Year: 2006

Branding for Your Employees (Too)

Adotas on internal branding:

As with any good marketing effort, it pays to begin by looking at the target audience. No doubt your internal audience has some awareness of your brand. Yet in many companies, especially ones that have recently reinvented themselves, employees may have no idea of what the brand stands for, where the company is going or even how the branded product or solution fits into customers’ lives or businesses. It’s a safe bet that if the employees aren’t sure what the brand essence is, the customers are wondering as well. (The paradox here is that some companies have to ask their customers what the brand stands for before they can move ahead.)

Many companies make fundamental strategic shifts in their businesses and assume that the rank and file will “get it” and “get behind it”. Of course, the reality is that a workforce with a wishy-washy understanding or, worse yet, a misunderstanding of the brand, its essence and its direction, will end up being a drag on company progress.

In the end, companies need to create a clear, consistent image for employees and recruits. The company image projected in the customer and employee marketplace should match up to what new employees experience when they are hired and on the job. The image should be communicated in terms that everyone understands. Letting recruits and employees role-play is a good way to introduce “real life” meaning to the message. Don’t take anything for granted with employees and recruits – communicate with them like customers and turn a buzzword into a powerful workforce enabler!

Read full Buzzwords are Branding Weapons: How Marketers Can Steer Buzz into Big Bucks

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Brand of Power and Power of Brands

Washington Post on brands and power:

Not long ago, the value of a company consisted largely of its “book value”: physical assets such as factories and equipment plus money in the bank. But today book value accounts for only about a third of the stock market capitalization of the top 150 U.S. companies, down from three-quarters two decades ago. In the new economy, corporate value lies in intangible assets: patents, databases, know-how — and brands.

So brands are eclipsing factories in value, and big brands appear to be crowding out smaller ones and reaching all around the world.

As brands have grown bigger, they have also grown more vulnerable. Marketing gurus such as Tom Collinger of the Medill School describe an unnerving revolution: The owners of brands used to sustain them with huge advertising budgets, but now consumers form their views of products in Internet chat rooms. If brands are both valuable and vulnerable, political consequences follow. Mighty companies have so much riding on their corporate image that they quiver in the face of customer opinion. And if they are mass-market companies, customer opinion is the same as public opinion, so corporate bosses become as sensitive to political and social shifts as elected officials.

Full article.

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Branding and Naming – Get the Big Picture

Boston Herald on branding:

What’s in a name?

Just about everything if it identifies your company or organization and tells the public what it can expect from you. Which is why the fin de siecle trend toward re-branding that picked up steam in the late ’90s is unlikely to end any time soon. “Old” businesses and organizations want to sound new. New organizations want to sound cutting-edge. “NYNEX,” after all, is so…20th century.

These days, even mom-and-pop shops are in the business of renaming themselves. Small nonprofits, looking to gin up more support from major donors, are attempting to recast themselves as well.

To be sure, companies […] need to review their logos and their overall graphic identity periodically just to make sure they don’t look outdated. That activity is something else, though — a brand refreshment, if you will, not a true re-branding.

True re-branding involves overhauling a firm’s identity and positioning.

Typically, existing customers, if they are happy with the service you provide, will come along regardless of the name change you make. It’s your prospective customers, that vast universe of potential business growth, that you want to hear from.

Don’t lose sight of your mission. Small nonprofits and small-cap companies can’t afford to give up their hard-won identity in the hope that an ill-considered new name will somehow position them better with their donors and customers.

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The Brand Underground

From the NYTimes on new & young branding and brands:

It is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

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10 Rules of Emotional Branding

Between the old concept of brand awareness and the new concept of Emotional Branding, a dialogue must take place that involves this changing of consumer reality in the decision process and brings a dimension of personalized relationship into the equation.

Here is a list of 10 very important rules of emotional branding from the interesting Mark Gobe’s book Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People:

1. From Consumers To People: Consumers buy, people live.

2. From Product To Experience: Products fulfill needs, experiences fulfill desires.

3. From Honesty To Trust: Honesty is expected. Trust is engaging and intimate. It needs to be earned.

4. From Quality To Preference: Quality for the right price is a given today. Preference creates the sale.

5. From Notoriety To Aspiration: Being known does not mean that you are also loved!

6. From Identity To Personality: Identity is recognition. Personality is about character and charisma!

7. From Function To Feel: The functionality of a product is about practical or superficial qualities only. Sensorial design is about experiences.

