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.

6 To Do’s When Branding Your Business

Corporations must be very concerned with branding and advertising practices that attract customers or retain them, as effective branding and advertising can have postive impact on corporate profitability.

Here are six suggestions that Howard D. Hill, Ph.D., president and CEO of Associates in Education in Orangeburg is proposing to assist corporations (and smaller companies) in maintaining dominance in desired areas of operation:

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4 Brand Valuation Methods

Value has different meanings to different people. The objective of the valuation is determined by its use. Some of the more common valuation approaches are market based/direct measurement method; brand communication investments based method; awareness and franchise valuation method; finance based/indirect measu- rement method; excess-earnings method and relief-from-royalty method.

The simplest direct measurement is to add all the brand’s communication investments, adjusted for inflation. An additional adjust- ment is sometimes made to account for and reward the risk taken by past managers. This adjustment is called the discount rate and it is used to compute the net present value of the successive investments, that is, what they are worth today. The method is simplistic and overvalues the brands; but brand buyers use it for that very reason. It also penalises brands that do not advertise heavily.
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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.

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

Seven Steps for a Brand Strategy

Successful brands are built on the twin foundations of awareness and relevance. If target audiences are not aware of you; if they don’t notice your message in the cacophony of messages they receive each day, then you will never have a chance to be relevant. And if they become aware of you—if you capture their attention—and fail to deliver relevance,then they will learn to ignore you. The seven-steps branding strategy outlined here will help provide the structure you need to assess and develop relevance and create awareness.

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Best Global Brands by Value for 2005

In the new special report, BusinessWeek and Interbrand rank the companies that best built their images — and made them stick in 2005. The names that gained the most in value focus ruthlessly on every detail of their brands, honing simple, cohesive identities that are consistent in every product, in every market around the world, and in every contact with consumers. (In the ranking, which is compiled in partnership with brand consultancy Interbrand Corp., a dollar value is calculated for each brand using publicly available data, projected profits, and variables such as market leadership).

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Trends in Future Marketing

Someday in the not-so-distant future, branding as we know it will be thought of as so 20th century. With societal, cultural and technological changes occurring at increasingly accelerated rates, keeping your eye on the horizon of future trends in branding gives your company the advantage.

1. Consumers Are the New Creative Directors
Born from consumers’ desire to differentiate themselves from the mass market, this trend toward customization will continue to grow with the flexibility and efficiencies offered by technology at home and in manufacturing.

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