Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Equity Study: The Insurance Industry

When we conducted our insurance industry brand equity study, we uncovered the following:

•    The insurance industry is highly fragmented.  While there are dozens of companies whose names consumers recognize, less than a handful receive significant unaided first mention.
•    While there is high behavioral loyalty, there is low attitudinal loyalty.
•    Consumers have a low emotional connection to insurance brands.
•    Less than one in five people indicated that their insurance company “has never disappointed them.”  (One sign of emotional connection.)
•    While consumers perceive there to be differences between insurance companies, they don’t perceive those differences to be significant.
•    Price and rates are among the most important points of difference between companies, suggesting the category is commodity-like among many consumers.
•    The following are the seven most important consumer benefits in the insurance industry.  Of these seven benefits, consumers perceive only two of them to be addressed to any large degree:

o    Paying claims fairly and promptly
o    Good rates/prices
o    Honest, trustworthy representatives
o    Accessible, available representatives
o    Knowledgeable, competent representatives
o    Easy to understand policies
o    Company financial stability

•    The following benefits have the widest variation in delivery and therefore provide the greatest opportunities for differentiation:

Improving Your Greatest Business Asset

It's a tough, competitive world out there, so in recent years the business community has spent a lot of money at office retreats and wheeling in programs that are designed to help their people help themselves and improve their performance. They are all lumped into what you can call self-improvement or motivational programs.

The superstars in this field are often in the mold of Deepak Chopra. His message is a bouillabaisse of Eastern philosophy, Western theology, Celtic traditions, modern medicine and even rap music. "Everything he ever heard is grist for his mill," says one observer.

Stephen Covey has been called "the hottest self-improvement consultant to hit U.S. business since Dale Carnegie." His message is "to reach your full potential, you have to build character." That's fine, but I'm not sure that's enough in today's hyper-competitive market. Nice guys don't always finish first.

And then there's Tony Robbins--a jut-jawed, Armani-suited warrior, 6-foot-7, who strides on-stage with an exploding smoke machine and strobe lights. His pitch is that you can achieve anything you want just as long as you adopt the right attitude. Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Witch Doctors, a valuable book that dissects management counselors and gurus, says that Robbins "is selling faint hope to suckers."

Now, the latest rage in firing up the staff is to import speakers who have beaten blindness, paralysis and other life-threatening obstacles. These "overcome all odds" conferences are long on emotion but very short on takeaway content.

I think it's time to offer some simple advice to deal with self-improvement issues.

Achieving Brand Management Success

To get there You Must Focus the Organization on Delivering the Brand Promise – Brand Management is Much More than Marketing (a.k.a., Making the Brand Promise Real)

Remember these keys:

•    Branding is not an afterthought; rather it is the core value of the organization.
•    Have a singular focus on delivering the brand promise.
•    The brand’s products and services must deliver upon the brand’s promise.
•    Focus everything your organization does on delivering the brand promise.
•    An organization must manifest its brand’s essence, promise, and personality at each point of contact it makes with people.
•    Carefully manage all the points of contact you make with the consumer.
•    An organization’s culture must reinforce its brand’s essence, promise, and personality.
•    To be truly successful, a brand must be based upon the enlightened vision of a strong leader and a relentless employee passion to better meet the needs of the customer.
•    Don’t forget to hire, train, motivate and compensate front line employees to deliver the brand’s essence, promise and personality.
•    The brand’s essence, promise and personality must drive organization decision-making and resource allocation.
•    Ultimately, you want to use brand identity systems, advertising, packaging, retail environment, services, the Internet and other delivery mechanisms to “bring your brand to life.”

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

The Language of Branding: Brand Personality

Each and every brand should choose an intended personality based upon the brand’s aspirations and its customers’ current perceptions of the brand.  The personality is usually communicated in seven to nine adjectives describing the brand as if it were a person.

A brand’s personality and values are often a function of the following:

•    The personality and values of the organization’s founder (assuming he or she had a strong personality and values)
•    The personality and values of the organization’s current leader (again, assuming he or she has a strong personality and values)
•    The personality and values of the organization’s most zealous customers/members/clients
•    The brand’s carefully crafted design/positioning (explained in this section)
•    Some combination of the above

While personality attributes will vary considerably by product category and brand, in general, strong brands possess the following personality attributes:

Brand Positioning: Choose Your Words Carefully

I had a depressingly familiar experience last week. A brand manager took me through their fresh brand strategy, and it was terrible. It was, like most brand positioning, pointless. About eight out of every 10 brand strategies have no impact whatsoever on brand equity. And this was going to be another addition to that big book of pointless branding for two reasons.

First, there were too many words in the positioning statement. Three concentric circles confronted me. The central red circle was called the brand essence. In the middle was a blue circle called brand personality. And then around the edge was a circle in yellow, called brand identity. Too much.

I have never seen a great brand positioning strategy that needed more than three words to define the brand. Any more than that and the probability of achieving any kind of impact on the market turns almost immediately to zero.

Responsibilities Of A Brand Champion

True brand champions have this on their plate every day...

•    Ensuring that the CEO shares the primary brand champion role with you
•    Ensuring that the brand has a carefully crafted mission, vision and promise
•    Maximizing relevant brand differentiation
•    Ensuring that the brand has an attractive personality
•    Making sure the brand stands for something important to the target customer
•    Making sure all employees understand what the brand stands for
•    Aligning organization strategy with brand strategy
•    Creating and sustaining organization-wide passion for the brand’s mission, vision and promise
•    Ensuring that the organization delivers against the brand essence, promise and personality at each point of contact the brand makes with employees, customers, shareholders, the press and any other stakeholders
•    Ensuring that the brand acts with consistency and integrity
•    Maximizing the target customer’s awareness of the brand
•    Infusing the brand with relevant innovation
•    Keeping the brand alive and “vital”

On this Valentine's Day, tell a brand champion you love them.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

When Brand Management Is At Its Best

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.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

The Importance of Focus & Differentiation

Focus & Differentiation are the two most important concepts in brand design.

•    By definition, a brand is not for everyone – therein lies its power.
•    The more specific your brand’s promise is, the stronger your brand’s equity will be.
•    Ideally, the brand tells a story that is unique to its organization.
•    Differentiate your brand in ways that are relevant and compelling to your target consumer.
•    Number 2 brands must never try to emulate market leaders.  Their power (as is true of all brands) lies in relevant differentiation.
•    Whenever possible, a brand should try to own the “next big thing” (the emerging key relevant differentiating benefit).

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Betting On The Law Of Duality

Microsoft just bet $44.6 billion on the law of duality. For those not familiar with this law, it goes like this: In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.

At the moment, Google has a 54% share of the search-engine business. Yahoo! is at 20% and Microsoft is at 13%. If Microsoft succeeds, its share jumps to 33% and there are two horses running after the online advertising business.

What makes this bet tricky is the fact that Google has become a generic brand. That's when a brand is used often in everyday language: "Google his name," or "I'll Google it." The brand is both a noun and a verb at the same time. "Scotch-tape it." Or "Xerox it." When this happens, you can have an enormous advantage over the competition. While it drives lawyers crazy because of their fear of losing a trademark, it is the grand slam of marketing. Viagra is already a generic brand in the erectile dysfunction battle. Their share is 60%. Cialis is at 27%. Levitra is at 13%. The law of duality has already struck.

Early on, a new category is a ladder of many rungs. Gradually, the ladder becomes a two-rung affair.

BrandQuote - February 10

                 'The customer is the appreciating asset.'                           

                                      - Federal Express

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop