Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Branding products, businesses, nonprofits, and even yourself
Following the branding process, step by step
Seizing the best moment to brand or rebrand
More than 5,000 branding books and millions of branding websites give proof to the fact that brands are a hot topic surrounded by a deluge of information — and confusion. To clear up the facts, here are a few easy definitions.
Branding is the process of positioning, packaging, and presenting the vision and idea of your brand so that others understand and believe what you stand for and the promise you invariably make and keep.
Branding isn’t a veneer that you slap on (usually in the form of a new logo) to mask or transform a product offering. Treating branding like some skin-deep solution is like putting lipstick on a pig: People see through the makeup. Instead, successful branding goes all the way to the core of who you are and what you stand for. When it does, it signifies, simplifies, clarifies, unifies, and magnifies what you are and do. And it adds considerable value as a result.
This chapter gives you a look at when and how to brand and why branding is worth every bit of the effort it involves.
To brand or not to brand, that is the question. Or at least that’s the question that hangs in the air until people who aren’t quite sure about whether they really need a brand hear this truth: More than any other quality — even more than strong financial statements, great management, or terrific product or service ideas — brands are the key to winning long-term growth and success.
By building a brand, you cast a strong, clear vision of what you stand for. Without a brand, you blur into a dime-a-dozen, one-seems-just-like-another category called commodities. In a sea of similar choices, branding differentiates and elevates your offering, paving the way for awareness, preference, selection, and profitability.
If you can think of even one way your offering is meaningfully different and better (not just different, but meaningfully different and better!), then you have at least one reason to build a brand that moves it into the prestigious realm of people, products, businesses, and organizations that stand out as distinctly different, preferable, and more valuable than all the others.
Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the 20th century’s most successful business investor, sums up the formula for business success in four frequently quoted words: Buy commodities, sell brands.
Airline tickets, laptop computers, and strawberry jam start out as commodities. All competitors address basically the same need in basically the same way, and if customers see no reason to choose one over the others, they simply opt for the one with the lowest price. Yet every day, customers make conscious decisions to buy the offering of one airline or computer manufacturer or jam maker over the others because of the unique attributes they trust to be true about their choice. Maybe they’re won over by the frequent flyer club options, service or warranty program, organic ingredients, or any of a zillion other distinguishing characteristics — the brand promises — that they understand and believe are worth premium pricing.
As proof that brands lift offerings out of crowded commodity categories, look at the following examples:
Commodity |
Brand |
Soft drinks |
Coca-Cola |
Water |
Evian |
Sneakers |
Nike |
Technology |
Apple |
Razor blades |
Gillette |
Internet search |
|
Online retail |
Amazon |
Logistics |
UPS |
Coffee |
Starbucks |
Lingerie |
Victoria’s Secret |
When you build a brand, you develop value, trust, preference, and the potential for higher prices and profit margins.
Your brand reflects the vision of the good that you aim to achieve. Just as the images on a country’s flag symbolize the core of what’s important to that culture and nation, your brand reflects the core of what’s important to you and your organization. It’s the banner that signifies what you’re passionate about, your fundamental values, what you aspire to achieve, and the promise on which you stake your reputation.
A well-defined vision is important whether you’re building a personal brand or an organizational brand:
Great brands stem from the beliefs, personalities, and values of those leading the brand. They result in a brand culture that’s authentic and heartfelt.
Instinctively, you’ve proven the influence of brand trust thousands of times over. Think of the last time you reviewed job applicants, or scrolled through screen-after-screen of shoe choices, or scanned reviews for movies playing in town. You had to make a choice, and chances are good that you opted for the offering you thought you could trust. Branding, or lack thereof, led to your selection.
If you viewed all the choices as similar and fairly risk-free, you probably let convenience or low price tip your decision. That’s because no single offering inspired your trust or presented distinguishing benefits, so you went with the quickest, least-expensive option. (The section on commodities earlier in this chapter has more on the topic of undifferentiated offerings.)
But if, after scanning all your options, you settled on an offering that took you out of your way or caused you to pay a little or a lot more, your decision was likely based on a sense that the one you selected was worth the price or the trouble because you believed it wouldn’t let you down. That trust, almost certainly, was the result of good branding.
You can build a brand for a product or service, a small or huge company, or a nonprofit organization. You can build a brand for yourself, called a personal brand, which is a brand category so hot that we’ve given it its own chapter (Chapter 4). In this section we give you an overview of all the kinds of brands you can build.
