Got Brand Strategy?
As Dick Martin says in his book Rebuilding Brand America, “Any cowboy with a hot iron can create a brand.”
Martin refers to a time when brands started as a signal of ownership. But today, successful branding is tied to emotional values. Brand, Martin says “has to be easy to understand and flexible enough to modulate in a wide variety of interactions with a large number of different audiences. Most important, it can’t simply be something you stick at the end of an ad or on the side of a building. It has to be the ‘golden thread’ that runs through every internal process and through every interactions with customers. And your promise can’t be primarily rational It has to operate on the deeper level of emotions and feelings.”
That brands that topped the 2007 Brand Keys Consumer Loyalty Engagement index http://www.brandkeys.com/awards/ are powerful because they make those connections. The index, which gauges the brands to which consumers are most loyal, determines the companies that are best able to engage consumers and create loyal customers through their brands.
The study measures 360 companies by polling 24,000 consumers between 18 and 60 years old across nine U.S. Census regions. Some not-so-surprising brands that topped the consumer index include Wachovia, Geico, Sony, the NFL, and Scotttrade. Some surprising ones, I think, included Pepsi over Coke, Circuit City over Best Buy, Expedia over Travelocity, and JetBlue over Southwest.
One thing is for sure. For the companies near the bottom of the index, take a good look at your brand strategy. Is your messaging aligned with corporate goals? Do you offer multiple channels in which to engage customers with your brand? Are you driving passion and emotion across the entire brand? Are all brand activities tied to the objectives of the firm?
If you answered "no" to any of these questions, as Mike Fasulo, chief marketing officer at Sony, recently said: “The cost of fragmentation is much higher than rallying around the brand.”
