Connecting with consumers is the key skill essential for building stronger brand bridges. It requires an end-consumer orientation for evaluating everything you do, meaning that the brand planner must become the in-house consumer advocate, always taking the consumer perspectives in meetings, evaluating how all new products and ideas might be perceived and better leveraged to enhance ideal brand perception and performance.
It’s nearly impossible to escape the pervasive influence that brands have on our lives. In the broadest sense, brands constitute organizing mechanisms to help us navigate through each consumer day. What we drink, eat, or drive, what products we use at home and at work, where we play or vacation, where we live, what we watch, what we read, and even who we interact with, and how, are often choices informed by or shaped by...
A business model consists of four things. First, it’s a description of how you make money, as it tells why and how your customers pay for your products and services. But even more important, a business model provides an experience, and that experience is essential to what people pay for. The difference between Saks Fifth Avenue and Walmart isn’t just the quality of the merchandise and the prices, it’s the way a customer feels because...
The majority of today’s advertising is still based on push marketing tactics, especially price discounting to incent consumers to buy. Push marketing sometimes works to move products off the shelf in the short term, but push marketing is not a brand building strategy.
Innovation should be a top priority for every organization, and today I want to shine a light on one of the most innovative and creative leaders in business history, Walt Disney. Could you learn anything from Disney? Nike CEO Phil Knight thought so, and while I was the Director of Brand Planning and Marketing Insights at Nike, he directed me to study Disney’s business practices to see if we could discover anything of use to...
