What is a brand?

In the last session the professor asking us again the questions "What is a brand?" and "How to manage it?". Is it a simple question? The answer seems so simple - is about feeling, but the process to find that feeling is not that easy. This is a chapter from Brands and Branding - An Economist Book, that talking about what a brand is.

Updated Wajo Club Site

Hello Again Take a look at the new Wajo Club Website. This may be helpful for our discussions on Thursday.

Ocada-san's Visit

Hello,
Ocada-san just sent photos of his time at IUJ. Enjoy!

Adaptive brand marketing-Rethinking your approach to brands in the digital age

Today, brand marketing shifts from hub and spoke, with MR, sales, advertising, etc to kaleidoscope from offline media to interactive media. To win in the new century, marketers should
take seriously consideration on the adaptability. Adaptive Brand Marketing, an approach that encourages companies rapidly response to align its consumer and brand needs and maximize return on brand equity.

The adaptive brand marketing make companies real changes in term of people, process and technology. People aspect will involve in elevating consumer understanding; executing globally or dedicating a global brand strategist. Rethinking your process of planning, partnership or measurements is important in this new marketing approach. The changes in technology will help company to enable scalable customer intimacy. For more details of what adaptive brand marketing is, how does it works and its meanings to marketers, you can refer to this report.

Sake No Jin

Sake No Jin proves to be another venue where sake lovers can compare and contrast different kinds of products. We have seen how they are trying (hard) to communicate their brands. Now I see that everyone capitalizes on the four treasures - rice, water, worker and environment - as what the speaker in the lecture presented. This is how the government is positioning the Niigata Sake. No wonder it was adopted by almost, if not all, sake breweries.

It is also interesting to note that there are prospects for market outside Japan, particularly the US. As the distributors pointed out, the market in the US is dominated by women, who does the shopping; younger generation, who loves to experiment and try new things; and the Japanese immigrants. They informed us about how typical shoppers buy sake, they face the shelf, close their eyes and grab one because, as we found out in our SA, "to the untrained eyes, they all look the same, and most probably taste the same."

So, is there any point of differentiation. Is there a hope for branding this product? The answer will be known during our final exam. Good luck!

The Future?

This is one of the best videos I’ve ever listened, by Patrick Dixon. It’s around 30 minutes, but worth listening. I’ve summarized his speech.

There are, Three areas which are fundamental to the future:

1. Consumer - (Disruption in terms of individual consumer)

2. Communities – (Disruption of communities)

3. Companies - (Disruption of Companies)

Consumer: The future will be shaped by emotion - The only word that decides the future of one’s business. Consumers fickle, change fast, have to be connected to their emotions for a business to sustain in future.Market research cannot tell you the future. All real innovation is about divergence - Doing things different. Even cost leadership doesn’t work – it’s all about capturing the passion & imagination of the consumer.

Communities: In the online world 'Advertising' has no place. Providing accurate information, verified by the users/consumers as correct – is all what matters. Communities get powered when they together & can change the whole business model in a very disruptive way, but very positive.

Companies: How terrible a company can be to a consumer's experience with their product/service, in future you will loose your customer within the first 10 seconds of your online Web. What’s important is to use the ‘Intelligent Technology’ but being focused, passionate, friendly and emotional

Ultimate slogan or the delivered promise for every business would be 'Making Life Better'.

STOP CAMPAIGNING, START COMMITTING

What i would like to share here is how building the brand beside campaigning, it is called committing. The examples described in this slide are political marketing until Nike which has power brand.

So, what i can learn form here is building the brand by committing is creating long term strategic partnership (for B2B) or building a good relationship with our customer by customer relationship management (for B2C). Anyway, it is just my opinion, so, what do you think??

http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation

Multiple Dynamics Drive Hormel Umbrella Campaign

In this article, we will see the success of an umbrella campaign (Hormel Foods) which get the most important two factors of any such kind of campaign: consumers' emotional attachment to the campaign and the meaningful reason for lumping brands together. Because according to Michael Stone, president/CEO of The Beanstalk Group brand licensing and consulting agency, "The biggest danger with any umbrella campaign is letting the individual brands' established identities get diluted,".

Hormel run this campaign to increase consumer awareness of its lesser-known brands/products as the core driver behind its new, multi-brand "Life Better Served" campaign, which will span print, TV and digital advertising, PR and in-store elements. The core message of the campaign is straightforward: Hormel has a variety of brands that together offer many options for providing "simple, wholesome" and protein-rich family meal solutions "despite the frantic pace of modern life," Scott Weisenbeck, Hormel Foods group product manager, integrated marketing said.