Products are tangible, physical items that you can hold in your hands or see with your own eyes before you make the purchase.
If a product lacks any perception of distinct quality or value, it’s known as a commodity (think salt). When a manufacturer wins awareness in the marketplace that its product has characteristics that make it different and better than others in the product category, that commodity turns into what’s known as a consumer brand (think Morton’s). (Refer to the preceding section for more on commodities.)
Branding is a powerful way to differentiate a product in ways that create consumer preference and premium pricing.
People buy services sight-unseen. Unlike tangible, three-dimensional products that shoppers can see and feel and try out before buying (or at least look at on your website), people buy services purely based on their trust that the person or business they’re buying from will deliver as promised.
Examples of globally recognized service brands include Google, eBay, H&R Block, Charles Schwab, and FedEx. For examples of local-level service brands, think of your region’s leading law firm, best hair salon, most innovative homebuilder, or most trusted medical clinic. Each earned its reputation by building a clear identity and consistently conveying a believable promise that people trust in while they wait for the purchased service to be performed and their high expectations to be met.
Many large companies and corporations build product or service brands in addition to their business brands. (The section later in this chapter titled “Brand Architecture 101” describes how business and product or service brands relate to each other.)
Procter & Gamble, for example, has a corporate brand in addition to a portfolio of consumer brands. On a smaller scale, you probably can think of a local land developer that builds product brands for each new residential community in addition to a brand for the land development company that holds the individual brands.
Table 2-1 summarizes how product or service and business brands differ from and complement each other.
Table 2-1 Comparison of Business Brands and Consumer Brands
Business Brand |
Consumer Product or Service Brand |
Builds trust with stakeholders, including investors, associates, and employees |
Builds emotional attachment with customers |
Helps prospective stakeholders decide: Is this business organized to deliver on its promises? Is the leadership strong and trustworthy? Is the business innovative? |
Helps prospective customers decide: How is this product or service relevant to my life? What does it mean to me? |
Projected through marketing tools and especially through personal contacts |
Projected through product packaging, labeling, digital communication, and advertising |
Results in lasting investor, employee, customer, and stakeholder relationships |
Results in consumer choice, purchase, and loyalty |
If you build only one brand — and that’s the advice we give to any business with limited marketing expertise or budget — build a business brand because business brands accomplish the following:
Individual brands are a hot topic and the focus of Chapter 4. They come in two types: personal brands and personality brands.
Whether you aspire to be a successful job applicant, a sought-after speaker, or a star in your community or industry, start by building a personal brand. Chapter 4 gets you started. Then look into Susan Chritton’s book Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Wiley) for in-depth guidance.
Branding starts before most brand-builders even know it. As soon as people form an opinion about you or your business, product, or service — perhaps based on real-world or online encounters you don’t even realize are happening — they form the basis of your brand image in their minds, which is where brands live. Branding is the process that aligns the opinions people hold about your brand with the image you want them to believe.
This section covers major branding steps and where to turn in the upcoming chapters for step-by-step branding advice.
Are you branding a product, a service, a company, or an individual? If the distinctions are a bit blurry, flip back to the section in this chapter titled, “So, What Do You Want to Brand?”
As part of your decision about what you’re going to brand you need to decide if the brand you’re developing will be your one-and-only or if it will live alongside or under the umbrella of other brands in your organization. The upcoming section on brand architecture helps you plot, plan, and decide the relationship between your business and your brand or brand.
When you’re clear about what you’re branding, the next step is to analyze your offering and the market in which it will compete. Think of this as your discovery phase, which is comprised of two major steps:
Begin by researching your prospective customers — who they are, where they are, and what motivates their buying decisions. Then analyze your competition to discover what solutions already exist in the marketplace and exactly how the offering you’re branding is different and better.
You need to know what makes your offering unique, what attributes make it excel over competing alternatives, and how it solves your customers’ wants or needs.
Flip to the first pages of Chapter 5 for help with this fact-finding mission.
Positioning defines how you’ll differentiate your brand and how you’ll slot it into an available space in the market and in customer minds.
Determining your brand’s position is an essential early step in the branding process because people will make mind space for your offering only if you can convince them, in a split second, that you provide unique solutions to problems or needs that aren’t already being addressed by competing solutions.
