Brand leadership

How important is your brand to you?  It’s a glib comment, but your brand is a valuable (if not your most valuable) asset.  Look at it this way – if you had a chance to buy a company that owned a few buildings and some aging machinery, or a company with no tangible assets that owned (say) the Toshiba or Nestle brand, which would be the most attractive?  Okay, most of our brands are far more modest, but over the years, think how much we invest in advertising and communicating our brand and all the brand collateral we create.

So where does brand leadership come in?  Brand leadership is putting the brand back at the centre of the organisation.  It is the MD or CEO who ultimately has stewardship of the brand.  Just as we would not allow our tangible assets, our buildings and machinery to deteriorate and devalue, it makes sound business sense to take a similar level of care with our brands.

There are simple techniques for keeping the brand central to all business decisions – one is to put the brand as an agenda item on all important meetings from board meetings on down. We should constantly be asking the question; “How will this affect the brand ?”

There are a lot of resources on the web on brand valuation, but as a straightforward overview take a look at www.jrcanda.com/art_valuation.html

Protecting your property – brands or patents

I do a lot of work with exporters and many of these are also having products manufactured in the emerging big economies. One of the great fears they express is that their intellectual properties will be stolen and their products copied.  The obvious solution is to try to protect their property with patents and other copyright protections.  These are fundamental things to try to get right, but it can be very costly – often prohibitively so for many businesses.

The ultimate protection, I believe, lies in strong brands. The key reason customers choose brands is reliability.  They know what they are going to get because they have used the brand in the past or it has a reputation.  Me-too and copycat products will always follow, there is hardly a product or service out there that does not have its imitators and competitors.  But when price is not the overarching consideration the reliabilty of the brand is a major factor.

Manufacturers seeking suppliers in regions like China and India are particular concerned about imitation. But strengthening their brand is a strong protection.  As the economies prosper people want the reassurance of a brand and the promise it makes.  Wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs don’t want to wear an imitation Rolex – they want the real thing.

How do brands live in a digital world?

How has new media impacted brands?
It goes without saying that digital media has dramatically changed the marketing and marcomms mix and anyone involved in branding or brand development has digital high on their agenda. Just how high depends upon the brand itself – not all brands are created equal

It’s apparent that this is a massive subject which I’m sure I will return to again and again, so for now let’s just consider the categories of brands

Traditional and existing brands – these generally take digital <into their standard marketing activities, though there are many brand awareness surveys indicating that a combination of online and offline promotion has far greater impact then the sum of the two activities.  Simple factors also have impact on existing brands – for example, consider B&Q and AT&T – where ampersands are not available in URLs. No wonder we have diy.com.

But many brands are now exploiting social internet, as strong brands generate discourse and conversation – for better or for worse. Everyone wants to talk about well-known names and if the brands are smart they can tap into this valuable resource to inform their marketing decisions.

Web-only brands

The internet has sponsored many brands that would not have existed previously – Amazon, lastminute.com, Google, Facebook etc.  For all of these, the web is their only shop window.  Such brands are usually very adept at on-line marketing but the really smart marketers exploit traditional marketing equally well.

One of the dangers with an online brand is that the owners are so focussed on the digital environment they neglect the offline arena. Just as offline brands need to exist in a digital world as well, online brands may also have opportunities to develop and extend into the offline world as well. Owners must take care to consider these opportunities in their brand development and not create something which presents real difficulties to work with offline.

New Brands

Perhaps the most exciting area is the creation of new brands. It is here taht the greatest impact is seen – any aware marketer must consider online opportunities as part of the brand development programme.  Equally important though are the opportunities digital media presents for the brand development process itself. Research, testing, market intelligence, surveys and brand comparisons can all be executed quickly and inexpensively online – even launches can be effected with massive impact for new brands.

We touched on Web 2.0 earlier, but for new brands the conversations that can be stimulated and the feedback marketers can get is hugely valuable. The only discipline that needs to be applied is in relinquishing a measure of control to engage with the audiences – something many companies find extremely difficult.

Stephen Fry – too clever by three quarters?

I’m not normally easily impressed by celebrities when they get onto the subject of new media et al, but this piece by Stephen Fry on social internet and Web 2.0, in the Guardian is excellent – knowledgeable, perceptive, thoughtful and well written:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/12/1

Has everyone gone brand mad?

I love the way the world has embraced the concept of the brand – after all, it helps pay my mortgage, but at times I just wonder if the media has gone rather over the top?

The press is now full of the concept of ‘brands’: the latest I heard was in the US Primaries where they were talking about the Hilary Clinton ‘brand’. I found myself thinking about whether this is justified and are all the examples we hear really justified as brands? I started trying to arrive a sound working definition of a brand – without a great deal of success. As I marketer I understand the concept of a brand, its relationship to corporate personality, brand structure and products. But clearly, entities that exist outside the marketing framework (in its strictest sense) can be considered as brands. I battered my brain for a while considering whether the ‘Clinton brand’ is in fact a brand, or a product.

Finally I fell back on the concept of brand ownership – who owns the brand? The brand is, of course, owned by the public. So, it is logical to consider that brands are in fact emergent. If the public consider it to be a brand – if it looks like a brand, smells like a brand and tastes like brand, chances are it is a brand.

Pipped at the post?

You know what it’s like, when that great idea you have been working on for months to put your brand right at the forefront of your sector is suddenly pipped – one of your competitors beats you to it! Your killer marketing idea is rolled out worldwide by somebody else while your people still have it somewhere in their in-trays.

What happened? Well, from my experience, clients are still thinking of web marketing in traditional terms. They look at activities as projects, where in fact they are processes. I see people coming up with great concepts, then spending months developing, changing, amending and micro managing.  They are reluctant to put their idea into action until every ‘t’ is crossed and ‘i’ dotted.  While over the other side of town, competitor ‘x’ came up with the same idea months later but is happy to go live early and allow the idea to develop on-line – they recognize that it is a process.

Key to winning the race, especially where social internet is involved, is being prepared to relax control – a problem many companies have.  But to be engaged with your audience means relinquishing a measure of control.  Stop trying to micro-manage activities before they go live. The web is dynamic – you will have to amend and react to changes anyway, so you might as well go live sooner rather than later and then edit, build and develop in real time.

Don’t think of internet projects in the same way as you would think of print jobs.  You don’t have to have every detail completed before going to press. In fact, regular updating keeps the process alive and vital.  Visitors (and search engines) like to see change and development.

Relax and enjoy the process – forget the paranoia and get that great idea online.

New year – same old?

Beginning the new year, I had a browse around the web to see what’s new on the branding front, online. I have to say I was rather disappointed. The majority of recent input from websites and blogs is simply re-hashing the same old platitudes.  This is very depressing considering the phenomenal rate of change in all online fields: searching, semantics, social networks, rich media, convergence etc. Why are brand marketers and developers not exploring exciting now opportunities?  Well… perhaps they are but are keeping very quiet about it.

I will continue to pursue the innovative – but in the meantime we could do a lot worse than go back to basics and look at one very sound site by Nathan Shedroff.