Think of your brand as a promise … a promise you make to your clients, prospects, employees, and even your vendors. But before you make that promise, be sure you never forget this fact. It is imperative that you are able to back it up. You cannot build a successful, long-term brand on unsupported claims and wishful thinking. History is littered with companies — big and small — that have promoted themselves or their products as something they would like to have lived up to but could not.

To separate you from your competition, your brand — your promise — has to differentiate you from others in the minds of your prospects. This is the reason you cannot use quality, integrity, or price when positioning yourself in your marketplace. So many companies claim to offer these particular characteristics that none of them stand out from the others. BMW has taken note of this. Although it is thought by many to be the best car made, the company has built its brand as “a driving machine.” It sells the experience. BMW knows that there are other high quality cars on the market, so a brand built on quality would be diluted and therefore, less profitable.

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The most important elements of a brand should be:

Brand Position

• Who is addressed by company’s branded products or services. What the company does and for whom
• The company’s unique value and how customers benefit from products and/or services
• Key competitive differentiators, what makes the brand be chosen, be different from its competitors

Brand Promise

• The ONE most important thing that the brand promises to deliver to its customers — Every time!
• What customers and partners should expect from every interaction, how should they feel as brand’s customers

Brand Personality

• What the brand is to be known for
• Personality traits that customers, partners, and employees use to describe the company. What comes to the (potential) customer’s mind when addressed about the brand

Brand Story

• The company’s history and how the history adds value and credibility to the brand
• A summary of products/services/solutions

Brand Associations

• Physical artifacts: name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery
• Ideally, it must reflect the all the above statements about the brand and the company

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Product extensions, on the other hand, are versions of the same parent product that serve a segment of the target market and increase the variety of an offering. An example of a product extension is Coke vs. Diet Coke

A successful brand helps a company enter new product categories more easily.

Brand extension benefits:

• Brand extensions let a marketer take a brand with well-known quality perceptions and associations and put it on a brand in a new category. Not only can marketers capitalize on brand awareness, they can also leverage off of the associations consumers know about the parent brand.
• Second, consumers who favorably evaluate a parent brand are more willing to try and adopt the brand extension than an unfamiliar brand in the same category. They trust a known brand name.
• Brand extensions can also help a firm’s stock prices. Some academic research has found that Wall Street attend to brand extension announcements and that whether they like them or not depends on how much they like the parent band.
• Brand extensions can also help consumers understand the core meaning of the brand name.

One of the principal dangers of brand extension is that the parent brand equity may be diluted. If there is a misunderstanding of consumers’ perception of the brand, it could be moved into a sector that consumers view as “inappropriate.” Quite often the parent brand will have been available for some time, enabling it to build a level of equity and trust with consumers. It will have strong credentials. Over time, its marketing has sought to build and secure these credentials within its target market. An irrelevant positioning has the ability to undermine the parent’s credentials.

TippingSprung’s second annual survey of brand extensions, produced in collaboration with marketing newsweekly Brandweek, revealed which extensions are most effective, which have potential to dilute the brand, and what makes some brands more extendible than others. Major trends in brand extensions were also uncovered.

The Top Brand Extensions.

• best overall brand extension – Iams pet insurance
• best liquor brand extension – Starbucks coffee liqueur
• best co-branding/ingredient branding – The Motorola ROKR phone with iTunes
• best extension of a magazine onto new platform – hardcover books from O, the Oprah magazine
• most overdue brand extendion – The Tide to Go stain removal pen
• best furniture brand extension – Antiques Roadshow
• best extension of a not-for-profit – National Geographic

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The experts cited understanding of Customer/Target frequently. This mirrors the finding in this report that metrics and brand research are key tools. Communication and Creative effectiveness were also frequently mentioned as critical aspects of successful branding.

These open-ended responses provide a useful counterpoint to the other findings in this report. They reflect the classic tenets of branding and marketing, which are focused on knowing the customer, maintaining a consistent brand in the marketplace, and delivering winning content and creative.

study says.

