Branding Strategy Insider

Nurturing Creativity For Stronger Brands

Business leaders have been heavily leaning on terminology like “design thinking” to define and quantify the process for innovation. It doesn’t matter what you call the process, what we all desire is more creativity. Creativity is elusive.

Most of us don’t understand creativity, but all of us appreciate it. Marketers spend all their energy seeking creative solutions to the challenge of building enduring and successful brands. Creating innovative products and brands people can’t get enough of is an elusive reality for many businesses – yet innovation happens everyday all over the world. 

Knowing that innovation is happening everywhere, and not wanting to be left behind, most enterprises want to be really good at innovation if they are to create a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This is where the organizational discipline of “design thinking” comes in play. It’s a trendy term that implies a higher value method for delivering creativity and innovation. It’s jargon. 

Innovation is radical not incremental

Radical innovation is what happens when something unexpected shows up, and it just happens to be something people where waiting for – just not asking for– like Facebook, the Swiffer, and an iPad. Every one of these innovations was not based on user needs. Radical innovation is not about function and form, but about function and meaning – never driven by users.

Building Winning Brands: Summarized

We've spent the past few months exploring the sixteen things that you must do to create a winning brand.

You can find a summary of each here. Let's take another look...

1.    Brands are personifications of organizations, products, services and experiences and they are the  source of relationships.
2.    Top management support is crucial to a brand’s success.
3.    A brand’s identity must be frequently and consistently presented.
4.    Profound customer knowledge is essential to building winning brands.
5.    The brand and its products and services must exceed customer expectations.
6.    Brand building begins with awareness.
7.    Relevant differentiation drives customer brand insistence.
8.    A brand should strive to evoke emotions and create sensory experiences.
9.    A brand should exhibit admirable human qualities.
10.    A brand must stand for something.
11.    Constant product and service innovation build strong brands.
12.    A brand should strive to create a sense of community.
13.    The corporate culture must reinforce the brand essence, promise and personality.
14.    Internal brand building is essential to external brand building.
15.    Front line employees are key to a brand’s success.
16.    Co-creating a brand with its customers will help the brand continue to thrive.

If you implement each of these 16 concepts in your organization, I guarantee you that your brand will win in its marketplace.

You will know that your brand is winning in the marketplace when…

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The Sixteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is creating a sense of community builds emotional connections and loyalty. Communities also facilitate add-on sales. Online, this can be accomplished through Web 1.0 & 2.0 techniques: •Directories (with hypertext links to specific pages on other sites) •Message Boards. They are more cost effective and more controllable than chat rooms. •Chat Rooms •Surveys/reviews •Daily tips, tricks or rules of thumb •Daily quotes (especially related to the website or blog’s main topic) •Personal user lists kept on your site •Guest books •Matching people with like interests (search and browse techniques) •Custom published web magazines •Extranet sections (password protected areas for clients/members with value added services) •Online events •Featuring regularly updated news headlines on topics related to the site’s purpose •Searchable library of articles by subject matter experts •Become a portal site – that is, an entry site for people looking for information and links on a particular topic.

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The Fifteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is your brand must stand for something. Nike stands for “authentic athletic performance.” Ritz Carlton is all about “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” The Nature Conservancy intends to “save the last great places” on earth. Patagonia is committed to serving people who love the wild country and the outdoor adventures that it provides. If you aren’t convinced, visit their web site. What does your brand stand for?

In building its Gold Crown store brand, Hallmark created an advertising campaign that communicated that if a person shops Hallmark Gold Crown stores, you can be sure that he or she is nice. One such ad features employees conjecturing about a new boss who was rumored to be tough. People changed their minds about her when they saw her walking to her office with a Hallmark Gold Crown shopping bag. This is called “branding as a badge.” An even better example of this is Harley-Davidson owners who wear the company logo as a tattoo. Another example is farmers who wear Pioneer Hi-Bred International or International Harvester ball caps. Do your customers proudly don your company’s logo?

Sponsored By: Harvard Business School Press

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The fourteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that co-creating your brand with your customers is a powerful thing. Harley-Davidson executives are masters at this.  They attend – and ride in – HOG rallies, talk with their customers at those rallies, observe new product accessories and debrief every HOG rally back at the office for new product ideas and other action items.  Today’s Internet technology makes it much easier to have real-time dialogs with your customers and to alter your approach to serving them.

The concept of co-optition broadens this concept to all of an organization’s partners. This competitive strategy recognizes the value of viewing the marketplace not as a “zero sum game” in which your gain is always someone else’s loss but rather as a place in which value can be created by discovering mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations that would traditionally have been considered competitors.

This approach recognizes that organizations become stronger the more value-generating relationships that they forge.  We believed in and extensively practiced this approach at Element K.
 
•We provided our content/courses to Learning Management System vendors. 
•We offered our Learning Management System to organizations that wanted to host other companies’ content. 
•We actually private labeled our entire e-Learning solution to organizations that wanted to compete with Element K in the e-Learning space. 
•We provided referrals to online degree granting schools in return for their referrals to us for continuing education.
 
And the list could go on and on.  Suffice it to say that most of our competitors were also our business partners in one-way or another.  This approach offers numerous advantages for the company that pursues it:

•Value-added exchange of information (latest product/service features, competitive information, industry trends, etc.)
•A cooperative relationship with your competitors
•More business referrals

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

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The thirteenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that brands are personifications of organizations, products, services and experiences.  In this way, they are the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty.  Let me tell you a story that illustrates the point.

