Loyalty, Love and Personal Branding

Excellent article of William Arruda over at MarketingProfs.com:

When building your personal brand, you need to have a sturdy brand foundation of rational brand attributes. Those attributes illustrate your competence and make you credible. Even the most lovable among us won’t get too far without being able to demonstrate results.

But when building your personal brand, emotion is an essential component that will help you create greater loyalty among your various constituencies.

As a “careerist” you can build loyalty beyond reason with your employer, peers, managers, and among all those people who need to know about you so that you can reach your career goals. To do this, you must be keenly aware of your brand attributes, how others perceive you. What is your combination of rational and emotional brand attributes? What makes you lovable?

Here are five tips for inspiring loyalty beyond reason:

  1. Take inventory of your personal brand attributes (rational and emotional).
  2. Get external input on your brand attributes. This will help you validate your self-assessment and provide insights into how you are currently perceived. You can’t change perceptions if you don’t know what they are.
  3. Decide which attributes (that are authentic to you) are relevant and compelling to your target audience and are differentiating from those of your peers.
  4. Live in the inquiry. Ask yourself how you can inject more of these brand attributes into everything you do-every report you author, every email you write, every telephone conversation you have.
  5. Assess. Ask for feedback. Measure results. Are you being perceived more consistently? Are you more fulfilled? Are you more successful? More loved?

Read full article here.

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New Global Brand Valuation Study

Despite its dominance, Interbrand/BusinessWeek global brand league table has inherent weaknesses. This is not news to anyone who works in branding: most marketers accept that the Top 100 is an imprecise but important approximation of global brand equity.

But all this is about to change. Next month global agency group WPP will launch an alternative brand valuation league table that will directly challenge Interbrand’s calculations. The system has been masterminded by chief research officer Andy Farr and his marketing quant jocks at Millward Brown Optimor (MBO).

Here are some insights into this soon to be revealed WPP study:

  • WPP’s annual Brandz survey questions more than 650,000 consumers and professionals in 31 countries.
  • The results are analysed to create a combined diagnostic and predictive tool that evaluates the strength and growth potential of brands.
  • Respondents are asked to compare more than 21,000 brands in 300 categories from sectors including long purchase-cycle brands, FMCG, retail and e-commerce and services.
  • Each respondent is asked to evaluate brands in a competitive context from a category they shop in.
  • Their responses generate scores for levels of bonding with a brand, its advantage over rival brands, brand performance and relevance to consumer needs.
  • Consumer loyalty and claimed purchasing data are used to generate a ‘brand voltage’ score, indicating the brand’s potential.

More here

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Branding as an Emotional Process

An interesting article in KioskMarketplace on the importance of branding in self-service:

Most consumers are unaware of the careful planning that goes into the design, packaging and marketing of the products and services they enjoy. Most of them don’t know why they feel comfortable when they walk into a Starbucks; they just know that they do.

This non-tangible, hard-to-quantify relationship between consumers and the products and services they buy is at the core of a successful business.

“(A brand is) primarily an emotional process of engagement. Branding is about 95 percent emotional, and a large part of that 95 percent is at an unconscious level.”

That’s a tough pill to swallow for those who would like to believe it is their product, or their hard work, that should get the credit for success.

I was tempted to agree with the 95/5 percentage, but on a second thought, I don’t think that a bad product/service will make it on a long run just based on its emotional affiliates unless emotion is the need the product adresses. I would rather say the 95% “emotional choice” is rather affecting the choice between two extremely similar products, say Coke vs. Pepsi for example, or as Ms.Janelle Barlow, Ph.D put it in the artlcle mentioned before:

The functionality of your devices — pretty similar, right? So the question is, what’s different? That’s really your strength. Inside an industry, functionality is really not going to be that different.