Looking at the overall strategy of Hormel Foods in this campaign, we will have some lessons on how to run the umbrella campaign in the purpose of simultaneously support individual brands with advertising.

Living the Brand drives sustainable competitive advantage

This article says that simply living the brand, ie delivering what we promise and good understanding of the brand values by all the employees and implementing them at all points of interactions with the customers can also be a sustainable competitive advantage.


http://www.bizcommunity.com/PressOffice/PressRelease.aspx?i=560&ai=2751

The power of brand equity, Microsoft case.

Have you ever looked through some financial data of Microsoft and asked about the value of brand equity of Microsoft? You will be very suprised about the huge power of this brand. In fiscal year 2009, the book value of Microsoft equity is only USD 39.558 billion. But its market value is USD 250.73 Billion. So, we can see approximately 6 times in gap. And our question is what factors made that huge difference between two numbers. Here are some following factors for this case:
1- Huge intangible assets such as corporate culture, customer loyalty, innovation, patents…
2- Brand equity – Brand name: Microsoft is the most widely recognized company in the world.
3- Microsoft consistent growth and met or exceeded the analyst consensus forecast.
4- High growth rate since 1986 up to now

But among these factors, brand equity plays the most important power. According to a estimate in August 2009, the brand value of Microsoft is about USD 76 Billion, ranked in second in the world, just after that of Google.

Even there are many different ways with many accompanied assumptions for evaluating one brand, we can not disagree with the strong power of Microsoft brand in the past, present and future.

5 Key Elements in Managing a Brand Portfolio

In Portfolio Management, Investor try to leverage the benefits among stocks in order to minimize the total risks. For example, when the number of stocks in one portfolio increase up to about 30 in US market, the individual risks of each stock will be disappeared and the total risk of portfolio seem be minimum at the systematic risk only. This theory is applied widely in Investment, but how about Marketing in general, and in Brand Portfolio Management in particular?

In the article " 5 Key Elements in Managing a Brand Portfolio", the author mentioned to five key elements we should consider in managing a brand portfolios. They are:1/differentiate, 2/energize, 3/extend,4/clarify, 5/start and end with the customer.

For the details of these elements, please look at the article.

What is the transferable core brand association that makes a successful extension possible?

In our last lesson we learnt about successful and unsuccessful category extensions for brands. The common problems exist in brand extensions are:
• Extending into a category in which the brand adds nothing but its identity (its products or services are not significantly different from current products or services in the category)
• Extending through opportunistic brand licensing without regard to impact upon the brand
• Extending into lower (and, sometimes higher) quality segments
• Not fully understanding brand benefit ownership, core values or importance

According to Peter Farquhar, successful brand extensions have three characteristics:
1. Perceptual Fit: Consumer must perceive the new item to be consistent with the parent brand.
2. Benefit Transfer: a benefit offered by the parent brand must be desired by consumers of products in the new category.
3. Competitive Leverage: the new items must stack up favorably to established items in the new category.

So, if a brand extension is build by considering the above concerns very unlikely that the brand will fail in the market place.

More on Sake

Sake is no longer the hot, pitiable plonk everyone used to think it to be. This is the opening title of a catchy information about pairing sake with foods. Check out http://www.sake-world.com/html/sake-food.html for more info. Further, it says:

If you study the flavor profiles of sake from around Japan, you can easily see how well the local sake jibes with the original cuisine of the region. Sake from mountainous regions of Japan, like the Tohoku region in the north, is sturdier and more rice-laden in flavor, complementing well the salt-preserved and fermented flavors common in that region's food. Sake from Shizuoka, Toyama and Miyagi are lighter and more supple, which works perfectly with the abundance of fresh fish found in these areas.

On whether sake can be considered healthy, here is why according to http://healthmad.com/health/drinking-can-be-healthy-six-drinks-to-improve-your-health/:

Sake is a Japanese alcoholic beverage made from rice. It is very caloric and the alcohol percentage is something around 20%. Although there aren’t many medicinal properties in sake, the lack of sulfites and antioxidants in that drink prevent it from causing allergies or hangovers. It is less likely for you to wake up with a headache in the next morning if you drank sake all night.

Ranking Ranqueen

This is not directly related to our brand discussion, but we had this information from previous class from professor. "Ranking Ranqueen".

