Best Marketing Book of 2005

strategy+business, published by the leading global management and technology firm Booz Allen Hamilton, has selected ProfitBrand: How to Increase the Profitability, Accountability and Sustainability of Brands by Nick Wreden as the best marketing book of 2005.

Mr. Wreden takes ambitious steps in explaining the significance of “sustainability” in customer relationships and the value of measuring marketing spending to establish accountability and profitability. Sustainability is critical, since by some estimates 80-95 per cent of products fail to become brands, he writes. Sustainability is also important because more than two-thirds of purchases are one-off buys. Only a brand focused on sustainability will take the steps that lead to second, third or even a lifetime of purchases.

ProfitBrand amplifies this concept, known in direct-marketing circles as the true value of a brand: “A brand is not built by acquiring customers; it is built by keeping them,” he writes. “Most competitive product advantages can be duplicated. The one advantage that cannot be duplicated is customer relationships.” Branding strategies that aim to make a company No. 1 in the market, for example, are doomed to failure, Mr. Wreden argues. That’s because brand sustainability can be achieved only on the basis of relationships formed on customer terms, not company terms.

Read the full review of the book here. (free registration required).

Other leading business books selected by the editors at Strategy + Business in marketing categories include:

Posted on by Daniel

10 Branding Insights and Opportunities

Leading South African brand consultancy, Interbrand Sampson, uses global insight from parent, Interbrand, to bring 10 branding insights and opportunities to the local market:

1. Clarity

In practice, clarity of vision, values and positioning overall, are often given insufficient attention. The majority of corporate and brand visions are interchangeable, bland and viewed with cynicism. In an over-communicated world, lack of clarity will substantially reduce effectiveness and efficiency; and complex brand and sub-brand structures without a real audience rationale will reduce this still further.

2. Brand as central organizing principle

The world’s most valuable brands use their brand as the central organising principle for all products and services, corporate organisation, structure and behaviour, environments and communications. They are brand centric. In this way, they ensure that their promise to and relationship with the customer is constantly delivered and refreshed.

(Well I tend to agree more with Douglas Rushkoff, author of the provocative new book Get Back in the Box, who urges companies to focus on products, not branding. But well this should be the number one advice coming from a branding agency, wouldn’t it? at&t bought it.)

3. Brand as a total experience

The success of experience-based brands at building deeper customer relationships at the expense of solely product-based brands argues strongly for every brand to think about its total chain of experience – from visual identity to advertising, product, packaging, PR, in-store environment – and increasingly round-the-clock presence and availability online.

4. More compelling and imaginative expressions of brand identity

The ability to break through brand proliferation and communications clutter depends on imaginative and innovative creative expression. Every opportunity to communicate counts, and every channel, from marque to distinctive corporate communications, from the office environment to the person answering the phone.

5. The brand as platform for innovation

In the constant battle to stay ahead of current and future competitors, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get sustainable competitive advantage through product development alone. Using a distinctive brand platform as a starting point for innovation in all areas of operation and experience can release more distinctive results – as well as being more effective and cost efficient. Use the brand platform as a springboard to look at growth categories for the future and in the context of consumer trends – and examine what your brand could distinctively bring.

6. Brands need profound protection

It is estimated that 9% of the world trade is counterfeited. Brand owners must use the full weight of the law, quickly and publicly, to prevent value loss and degradation. Legally ‘ring-fencing’ your brand should be a never ending process.

7. Understanding the value of your brand

Use brand value as a core measure of people’s performance, which both built momentum and created sustainable premium growth. Brand values also crucial management information for mergers, acquisitions and divestments, which will continue in the future as markets shake out and consolidate.

8. Effective and efficient brand monitoring and measurement

It can be tempting for organisations to do a brand programme, and not put in proper monitoring and measurement – and indeed support – systems to maintain them properly. The most successful organisations integrate these systems into their day to day operations and plans.

9. CSR as core social responsibility

In an all-seeing digital world, and in a sharper business environment where employees at all levels can be ambassadors or saboteurs for the company’s reputation, there really will be no hiding places any more. Organisations will have no choice but to be transparent in their dealings and fulfil their promises, or to have transparency forced on them. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to be an overused buzz term in too many organisations today, and a whole new industry has grown up around it. Although good intentions may be there, all too often organisations look at
CSR as an insurance policy, or a more sophisticated form of cause-related marketing, rather than as core to their operations.

