Attitude Branding

In today’s economy filled with consumer over-stimulation, people are driven by their feelings and emotions. This has created a new form of branding, known as attitude branding. Attitude branding is where a company chooses to represent a feeling that does not have a direct connection to the product.
Nike Corporation is one of the forefathers of attitude branding, with its billion dollar phrase of “just do it.” The slogan itself is not particularly related to their products; it does not purport any particular details about Nike shoes or athletic gear. Instead, the branding strategy promotes a lifestyle, an emotional connection with the consumer. This is clearly seen in Nike commercials, which rarely highlight the shoe, but instead focuses on people achieving their athletic goals.
Other popular companies that built their corporate empires with attitude branding include Starbucks and The Body Shop. Reflecting upon their branding, their slogans and symbols do not relate to coffee or body products, respectively. Instead, they both attempt to connect with the consumer’s emotions, encouraging customers to enhance their lifestyle through their products.
Attitude branding is one the most effective ways for a company name and product to become known by millions of consumers. This form of branding can take a small business and create a global corporation. Starbucks started out as one small store in Seattle – but through attitude branding that was reflected in its logo and store ambiance, it has become a global phenomenon found in almost every country.
Success and attitude branding go hand-in-hand. When you can tap into a consumer’s emotions and lifestyle desires, you build your company’s foundation to tremendous prosperity.

Factors that Build Brands

(Professor David Jobber identifies seven main factors in building successful brands)

1. Quality
Quality is a vital ingredient of a good brand. Remember the “core benefits” – the things consumers expect. These must be delivered well, consistently. The branded washing machine that leaks, or the training shoe that often falls apart when wet will never develop brand equity.
Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and higher profitability that their inferior competitors.

2. Positioning
Positioning is about the position a brand occupies in a market in the minds of consumers. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market.
Positioning can be achieved through several means, including brand name, image, service standards, product guarantees, packaging and the way in which it is delivered. In fact, successful positioning usually requires a combination of these things.

3. Repositioning
Repositioning occurs when a brand tries to change its market position to reflect a change in consumer’s tastes. This is often required when a brand has become tired, perhaps because its original market has matured or has gone into decline.
The repositioning of the Lucozade brand from a sweet drink for children to a leading sports drink is one example. Another would be the changing styles of entertainers with above-average longevity such as Kylie Minogue and Cliff Richard.

4. Communications
Communications also play a key role in building a successful brand. We suggested that brand positioning is essentially about customer perceptions – with the objective to build a clearly defined position in the minds of the target audience.
All elements of the promotional mix need to be used to develop and sustain customer perceptions. Initially, the challenge is to build awareness, then to develop the brand personality and reinforce the perception.

5. First-mover advantage
Business strategists often talk about first-mover advantage. In terms of brand development, by “first-mover” they mean that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create a clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market. There is plenty of evidence to support this.
Think of some leading consumer product brands like Gillette, Coca Cola and Sellotape that, in many ways, defined the markets they operate in and continue to lead. However, being first into a market does not necessarily guarantee long-term success. Competitors – drawn to the high growth and profit potential demonstrated by the “market-mover” – will enter the market and copy the best elements of the leader’s brand (a good example is the way that Body Shop developed the “ethical” personal care market but were soon facing stiff competition from the major high street cosmetics retailers.

6. Long-term perspective
This leads onto another important factor in brand-building: the need to invest in the brand over the long-term. Building customer awareness, communicating the brand’s message and creating customer loyalty takes time. This means that management must “invest” in a brand, perhaps at the expense of short-term profitability.

7. Internal marketing
Finally, management should ensure that the brand is marketed “internally” as well as externally. By this we mean that the whole business should understand the brand values and positioning. This is particularly important in service businesses where a critical part of the brand value is the type and quality of service that a customer receives.
Think of the brands that you value in the restaurant, hotel and retail sectors. It is likely that your favourite brands invest heavily in staff training so that the face-to-face contact that you have with the brand helps secure your loyalty.

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing is the art/science of making the right impression on prospects. It’s the active process of discovering, developing and bringing the right image or identity of your company to the marketplace. Too often, clients are focused on the later stages of the brand identity development process, such as the presentation on a Web site or advertisement in a magazine.
Effective Brand Marketing is a complete process of researching the market and developing an image for your corporate identity, and then engineering its presentation at optimal times and places. Since search engine users are looking for a specific product or service, having your well-constructed brand presented in search engine listings, is perhaps one of the best brand impressions you can make.

What are the elements of brand marketing?

• Target market research: collecting information on prospect needs and preferences.

• Features and benefits: identifying target prospects are interested in and which will move them to purchase.