The company's website is here, and you can translate with google or others.
http://www.ranking-ranqueen.net/

Stores are only in Tokyo, Sapporo, and Fukuoka, and selling CDs, books, magazines, soft drinks, snacks, cosmetics, and so on.

You can see how often ranking changes and what kind of items are sold well right now.

So, conventional brand is nothing to do with here. Top selling product, ranking, is the brand itself.

Japanese people love blood type and ranking.
I want what others want;

More ideas from Obata-san

Hello Brand Managers,

I just received another email from Obata-san. I think that you should include these points in your brainstorming about the brand, as each is important:

She has three ideas about her products/brand:

They should be:

1: easy to recognize
Big companies use advertise for this, but we, the small brand should find something else. For example, internet, with efficient key words...

2: easy to obtain
through optimization of her website and strategic partnerships

3: easy to recommend
I would like to expect the word of mouth among their network.
Which points should we stress in order to impress them? How can Obata Shuzo send the information effectively to them to keep and/or create their interest on Sake ??
**this is a very important exercise related to Brand Elements, and Brand Message***

Build your brand from the inside out

Branding begins with your employees. They can reinforce or break your brand's promise whenever they interact with customers, investors or other stakeholders. They are the direct touch points who deliver your brand's promise. So engaging employees to your brand will be important as doing to your customers.
This article pointed out the 3 lessons as a base for building our brand from inside out. Lesson 1: It is more than just the posters in the hallways which means that brings the tangible evidence showing that the brand is infused in the way of doing its business. Lesson 2: brand and HR, the new best friends which means that joining the people in brand and HR together, not only by the physical proximity but also the regular communication and joint projects. Lesson 3: Internal communication is your lifeline. We would know more how these 3 lessons worked with examples from Virgin Media and Red Hat.

Feedback on Farkhod's presentation

Hello Brand Managers,
Just wondering what you thought of Farkhod's lecture. Was it helpful for you? I found a few of his slides to be fantastic, and have asked him to share them with us. I can't guarantee that he will, as these were all confidential and not officially approved by his company, but I will let you know if I do receive them.

I hope that our classes last week have helped drive home the point about where a brand truly lives, and how to find a way to make it come "alive". Hiranthi's post on Emotional Branding below may also provide more insights.

I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday!

Storytelling for branding

Kalus Fog and two other authors have come with ain interesting framework to buld a brand. it's interesting because it collects some of the lessons learnes from UWB book. Every succesful story has 4 elements:message, plot conflict and characters This core story would become from the result of the thumstone exercise, screening of internal and external, distilling this data and testing the uniqueness of the outcome. From my understanding they suggest that thorugh a compelling story the company values become dynamic and easier to understand by stakeholders.

What is the value of an emotional association to your brand?

It should come as no surprise that humans are emotional creatures. Even a casual glimpse into the nation’s driveways, liquor cabinets, and cosmetics shelves reveals that consumers make buying decisions based in part on their feelings and emotions about particular brands. And marketers have long recognized the fact that emotions play a key role when consumers are talking about—or purchasing—products in categories as disparate as those represented by brands like Mercedes, Kodak, and Louis Vuitton.

I found this video, speaking about emotional branding. It highlights how important it is to make your brand alive in the minds of consumer. Because the factual truth is that, it is the consumer who owns the brand, not the corporation.

Sake Tasting

We have all tasted the Manotsuru sake variety yesterday. A million thanks to Obata-sama. Now we have a concrete experience about the product. Does it mean that we already know the brand? Can we figure out its competitive advantage by tasting the actual product? Are the questions thrown and the answers given by the owner herself enough to fill the gaps in the information for branding? Is the product the competitive advantage?

To the untrained palate like mine, the taste do not differ so much as to tell which one is better. The aroma is pleasant for some and yet less attractive for the other kinds. Obviously, the product is one of the brand elements that make-up the brand. But we still have to find that specific thing that may make its brand stand out and resonate with the target customers.

Happy hunting!

Snapple: Branding lessons for all

This article will help us to study the very history of modern consumer branding, with the case of Snapple.
First lessons from the first start was to "let founders be founders and not be too quick to apply the artificial laws of marketing to a brand that is still led by them". Later on, brand management with research, a clear positioning, and break the rules by being true to your brand. In 1994, after being acquired by Quaker Oats who succeeded in branding Gatorade and would like to apply that success to Snapple. However, it was a failure, which led to a lesson of "a strategy that works for one brand will never work for another".
In 1997, Snapple's brand was rebuilt by Triarc and it was successful with the root from the brand equity of Snapple. This lesson illustrated that "great brands can never be killed off by bad brand management"

Best Global Brand 2009

This is the list of best global brand in 2009 by Interbrand and also published in Business Week. In this report also mention about the future of the brand and some articles talks about branding. From the opportunities for advancement and reinvention until tomorrow's brand leaders are discussed here. What can we learn from the famous brand?

"My brand's bigger than your brand" - How would you really value your brand?

Brand valuation is regarded by many marketers as providing the definitive proof of the business value of marketing. The various brand rankings by value released each year attract plenty of attention. What does the differences in results and methodology of the rankings produced by different financial papers, conclude to marketers?, for example, Coca-Cola's 2008 valuation varied from $45bn to $67bn, what does this mean?

The truth is that, A brand is worth nothing if people aren't willing to pay for it. There's no revenue stream. So the key component in this brand-value equation must be the consumer. The real value of an existing customer varies according to that customer's level of engagement with the brand."Fully engaged" consumers are more likely to repurchase the brand and recommend it. They are also more willing to pay a price premium in spite of the price incentives offered by competing brands.

Hence, regardless of the methods used to put a price tag on a company's brand, company should pay more attention on the needs and feelings of the consumers, who are responsible for the rise and fall of those billion dollar brand valuations.Brand assets aren't owned by the company or by the firms that assign a dollar value to those assets. They're owned by the consumer. So your brand should Listen to them, and learn.
source: http//gmj.gallup.com/content/24922/managing-value-your-brand.aspx#2

What color is your brand?

This Video explains the colors that suits best to communicate varying brand attributes:

What Michael Jackson-'The Brand Icon' can teach you about Personal Branding?

I read this article, speaks about ten factors describing how Jackson's brand can be applied to someone's personal brand.
http://www.careerhubblog.com/main/2009/06/what-michael-jackson-the-brand-icon-can-teach-you-about-personal-branding.html
There has been some criticisms for this article, especially with regards to the final factor, i.e. "Die Young". But I believe the author's point in here is to highlight the fact that a brand should be awake and keep on improving their position and should be ready for a reinvention; it shouldn't be obsolete. I think the brand icon - 'Jackson' is an excellent example for personal branding. It is a memorable resonating brand that captured millions of hearts.

Creating an Online Identity

Online companies are successfully putting branding to work with a help from Mr. Dot Com. "The Internet helps promote companies' products in a very efficient manner and especially to all audiences in all parts of the world," says Dettore (http://www.va-interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt/branding.html#9). "Typical advertising media hit only a segmented or regional strategy, so the Internet is one of the most cost effective ways to brand."

Experts say that the brand names of seven Internet companies are already recognized by more than 50 million adults, giving them' mega-brand' status. According to a survey from Intelliquest, 10,000 Internet users associated the following Net names with the following products:

• Books: Amazon.com - 56 percent
• Music: CDNOW - 24 percent
• Computer Software: Microsoft - 30 percent
• Computer Hardware: Dell - 20 percent
• Clothing: The Gap - 12 percent
• Travel: AOL, Yahoo!, Travelocity - 8 percent each
• Autos: Yahoo! - 6 percent

Maker's Mark: building an icon brand

In this paper, we can see the secret of Marketing techniques by Bill Samuels to make Maker's Mark from unknown brand to the nation's premium bourbon leader.

Samuels stated the icon brand as "awesome respect by those in the know.". And Jack Daniels in the 80's and Absolut Vodka in the 90's were considered as the most successful icon brands.
The way Samuels did for Maker's Mark was its personalization approach embodied by a "one customer at a time" philosophy, and using web technology to differentiate from competitors.

We will find out more deep insights and interesting viewpoints on his industry and his marketing techniques in this paper. Some Pearls of marketing wisdom at the end will be good for our resources as well.

Sites of most interest to foreigners in Japan

Obata-san would like to better understand the difficulties foreigners in Japan have with figuring out the best sake to drink, and also which websites are most important to foreigners living in Japan. I look forward to discussing this with all of you tomorrow!

---------------------
Dear Philip,

I have a favor.

