In this post I thought I'd discuss a few of my thoughts on branding which some of the entrepreneurs asked me to share with them. Since all businesses and markets differ once you get up close and personal, my thoughts below are kept to the macro level; broad brush stroke points common to most business.
Branding
Our brands are the gut response and emotional reaction someone has in association with our company, products, and services. We may own the trademark and name but the world owns the experience therefore we don't control our brands... we steward them.
A unique symbol that our markets can identify us with.
Our logo/wordmark is not our brand either. Although it serves a very important role it is quite simply a visual trigger by which people can identify us; a graphic that assists them in differentiating our products/services from all the others. The key here is 'differentiate'. Think of IBM's wordmark with its horizontal stripes. Visually arresting or artistic it is not. Highly identifiable? Absolutely. http://bit.ly/IBM_logo.
There can be a good deal of investment that goes into developing a logo/wordmark, however if you're a small-to-medium sized business, get it done and move on. Of course ensure it is unique i.e. highly identifiable and not offensive or contain confusing or 'bad luck' elements but from there it doesn't even have to be particularly appealing to start. After all, most enduring organizations have an 'over time' evolved logo/wordmark. In almost 38 years the Starbucks logo has under gone atleast five make-overs http://bit.ly/starbucks_logo_evolution. I am not suggesting we want to be willy-nilly changing our brand anchors, but here's the thing. Unless we have a tonne of time and people working on it that are willing to stay up nights and work weekends to get to 'great' we'll need to be happy with a solid 'good' for now. It frees up our resources for other projects and gives us time to collect a reasonable data sample (feedback) before we go back to it.
Building our brands
Think of your brand as your garden. We water it, feed it, and weed it... but we don't control it. There is a whole world of external elements at play which we cannot logically expect to bend to our will. Seeds from a garden miles away, caught and released over our flower bed from the feathers of a passing bird. Our neighbors not tending to their weeds that then propagate over on our side of the fence. How about over or under exposure to sun, water, frost. You get the idea.
So where do we start? How do we build and nurture a great brand? With discipline, diligence, and logic.
Discipline.
First understand and embrace what it is we wish consumers to experience when they interact with our brand? What is 'the value proposition'. Exceptional price? Exceptional quality? Exceptional innovation? Don't try and do it all. We don't need to, and the odds are stacked heavily against us - many would say its impossible. We are setting ourselves up for a whole lot of pain and cost when we don't manage market expectations. For example, would you buy a Volvo and expect the tune-up to be inexpensive? No, of course not. We bought it for exceptional quality engineering. We expect that kind of quality comes with a price tag. And although we may expect some rationale for the various line items on the invoice, we are ok with the premium.
Once we've determined the basis for our value proposition we need to be ultra consistent about it. Make sure our customers always feel confident they'll experience the 'X' that they have been conditioned to expect from our brand and are willing trade us for their money. Ponder this one, we can travel virtually any where in the world and purchase the same Big Mac as we do from our local drive thru. Now that's brand consistency.
Diligence:
Get out into the world and talk it up. Don't spam people though. Spam can cause more damage than good; mostly in wasted resources. Start conversations with our nearest and dearest friends, associates, and clients. People who know we're good at what we do. Ask them to refer us, pass something on, invite us to speak at an event or be a guest editor, etc. A third party stamp of approval is the most valuable form of proving credibility and source of leads - bar none. If we're good at what we do, i.e. keep our value promise, most people are happy to help us out. We've all heard of viral marketing right? Well this is it in its infancy. Be patient, don't expect money to come pouring through the doors right away. There's a good quote from Lance Armstrong that goes... "I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else." Keep our heads up and be diligent; the harder and smarter we work at connecting with people the broader our circle of influence becomes. And the beautiful thing is, our influence grows exponentially. Think of how many people you know? Each one of them... our happy partners, customers, and friends know alot of people as well.
Here's a fantastic bit of viral branding by VW for their luxury car the Phaeton http://bit.ly/Phaeton_plant_video. A notable bit of back ground is that I didn't receive the video via Volkswagen or any of its affiliates. As a matter of fact I couldn't even find it on any of their sites. So where did I get it? A trusted friend who knows I love great marketing and cool tech sent it over to me. The key phrase here is 'trusted friend'.
The tactic worked because...
• the mail came from someone I know... so I opened it.
• someone I trust recommended it as 'brilliant'... so I invested the time to watch it.
I watched it and agree it's brilliant... so I'm passing it on to you folks. And if you trust my opinion you may invest the time to watch it as well.
