Brand Strategy Archives : Page 10 of 16 : Persona Design

Social Branding: The New Rules for Brand Success on Social Media

October 14, 2014/3 Comments/in Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Integrated Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Media /by Lorraine Carter

There’s no doubt about it: If you want a successful brand, you need to incorporate social media into your branding strategy. Customer interactions are increasingly taking place online rather than in person or over the phone, and your audience expects to find a strong social media presence for their favorite brands.

Just how important is social media?

Here’s what the landscape looks like as of January 2014, and the statistics just keep growing:

74 percent of the world’s Internet users are active on social networks

44 percent of users in Western Europe are active on social networks

Mobile is increasingly used for social, and Western Europe’s mobile penetration stands at 128 percent—or 1.28 devices for every person

Social penetration is 78 percent in the UK

Source: US Census Bureau, ITU, CIA

In the early days, brands were successful on social media if they had a lot of fans or followers. The bigger the numbers, the better your brand was perceived. But now that social has exploded into a vast sea of noise, effective social branding has moved out of the numbers game. It’s not the size of your customer base on social media – it’s what you do with it that counts.

Top 4 of today’s most important rules for social media branding success.

Rule 1: Be Consistent

As with any other element of your branding strategy, consistency is vital for social media success. Each of your social channels and platforms should clearly belong to your brand – but remember that consistency extends to much more than your logo and signature colours. With social media, you also need to develop consistent brand messaging, and a consistent tone and voice. Your company can’t be formal and serious on Facebook, yet irreverent and fun on Twitter.

Being consistent on social media requires your brand to develop and adhere to a style that is followed without fail. If you have more than one employee participating in your social media campaigns, especially if they work on different platforms, make sure they’re on the same page when it comes to your brand messaging, promise, values, voice and your brand tone.

Etsy is a strong example of a brand that maintains social media consistency. The online community marketplace with an emphasis on hand-crafted and vintage items has a branded presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest, that makes use of the Etsy brand’s simple, memorable logo and distinctive orange brand colouring, paired with plenty of stunning product photos. Etsy frequently and consistently cross-posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and makes full use of Pinterest with dozens of organized boards arranged into product categories.

Rule 2: Be Active

Simply being on social media will not help your brand. In order to drive social branding, you need to have an active presence on the platforms you use, and interact with your audience frequently. In fact, having an inactive social media page can turn potential customers off, because your brand will be perceived as not interested in hearing from your audience.

For this reason, it’s important to choose the right platforms for your social branding strategy. Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the more social networks they join, the stronger their social marketing will be – but creating accounts on dozens of social platforms and ignoring most of them is actually detrimental to your brand.

Instead, look for the networks where most of your target audience is, and focus on building a strong presence on those networks. Facebook and Twitter might be totally suitable for some brands and a lot less relevant for others. Your chosen social platform is driven by what is most appropriate for your core target audience and where they interact most. LinkedIn is very effective for professional and B2B brands. If your brand has a strong visual component, Pinterest is an excellent platform.

Once you’ve chosen the right platforms, get active. Post frequently – but don’t make all your content about marketing. The goal of social media is not to sell, but to build relationships. Your social media posts should entertain, inform, inspire, or interest your audience.

Taco Bell has a highly active social media presence that gets results. With a brand platform dedicated to fun and delight, and frequently posted content that focuses on customers, the restaurant chain’s Facebook page has more than 10 million fans, and 1.37 million follow them on Twitter.

Rule 3: Be Engaging

An important part of Taco Bell’s social media success, and many other brands that understand how social works, is engaging the audience. The best brands on social media don’t broadcast – they have conversations. They post content that invites audiences to participate, and encourages them to share with friends for even more visibility. From simple questions to elaborate contests, these brands make followers feel like part of the brand experience.

