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keys to success in brand building: a summary
Branding is the concept of imbuing organizations and their products and services with human qualities and identities so that they can stand for something, share values with their customers, make promises to their customers, create emotional bonds with their customers, and generally add value beyond the product or service itself.
After having spent thirty years as a marketer and having helped more than 150 brands craft their strategies, here is what I have come to understand creates strong brands:
1. First and foremost, the brand must stand for something. Its mission, vision, and values must be clearly articulated. Furthermore, its promise must have been crafted with much forethought. And the promise must be relevant, compelling, and unique. That is, the brand must offer and deliver on a “unique value proposition” that matters to its target markets.
2. To support this value proposition, the brand must know whom it is serving. It must know this customer in great depth. What motivates that person? What are the customer’s hopes and fears? What are his attitudes? What does she value? How does the person purchase and use the products and services in the categories within which the brand operates? This requires in-depth research and strong intuition about human behavior and motivation.
3. Next, the brand’s identity must consistently support its value proposition—that is, its intended essence, archetype, personality, mission, vision, values, and promise. The brand identity refers to the name, logo, colors, tagline, brand voice, and visual style, and other visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory cues associated with the brand.
4. Aesthetics matter more than most people realize. Establishing a refined or otherwise compelling brand design aesthetic will have a positive impact on the brand. Witness Apple, Jaguar, and Ty Nant.
5. One should put adequate controls in place to ensure this brand identity consistency over time and across all customer touchpoints.
6. Brands that have strongly held values that align with their customer’s values create strong emotional connections with their customers.
7. Furthermore, those brands can become the source of community for people who share their values.
8. And they can serve as a “badge” for people to signal to the world who they are (or who they want to be) and what they value (self-expressive benefits).
9. These types of brands have ongoing dialogues with their customers and engage their customers in a myriad of other ways.
10. One of the ways in which brands engage their customers is by continuously cocreating themselves and their products and services with their customers.
DID YOU KNOW?
• Generating brand trial is frequently the focus of smaller brands while large brands tend to focus on maintaining (and building) brand loyalty.
(Source: Allan L. Baldinger and Joel Robinson, “Brand Loyalty: The Link Between Attitude and Behavior,” The NPD Group.)
• For a new brand, it is important to track the number of stores deciding to sell the product, while for a mature brand, it is more important to look at the number of stores delisting the product.
(Source: Lars Finskud, “Bringing Discipline to Brand Value Management,” Financial Times Retail & Consumer Publishing, Brand Valuations, 1998.)
• “For a fast-growing brand, the number of new loyal customers is important, but for an established brand it is the number of lost loyal customers that is the telling indicator.”
(Source: Finskud, “Bringing Discipline to Brand Value Management.”)
• In a major brand loyalty study, the researchers found that two-thirds of the time, when people who were more attitudinally loyal than behaviorally loyal to the brand (“prospects”) outnumbered those who were less attitudinally loyal than behaviorally loyal to the brand (“vulnerables”), the brand’s market share increased. Market share decreased when the opposite was true. That is why it is important to measure both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty.
(Source: Baldinger and Robinson, “Brand Loyalty,” http://www.npd.com/corp/newsletters/product_brandbbldrjar.htm.)
11. Storytelling is central to brand building. Tell stories about the brand’s heritage and history and founder. Tell stories about heroic or admirable acts performed by the brand. Tell stories about the brand’s legendary service.
12. Whether the CEO, president, executive director, director general, or managing partner, the brand’s leader must understand the importance of building a strong brand and must share the brand’s beliefs and values.
13. The brand’s leader must drive brand understanding and support throughout the organization, by working with HR, communications, and other functions, and by transforming the organization’s employees into brand champions and evangelists.
14. This effort may include redesigning the organization structure, recruiting criteria, common measures, rewards and recognition, and even internal systems and processes.
15. Customer touchpoint design (delivering on the brand promise at each point of customer contact) can be a starting point for this redesign.
ON RELATIONSHIPS
People develop relationships with other people. Brands exist so that organizations can do the same. So, what maximizes a brand’s appeal? The same things that maximize a person’s appeal—authenticity, honesty, integrity (that is, a congruence between thoughts, words, and deeds), charisma, warmth, assertiveness, approachability, passion, reliability, and originality. And here is the thing that makes people and brands the most interesting: Each possesses a different combination of qualities that appeals to different people at different times.
