Tag: competition

What Branding Is? What Branding Is Not?

Interesting post on the subject at Branding Management:

Think of your brand as a promise … a promise you make to your clients, prospects, employees, and even your vendors. But before you make that promise, be sure you never forget this fact. It is imperative that you are able to back it up. You cannot build a successful, long-term brand on unsupported claims and wishful thinking. History is littered with companies — big and small — that have promoted themselves or their products as something they would like to have lived up to but could not.

To separate you from your competition, your brand — your promise — has to differentiate you from others in the minds of your prospects. This is the reason you cannot use quality, integrity, or price when positioning yourself in your marketplace. So many companies claim to offer these particular characteristics that none of them stand out from the others. BMW has taken note of this. Although it is thought by many to be the best car made, the company has built its brand as “a driving machine.” It sells the experience. BMW knows that there are other high quality cars on the market, so a brand built on quality would be diluted and therefore, less profitable.

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5 Rules to Establish and Maintain Brand Awareness

Despite the fact that the hot ways to enhance your brand involve new media, business branding basics are still in style. Branding success will depend on adapting to the rapidly evolving media environment and taking advantage of new opportunities to reach your target audience.

But, there are some branding constants that will remain critical for establishing and maintaining brand awareness with your target audience. Regardless of the medium chosen for distribution, you must: Continue reading →

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Brand – Key Factor For Customers When Choosing a Wireless Service

Brand and brand name is the key factor for customer when choosing a wireless service. What’s interesting in the J.D. Power and Associates 2006 Wireless Retail Sales Satisfaction StudySM whose Volume 2 was released today – is that the customers are increasingly influenced by the handset when selecting a wireless service.

While the summed importance of branding (of the carrier and the phone) in purchasing decision seems to remain constant at a total of 59% it is worth noticing that 19 percent of customers cite the type or brand of cell phone as a key factor during the initial process of selecting a wireless service, up from 11 percent in 2004. While the brand of wireless provider is still the most popular reason influencing the initial selection process, it has decreased significantly in importance, down 8 percentage points from 2004 to 40 percent in 2006.
Continue reading →

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Eleven Killer Tactics To Create a Strong Brand

Karen Post‘s excellent book Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick in Your Customers’ Minds is presenting eleven tatoo tactics that speak loudly even when you whisper.

 

The strategy is set. You clearly know who you are, you’ve decided on your brand difference, you’ve found folks who want what you have, and you’ve mapped out the great experience you will deliver. Now you must employ the big brand bang and let your message resonate through every point of market contact.

The next step in building your brand is tactical. What specific weapons are you going to launch, at whom, and with what frequency? How will you be heard, noticed, and remembered in a crowded, chaotic playing field, possibly working with less money than your competitors? I refer to this engine as ‘‘speaking loudly even when you whisper,’’ by which I mean making sure that even your smallest effort is on target, relevant, and working to build the brand.

 

Tactic 1: Visual Identity

The footprint of a brand—your corporate identity, graphic system, or visual voice—can take your brand many good places. It can also head you straight into a wall if it does not accurately project what the brand is and consistently stick to the story.
Continue reading →

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Best Global Brands by Value – 2006

The previously announced Interbrand & BusinessWeek 2006 Best Global Brands by brand value is finally out with no major movements in the top 10.

Brand value is calculated as the net present value of the earnings the brand is expected to generate and secure in the future for the time frame from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. To be considered the brands must have a minimum brand value of US$2.7 billion, achieve about one third of their earnings outside of their home country, have publicly available marketing and financial data, and have a wider public profile beyond their direct customer base.

Continue reading →

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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:

  1. Quality positioning
  2. Value positioning
  3. Feature-driven positioning
  4. Relational positioning
  5. Aspiration positioning
  6. Problem/solution positioning
  7. Rivalry-based positioning
  8. Warm and fuzzy positioning
  9. 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.

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Key Branding Trends in 2006

Robert Passikoff is president/founder of Brand Keys, which has published the Customer Loyalty Index of leading companies in 26 product and service categories since 1996., has an interesting article over at Chief Marketer about what he calls the five key trends that will determine the difference between success and failure for brands and marketers for 2006:

1. An emphasis on “engagement.”
Inserting itself between traditional marketing activities and an increasing demand for return on investment assessments, engagement will become the Holy Grail for marketers and advertisers. Defined as the outcome of ad and marketing activities that substantively increases a brand’s strength in the eyes of the consumers, engagement will be used more and more to allocate marketing budgets. Continue reading →

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Evaluate Your Name

When re-branding a business or a product or when you set up a new one and have to come up with a brand new name you should find a way to evaluate among different options that might come up in order to choose the best one out of them. Here I just stumble upon and interesting tool to dissect potential names into the nine categories to make it easier to understand why name work or don’t work, and to more easily weigh the pros and cons of one name versus another:

Appearance – Simply how the name looks as a visual signifier, in a logo, an ad, on a billboard, etc.

Distinctive – How differentiated is a given name from its competition. Being distinctive is only one element that goes into making a name memorable, but it is a required element, since if a name is not distinct from a sea of similar names it will not be memorable.

Depth – Layer upon layer of meaning and association. Names with great depth never reveal all they have to offer all at once, but keep surprising you with new ideas.

Energy – How vital and full of life is the name? Does it have buzz? Can it carry an ad campaign on its shoulders?

Humanity – A measure of a name’s warmth, its “humanness,” as opposed to names that are cold, clinical, unemotional. Another – though not foolproof – way to think about this category is to imagine each of the names as a nickname for one of your children.

Positioning – How relevant the name is to the positioning of the product or company being named, the service offered, or to the industry served.

Sound – Again, while always existing in a context of some sort or another, the name will be heard, in radio or television commercials, being presented at a trade show, or simply being discussed in a cocktail party conversation.

“33” – The force of brand magic, and the word-of-mouth buzz that a name is likely to generate. Refers to the mysterious “33” printed on the back of Rolling Rock beer bottles for decades that everybody talks about because nobody is really sure what it means. “33” is that certain something that makes people lean forward and want to learn more about a brand, and to want to share the brand with others. The “33” angle is different for each name.

Trademark – As in the ugly, meat hook reality of trademark availability. All of the names on this list have been prescreened by a trademarked attorney and have been deemed “likely” for trademark registration.

Read more about it here

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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.

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