To determine your market position, follow these four steps:
Chapter 5 takes you on a step-by-step walk through the positioning process, including how to locate your market position, how to communicate your position, how to win your position in your consumers’ minds, and how to protect your position so that your brand can claim and own the defined niche in which it will live and grow.
Your brand definition is a true statement about what your brand stands for. It describes what you offer, why you offer it, how your offering is meaningfully different and better, the unique benefits your customers can count on, and the promise or set of promises you make to all who work with and buy from your business.
You have to know your brand definition before you begin to develop and project the public presentation of your brand. Otherwise the external face of your brand — everything you present through marketing efforts — won’t match up with the internal base of your brand, and your brand will lack credibility.
Figure 2-1 uses an iceberg to represent the relationship between the base and face of your brand:
As you define your brand, turn to Chapter 6 for help with every step involved.
This is the point where branding gets exciting. The minute you give your brand a name and face — or logo — you can watch managers, employees, and others inside the company start to buy into the branding process. Here’s a brief introduction to these important brand elements:
Your brand launch happens in two phases and in this order:
Whether you’re launching a new brand or relaunching a revitalized brand, be sure to launch from the inside out. Before you even think of introducing your brand to prospects, explain it to all the people who have or feel that they have a stake in your business, including the following:
Your brand goes public when you unveil your name, logo, and slogan and when you begin to tell your market the story of how your brand reflects what you stand for. Coauthor Barbara is the marketing guru on our author team, and she’s designed Part III to guide you as you write the marketing plan for building awareness for your brand through digital communications, social media, advertising, publicity, promotions, sales materials, and all other communications that carry the announcement and story of your brand into your marketplace.
This is the “care and feeding” phase of the branding process. This stage also requires the most persistence, and it’s where too many brands lose steam. Just like good parenting, good branding management can be summed up in a single word: consistency.
Begin managing your brand from the moment you introduce it for the following reasons:
The chapters in Part IV begin with advice for keeping a tight rein on the way people encounter your brand, called your brand experience, followed by chapters full of tips for creating brand allegiance and loyalty, leveraging value, and, when the time’s right, revitalizing your brand by giving it a partial or full makeover to fit market or business conditions, tastes, and trends.
The chapters in Part V focus on how to protect your brand by establishing and standing up for your legal rights. They also help you create usage rules that protect your brand from well-meaning but misguided attempts by staff members, freelancers, printers, sign makers, and others who are all too willing to help you “refine” or “tweak” your brand image, which usually leads directly to an erosion of the consistency you’re fighting to maintain. And, should conditions rock your brand strength, Chapter 18 helps you take action through both preemptive actions and, if necessary, crisis communications.
When you hear people talk about their (or your) need to rebrand, think long and hard before tuning into the conversation or signing them on as your branding consultants. In all but the most extreme cases, when people talk about rebranding what they really need is a brand update, also called a brand refresh or a brand realignment.
Here are some examples of successful brand realignments and rebranding efforts:
When and if your brand presentation gets out of step with its market, work hard to keep the brand esteem you’ve carefully built as you refresh and realign your brand presentation to match the market’s evolving interests.
If you’re a visual person, Figure 2-2 lays out the branding process in a diagram that presents the eight steps involved to develop a brand from the essence of a vision to an understanding and preference that results in choice, marketplace esteem, and greater success.
The verbal and visual relationship between your business brand and your product brand — also described as the relationship between your parent and subsidiary brands — is called brand architecture. Most brands follow one of two types of brand architecture:
The following sections describe each category.
Adopt a master brand strategy if any of the following situations apply to your business:
Unless you’re a deep-pocketed megamarketer, your brand will probably fall under the category of master brand/parent-driven brand architecture. We feel so strongly about the practicality of creating a single brand that we dub it the Rule of One. Heed the rule by building a single business brand. If you decide you need to brand individual products or services, build parent-endorsed subsidiary brands under your single, strong business brand.
A multiple or product-driven brand architecture is used by companies that offer a range of products within a single or various market segments. For example, Tide and Pampers are among major brands owned by Procter & Gamble, yet P&G is virtually invisible as each brand is presented to consumers.
Multiple brand or product-driven brand architecture is the most costly branding strategy. You need to build a strong, stand-alone brand for each and every product, plus you need to build a corporate or business brand that carries its weight in the financial and corporate worlds while also serving as a magic carpet for each brand to ride in on until it establishes itself as a seemingly independent entity in the marketplace.
