Branding 101
by Brad VanAuken

Think of this as your tuition-free Branding University. This content has been compiled over a career in branding by our chief brand strategist, Brad VanAuken. If you like what you read here, we recommend you try his two books, Brand Aid and The Brand Management Checklist.

Branding 101 — serious information that will get you thinking, and winning.

• Defining “Brand“ And Why It Matters
• Creating Brand Insistence: The 5 Drivers
• Building Blocks of Brand Insistence
• 16 Most Important Things to Know About Building Winning Brands
• 39 Common Brand Problems
• Brand Management Checklist

Also check out our Brand Briefs for concise knowledge on a wide range of brand- and marketing-related topics, our Recommended Reading and our Links.

Defining "Brand" and Why It Matters

Brands personify organizations and their products and services. That is, brands allow non-human entities to take on human qualities such as trustworthiness, authenticity, vitality and reliability.

In this way, brands enable entities to create emotional connections with customers and potential customers, resulting in more frequent usage and greater loyalty.

Brands are also the sources of promises to customers. They promise relevant differentiated benefits. Most people associate only one or two attributes with any organization, product or service. Well thought-out branding increases the likelihood that the attributes chosen are relevant, believable, compelling, and are customer benefits that motivate purchase or usage.

Proper brand positioning can ensure that people perceive the brand in ways that achieve organizational objectives. Diligent brand management efforts can move people from considering the brand (when they have specific needs), to preferring the brand, to purchasing the brand, to being completely loyal to the brand, to enthusiastically recommending the brand to others.

Studies have demonstrated that brands can produce the following benefits for organizations

• decreased price sensitivity,
• increased customer loyalty,
• increased bargaining power with retailers (for manufacturers),
• independence from particular product categories,
• increased flexibility for future growth (through brand extension),
• increased ability to hire and retain talented employees,
• increased ability to focus the organization's activities and resources,
• increased market share,
• increased stock price,
• and increased shareholder value.

Studies have shown that an organization's two most important assets are its people and its brands. Typically, most of a company's financial value results from its brand asset value, which often far exceeds the value of all of the company's tangible assets. This brand asset value was historically called ‘goodwill' by accountants.

Elements of a strong brand include:

• the brand's intended marketplace position (including its unique value proposition) and its strategy,
• its identity (including its logo and its tagline),
• its marketing communication and
• its customer touch point design (the way it interacts with customers and potential customers at each point of customer contact).

Through proper brand management, brands can be built, strengthened, extended into new product/service categories and leveraged in a myriad of other ways.

Branding is all about bringing an organization and its story to life in ways that capture the attention and support of the brand's intended customers and other stakeholders.

Contact us to help you bring your brand to life.

Creating Brand Insistence

How do you create brand insistence—that wonderful state where clients and customers don't just prefer you but will go to the ends of the earth to acquire or use your brand?

Contact us to put Brand Insistence to work for you.

Building Blocks of Brand Insistence

What's necessary to create the result you're looking for? Just making people aware of your brand and its relevance will only get you into the purchase consideration set—a long way from brand insistence. The final step—the emotional connection—is how the world comes to love you.

16 Most Important Things to Know About Building Winning Brands

This popular article by Brad VanAuken, chief brand strategist for Brand | Cool, netted out the contents of an entire career—and two books—on branding. We've made it even shorter and sweeter here. You can also download the entire article in PDF form.

• Brands are personifications of organizations, products, services and experiences—the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty.
• Top management support is crucial.
• Your brand's identity must be frequently and consistently presented.
• Profound knowledge of your customer is essential.
• The brand and its products and services must exceed customer expectations.
• Brand building begins with awareness.
• Relevant differentiation—not price and not product features and benefits—is the defining aspect of a brand.
• Evoke emotions and create sensory experiences.
• Exhibit admirable human qualities.
• Stand for something.
• Engineer constant product and service innovation.
• Create a sense of community.
• The corporate culture must reinforce the brand positioning.
• Create a company aligned with your brand promise—full of brand maniacs, champions, and evangelists.
• Front line employees are key to a brand's success.
• Consider co-creating your brand with your customers.

Excited about these possibilities?

Contact us to talk about how we can help you make your brand promise real—to your customers, your company, the world.

39 Common Brand Problems

This is the short, sweet version. You can download the entire article in PDF form, which includes the solutions to these problems.

