Tag Archives: branding

K.I.S.S. – Keys to Brand Management

Sometimes you can get carried away when you write a blog or sit down with a client.  You don’t mean to, but you end up waxing on and on about the nuance of this point or the other.  That is why it is nice to occasionally run across a simple little list that offers a lot of compact value.  The Blake Project offers a great 7 bullet list on Key Brand Management Considerations.  Each one is pearl.

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The 3 R's of Branding

The 3 R’s of Branding

Art Butcher of International Business Academies Limited (a.k.a. IBAL) asked me to write a post to share on the IBAL’s new website. While that project is coming together I thought I would share the post here as well:

Everyone has heard of the 3 R’s of education: “Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic”, but have you heard of the 3 R’s of branding? They are Recognition, Reputation and Reaction.

Recognition: We want our products to be recognized. We want the hard work that goes into packaging our products and services, the money we spend on advertising, and all the planning we do in marketing, to benefit our brand, not the competition’s. This is why logos are important. This is why we craft tag lines and slogans. This is why Coke is so fussy about the exact shade and hue of red in their packaging. This is why McDonald’s is so aggressive about controlling the use of “Mc____” wherever it can.

Reputation: In the end your branding is a suggestion that your company makes about its relevance and meaning, and it is your customers, prospects and partners who get to decide what your brand truly means to them. You can be well recognized, but if your reputation is bad the recognition can hurt you. On the other hand, if your product is undistinguished from your competition, a well-recognized brand alone may not be helping you as much as you think. How often have you sneezed, asked for a Kleenex, and been handed a Puff? Did you notice the difference? Did you care? Recognition is naturally associated with reputation, but the reputation is strongest when it encompasses a unique value or serves the needs of a particular niche.

Reaction: This is where the money is made, or lost. You want your brand to provoke a positive reaction, to get people to choose your product over the competition’s. You want a reaction so positive and strong that it can beat a sale price on a similar item or have a customer choose your service over another solution. But a negative reaction can be brutal. Whether you are being ignored on the shelf, or actively boycotted, a negative reaction cycle can be ruinous to your business.
So how do you tune your branding to get the reaction you want? Well the magic won’t happen if the recognition and reputation aren’t right. You have to take Recognition beyond merely locating yourself in an industry or slapping a logo on your business card. You have to approach Reputation in a mindful way – don’t just let it happen, participate! Align your values with the expectation you set for your brand. Know the boundaries of your message and the expectations you are setting with your brand promises. Be prepared to walk your talk and fix it when you stumble. You are in the business of developing and maintaining trust.

Here a few more R’s for you: Repetition, Reinforcement and Rigor: Consistent and attentive behavior, clearly communicated value, and a track record of disciplined delivery will support the 3 R’s of Branding and will get you seeing the Reactions the matter!

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Sugar, water, caffeine and fizz

How do you sell your product? By listing the ingredients?  If you’re a repeat reader of this blog you probably know that I like my Coca-Cola.  I like to drink it and I like to learn from one of the top marketing companies of all time.  How often do you see Coke advertising the quality of their sugar refinement process, or showing a schematic diagram of their bottling and distribution process? Unless you’re a bottler or distributor, the answer is probably never.  Coke doesn’t try to sell the end consumer on the merits of all the great ingredients and brilliantly innovative processes that go into making the little 12 ounce miracle that is a can of Coke.  Instead they focus on what Coke does for you, what you get from their product.  Coke sells refreshment.  Coke sells nostalgia.  Coke sells an association with positive experiences that are varyingly hip, exciting, and even patriotic.

So what does this mean for your business? The next time you are developing an ad or a brochure  consider who it is for and what does that audience want.  Try to get beyond the logical and strictly feature-oriented  and introduce emotional and associative elements that tap into the buyer’s motivations. Ask yourself, is there a narrative?  Have you left room for the consumer to participate in an experience? If your customer can’t envision a better, more successful self through the lens provided by your marketing materials then even the best ingredients, the most innovative process, the most comprehensive set of features, will all just be noise competing with your value proposition.

