Consistency – The Most Important Aspect of Sucessful Branding

Consistency is considered to be the most important aspect of a succesful branding by branding experts and industry opinion leaders questioned in a an Interbrand’s survey made pubilc late January this year.

The experts cited understanding of Customer/Target frequently. This mirrors the finding in this report that metrics and brand research are key tools. Communication and Creative effectiveness were also frequently mentioned as critical aspects of successful branding.

These open-ended responses provide a useful counterpoint to the other findings in this report. They reflect the classic tenets of branding and marketing, which are focused on knowing the customer, maintaining a consistent brand in the marketplace, and delivering winning content and creative.

study says.

Here is the list of the top 10 aspects of successful branding, as resulted from the study:

  1. Consistency (36.0%)
  2. Understanding of Customer/Target (18.2%)
  3. Message/Communication (14.7%)
  4. Creative/Design/Brand ID (12.8%)
  5. Relevance (12.4%)
  6. Differentiation/Uniqueness (12.0%)
  7. Key Stakeholder Buy-In (10.9%)
  8. Positioning (9.7%)
  9. Clarity (8.9%)
  10. Connection to Customer/Target (8.9%)

Read the study here.

Branding News Roundup – 07/07/2006

Death of Mass Marketing

Marketers typically employ online ad targeting — especially through behavioral, contextual, geographic and search methods — for direct response goals more so than for branding ones.

The focus is shifting, however, according to Advertising.com’s ongoing survey of U.S. web publishers. While only 19.2 percent of respondents cited branding as the main objective of online advertisers in 2005, that figure more than doubled to 41.5 percent this year.

Assessing the financial value of brands

Assessing the size or success of something as slippery as a brand involves a great deal of subjectivity. That is compounded by the fact that two competing factions are promoting two very different approaches to measuring a brand’s effectiveness.
On one side are accountants, armed with the financial wizardry of the capital markets. On the other are workers from the creative industries, the people who create and maintain brands and need to judge their own success.

Mark Ritson on branding: GM is risking death by brand overload

GM is economising on front-of-house systems, with many dealerships now merged into cost-efficient, but brand-killing, shared retail points. Target segmentation and brand differentiation are being replaced by cannibalisation and commodification as GM gradually destroys itself.