Will you please ask your students the following ?
I would like to know where on the internet are they checking the information and news about sake or/and food ?
Japanese consumers use rakuten shop and yahoo shop so much.
For foreigners who live Japan….which sites are they checking when they want to buy or check something related to sake??

Personas for Branding

Personas are fictional examples of a customer segment presented in a context as a story. They have been mostly used for product development but lately they have found application for brand builders.

In this case the persona will not portrait a user but the buyer of a product. Nowadays demand is shifting from products or services in isolation to experiences, what could be called the experience economy "...a new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers that engage each one of them in an inherently personal way..." (Joseph Pine & James Gilmore,2005). In order to provide experiences, products must appeal to emotions and customer knowledge has to go from segmentation profiles to a much deeper level and this level could be achieved by developing a branding persona. Mike Moser (United we brand) hightlights the importance of emotions to build strong brands, knowing "the peopleness of people" as he refers to it. Developing branding personas could be an effective way to get insights on where a brand fits in people's lives and what kind of core message could resonate with our customers.

Best Practice for Driving Employees Brand Advocacy

Brand personality reflected on the personality of the top one or two people in the company, for example Steve Jobs with his company Apple. To resonance with brand consumer not only look at the top/CEO but also the employee. How to deliver the brand message from top to all employees so that employee can help company to strengthen its brand. Forrester report give five best practice to drive employee from brand resisters up to the brand advocates: 1) share the brand message internally; 2) involves employee in brand planning; 3) personalize the brand promise; 4) enable employee of delivery of the brand promise; and 5) reinforce brand-aligned behaviors and attitutdes.

Secret of successful differentiation

In the paper of "what is strategy" by Michael Porter, he has mentioned that the essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do. Many successful brands has been following this by creating their differentiation that won't be imitated. Like Starbucks with their thought of neighbor hangout coffee shops with easy chair and sofas, Volvo with their safety brand and did everything humanly possible, etc.

This paper will help you to find out the secret of successful differentiation by thinking beyond the core benefits of your product category. We will see the different thought of Naked News, Apple, Virgin Atlantic, etc. The differentiation that these companies created may become the core-benefits of their product category (Nokia...) but also may not which seems ridiculous to competitors (Virgin Atlantic, Swatch, ...).

Branding Evolution: Dove Story

"Dove Evolution Campaign" can be a very good example of brand evolution when the company use viral advertisment to clarify their brand message so that it is more understandable to your consumers and/or partners.

Since the brand was launched in 1957, the Dove advertising message has been a constant: It's not soap. It's a beauty bar. The picture of cream pouring into the bar was the iconic image Dove used in ads for nearly five decades. However, Unilever downsized from 1,600 brands to 400 in 2002 , nominating Dove to be one of its master brands. No longer just a beauty bar, Dove was to be a beauty brand, encompassing products such as body wash, deodorant, hair care and body lotion. Nothing in its heritage had prepared the brand to represent all of these functions. Dove now had to come up with a message that could speak for all its products. And the message is . "The Real Truth About Beauty" as you can see from video.

What if the Brand speaks to you?

‘Personality traits are what the brand will live and die for’ so Brand personality is a set of human characteristics associated with a brand.
For example:
IBM is ‘Older’ while Apple is ‘Younger’
Coke is ‘Confirming’ while Pepsi is ‘irreverent’

Personality of Levi’s Brand for me is:
Rebellion, sensuality, being cool - this gauge my perception & attitude towards Levis brand, differentiate the product when the brands are similar in product attributes, creates brand equity, a powerful relationship

This article describes more about brand personality, seeing a brand as a friend and how important it is to add a sense of humor or a symbol that can help to strengthen the brand relationship.

4 Elements of a Winning Brand

In this article, author Kim T. Gordon　suggested four guidelines to create a winning brand image.

1. Differentiate your brand

2. Promise value

3. Be a market leader.

4. Integrate your messages

For more details, please look at the article

Determining Your Brand Personality

Today we discussed about brand personality in class. I found a short video also discusses how to determine your brand personality and how knowing your brand personality affects your marketing efforts.

"Toyota Brand" - Lessons Learned?

They knew there was a severe incident on last August.
They then decided to recall 5.4mil. cars and stopped selling on January.
They finally apologized today, Feb.2.

Snow brand was gone, though they still alive with different brand...
Paroma, gas product company, was gone.
many many cases.

In "United We Brand", "ask whether the core value will hold up under stress."

Core value of Toyota was ...?

Let's see carefully how Toyota will recover its brand.