Here is the list of the top 10 aspects of successful branding, as resulted from the study:

1. Consistency (36.0%)
2. Understanding of Customer/Target (18.2%)
3. Message/Communication (14.7%)
4. Creative/Design/Brand ID (12.8%)
5. Relevance (12.4%)
6. Differentiation/Uniqueness (12.0%)
7. Key Stakeholder Buy-In (10.9%)
8. Positioning (9.7%)
9. Clarity (8.9%)
10. Connection to Customer/Target (8.9%)

Read the study here.

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Every day we are bombarded by millions of messages. They’re everywhere, from print media to highway billboards, local supermarkets, public phone booths, our mailboxes, radios and television sets.

Add to that the explosive growth of the internet and the new communication opportunities this medium presents, and today’s business owner or manager has a near-impossible task at hand; making his or her message stand out among the noise generated by others.

Next the article is presenting the 5 key strategies for a competitive visual identity (logo) as the first of the two crucial components of branding:

1. Be unique
2. Instantly communicate the nature of the business, product, or service.
3. Be appealing to the target audience
4. Be able to withstand the test of time
5. Be able to work in context of all potential communications’ media

The second and equally important component of branding is a verbal one. It is often referred to as a slogan, tagline or a positioning statement.

1. Be as unique as the company logo
2. Be brief and memorable
3. Be honest

Read more here.

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Here is a list of 9 things that should be taken in consideration when naming a new business or product:
1. The Name Achieves Differentiation From Competition – your name should be different from the competition, as should your messaging.
2. The Name Reinforces Positioning in Marketplace – a name should make an impact and should bring forth some sense of the company’s position as it enters the marketplace.

3. The Name Engages Customer or Prospect – it should be something that causes interest, causes inquiry and causes potential for action.

4. The Name Is unforgettable – it should embed itself in the collective consciousness, tie to mental signposts in the consumer’s brain and help the consumer remember the name when speaking to friends.

5. The Name Has a Life of It’s Own – A company name needs to carry a self-sustaining message, something that identifies what the company does or provides, without additional messaging or clarity being added.

6. The Name Evokes Deep Well For Graphical Images – it helps develop a logo, and design for websites, etc.

7. The Name Rises Above the Goods and Services You Provide – it should have a greater, more encompassing edge than the things you provide – because if it is tied to services or products, and they change, your name might well need to, also.

8. The Name Has What It Takes to Dominate the Category – this comes from the idea of timelessness, of speaking to the consumer in an unforgettable way, but it also goes above and beyond that.

9. Url has to be Available for Registration For Web Address- extremely important issue in today’s time and age of the internet.

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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.

Here is the list with 2006 top 10 standings:
Rank Brand Brand Value ($m)
1(1) Coca-Cola 67,000
2(2) Microsoft 56,927
3(3) IBM 56,201
4(4) GE 48,907
5(5) Intel 32,319
6(6) Nokia 30,131
7(9) Toyota 27,941
8(7) Disney 27,848
9(8) McDonald’s 27,501
10(11)Mercedes 21,795

Top Gainers
The top gainer with a brand value increase of 46%, Google (#24) creates growth under with the strategy of “do no evil” positioning itself at the opposite end of the spectrum from the more corporate Microsoft. Overall growth of Internet commerce has perpetuated consumers’ acceptance of purchasing goods and services online enabling eBay (#47) to skyrocket in value up 18% and the third highest gainer this year.

In the second spot with a value increase of 20%, Starbucks (#91) has found financial success by leveraging the brand with a premium fast food and extending its product offering into music and publishing.

Top Decliners
The growth of mass retailers has taken market share from traditional apparel brands such as Gap (#52). Losing the most brand value with a decline of -22%, Gap has been unable to clarify its brand image and with a less distinct positioning the brand has been less effective at selling clothing causing reduced long-term stability.

Ford (#30) continues to lose money on every car sold – and brand value year after year. Down -16% this year, Ford’s American heritage is an insufficient brand attribute to hold off growing competition from Japanese and German automakers.

Down -12% this year, Kodak (#70) has made valiant strides to catch up with the digital world, however the reality is that competition is fierce and profitability is thin compared to Kodak’s film business and thus the brand’s value continues to decline.

Last year Best Global Brands by Value for 2005

Further readings on this:
Interbrand’s press release

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Myth #1: Size doesn’t matter.
Yes, it does. Shorter is better in everything from memorability to packaging.

Myth #2: There are no words left to steal from the dictionary.
Not true. Your speaking vocabulary may only be 30,000 words, but a hefty dictionary will yield 750,000 words

Myth #3: Coining a new word is easy.
But the trick is to create a new name that is meaningful, impactful and starts the positioning process for the brand or company.

Myth #4: Manufactured names are all the same.
A made-up name might be a simple fusion of two easily recognized words, it might be an altered form of a recognizable word or it might be a foreign word that some people would recognize

Myth #5: Customers will take our name literally.
Good names are suggestive. They are bundles of possible meanings. They are not contractual commitments.

Read the full 5 Myths about Brand Names

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1. Quality positioning
2. Value positioning
3. Feature-driven positioning
4. Relational positioning
5. Aspiration positioning
6. Problem/solution positioning
7. Rivalry-based positioning
8. Warm and fuzzy positioning
9. Benefit-driven positioning

Positioning is an act of seeking, placing and optimizing something in relation to the competition in surrounding environment and is based on customer-company-competitor relationship triangle. In order to move up the ladder in the customer mind, management must follow the rules of positioning. Basic qualities of brand positioning include:

Relevance: Positioning of brand must focus on benefits that are important to people or reflect the character of the product.

Clarity: Brand should be positioned in such a way that it is easy to communicate and quick to comprehend.

Distinctiveness: In current market situation there are reasonably good number of players vying for a share in the market, forcing them to compete on the basis of price or promotion. To overcome such a situation, company needs to offer distinctiveness in its products or services.

Coherence: A brand should speak with one voice through all the elements of the marketing mix.

Commitment: Management should be committed to the position it has adopted. Once a position is adopted, it takes commitment to see it through.

Patience: Patience plays an important role in the success of brand as branding is not a one-day wonder – it takes years to position a brand in consumers’ mind.

Courage: Adopting a strong brand position requires courage as it is much easier to defend an appeal rather than generate sales pitch.

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Appearance – Simply how the name looks as a visual signifier, in a logo, an ad, on a billboard, etc.

Distinctive – How differentiated is a given name from its competition. Being distinctive is only one element that goes into making a name memorable, but it is a required element, since if a name is not distinct from a sea of similar names it will not be memorable.

Depth – Layer upon layer of meaning and association. Names with great depth never reveal all they have to offer all at once, but keep surprising you with new ideas.

Energy – How vital and full of life is the name? Does it have buzz? Can it carry an ad campaign on its shoulders?

Humanity – A measure of a name’s warmth, its “humanness,” as opposed to names that are cold, clinical, unemotional. Another – though not foolproof – way to think about this category is to imagine each of the names as a nickname for one of your children.

Positioning – How relevant the name is to the positioning of the product or company being named, the service offered, or to the industry served.

Sound – Again, while always existing in a context of some sort or another, the name will be heard, in radio or television commercials, being presented at a trade show, or simply being discussed in a cocktail party conversation.

“33″ – The force of brand magic, and the word-of-mouth buzz that a name is likely to generate. Refers to the mysterious “33″ printed on the back of Rolling Rock beer bottles for decades that everybody talks about because nobody is really sure what it means. “33″ is that certain something that makes people lean forward and want to learn more about a brand, and to want to share the brand with others. The “33″ angle is different for each name.

Trademark – As in the ugly, meat hook reality of trademark availability. All of the names on this list have been prescreened by a trademarked attorney and have been deemed “likely” for trademark registration.

Read more about it here

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