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.
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.
Continue reading
Building a brand requires real understanding, knowledge, talent, correct creative skills, resources, and, of course, time.
Some businessmen think the product is the brand. Even a company itself is a brand they cannot recognize. The goodwill, image of the company can create an impact on the whole products or brand which they may not realize. They perhaps get to some understanding; when it has got some market hiccup, but before that they hardly bother. After experiencing any downside it is difficult to repair. Business people still do not understand that it is a matter of experience.
Michael Kanellos, editor at large at CNET News.com, has an interesting article providing some advices for nowadays business naming, that even if is focused on tech companies, is still useful for businesses at large:
In any event, for you start-up execs, here’s a handy guideline for how not to name your company:
1. Avoid redundancies. This was a lesson lost on Internet Gold-Golden Lines of Petach Tiva, Israel.
2. Don’t sound like you may have a criminal or shady past. This one’s for you, DepoMed. It sounds like you’re going to sell vitamins out of the trunk of your car, not like you’re a developer of advanced medical technology for gastric conditions.
3. Don’t be lurid. Hello, XenoPort, NuVasive, and WiderThan. If you can spare the money, hire a focus group of 13-year-old boys to give you their reactions to all name suggestions.
4. Triple words are out. Yes, that’s you, VendareNetblue. It didn’t help PriceWaterhouseCooper. Even the Germans try to limit the combining of words to two.
5. Don’t sound desperate or obvious. Good Technology. KnowFat. Though, sometimes it works. Hurray Holding: Enthusiasm makes up for a lot.
For the second consecutive year, [tag]Landor[/tag] Associates is proud to announce the exclusive publication of its [tag]Breakaway Brands[/tag] Study in FORTUNE magazine’s September 18th issue, now available on newsstands and at www.fortune.com.
The study identifies the ten brands in the United States that have made the greatest percentage gains in business value as a result of superb brand strategy and execution over the three-year period, from 2002-2005:
Why is brand loyalty so important? For the business owner, it is easier to keep existing customers than to search out new customers. Advertising and marketing to new customers is four to six times more expensive than the cost of marketing to your existing customers. A brand-loyal customer is less sensitive to and less likely to stray to a competitor’s promotions.
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.
Work on influencing the customer’s attitude. Be sure the customer gets what they want from the product. Create incentives for customers to repeat purchase though frequent buyer programs, gifts, give-aways or other creative means. Stand behind your product. If you don’t, they won’t. Know who your good customers are. Treat those customers well. Remember that once a customer always a customer is not a foregone conclusion.
A recent study by Standard Life shows that the employees the felt part of the business and understood its goals were willing and able to contribute their best to achieving those goals.
Your internal communications plan and branding is a huge step toward employee engagement and here is a list of eight things to do about it:
Branding isn’t just one aspect of your marketing campaign. It is the combination of everything your business stands for. Branding is not created with a single, stand-alone event — rather it is created over time through a series of strategically thought-out actions.
Let’s review a few common myths about branding and introduce some constructive, proactive branding principles worth remembering.
Co-branding (also called Dual Branding) has become a rage in the marketing arena, with companies realizing that isolation is not after all the best policy.
The markets of yesterday saw companies focusing on the customer thinking about “How can I promote my jeans?” The marketers today believe that the myopia needs to clear off to a “How do I define my customer?” approach. By saying, “defining my customer”, i don’t mean getting back to classroom and assessing who the target consumer is. Defining a customer means more in terms of creating a persona for the customer, or rather shaping the customer.
The Strategic Name Development Blog has an excellent post about the notion of pormanteau (a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words), titled Company Naming: What’s in Your Portmanteau?:
It was Lewis Carroll who first used the word “portmanteau” to describe a word made up of other words – in this case, the words he had invented for the poem “Jabberwocky.” While some portmanteau words, like “guesstimate,” have an immediately obvious meaning, “brillig” and “slithy” are not so obvious.
There are two reasons portmanteaux make good company names. The first is that, as coined words, they are much easier to trademark than natural words. (But you still need to check the trademark database to make sure no one else invented the word before you did.)
The second reason for choosing a portmanteau name is the ability to evoke two or more concepts with one word: Verizon, for instance, is a combination of the Latin word veritas, meaning “truth,” and the English word “horizon.”
More resources on the subject: