One thing that both these natures of brand have in common: ultimately they depend on the values, integrity and effectiveness of the organization that creates the brand. If the brand is a promise of a level of quality, you can’t break the promise with immunity, especially in a digitally amplified world of blogs, forums and buzz. Each of the “promise” brands I used as examples, GM, United and Microsoft, stand in danger of their promises losing all meaning with customers. A promise is only as good as the level of trust you’ve built with the recipient.

But if the brand is a religion, the culture of the organization becomes even more important. Irrational decision factors run amok: the perceived culture of the organization, how the brand label connects with who we are, the social circles it places us it, or the circles we wish it would place us in, the values the company stands for, the exclusivity of the brand. The brand relationship becomes a complex stew of beliefs and emotions. We only make this investment for brands that hold a unique position in our mindscape. We feel we have to get as much from the brand as we’re willing to give it in terms of our emotional loyalty. And if a brand doesn’t reciprocate, it is quickly downscaled from a religion to a passing fancy.

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“I thought I’d be able to tell the difference, but I couldn’t — I looked at the ingredients and they seemed almost the same,” says 30-year-old Ms. Mills, a stay-at-home mother of two in Ardmore, Okla. On her next shopping trip, “I’m going to buy the store-brand moisturizer and cleanser — it’s less money.”

Many Americans are changing their everyday purchases and abandoning brand loyalty, prompted by the persistent financial pressure of rising food, gasoline and electricity prices. 

Retailers are also sensing more shopper experimentation. This fall, supermarkets Safeway Inc. and Kroger Co. noted that sales of their store brands are on the rise. “In this economy, customers are much more willing to try a private-label item, and we’re seeing signs that this is happening more and more as the year progresses,” Kroger CEO David Dillon said on a conference call.

To be sure, overall sales of name-brand goods are still higher than those of store brands. Still, about 40% of primary household shoppers said they started buying store-brand paper products because “they are cheaper than national brands,” according to a September report by market-research company Mintel International, which interviewed 3,000 consumers. Nearly 25% of respondents reported that it is “really hard to tell the difference” between national brands and store brands of paper products. Store brands on average cost 46% less than name-brand versions, Mintel found.

The above paragraphs are extracted from todays WSJ’s article At the Supermarket Checkout, Frugality Trumps Brand Loyalty .

Crisis provides brands a challenge and an oportunity. Is the time that most of the brands will be put to test by tougher buying conditions or pricing beyond brand as a final buying argument.

It’s the time new brands can made their way up into the consumers minds and benefit later from surviving these harder times.

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Seek out insights:

Outstanding brands identify customer insights. When these insights are shared across cultures they assist in a brand’s adoption globally.

Integrate local intelligence:

Brand guidelines are tremendous tools for ensuring consistency. However, they have been known to impede innovation and diminish relevance. Brands are dynamic, never static, so the management of them must integrate new thought. In the case of global brands, to assume that one message can appeal uniformly to all audiences with equal relevance is unrealistic. Well-managed global brands cull local markets for intelligence related to the ‘next big thing’ to ensure local relevance and to counter competitor’s moves.

The Team:

Global brands demand a global brand management team. This regional and international organisation is in place to maintain brand leadership. Companies with large brand portfolios tend to have separate managers for each brand. Regardless, global brand managers have the authority and resources necessary to implement key decisions based on performance measurement. Global brand management teams implement processes to create, review, and improve brand performance.

Investment:

Intangible assets, including brand, now comprise the majority of the value of a company. These assets require capital investment like any other. Progressive companies and enlightened management recognise the need for appropriate communications spending.

Measurement systems:

In order to sustain a global brand’s long-term position, there must be consistent and widespread brand equity measurement. This will not only help brand development by highlighting and demonstrating best practices, but it will also provide the brand management team with a means of monitoring global consistency.

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The purpose: to highlight to senior executives the importance of paying close attention to their brand’s performance in the online arena.

The method: ranking is based on the number of times the brand’s name appears in leading search engines like Google, Baidu and Technorati, the number of links to the brands website, its reach and Page-rank relevance, and the number of times people express their “love” or “hate” for the brand.

The Top 10 (Interbrand/BusinessWeek position in brackets):

1. Google (38)
2. eBay (55)
3. Apple (41)
4. Amazon.com (68)
5. Disney (7)
6. Yahoo! (58)
7. Microsoft (2)
8. Canon (35)
9. Nokia (6)
10. Sony (28)

The PDF: here

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• Communication medium that conveys image. To take advantage of the inherent strengths of the Web — potentially endless depth and two-way communication — sites must provide content and function that support Brand Image. For example, to back up Apple’s claim to “lead the industry in innovation,” its site must describe the innovative aspects of Apple products and provide standout function like a best-in-class configurator. To reinforce multichannel marketing campaigns, sites also need elements like language, imagery, typography, and layout to be consistent with both the intent of the positioning and the style of ads in other media.

• Delivery channel that enables action. Sites don’t just appear before customers the way television ads do. If a customer sees a home page, it’s because she typed a URL or clicked a link — and that means she arrived with goals like finding specific information, making a purchase or getting service. To avoid frustrating and annoying her — a bad way to build brand — sites must supply the content and function she needs to achieve her goals. For example, customers looking for a low-cost American Express card need content that includes annual fees and APR plus function that lets them apply online. Sites also need navigation that makes it easy to find the content, and they need presentation that makes it easy to consume the content.

The Web’s dual role as an image and action-oriented medium challenges the best of firms. To fulfill the online potential of their brands, Web decision-makers should:

• Build usable sites that won’t frustrate and annoy customers. To design sites that deliver great Brand Action, follow the principles of Scenario Design: Know your users, know their goals, and then use that knowledge to help build streamlined paths from the home page to the goal.
• Create a “brand persona.” User personas — which represent a customer segment as a single human with a name, face, attitudes, and goals — make it easy for companies to focus on the most important needs of their most important customers. To help Web teams focus on the top aspects of their brand positioning, teams should create a parallel document summarizing the key image attributes they need to communicate online. This brand persona shouldn’t try to copy the user persona format by turning the brand into a faux human. Instead, it should borrow relevant elements like a narrative description of the firm’s mission, vision, and values to set context, a logo in lieu of a face, the tagline from the current campaign instead of a user quote, and bulleted lists of the most important benefits, personality characteristics, and desired behaviors.
• Make Brand Image permeate the site. Companies should check every page of their sites during creative reviews — and on an ongoing basis — to ensure that brand positioning attributes are there and that, more importantly, no elements that contradict the positioning are there.
• Conduct full Brand Image reviews on a quarterly basis. Evaluating site Brand Image is a straightforward job. Start with a relevant user goal to direct reviewers to the parts of the site they’ll check and a brand persona to remind them what they’re checking for. Then have reviewers attempt to complete the user goal while checking how well each page supports the positioning summarized by the brand persona. Borrow the Brand Image evaluation criteria from this report, then check your closest competitors against brand personas you derive for them by reading how they describe themselves on their site, in their press releases, and in their annual reports.

See full Forrester Research Study(registration required)

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