Brand Aid

A Quick Reference Guide to Solving Your Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position

Brad VanAuken

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780814434741
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Brand managers, marketers, and executives have long turned to the trusted principles in Brand Aid to troubleshoot their branding problems.

A catchy business name and a smart logo may get you a few clicks, but to create a sustaining image for your organization and build continual success will require the perfect branding statement. The essence of an organization begins with establishing its brand; therefore, it is essential to get it right.

With over 30 years of experience building world-class brands, branding expert Brad Vanauken covers topics ranging from research and positioning to brand equity management and architecture strategy. This invaluable guide has collected illuminating case studies, best practices, and the latest research to offer invaluable advice on every aspect of brand management, including:

• The 6 most powerful sources of brand differentiation
• 5 elements that trigger brand insistence
• Turning brand strategy into advertising
• Online branding
• Social responsibility, sustainability, and storytelling
• 60 nontraditional marketing techniques

An organization cannot afford to get their branding wrong. With the treasure trove of techniques, templates, and rules of thumb found in Brand Aid, it won’t!

PART 1

Introduction to Brand Management

1

a brand is a friend

Business leaders talk about the importance of maintaining strong brand equity, but is there consensus on what brand equity is? Some people say it’s everything associated with the brand that adds to or subtracts from the value it provides to a product or service. Others emphasize the financial value of the brand asset. Still others stress the consumer loyalty or price premium generated by brand equity. Some even talk about the permission and flexibility a brand gives an organization to extend into new product and service categories. While all of these opinions are very important parts of brand equity, I think the following story best illustrates what brand equity is.

Imagine you are having lunch with a longtime and very good friend. Several times throughout the lunch, she makes disparaging and sarcastic remarks that make you feel bad. You think to yourself, “This just isn’t like her. She must be having a bad day.” You meet with her again a week or two later, and again she acts ornery and negative. You think to yourself, “Something must be going on in her life that she’s really struggling with. Maybe she is having difficulties with her job or her health or her marriage or her children.” You may even ask her if everything is all right. She snaps back, “Of course it is.”

Your interaction with her continues in this vein over the next couple of months. You continue to try to be supportive, but she’s definitely getting on your nerves. After many meetings and much interaction, you finally decide that she’s a changed person and someone with whom you prefer to spend less and less time. You may get to this point after a few months, or perhaps even after a year or more. She doesn’t change, and eventually the relationship peters out.

Now consider for a moment that the person you first had lunch with is the same person as before, with one exception: She is a total stranger to you. You haven’t met her previously and she is not your dear friend. I would guess that after enduring many caustic comments and being insulted a few times at that lunch, your first impression wouldn’t be very positive. In fact, you’d probably be inclined not to get together with that person again. You’d probably walk away from that lunch thinking, “What a miserable person. I hope I don’t run into her again.”

In both of these scenarios it is the same person behaving the same way in the same situation. Yet in the first scenario, you are very quick to forgive the behavior. In fact, you feel a lot of concern toward her. In the second scenario, you can’t wait for the lunch to be over and you hope never to see the person again.

In the first scenario, the person was a longtime good friend. She had a lot of equity with you. In the second scenario, she had no equity at all. You see, if people or brands have a lot of equity—that is, if you know, like, and trust them—you will “cut them a lot of slack” even if they repeatedly fail to meet your expectations. If a person, product, service, or organization has no equity with you, no emotional connection, and no trust, then you are much less inclined to forgive unmet expectations.

DID YOU KNOW?

“Familiarity … more often breeds liking.”

(Source: Raj Raghunathan, Ph.D., Sapient Nature, January 17, 2012.)

Declining brands tend to lose buyers while the brands’ loyalty and purchase rates stay stable among remaining buyers.

(Source: Andrew Ehrenberg, “Description and Prescription,” Journal of Advertising Research, November/December 1997, p. 19.)

In most product categories, price is the primary purchase incentive for no more than 15 percent to 35 percent of all customers.

(Source: Kevin J. Clancy, “At What Profit Price?” Brandweek 38, no. 25, June 23, 1997, pp. 24–28.)

Brand equity creates a relationship and a strong bond that grows over time. It is often so strong that it compensates for performance flaws, whether an out-of-stock situation, poor customer service, a product that falls apart, inconvenient store hours, or a higher-than-average-price. In the end, you want to deliver good quality and good value, innovation, relevant differentiation, convenience, and accessibility with your brand. However, we must never forget that building brand equity is like building a close friendship. It requires a consistent relationship over time, trust, and an emotional connection.

TEN SIGNS THAT PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND MARKETING

1. They never think about the customer and that individual’s motivations and needs.

2. They define marketing as sales support.

3. They use the terms sales and marketing interchangeably.

4. They use the terms marketing and advertising interchangeably.

5. They think about marketing as a cost center or overhead rather than as an investment.

6. They only think of marketing as its tools and tactics, not as an integrated process that delivers on a strategy.

7. There is no well-thought-out media plan.

8. They believe marketing should copy whatever the competitors are doing.

9. They think anyone can do marketing, ignoring that it is a discipline based on training and experience.

10. They can’t see the link between marketing strategy and business strategy.

2

understanding the language of branding

It is important to establish a common brand management vocabulary in your organization. Establishing this common vocabulary will ensure that people can communicate with fewer misunderstandings. More important, it will help communicate and reinforce key brand management principles.

I worked with organizations in which different managers used different terms to describe positioning the brand. Terms ranged from “essence” and “promise” to “position” and “unique value proposition.” This caused great confusion. I worked with other organizations that struggled with the differences among master brand, family brand, parent brand, umbrella brand, corporate brand, brand, subbrand, endorsed brand, product brand, etc. The aim is to agree on one set of terms and to simplify the brand architecture.

Brand

The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.”¹

More important, a brand is the source of a promise to the consumer. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. Everything an organization does should be focused on enhancing delivery against its brand’s promise.

Combining a few different definitions, a brand is the name and symbols that identify:

• The source of a relationship with the consumer

• The source of a promise to the consumer

• The unique source of products and services

• The single concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect (according to brand management experts Al Ries and Laura Ries, in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding)

• The sum total of each customer’s experience with your organization

Finally, another way to think about brands is that they are personifications of organizations and their products and services. In this way, brands can hold certain values, have specific personalities, possess admirable qualities, stand for something, make promises, and create emotional connections with people.

THE ORIGIN OF BRANDS

Brands date back to earliest recorded history when they were used to indicate the origin of a product and information about its quality. As far back as 2250 BCE, researchers have found evidence of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Introduction to Brand Management
• Part 2: Designing the Brand
• Part 3: Building the Brand
• Part 4: Leveraging the Brand
• Part 5: Brand Metrics
• Part 6: Other Brand Management Considerations
• Part 7: Brand Management In Brief
• Appendix A: Brand Audits
• Appendix B: Online Brand Management and Advertising Resources
• Appendix C: References/Further Readings
• Notes
• Index