Branding Strategy Insider

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 

Brand Strategy: The Rudder That Steers The Ship

In many business organizations, there is still much confusion about the role of strategic brand development and brand management and who within the organization should lead it.

Brand strategy and brand management is too important to be left to marketing people.

That’s my spin on the famous David Packard quote (as in Hewlett Packard) about marketing being too important an activity to the well-being of a business enterprise to be left in the hands of marketing people alone.

Business leaders have notoriously looked at marketing with a critical eye. Marketing is not a “hard discipline” like engineering, sales and finance. Business leaders love quantified activities that facilitate a predictable return. Marketing doesn’t provide predictable returns.

And in today’s social media, permission and privacy driven world, marketing is even more suspect by consumers. Customers want real, authentic connections and engagement to brands, not more marketing and selling.

Brand strategy and brand management is not a sub-discipline of marketing.

As brand strategy and brand management becomes more essential for marketplace success, enlightened business leaders have moved it further away (and upstream) from the core competencies within marketing organizations. 

3 Keys To Building A Competitive Brand Advantage

In many conversations with my client colleagues, hands down, the most important brand building challenges they say they are facing is vision, innovation, and alignment.

No doubt, the stakes for marketplace success are growing ever higher for marketers. Consumers have more choice than their mind’s can process. Against the backdrop of a dicey economy, over-crowded retail channels, and price pressure driving nearly every decision these days, marketers are neck deep and choking on more short-term marketing tactics to sell more stuff.

Few are granted the luxury of stepping back and making big picture assessments with clarity and confidence that the future they are busy creating will matter to anyone by time they get there. Brand building is like riding a bullet train these days. It’s easy to feel like your being left behind. Regardless, I believe it’s a good idea to be looking up and out right now.

In listening to my client colleague’s conversations, here’s my take on what may be the most important areas of focus for many marketing decision-makers and brand managers to pursue their best opportunities now and in the future.

Targeting Your Best Customer Is Just The Start

Targeting your value proposition to the right consumer is a basic marketing function. Knowing where to aim your creativity and money is the essential first step in any productive initiative to grow the value of your brand. Yet as important as defining the right target consumer is for your value proposition, it doesn’t automatically mean that defined segment will engage with your brand. Targeting is a means, not an end.

Brand managers are passionate about targeting! Many use a variety of techniques and methods for defining consumer segments. They know it’s better to generally get the definition of their customer mostly right. Targeting is not an exercise in precision as much as it is having a navigational aid to aim the trajectory of your marketing. It’s worth noting your most perfect and profitable customers most likely will not comprise the largest majority of people who will make up your customer base.  So effective targeting needs to include those consumers who may be just outside the descriptive attributes of your high yield customers.

Like a game of darts, you can score points and win without hitting the bulls eye with each throw.

To gain a comprehensive picture and an actionable perspective on defining your best target consumer profile, consider all these criteria:

Demographics
The basic and fundamental starting point, critical for segmenting the market to identify the highest potential target groups, usually defined by sex, age, household characteristics, occupation, origin, income, and education. The most useful aspect of demographics is these attributes are concrete and without bias.

The Brand Audit: Key For Determining Brand Health

When brands reach the tipping point where sales begin to slide because customers no longer resonate with the brand’s value proposition, it’s time to put your finger on the pulse of your brand and determine the long-term outlook for brand health.

Brands have life cycles. They begin with excitement and promise, enter their growth phase, reach a plateau, and then slowly lose relevance as customers move on to the latest and greatest new thing. This is as natural as life itself. That’s why it’s a good idea to monitor brand health along the way–before sales slip.

Brand managers these days are heads down managing the urgent daily business of the brand. Rarely are they offered the opportunity to step back and make an informed high altitude assessment of brand health.

Completing a brand audit is a chance to take a fresh and objective look at your brand from a number of critical perspectives.

A comprehensive brand audit will often reveal new grow opportunities for your brands, and new ways to make your brand resonate with a new generation of target customers who will represent your brand’s bigger future.

If you believe your brand could use a check up, take the time to make a close examination of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats facing brand health. A comprehensive brand audit will include a thoughtful examination of the following:

Victory At Shelf Requires More Than Words

 
The big battle for packaged goods success has always been at the shelf, and nobody will deny the influence packaging has on winning this battle. But it takes more than words on a label to win.

Right now consumers are shocked and paralyzed, and it shows in their purchase behavior. In response, marketers are in hyper mode tweaking their packaging, discounting their prices and promoting their brands – doing whatever it takes to get their share of a diminishing wallet. Winning at shelf keeps getting tougher.

A case in point.

The inspiration for this post came as a result of a recent conversation with a brand owner (who had experienced early distribution and sales success with their start-up ready-to-drink health beverage line) about the effectiveness of their current packaging to communicate the product benefits to influence purchase.

