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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Marketing a Strong Nonprofit Brand

Laura Ries has run a list of 7 important things to consider when building a brand for the non-profit organizations:

1. The name
2. The spokesperson
3. The position
4. The enemy
5. PR, PR, PR
6. A signature event
7. Color and logo

What is your (personal) brand worth?

David Sandusky has an interesting list of questions people should ask themselves when they’re evaluating their own personal brands. What about you? What is your personal brand worth? How do people feel when dealing with you? Do they think of you when looking for an expert in your space? Do people hear from you only when you need something like a job; or are you making networking deposits regularly.

More, he has a 4 steps strategy to define and maintain a personal brand:

1. Define yourself
2. Understand your environment
3. Formulate a career and brand strategy
4. Execution

Branding to further boost economy

China plans to further boost its world economic status through branding.

“Branding is a decisive factor in the world’s economic development, and in some cases, an established world brand’s overall value is even bigger than that of a middle-sized country,” said Sun Bo, director of the quality management department of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, yesterday.

China now has seven products with six brands that are famous worldwide – Haier refrigerators and washing machines, Huawei programmed control switchboards, Zhongxing programmed control switchboards, Zhenhua container cranes, Gree air-conditioners and Sunshine worsted woollens.

The sales volume of the products ranks among the top five in their world markets.

“We will still have to make them even more recognized worldwide,” Sun said. He said the bureau would help enterprises upgrade quality insurance, measuring and testing systems, and encourage them to apply international rules and standards.

More here.

Seven Steps to Building a Strong Brand

1. Develop your benchmark.
2. Compare your organization to the various competitive choices available to your target market.
3. Analyze your SWOT.
4. Focus on the Opportunities.
5. Identify your message.
6. Time & Money. Layout the timetable. Identify your budget components.
7. Implement the branding tactics.

via

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Most businesspeople agree that good planning is essential for success. Even so, it’s surprising how many companies don’t create a thorough plan to generate and manage their customers.

1. Start with your annual goals
2. Highlight your competitive position, value proposition and brand strategy
3. Outline any plans for your products & services
4. Outline your major marketing campaigns
5. Develop your tactical sales plan
6. Develop a budget
7. Revisit your plan regularly

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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.

No related posts.

What better way to honor the brash origins of this city, the owners of Houston’s new professional soccer franchise reasoned, than to name their team “Houston 1836,” a nod to the year when two entrepreneurial brothers from New York arrived here to build a city atop the swampy bayous of southeast Texas.

Many Latinos in Houston, though, greeted the unveiling of the team’s name this week with a shudder. Eighteen thirty-six also happens to be the year that a group of English-speaking interlopers waged a war of secession that resulted in Mexico’s loss of Texas, ushering in more than a century of violence and discrimination against Mexicans in the state.

Read full article here. (via)

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Seven rules for marketing and brand building, based on a fundamental for entrepreneurial success, are now essential for compelling customers to embrace your brand.

Embrace 3-D marketing

Entrepreneurs are obsessed with building lasting, face-to-face relationships, a principle that only 3-D marketers can leverage to full advantage. 3-D marketing—encompassing events, exhibits, displays, merchandising, premiums, target market research, prospect follow-up and much more—enables marketers to truly “touch” their customers in ways that traditional mass marketing does not. It’s the most powerful tool in the marketing arsenal for creating customer relationships and building brand image on a face-to-face basis.

Make ROI your mantra

Entrepreneurs are notoriously impatient to maximize the return on every investment they make. Amazingly, in the world of 3D marketing, executives often forgo measuring ROI until called to the carpet — and by then, they have no assurance that they are looking at meaningful indicators of brand participation or brand loyalty.

Dive into your industry

Stellar entrepreneurs study their target industries in minute detail, zero in on the marketplace needs they’re uniquely positioned to fill, and develop brands that showcase their added value. Do you know what your brand is, what it isn’t, and what it needs to be? How should you be promoting your brand so that it resonates with a changing marketplace of prospects and buyers?

Focus resources through end-to-end planning

In the new world of 3-D marketing, you must champion end-to-end planning processes—beginning with market research and message development, graduating to creative conceptualization and implementation, and ending with customer follow-up and results measurement. As part of your marketing effort, you should be spearheading an end-to-end planning approach for each one.

Remember the vision

Entrepreneurs are “big idea” people with a compelling vision and the drive to see it through. Too often, marketing executives lose their dedication to understanding their corporation’s vision and strategy—and advancing them through several integrated tactics with a common set of underlying messages.

Seek new paradigms for achieving teamwork and synergy

The teambuilding spirit typical of entrepreneurs is a requirement for marketers, who should be taking it to the next level. Do you, for instance, organize on-site “pep-rally briefings” of your sales team just before major events—reinforcing the brand messages most likely to draw customers in? While sales would normally lead these meetings, your intimate branding knowledge should be compelling you to initiate this out-of-the-box approach.

Honor the team members

Like entrepreneurs, you depend on your team to help you shine. Learn to nurture and empower the people who work with you every day—encouraging them to take your ideas further, to continually focus on overall returns, and to develop new approaches. As the rules for brand-building success take a dramatic turn, you’ll need their talents to help you capitalize on future opportunities—and to maintain the luster of your brand.

via MarketingProfs.

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