Branding Strategy Insider

Sacrifice And Focus: Power For Brands

It’s tempting for brand owners to leverage as much value as they can from the equities of their brand– sometimes at the expense of why your brand matters in the first place.

If you’re responsible for managing a successful brand, of course you would want to seek as much opportunity to grow revenue as you can. Brand extensions may not only provide the perfect tactic to add to your revenues, but they can also strengthen the brand’s original meaning in the bargain. This is precisely what makes the art of sacrifice such a hard pill for many marketers to swallow.

I like to think of brands as if they are beasts of burden - everyday they plow along with great strength and endurance as long as they stay healthy.  One of the big indicators of brand health is resonance. If you stretch your brand’s meaning too far with exaggerated licensing deals and brand extensions, well –you’re hastening its demise. Before you start making big shifts by adding more stuff to what your brand encompasses, be confident it aligns to the organizing principles of your brand strategy.  Don’t muddy your long-term brand equity by losing your resonance with the tribe that got you there to begin with.

Like a good parent, sometimes you just have to say no. The good news is the more you say no, the more highly-focused (and valuable) your brand becomes.

Technology Licensing And Brands

I was talking to a prospective client the other day. We were discussing how product innovation is critical to helping brand owners stay connected with their consumers. One of the best examples of this is to consider what Apple has done with their iPod, iPhone and most recently the iPad.   

Through product innovation Apple has made existing platforms such as the iPod and iPhone significantly more relevant to their consumers ever since the products were originally launched. Moreover, through the introduction of the iPad, Apple has created an entirely new category to help consumers stay connected with the world in a simple, powerful and elegant way.   

My prospective client was considering licensing some patented technology they possessed. When I told him that the best way to find suitable partners for the technology was to understand their partners' brands and the positioning of those brands, he wanted me to explain why I felt that was so important.  

My point to him was that technology can be the key to helping a brand owner more powerfully reinforce their brand position with the consumer.  To keep with the Apple example, the makers of the iPhone made their platform available to the world so that anyone with an idea for an application could gain access to iPhone protocols.  When the iPhone launched in 2007, there were very few Apple developed applications available with the phone.

Brand Management Training

Here is what I would want a brand manager in my marketing department to know:

• What a brand is
• The benefits strong brands deliver to organizations
• The brand management process
• What leads to customer brand insistence
• What contributes to brand loyalty
• What helps brands connect emotionally to their customers
• How to conduct a brand audit
• How to measure brand equity
• How to measure the asset value of a brand
• How to read and use point-of-sale (POS) data in managing brands
• Customer segmentation approaches
• Qualitative and quantitative brand research methodologies and approaches
• How to use projective, laddering and guided imagery techniques
• How to align brand values with customer values
• The different types of brand benefits
• How to turn your brand into a “customer badge” (self-expressive benefits)

Measuring Brand Performance

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” ~ Peter Drucker

If you are a brand manager, by definition, you are measuring the performance of your brand on a regular basis. Otherwise, how can you successfully manage your brand? Here are the items I recommend brand managers measure:

• Unaided brand awareness (for the categories in which the brand competes and perhaps for the customer benefits the brand delivers)
• Top-of-mind brand associations (your brand’s true position in its customer’s minds)
• Perceived brand delivery against the most important customer benefits
• Attitudinal loyalty toward the brand
• What customers think makes your brand unique (differentiation)
• Brand price sensitivity (a measure of brand strength)
• Brand vitality (a measure of brand marketplace momentum)
• Brand quality perceptions
• Brand value perceptions
• Brand accessibility perceptions
• Emotional connection to the brand
• Brand values alignment with its customers
• Brand distribution
• Brand market share
• Brand sales
• Brand profitability

If you have access to these brand metrics, it is more likely that you are actively managing your brand to increase its strength and performance. One should measure most of these items at least once a year and immediately after major brand initiatives.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Celebrities In Advertising: A Marketing Mistake?

Popular wisdom asserts that getting a celebrity endorsement is a tried-and-true, simple-to-implement way to maximize advertising effectiveness. Sure, it's expensive, but celebrities always yield stronger ties with viewers and, ultimately, greater sales, right?

Wrong. Over the course of last year, time and time again we observed incredibly low effectiveness scores of TV ads starring celebrities. From Tiger Woods to Donald Trump, we found that with rare exception, celebrity endorsements were largely ineffective and failed to yield the benefits popular wisdom promises.

We set out to understand whether celebrities today are really worth the significant investment that brands were making. We studied every nationally televised ad for the first 11 months of 2010 and found that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it. Specifically, our study, 2010 Celebrity Advertisements: Exposing a Myth of Advertising Effectiveness, 2010, showed that fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on advertising effectiveness.

Why was this?

Marketing Competency Assessment

Over the past decade, I have helped hundreds of organizations refine their brand management and marketing efforts. In so doing, I have gotten pretty good at making a fairly quick assessment of an organization’s or individual’s marketing capabilities. Here are some of the signs that the organization or individual knows what it/he/she is doing regarding brand management and marketing:

• An insightful and nuanced (and often elaborate) description of the target customer groups and segments
• Backed up by qualitative and quantitative marketing research
• Including brand positioning maps for the brand in question and its competitors
• Knows the difference between attributes, benefits and values
• The brand strategy is based on benefits and values (especially emotional benefits and values)
• The brand’s promise is unique, compelling and believable (with an emphasis on compelling)
• The brand’s tagline reinforces the brand’s promise
• Familiarity with self-expressive brand benefits
• Understands the importance of category description and competitive “frame of reference”
• Familiar with the concept of “category of one” brands
• Understands(and has used) the following qualitative research techniques: projective, laddering and guided imagery
• The brand’s media plan is highly targeted and efficient based on the target customer definition
• Is familiar with the concept of customer touch point design
• The CEO is involved in the brand strategy process
• Good understanding of customer purchase and usage behaviors
• Customer-centric, common sense approach to all marketing decisions

Test yourself and your organization against the previous bulleted items. How well do you stack up?

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Defining Segmentation Research

You’re new in your job. Or the competitive landscape has changed. Whatever the reason, you need to understand which customers to target for purposes of product development, marketing, and customer experience design. So you call one of the big firms that specialize in segmentation and brand tracking. They tell you identifying and following your target audience requires a study that requires 12 weeks and costs a couple hundred thousand dollars or more. Once you recover your composure, you ask: ‘Why does it have to be so complicated?’ Sound familiar?

Segmentation is a vitally important tool for any business; no business can afford to move ahead without a clear idea of its likely customer, their needs and their brand alternatives. But complicated segmentation research can makes things more complicated. So here are some thoughts about what marketers really need to know.

What is Segmentation Research?
At heart, segmentation is about identifying groups of people who respond differently to marketing so that your efforts can be focused on the most attractive prospects. Segmentation first became fashionable in the 70’s just as mass brands were beginning to give way to ‘niche’ markets and brand extensions. At the same time, media fragmentation and new media research techniques were providing more precise targeting options. The question became, ‘Why treat everyone the same?’ It wasn’t long before everyone was doing ‘segmentation research’.