2005 Top Brands – Brandchannel Readers’ Choice Awards

Brandchannel published its fifth Annual Reader’s Choice Award, a top of the brands that had the most impact in the passed year.

Over 2500 people from 99 countries voted in the 2005 poll. The greatest number of voters fell in the age range of 26 to 35 year olds, with about a third more men voting as women.

Brandchannel conducts the study each year under the following conditions:

  • Readers are instructed to vote for the brands that had the most impact on them that year.
  • Impact is defined as good or bad. (Bad impact might be a brand like Enron.)
  • The study runs online and is open to the public during November and December.
  • Votes can be cast for up to five brands per region; respondents can only vote once per region but no section is mandatory.

Here is the Global top 10 brands that have the most impact on us in 2005 (in brackets are the previous year positions):

  1. Google (2)
  2. Apple (1)
  3. Skype (new)
  4. Starbucks (4)
  5. Ikea (3)
  6. Nokia (10)
  7. Yahoo! (new)
  8. Firefox (new)
  9. ebay (9)
  10. Sony (new)

Read full article in Brandchannel

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Interactive Brands

The brand – the collection of sentiments, concepts, ideas, myths, whatever, surrounding your product or commercial offering – is beholden to the needs, desires and tastes of consumers. Your brand had better be able to adjust or it becomes irrelevant. What your target consumers consider a relevant message is even more shifty and unstable than what they consider a relevant product.

The brands are interactive in the sense that the web in general, and blogs in particular, are making the feedback loop between consumers and marketers incredibly tight. But the only thing new about the situation is its immediacy; the loop has shrunk from a traffic circle to a wedding ring. The “brand stewardship” model of marketing, in which the brand is dictated to the consumer and only grudgingly changes course under threat of absolute ruin, has always been wrong-headed. You can’t completely and totally manage, control and broadcast your brand or its perception. Immediate feedback and reactionary blogging have only amplified what has always been the case. Brands are creatures of relevance and relevance is incredibly unstable. If a brand can’t intelligently react to maintain relevance (in a way consistent with its history) then it will fail.

It’s our job to look ahead, determining relevance and the appropriate means of communication for our clients. But first we must understand that it’s interaction, not broadcast.

Well said.

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Five-level Brand Leadership Model

The BBDO’s five-level brand leadership model provides a systematic approach to developing brands. This model comprises five development stages that function as building blocks for brands to reach or be elevated to.

Level 1 – Proprietary goods

At this level, the functional aspects of a product are in the foreground. Typical of a proprietary good is the fact that, though it literally has been “branded” with a label (in the physical sense), no advertising efforts is expended for it. In this context, the product is branded to indicate its provenance and affix a “seal of quality” that comes from its manufacturer. This quality pledge allows consumers to clearly associate any deviation from the expected quality with a specific manufacturer. The supplier commits itself to a pledge on which consumers can call the company at any time and which they expect – if not demand – that company to deliver.

Level 2 – Branded products

In addition to the characteristics of a proprietary good as outlined above, this level also includes success factors as yardsticks of “major brands.” Besides bearing the basic manufacturer’s mark, a branded item fulfills certain criteria such as constant, above-average quality, above-average price level and a high level of awareness created by way of advertising pressure. A branded item is characterized by the fact that it is widely distributed and enjoys major recognition on the market. One characteristic of brands at this level is the fact that, while their consumers have access to additional information, the quality of this information has achieved neither mind share nor heart share. In other words, these brands have not yet succeeded in forging emotional bonds with consumers.

Level 3 – Positioned brands

The brands clustered here are set apart by their emotional and cognitive impact on consumers in addition to their functional utility.

At this level of development, consumer attitudes and associations are extremely important. Expertise about preferences and purchase patterns, coupled with cognitive and emotive positioning efforts, is used to evoke certain associations among consumers. To this end, the consumer must, however, also interpret the message conveyed by the brand. To elevate a brand to this level and keep it there – to actively involve consumers – brand management must position the brand cognitively and emotionally by way of a brand-building program. Positioning efforts on the part of brand management, plus integrated communication measures, make it possible to create brand strength and cultivate brand personality.

To elevate a brand to this level and keep it there – to actively involve consumers – brand management must position the brand cognitively and emotionally by way of a brand-building program. Positioning efforts on the part of brand management, plus integrated communication measures, make it possible to create brand strength and cultivate brand personality. The result of these measures can then be seen in a product’s ability to capture a certain position on the market and hold its own against the competition.

Level 4 – Identity-building brands

This identity is the product of interplay between producer and consumer to create a suitable brand environment. The brand is integrated into the consumer’s personality.At this level of brand leadership, consumers define themselves via the brand (and the brand via its loyal customers), relying on it for self-expression and identity formation.

