Brand Growth

I’ve spent the past few days contacting experienced marketing professionals in the professional services industries to ask how they measured the value of thought leadership to their firm’s financial performance and I heard an extraordinary number of tactical responses that covered web metrics (e.g. page views), social media (e.g. sentiment analysis), mindshare (e.g. media mentions), sales (e.g. CRM metrics counting client meetings, usage in proposals, etc.) and loads of anecdotal evidence (e.g. stories about clients talking about their thought leadership at board meetings).

Before I go any further, I must make an important distinction. This article concerns driving a brand’s growth within an existing category. As such, it is likely to return less growth than launching a brand into a country with a fast-growing economy or extending an existing brand into a completely new category. However, most marketers still need to fight for market share and to do so successfully should bear these ten actions in mind.

When strategically executed, extending the brand via licensing is a well-proven growth strategy. Brand Licensing enables:

The classical economic perspective holds that perfectly competitive markets are characterized by undifferentiated products sold based only on price. Any departure from such a characterization is viewed as evidence of an imperfect market. This view of markets has given rise to strategic thinking that focuses on the identification of market imperfections and the creation of structural barriers to market entry and the creation of supply-side competitive advantage.

If we’ve learned anything from the wrenching changes in society in recent years, it’s this: Business as usual is a losing proposition. The implications go well beyond culture—they hold profound meaning for commerce, as well.