Tag: Positioning

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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Top Brand Extensions

Brand extension is a marketing strategy in which a firm that markets a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name but in a different product category. Brands use this as a strategy to increase and leverage equity.

Product extensions, on the other hand, are versions of the same parent product that serve a segment of the target market and increase the variety of an offering. An example of a product extension is Coke vs. Diet Coke

A successful brand helps a company enter new product categories more easily.
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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.

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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.

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5 Myths of Brand Naming

After the 5 Tips on Brand Naming, here is an interesting post of Steve Rivkin is the co-author of The Making of a Name : The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy on 5 Myths of Brand Naming:

Myth #1: Size doesn’t matter.
Yes, it does. Shorter is better in everything from memorability to packaging.

Myth #2: There are no words left to steal from the dictionary.
Not true. Your speaking vocabulary may only be 30,000 words, but a hefty dictionary will yield 750,000 words

Myth #3: Coining a new word is easy.
But the trick is to create a new name that is meaningful, impactful and starts the positioning process for the brand or company.

Myth #4: Manufactured names are all the same.
A made-up name might be a simple fusion of two easily recognized words, it might be an altered form of a recognizable word or it might be a foreign word that some people would recognize

Myth #5: Customers will take our name literally.
Good names are suggestive. They are bundles of possible meanings. They are not contractual commitments.

Read the full 5 Myths about Brand Names

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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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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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