Branding Strategy Insider

Branding Trivia

How will you do in our end-of-month branding trivia drill? Give yourself 5 minutes and then click the 'continue reading' link...

Trivia Question #1
Regarding customer loyalty, what should newer, faster growing brands focus on as an indicator of brand health and what should more established brands watch for as an indicator of brand health?

Trivia Question #2
In most product categories, price is the primary purchase incentive for what percent of all customers?

Trivia Question #3
Which is the most predictive of brand market share? (a) brand loyalty, (b) brand value, (c) brand penetration, (d) brand awareness, or (e) brand differentiation?

Understanding The Funnel

I've been talking about funnels for almost ten years, but realized I hadn't blogged on this... so here goes.

Traditional marketing divides the world into two groups:

prospects
and
customers

Customers are traditionally undervalued, and prospects are all treated the same.

As marketing got more sophisticated, some prospects ended up being treated a little differently than others. Someone reading Field & Stream, for example, is a more valuable prospect to a bullet company than someone reading Bass Fisherman.

Missing from this demographically-based analysis is the idea that people can change. They change their posture, their attention and their attitude. And as the knowledge they receive increases, their value as a prospect changes as well.

I think marketers always knew this, but they haven't been able to do much about it.

Until now.

The Google funnel is easily measured and if you're marketing anything to anyone, you need to understand it (this idea is so powerful it's now built in to Google's free web analytics program, Urchin).

Building Winning Brands - 13 of 16

The thirteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that brands are personifications of organizations, products, services and experiences.  In this way, they are the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty.  Let me tell you a story that illustrates the point.

Imagine you are having lunch with a long-time and very good friend. Several times throughout the lunch, she makes disparaging and sarcastic remarks that make you feel bad. You think to yourself, “This just isn’t like her. She must be having a bad day.” You meet with her again a week or two later, and again she acts ornery and negative. You think to yourself, “Something must be going on in her life that she’s really struggling with.  Maybe she is having difficulties with her job or her health or her marriage or her children.” You may even ask her if everything is all right. She snaps back, “Of course it is.”

Your interaction with her continues in this vein over the next couple of months. You continue to try to be supportive, but she’s definitely getting on your nerves. After many meetings and much interaction, you finally decide that she’s a changed person and someone with whom you prefer to spend less and less time. You may get to this point after a few months, or perhaps even after a year or more. She doesn’t change, and eventually the relationship peters out.

Now consider for a moment that the person you first had lunch with was the same person as before, with one exception:

Naming: Of Renamed Brands and Previous Names

Linking a renamed brand to its previous name: should you or shouldn't you?

First, I would ask, why did you change the name? In general, it is better to use an existing name if it has built awareness, equity and positive associations over time. There are only three situations in which I would change a name: (1) the name change was forced by a parent company, merger, acquisition, ownership change, disassociation from a parent organization, legally forced loss of use, etc., (2) you currently have multiple brands that make the same promise or meet the same need and you want to simplify your brand architecture and reduce your costs by merging the separate brands into one brand and (3) the previous brand name carried so much negative baggage that you believe that you would significantly increase your marketing success by starting over rather than by repositioning the old brand.

Assume you changed the name for the first reason. Here is what I would do. Communicate the new identity aggressively. Link it to the old name for a while, assuming the old name had high awareness and mostly positive associations (Formally known as…). Make sure you have legal permission to communicate this link (which is especially unlikely in a legally forced loss of use). Monitor awareness and other equity elements associated with the new brand. When the brand equity has achieved its targeted level, delete the link to the previous name.

If you changed the name for the second reason, the approach is simple: change the identity on all of the merged products to that of the remaining brand(s). If the rationalized (that is, eliminated) brands had strong brand equities or loyal consumer franchises, pursue the same sort of transition outlined above.

If you changed the name for the third reason, do not link the new name to the old one.

Branding Snapshot - May 27

This last full week of May was as fruitful as ever around the blogosphere. Here on Branding Strategy Insider the week was influenced by these thoughts…

Seth on Trademarks
What every entrepreneur, geek, brand manager and marketer needs to know about trademarks...

Martin on The Vision Statement
What value do companies gain from such statements?

Derrick on Memory & Communication
Does the memory of images decay less rapidly than the memory of words?

Brad on Overcoming Common Brand Problems
While it might be tempting to choose a name that describes your product or service, it’s a mistake.

