Branding Strategy Insider

Branding Trivia

How will you do in our end-of-month branding trivia?

What brands are associated with these taglines?

1. You deserve a break today.
2. Be all that you can be.
3. Just do it.
4. It's the real thing.
5. Where's the beef?
6. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
7. We try harder.
8. Oh, what a feeling…
9. You've come a long way, baby.
10. Mmm mmm good
11. It's where you want to be.
12. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
13. Don't leave home without it.
14. A different kind of company.  A different kind of car.
15. The Uncola.
16. Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
17. When you care enough to send the very best.
18. Have it your way at…
19. All the News That's Fit to Print.
20. Put a tiger in your tank.
21. Snap! Crackle! Pop!
22. We bring good things to life.
23. It's not just a job – it's an adventure.
24. The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat.
25. Nothing beats a great pair of legs.

EquiTrend Brand Leaders

This week Harris Interactive released the 2007 results from EquiTrend, a renowned annual brand equity study that measures and compares over 1,000 brands across 39 categories.

Among the brands included in this study, there are six brands that stand above all others:

• Hershey Kisses Chocolate Candy has achieved the highest overall “Brand Equity” score (79.5) as well as the highest “Overall Relevance” score (77.2) among all 1,120 brands measured.

• Coca Cola and Heinz Ketchup both scored 98 percent “Familiarity” rating among respondents, the highest of all brands measured.

• St. Jude’s Research Hospital was noted as having the highest quality score with an 8.54 out of possible 10.

• Kraft Foods, Inc. has captured the highest “Purchase Consideration” among brands measured with a score of 8.55 out of a possible 10.

• Craftsman Tools appears to have earned the attention of consumers and gained the highest score for both “Brand Expectations” (7.65) and “Trust “(8.55).

• Bentley Automobiles seems to have set itself apart not only among automotive brands but among all 1,120 brands measured as it scored the highest rating for “Distinctiveness” (7.61).

“These brands are to be commended for not only have they made themselves known – they’ve made their brands relevant to their consumers,” said Carol Gstalder, Senior Vice President, Brand & Strategy Consulting Practice, Harris Interactive. “They have created consumer expectations for a positive experience with their brands, and most importantly, they’ve delivered on that brand promise.”

EquiTrend provides insight on all 1,120 brands included in the survey based on six base measures, including: Familiarity, Quality, Purchase Consideration, Brand Expectations, Distinctiveness and Trust. From these base measures “Brand Equity” and “Overall Relevance” are calculated for each brand (See the methodology for details).

EquiTrend has been designed to be a concise and efficient way to measure the bonds that exist between the consumer and brands. Key measures help determine a brand’s stance among its competitors, within other categories, and in comparison to world-class brands overall. Brands that utilize EquiTrend are also able to break down results to understand their brand measures by various audience segments including such segments as influentials and teens.

Methodology

• The EquiTrend study is a brand equity study conducted online once yearly by Harris Interactive.

Building Winning Brands - 15 of 16

The Fifteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is your brand must stand for something. Nike stands for “authentic athletic performance.” Ritz Carlton is all about “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” The Nature Conservancy intends to “save the last great places” on earth. Patagonia is committed to serving people who love the wild country and the outdoor adventures that it provides. If you aren’t convinced, visit their web site. What does your brand stand for?

In building its Gold Crown store brand, Hallmark created an advertising campaign that communicated that if a person shops Hallmark Gold Crown stores, you can be sure that he or she is nice. One such ad features employees conjecturing about a new boss who was rumored to be tough. People changed their minds about her when they saw her walking to her office with a Hallmark Gold Crown shopping bag. This is called “branding as a badge.” An even better example of this is Harley-Davidson owners who wear the company logo as a tattoo. Another example is farmers who wear Pioneer Hi-Bred International or International Harvester ball caps. Do your customers proudly don your company’s logo?

Sponsored By: Harvard Business School Press

Brand Building: Resisting 'Sameness'

Ever heard of a brand that rejects customers? Probably not. Brands are uniformly desperate to attract them. So why would a brand take the opposite approach?

Some years ago, I developed the concept for the Pepsi Web site's relaunch. I was challenged by the big question, how do you create a Web site for promoting sticky soda? The site had to be cool and relevant; it had to make visitors drink more soda than they already did. Given Pepsi's prominence, the task might appear easy. Yet without abusing the usual solutions, such as games, screensavers, and music news, it wasn't. Those hackneyed techniques were, even back then, so overdone they weren't suited to brand building unless the brand was in the gaming or music industries.

The solution was extracted from a simple proposition: Kids love challenges. It became the basis for a highly unusual approach that aimed to reject Pepsi site visitors rather than embrace them.

To enter the site, visitors were required to pass an intelligence test. If their answers weren't clever enough, quick enough, or simply correct, the site rejected them. If visitors succeeded in getting in, there were prizes. First prize was... a trip into outer space! Yes, a real one, shared by six lucky people.
The assignment taught me reverse marketing isn't such a bad thing. Thousands of kids tried to enter the site every day. And thousands of rejected visitors spread rumours about "backdoors" into the site that allowed users to bypass the test.

Drucker Wisdom: Leadership and the CEO

Successful leaders don't start out asking, "What do I want to do?" They ask, "What needs to be done?" Then they ask, "Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?" They don't tackle things they aren't good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, "Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself."

Check Your Performance
Effective leaders check their performance. They write down, "What do I hope to achieve if I take on this assignment?" They put away their goals for six months and then come back and check their performance against goals. This way, they find out what they do well and what they do poorly. They also find out whether they picked the truly important things to do. I've seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done. They have an impressive record of achievement on trivial matters.

Mission Driven
Leaders communicate in the sense that people around them know what they are trying to do. They are purpose driven--yes, mission driven. They know how to establish a mission. And another thing, they know how to say no. The pressure on leaders to do 984 different things is unbearable, so the effective ones learn how to say no and stick with it. They don't suffocate themselves as a result. Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.

Internal Brand Building: The Strength Within

In the late 1990's I had the opportunity to chair the first conference focused on internal brand building. Almost a decade later this concept remains in its infancy for much of the business world. I'm reminded of this when I hear something similar to the following from marketing executives:

"We conducted exhaustive consumer research. We carefully positioned our brand. We developed and instituted comprehensive brand identity standards and systems. We are running our new advertising campaign. Now what do we do? How do we get the rest of the organization to understand and care about the brand and its promise? How do we get the organization to deliver on the promise? How do we make the brand promise real?"

Those questions drove us to create an internal brand building seminar which we deliver regularly at conferences and organizations.

David Aaker posed this very important question when he visited Hallmark during my tenure:

"Until everyone from your CEO to your receptionist can accurately and consistently articulate your brand's promise, how do you expect your customers to?"

Kristin Zhivago captured the concept well in an article that she wrote for Business Marketing. She said:

"A brand is not an icon, a slogan, or a mission statement. It is a promise — a promise your company can keep. First you find out, using research, what promises your customers want companies like yours to make and keep, using the products, processes and people in your company. Then you look at your competition and decide which promise would give you the best competitive advantage. This is the promise you make and keep in every marketing activity, every action, every corporate decision, and every customer interaction. You promote it internally and externally. The promise drives budgets and stops arguments. If everyone in the company knows what the promise is, and knows that they will be rewarded or punished depending on the personal commitment to the promise, politics and personal turf issues start to disappear."

Certainly the brand promise drives your marketing communication and your brand identity standards and systems. But it must do much more than that. Your products and services, every point of contact your brand makes with consumers and the total consumer experience your brand creates must reinforce your brand's promise. This has tremendous organizational implications. How can an organization deliver against its promise if its front line employees don't know (or care about) what its brand stands for?

Brand Quote - June 23

"The trouble with marketing theorists, with all their triangles and flow charts, is not that they are wrong. They just make sense of what good marketing does instinctively but after the fact. It is instinctive marketing - marketing which is based on your beliefs and your values - that makes the biggest impact. The impression that the 'after-the-fact marketing science' gives us is that in fact these things are unimportant, but at the end of the day this is what makes a brand distinct and gives it soul"

                                                          - Tessa Graham

Sponsored By: Harvard Business School Press

Extending Your Brand to Employees

I recently had the opportunity to present and lead a panel discussion at The Conference Board’s ‘Extending Your Brand to Employees Conference’ in Chicago, IL. The conference provided a forum for marketing, brand, communications and HR professionals to share how they have engaged their employees to embrace and deliver upon their brands’ promises.

Here are some of the more interesting quotes and thoughts from that conference:

“Branding is all about the promises your company makes to external audiences and the promises it keeps with those audiences.”

Randall S. Rozin, global director, branding and marketing communications, Dow Corning Corporation

Scott Davis, senior partner, Prophet, indicated that he believes the following three things are most important in branding today:

-Brand relevance
-Customer experience
-Employee engagement and alignment

“It seems to me that when people talk about employer branding, they are talking about one of two things:

Positioning the organization to potential and current employees
Engaging employees to deliver upon their organization’s promises to its customers
These two things are important and related, yet different.”

Kristen Weirick, employer brand manager, Whirlpool Corporation

Bonnie Gellas, director, corporate communications, Merrill Lynch indicated that at Merrill Lynch ‘Human Resources (HR)’ has been renamed ‘Leadership and Talent Management,’ reflecting how that company views the evolving role of that function.

Lissa Reitz of Target Corporation indicated

The Branding of Nations

Companies, products, universities, museums, municipalities and individuals brand themselves.  Why not nations?  After all, they have more at stake then almost any other entity – tourism, exports, foreign direct investment, industry formation/focus, immigration, satisfied citizenry, national heritage and support of domestic and foreign policy, to name a few.

Some countries or regions that have attempted to brand themselves include the UK, USA, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, Portugal, Spain, Thailand and Dubai.

Branding nations is an extraordinarily complex task. The stakeholders are legion (politicians, businesses, industries, citizens, etc.) as are the potential target audiences (tourists, immigrants, business and political leaders, etc.).  It is extremely difficult to control a nation’s image because of all of factors that can influence that image.  Because so many factors contribute to that image and because brand building is such a long term process, it is also very difficult to measure the effectiveness of even a very well funded re-branding campaign.

Impressions are created by foreign policy including diplomatic and military strategy, participation in multinational discussions and agreements, immigration and trade policy, foreign aid, alliances and media briefings.  Impressions are also created by exports (especially exported media and high profile product brands), tourism, study abroad, exchange programs, friends, relatives, and business associates residing in (or visiting) the country, the hosting of international events (cultural, sporting) and the domestic and foreign press.  The culture itself is a significant contributor to brand identity as is the nation’s brand building capacity (resources and marketing savvy).  A brand’s perceptions will also be influenced by how long the nation has been an active part of the world community and known by the world community.  Put another way, industrialized countries that export have more brand awareness and “country of origin” associations than developing countries that do not.

Engineering the Starbucks Experience

In 2002 Starbuck's shared its guiding principles for brand building. Five years later do they still ring true?

•Starbucks brand is its product, its people and its in-store experience.

•Starbuck's promise: For curious and discerning adults, Starbucks provides the best coffee experience that enriches lives.

•Starbucks strives to create an inviting, enriching experience that is stylish and elegant and that provides people with respite, time out and a personal treat.  The experience is designed to enhance sensory signals.

•Starbucks romances coffee drinking.  It encourages its employees to approach coffee with a wine steward mentality.

•Involvement and personal interaction is key to the Starbucks experience.  Starbucks strives to be authentic and stand for something through passionate and committed employees.  It promotes treating people with respect and dignity.

Excerpted from Nancy Barnet's (Strategic Liaison Director, Starbucks Coffee Company) presentation at the 2002 Summit on Internal Communications, October 22,2002, Chicago, IL.

For more on Starbucks click here.

Sponsored By: Harvard Business School Press