The upcoming sections spotlight major times that businesses launch or work to strengthen their brands.
When you launch a business, branding needs to be an essential part of your business plan (if that term just threw you into a panic, run — don’t walk — to get a copy of Business Plans Kit For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Steven Peterson, Peter E. Jaret, and Barbara Findlay Schenck [Wiley]).
As you blueprint how to brand your business, follow the first seven steps in the branding process outlined in the preceding section of this chapter and detailed throughout this book, taking special care with these steps:
When introducing a product, begin by deciding whether it will enter the market under your business brand or as its own brand, with or without a visible link to your business brand. (For more on this decision, refer to the earlier section “Brand Architecture 101.”)
If you decide to introduce your product as an altogether new brand, follow the seven steps in the branding process outlined in this chapter, giving special consideration to the Step 2 discovery phase that determines your product position, point of difference, and marketing approach.
If you decide to introduce your product as a new offering under your business brand, your product introduction can gain leverage from the established visibility and value of your brand in the marketplace. However, take a few steps to ensure that the product enhances your brand as much as your brand can enhance the product introduction. Consider these questions:
The Rule of One is worth repeating here: Unless your business has strong marketing expertise and a well-funded marketing budget, limit the number of brands you build to one and introduce all products under that strong, single brand. The price of getting too ambitious is marketplace confusion and erosion of brand understanding and trust in your marketplace.
Projections have it that by 2020, more than 40 percent of the American workforce will be freelancers, contract workers, or temporary employees. No question about it, if you’re working independently, you’re up against stiff and growing competition. But here’s the good news: Research by the Freelancers Union finds that freelancers who think like entrepreneurs and turn their services and talents into branded businesses earn higher rates and work more hours.
Branding yourself and your solo business is so important that in this second edition of Branding For Dummies we’ve devoted a whole new chapter to the topic. If you’re a one-person business, turn to Chapter 4 for help building your brand and presenting the brand story that can serve as the deciding factor in winning business and achieving success.
Successful nonprofit efforts and fundraising campaigns operate under the auspices of well-known, well-regarded, well-branded organizations. Jim Collins, author of the bestselling management book Good to Great (HarperBusiness), actually names brand reputation the key link in social sectors, where potential supporters need to “believe not only in your mission, but in your capacity to deliver on that mission.”
In a sentence, nonprofits need strong brands.
Before launching a fundraising campaign, establish credibility and trust by building a brand image that prospective donors can trust and believe in. Follow all the steps in the branding process detailed in this chapter, taking extra effort to build a strong, emotional story that builds belief in the cause you’re seeking to fund and confidence among supporters that you will leverage donated dollars into good works.
Brand first. Go public second. Don’t even consider launching an initial public offering, or IPO, until you have a well-established and well-regarded brand. Investors buy into businesses they trust to be innovative, successful, and capable of rising to even higher levels of growth and profitability, and brand strength factors heavily into the decision.
For proof that the sequence of branding before going public works, look no farther than the IPOs of Facebook and Twitter. Both built brands so strong that when shares were made available investors scrambled to buy, even though Facebook profits had dipped and Twitter profits had yet to materialize.
Maybe you’re expanding into an adjacent regional market. Maybe you want to sell in international markets. Or perhaps you’re establishing a global business with operating presences in a range of countries. If your brand is going to travel, it had better be up to the task. Before your company opens markets or crosses borders, take these steps:
Venture capitalists look to invest in companies with strong leadership, strong business concepts, and strong positions in growing market arenas.
Don’t even think of approaching venture capitalists until you have
Use your business plan — the prerequisite to every venture-capital request — to present your business and explain your brand. But also be prepared to make your personal presentation the embodiment of your brand personality. The old phrase walk the talk goes hand-in-hand with the advice to be your brand to communicate and gain trust in your brand story.
There’s really no such thing as a brand merger. Combining Brand A with Brand B doesn’t result in Brand A + B. It either results in a retooled version of Brand A, a retooled version of Brand B, or an all-new Brand C.
Entering a merger is entering a politically sensitive area. As part of the merger negotiations, address the following questions:
Depending on your answers to these questions, move into branding action by either revising and reintroducing the surviving brand (turn to Chapter 16 for steps to follow) or starting from scratch to build an altogether new brand, following every step described in this book. Either way, dedicate time, effort, and funding to gain understanding and buy-in from the staffs and stakeholders of both organizations before taking the retooled or new brand public.