In 2012, Domino’s UK ran a Twitter campaign called “Tweet for Treats” that engaged audiences in a very direct way. For a time period of two hours, they invited followers to tweet with the hashtag #letsdolunch, and stated they’d knock a minimum of £0.01 off the price of their pizzas for every tweet sent that day for lunch. The campaign knocked the pizza price from £15.99 to £7.74. Anyone who followed Domino’s UK on Twitter or liked their Facebook page could order pizzas at the final discounted price through the Tweet for Treat Facebook Tab between 12:00 – 15:00 GMT on their Facebook page. The campaign gained the brand lots of interaction and hundreds of new followers, and helped them sell a lot of pizzas.

Rule 4: Be Social

Another highly effective strategy for social branding is to make it social – in the name of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Practicing good CSR boosts brand perceptions and brand awareness, and social media is an ideal channel for spreading the word about your brand’s social consciousness.

Brewing company Molson Coors Canada uses social media to leverage CSR and increase reach for their responsible drinking initiatives. The company’s social media team focuses not only on selling beer, but also connecting with communities for their programs that include responsible drinking education, the TaxiGuy program that provides cab rides for people who’ve had one too many, and covering the costs of public transportation for drinkers on New Year’s Eve.

Your brand can’t afford to ignore social media. Effective social branding doesn’t have to be complicated – when you maintain consistency. Focus on the best platforms for reaching your audience in terms of what is relevant to them, keep an active brand presence, and engage audiences with informative, interesting, entertaining, or interactive content that meets their needs.

When done strategically and consistently social media can amplify your brand visibility and boost your bottom line.

What do you think?

• How many social channels is your brand on? Are any of your pages inactive?

• Have you integrated social media into your brand strategy or rebranding strategy?

• Which social networks are most likely to attract your target audience?

• Is your brand displayed consistently across all of your social platforms?

• Are you using a consistent brand tone and voice for social media?

• Does your social presence reinforce your brand messaging and values?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Audit: Tips for Determining Your Brand’s Health – Can It Be Improved?

October 2, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Audit, Brand Auditing, Brand Relaunch, Brand Strategy, Branding, Rebrand, Rebranding /by Lorraine Carter

Have your sales hit a slump? Are hot new brands drawing your customers away? If your brand seems to have lost its shine, it may be time for a brand audit or brand health check.

Brand audits are effectively a health check for your brand. These comprehensive, honest evaluations look at the overall effectiveness of a brand and its current position in the market compared with the competition, as well as pinpointing inconsistencies and weakness, and identifying potential areas for improvement.

With a thorough and properly executed brand audit you can halt brand deterioration and refresh or revitalize your brand, giving it a new lease of life and effectively stopping the rot to grow your bottom line.

When Should You Perform a Brand Audit?

While a brand audit can provide you with valuable insight into your brand’s performance at any point, there are certain times when it makes more sense to have a brand audit done. One is at the peak of your brand’s evolution.

Brands typically follow a lifecycle that’s similar to most living things: they begin new and full of potential, enter a growth phase, and eventually reach maturity. At this point, you may begin to see market slippage as your brand loses relevance, or your customers move on to newer brands. Regular brand audits that are timed against your brand’s lifecycle can actually help you identify the signs that your brand is about to plateau, allowing you to refresh or revitalize before you begin to lose sales.

Another common time when a brand audit not only makes sense, but can actually be pivotal to success, is prior to a planned rebranding campaign. There are a number of reasons your organisation may be undergoing a rebrand, and a thorough brand audit is a crucial part of any effective rebranding strategy.

Why Do You Need a Brand Audit?

Having a brand audit done at the peak of your brand lifecycle and prior to a rebrand are proactive strategies for preserving and developing your brand. There are also several circumstances that can merit a reactive brand audit—one intended to diagnose issues and problem areas, and turn around a flagging brand.

