Don Sexton, co-author along with the more famous Donald Trump of Trump University Marketing 101: How to Use the Most Powerful Ideas in Marketing to Get More Customers
Commandment 1: Establish a Clear Brand Position
A brand position is a clear, unambiguous statement that communicates what your company stands for and what it offers. You should choose one or two benefits that make up your brand position. These are the key benefits that your target market cares about and that you have the capabilities to produce. Why one or two? Because people generally can’t remember more than that.
Commandment 2: Build Your Brand on an Emotional Benefit
Your goal is to find an emotional benefit that is far superior to that of your competitors and to associate that benefit with your brand. In other words, you want to own that benefit.
Commandment 3: Build Your Brand as Early as Possible
If you don’t build your brand as quickly as possible, someone else may take the position that you want.
Commandment 4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets
Marketing strategies need to focus on the attributes of the product or service so that they are effectively positioned in the marketplace. Brand strategies must do that too, but a branding strategy must also focus on the associations and identifiers.
Commandment 5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position
You want all the touch-points in your company to reflect your brand. For example, if your brand is built on “friendliness,” everything in your company must embody that, from the employees to the logo to the company lobby.
Commandment 6: Make Sure All Your Products and Services Embody Your Brand
If you come up with a brand position and your product or service doesn’t embody it, your brand will have no credibility and will quickly fail.
Commandment 7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position
If your product or service embodies your brand and your customers don’t know it, it’s useless. You must always remind customers of what you do well, and then remind them again.
Commandment 8: Don’t Dilute Your Brand
Once you have established a clear brand position, don’t dilute it. What this means is that you shouldn’t keep extending your brand or adding to it indefinitely. If you extend it, you might actually hurt it. In particular, you should never extend your brand to products and services where customers won’t let it go. Remember, branding is about what customers will let you do.
Commandment 9: Always Monitor Your BrandYou need to continually monitor your brand position to make sure it remains relevant to your customers. Trends change. Your brand needs to change with them.
Commandment 10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organization’s Most Valuable Asset
Maintaining your brand involves everything we have talked about in this report. It means maintaining consistency, communicating and monitoring. It means putting Commandments 1-9 into practice every single day
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