Tag: emotion

What a Brand Is and What a Brand Isn’t

A brand is not:

  • a trade mark – these are leagal properties
  • a mission statement – this is a reminder
  • a logo or a slogan – these are your signatures
  • a product or a service – these are just the tangibles
  • advertising – they deliver your messages

A brand is:

  • Point of view – branding is a strategic point of view, not a select set of marketing activities
  • Customer value – branding is central to creating customer value, not just sound bites and images
  • Competitive advantage – branding is key tool for creating and sustaining competitive advantage
  • Engineered – brand strategies must be “engineering” into the strategic planning process
  • Alive – brands get their identity from meanings. Products and services are the blood of a brand. Your organizational culture and standards for action are the heartbeat.
  • Logic and emotion – branding is part science and part art

Source

Posted on by Daniel 1

How to Create a Cult Brand

Customer communities are commonly found among many reputable lifestyle brands. Brands that embrace and harness these communities enjoy a high level of customer loyalty, which drives long-term profitability.

Brands like Apple, Oprah, Harley-Davidson, Ikea and Southwest Airlines have made their competition irrelevant through brand communities they have helped nurture over the years. But why do brand communities form? And what can we learn about them?

Psychologist Jenny Lee, a brand consultant at The Cult Branding Company, explores the social and psychological motivators that fuel the development of brand communities in a compelling new white paper.

The white paper titled, “Why We Join: A Sociological and Psychological Analysis of Brand Communities,” along with an illustrative presentation can be downloaded freely here.

Here are seven steps to take in order to create a cult brand:

  1. Determine how customers are emotionally connected with your brand
  2. Determine what your brand symbolizes in the minds of your best customers
  3. Support the community so that it reinforces psychological attraction customers have towards your brand
  4. Whenever possible create a space where your customers can meet and interact with one another – either in person or online
  5. Sponsor social events that reflect your brand’s mission
  6. Set up conditions for a fun, playful environment where friendships can be made
  7. Don’t control community. Instead participate as a co-creator
Posted on by Daniel 4

Brand Starts and Ends at the Core

Gord Hotchkiss in MediaPost in an article on Brand Promises Vs. Brand Religions:

One thing that both these natures of brand have in common: ultimately they depend on the values, integrity and effectiveness of the organization that creates the brand. If the brand is a promise of a level of quality, you can’t break the promise with immunity, especially in a digitally amplified world of blogs, forums and buzz. Each of the “promise” brands I used as examples, GM, United and Microsoft, stand in danger of their promises losing all meaning with customers. A promise is only as good as the level of trust you’ve built with the recipient.

But if the brand is a religion, the culture of the organization becomes even more important. Irrational decision factors run amok: the perceived culture of the organization, how the brand label connects with who we are, the social circles it places us it, or the circles we wish it would place us in, the values the company stands for, the exclusivity of the brand. The brand relationship becomes a complex stew of beliefs and emotions. We only make this investment for brands that hold a unique position in our mindscape. We feel we have to get as much from the brand as we’re willing to give it in terms of our emotional loyalty. And if a brand doesn’t reciprocate, it is quickly downscaled from a religion to a passing fancy.

Posted on by Daniel 1

23 Elements of a Healthy Brand

A healthy strong brand has definitely has some other attributes than the best or the biggest. A healthy and a strong brand generates also more results than just bigger sales. A healthy strong brand sustain a product over time through consistency, excellent communication, providing value to its target customers. These and much more.

Here is a checklist of 23 brand health criterias as presented in Peter Cheverton’s excellent book Understanding Brands (Creating Success):

  1. is based on a proposition of genuine substance and value to the target customer
  2. communicates a clear and powerful brand definition
  3. communicates a clear ‘emotional charge’
  4. communicates an attractive and relevant personality
  5. wins, builds and retains customer loyalty
  6. is well known by the target customer
  7. is held in high esteem by the target customer
  8. communicates and evidences a unique match between the company’s capabilities and the customer’s needs
  9. is a source of competitive advantage
  10. is an investment of increasing value that others will want to own
  11. maintains its relevance over time by evolving in response to changing customer expectations and perceptions
  12. increases the profitability of the business is consistent with the business strategy
  13. makes sense within the business’s brand architecture
  14. provides a protective ‘halo’ for growth strategies
  15. provides a barrier to entry for new entrants or substitutes
  16. is uniquely positioned in the market and creates a relevant space in the customer’s mind
  17. communicates and demonstrates a clear sense of value
  18. interacts consistently with the customer on as many fronts and on as many occasions as possible
  19. cements the brand definition into the customer’s mind through interactions and positive associations
  20. is managed and supported consistently over time
  21. has values that can be applied consistently and successfully to all parts of the marketing
  22. mix and through all promotional media
  23. makes people want to get their hands on it
Posted on by Daniel 4

Popular Brands May Brand the Brain

A new study finds that familiar brands evoke faster, more positive responses in the brain than lesser-known brands.

In tests on young adults using real-time functional MRI, the logos of well-known auto and insurance companies “lit up” areas of the brain associated with warm emotions, reward and self-identity.

“Furthermore, strong brands were processed with less effort on the part of the brain,” said Dr. Christine Born, a radiologist at University Hospital, part of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

In contrast, less-recognized brands triggered more activity in brain regions associated with working memory and negative emotions — suggesting these products were less easy to “process” and accept.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Daniel 0

Reconciling Brand and Organizational Culture

Interesting article about the way organizational culture, business goodwill, branding and the law are interacting. Here is an excerpt:

Whether shaping the branding strategy of a start-up or optimizing the strategy of an established company, the key to maximizing goodwill is in closing the gap between organizational culture and organizational brand. Sometimes we see wonderful brands that resonate with the market, but are undermined by the internal culture as in the case of marketing an image of customer service, but having sales clerks who are untrained or unhelpful. In that case, the challenge is to correct the organizational culture over time to effectively support the brand. Typically this management issue can be resolved through a process of adjusting the focus of existing employees while working to make sure new employees match the needs of the evolving culture.