The suitable drivers at this level are communication tools with specific attributes – for instance, emotionality, interactivity or virtuality – that support the process of building brand identity particularly well.

Level 5 – Mythological brand

As with the level of identity-building, a “mystique brand” helps provide customers with a social orientation, and most of all with a metaphysical orientation. Increasingly, such a brand assumes the function of a guide or mentor offering insight into the meaning of life, helping consumers better process the social and the existential, and offering them support when it comes to finding their place within the “collective self.”

No drivers can be identified for this level because the timeframe for brand development is extremely long and special societal factors are indispensable. This brand status is not desirable for all brands and can only be achieved in isolated cases. A brand at this level, virtually having attained a cult or “religious” status, is difficult to manage; the danger of falling down to earth is extremely high due to the risk of disappointing followers or alienating a portion of them. In addition, such a brand is vulnerable to potential value shifts within a society that are completely beyond a company’s control.

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6 Most Common Branding Systems

Branding systems, or architectures, can take various forms that emphasize the corporate name and image, de-emphasize the corporate name, create new brands apart from the company brand, or combine these approaches. Here is a list of the most common branding systems:

Corporate brand
Strong corporate image is synonymous with product class. Not that common in shelf goods, becoming more popular with technology companies.

Licensed brand
Used commonly in the fashion industry. Manufacturers license the name for clothing goods and brand extend into areas such as sunglasses and umbrellas.

House brand
Includes several product classes. Used by diversified companies allowing each subsidiary to operate as its own entity and target specific market segments Also used when two product lines are incompatible (i.e. Honda and Acura — economy and luxury).

Dual brands
Combining the corporate brand with strong subbrand. Subbrands can help differentiate and boost corporate brand and drive brand preference. Subbrands can become umbrella names for a family of products extensions (there are now several versions of Cheerios and almost 40 Herbal Essence product choices). Nestle added its corporate name to Kit Kat.

Co-brands
Aims to benefit both brands by raising the perceived quality of each brand. Follows rational that the very act of branding can raise familiarity and perceived quality of a product. Allows a brand exposure in product class that it could not enter on its own.

Mono brands
Strong single product brand identity without use of corporate brand. Each product identifies specific customer need. Used by large conglomerates in diversified lines such as P&G, UniLever, Beatrice. Useful when extending product line vertically to gain shelf space/market share.

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Risk and Rewards for Global Brands

Very interesting Interbrand white paper which explores the attraction and risks associated with brands that are going global.

Successful global brands achieve a high degree of consistency in visual, verbal, sonic and tactile identity across geographies. They deliver a consistent customer experience worldwide, often supported by an integrated global marketing effort.

The risks of taking a brand global must be carefully weighed or the damage to the brand can be irrevocable. These risks include, but are not limited to:

  • Erroneously assuming the brand communicates the same meaning market-to-market, resulting in message confusion
  • Over-standardizing or over-simplifying the brand and its management, resulting in a culture of discouraged innovation at the local level
  • Use of the wrong (or tried and true) communications channels, resulting in inappropriate spending and ineffective impact
  • Underestimating the investment in spending and time for a market to become aware of the brand, try it, and adopt it
  • Not investing in internal brand alignment to ensure that regional employees understand the brand values and benefits and are able and willing to communicate and deliver consistently
  • Failing to modulate performance metrics based on local variables

Interbrand has identified a consistent set of principles shared by successful global brands.

Recognition
Well-performing brands enjoy strong awareness among consumers and opinion leaders. These brands lead their industry or industries.

Consistency
These brands achieve a high degree of consistency in visual, verbal, sonic and tactile identity across geographies. They deliver a consistent customer experience worldwide, often supported by an integrated global marketing effort.

Emotion
A brand is not a brand unless it competes along emotional dimensions. It must symbolize a promise that people believe can be delivered and one they desire to be part of. Through emotion, brands can achieve the loyalty of consumers by tapping into human values and aspirations that cut across cultural differences.

Uniqueness
Great brands represent great ideas. These brands express a unique position to all internal and external audiences. They effectively use all elements in the communications mix to position within and across international markets.

Adaptability
Global brands must respect local needs, wants and tastes. These brands adapt to the local marketplace while fulfilling a global mission.

Management
The organization’s senior leadership must champion the brand, ideally with the CEO leading the initiative. A leader’s continual articulation of the brand philosophy and the brand’s view of the world is meant to give the business strategy a recognizable face.

