1. Know your needs and have an idea about how you’d like them met.
2. Go ahead, be a fan. If you admire the branding efforts of a certain company, call around and find out who did the work.
3. Go with a referral, not a blind hire. Canvass your contacts. This is always better than hiring someone with no frame of common reference. I
4. Throw a few companies a bone & see what they do with it. Give them a general question or problem scenario. See how responsive they are and how much time it appears they put into crafting their response.
5. Money isn’t taboo. Once you’ve found a company you’d like to work with, discuss it from the outset. It’s better to agree on financial terms from the start than for either of you to be in a precarious position somewhere down the line.
Tag: Branding
Branding News Roundup – 02/13/06
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.
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.
6 Basic Qualitites of Brand Positioning
The right positioning incorporates strong values and differentiators that are important to your customers. Brand positioning is important in deciding where you want to position your brand within its category and relative to the competition. We mentioned here before nine positioning types you can think of:
- Quality positioning
- Value positioning
- Feature-driven positioning
- Relational positioning
- Aspiration positioning
- Problem/solution positioning
- Rivalry-based positioning
- Warm and fuzzy positioning
- Benefit-driven positioning
Positioning is an act of seeking, placing and optimizing something in relation to the competition in surrounding environment and is based on customer-company-competitor relationship triangle. In order to move up the ladder in the customer mind, management must follow the rules of positioning. Basic qualities of brand positioning include:
Relevance: Positioning of brand must focus on benefits that are important to people or reflect the character of the product.
Clarity: Brand should be positioned in such a way that it is easy to communicate and quick to comprehend.
Distinctiveness: In current market situation there are reasonably good number of players vying for a share in the market, forcing them to compete on the basis of price or promotion. To overcome such a situation, company needs to offer distinctiveness in its products or services.
Coherence: A brand should speak with one voice through all the elements of the marketing mix.
Commitment: Management should be committed to the position it has adopted. Once a position is adopted, it takes commitment to see it through.
Patience: Patience plays an important role in the success of brand as branding is not a one-day wonder – it takes years to position a brand in consumers’ mind.
Courage: Adopting a strong brand position requires courage as it is much easier to defend an appeal rather than generate sales pitch.
4 Steps To Start-Up Your Brand
Where do you start building up your brand? Steve Strauss author and speaker who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship. answers for USA Today‘s readers:
Step 1: Understand how you are perceived: How do people perceive your business now? Is that how you want to be perceived?
Step 2: Decide upon your Unique Selling Proposition: What makes you or your business unique, different, special? What niche is available that only you can fill?
Step 3: What are customer expectations? What do your clients typically expect of you? What unique attributes do you offer that best fit client expectations?
Step 4: Make it personal, if possible: Who do you trust more, a corporation or a person? Whom would you expect to give you better customer service – a corporation or a person? What about honesty – whom do you think is more honest? The answer to all three, of course, is a person. That is why, if possible, it is often a good idea for a small businessperson to tie his or her own name/personality in with the brand. People like and trust people more than businesses.
The fourth point is probably the strongest and really recommended especially for small businesses cases. Interesting reading here: Time for some brand aid
What’s in a Brand Name?
Naming a new brand without taking enough in consideration the main target market may lead you to unexpected surprises. Here is an interesting NYT article on such a case:
What better way to honor the brash origins of this city, the owners of Houston’s new professional soccer franchise reasoned, than to name their team “Houston 1836,” a nod to the year when two entrepreneurial brothers from New York arrived here to build a city atop the swampy bayous of southeast Texas.
Many Latinos in Houston, though, greeted the unveiling of the team’s name this week with a shudder. Eighteen thirty-six also happens to be the year that a group of English-speaking interlopers waged a war of secession that resulted in Mexico’s loss of Texas, ushering in more than a century of violence and discrimination against Mexicans in the state.
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
3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Develop Your Brand
Before you begin developing a brand, you must have a solid understanding on who your customers are and how do you intend to serve them. Details can be extracted from your marketing plan or mission statement, but after all there everithing goes to asking yourself the next questions:
How do I want consumers to view my company? – Is the identity you want to portray friendly and personable? Professional? Efficient? Creative? Innovative? Appropriate for your target market? To begin choosing your branding direction, it may be helpful to write a list of characteristics that people would ideally use when describing your business. Identify the words you want consumers to recall when your business comes to mind.