Another great example of viral marketing I experienced recently came out of Vancouver Island University. One of my sisters, Lynn, is an adviser at VIU and received an inmail from an instructor in the Cosmetology program letting her know they were starting to take outside appointments http://bit.ly/VIU_cosmetology. Lynn called my other sister and I, and the three of us went in for a pamper session. It turns out alot of faculty got that same mail and the students were booked solid with appointments. Additionally, each faculty member brought in atleast one of their friends, relatives, etc; people whom if they were satisfied with the value-in-exchange-for-their-money would then tell their friends, relatives, co-workers, and so-on. What was a small, quick act on the part of that instructor could keep those students busy for the duration of their program. Moral of the story here, is that viral doesn't have to mean reaching out to tens of thousands of people. That's a daunting task, whereas reaching out to those that know and trust you is easy. Just keep at it.
Logic:
Who wouldn't love to be Google. A company that in 2008 was identified as having the most powerful brand in the world http://bit.ly/Brandz_top_100. So logically if we want to be them, we should study how they and others like them got to where they are http://bit.ly/search_engine_history. They certainly didn't become the global success that they are over night. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, started from humble beginnings begging and borrowing resources while they were students at Stanford University.
Second, understand our market(s), its needs, wants, and desires. Learn the language of our consumers; the information, phrases, words, and triggers that are meaningful to them. Logically if we speak their language we have far greater odds of earning their trust. In this way we can earn a company's, group's, person's trust and potentially referral without selling them a thing. For example I attended a public relations workshop sponsored by the British Columbia Technology Association (BCTIA http://bit.ly/BCTIA) where I contributed some insights to the group re building media trust. Some time after that event I received a call informing me that the company I worked for was being considered for a pretty prestigious manufacturing award. I inquired as to how we had been selected as a contender and was told a board member of the association had put us forward. I then called the gentlemen and inquired as to how he knew about us. Turns out he was sitting in that workshop and was of the opinion that any company that applied that much forward thinking to their PR must also make one heck of a product. What I said resonated with him because I offered practical advice, in lay-person terms (he was a CEO not a marketer), that he could run with. If we dig back into our memory banks I'm sure we'll all be able to come up with at least one time when we said something along the lines of... "I haven't tried it myself, but I read an article (other) discussing... and it seems quite impressive." If we hadn't tried it how would we know? Because 'X' had been communicated to us in a language and tone that convinced us. Doing our homework to understand what the language is may take some effort but its a logical approach that works.
A logical data source for building and evolving your brand is the internet. In an earlier post I mentioned that the world-wide-web (www.) can be an incredibly powerful tool. For me, one of its greatest strengths is the high quality behavioral data we can mine from it. Priceless information that up until quite recently, was only accessible by the giant corporations with mass money, reach, and cross-over consumer bases from which they could compile their data. Today we all have good quality access through our own site(s) and search engine analytics such as that provided by Google, Yahoo, etc. There's also a plethora of aggregator sites and business intelligence software such as AdMob, Alexa, Bango, BuzMetrics, Compete, CoreMetrics, KeywordSpy, Omniture, Overtone, Quantcast, Radian6, Webtrends, WordTracker... to name just a few.
I can't emphasize the value of behavioral data enough. Unlike traditional survey and most focus group reports this data is compiled from actual user activity. It is grounded in people's real interests and motivators vs respondents answering questions based on what they should or might do given a specific circumstance or event, that may or may not occur or be significant at some point in the future.
Another key advantage is that web analytics are near real-time data sources. You can act on it while it is still relevant i.e. while its hot in the media or its still seasonably applicable. As with most things that are worth while there's a learning curve, and certainly some people are far better skilled at compiling and analyzing the data, trends, etc than others. Whether you wade into the ocean of data yourself, or hire a professional to compile and monitor it for you, you will be that much richer for your investment. You will gain actionable insight into the value and discussions surrounding your, and your competitors brands.
What kind of behavioral data we want to compile and analyze is a huge topic. The data provides critical inputs for monitoring performance factors across almost all marketing disciplines, thus applies to much more than just branding. For example, we can quite accurately and inexpensively qualify whether our creative has hit the mark before we take that plunge, and run the same thing in a more costly forum or format. It's a terrifically interesting and important category so I'll leave it to a future dedicated post.
Branding, business development, and business intelligence are topics near and dear to my heart. I hope you found my thoughts on 'Branding discipline, diligence and logic' worth your time investment. Should you have any questions, would generously like to add a few of your own thoughts, or would like to inquire about me joining your team I welcome hearing from you. There's a comment section below this post or alternatively please feel free to email me at TLoslo@shaw.ca or visit my online profile at http://www.TraceyLoslo.com.
Kind regards... Tracey.
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