Excellent Posts plus SMART Objectives

First, for those of you who are posting here, your comments/insights are excellent. Second, I hadn't checked on the concept of SMART objectives recently, and per Ronaldo's point in class, others have extended/modified the original SMART elements. Here is an online resource that explains all of these. But I think that the spirit of "why" the idea of "SMART" was created is more important than sticking to any of these models. As we discussed in class, I have seen that "measurable" and "time bound" are the two areas in which students or junior executives typically have difficulties in creating Objectives.

Building your brand with flanker brands

After studying the case "Introducing New Coke", we have mentioned of "Flanker brand" as one way to compete.

So what is flanker brand? why is it important? and whether it will work for the brand or not? This paper will give you the answer of these questions. "Flanker brand is a new brand introduced into
the market by a company that already has an established brand in the same product category. The new brand is designed to compete in the category without damaging the existing item’s
market share by targeting a different group of consumers." Flanker brand has some advantages, such as: shelf space broaden; capture "brand switchers"; Reduce risks to the existing brands/company, etc. In sprite of its importance, flanker brand can not apply for every brand, every company. A flanker brand will work best if we implement it appropriately.

United We Brand: How to Create a Cohesive Brand That's Seen, Heard and Remembered

As we know, core brand values play a very important roles to communicate to anyone inside or outside the company. Here are some basic questions we should consider when we are looking at potential core values:

1- Which values are so inherent in your company that if they disappeared, your company would cease to exist as it is?
2- Which values does your company consistently adhere to in the face of all obstacles?
3- Does the word passionate come to mind when you look at a value and apply it to your company?
4- Which core values does this culture value?

For more details, please look at the title.

What is Strategy?

The beauty rip off – Hair perm turned into a horror story

As explained by professor last week (New Coke Case), how a resonating brand could create dissonance in the minds of consumer, I remembered this incident happened in Sri Lanka. (With relates to a cosmetics brand)

Janet Beauty Care” products are first and only commercial herbal beauty care brand in Sri Lanka. In November 2003 Janet faced a controversial sitation – which was heavily highlighted by media. Their slogan , “Real Herbs – We respect Mother Nature” was challenged by the public with an incident of a hair treatment causing adverse side effects.

Full Story: [http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2004/02/22/fea11.html]

After this incident Janet products were questioned by the public & lost the reputation maintained for years. Even though the company exists with a fair reputation at present, they have faced major failures in financial terms.

Criticisms to Porter's Five Forces

Although Porter's five forces are generally accepted because it can be proven empirically, there are still some criticisms about it. Let me share you some of these.

Porter's framework has been challenged by other academics and strategists such as Stewart Neill. Similarly, the likes of Kevin P. Coyne and Somu Subramaniam have stated that three dubious assumptions underlie the five forces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Criticisms):

• That buyers, competitors, and suppliers are unrelated and do not interact and collude.
• That the source of value is structural advantage (creating barriers to entry).
• That uncertainty is low, allowing participants in a market to plan for and respond to competitive behavior.

5 Forces Michael Porter

All the firm strives for competitive advantage over its rival firm .Let take a look at the 5 forces .

Brand Resonance Pyramid

How the product resonance with the customer? What about the new media recently? Does it change how the product resonance? Keller use pyramid model to build brand resonance.

The myth of First Mover Advantage

Professor talked about this last time. I just came across this article and thought that it may be interesting for us.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3541_333311

Harmonizing your brand touchpoints

We have mentioned "Brand touchpoints" at the last class and I would like to share you more information on this. Touchpoints are the channels by which you can drive your customers or stakeholders satisfaction.

Brand touchpoints fall into three different customer-experience segments: pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. Typical pre-purchase experience touchpoints for consumer-packed goods company include advertising, samples, direct mail, etc. Typical purchase experience touchpoints for CPG company include POP display, packaging, in-store display, etc. And typical post-purchase experience touchpoints will be customer service, loyalty programs, newsletter, etc. But what are the goals and objectives of each touchpoints and whether we should focus on whole touchpoints or some that really drive your brand experience you desire?

This paper will help you understand more of brand touchpoints and learn four steps that help company to determine which brand touchpoints they should leverage. Even this paper is quite old (2003), it seems that there are some lessons we can learn about brand touchpoints.

Factors to create a sustainable competitive advantage

The video explains how a company should differentiate its product & create a more specific competitive advantage. Hence,
1. Customers should be aware of the product's specific differentiations.
2. Secondly, create a Brand touchpoint/positioning in the eyes of customers.
3. Finally, make it a Mafia offer.

