Branding Strategy Insider

The Philosophy of Brand Management

At its worst, the organizational brand is a name and a logo that is inconsistently applied to an unrelated set of products and services.  It is overused and means nothing, and it reminds people of the worst of an over commercial society.  It feels cold and seems exploitative.  It is perceived to be a vestige of a past era.

At its best, brand management aligns organizations with value-adding activities. It keeps organizations focused on meeting real human needs in compelling new ways. And, at its best, the organizational brand defines how the organization best meets its customers’ needs in unique and compelling ways.  It serves as the organization’s unifying principle and rallying cry; it infuses the organization with a set of values and a personality; and it holds an organization’s employees to a consistent set of behaviors.  The organizational brand stands for something.  It establishes trust and a certain level of assurance; it makes it possible for people to establish relationships with the organization; and it creates expectations that must be fulfilled.  The brand can bring an organization to life in a very real way.

In the end, brand management is all about meeting people’s physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and other needs in unique ways.  It is the application of free enterprise to the timely and timeless needs of mankind.

From all of us at The Blake Project we wish you a brand at its best.  May you unleash your brand’s power and transform your organization through branding in the new year.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Non-Traditional Marketing Approaches that Work

Advertising is usually the most important element in any brand marketing plan, but many companies are finding that other approaches are also effective.  Some have pursued these approaches out of necessity, being unable to support national advertising campaigns, while others are just more innovative than most in developing their marketing repertoires.

Following are some examples of non-traditional marketing techniques:

•    Membership Organizations (Harley Owners Group [HOG], Hallmark Keepsake Ornament Collectors Club, Pond’s Institute)

•    Special Events (HOG Rallies, Saturn Owners Homecoming, Jeep Jamboree)

•    Museums and Factory Tours.  Examples include the World of Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta and Las Vegas; CNN Factory Tour in Atlanta, Kellogg’s Cereal City USA in Battle Creek, MI; the American Girl Place in Chicago, the Crayola Factory tour and store in Easton, PA; the Hallmark Visitors’ Center in Kansas City, MO; the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour in Waterbury Center, VT; Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, PA; The Vermont Teddy Bear factory tour and store in Shelburne, VT, Dewar’s World of Whisky in Aberfeldy, Scotland; MacWorld Expo (85,000 make this pilgrimage!) and the annual Saturn owners homecoming in Spring Hill, TN.

•    Theme Parks (Disney World, Cadbury’s Theme Park, Legoland, Busch Garden, Knottsberry Farm)

What examples can you add?

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Did You Know? - December 29

Well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in our brains. -- Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study areas of the brain affected by visual stimuli associated with strong and weak brands. -- "Brain branding" is an interdisciplinary approach to improve understanding of how the mind perceives and processes brands.

Source: Radiological Society of North America

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Top Brand Extensions

As you may know, brand extension is a marketing strategy in which an organization that markets a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name but in a different product category. Brand managers use this as a strategy to increase and leverage brand 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.
Brand extension benefits:

    * Brand extensions let a marketer take a brand with well-known quality perceptions and associations and put it on a brand in a new category. Not only can marketers capitalize on brand awareness, they can also leverage the associations consumers have of the parent brand.

    * Second, consumers who favorably evaluate a parent brand are more willing to try and adopt the brand extension than an unfamiliar brand in the same category. They trust a known brand name.

Behavioral Targeting: Into the Abyss

The Association of National Advertisers held their annual conference recently. Speaker after speaker addressed the growing popularity of what is known as behavioral targeting as opposed to basing pitches on consumer attitudes, opinions or perceptions.

The ability of the Internet to monitor what consumers are doing by tracking what Web sites they visit is fueling interest in what many call understanding our customer better. I call it getting totally confused by your customers. The result, according to one speaker, will be different messages in different media for different customers. While admitting it will be terribly complex, they feel that this is the way it will be. I say many will be led by all this into the abyss of blurred brands and hopeless confusion from which they may never recover.

Anheuser-Bush dived in by studying "use occasions." Then they launched an ambitious online project that offered entertainment programming named Bud.TV. It turned out to be a bust, so the "content is being rethought." But here's my favorite line from their presentation. "The programming had nothing to do with our brands." I say then, what's the purpose of all this money and effort?

When to Call a Brand Consultant

An advertising agency and a brand consultancy both play important roles in business growth. Earlier in the year I touched on the differences between the two. Back on the topic  - when should you call a brand consultant?

