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Having spent the majority of my adult life building, managing and leveraging brands and then having written a 320 page book on brand management, it is actually quite difficult for me to 'net out' the 15 most important things to know about building winning brands. For instance, I started out trying to do so for my book, The Brand Management Checklist, but ended up with one chapter on the 40 most common brand problems and another chapter summarizing the 70 most important things that can be said about brand management. In the spirit of brevity, I am for the first time, 'netting out' the 15 most important things to know here. 1. Brands are Personifications of Organizations, Products, Services and Experiences In this way, they are the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty. Let me tell you a story that illustrates the point. Imagine you are having lunch with a long-time 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 was the same person as before, with one exception: she was a total stranger to you. You hadn't met her previously and she was 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 her again. In the first scenario, the person was a long-time 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. Brand equity creates a relationship and a strong bond that grows over time. It is often so strong that it compensates for performance flaws: an out-of-stock situation, poor customer service, a product that falls apart, inconvenient store hours, a higher-than-average-price, etc. 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. 2. Top Management Support is Crucial In 1998, The Conference Board conducted a study on 'Managing the Corporate Brand.' In that study, they discovered four organizational support factors were critical to brand strategy success. They are:
- CEO leadership and support
- A distinctive corporate culture that serves as a platform for the brand promise
- The ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees
- The alignment of brand messages across functions
Top management's understanding and support of brand management principles directly affects all four factors.I have conducted numerous 'Creating a Brand Building Organization' workshops in the last few years. The participants have been brand champions from hundreds of organizations. Of the toughest obstacles that these brand champions have encountered in creating brand building organizations, three of the top nine involve the lack of top management support:
- Senior management is not focused on the brand
- Senior management has a short attention span and fails to provide the ongoing support and resources necessary for effective brand building to occur
- Some senior leaders do not believe in the brand management concept
At the Institute for International Research's The Branding Trilogy conference in Santa Barbara, California, Kristine Shattuck, Los Angeles Area Marketing Manager, Southwest Airlines put it well when she said, 'Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers. Market to your employees as much as your customers. If your employees don't 'get it,' neither will your customers.' This can only happen if top management aligns all of its organization's processes and systems in support of its brand's promise. Here is an illustration of what happens when top management does not align its organization's behavior with its brand's promise. Do you remember United Airlines 'United Airlines Rising' advertising campaign in 1997? This campaign was meant to communicate to the public that United was aware of their problems and was making an effort to raise their service to meet consumers' expectations. But, the campaign backfired on them when they first launched it. Why? Because, just as United was making promises about its new customer satisfaction philosophy, its flight attendants were threatening a labor action called CHAOS™, or 'Creating Havoc Around Our System™'. The Association of Flight Attendants stated, 'No raises, no rising.' To add insult to injury, United's customer relations department was also so unresponsive to complaints that a disgruntled customer created the website www.untied.com, a site featuring complaints from other United Airlines passenger. 3. Profound Customer Knowledge is Essential Profound customer knowledge is essential to building winning brands. Bill Stacy, one of my bosses at Hallmark Cards, was fond of saying, 'Remember to thank our customers for your pay check.' This statement was a constant reminder that all of an organization's revenues and profits result from one thing - customers who are willing to pay money for products and services that meet their needs. Any brand management initiative, any marketing initiative, and indeed any business or organizational initiative must start with a solid understanding of the customer. Indeed, organizations exist for one purpose - to meet human needs. Thriving organizations do that exceedingly well. Venerated organizations have managed to meet evolving human needs over a long period of time. The first step in crafting a brand's promise is defining the target customer. Without a profound understanding of the target customer, a business will never thrive and may not even survive. A strong brand promises a relevant, differentiated, purchase-motivating benefit to the target customer. The benefit must focus on points of difference, not points of parity. The ideal benefit to claim has the following three qualities: (1) it is extremely important to the target customer, (2) your organization is uniquely suited to delivering it and (3) competitors are not currently addressing it (nor is it easy for them to address it in the future). Customer research has gotten very sophisticated, going far beyond the standard survey or focus group. Brand positioning should be informed by both qualitative and quantitative research. Brand extension is informed by brand asset and brand association studies and concept testing. Marketing savvy companies now use projective and anthropological techniques. The are also specific techniques for logo recognition and recall and brand equity measurement. Customer insights can also be gained through the Internet (chat rooms, message board, online surveys, etc.) and customer service feedback. Harley-Davidson executives ride with their customers in HOG rallies as a routine source of customer insight. While customer insight is important, it does not replace ideation and market need anticipation.
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