6 Practical Steps to Bringing your Brand to Life

What does branding really mean? There are a lot of different definitions floating out there, and way too many misconceptions. I define branding as "the process with which you define your company's distinctive value that your customers desire and are willing to pay a premium for." I have provided 6 practical steps to help you establish your brand and bring it to life.

STEP 1: Define Your Business Framework
First define your business by outlining it's vision and mission statements, and core values. A vision is a statement about what your organization wants to become, while your mission statement is a precise description of what an organization does. For example, the Westin Hotel chain's vision statement is, "Year after year, Westin and its people will be regarded as the best and most sought after hotel and resort management group in North America.” While Wal-mart's mission statement quite simply states, "To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people."

Your core values should represent your fundamental values and beliefs that define how your business behaves, how it will value its customers, suppliers and staff. Some examples would be passion, accountability, and respect.

STEP 2: Define Your Target Market
Understanding the ideal customer for your product is vital to your ability to remain relevant and competitive. Start by profiling your ideal customer along categories like sex, occupation, age group, education, geography, income, and buying habits.

STEP 3: Define Your Value Proposition
What compelling, unique value do you offer to your target market that they simply cannot ignore. Know your core competencies, what your business does best, and always remember, you can stand for only ONE thing or you will confuse the marketplace.

STEP 4: Understand Your Product
Get to know your product intimately and what makes it distinctive and desirable to your target audience. What solutions do you offer customers? What are the features and benefits? Where is it positioned along price and quality? What value-added services do you offer?

STEP 5: Create Your Brand Graphics and Message
A great logo visually represents your business and lets people know right away what you do. It should be accompanied by a tagline that clearly reinforces your value offer with very few words. For consistency, use a graphics standard which specifies corporate colors, treatments and type fonts that your company adheres to.

STEP 6: Develop an Integrated Marketing Plan
Develop a plan centered around assuring every dollar you spend brings in more that $1 in return. If not, don't be afraid to stop and re-assess. Continual testing is the key to finding your best marketing mix. But stay away from the "one-off" approach of putting an ad in one magazine and sitting back waiting for the phone to ring. Rather, use an integrated approach that includes advertising, PR, sales promotion, etc. that creates a synergy and reinforces your campaign message. This makes it easier for your audience to recall. It also helps you develop that perception of omnipresence where your brand name seems to be everywhere.

After you've completed these 6 steps, continually measure your brand against this checklist to ensure it stays strong:

• Is your message powerful and compelling enough to gain attention?
  
• Is your offer attractive enough to distinguish you from the competition?
  
• Do you engage in creative ways to increase the profile of your company and its competitive advantages?
  
• Are you consistent and persistent using an integrated marketing approach? Does each mediums reinforce the other?

How to Be a Compassionate Designer for Passionate Customers

David Armano on Marketingprofs.com shares his insight on how design helps develop passionate users in the new "experience economy" where businesses must deliver a brand experience that is desired and differentiated. But in order to design for passionate users, designers must be compassionate in their approach. Parking one's ego is the first step. David provides four other practical steps to becoming a compassionate designer.

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Think Different - My Favorite Ad Campaign

Apple's "Think Different" campaign is still my favorite and most memorable. I remember the first time I saw it was in a movie theater during the trailers. It was the one featuring Muhammad Ali. It was a captivating black-and-white montage of this legend who changed the sport of boxing forever. The documentary-style commercial built up to the final grammatically incorrect punch line "Think Different." It gave me goosebumps. It still does. The campaign features others like Gandhi, Einstein, and Rosa Parks who have challenged convention with radical thinking and action that have deeply changed the world forever. Leveraging the powerful feelings associated with these people and applying them to the Apple brand was ingenious and stills stand in my books as the best campaign of all time.

Resist the temptation to stretch your brand

Informative article by Ted Matthews in Canadian Business Online, who describes the pitfalls of getting away from your core business and brand, and launching into sister ventures that seem appealing but only prove to be a costly lesson in poor judgment. The guidelines you instinctively use to make yourself the best in your business - core purpose, clear and single-minded vision, market position - get stretched when trying to apply them to a new venture where the current competition is better. Ted provides a case in point:

For Cam Heaps, president of Steam Whistle Brewing, a Toronto-based microbrewer, this insight came the hard way. Recently asked for the best lesson he had learned from his family's earlier venture with Upper Canada Brewing Co., Heaps answered: "Do one type of beer, one brand, and do it well." He was referring to Upper Canada's brand-extension mistake of trying to drive sales by coming out with new beers, new names and new campaigns on a regular basis. Heaps and his team lost focus on their original product, and missed opportunities to reinforce it, because new product launches meant constantly having to start anew at every level and discipline of the firm. Their loss of focus ultimately led to Upper Canada's 1998 sale to rival Sleeman Breweries Ltd. of Guelph, Ontario.

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Why marketing should make the user manuals!

Lance Tracey shared this great post with me from Kathy Sierra on the Headrush Blog. She asks a very good question... why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? So much time and effort is put in to designing slick glossy brochures to attract new users, while product manuals are treated as a painful afterthought - usually black and white printing on low-grade stock. Yet, product manuals are to be used by existing users who have bought from you. You would think they would matter most and the information they need from you would be packaged accordingly. But in almost all cases, it isn't. And we wonder why users don't read the f***ing manual! I'm guilty of it myself. There is such a natural tendency by business operators and marketers to entice and capture new customers, rather than focus on their captive mass. I think 'hunting' seems sexier than 'cultivating' so we align our marketing resources as such. What would happen if it were the other way around and we placed more emphasis on our current users and treated them the same or better, not worse. You could turn them in to a highly effective viral marketing channel by engaging and helping them to become as passionate about your product as you are. You'll get the new users as a result.