Imagine you are having lunch with a long-time and very good friend. Several times throughout the lunch, she makes disparaging and sarcastic remarks that make you feel bad. You think to yourself, “This just isn’t like her. She must be having a bad day.” You meet with her again a week or two later, and again she acts ornery and negative. You think to yourself, “Something must be going on in her life that she’s really struggling with.  Maybe she is having difficulties with her job or her health or her marriage or her children.” You may even ask her if everything is all right. She snaps back, “Of course it is.”

Your interaction with her continues in this vein over the next couple of months. You continue to try to be supportive, but she’s definitely getting on your nerves. After many meetings and much interaction, you finally decide that she’s a changed person and someone with whom you prefer to spend less and less time. You may get to this point after a few months, or perhaps even after a year or more. She doesn’t change, and eventually the relationship peters out.

Now consider for a moment that the person you first had lunch with was the same person as before, with one exception:

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The twelfth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that front line employees are key to a brand’s success.

At the Institute for International Research’s December 1999 Brand Masters Conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Sixtus Oechsle, Manager, Corporate Communications & Advertising, Shell Oil Company, indicated that in a study of sources of brand favorability, Shell Oil found that interaction with company employees had the greatest impact (much greater than brand ads or news) on brand favorability.

At which point in the customer process do you think McDonald’s “moment of truth” occurs?  How much control does McDonald’s have over that point?  How well trained and paid are the employees that deliver that “moment of truth”?  How much turnover occurs in those ranks?

Does the person answering your 1-800 number know what the brand stands for?  How about the in-store sales associate?  The copywriter for your brand catalog?  The person developing a brand promotion?  The people who design the brand’s products?

Front line employees are critical to a brand’s success.  Are your front line employees helping or hurting your brand?

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

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The eleventh most important thing to know about building winning brands is that the corporate culture must reinforce the brand positioning. 

As I mentioned earlier, The Conference Board found this to be one of the most important contributors to brand strategy success.  Brand management pioneer, David Aaker posed the following very important question when he visited Hallmark several years ago: “Until everyone from your CEO to your receptionist can accurately and consistently articulate your brand’s promise, how do you expect your customers to?” At the Institute for International Research’s The Branding Trilogy conference in Santa Barbara, California, Kristine Shattuck, Los Angeles Area Marketing Manager, Southwest Airlines put it well when she said, “Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers.  Market to your employees as much as your customers.  If your employees don’t ‘get it,’ neither will your customers.”

Hiring employees whose personalities and values match those intended of the brand will ensure that the brand experience is consistently delivered as intended.  Hiring employees who are category enthusiasts ensures knowledge, passion, credibility and the ability to communicate more easily with customers and potential customers.  It also helps you tap into customer networks more easily.  This is important across functions – from product development, sales and customer service to marketing research, quality control and senior management.  For example, Oakley looks for employees who have a serious interest in sport.  Southwest Airlines hires people for their sense of humor and positive attitude.   Virgin Atlantic also hires people based on their congruence with company values.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

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The Tenth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that internal brand building is one of the hottest topics in brand management today.

One of the most difficult tasks in brand management is transforming the organization from one that does not understand the scope or importance of brand management to one that embraces and actively builds the brand as a critically important source of sustainable competitive advantage.  Key to this transformation is the organization’s brand promise.

The following comment is typical of what I hear from marketing executives at more and more companies these days: “We conducted exhaustive consumer research.  We carefully positioned our brand.  We developed and instituted comprehensive brand identity standards and systems.  We are running our new advertising campaign.  Now what do we do?  How do we get the rest of the organization to understand and care about the brand and its promise?  How do we get the organization to deliver on the promise?  How do we make the brand promise real?”  These questions pose a particularly difficult problem for large, decentralized organizations.

Certainly, the brand promise drives your marketing communication and your brand identity standards and systems.  But it must do much more than that.  Your products and services, every point of contact your brand makes with consumers and the total consumer experience your brand creates must reinforce your brand’s promise.  This has tremendous organizational implications – from alignment with organization mission and vision, HR systems (such as recruitment, training and performance management) and internal communication to operational systems, resource allocation and strategic planning.

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The ninth most important thing to know about building winning brands is that while brands are not products or services and products or services are not brands, a strong brand requires strong brand management and constant product and service innovation. 

Imagine how difficult it must have been for Kodak to enter the digital photography business given the vast array of plants, equipment and other assets it has traditionally devoted to chemical-based photography.  Blue Mountain Art’s more aggressive entry into online greeting cards (all cards were free when they launched their web site) leapfrogged it ahead of Hallmark Cards and American Greetings in the digital space.  I bet Smith Corona would have defined itself as a “word processing” company if they had it to do over again.

The marketplace is too competitive for you not to try to constantly reinvent yourself.  Maintain a significant pool of resources to invest in new ideas.  Award the resources based upon projected incremental sales and return on investment.  Hold frequent ideation and creative problem solving sessions.

Pursue each of the following approaches to new business development:

•identify gaps in your product/service portfolio (for the category as currently defined)
•identify current consumers’ unsatisfied needs
•address emerging consumer needs
•expand the definition of your brand’s category
•exploit an expanded brand identity
•exploit channel opportunities (new distribution)
•apply new technologies
•target new consumer groups