 

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Branding News Roundup – 02/13/06

Maslow and Branding: Esteem

So yes, this really is all about ego. We don’t like to admit that we need our ego stroked, that we want to be recognized and feel important. But hey, it’s a fact AND it’s a huge motivator for purchase (like L’Oreal’s tag line: “It’s more expensive, but I’m worth it.”) Obviously all fashion, cosmetics, car companies, etc. are playing on Esteem, but as you can see from the above examples, any company can meet this need.

Re-Branding…

When re-branding ourselves – our organizations – we are making a declaration to be free of attachment to the comfort of the known. Free of the comfort of the predictable. We as organisms – be we individuals or organizations – seek stasis; predictability; comfort. The great trap of the human condition is a striving for comfort. As managers we organize work processes to gain as much predictability as possible. We become slaves to our forecasts and plans.

Coloring Your Brand Perception

Brands are defined by the perceptions and experiences that someone has with a company product or service, what it looks like, what it sounds like and how it acts. One element in shaping an image is the use of color. Although color alone does not establish your brand it is one element that effects consumers emotions, behaviors and perceptions in relation to your company, product or service. In designing it is important to pick the right colors for the right effect to help reinforce the brand. A good place to start is to recognize the product or service being advertised, the target market, and the desired reaction and response of the consumer.

Olympic strategy key to branding gold

How companies try to get the most from the Games is a sport all in itself. While some companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars for rights to the rings, marketers say there’s more than one way to play the sponsorship game around the Olympics.

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8 Laws of Personal Branding

Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. Here is a list of 8 laws that should help you will create an effective – and lucrative – personal brand:

1. Specialisation: A great personal brand must be precise, concentrated on a single core strength, talent or achievement.

2. Leadership: Endowing a personal brand with authority and credibility demands that the source be perceived as a leader by people in his/her domain or sphere of influence.

3. Personality: A great personal brand must be built on a foundation of the source’s true personality, flaws and all.

4. Distinctiveness: An effective personal brand needs to be expressed in a way that is different from the competition.

5. Visibility: To be successful, a personal brand must be seen over and over again, until it imprints itself on the consciousness of its domain or sphere of influence.

6. Unity: The private person behind a personal brand must adhere to the moral and behavioural code set down by that brand. Private conduct must mirror the public brand.

7. Persistence: Any personal brand takes time to grow, and while you can accelerate the process, you can’t replace it with advertising or public relations.

8. Goodwill: A personal brand will produce better results and endure longer if the person behind it is perceived in a positive way.

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Visa Re-Branding – Life Takes Visa

Visa today unveiled its first new branding direction in 20 years, according to Suzanne Lyons, its executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

The tagline, ending the decades-long reign of “It’s everywhere you want to be,” is “Life takes Visa,” Lyons said. Although the tagline was used in the last couple of years in English-language communications in Latin American countries (actually Visa is using 5 different taglines for 6 different regions of the world – more here), TBWA\Chiat\Day decided to go with it and start promoting it next week during the Winter Olympics Openning ceremony.

The new brand campaign is the latest in a series of milestones marking Visa adapting its brand to its corporate evolution, with recently introduced new governance structure; new brand architecture, including a new logo and a new card design. More about the new branding campaign here: http://www.visa.com/advertising.

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Corporate Branding vs. Product Branding

Product branding is a well-known phenomenon in marketing. A brand is a promise to the customer that goes beyond the generic product, the technical and physical attributes. When selling a branded product the company promises that the consumer will achieve special qualities by using the product, different qualities than when using a similar non branded or different branded product. A typical message from the company is “when using this product you will be more attracted, become better looking and signal a higher social class“. By using the branded product the consumer can communicate his/her lifestyle or wanted lifestyle.

On the other side corporate branding refers to the practice of using a company’s name as a product brand name. It is an attempt to leverage corporate brand equity to create product brand recognition. It is a type of family branding or umbrella brand.

Martin Roll, author of Asian Brand Strategy : How Asia Builds Strong Brands has an interesting view on corporate branding:

Corporate branding employs the same methodology and toolbox used in product branding, but it also elevates the approach a step further into the board room, where additional issues around stakeholder relations (shareholders, media, competitors, governments and many others) can help the corporation benefit from a strong and well-managed corporate branding strategy. Not surprisingly, a strong and comprehensive corporate branding strategy requires a high level of personal attention and commitment from the CEO and the senior management to become fully effective and meet the objectives.