• Brand presentation: design of ur brand that maximizes the impact and impression of your business.

• Brand experience: creating a Web site or other advertisement that makes the users meeting with your product or service memorable, fun or useful.

Brand

Brand Definition

What is a brand? Too often even marketing professionals don't have an answer, and too many have their 'own' answer. Which makes life very confusing!

Here are some of the best definitions of the word "brand":

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as:
"a name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors."
Signs and symbols are part of what a brand is, but to us this is a very incomplete definition.

Walter Landor, one of the greats of the advertising industry, said:
"simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality."

In his book, 'Building Strong Brands' David Aaker suggests the brand is a 'mental box' and gives a definition of brand equity as:
"a set of assets (or liabilities) linked to a brand's name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service..."
This is an important point, brands are not necessarily positive!

Building from this idea of a 'mental box' a more poetic definition might be:
"A brand is the most valuable real-estate in the world, a corner of the consumer's mind".

These are all great definitions, but I believe the best is this:
"A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer".
Why is it best? Well, first of all it is easy to remember, which is always useful! But it is also best because it works to remind us of some key points:
This definition makes it absolutely clear that a brand is very different from a product or service. A brand is intangible and exists in the mind of the consumer.
This definition helps us understand the idea of brand loyalty and the 'loyalty ladder'. Different people have different perceptions of a product or service, which places them at different points on the loyalty ladder.
This definition helps us to understand how advertising works. Advertising has to sell, and it achieves this by positively influencing people's perceptions of the product or service.

Brand Image

Like brand personality, brand image is not something you have or you don't! A brand is unlikely to have one brand image, but several, though one or two may predominate. The key in brand image research is to identify or develop the most powerful images and reinforce them through subsequent brand communications. The term "brand image" gained popularity as evidence began to grow that the feelings and images associated with a brand were powerful purchase influencers, though brand recognition, recall and brand identity. It is based on the proposition that consumers buy not only a product (commodity), but also the image associations of the product, such as power, wealth, sophistication, and most importantly identification and association with other users of the brand. In a consumer led world, people tend to define themselves and their Jungian "persona" by their possessions. According to Sigmund Freud, the ego and superego control to a large extent the image and personality that people would like others to have of them.
Good brand images are instantly evoked, are positive, and are almost always unique among competitive brands.
Brand image can be reinforced by brand communications such as packaging, advertising, promotion, customer service, word-of-mouth and other aspects of the brand experience.
Brand images are usually evoked by asking consumers the first words/images that come to their mind when a certain brand is mentioned (sometimes called "top of mind"). When responses are highly variable, non-forthcoming, or refer to non-image attributes such as cost, it is an indicator of a weak brand image.

Successful brand

The word brand originally meant anything hot or burning, and for hundreds of years was associated with the process of marking an animal with a unique symbol so that the owner could identify it at a later date. The practice involved heating a branding iron that was fashioned into a symbol, letter or name, in a fire, which would then be pressed against the hide of an animal, burning the hair and skin and leaving a permanent scar on the body.
The term brand now has a wider meaning, and is used to describe a name, logo or slogan associated with a particular company, product or service. Brands came about as a way to identity a companies' products from similar products of rival businesses, but of course branding could also be used to disguise an inferior product as one of higher quality; in ancient China, merchants sometimes used branding to falsely pass off lower grade garden tea as higher grade hill tea, by using names such as "Misty Mountain Tea", or "Garden in the Sky Tea".
A brand is all about how a customer perceives a product or company. A successful brand is recognisable and creates an instant association with a product or service. For example, people see a McDonald's Restaurant, and they know they can get quick and cheap food there. Building a brand can take a long time and is a combination of a having a consistent product, as well as strong advertising and marketing.
The highest level of achievement in the world of branding is to create a brand that is instantly recognisable even without the name of the company present. This takes years of marketing and huge amounts of investment; companies that have achieved this include Nike (with its "swoosh"), McDonald's (with its Golden Arches), Playboy (with the Playboy Bunny) and several car manufacturers such as Mercedes, Jaguar and Mitsubishi.
These days, companies spend thousands of pounds building and promoting their brands, keeping up on the latest media news and advancements. A company's brand is vital to its success and therefore it's imperative that a company monitors its brand image to ensure that it is being perceived in the way it wants to be.
Negative press relating to a particular brand can have extremely detrimental effects and can mean that the public associate a brand with negative aspects, which is obviously bad for business, and a damaged brand can take months or even years to recover, if it ever recovers at all.

Top Global Brands 2007

(according to Interbrand and the BusinessWeek magazine Research)

Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, Nokia...

What do these famous brands have in common?