They were concerned about the descriptive words used to convey the benefits of the product’s attributes. They believed people cared about function, and they wanted to use better words. They believed the words on the label were the cause of a sales slide. They asked us for some advice on how to fix their copywriting problem.

The brand owners could not see the real cause of their sales slide. They were too emotionally invested in what they’ve been doing thus far, even though it was clearly no longer working. They were more interested in “selling tactics” without any deep concern or strategy for connecting with people. The desire for immediate sales was having the opposite effect.

Brand Strategy: Win By Creating New Value

Many marketing people are obsessive about the urgent work of competing rather than the more important work of creating.

Brand owners and managers are busy people! They’re busy everyday in back-to-back-meetings. They’re under increasing pressure to create more revenue, and get more stuff done as cost effectively (cheap) as possible. They’re thinking about supply-chain logistics, product development, pricing, channel strategy, promotions, customer service and their competitors.

Managers are hyper-focused on their marketing ROI– the urgent metrics executive management values most and forms the basis of reward and compensation. It’s easy to see why the focus is on the urgent rather than the important. Only a select few of enlightened marketers are afforded the luxury of paying much attention to the more important work– creating!

One of the important principals we hold near and dear in our brand strategy practice needs to be mentioned:

Tis better to create new value than compete for the value created by others.

Why on earth do really smart people invest tens of millions of dollars bringing me-too products to market?  It makes no sense at all, yet it happens all the time in every product category.

Aligning Brand Values With Customer Values

A business associate recently asked me what I mean when I say that brands can connect with people on a values level. Here are the examples that I shared with him to illustrate the concept.

“The strongest companies/brands often connect with their customers on a values level. Toyota Prius is for people who are progressive, environmentally sensitive and care about "Mother Earth." Mercedes shouts social status and is for people who want to be perceived as having made it in society and the world. Patagonia is for people who love the pristine nature of the wilderness and who are passionate about the sports that they pursue (rock climbing, hiking, kayaking, etc.) in the great outdoors. Nike is for people who perceive themselves as, aspire to be or admire authentic athletic performers. Mini-Cooper is for people who want to be perceived as non-conformists, as being a little bit different or quirky. Fox News is for people who are politically conservative and who believe in a clear right and wrong, the sovereignty of the individual and a diminished/limited role for government. Apple is for smart, innovative, leading-edge, hip people who are a step or two ahead of everyone else. Reed College is for the self-directed, hyper-intellectual liberal student.”

While this may not always hold true, it does for a large portion of these brands’ customers.  So, for instance, some people will say, “I simply bought a Prius because gasoline prices are skyrocketing and it achieves a much higher MPG than most other cars.” However, many others will have purchased a Prius not as a simple spreadsheet exercise to save money but rather to do their part in creating a lighter personal footprint on the earth.

While brands can promise functional, emotional, experiential or self-expressive benefits, those whose values are aligned with their customers’ values are much more likely to achieve a much deeper and longer lasting loyalty.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Communication Gives Brand Marketing Teams The Edge

In the marketing world of we often think of the “brand” as the impression of a product, service, company or person held by existing or potential customers.  Marketers go to great lengths, rigor and sometimes pain-staking efforts to develop a particular brand strategy.  As a result of this due diligence many brands are successful. On the other hand many more brands exist in mediocrity. 

How do great brands become great brands?  There are many factors, some obvious, some not so obvious. Today, I would like to explore the not so obvious.

If you are a leader of a brand team the answer to that question may be found by looking at your communication process. What are the common threads that help lead products to success across verticals?  Simply put it it’s the people that are on the team and their level of commitment to the strategy. For example in the next staff meeting without notice ask your team to write down and then recite the core brand strategy. If they do know the strategy ask them how and why it was developed.  In most cases at least half of the team will not be able to give thoughtful answers to these questions.  That’s because often brand leaders don’t take time to get their team bought in to the strategy.  The cause and effect circumstance is that half the team is rowing the boat at a different cadence or worse yet in a different direction. Leaders often give transactional orders and assignments and then check to see if the assignment has been completed.  If brand managers don’t know why and where their assignment fits into the strategy then the assignment becomes a task without meaning. As a consequence the brand manager starts to play the do the task, hit the deadline to check the box game. 

Ten Qualities Of World-Class Brands

1. Well-known – without awareness, nothing else counts; a brand can’t be in people’s purchase consideration sets unless they are aware of the brand

2. Relevant – the brand must be perceived to be relevant to people’s hopes, needs and desires

3. Differentiated – to stand out among competitive alternatives, the brand must be unique in ways that matter to customers

4. Customer-Centric – only when the brand knows its customers and their needs well, can it deliver exceptional purchase and usage experiences

5. Trustworthy – this implies being honest and authentic, consistent and predictable, reliable and dependable, and always delivering on its promises