Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Positioning Elements Defined

The brand position or brand positioning is how the brand is perceived in the context of competitive alternatives. As brand consultants, when we develop brand positioning statements for clients, we include a target customer definition, brand essence, brand promise, brand archetype and brand personality, giving the intended brand position/positioning (as opposed to the actual brand position in the mind of the customer) greater depth.

The unique value proposition and brand promise are similar. They both focus on the one or two key points of difference between the brand in question and other brands. Typically, these points of difference are brand benefits, benefits that are relevant, unique, compelling and believable for the brand in question. Brands typically focus on only one or two benefits and research has shown that people can’t link more than that number of benefits to a given brand in their minds. The first or most important benefit is sometimes referred to as the primary brand benefit. The unique value proposition for Volvo is “safety.” As a brand promise, it could be expressed as “Only Volvo assures a safe ride to parents who care about their children’s safety.”

Brand essence is the “heart and soul” of the brand, its timeless quality, expressed as “adjective, adjective, noun.” Some people refer to the brand essence as the brand mantra, while for others, the brand’s mantra is synonymous with the brand’s tagline or slogan.

Disney’s brand essence: Fun family entertainment

Nike’s brand essence: Authentic athletic performance

Starbuck’s brand essence: Rewarding everyday moments

Brand Building On An Ideal

• How well do we understand the people who are most important to our future?
• What do we and our brand stand for?
• What do we want to stand for?
• How are we bringing the answers to these questions to life?

These questions go to the heart of how the customer relationship is evolving over time and thus what its growth potential is. They bring your heritage and organizational DNA into sharp relief. They show you how far you’ve come from your start and how far you have to go to achieve your current and future goals. They provide the best possible way to do a gap analysis, and they furnish critical tools for centering a business around an ideal.

It takes guts, discipline, and honesty to ask these questions and act on the answers. Doing so enables you to define and develop a compelling difference from the competition in the eyes of customers — and back it up! Great businesses and great business leaders welcome these questions. They know it is folly to ignore them, or to try to answer them with mere wishes. Your answers have to connect your people’s core beliefs and your customers’ fundamental values in a genuine, significant way.

Those with the most trouble answering these four questions often have leaders who pride themselves on running “realistic,” numbers-driven organizations. Ironically, these leaders simply aren’t realistic enough to recognize the highly profitable top-and bottom-line growth that cascades from serving an ideal of improving people’s lives.

Numbers alone can’t be your North Star. It’s too easy to game them, consciously or unconsciously. As nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and American author Mark Twain are both famous for saying, there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Set your sights on an ideal, however, and you can follow it to highly profitable top-and bottom-line growth.

More To Learn From Steve Jobs

It's been more than four months since the passing of Steve Jobs. Much has been written and shared in that span about one of the greatest innovators and marketers of our times. In the flurry of remembrences I missed this opinion piece in the New York Times by his biographer, Walter Isaacson. For me, Steve's lessons continue to surface. 

The Genius Of Jobs 
One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

Time For Brand Marketers To Lead A Comeback

It’s a good thing the game between the NFL's New England Patriots and the New York Giants was exciting because this year’s Super Bowl commercials were dull, and what a weird thing to say about the Super Bowl. Generally, it’s the very opposite of that.

Perhaps it’s best not to read too much into Super Bowl ads vying for viral buzz (many of which adopted a new pre-game, social media preview approach to generate buzz, albeit some have argued it was poorly done). But there was one thing that stood out.

In a noticeable departure from the tradition of Super Bowl Sunday, this year’s crop of ads lacked courage. They took no risks. They pushed no boundaries. They defied no expectations. Truth be told, they were gutless.

These are harsh words, but others have expressed similar disappointment with this year’s Super Bowl ads, including Stuart Elliott, The New York Times’ trenchant observer of advertising, who wrote in his column the day after the game about the “dearth of originality” in this year’s assortment of ads.

Why so little daring and audacity? Now, rarely is looking from the outside in on the business motives and creative objectives of advertisers a useful way of dissecting advertising decisions. Yet, what was seen on air points unambiguously to the things that advertisers felt comfortable doing, things that hint at their intentions. More specifically, advertisers felt safest recycling the sorts of themes, humor, characters, plot twists and surprise endings that were inventive the first time out in years past. Some of these ads even made direct reference to past ads (or other past pop culture). It was a night of commercials that, in effect, imagined the future as a salvage project of things bygone.

When To Reposition Your Brand

Brand repositioning is necessary when one or more of the following conditions exist:

• Your brand has a bad, confusing or nonexistent image.


• The primary benefit your brand "owns" has evolved from a differentiating benefit to a cost-of-entry benefit.


• Your organization is significantly altering its strategic direction.


• Your organization is entering new businesses and the current positioning is no longer appropriate.


• A new competitor with a superior value proposition enters your industry.


• Competition has usurped your brand's position or rendered it ineffectual.


• Your organization has acquired a very powerful proprietary advantage that must be worked into the brand positioning.


• Corporate culture renewal dictates at least a revision of the brand personality


• You are broadening your brand to appeal to additional consumers or consumer need segments for whom the current brand positioning won't work.  (This should be a "red flag."  This action could dilute the brand's meaning, make the brand less appealing to current customers or even alienate current customers.)

Sponsored by: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Discount Voucher Sites: Threat To Brand Value?

Discount voucher sites are all the rage. Groupon, Living Social and a host of other players are entering the mushrooming markdown market. This begs the question if discount sites are good news for brand value?

