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.”
The United States Postal Service has a comprehensive branding program that it has developed in association with Campbell-Ewald Advertising. The program is titled "Branding through The Mailbox". This comprehensive effort is focused on using innovative, targeted, and cost effective direct mail to enhance and grow your branding campaign.
If you are willing to invest the time for a meeting, USPS will gladly consult with your company at no cost to you.
Phil Montalvo
Account Manager
USPS
Pacific Area
Mila, Tom
Let's take the customer-brand linkage one step further.
If we accept that a brand is what the customer feels (thinks and says) it is, not what the marketer says it is, then it follows that there are as many brands as there are groups of customers with similar feelings about it.
That means each different 'segment' has a subtly different view of the brand. Eighty percent of the feelings the brand evokes may be the same for all segments (and should correspond very closely with the marketers communicated brand values and their organisation's ability to deliver them), but 20% of the feelings are likely to be different.
It is in delivering the extra 20% through a superior product-service-experience combination that real brands are made. Brands that mean the same to customers and marketers alike, and to the marketing bottom-line. And that 20% will be driven by the segment and what it says about the brand more than by marketers and what they say. This is why opt-in community and advocate social networks are critical to the future of branding.
Ducati's recent closure of its traditional marketing department and its re-opening as a Ducati community management organisation is one extreme example of the power of community. As the ultimate sports motorcycle, Ducati's riders' enjoyment of riding, involvment with Ducati and resulting advocacy to other riders is worth so much more than any number of slick ads from non-riders.
Just a thought.
Graham Hill
Dear Mila,
Great Blog. I read several and your's gets the prize today. You managed to hit the nail on the head. It is that essense that flows through the organization and the buy-in from the entire enterprise that builds the momentum of the brand until it becomes known to your customers and even the casual observer. Graham is so right in that we can no longer force a brand on the marketplace, we have to actually believe in what we are doing and how we do it before anyone else is going to be bothered to even get to know you.
Cheers,
Tom West
Mila
I am not sure whether you have things the right way round.
In the olden days, marketers considered brands to be the things that their marketing communications about products created. Communications created brands. We now recognise that is is largely marketing self-deceipt.
Today, marketers consider brands to be the things that customers feel, think and say about their products. Experiences - real, imagined or desired - create brands.
Companies with the weakest 'brands' are those whose products do not deliver what customers have come to expect of them. The response isn't to look at the brand strategy (that's like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted), but to look at how their customer and product strategies deliver a superior experience. And how all three together drive value creation.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager