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...)

The Art & Science of Branding

This video explains about successful branding

Why branding?

In class, we have 5 whys to find a right SEED question and I wonder why branding.
Everything the company tries to do is to get profit. So, the simple answer is that branding is for profit.
According to the title, we look at two aspects: for internally, branding supports for employee satisfaction, loyalty and achievement; and for externally, branding differentiate our company from other competitors, influences the customer's purchase decision and adds value to our business. For further discussion, please look through the above mentioned title.

Weclome to the 2010 Brand Management Blog

Hello and Welcome to our Class Blog for the 2010 Brand Management class at IUJ. On this blog, I would like you to post or make comments related to the posts that others make each week. In this forum we can discuss the topics we've discussed in class in more detail, and add more insights and information.

To receive credit for your blog posts, please either post a message or comment on the posts that others make.

Let's use this as a forum to further our understanding of how to manage a brand in the business realities of 2010!