8. From Ubiquity To Presence: Ubiquity is seen. Emotional presence is felt.

9. From Communication To Dialogue: Communication is telling. Dialogue is sharing.

10. From Service To Relationship: Service is selling. Relationship is acknowledgment.

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Small Business and Branding

Branding weekend food for thought:

Karen Post, author of Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick in Your Customers’ Minds

Your brand is not your logo or tagline, but the sum of what your business does every day. It’s what the market thinks, feels, and expects from you.

If you want to make the buyer’s choice easy and finish first, you’ve got to be truly distinct and communicate those attributes on all touch points every day.

Bill Schley, author of Why Johnny Can’t Brand: Rediscovering the Lost Art of the Big Idea

Small businesses can do this better than giant corporations, because they have the passion for their business, an understanding of their business, and live or die for it. There are no layers of bureaucracy between them and a great brand idea, like in big organizations

From SmallBizResource.com

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Best Global Brands by Value – 2006

The previously announced Interbrand & BusinessWeek 2006 Best Global Brands by brand value is finally out with no major movements in the top 10.

Brand value is calculated as the net present value of the earnings the brand is expected to generate and secure in the future for the time frame from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. To be considered the brands must have a minimum brand value of US$2.7 billion, achieve about one third of their earnings outside of their home country, have publicly available marketing and financial data, and have a wider public profile beyond their direct customer base.

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Trump’s 10 Commandments of Branding

Don Sexton, co-author along with the more famous Donald Trump of Trump University Marketing 101: How to Use the Most Powerful Ideas in Marketing to Get More Customers have an interesting free White paper on 10 Commandments of Branding:

Commandment 1: Establish a Clear Brand Position
A brand position is a clear, unambiguous statement that communicates what your company stands for and what it offers. You should choose one or two benefits that make up your brand position. These are the key benefits that your target market cares about and that you have the capabilities to produce. Why one or two? Because people generally can’t remember more than that.

Commandment 2: Build Your Brand on an Emotional Benefit
Your goal is to find an emotional benefit that is far superior to that of your competitors and to associate that benefit with your brand. In other words, you want to own that benefit.

Commandment 3: Build Your Brand as Early as Possible
If you don’t build your brand as quickly as possible, someone else may take the position that you want.

Commandment 4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets
Marketing strategies need to focus on the attributes of the product or service so that they are effectively positioned in the marketplace. Brand strategies must do that too, but a branding strategy must also focus on the associations and identifiers.

Commandment 5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position
You want all the touch-points in your company to reflect your brand. For example, if your brand is built on “friendliness,” everything in your company must embody that, from the employees to the logo to the company lobby.

Commandment 6: Make Sure All Your Products and Services Embody Your Brand
If you come up with a brand position and your product or service doesn’t embody it, your brand will have no credibility and will quickly fail.

Commandment 7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position
If your product or service embodies your brand and your customers don’t know it, it’s useless. You must always remind customers of what you do well, and then remind them again.

Commandment 8: Don’t Dilute Your Brand
Once you have established a clear brand position, don’t dilute it. What this means is that you shouldn’t keep extending your brand or adding to it indefinitely. If you extend it, you might actually hurt it. In particular, you should never extend your brand to products and services where customers won’t let it go. Remember, branding is about what customers will let you do.

Commandment 9: Always Monitor Your BrandYou need to continually monitor your brand position to make sure it remains relevant to your customers. Trends change. Your brand needs to change with them.

Commandment 10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organization’s Most Valuable Asset
Maintaining your brand involves everything we have talked about in this report. It means maintaining consistency, communicating and monitoring. It means putting Commandments 1-9 into practice every single day

Download full PDF file here.

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5 Reasons to Brand A City

Paris is romance, Milan is style, New York is energy, Washington is power, Tokyo is modernity, Lagos is corruption, Barcelona is culture, Rio is fun. These are the brands of cities, and they are inextricably tied to the histories and destinies of all these places.

Branding is a tool that can be used by cities to define themselves and attract positive attention in the midst of an international information glut. Unfortunately, there is the common misconception that branding is simply a communications strategy, a tagline, visual identity or logo. It is much, much more. It is a strategic process for developing a long-term vision for a place that is relevant and compelling to key audiences. Ultimately, it influences and shapes positive perceptions of a place.

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