Download the full white paper (PDF)

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5 Key Elements in Managing a Brand Portfolio

A business needs to stay relevant in a dynamic market in which new categories and sub-categories are emerging, mergers or brand extensions are taking place. Too often a brand finds its market share declining despite retaining strong awareness, image, and even loyalty. Customers are simply no longer buying. A brand portfolio strategy can help address relevance. Managing brands in a coordinated way helps a company to avoid confusing its customers, investing in overlapping product-development and marketing efforts and multiplying its brands at its own rather that its competitor’s expense. Here are five key elements to consider in managing a brand portfolio:

Differentiate

Differentiation is the only alternative to price-dominated competition. However, achieving a sustainable point of differentiation is difficult. Offering base points of differentiation that are effective is generally short-lived as competitors copy them quickly.

A portfolio solution is to create branded differentiators, branded features, services or programmes that provide a sustainable point of differentiation.

Energize

Most brands can use more energy. The energy gap problem is particularly troublesome, ironically, for market-leader firms in mature categories that often have an enviable reputation of high quality, trustworthiness and innovation. Such brands nearly always tend to be viewed as boring.

The portfolio solution is to create a branded energiser, a branded product, promotion, sponsorship programme or other entity that will enhance and energise a target brand. The target brand which may be boring, can be linked to a brand that has substantial energy.

Extend

Most companies desire growth in order to create organisational vitality and to realise the objectives of investors. Even if a growth sub-market is discovered for which competition is modest and an attractive offering is available, a brand asset will be needed to enable the growth option.

A portfolio solution is to create and leverage brand assets. A brand extension strategy leverages brands into adjacent product classes. In doing so it is useful to build brand platforms that will eventually span many products, perhaps using sub-brands rather than looking to incremental extensions.

The concern in any extension decision is the impact that the extension has on the brand – in addition to the help the brand will give to the extension. An ill-conceived or badly implemented extension can damage the brand. Brands can also be used to extend vertically. The super-premium market is attractive as it contains most of the product vitality and attractive margins. Vertical brand extensions are often compelling but they represent delicate brand portfolio issues because moving up involves brand credibility and moving a brand down involves risk.

Clarify

Consumers and employees become frustrated in trying to determine what the firm stands for in the various product-market settings. There is also a lack of brand-building focus, resulting in ineffective use of brand-building budgets. A portfolio strategy can enhance focus and clarity. One route is simply to reduce the number of brands, especially those that are strategic.

Another route is to clarify the roles that the various brands would play, develop them for success in those roles and make sure they are used consistently. Still another is to leverage the corporate brand within the portfolio. This usually represents the people, values and culture of an organisation and it is often ideally suited to being an endorser brand.

Start and end with the consumer

The starting point for marketers is to define categories as consumer do. The marketers need a disciplined way of evaluating their brands’ opportunities, like analizing the need states – the intersection betweet what customers want and how they want it.

Related readings:
Brand Portfolio Strategy by David A. Aaker

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Trends in Product Branding

There are two trends in product branding, which may at first seem disconnected: the focus on product experiences, and the growth of corporate branding.

People increasingly see the product experience as a key driver of the brand relationship. The quality of the product experience is growing in importance after a couple of decades when some companies perhaps lost focus on product performance, particularly in developed markets. If true innovation is defined as product change that provides real solutions to real consumer issues, then it’s not unfair to suggest that some brands ignored this in favour of quick-fix brand extensions which lacked any longer-term impact

Surface innovation that fails to truly innovate or differentiate can have a short-term positive impact on profits. This may be enough for a new product manager under pressure to deliver, but it can turn off consumers in the medium term, as marketing becomes a surrogate for product innovation and stops being truly effective.

Consumers buy products, and for many the product experience is by far their most important touchpoint. It should be stressed that, although it has been over-emphasized on occasion, the so-called softer side of the brand remains an important component of the brand alchemy. Through a brand’s emotional story, the product experience is amplified and linked to the consumer’s imaginative life – it is all a matter of balance.

The second trend is the development of corporate brands, which have traditionally stayed ‘behind the scenes’. Procter & Gamble’s name is increasingly visible on many of its brands. Its main competitor Unilever also announced early last year that they would use their corporate name in customer-facing marketing activities. We could also mention Nestlé, Danone and many others, which have been historically keen to hide their wide range of branded products from consumers. Many reasons drive the decision to appear as one company under an ‘umbrella brand’. In part it is a response to a global marketplace, but the main factor is the need to rationalise marketing spend.