They all finished last year in the top five of global brands by value, according to Interbrand, which just published its 2007 annual ranking of the Best Global Brands, in cooperation with BusinessWeek Magazine.

The winner, and still champ, is the Coca-Cola brand, with an estimated value of over $65 billion. The global giant is slowing though as the company is spending a lot of time focusing on the healthier beverages that people are continuing to choose over the classic Coke beverage. Microsoft is second with an estimated value of $58 billion, followed closely by IBM at $57 billion and GE at $51 billion. Nokia finished out the top five at $33 billion. The top four positions remained unchanged from last year, while Nokia moved up one spot as the result of a 12 percent increase in value.

The Internet search engine and advertising company Google was the biggest gainer on the global brands list for 2007 with a 44 percent increase in brand value. Google is ranked 20th with a brand value of about $17.8 billion. Last year they had a brand value of $12.3 billion and were ranked 24th.

Business Week spoke with Google's vice-president of marketing David Lawee to ask him about the meteoric rise of the company. Lawee says his job is made easier by the quality of the products that Google releases: "When you have a great story to tell, you just have to tell it. Your job as a marketer is infinitely easier. We have a great story to tell." He also said "The challenge for us is to continue to outdo ourselves. That's a challenge for a lot of brands. Brands aren't static things. They're like people. They grow, they learn, they evolve. Now we're almost 10 years old. We know we have a lot to learn. But we're trying to be our own person. That's a little bit different from the way branding used to be done."

Notable winners for 2007 include the Internet giant Google with a 44% increase in brand value, the Spanish owned clothing brand Zara with 22%, Apple computers with 21%, Nintendo with 18%, and the Starbucks coffee giant with a 17% increase in value.

While the biggest losers list included the American car maker Ford with a drop of 17%, Gap clothing brand dropped 15%, Kodak with 12%, Pizza Hut with 9%, and the mobile phone maker Motorola with a 9% decline in brand value.

Interbrand ranks each brand by calculating the net present value of the earnings that the brand is expected to generate. More than one third of the brand's earnings must be derived from countries other than where they are based and they must be well recognized outside of their main customer base. Their marketing and financial data must also be publicly available which excludes large privately held companies like Visa. Airlines are excluded, as are pharmaceutical brands this year, and insurance companies have been allowed this year for the first time.

When talking about the measuring of brand value, Interbrand's Group Chief Executive Jez Frampton said they have "always placed great emphasis upon the need for a balance between the logical and the creative. Brands, after all, live in our heads and our hearts. But ultimately, brands are value generators for business. Increasingly, we need to understand how brands deliver value and use this information to better inform business decisions."

In a report put out by Interbrand, they said "Leaders plan for their success by creating, managing and implementing strong strategic visions that make businesses stand out and command attention. The successful brands recognize and commit to this as a cycle of activity, prospering while they deliver economic value to the brand and their organization."

What is Branding?

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines 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 other sellers.
Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem.
The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:
- Delivers the message clearly
- Confirms your credibility
- Connects your target prospects emotionally
- Motivates the buyer
- Concretes User Loyalty
To succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects.You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.
Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.
A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It's important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It's a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without.

The History of Branding

Branding practices were first practiced in the nineteenth century, when packaged goods were sold to the general public. The first commercial brand registered was Pears Soap. When the items shipped to local merchants, the company would place the brand name and logo on all of the packaging, therefore implementing basic branding practices.
Other companies quickly followed suit, including Aunt Jemima, Quaker Oats and Campbell Soup. Each of these companies is still recognized and known around the world today – with the same branding they used decades or centuries ago. With branding, a consumer is essentially buying a company name, instead of just a product. Branding increases the reputation and respect that is held for a specific company.

The Fundamentals of Branding

A company’s product or service is only as effective as its branding strategies. Even with the best product in the world, a business cannot generate revenue without customer recognition and attraction. The underlying goal of branding is to prompt the consumers to both consciously and subconsciously recognize a certain product brand. Research has demonstrated that the more familiar consumers are with a product or brand, the more likely they will buy.
For example, the top Fortune 500 companies, such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and IBM, are exponentially successful because of their strategic branding practices. Regardless what country you travel to, the image of Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse, and McDonalds are prevalent and powerful – their branding strategies permeates to consumers, regardless of age, location, or nationality.
Most business experts agree that if a company desires to achieve multimillion revenues, effective branding practices must be implemented. Through proper branding, an unknown corporation can attain celebrity status in consumer households. For example, the strategic branding and placement of the word “Juicy” across derrieres launched fashion line Juicy Couture into international fame. In fact, branding is one of the easiest and fastest ways for a company to develop its market share.