5 Brand Lessons For New Entrants

Janice Spark in bizcommunity.com has five valuable lessons for brands entering new markets:

1. Value must be the core of the brand

New players seeking to gain market share in an established industry can generally expect to be met by a public with a mixture of hope and resigned cynicism. While some potential customers will display a touching belief that the new player will drive prices downward, many consumers believe first in the tendency of business to maintain monopolies, duopolies and a fixed range of prices.

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Top Growing Web Brands

Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, announced last week that user-generated content sites, platforms for photo sharing, video sharing and blogging, comprised five out of the top 10 fastest growing Web brands in July 2006.

Image hosting site ImageShack ranked No. 4 among July’s fastest growing Web brands, increasing 233 percent, from a unique audience of 2.3 million to 7.7 million (see Table 1). Heavy.com, a video sharing site, took the No. 5 spot, increasing 213 percent, from 965,000 to 3.0 million unique visitors. Photo sharing site Flickr followed at No. 6, growing 201 percent from 2.1 million to 6.3 million unique visitors. Other user-generated content sites that made it into the top 10 fastest growing Web brands were MySpace, with a 183 percent year-over-year increase, and Wikipedia, with a 181 percent year- over-year increase.

“User-generated content sites have seen significant growth over the past year, owing in large part to their reliance on viral marketing. They also benefit from their cost-effectiveness — the content is practically free.”

said Jon Gibs, director of media analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings.

Brand % Growth
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HSBC                   394%
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Sonic Solutions     241%
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Associated Press   234%
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ImageShack          233%
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Heavy.com            213%
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Flickr                    201%
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ARTIST Direct       185%
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Partypoker.com     184%
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MySpace                183%
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Wikipedia               181%
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Brand Think – Weekend Reading

From Lilian Wong’s Brand Think: a guide to branding:

Brands are undeniably pervasive in our lives. Besides the consumer brands that we use daily, there is subconsciuous awareness of how the way our lives chart out, had something to do with the brands we were associated with. I am talking about brands we choose for education, career, and maybe, even the district we live in, each of which carry meanings and associations, and could perhaps have made our lives somewhat different.

The concept of Brand Person […] is and easy concept for anyone to relate to. It offers a starting point for people to put more thought into getting into brandint and taking control of marketing their own brands. That’s how Brand Think emerged. It has to get down to knowing the nuts and bolts of branding and committing to a discipline of action.

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The B.R.A.N.D.I.N.G. Approach

The Interbrand survey focuses on brands that are ‘global’ – in their words, global brands are ‘available in many countries and, though they may differ from country to country, the localized versions have a common goal and a similar identity.’

Although it can be extremely successful, this is not always the best strategy to adopt. A global brand brings with it an extra set of challenges and costs associated with achieving the consistency and scale of a global brand along with the intimacy of a local brand. Choosing the right communication strategy for each country (and culture) is a critical but complex task.

Companies competing well in several markets may be seduced into a global branding strategy which does not match the business strategy for the organization. If this happens, the company will find itself doing neither the local nor the global aspects very well. Conversely, if it makes sense for the business strategy to be global, then, of course, global branding is also going to be critical.

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UK Superbrands

Microsoft has taken first place in this year’s Superbrands Awards, intended to recognise the highest standards of branding.

The BBC came second, with British Airways third and Mercedes-Benz and Porsche taking fourth and fifth respectively. Marks & Spencer proved its return to favour with the public by taking sixth place.

The Superbrands Council, which includes direct marketing guru Drayton Bird and the co-founder of Innocent drinks Richard Reed, considered more than 1,200 brands. Of these, 650 were selected and rated by a 2,373 strong consumer panel, coordinated by market research company YouGov.

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Branding for Your Employees (Too)

Adotas on internal branding:

As with any good marketing effort, it pays to begin by looking at the target audience. No doubt your internal audience has some awareness of your brand. Yet in many companies, especially ones that have recently reinvented themselves, employees may have no idea of what the brand stands for, where the company is going or even how the branded product or solution fits into customers’ lives or businesses. It’s a safe bet that if the employees aren’t sure what the brand essence is, the customers are wondering as well. (The paradox here is that some companies have to ask their customers what the brand stands for before they can move ahead.)

