In an era of slow growth, tight margins, and fckle consumers, the key to success is to differentiate. One critical element in successfully differentiating is communicating that difference to consumers. Hence, branding will require special attention from retailers who want to stand out from the crowd. 

Aside from specialty apparel and luxury retailers, branding has not always been seen as important for retailers—especially those that sell food and other mass products. Yet for these retailers, branding has never been more important. 

Today’s most successful retailers typically have one of two attributes. First, there are those with the most effcient supply chains, which translates into lowest costs and prices. However, there are those retailers that do not attempt to match low-price leaders and have succeeded by managing their brands and demonstrating to consumers why they are different.

Read all Deloitte reports on retail in 2009 here

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But, there are some branding constants that will remain critical for establishing and maintaining brand awareness with your target audience. Regardless of the medium chosen for distribution, you must:

• Ensure your brand promise is clear. Be simple, be direct, and by all means, be consistent.
• Focus on creating a well-conceived brand name. Even the cleverest branding strategy will fall flat if the name you seek to brand is poorly conceived.
• Understand the competition. No one operates in a vacuum. While originality is important, it’s critical to be aware of your competitors’ branding strategies.
• Set branding goals. You can’t very well determine your success if you don’t have a benchmark against which to measure it. Know where you want to go and when you want to get there.
• Remain committed yet flexible. Branding success doesn’t occur overnight; it takes commitment to maintain focus and build loyalty. But that doesn’t mean strategy changes might not be necessary along the way, so be open to tweaking your approach as necessary.

Read more in the Entrepreneur.com article Branding Trends: Delivery Channels Take the Lead

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Lacoste has coming roaring back from obscurity to become one of the hottest sports/apparel brands around. The company’s US sales grew in the US of 1000% in 5 years. Not bad for a brand that was once languishing under General Mills’s ownership.

What can other brands learn from Lacoste’s comeback?

1. History Can Be Made Relevant to Today
2. If You Have an Iconic Identity, Use It
3. Seize Relevant Trends
4. Don’t Be Scared to Innovate
5. Patience Pays
6. Scarcity Adds Value

Read the full InfluxStyle article: 6 Reasons Behind a Brand Comeback- Learning From Lacoste

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The basic concept of branding will definetly remain unchanged — to create an emotional attachment between the consumer and a product — but the near future (or should I say present?) will demand from branding to adapt to consumers high demand for specialized – peronalized – customized products.

The new technologies are changing the way consumers interact with companies, or with other consumers for that matter, exchanging views, complaints, opinions and comments about products and services, about brands, about companies, about YOUR company.

On the other side there are companies already engaging creative customers in new ways. These companies are clearly aware that tapping into the collective intellectual capital of their customers yields great creative and “real” content. However, let’s not make the mistake to think that in the end these conversations will all be about communications and branding: how about extending this cooperation with consumers to virtually everything a corporation does, by making the customer an integral part of ALL creative and creational processes? There are companies inviting theis customers to engage in CUSTOMER-MADE goods, services and experiences?

Get ready for CUSTOMER-MADE: the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed. Consumerism will never be the same!

Read a detailed analysis on the customer made trend.

More than that, Martin Lindstrom, a recognized branding guru and author of Brand Sense is presenting five reasons for which branding is changing and companies have to adapt to the customization and personalization trend:

• Brand blogging
• Brand Phishing
• Brand alliances
• Situation placement
• Me Selling Proposition

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