Who are my customers and how does my product or service address their needs? – You need a strong understanding of your customer base to create an effective branding strategy. The idea of branding is to tell a consumer in as few words as possible how you will fulfill their needs. Knowing their needs is the first part, and communicating how you intend to fulfill those needs is the second.
Who are my competitors and why is my product or service better? – Sometimes looking at the competition can give you food for thought. You can see what is working for them and what is not working, and keep that information in mind as you create your own brand. Study people’s perceptions of other businesses. Use your personal experience as a consumer to guide you. Emphasize what is unique about your business that makes it a better choice than the competition.
Branding News Roundup – 12/08/05
Coca-Cola previews global advertising campaign – AdAge (free reg. required) is featuring the full story on the sneak peak Coca-Cola offered at its new global advertising campaign for its flagship brand, campaign that carries the theme Welcome to the Coke side of life
Brand Gamble: Mergers and Aquisitions — the article published on brandchannel by Alycia de Mesa is addresses the problems that appear when two brands join in the holy M&A, and they sometimes overlook their first love: the customer. Hard to belive but it happens all the time. The resulting company may be stronger and bigger but it doesn’t really matter if the customer’s great expectations are not met.
It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid — Wall Street Journal article on the best brands that are created around a purpose, entirely published on Brand On Blog
All Branding is Divided into Three Parts — interesting classification of the brands made by Warren who considers three branding approaches: independent branding, endorsed branding and monolithic branding.
Employerbrand.com – if you are into the employer branding concept, here is a site for you with insights on the matter and some interesting case studies on Microsoft, Reuters, Unilever and Tesco
10 Rules To Turn a Small Business In a Big Brand
Starting from the idea that in the last few years, we have witnessed a growing number of small companies that are starting to realise that branding is not the reward for success but the reason why strong brands become strong brands in the first place, The Business Times of Singapore is publishing an interesting list of 10 fundamental rules of branding, nothing new, but still interesting:
1 Perception is the truth
The battlefield of branding is in the minds of the customers. And as far as customers are concerned, perception is the truth, regardless of the facts.
2 Fortune favours the first
Many experts argue that the first mover advantage is a fallacy as there have been many first movers who failed. Being first only gives you the opportunity to lodge your brand in customers’ minds first. Fail to exploit that advantage and your competitors can, and will, catch up.
3 If you are not first, move the battlefield
If you are not first in the market, then you might need to shift the battlefield by creating a new category in which they can be first.
4 Keep a clear focus
If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. Focused brands concentrate on owning one thing in the mind instead of creating line extensions indiscriminately.
5 Differentiate or sell cheap
In the absence of any perceived difference between products, customers will focus on the price.
6 Use PR for brand building, advertising for maintenance
Many companies make the mistake of using advertising to launch their brands. As advertising is a self-declaration, it has near-zero credibility in the eyes of consumers. Public relations, however, involves what others say about you, and hence carries with it the weight of third party endorsement.
7 Find a great name
In the long term, the name of your products is what separates you from your competitors as your unique ideas and concepts can be copied. To ensure greater brand recall, a short, unique and memorable name should be adopted.
8 Be absolutely consistent
Successful branding requires unwavering consistency
9 Find an enemy
To have credibility, you need to have an enemy. What would Superman be without Lex Luthor? Competition between brands creates excitement in the media and with the customer base, thus helping the category grow.
10 You may need a second brand
Your brand cannot stand for everything, thus necessitating the launch of a second brand in order to enter a new category. It is advisable, however, to launch a new brand only when your existing one is a dominant player in its category. If you struggle to increase sales in a category you know well, what are the chances of you doing well in a category you know nothing about?
Read full article here.
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:
- All Marketers Are Liars : The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, by Seth Godin
- Brand Hijack : Marketing Without Marketing, by Alex Wipperfürth
- How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, by Gerald Zaltman