So put your money where your users are if you're in it for the long haul and develop kickass support material. This isn't the place to cut corners. And as Kathy suggests, make your manuals so good and informative that they could also be used as sales brochures.

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Pontiac goes with Internet-Only advertising

Digiknow blogged about this article that appeared in Advertising Age regarding Pontiac who will be adopting an Internet-only advertising campaign for their new sporty G5 coupe. Although adopting such a campaign will not generate the same general brand awareness as television, they feel the Internet will let them target their specific audience of young men who are in the market for a car and are likely to find the G5 appealing. This transition to an Internet-only campaign also means a reduction in advertising spend as compared to more traditional mass media because of the net's incredible ability to focus spend and campaigns. Also, it's cheaper. The article also talks about a general movement by carmakers to spend less on campaigns that try to convert owners of competing cars, to retaining current customers longer and keeping them loyal to the brand. This strategy places more emphasis on target marketing and CRM.

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Essence of Branding

A well written article by Nick Rice who shares how branding is happening whether you are driving it or not. Every interaction with your company creates an impression in that person. He defines brand as the gut feeling of those people that has been exposed to your company and/or products and services. Since you cannot control individual gut feelings, you cannot control your brand. You can, however, influence it. I agree with Nick. So often people mistaken a logo design as branding, rather than just one element that represents a brand. To make a brand effective, businesses need to define what their brand stands for, what their value proposition is and what beliefs they would like the marketplace to have of their brand. Then, they need to stay consistent with those beliefs by living their brand in everything they do.

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Top Gun Tom's brand is fading fast

What happened? Here's an actor who has spent the better part of 20 years building a strong, cool and recognizable brand we all know as "Tom Cruise". An A-list movie star who has enjoyed a fairly equal following amongst male and female movie-goers. Men could like him because he seemed cool, women loved him for everything else. His aloofness and camera-shy approach to interviews made his brand even more appealing, if not mysterious. It let his fans mistaken him for the heroic characters he played on screen. This appeal over the years has translated in to billions of dollars in box office receipts for Paramount Pictures from hits including "Top Gun," "Mission Impossible" and "Days of Thunder." It has also made Tom a very rich man.

This week, in the latest bizarre chapter of Tom Cruise, Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, the parent company of Paramount, ended its 14-year relationship with Tom's production company, Cruise/Wagner Productions. According to The Wall Street Journal, Redstone cited Tom's controversial conduct and behavior over the last year as the reason for the split.

Redstone reportedly believed Tom's antics -- including his now infamous appearances on "Oprah" and "Today" -- had a negative impact on the bottom line for "Mission Impossible III." Redstone said, "As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal." Redstone told The Wall Street Journal: "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

It's safe to say that Paramount feels the Tom Cruise brand has been irreparably damaged and will never have the box office appeal it once did. A cool brand that is fading in to "Wacko Jacko" territory. His bizarre behavior on Oprah was the tipping point as it exposed him as someone his fans did not wan to see - a nerd. Even a little creepy. And so the Tom Cruise brand has spiraled downward ever since. A lot can be learned from Tom in how to manage or mismanage your brand. It is so vital to stay true and consistent with what your customers believe your brand stands for. Reinforcing these beliefs rather than compromising them is key to a healthy brand and longevity.

Now I have to admit, I really enjoyed "Mission Impossible III." I thought it was the best one of the franchise by far. And I remember coming out of it thinking, "Tom is still a good actor." But seeing Tom lose his cool over the past year, made him no longer cool on screen and that has forever changed the way I view Tom Cruise.

Logo Design For Effective Branding

Some simple tips when approaching the question of how to design an effective logo. How memorable is your business? It might be your service, your products, or most importantly your company branding.The elements that go into your company's logo has a significant effect on how successful your business will be in bringing customers in and keeping them coming back.

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Crocs' ugly shoes score a pretty payday

Interesting article regarding the Croc's craze - those shoes you see grown men wearing and just can't understand why. I found this on money.cnn.com


Crocs' ugly shoes score a pretty payday
They're the hottest thing to hit the streets this season, but will the company still be standing after the fad fades?

Crocs, the colorful resin clogs, are the biggest footwear fad since Ugg boots, and equally as ugly. But will they be able to sustain the same long-term success that Uggs' homely sheepskin designs have enjoyed?

Crocs Inc. (Charts) started just four years ago when three Boulder, Colo.-based founders decided to market a shoe developed and manufactured by Foam Creations, Inc.

The chunky shoes, which cost about $30 a pair, are made with a proprietary resin which softens as it warms, and molds to the wearer's foot - making them surprisingly comfortable.

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Marketing to the MySpace Generation (and the Economics of Social Networking), Part 1 of 2

Interesting article regarding marketing to the MySpace generation. I found it on marketingprofs.com

The growth of MySpace has been front and center in the media over the past 12 months, in part because of the continued incredible growth of the venture but also because of social outrage generated by those who view it as an inappropriate and unsafe environment for teenagers. Here, Cliff looks at what has happened with MySpace, what has changed, and what he's learned about the online social networking business model over the past 12 months.

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