Many companies make fundamental strategic shifts in their businesses and assume that the rank and file will “get it” and “get behind it”. Of course, the reality is that a workforce with a wishy-washy understanding or, worse yet, a misunderstanding of the brand, its essence and its direction, will end up being a drag on company progress.

In the end, companies need to create a clear, consistent image for employees and recruits. The company image projected in the customer and employee marketplace should match up to what new employees experience when they are hired and on the job. The image should be communicated in terms that everyone understands. Letting recruits and employees role-play is a good way to introduce “real life” meaning to the message. Don’t take anything for granted with employees and recruits – communicate with them like customers and turn a buzzword into a powerful workforce enabler!

Read full Buzzwords are Branding Weapons: How Marketers Can Steer Buzz into Big Bucks

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Brand of Power and Power of Brands

Washington Post on brands and power:

Not long ago, the value of a company consisted largely of its “book value”: physical assets such as factories and equipment plus money in the bank. But today book value accounts for only about a third of the stock market capitalization of the top 150 U.S. companies, down from three-quarters two decades ago. In the new economy, corporate value lies in intangible assets: patents, databases, know-how — and brands.

So brands are eclipsing factories in value, and big brands appear to be crowding out smaller ones and reaching all around the world.

As brands have grown bigger, they have also grown more vulnerable. Marketing gurus such as Tom Collinger of the Medill School describe an unnerving revolution: The owners of brands used to sustain them with huge advertising budgets, but now consumers form their views of products in Internet chat rooms. If brands are both valuable and vulnerable, political consequences follow. Mighty companies have so much riding on their corporate image that they quiver in the face of customer opinion. And if they are mass-market companies, customer opinion is the same as public opinion, so corporate bosses become as sensitive to political and social shifts as elected officials.

Full article.

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Branding and Naming – Get the Big Picture

Boston Herald on branding:

What’s in a name?

Just about everything if it identifies your company or organization and tells the public what it can expect from you. Which is why the fin de siecle trend toward re-branding that picked up steam in the late ’90s is unlikely to end any time soon. “Old” businesses and organizations want to sound new. New organizations want to sound cutting-edge. “NYNEX,” after all, is so…20th century.

These days, even mom-and-pop shops are in the business of renaming themselves. Small nonprofits, looking to gin up more support from major donors, are attempting to recast themselves as well.

To be sure, companies […] need to review their logos and their overall graphic identity periodically just to make sure they don’t look outdated. That activity is something else, though — a brand refreshment, if you will, not a true re-branding.

True re-branding involves overhauling a firm’s identity and positioning.

Typically, existing customers, if they are happy with the service you provide, will come along regardless of the name change you make. It’s your prospective customers, that vast universe of potential business growth, that you want to hear from.

Don’t lose sight of your mission. Small nonprofits and small-cap companies can’t afford to give up their hard-won identity in the hope that an ill-considered new name will somehow position them better with their donors and customers.

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The Brand Underground

From the NYTimes on new & young branding and brands:

It is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

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10 Rules of Emotional Branding

Between the old concept of brand awareness and the new concept of Emotional Branding, a dialogue must take place that involves this changing of consumer reality in the decision process and brings a dimension of personalized relationship into the equation.

Here is a list of 10 very important rules of emotional branding from the interesting Mark Gobe’s book Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People:

1. From Consumers To People: Consumers buy, people live.

2. From Product To Experience: Products fulfill needs, experiences fulfill desires.

3. From Honesty To Trust: Honesty is expected. Trust is engaging and intimate. It needs to be earned.

4. From Quality To Preference: Quality for the right price is a given today. Preference creates the sale.

5. From Notoriety To Aspiration: Being known does not mean that you are also loved!

6. From Identity To Personality: Identity is recognition. Personality is about character and charisma!

7. From Function To Feel: The functionality of a product is about practical or superficial qualities only. Sensorial design is about experiences.

8. From Ubiquity To Presence: Ubiquity is seen. Emotional presence is felt.

9. From Communication To Dialogue: Communication is telling. Dialogue is sharing.

10. From Service To Relationship: Service is selling. Relationship is acknowledgment.

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