Revitalizing a Mature Brand

Building a strong brand takes time, commitment, and hard work, but the result is one of the most valuable assets a company can own. Instant identification in the mind of the customer, a reputation for competence and quality, the knowledge that the promises of the brand are genuine and not just slogans…the list of benefits goes on.

A strong, mature brand isn’t a static asset. It must be cared for and nurtured, kept fresh, dynamic, relevant, and at top of mind while retaining its unmistakable identity and heritage.

Revitalizing a mature brand is to a degree the classic meeting of irresistible force and immovable object. One side of the argument is “change or die,” while the other is “tradition is paramount.”

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Posted on by Daniel

2005 Product Placement Awards

A successful product placement either introduces or reinforces a brand name in the audience’s mind.

In case you missed it the Brandcameo product placement awards from Brandchannel are up.

Ford, which has had roles in movies from Bullitt to Are We There Yet?, was a winner. As a large, established brand, Ford Motor Company’s placements are brand reinforcements, and reinforce Ford did. Its 19 placements in 2005 mean that Ford appeared in nearly 50 percent of all Number One films (41 total).

Also worth mentioning the Brandcameo 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award for Product Placement which goes to Gatorade.

Gatorade’s real-life sideline omnipresence has made it a sports film necessity in order to achieve a realistic scene — an enviable position for products attempting to get into films and fight the “it’s just not natural” label.

As Darren Rovell, author of First in Thirst: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat into a Cultural Phenomenon puts it, “If you cant use the pro uniforms, if you cant use the real players or the real coaches, having Gatorade on the sidelines immediately conveys to the movie viewer, ‘This is authentic.’ If you are making a sports movie that has any action, Gatorade is one of the most natural fits.”

Read more about it here.

Posted on by Daniel

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

Branding as Business Personality

Big companies with big marketing budgets usually have personalities. Their ad agency calls this branding, but it is really just a corporate personality.

Giving your company a personality can be done on the cheap, an important thing for a small or medium-sized business.

The real cost of a corporate personality is commitment. A commitment to represent yourself through your corporate, personal and community communications with a consistent (and positive) personality.

Personality makes you a brand – not the other way around. Personality is what makes people remember you, for better or worse. A good personality makes people come back for more.

A personality can make your business remarkable.

Posted on by Daniel

5 Myths of Brand Naming

After the 5 Tips on Brand Naming, here is an interesting post of Steve Rivkin is the co-author of The Making of a Name : The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy on 5 Myths of Brand Naming:

Myth #1: Size doesn’t matter.
Yes, it does. Shorter is better in everything from memorability to packaging.

Myth #2: There are no words left to steal from the dictionary.
Not true. Your speaking vocabulary may only be 30,000 words, but a hefty dictionary will yield 750,000 words

Myth #3: Coining a new word is easy.
But the trick is to create a new name that is meaningful, impactful and starts the positioning process for the brand or company.

Myth #4: Manufactured names are all the same.
A made-up name might be a simple fusion of two easily recognized words, it might be an altered form of a recognizable word or it might be a foreign word that some people would recognize

Myth #5: Customers will take our name literally.
Good names are suggestive. They are bundles of possible meanings. They are not contractual commitments.

Read the full 5 Myths about Brand Names

Posted on by Daniel

Dollar Value of Brand Equity

Brand equity is that incremental value that accrues to a product when it is branded. Simple brand awareness is one source of brand equity. If you can get your name to pop up in people’s minds when they think of the product category, you’ve won a big part of the battle.

[There are] two other sources of brand equity: a consumer’s perception that a brand is better than it really is (“attribute-based” equity), and nonattribute-based equity, for instance, a consumer’s preference for a brand based on the cachet of owning it. If you’re successful in these three aspects, an added benefit is that stores will feel a customer pull to carry your product, and so your availability and hence sales will increase.

Simple awareness ”getting the brand’s name to pop up in consumers’ minds”generates the largest return, followed by consumers’ responding to the cachet of owning the brand (nonattribute-based equity). Attribute-based equity trails in third place. This means that a brand’s image provides a stronger incentive for buying even than the perception that it is a better product. But greater awareness of your brand is the major component driving brand equity.

These are some extracts out of an interesting study with the title Calculating the Dollar Value of Brand Equity made by V.Seenu Srinivasan Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business along with Chan Su Park of Korea University Business School and Dae Ryun Chang Yonsei Business School. Read more about the study here.

Posted on by Daniel

Most Popular Brands With Teens Worldwide

Teens are mostly influenced by the culture of brands. Once dominant, U.S. labels now account for just half of the 10 brands that are favorites among teens globally, based on a new study entitled “GenWorld,” conducted by Energy/BBDO and obtained exclusively by WWD. That’s down from the eight U.S. brands that made teens’ top 10 in 1995, when Chip Walker, executive vice president at Energy/BBDO, last did comparable research on teens, for the former agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles.

Branding experts differ on the chief causes of the apparent loyalty shift. They cite factors that range from deft, low-key marketing and product innovation by firms to a political pushback by young consumers. Smart brands win teen market share by allowing teens to be part of a brand “story,” experts say. Mr. Walker names the global teen “passion points” as music, media, sports, and communication.

Still, not all experts see country of origin as an issue with teens. Some doubt whether many US teens could name Adidas’s home base.

“For today’s teens, online buzz is king, and peers hold the most sway. What applies to young people is ‘Did it break? And did my friends say it was cool?’ [It’s an] opinion process that goes on through IMs and text-messaging, and it applies to everything from movies to cargo pants.”

says Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group who has worked with the trend-watcher firm Intellisponse on its annual surveys of what (primarily US) teens want.

10 Most Popular Brands With Teens Worldwide

Rank
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.		 Favorite Brand 2005
Sony
Nokia
Adidas
Nike
Colgate
Nestle
Cadbury
Coca-Cola
M&Ms
Kodak		 Favorite Brand 1995
Coca-Cola
Sony
Adidas
Nike
Pepsi
Kodak
Colgate
Disney
M&Ms
Reebok

If you want to read full Energy BBDO release on the study here is the PDF file (85 kB).

Posted on by Daniel

Hiring a Branding Company – 5 Tips

1. Know your needs and have an idea about how you’d like them met.
2. Go ahead, be a fan. If you admire the branding efforts of a certain company, call around and find out who did the work.
3. Go with a referral, not a blind hire. Canvass your contacts. This is always better than hiring someone with no frame of common reference. I
4. Throw a few companies a bone & see what they do with it. Give them a general question or problem scenario. See how responsive they are and how much time it appears they put into crafting their response.
5. Money isn’t taboo. Once you’ve found a company you’d like to work with, discuss it from the outset. It’s better to agree on financial terms from the start than for either of you to be in a precarious position somewhere down the line.

Posted on by Daniel