In summary we don’t think so. It may be good for short term revenue spikes and potentially contribution margin boosts but not long term brand value. This is based on our experience with hotels, spas and restaurants to name a few. Let us share how we arrived at this position. This will be in summary format and then in detail for those that want to read on.

To increase brand value brand equity needs to grow. Numerous empirical studies demonstrate how increases in brand equity drive a brand’s financial performance. Don’t treat the symptoms but the cause if you will. Equity is measured in a number of ways. We’ll consider these in the context of discount sites to develop our argument. Do discount voucher sites drive the following dimensions of brand equity?

A Challenged Marketplace: Opportunity For Brands

In today’s business climate, one thing stands out. All the rules are up for grabs. At least from where consumers stand, everything they’ve taken for granted can no longer be taken at face value. What seems good and trustworthy is just a headline away from some bombshell of betrayal. Presumptions about family, gender and race are being upended by demographic turnabouts. Traditional milestones of education, career and retirement are under question. For most people, figuring out the future means reexamining what used to work and finding a new way forward.

What a great opportunity for brands and those that manage them!

More than ever, consumers want fresh answers and new solutions. Brands have an unprecedented opportunity to bring something better to the table. So here are three brand management tips for the marketplace ahead.

First, embrace incongruity. Combine unusual elements. Confound expectations. Reinvent category boundaries. Embrace experimental culture. What consumers know nowadays is what doesn’t work, so they’re willing to experiment and give something new a shot.

Why not a Nissan that is more a rolling day spa selling health than an automobile selling transportation, with the A/C spritzing you with vitamin C to prevent wrinkles and seats designed by NASA that improve blood flow? Why not iPad kiosks at selected Delta gates at LaGuardia and JFK where people can sit and order food, play games or read? How about the vegetable butcher at Eataly’s in New York City or the Paper Pot from Molla Space that stylishly dispenses toilet paper like tissue or the Urbio Urban Vertical Garden that turns any interior wall into a green space? And don’t forget THE RIDE, which remakes the old-timey Manhattan bus tour with a combination of live street theater and buses specially equipped with the latest audio and video technologies.

Brand Threat: The Out-Of-Touch CEO

“Bank of America Corp. is scrapping its plan to charge a $5 monthly fee for making debit card purchases after an uproar and threatened exodus by customers.” --Bloomberg, 11.1.11

 “Netflix has decided to can Qwikster, the DVD-rental spin-off it announced to unlimited screaming last month." --Wall Street Journal, 10.10.11

“Barely a month into Meg Whitman’s tenure as chief, Hewlett-Packard announced on Thursday that it would not sell the company’s dominant personal computer business — closing off a strategic path offered by her predecessor.”--New York Times, 10.27.11 

These stories might be laughable if they weren't such a tragic waste of shareholder value. 

Most every company says it values its customers, and hates to 'walk away' from them. Leaders are called on to make tough decisions they believe are in the best interests of their companies. And sometimes, these decisions advantage some customers at the expense of others. That doesn't make them bad decisions, just risky ones. 

But leaders of some of our greatest brands act like they have forgotten (or never knew) what every junior brand manager surely knows --- to test potentially risky messages and find ways to mitigate their negative impact. Instead, senior leaders are acting like bulls in a china shop, awkwardly and prematurely broadcasting their strategic decisions in ways that destroy their company's (and their own) reputation and value.

Brand Management: Process And Responsibilities

Brand Management Process: Key Components

• Identifying/defining your most important customers
• Understanding what motivates your customers and what could cause them to choose your brand over your competitors’ brands
• Carefully selecting a brand position that could provide your organization with marketplace advantages
• Translating that position to a strong and consistent brand identity, including:

             -  Intuitive brand architecture
             -  Strong name and icon 
             -  Tagline that succinctly reinforces brand promise

• Developing brand messaging including an elevator speech
• Educating employees about the brand promise, elevator speech and identity standards and giving them the incentives, tools and training to become effective brand champions
• Developing an integrated launch and ongoing marketing plan
• Reinforcing your brand’s promise at each point of customer contact
• Measuring the ongoing equity of the brand and making adjustments as necessary 

Consumer Behavior: From Trading Up To Trading Off

The opposite of trading up is not trading down. In fact, there is no opposite of trading up; shopping behavior is more nuanced than that. When shopping hit the skids after the financial crisis, there was a lot of talk about a new normal of frugality, as if the only thing possible after a decade-plus of trading up was a generation to come of nothing but trading down. It’s clear now that those prognostications were flawed, not to mention overly pessimistic.

This is not to say that consumers aren’t buying less. Indeed, they are. The drop in discretionary consumer spending from the pre-recession peak to the recessionary trough was 6.9 percent, more than double the next largest post-WW2 decline during the second dip of the early 1980s double-dip recession. Since hitting bottom, spending has been growing, but on a trend line below the pre-recession trajectory. This so-called output gap is the shrinkage in the size of the economy that is playing out most problematically as high, enduring unemployment. Clearly, consumers have cut back.

The proper issue is not whether, but in what way consumers are cutting back. One way in particular is under-appreciated. More than trading down, consumers are trading off. Squeezed by tighter finances, many consumers – most, in fact – are not walking away from the things that matter most. Instead, they are prioritizing those things then trading off everything else to afford them. Brands suffering from trading down have simply done a poor job of making themselves a priority worth trading off to get.