• Your company has acquired or merged with another company.
• You're launching a new product, service or company.
• A competitor has mounted an unexpected attack on your brand.
• Your profit margin or market share is shrinking.
• Research shows that your brand is not understood by your audience.
• Customers don't see a difference between your brand and your competitors.
• You're having difficulty knowing what to brand and how.
• You need to decide the relationships between parent and sub brands.
• There's a noticeable gap between business vision and customer experience.
• Your brand expressions don't fit your brand strategy.
• Your brand expressions lack excitement or relevance.
• Your brand expressions are confusing with too many product names, sub-brands, logos, taglines, etc.
• Your brand's touchpoints lack consistency across media or cultural borders.
• Your creative partners need to better understand your brand.
• You need to get executive buy-in for brand programs.
• You need to completely understand your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
• The meaning of your brand fluctuates as executives come and go.
• You want/need to educate your organization on the benefits of building a strong brand.
• You want to extend your brand into new product or service categories and would like to know which categories have the highest probability for success.
• You want to set up brand metrics against which to measure the success of branding endeavors.
• You want to make your brand more relevant to certain customers.
• You want to bring the brand to life at each point of customer contact.
• You want to take your brand global.
• You need to revive your brand.
• You need to 'sell' the brand internally.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

David Ogilvy on Creativity and Success

“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product,” wrote Ogilvy. “Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.” Ogilvy was an advertising executive who praised the virtues of creativity; if an ad didn’t sell, it was because it wasn’t creative. His years of experience taught him that people were not going to buy a product if the ad was boring; only interest and curiosity would entice people to buy.

Ogilvy became the most sought-after advertising man because he understood precisely what it was that made an ad appealing. Take, for instance, his now famous campaign for Hathaway, a Maine-based shirt manufacturer. Ogilvy created a man with an eye patch, who appeared to be a sophisticated eccentric. The eye patch came to be the man’s signature garment, even though it was the Hathaway shirt he was meant to be selling. In the end, the character had become such an icon that Hathaway ads could be run without even mentioning the brand’s name and the company’s revenues tripled within just a few years.

In addition to having a creative idea, Ogilvy believed that “the most important decision is how to position your product.” His campaign for Dove soap, which he positioned with the phrase “one-quarter cleansing cream”, became one of the most successful and enduring ads of his career. However, Ogilvy also understood that positioning meant little if the rest of the ad was a flop. “A lot of today's campaigns are based on optimum positioning but are totally ineffective - because they are dull, or badly constructed, or ineptly written,” said Ogilvy. “If nobody reads your advertisement or looks at your commercial, it doesn't do you much good to have the right positioning.”

2007 in Review: A Year of Maestros and Muppets

So that was 2007. As usual, there were a host of marketing mistakes and a few moments of genius. Let's celebrate the latter first, as they are rare gems.

My first pick is AG Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, and still the world's greatest marketer. Another stellar year for him saw P&G continue to grow profits and share price while reducing the number of brands in its portfolio. Lafley is the antidote to the financially oriented chief executives on this side of the pond. He came from marketing, and has driven P&G forward with a simple message of focus on customers and innovation around their needs. He's no slouch when it comes to organisational issues, either: the mission of absorbing the 30,000 employees and 50,000 product codes that came with the acquisition of Gillette is complete, one year ahead of schedule.

My next pick is Robert Polet, the chief executive of the Gucci group. No one expected the former Unilever executive to be able to walk into the world of luxury branding and be so successful so quickly. But by introducing leaner production systems and encouraging the great house of Gucci and its other luxury stablemates to incorporate consumer insights into their strategies, Polet is proving phenomenally successful.

Great Moments in Design: Absolut Vodka

The Absolut Vodka bottle has become something of a modern icon. It's origins are found in a breakthrough that came when a bottle was finally chosen. Like many breakthroughs it came purely by chance and in retrospect seems almost too obvious.

Advertising man Gunnar Broman was looking through an antique shop window in Stockholm's "Old Town" when he saw an old Swedish medicine bottle, a cultural icon was unchanged for more than a hundred years. The bottle was elegant, different, simple and very Swedish. In the 16th and 17th centuries vodka had been sold in pharmacies as medicine to cure everything from colic to the plague.

The choice was a stroke of genius. Several Swedish designers were given the job of helping the Absolut Vodka team further develop the bottle.

It had been decided that there should be no label to hide the crystal clear contents. After much discussion and several prototypes the team came to the conclusion that some kind of colored lettering was required. Blue was decided upon as a the most visible and attractive color, the color that is still used today for the Absolut Vodka logo.

Building the Christmas Brand

Christmas is a brand hand-crafted by and for the people. It is a diverse stew of traditions... many of which are thousands of years old... while others surprisingly quite contemporary.

Did you know there are a slew of Christmas traditions invented and/or made popular by marketers?

Thousands of Years Ago
In the olden days people would celebrate the winter solstice - knowing that the shortest day of the year was passing and longer days were to return. It was winter, the harvest was complete, and there was time to enjoy and celebrate.

In Scandinavian countries, traditions included bringing into the house a large log to serve as the base for the holiday fires. For twelve days the Yule log flames burned and they partied on.

The Romans would honor Saturn, the god of agriculture by celebrating Saturnalia - a Marti Gras-like party of drinking, singing, and feasting. They would also honor the children of Rome by celebrating Juvenalia and observe their most sacred celebration the birth of Mithra, the infant god of the sun, on December 25.

The pagan songs mentioned above would later be replaced with Christian songs - the beginning roots of Christmas carols.

The name Christmas means "mass of Christ" from the Old English "Cristes Mæsse."

Fourth Century A.D.
MARKETING MOMENT: In the forth century, church officials decided to make the birth of Jesus a holiday. The bible doesn't indicate the date of Jesus' birth, so Pope Julius I chose December 25. Purposely chosen to replace the pagan celebrations mentioned above.