Among the advantages of a corporate branding strategy we can count:

  1. the corporate brand is the face of the business strategy, portraying what the corporation aims at doing and what it wants to be known for in the market place, is the overall umbrella for the corporations’ activities and encapsulates its vision, values, personality, positioning and image among many other dimensions.
  2. corporate branding strategy creates simplicity; it stands on top of the brand portfolio as the ultimate identifier of the corporation.
  3. a coporate branding strategy can drive some cost efficiencies that can often be achieved as opposed to a large multi-brand architecture where the corporate brand plays a smaller or insignificant role.

On the other side among main disadvantages of this strategy is that products may not be treated individually, which reduces the focus on the products’ unique characteristics or that the corporate name can become synonymous with a product category

Three different strategies can be approached for corporate branding:

Branded identity is when a company uses different brands for their products that function independent from each other and the company’s brand. The strength of this strategy is the flexibility. The company can build different brands in different marked segments and for different products. If a brand is involved in a scandal it will only damage that brand, and will not hurt the other brands of the company.

Endorsed brand identity is when an organisation has a group of products or companies that it endorses with a group name and a common identity. The strength of this approach lies in the relationship of the products/companies, they can benefit from the goodwill given to others with the same common identity.

Monolithic brand identity is when a company uses only one name and one visual style for all it products. The strength is the simplicity and the potential for growth. The weakness is that one happening; one scandal can cause severe damage even to big strong brands.

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Branding News Roundup – 02/04/06

Branding Lessons From GM: What Not To Do
The bottom line is that in the branding business, less is more.

A successful brand has to stand for something. And the more variations to attach to it, the more you risk standing for nothing. This is especially true when what you add actually clashes with your perception. […]Until companies come to grips with the simple fact that they don’t really have an inordinate need to grow, but an inordinate desire to grow (because of Wall Street), bad things will continue to happen. Slowly but surely, brands will lose their meaning as they try to become more.

George W. Bush, Branding Guru?
What lessons can be drawn from Bush as brand guru?

  • Visuals are more important than text
  • PR is the most pow
  • Naming is important
  • Brand to your base
  • Enlist brand allies

Internal Marketing vs. Internal Branding
Where Internal Marketing & Internal Branding Overlap

  • Both approaches recognize employees ARE the brand. As a result, both are focused on engaging employees.
  • Both are part of organizational and marketing strategy to strengthen competitive advantage.
  • Both involve leadership – i.e., neither can be effective without management commitment.

How do we brand ourselves?
Like any branding exercise, the key to personal branding is having a good product, one which you understand and pitch to the right market. The first step in personal branding is knowing who you are, find out what strengths your brand possesses and how these strengths can help you. Personal branding is not about presenting a façade to the public; a poor product will not stand up to market scrutiny. This is also a choice of brand elements, people you deal with, the look that you have, and how you conduct yourself.

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Brands vs. Tomorrow’s Major Consumers: Teenagers

GenWorld Teen Study just released by Energy BBDO has interesting information for marketers, giving them some suggestions on how to reach tomorrow’s major consumers: teenagers. Conducted in 13 countries, the study found a worldwide generation is being guided by one ethical code: authenticity.

[..] unlike the Gen-Xers that preceded them, this new generation believes there are causes worth supporting, with 70% agreeing with the statement, “I would fight for a cause I believe in.”

So what does this means for brands? In a statement, Walker said, “The days of a Nike-style mega brand that dominates an entire generation may be over, but so is the enclave-ization of the teen world into stereotypical Skaters, Goths, Geeks and Cool Kids. Welcome to a world with as many different definitions of cool as there are individuals.”

The PDF copy of the report can be seen HERE (PDF, 2.6 MB)

Posted on by Daniel