Innovation and competitve advantage

"Innovation, technology advances, and competitive advantage are connected by complex and multidimensional relationships" is the first comment in an interesting article named "Innovation and competitive advantage: what we know and what we need to learn". In this article, they consider four factors that impact on the relationship between innovation and competitve advantage. One, innovations that are hard to imitate are more likely to lead to sustainable competitive advantage (e.g., Clark 1987; Porter, 1985). Two, innovations that accurately reflect market realities are more likely to lead to sustainable competitive advantage (e.g., Deming, 1983; Porter, 1985). Three, innovations that enable a firm to exploit the timing characteristics of the relevant industry are more likely to lead to sustainable competitive advantage (e.g., Betz, 1987; Kanter, 1983). Fourth, innovations that rely on capabilities and technologies that are readily accessible to the firm are more likely to lead to sustainable competitive advantage (e.g., Ansoff, 1988; Miller, 1990). For further discussion, please take a look at the article.

Warren Buffett on competitive advantage

We say a lot about the role of strong brands as competitive advantage. Just look at the view of one of the great investors in the world, Warrent Buffet, about this topic in the article "Brand names - Warren Buffet secrets". In his opion, there are two types of companies: commodity companies and non-commodity companies. Commodity ones produce or sell the undistinguishable products/services to others. In contrast, uncommodity companies produce a product or service that is so different from its competitors, or so special, that the customer, and the distributor, cannot do without it. This allows the company what Mary Buffett and David Clark call a "continuing competitive advantage".Brand name is one of important tool to build continuing competitve advantage. In this article, he also gave example about some strong names such as Coca Cola, Gillete and three brand name advantages. For further discussion, please take a look at this article.

Question Trees and Competitive Advantage

Thank you for the great discussion in class yesterday. If you are looking for something to post, I was wondering about other Question Tree creation methods. I've been using the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto as the foundation for this process, but I'm wondering if you have found or are familiar with other methods.

Also, from our class yesterday on Competitive Advantage, I am still looking for a simple, easy-to-use framework for assessing Competitive Advantage. I've read many books and papers on this, but have never seen a step-by-step framework presented. Because of this, I've made one myself.... but I'm wondering if you know of any others in use.

Your comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

See you in class next week.

Building A Strong Brand: Brands and Branding Basics

I would like to share an article from Dave Dolak on brands:

The word "brand", when used as a noun, can refer to a company name, a product name, or a unique identifier such as a logo or trademark.

In a time before fences were used in ranching to keep one's cattle separate from other people's cattle, ranch owners branded, or marked, their cattle so they could later identify their herd as their own.

The concept of branding also developed through the practices of craftsmen who wanted to place a mark or identifier on their work without detracting from the beauty of the piece. These craftsmen used their initials, a symbol, or another unique mark to identify their work and they usually put these marks in a low visibility place on the product.

Not too long afterwards, high quality cattle and art became identifiable in consumers’ minds by particular symbols and marks. Consumers would actually seek out certain marks because they had associated those marks in their minds with tastier beef, higher quality pottery or furniture, sophisticated artwork, and overall better products. If the producer differentiated their product as superior in the mind of the consumer, then that producer's mark or brand came to represent superiority.

Today's modern concept of branding grew out of the consumer packaged goods industry and the process of branding has come to include much, much more than just creating a way to identify a product or company.

Branding today is used to create emotional attachment to products and companies. Branding efforts create a feeling of involvement, a sense of higher quality, and an aura of intangible qualities that surround the brand name, mark, or symbol.

Good brands-What make them special

This "Good brands report 2009" written by PSFK is really a good source for us to understand the the insights of good brands in the world. Each brand will process their own brand value but they still share some common straits which are utility, experimentation, environmental priority, community and listening, etc.

We also have some good lessons from top 10 brands, Google, Apple, Zipcar, etc. Like, Google with the lesson on experiment rapidly and embrace failure; Apple with the lesson on every aspect of your brand should be as good as your product, etc.

Please refer to the link above for your information and some good resources to improve your brand value.

What would YOU do? - Believing in your BRAND. :)

Since I've never been in this line of work, I was just thinking.. For you to create (or at least be inspired to create) a good brand strategy for your product, you actually have to believe in your product. Right? However, does this mean that we should not be part of companies whose products we don't support/believe in? (At least from the perspective of an employee working for the Marketing Department.)

