Vincent Grimaldi is an international strategist specialized in customer-oriented solutions. He is managing partner of The Grimaldi Group, a change management consultancy, and professor of business administration at Baruch College in New York. He is a regular speaker on both sides of the Atlantic.
The concept of branding is about as old as man can remember, and branding principles apply to about everything that bears a name: products, companies, states and nations, celebrities, politicians, families, and even you who might be trying to build a reputation and make a decent career.
All those names – competing for attention and brain share – keep piling up into a considerable number. Some authors claim that about 10,000 new brands are created every day. Whatever the right number is, it's a disproportionately high population compared with the tiny number of great brands as reflected by the short list gathered for brandchannel's "Readers' Choice Award" survey. Still, the management of most companies tends to believe that their brand is great. Let’s examine the validity of their statement.
The ultimate metrics to define a great brand can be seen on the skin of its audience. (If people tattoo your brand on their skin, you should probably trade this article for Rolling Stone magazine.) Still, there are cool brands such as Nike, Sony, Orange, and Accenture that epitomize greatness without burning the skin of their fans. How can we then define the essence of such greatness?
The essence of greatness is in the capacity of a brand to foster the sales of a product/service by creating an emotional link with its audience. As such, a great brand balances the delivery of functional benefits with emotional ones.
In practice, you could ask yourself the following questions: Does my brand have any substantial positive impact on sales and market share (If market share is difficult to assess, consider your sales level against industry averages or against the estimated sales of your main competitors)? Does my brand hook our customer-base and make them loyal to the company?
If you answered "Yes" to those two simple questions, Congratulations! You most likely have a great brand and it is a valuable asset for your company. In the case of Coca-Cola, for instance, Interbrand values its brand at a whopping US$ 68.9 billion, ranking it “most valuable global brand.” The Pan Am name sold for over US$ 40 million, the Rolls-Royce brand for US$ 66 million, and Coca-Cola could probably borrow billions of dollars using only its name as collateral!
Building a great brand is therefore serious business, albeit a blend of art and science. Whatever your brand and its specific situation, the path to greatness remains the same and is almost entirely based on the way the brain stores, recalls, and processes memories. Considerable progress has been made in the last 15 years in this research field, to the great benefit of marketing and branding.
In a nutshell, great branding starts with a rigorous assessment of your audience and of the brand positioning in the minds of those people. What beliefs pop up in their mind when they think about your brand and its category? What are the good and bad memories coming back to mind? In the case of a car make, for instance, people may remember that this was the automobile of their first kiss, but they may as well remember a tire recall. In the case of a law firm, memory may associate with a painful divorce and broken family, for example. As it transpires, a brand interferes with a considerable level of noise in the collective memory of its audience.
As part of that assessment effort, great branding typically seeks to isolate a segment that would be particularly receptive to its message – to the point where those select few would champion "their" brand around them (remember the tattoos) – and have a strong direct or indirect impact on revenues. For instance, many companies – e.g., breweries – have successfully focused their marketing message on the heavy user of their product/service, e.g., those chugging an entire 6-pack in one sitting.
That group constitutes the marketing target, which is a much narrower subset of the economic target made up of all the people buying the product/service. The goal is to rally that economic target because they identify with your marketing target. In the case of Marlboro, for instance, many smokers buy that cigarette because it makes them feel independent and free like a cowboy, not because they are cowboys. As it appears, great branding is deeply rooted in psycho-sociology.
Great brands sell, and sell repeatedly! The fundamental reason for building a great brand is essentially to increase revenues relatively to the competition. However, branding can be tremendous fun, and therefore, it is easy to lose focus. It is focus that creates successful brands and helps businesses grow by, first and foremost, increasing sustainable sales and price premiums, but also by attracting and retaining the best talent, and facilitating relations with employees, suppliers, vendors, shareholders, and the community. A focused brand also helps internally as it creates alignment at all levels of the organization. Alignment is good in itself, alignment with the mind of the customer is even better!