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I didn't finger-paint

When I was just a little tyke I became somewhat notorious for saying what I didn’t do. It all began when I was queried by my father at the dinner table one evening about what I had done that day in pre-K. I am told that without hesitation I exclaimed that “I didn’t finger-paint!”, and promptly burst into tears. I’m can’t quite recall now what it was about finger-painting that had caused me such childhood stress, and anyone who knew me in art school will certainly attest that whatever it was I got over it – in spades, but I digress. No matter the cause, it was apparently the start of a habit, which to my parents’ dismay continued well into adulthood, of answering questions of the “what did you do today?” variety with an initial summary of what I didn’t do. Parental frustration aside, it turns out to have been good practice for a brand strategist.

To know what you didn’t do, to choose what you won’t do, to pick the line you will not cross, are all actions that help us define who we are, what we’re interested in, where we set our priorities. The same process can help develop the meaning behind your brand. Understanding what your brand isn’t, what you don’t want it to be, can be enormously useful in learning to articulate just exactly what you DO want it to mean.

The first, obvious place to explore is your competition. Seek out the edges of your difference: the territory where your competition does not compare – by knowing what they aren’t you gain access to who you are, but you can go further still. Consider Nike: Certainly they are not Adidas, nor are they Converse, and exploring these and their other competitors can do much to illuminate the brand ethos and that drives product development, but to understand the potency of the brand, and its ability to build cult-like loyalty it is helpful to explore other things that Nike is not: Nike is not about apathy.  It’s not about being a couch-potato.  The words “Just do it” aren’t just a slogan, they are a challenge, a call to action that imply that the non-Nike is perhaps indecisive, less bold, or even lazy. Or how about Whole Foods? Their brand promise is expressed as much by what they do not carry in their stores as by what they do.

So in conclusion, next time you are at the dinner table (or maybe in the boardroom) try asking, “What didn’t you do today?” Throw in a “Why not?” and you might find that you have a revealing conversation.

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Setting expectations

We TryWhether we realize it or not, the actions we take are measured against expectations created by our brand. In some cases this can be a slippery slope. Consider the deliberately expectation-setting tag line for Avis car rental service, “We Try Harder” – certainly this phrase leads to an assumption that the service from Avis will reflect more effort than their competitors. We infer that the extra effort will result in better service. It’s a memorable phrase, and a noble goal, but is it good branding? That depends on the follow-through of every Avis employee you meet. If the company culture promotes a positive, service-focused, can-do attitude across the board, then yes, this is good branding. If however, the trend is to have service that is poor, attitudes that are uncaring, or worse, surly, then the brand message collapses under the weight of the failure to live up to the expectations created in the mind of consumers. In the age of the blogosphere, disconnects between promise and follow-through can be rapidly exposed. The lesson boils down to “walk your talk.”

Since Avis has used the “We Try Harder” line for a long time now I will gladly assume that it has been a fair reflection of their actual brand experience. However, not every tag line is so overt in the expectations it sets. What promises does your branding imply? And do you deliver on those expectations?

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Disambiguate or Die

I first ran into the term “disambiguation” while hanging out with a few speech scientists at a speech technology industry conference. For them, it was serious business. When your product is speech recognition, the subtle phonetic differences between “Austin” and “Boston” can have a huge impact. Usually the fix is easy in theory, but can get dicey in practice. Asking a customer if they mean Texas or Massachusetts seems like the obvious thing to do, unless your customer is from Boston Township, Ohio, or Austin, Colorado. Not to mention that the average caller of a voice system is only going to tolerate a couple of “Did you mean _____?”s before they hang up or mash down so hard on the asterisk that they break a nail.

So the speech techies take disambiguation very seriously, but why should they have all the fun? I’ve never seen ambiguity listed as a desirable attribute for a brand, but clarity on the other hand is desirable. I like the term disambiguation because it implies a process for taking you from ambguity to meaning. It might take a few iterations, however, and you may only get a few tries before your customer hangs up.

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