10. Always act like a leader brand

What can be termed a ‘leader brand’ today is not a brand leader in the old fashioned sense, reflecting scale and muscle alone. Rather, it reflects a newer, restless and agenda-setting leadership across all areas of philosophy and operations, inside and out.

Posted on by Daniel

6 Components of Branding

Branding is not just a logo or trademark. It incorporates many components that work together to form the destination brand concept. Their management is part of the brand strategy. The value of the brand is described by the term brand equity. Brand positioning and leveraging are branding management approaches. The identity, image, personality, essence or soul, character and culture are the brand components.

Brand identity

is how brand strategists want the brand to be perceived. It is a set of unique brand associations that represent what the brand stands for. These associations imply a promise to customers from organization members. Brand identity should help establish a relationship between the brand and the customer by generating a value proposition involving functional, emotional or self expressive benefits.

Brand image

is a key component in the formation of a clear and recognizable brand identity in the market. Brand image is related to how the brand is currently perceived by consumers. In other words what is the reputation of the brand in the marketplace.

Brand character

is related to its internal constitution, how it is perceived in terms of integrity, trustworthiness and honesty. This is also related with the promise of the brand to deliver the experience associated with its name.

Brand culture

is about the system of values that surround a brand much like the cultural aspects of a people or a country.

Brand personality

is the set of human characteristics that are associated with the brand. It includes such characteristics as gender, age, socioeconomic class, as well as human personality traits such as warmth and sentimentality.

Brand essence (brand soul)

represents the emotional elements and values of the brand. Essence should be part of a long term positioning that does not change with every communication

Tag: Brand Components

Posted on by Daniel 4

Branding News Roundup – 11/29/05

Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising opens in Notting Hill on Thursday and will take in 200 years of consumer history with displays of thousands of brands and products. The museum would develop into an archive and resource for marketing professionals wanting to understand how today’s companies sold themselves in the past.

The top ten rebranding nightmares – One of the best ways for a company to secure negative press coverage is to pay a pretentious branding consultancy millions of pounds to come up with a confusing and ridiculous new name. It seems that some people never learn, which is good for journalists, but a bit of a shame for investors. This Times article looks at ten of the most amusing names to have emerged in recent years.

The Top 50 U.S. City Slogans – Since we discussed here before about destination branding here is a list of the top 50 US City Slogan from the Vegas’s famous What Happens Here, Stays Here to less known Newark, on a Roll. As a bonus, there is also a list of Top 50 U.S. City Nicknames.

Stinky Branding – As part of a new craze for smelly-branding, hip brand managers are desperately trying to project a sensory message with an exclusive aroma. Checkbooks are being scented, clothes are pre-perfumed, and cars are wildly sprayed. Now you know why massage oils are scented, and how aromatherapy became so popular.

Posted on by Daniel

Re-branding – Not Always The Answer

Interesting article of Al Ries author of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding on AdAge.com website (registration required).

Starting from recently over-buzzed Atlanta re-branding, Ries is making a extremly good and sustained point about the need and the opportunity of rebranding, changing logos and slogans, or becoming “too creative” in terms of branding.

What leads cities, states, countries and companies to concoct meaningless, unmemorable slogans? I believe the culprit is “creativity.”

Every day of the week, advertising agencies are hired to create new, compelling branding strategies and fired when these new, compelling branding strategies don’t work.

The best example of the power of consistency is the Marlboro cowboy, who has been riding the range for 50 years. The advertising doesn’t win any awards, but it has taken the brand from nowhere to become the No. 1 selling cigarette brand in the world.

A powerful brand is not built by creativity, although there needs to be a creative spark to get the brand ignited. A powerful brand is built by consistency, year after year after year.

Basically if you have something that is working, don’t try to fix it. The re-branding decision is a tough one, as long as we do not have (re)branding in our minds a purpose (as some agencies have it), but as a tool for sustaining and growing the business.

Related posts:
Re-branding the Right Way

Tag: Re-branding, Rebranding

Posted on by Daniel

Employees Branding Guidelines

The brand-developing process centers on the messages the organization sends and the processing of those messages in its employees’psyches.

Employee branding is a process by which employees internalize the desired bran dimage and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents. The messages employees take in and process influence

  • the extent to which they perceive their psychological contracts with the organization to be fulfilled
  • the degree to which they understand and are motivated to deliver the desired level of customer service

In so doing, they drive the formation of the employee brand. The messages employees receive must be aligned with the employees’organizational experiences if the psychological contract is to be upheld. Therefore, the conscious development of organizational messages is the fundamental building block in this process.

The messages must then be delivered through appropriate message sources.The following guidelines provide a starting point in this process:

  1. Organizational messages should be carefully thought out and planned in much the same way mission and vision statements are thought out and planned.
  2. The organizational messages should reflect the organization’s mission and values.
  3. Messages directed toward external constituencies must be in line with the messages sent to employees.
  4. Messages directed toward external constituencies should be sent internally as well.
  5. The design of recruitment and selection systems should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  6. The compensation system should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image. For instance, managers in organizations that value training must be held accountable when they fail to train and develop their employees.
  7. Training and development systems should help managers and employees internalize their organization’s mission and values and help them understand how the mission and values pertain to their roles in their organization.This should enable them to more effectively articulate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  8. Advertising and public relations systems should communicate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  9. Managers should be taught the importance of communicating messages that are consistent with their organization’s mission,vision, policies, and practices.
  10. Performance management systems should address inconsistencies between practices and policies to minimize violations of employees’ psychological contracts.
  11. Accurate and specific job previews should be given to new employees so that realistic expectations are incorporated into their psychological contracts.
  12. Corporate culture (artifacts, patterns of behavior, management norms, values and beliefs, and assumptions) should reinforce the messages employees receive.
  13. Individual output should be measured and analyzed to determine if there are message-related problems at the departmental, divisional, or organizational levels.
  14. Individual messages should be continually examined for consistency with other messages.
  15. Message channels should be examined to ensure consistency of message delivery.
  16. In the event that messages need to be changed or psychological contracts altered, organizations must take careful steps in rewriting the messages.
  17. Measures should be used to assess outcomes such as customer retention, service quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction and performance
Posted on by Daniel

10 New Rules of Branding

Simon Williams of branding consultancy Sterling Group argues, that in today’s Savvier-than-ever consumers environment, brands have to work that little bit harder and smarter to cut through. To achieve the cut through Simon proposes a new set of marketing rules. Interesting, not enough, but worth to be considered, here is the succinct list:

  1. Brands that influence culture sell more; culture is the new catalyst for growth.
  2. A brand with no point of view has no point; full-flavor branding is in, vanilla is out.
  3. Today’s consumer is leading from the front; this is the smartest generation to have ever walked the planet.
  4. Customize wherever and whenever you can; customization is tomorrow’s killer whale.
  5. Forget the transaction, just give me an experience; the mandate is simple: Wow them every day, every way.
  6. Deliver clarity at point of purchase; be obsessive about presentation.
  7. You are only as good as your weakest link; do you know where you’re vulnerable?
  8. Social responsibility is no longer an option; what’s your cause, what’s your contribution?
  9. Pulse, pace, and passion really make a difference; had your heartbeat checked recently?
  10. Innovation is the new boardroom favorite.

Read the full Chiefmarketer.com article

Tag: Branding Rules

Posted on by Daniel

Country Brand Index 2005

At the moment I blogged something here about destination branding, earlier this month, I have to admit I didn’t know anything about the fact that FutureBrand, a leading global brand consultancy, in conjunction with sister company and leading global public relations firm, Weber Shandwick, were about to release first-of-its-kind global survey that identifies countries as brands and suggests the pivotal role that branding could
make in helping countries differentiate themselves.

If a ‘brand’ is defined as an experience, then some of the world’s most powerful and recognizable brands should be countries. The challenge the industry faces is that it must move away from the traditional reactive and tactical marketing approaches and instead, create and deliver an overall brand experience that drives sales and turns visitors into country-brand evangelists

said Rene A. Mack, president of Weber Shandwick’s global travel practice.

Branding a country takes time,commitment and focus. While many of the countries that ranked high have scored well, not all of them have fully crafted their brands as places that differentiate, nor do theystand for something in the hearts and minds of key audiences, expand and drive business opportunities or perpetuate loyalty and preference.

As both tourism and international trade becomes morecluttered and competitive, brand is one of the few ways to truly differentiate. Those countries willing to truly work on brand building will be more likely to enjoy a competitive advantage, higher returns, longer term momentum and stronger advocates.

says the study.

The study has many interesting insights into the travel and destinaiton branding and has as its output an overall top of 2005 destinations:

  1. Italy
  2. Australia
  3. USA
  4. France
  5. Maldives
  6. Greece
  7. Fiji
  8. Thailand
  9. Egypt
  10. Bahamas

 

Posted on by Daniel