New on Branding Strategy Insider
We are featuring marketers seeking employment. Currently, Bill Perkins is seeking a C-level or VP-level position in marketing or business development.

Comment(s) of the Week
Goes to Steve Woodruff on The Vision Statement

Elsewhere…
We like:
Chris Brown’s perspective on Branding & Marketing
David Armano’s Logic & Emotion
David Koopmans' Business of Marketing & Branding

Looking forward to a new week, new month and new discoveries…

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Brand Quote - May 26

"Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand."

                                    - David Ogilvy

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Branding: Just Ask

This question came to us from Karen, a marketer in Philadelphia:

"In Brand Advertising which should be emphasized - Reach or Frequency?"

Karen, thanks for asking. Many will say that it is more efficient to focus on reach (versus frequency) because there are diminishing returns with each new ad exposure. That is, the advertising response curve is usually concave. This is particularly true if your goal is to create an immediate sale of a ubiquitously purchased consumer product. In that situation, reach almost always delivers "more bang for your buck." However, if your funds are limited and your audience is highly targeted, you would do better to focus on a reach schedule of 3+, seeking out media with significant audience overlap.

For brand building purposes, we usually focus on advertising frequency targeted at those that are most likely to influence the remainder of the market: primary target opinion leaders and "hard core" users.

Have a question related to branding? Just Ask...

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Overcoming Common Brand Problems - 32

Number 32 in our list of the 40 Most Common Brand Problems lingers on packaging, business cards and buildings...

Common Brand Problem Number 32: Choosing generic (non-proprietary) brand names

Analysis: While it might be tempting to choose a name that describes your product or service, it’s a mistake. The name can soon become confused with that of every other brand that takes a similar approach or worse yet, it can link the brand to an outdated product or technology.

Key Point: Consider brands that include “sys” or “tech” in their names. Is it easy to tell them apart? In retrospect, how about the wisdom of the “Cellular One” name now that PCS and other technologies have moved us past cellular? Own a name that is suggestive of a timeless consumer benefit (Aris Vision Institute – for laser eye surgery) or one that is “coined” and whose meaning you can define through consumer communication (Kodak or Xerox).

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Brand Expression: The Vision Statement

Before you can tell people what you want them to think about you, you must know clearly who you are. A quick review of most corporate sites reveals a disappointing lack of unique brand visions and distinctive corporate identities. Though some company executives devote time to thinking about and defining who they are and where they want to go, the vast majority seems to come up with impotent copy-and-paste statements, redolent with empty clichés and nebulous objectives.

Take a look at this excerpt from one company's vision statement:

"We will be seen in all our markets as the quality leader among international airlines. This will be achieved by:

• Mobilizing our joint talents, know-how and skills
• Inspiring all staff to support our persistent effort to improve quality
• Placing quality first in everything we do
• Setting an annual target of measurable improvement
• Doing things right the first time
• Providing both our external and internal customers with a reliable and punctual product and careful and friendly service."

Now, tell me, which airline is this? American Airlines? British Airways? United Airlines? Well, in fact, it could be any of them, couldn't it? This was taken from KLM's vision statement but, demonstrably, most corporate vision statements read the same. They're largely cut-and-paste jobs, with the only difference being in the company name.

I'm not criticizing the way people run their companies. But I am flagging such vision statements with huge question marks. What value do companies gain from such statements?

Godin on Trademark*

What every entrepreneur, geek, brand manager and marketer needs to know about trademarks...

If you Google "generic trademarks", you'll find a list on Wikipedia that includes, "aspirin, bikini, brassiere, cola, crock pot, dry ice, escalator, granola, heroin, hula hoop, jungle gym, kiwi fruit, pilates exercise system, trampoline, videotape, Webster's dictionary, yo-yo, and zipper". Each of these trademarks was worth many millions of dollars, and then, poof, it belonged to everyone.

Some people are worried about this. Jeroen send me a note and asked me to riff about it... it even has a name: genericide.

In 1999, I invented a trademark and wrote a book about it. Yahoo still owns the trademark in Permission Marketing®, but a quick search will show you more than a million matches for the expression. What's going on?

I had to make a decision. I could have pushed the world to call the ideas I wrote about, "Permission-based Marketing". Or, I could have been really flexible and encouraged people to call the approach the same thing I did. I figured it was better to be the coiner of a phrase used by millions than to have a little corner of the world all to myself.

And that's part of the paradox of a trademark.