As consumers, we sometimes see a great company culture anchored to a lousy brand, what I call “the best kept secret” syndrome, such as finding a wonderful product in unattractive packaging. Typically, this marketing issue can be resolved by investing in creative communication services to more accurately share the story of the organization. In both reconciliation processes, there will be an investment of time, money, and emotion. These investments should be made with a strategy to leverage and protect that investment, which is where the intellectual property enters the picture.

Read full article in the Kevin E. Houchin’s Creativity and Law Blog.

Posted on by Daniel 1

Branding News Roundup – 02/13/06

Maslow and Branding: Esteem

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.

Re-Branding…

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.

Posted on by Daniel 0

9 Components of Corporate Identity

Marcia Yudkin author of Internet Marketing for Less Than $500 Year and 6 Steps to Free Publicity has an interesting list of 9 components of small business identity:

1. Values.
Do you stand for stability, like Prudential insurance? Innovation, like 3M? Educational curiosity, like the Discovery Channel? Social consciousness, like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream?

2. Personality.
From the company’s personality can flow ad campaigns, kinds of special events to sponsor, company colors and typefaces, corporate gift selection, even the talent chosen to record company voice mail messages.

3. Behavior.
Your company’s image includes not only how you promote yourselves but also how you act toward customers and the public. Things like how you answer the phone, how you greet shoppers, how cheerfully you correct mistakes or accept returns, how aggressively you negotiate contracts all become bound up in one composite image.

4. Price.
How much you cost in comparison to competitors often becomes part of your image. If you’re tempted to keep price out of the equation until someone expresses a desire to buy, think twice.

5. Range.
Customers should understand the spectrum of products and services that you sell.

6. Geographical roots.
Where did your company come from? If you’re a locally owned family business competing with multinational giants, make sure people know that. If you’re selling nationally but rooted in a picturesque corner of the country, make hay out of that.

7. Longevity.
Moody and Regan, a printing company in Waltham, Massachusetts, wisely and impressively uses as its tag line, “Established 1898.” Whenever you’ve been around much longer than competitors, you can profitably incorporate that into your image.

8. Slogan.
Which brand “tastes good like a cigarette should”? Which car is “the ultimate driving machine”? Even local or specialized companies can achieve this kind of awareness with their clientele.

9. Benefits.
What do buyers get when they purchase from you? Most companies provide intangible, emotional benefits as well as tangible, practical ones (Burger King: inexpensive, satisfying meal; Boston Pops: a fun night out; Kodak: photos with true-to-life colors).

Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and ten other books hailed for outstanding creativity. Find out more about her new discount naming company, Named At Last, which brainstorms new company names, new product names, tag lines and more for cost-conscious organizations, at http://www.NamedAtLast.com.

Posted on by Daniel 0

Brand Naming – 5 Tips

The name is the brand trigger. When it is said or read or thought, all the impressions, experiences and promises of the brand are brought to mind.

Creating a new brand name, whether is a new company or a new product line, is an opportunity to take a deep breath, take stock of who you are and where you’re headed, figure out what new things you need to add to the marketing mix, and what baggage you may be ready to leave behind.

The following key attributes should be present in every company name:

  • Position the company/product within the markets it serves.
  • Attract customers and prospects, usually by stating a benefit, specific or implied.
  • Be memorable
  • Be easily pronounced
  • Have positive verbal associations and connotations.
  • Be unique, not at all like competitor names.
  • Be protectable.

Next is a list with some five things to be considered when you start naming a new company, product or service:

1. Determine How Important the Name Really Is

Having a clever name isn’t always important. Many companies thrive in industries that are based on government contracts, bidding wars, business friendships, etc., and their name is often just a unique identifier to be placed on legal paperwork.

For most companies, however, their name can be an integral part of their marketing process. A clever, memorable name can make a potential client think about the company for a few extra moments, which may be all you need to get the edge on your competitors.

2. Stand Out…

The most common mistake made when naming a new business endeavor is to make it sound like the others in that industry. This is based on anxiety about whether the new business will be taken seriously. In reality, it’s critical that you stand apart from your competition, and that you look to your competitors as examples of what to avoid.

There are literally 30 or 40 wireless companies called Mobile-something — Mobileum, Mobilocity, MobileOne. Make a rule and don’t pick a name with ‘mobile’ in it, if you name a wireless company.

3. …but don’t get carried away.

A name that doesn’t mean anything, or it has no depth won’t work ussualy. A name should connect with something already in the collective subconscious. Don’t forget, you’re trying to make an emotional connection.

4. Test your tolerance for going ‘out of the box.’

If you’re looking for something unusual, usually when it comes down to it, the obstacle is always fear. Make sure that the fears aren’t based on what happens to brands out in the world. It’s like Banana Republic. People don’t see the name and think, ‘Whoa, an ugly racial slur — I’m not going to shop there.’ It’s all contextual.”

5. Don’t involve too many people

Most corporations have no problem delegating marketing and advertising issues to the marketing department, but when naming is involved, especially naming the company itself or key products, suddenly everyone wants to have a say in the process, and it can quickly become politically and emotionally charged. Therefore, it is essential that you keep the number of people involved in a naming project to a minimum, that they have real authority, and that they all understand the ideas outlined above.

Posted on by Daniel 1