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!