Many companies have developed multi-layered and extremely complex brand architectures over the years – some for historical reasons (like brand acquisitions), some possibly due to a lack of internal cohesion or communication. The trends toward corporate branding and an emphasis on the product allow us a different perspective on what brand architecture could and should look like. They imply a simplified brand structure in which the corporate brand would directly endorse a range of product brands, with all intermediate brand levels progressively disappearing. This would clarify the offers, put the product back at centre stage for consumers, and force companies to really define their corporate brand and related values.

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Broaden Your Brand

Scott Bedbury, author of A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century has five smart ways to build intelligent brandwidth:

1. Develop a beneficial cobranding deal with a good partner
Someone who brings something of value to the table that you don’t have. Starbucks’s deal with United Airlines put Starbucks coffee on United flights worldwide and allowed both sides to achieve important brand objectives.

2. Reach out for a brand extension.
Time magazine had a very popular section in the back of the book that featured interesting people. A brand extension turned that section into People magazine. People magazine was a dazzling success — so much so that it launched its own brand extension: Teen People magazine.

3. Leap into new distribution channels.
Putting Starbucks on United flights cobranded the cup of coffee. Putting whole-bean and ground coffees into more than 30,000 grocery stores created a complementary channel for an existing product.

4. Jump into new product categories.
Think about Ralph Lauren’s line of paints, which are now sold in home-improvement stores. The company unearthed a new category and a new distribution channel. Martha Stewart started with a cookbook. Today, if I need garden clogs, I’ll buy them from her. Starbucks became the maker of the best-selling coffee ice cream in grocery stores around the nation in less than six months.

5. Create a new subbrand.
Nike is a big brand — but Air Jordan is a tremendously successful subbrand. Toyota is a big brand — but Lexus is such a successful subbrand that most car buyers don’t even think of it as the child of a parent company (which may be the best compliment you can pay any subbrand).

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Key Attributes of A Great Brand

A great brand is hard to find and even harder to build. It doesn’t matter if your company is Wal-Mart, your own small grocery store or yourself, every one of them want a great brand, one that exemplifies its best qualities and makes every customer want to purchase its products or services. No one-element makes up a brand. It is both a physical and emotional trigger to create a relationship between consumers and the product or service.

What are the qualities, the attributes, that turn a brand into a great one? I’ll try to put up a list of them here, and I’m looking forward for the readers of this blog to fill in the gaps that might come up:

1. An idea
Behind every brand is a compelling idea, which captures customers’ attention and loyalty by filling an unmet or unsatisfied need.

2. Uniqueness
Does it differentiate you from the other organization in your market?

3. Attractiveness
Does your brand appeal to people? A great brand makes sure that consumers can understand your promise and are attracted by it.

4. Honesty
Customers want to believe the promises made, and they are quick to spot insincerity and over-exaggerated claims. Make sure your brand promises are achievable and can get to the customer.

5. Consistency
Regardless of brand choice and implementation, consistency is one key attribute of a great brand. You must ensure that every aspect of your organization, from marketing materials and Web sites to customer service personnel, maintains the values outlined in your brand.

6. Long term thinking
A long-term approach, makes easier for a brand to travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to multiple consumer segments simultaneously, create economies of scale, and let you operate at the higher end of the positioning spectrum. Consumers are looking for something that has lasting value.

7. Relevancy
A great brand has to be relevant. It has to meet what people want, it performs the way people want it to.

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Branding as Art

For those of you that didn’t see the Guy Kawasaki’s post yet titled The art of branding, here is a summary of main rules of branding:

1. Seize the high ground. Establish your brand on positive attributes
2. Create one message. It’s hard enough to create and communicate one branding message. You can pick one message, see if it works, and then try another. But you can’t try several at once.
3. Speak English. Not necessarily, English, but speak in non-jargonese.
4. Apply the opposite test. See if your competition uses the antonyms of the adjectives that you use to describe your product. If it doesn’t, your description is useless.
5. Cascade the message. The marketing department of many companies assume that once they’re put out the press release or run the ad, the entire world understands the message. It’s unlikely that even the entire company does. Start with your board of directors and work down to Trixie and Biff at the front desk and make sure every employee understands the branding.
6. Focus on PR, not advertising. Brands are built on what people are saying about you, not what you’re saying about yourself. People say good things about you when (a) you have a great product and (b) you get people to spread the word about it.
7. Strive for humanness. Great brands achieve a high level of humaness. They speak to you as an individual, not as part of a market.
8. Flow with the go. As much as a I love marketing, at the end of the day, customers ultimately determine what your brand means. Ultimately, you flow with what’s going, and you be thankful that it’s flowing at all.

Guy Kawasaky is author of book The Art of the Start : The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything and video How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

Read the full post: The Art of Branding

 

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