Therefore, once the marketing target is mapped, great branding seeks to focus on one or two attributes in the mind of that customer. They should be "hot buttons" that will trigger the positive response being sought. The brand positioning strategy is then ready to be delivered at each contact point with the customer: product, advertising, retail, website, merchandising, toll-free hotline, PR, and recruiting.
All those names – competing for attention and brain share – keep piling up into a considerable number. Some authors claim that about 10,000 new brands are created every day. Whatever the right number is, it's a disproportionately high population compared with the tiny number of great brands as reflected by the short list gathered for brandchannel's "Readers' Choice Award" survey. Still, the management of most companies tends to believe that their brand is great. Let’s examine the validity of their statement.
The ultimate metrics to define a great brand can be seen on the skin of its audience. (If people tattoo your brand on their skin, you should probably trade this article for Rolling Stone magazine.) Still, there are cool brands such as Nike, Sony, Orange, and Accenture that epitomize greatness without burning the skin of their fans. How can we then define the essence of such greatness?
The essence of greatness is in the capacity of a brand to foster the sales of a product/service by creating an emotional link with its audience. As such, a great brand balances the delivery of functional benefits with emotional ones.
In practice, you could ask yourself the following questions: Does my brand have any substantial positive impact on sales and market share (If market share is difficult to assess, consider your sales level against industry averages or against the estimated sales of your main competitors)? Does my brand hook our customer-base and make them loyal to the company?
If you answered "Yes" to those two simple questions, Congratulations! You most likely have a great brand and it is a valuable asset for your company. In the case of Coca-Cola, for instance, Interbrand values its brand at a whopping US$ 68.9 billion, ranking it “most valuable global brand.” The Pan Am name sold for over US$ 40 million, the Rolls-Royce brand for US$ 66 million, and Coca-Cola could probably borrow billions of dollars using only its name as collateral!
Building a great brand is therefore serious business, albeit a blend of art and science. Whatever your brand and its specific situation, the path to greatness remains the same and is almost entirely based on the way the brain stores, recalls, and processes memories. Considerable progress has been made in the last 15 years in this research field, to the great benefit of marketing and branding.
In a nutshell, great branding starts with a rigorous assessment of your audience and of the brand positioning in the minds of those people. What beliefs pop up in their mind when they think about your brand and its category? What are the good and bad memories coming back to mind? In the case of a car make, for instance, people may remember that this was the automobile of their first kiss, but they may as well remember a tire recall. In the case of a law firm, memory may associate with a painful divorce and broken family, for example. As it transpires, a brand interferes with a considerable level of noise in the collective memory of its audience.
As part of that assessment effort, great branding typically seeks to isolate a segment that would be particularly receptive to its message – to the point where those select few would champion "their" brand around them (remember the tattoos) – and have a strong direct or indirect impact on revenues. For instance, many companies – e.g., breweries – have successfully focused their marketing message on the heavy user of their product/service, e.g., those chugging an entire 6-pack in one sitting.
That group constitutes the marketing target, which is a much narrower subset of the economic target made up of all the people buying the product/service. The goal is to rally that economic target because they identify with your marketing target. In the case of Marlboro, for instance, many smokers buy that cigarette because it makes them feel independent and free like a cowboy, not because they are cowboys. As it appears, great branding is deeply rooted in psycho-sociology.
Great brands sell, and sell repeatedly! The fundamental reason for building a great brand is essentially to increase revenues relatively to the competition. However, branding can be tremendous fun, and therefore, it is easy to lose focus. It is focus that creates successful brands and helps businesses grow by, first and foremost, increasing sustainable sales and price premiums, but also by attracting and retaining the best talent, and facilitating relations with employees, suppliers, vendors, shareholders, and the community. A focused brand also helps internally as it creates alignment at all levels of the organization. Alignment is good in itself, alignment with the mind of the customer is even better!
Therefore, once the marketing target is mapped, great branding seeks to focus on one or two attributes in the mind of that customer. They should be "hot buttons" that will trigger the positive response being sought. The brand positioning strategy is then ready to be delivered at each contact point with the customer: product, advertising, retail, website, merchandising, toll-free hotline, PR, and recruiting.
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