1. Not delivering against the communicated brand promise
2. Not linking brand planning to the business’ strategic planning process
3. Decreased product or service quality, the cumulative result of gradual and incremental changes to reduce costs.
4. Increased product or service prices inviting low-end market segments and competitors, the cumulative result of gradually raising prices at a rate greater than inflation.
5. The brand is gradually undermined by quarter-over-quarter revenue and profit pressures
6. Limiting the brand to one channel of distribution or aligning the brand too closely with a declining channel of trade
7. Failure to extend the brand into new product categories when the core category is in decline
8. Completely blurring the brand’s meaning and points of distinction by over-extending your brand into different categories and markets
9. Not applying the latest product and service innovations to your flagship brand because it is getting too old and stodgy (a self-fulfilling prophecy)
10. Creating brands or sub-brands for internal or trade reasons, rather than to address distinct consumer needs
11. Launching sub-brands that inadvertently reposition the parent brand in a negative light
12. Unsuccessfully extending the brand up to a premium segment or down to a value segment
13. For market leader: Following challengers because it’s easier and produces more immediate results, rather than creating new ways to meet consumer needs
14. Not keeping up with the industry on product or service innovation
15. Decisions that adversely affect the brand are made outside of the brand management context
16. Senior managers do not understand what the brand stands for
17. Viewing brand equity management as a communications exercise, but ignoring it in other business processes and points of contact with the consumer
18. Licensing the brand name out to whomever will pay for it
19. Applying branding decisions at the end of the product development process (“Now, what will we name this?”) versus treating brand management as the key driver of all of your enterprise’s activities
20. Confusing brand management with product management
21. No person or department has responsibility for the brand. It lacks internal mindshare, supervision, and management.
22. Treating brand management primarily as “logo cops”
23. Well thought-out marketing decisions are second guessed by non-marketers who think marketing is a matter of opinion rather than an art and a science in which experience matters
24. Defining your target consumer too broadly (for instance, women ages 18-65)
25. Not really understanding the consumer, his needs, and motivations
26. Defining your brand too narrowly, especially as a product category (for instance, “greeting cards” versus “caring shared”)
27. Marketing is divided into functional “silos” (advertising, promotion, brand management, product development, publicity, etc.) with no integrating mechanism
28. No central control of the brand portfolio (so that each brand team is free to apply the best differentiating features of one brand to each of the others in the portfolio)
29. Choosing generic (non-proprietary) brand names
30. No brand identity standards and systems means inconsistent presentation and customer confusion
31. Trying to be the best at something, especially core category benefits, rather than owning a differentiating quality
32. Trying to own cost-of-entry benefits—and not owning any differentiating benefits
33. Focusing too much on product attributes and not enough on brand benefits in consumer communication
34. Trying to make too many points in your brand communication rather than focusing on the one or two most compelling points of difference
35. Frequently changing your brand’s positioning and message
36. Loss of brand equity because of reduced or eliminated brand advertising
37. Overexposing the brand to the point that it becomes “uncool”
38. Spending too much money on trade deals and sales promotion at the expense of brand building
39. Being attacked by special interest groups who want to make a public statement

Contact us to put help solve your most pressing brand problems.

Brand Management Checklist

Here is a simple way to assess the efficacy of your brand management practices. All answers “YES?” You are a brand guru. If you answer them all “NO,” you need help.

If you are like most of us, you'll fall somewhere in the middle and have a better idea of where you have work yet to do.

 

Positioning Your Brand	YES	NO
Do you have profound insight into your consumer's values and motivations?
Do you fully understand the following for all the categories in which your brand operates: (a) the different market segments, (b) the competitive set, and (c) which consumer benefits are “cost-of-entry“ versus “differentiating“?
Do you fully understand the decision making process (rational or not) the consumer uses to purchase your brand?
Have you defined the role, target consumer, essence, promise and personality for your brand?
Do you have absolute clarity around what your brand stands for and how it is unique and compelling to consumers?
Do you have criteria to help you decide when you can use an existing brand, when a completely new brand is needed when a sub-brand is the right choice?

Creating a Brand Building Organization	YES	NO
Do the CEO and other corporate officers embrace the brand as a key corporate asset that must be built and leveraged?
Have you calculated the value of your brand as a financial asset?
Can all employees accurately and consistently articulate your brand's essence and promise?
Is there a process by which all marketing elements are integrated to deliver against the brand promise and key brand priorities?
Do your organization's common measures include key brand measures?
Are you redesigning your business processes and systems, networks of relationships and customer service functions to better align with and support your brand's promise of differentiated consumer benefits?
Does the corporate culture reinforce the brand promise?

 

Managing Your Brand's Identity	YES	NO
Do you have comprehensive brand identity standards and systems that address all uses of your brand's identity elements?
Is your system effective in multi-media environments?
Does it address co-branding, co-marketing, brand licensing and sponsorship situations?
Are there simple and consistent ways in which sub-brands relate to corporate or parent brands?
Do you confer with intellectual property lawyers when designing new products and brands to ensure what you've created has maximum protection under the law?
Do you have an ongoing process set up to proactively protect your brand's identity against dilution or confusion?

Building Brand Equity	YES	NO
Do people in your organization understand that brand building is a long-term exercise with cumulative results?
Do you know what drives brand preference and insistence within your categories?
Have you established brand equity measures and targets?
Is someone held accountable for managing the brand's personality?
Do you use in-depth, qualitative consumer research techniques (such as laddering, hidden-issue questioning and symbolic analysis) to better understand your consumer's needs and motivations as they relate to your brand?
Do you have a way of measuring return on marketing investment?
Do you know if your brand keeps its promise at each point of contact it makes with consumers?

Marketing Your Brand	YES	NO
Is marketing perceived to be an investment (versus a cost) at your company?
Are there clear objectives and performance targets for each marketing program you initiate?
Do you know who your best customers are? Do you know why they are your best customers? Have designed programs to retain those customers?  Are you actively trying to increase share in your high profit, heavy user market segment?
Is there agreement on what portion of your marketing resources will be spent on brand building versus product sales promotion?
Are customer service departments and customer contacts always included in your marketing programs?
Do you use proactive publicity to build the brand? (This can be one of the most powerful and cost effective marketing tools.)
Have you considered creating consumer membership organizations to increase emotional connection and loyalty to the brand?

Extending Your Brand	YES	NO
Have you identified what your brand owns in the consumer's mind?
Have you identified all areas in which the consumer gives your brand permission to operate?
Have you identified all the ways your brand and others in its category have made compromises with the consumer? Have you found ways to redefine your business to break those compromises?
Have you explored ways to make your brand more relevant to the next generation of consumers?
Do you have a way to screen all new brand extension proposals for their congruence with the brand promise and impact on brand equity?

How did you score? Contact us and we'll show you some ways to ace the next round.