For instance you were offered a job as the Brand Manager of Pepsi - a really good opportunity for you, but you're a Coca-Cola drinker - and you don't really like the taste of Pepsi as compared to Coke. Will you accept the job or not? Why?

Just wondering about your views on this. :)


- Emilie

New study: Deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance

There was a new research recently published about a Deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance. The study looked at how the 100 most valuable brands — as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking — engaged in 11 different online social media channels.They critiqued the brands on not only their breadth of engagement across these channels, but also their depth, such as whether they reply to comments made on blog posts. Each brand was given a numerical score. The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:
Starbucks (127)
Dell (123)
eBay (115)
Google (105)
Microsoft (103)
Thomson Reuters (101)
Nike (100)
Amazon (88)
SAP (86)
Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

Note that they are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on companies than the competition.

Brand elements at its implementation

ArceloMittal implementing the brand elements
Click here

Relaunch of a Failed Brand in Sri Lanka

Celltel was the first cellular operator in Sri Lanka (1989). They introduced their brand as "Celltel" making the word synonymous with "mobile phone". People even used to say "I owned a Dialog, CELLTEL" (Dialog :another carrier network,celltel: a common word in place of 'mobile phone')". Celltel lacked good marketing skills, What celltel promised in their advertisements were always subject to some un-advertised condition,making the consumer frustrated. (In my experience I owned a celltel connection too, but changed later due to missing promises). After the massive failure, celltel was acquired by Millicom Luxeburg and relaunched to Sri Lanka again as "Tigo"...trying to brainwash Sri Lankans that there wasn't a brand as "Celltel", in order to recover the lost brand image.

This is a new Tigo Advertisement:

Elements of a Winning Brand Name

Brand name is one of the most important elements of brand. Brand name is defined Word(s) that identify not only a product but also its manufacturer or producer, such as Apple, Coca Cola, IBM, Mercedes, Shell, Sony, Toyota. So, creating a good brand name plays an important role for your business and of course, it takes your great efforts in term of time and other resources. According to the article, here are some elements of a captivating and winning brand name: memorable and easy to spell, concise, informative, visual element, positive connotation and color.

Brand Experience

Something that businesses often forgot is brand experience. It is what consumer see, touch, and feel about the product. A good or bad experience will stick in the consumer mind forever, so that businesses should be aware of this. In the internet era, the marketing job become very challenging. What brand is stand for? If your company don't have the answer, ask them ask the customer. Company should tell how relevant their product/service to the customer needs and different from everyone else who sells what you sell. This article talk about the key factor in company and customer relationships, brand promise.

JAL Brand - Dead or Alive?

JAL (Japan Air Line) is now being considered to be restructured by the "government-brokered package (from WSJ 1/12)". So what would happen to the "JAL" brand?

JAL and ANA(All Nippon Airways) have dominated Japanese domestic airline so long and Japanese people in fact have little choice of the airline companies, especially for minor place like Niigata airport.

So what if JAL is restructured and lowers its service (decreasing some routes)? Will JAL brand be devaluated? Yes, definitely. But so what? JAL would maintain its position as one hand of Japanese main airlines taking advantage of its domination.

There has not yet been announcements that ANA will be allowed to increase its flight, or other airline companies, such as Skymark Airlines or Foreign companies will replace JAL's routes.

JAL brand might be keep alive, and would be revitalized in the near future. And Japanese people would accept it not only because they have little choice but also because of their tolerance, "Mizu-ni-nagasu", just same as Snow Brand...

Reading article"Unfortunate conclusions"

This article is really a touchy one. It relates to my life story and I wonder if I have read this article a couple of years ago, my destiny could have been different. I could not reveal my story here.

How we can relate the unfortunate decisions to Brand value...may be we tend to make wrong perceptions about a company with out sound reasoning and end up in the undesired island as explained in the article.So, make desision after a careful and sound reason.

Brand Value

Today, we have seen the increasing brand values in determining the overall corporate wealth. So, what is the value in brands? In this article, we will know that the value of brands is resided in the brand equity.

Brand equity has three dimensions but the first dimension "Customer-based brand equity" has grown more important. So to make simplify, what brand managers do is to make the brand enter into each consumer' life and make brands become different and more valuable. In this article, you can have a deep knowledge of what are the value of brands and some famous brand examples (Nike, BWM...)