Reasons to Brand A City

Paris is romance, Milan is style, New York is energy, Washington is power, Tokyo is modernity, Lagos is corruption, Barcelona is culture, Rio is fun. These are the brands of cities, and they are inextricably tied to the histories and destinies of all these places.

Branding is a tool that can be used by cities to define themselves and attract positive attention in the midst of an international information glut. Unfortunately, there is the common misconception that branding is simply a communications strategy, a tagline, visual identity or logo. It is much, much more. It is a strategic process for developing a long-term vision for a place that is relevant and compelling to key audiences. Ultimately, it influences and shapes positive perceptions of a place.

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2 Deadly Sins and 2 Golden Rules in Branding

Inq7.net is publishing an interesting interview with best-selling marketing author and brand strategist Al Ries, co-author of “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” and “The Origin of Brands : Discover the Natural Laws of Product Innovation and Business Survival” on the common mistakes in branding and marketing products.

According to Ries there are the two deadly sins most commonly made by companies in the branding and marketing of their products:

1. Line extension — putting the company name on every product. You can’t stand for something if you put your name on everything.
2. Lack of focus — trying to sell too many products to too many different markets.

Accordingly, there are also two golden rules:

1. Be first in a new category
2. Keep your company focused.

These are simple, conceptual ideas, of course, but not easy to execute. Many people think marketing is nothing but common sense, but it’s not. Marketing is a highly complex discipline that takes decades to learn.

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Drive Organisational Growth Through Your Brand Strategy

A brand touches every part of the organisation and cannot be defined by: a product or service; a logo or graphical identity; an advertising campaign; a symbol; a spokesperson or a name.

Ultimately the brand is the intellectual and experiential substance behind the value you create in your customer, staff and stakeholders mind. This is far more than just creating a brand perception. It is about ensuring the delivery on the perception so that brand perception and brand reality become the same thing.

How do we go about developing an effective brand strategy that is designed to drive organisational growth? Here a simple five step process as a guideline:

1. Redefine organisation strategy to include the principle that your brand is everything and drive brand from the top of the organisation.
2. Understand clearly who you are, and who you are not, as an organisation.
3. Understand your target market clearly:

  • Understand how their purchases are broken down between the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages.
  • Understand what their specific needs and motives are during the different stages, as they will be very different during each stage
  • Understand how your organisation impacts on each stage

4. Identify and engage with your brand culture as this will drive your staff’s behaviour and result in a positive brand experience.
5. Understand how to measure the above in terms of brand strength and the strategy pillars, so you know how to adjust your organisation in a meaningful way.

Posted on by Daniel