The best brands will challenge and comfort and inspire and draw out one’s best and help one grow, just as the best human relationships do.
Branding, at its best, transforms organizations so that they are capable of creating, nurturing, and sustaining mutually profitable relationships with people. And that is a very good thing.
16. Anything you can do to make your brand more authentic, trustworthy, reliable, likable, and admirable will strengthen its emotional connection to its customers.
17. Linking the brand to noble qualities—“truth, justice, and the American Way,” compassion, grace, beauty, freedom, and the like—will enhance people’s emotional connection to the brand.
18. Linking the brand to cultural icons, symbols, and other references can also enhance people’s emotional connection to the brand.
19. It is important that a brand makes a unique and compelling promise, but it is more important that it keeps that promise.
THE QUICK BRAND HEALTH ASSESSMENT
You know your brand is winning in the marketplace when:
• The brand is mentioned to customers and potential customers, and they brim with enthusiasm in their response.
• Your brand’ s external messages “ring true” with all employees.
• Employees are enthusiastic and consistent in recounting what makes their brand special.
• The brand’s market share is increasing.
• Competitors always mention your brand as a point of reference.
• The press can’t seem to write enough about your brand.
• Your CEO has a strong vision for the organization and its brand and talks more about the vision than financial targets.
• Your organization’s leaders always seem to “talk the brand” and “walk the brand talk.”
20. Anticipating customer needs (e.g., smartphones), innovating products and services (e.g., Amazon.com, Toyota Prius, Tesla Motors), and providing outstanding customer service (e.g., Zappos, Nordstrom) all lead to strong brands.
21. Brands that help people solve their problems create stronger customer loyalty.
THE FUTURE OF BRAND MANAGEMENT: MY PROGNOSTICATIONS
• Building emotional connection will be key.
• Brands will focus more on creating/engineering the total customer experience.
• Customer-relevant innovation will be a key success factor.
• Outstanding customer service will also be a key success factor.
• Hiring the right employees and creating the appropriate culture will be essential.
• More and more, brands will cocreate the customer experience with the customer.
• More and more, brands will need to “stand for something” to survive.
• Strong brands will not only “stand for something.” They will also provide forums for people who believe in what the brands stand for.
• Organizations whose employees become consultants to and friends and partners with their customers will be the most successful.
• One-on-one marketing will become more and more important.
• The Internet will also become increasingly important as a brand building vehicle.
• For larger organizations, customer relationship management (CRM) will become a critical success factor.
• Fast, flexible, and agile organizations will increasingly “win” in the digital age.
• With the explosion of virtual and morphing organizations and ever-changing business alliances, the brand essence and promise and the organizational culture and values may increasingly be the only elements that create a sense of “entity” for organizations.
• The viral spread of information will increasingly expose organizations for what they really are—therefore integrity and consistency will be key.
• Managing “buzz” will be an essential brand management activity.
• “High tech” and “high touch” will both become increasingly important.
Waning Philosophical—Brand Management at Its Best
At its worst, the organizational brand is a name and a logo that is inconsistently applied to an unrelated set of products and services. It is overused and means nothing, and it reminds people of the worst of an overly commercial and consumptive society. It feels cold and seems exploitative. It is perceived to be a vestige of a past era.
At its best, brand management aligns organizations with value-adding activities. It keeps organizations focused on meeting real human needs in compelling new ways. And, at its best, the organizational brand defines how the organization best meets its customers’ needs in unique and compelling ways. It serves as the organization’s unifying principle and rallying cry, it infuses the organization with a set of values and a personality, and it holds an organization’s employees to a consistent set of behaviors. The organizational brand stands for something. It establishes trust and a certain level of assurance, it makes it possible for people to establish relationships with the organization, and it creates expectations that must be fulfilled. The brand can bring an organization to life in a very real way. Other specific benefits of a strong brand are shown in Figure 22–1.
In the end, brand management is all about meeting people’s physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and other needs in unique ways. It is the application of free enterprise to the timely and timeless needs of mankind.
I wish you a brand at its best. May you unleash your brand’s power and transform your organization through branding.