Brand audits can help you:

Determine the actual position of your brand in the marketplace, and develop effective strategies to elevate your market position

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, so you can address weak points and capitalize on your strengths for more effective brand differentiation

Discover the actual expectations of your target markets and align your brand more thoroughly with its intended audience

Gain a clear perspective on market perceptions of your brand, and make any necessary adjustments to strengthen your brand platform and customer experience

Address internal issues and repair your brand positioning within the company, in order to strengthen employee morale, productivity, and empowerment

A strong and consistent brand makes more money, both through increased sales and decreased market spend as the power of your brand drives more word of mouth, greater customer engagement, and increased brand loyalty.

Comprehensive brand audits allow you to strengthen your brand and make it the best it can be, illuminating new growth opportunities and new ways to create resonance with your audiences.

What Does A Brand Audit Involve?

There are several factors that define the depth and extent of an effective brand audit. These include the size of both the brand and the organisation itself, the power of the brand relative to the industry and market, the required timescale to complete the brand audit, and the available budget.

In any event, the first step to a brand audit is to clearly define the objectives of the audit. You may simply want to perform a health check for your brand and gain an accurate measure of your market standing, or you may be in the early stages of a rebrand and require an extensive brand audit. The brand audit’s objectives must be absolutely clear from the start in order to develop an effective strategy for analysis and measured against the desired deliverables.

The actual elements of a brand audit vary according to the objectives and the factors mentioned above. These elements may include:

Internal elements: Positioning, brand values, culture, voice, USP, product or service positioning etc.

External elements: Logo and other branded design elements, all brand collateral, website, packaging, social media, SEO, advertising and public relations, content marketing, sponsorships and CSR, videos, testimonials, customer experience etc.

System elements: Corporate brand standards, brand style guides, customer service systems, sales processes, touch points, HR policies, internal systems etc.

Additionally, a comprehensive brand audit will involve strategy reviews, market research, communications reviews, customer research, and employee and HR research.

Internal Brand Audit Support: Getting Employees On Board

Without internal support, a brand audit that is carried out for the purposes of revitalising, refreshing, or salvaging a brand will fail. An essential component of a brand audit is ensuring that both your management and employees understand the reasons for the audit.

It’s critically important to get their full support and commitment on board, not to mention help get them excited about the upcoming changes. Employees who embrace your brand can become powerful brand ambassadors, allowing you to maintain brand consistency and cultivate a loyal customer base.

Some strategies for engaging employees in a brand audit include:

Communicate: Employees who aren’t aware that a brand audit is being conducted can’t contribute to the cause. Inform your employees early and often about the process, and invite them to ask questions and offer suggestions.

Solicit Input: Your employees are an excellent source of information about customer perceptions of your brand, as well as the business itself. Actively solicit employee input on how they view the brand’s strengths and weaknesses, what changes they would make if they could, and how they see customers responding (or not responding) to the brand.

Reward Participation: Employees who “live the brand” are powerful assets—and the more you have, the more effective your brand will be. Watch for employees who embrace the brand audit and strive to reflect changes, and reward them by publicly acknowledging their contributions, or even offering bonuses. This can also encourage others to engage in the process.

Enlisting Your Customers For Your Brand Audit

Public perceptions of your brand are a vital part of a brand audit, and may even be the main reason for performing one. The best way to learn what your target audience thinks about your brand is to ask them directly.

Online polls can be a simple and effective way to gauge customer sentiment about your brand. These one-question checks are quick for viewers to complete, they can be promoted easily online, and they can offer an honest starting point for more in-depth elements of your brand audit. If you have a Facebook page for your brand, you can run the Facebook Poll App and gain instant feedback from your fans.

For a more comprehensive customer view, you can create an online survey with several questions and multiple answers. Online surveys offer greater potential for detailed data and analytics from a wide sampling of your target audience, and can help you further refine your brand audit objectives.

Finally, hiring mystery shoppers is an effective and candid way to gain customer perspective on your brand. Mystery shoppers can engage with your brand at every touch point, and offer a detailed picture of the way customers actually view your brand from the outside—a perspective that is virtually impossible to gain internally.

We have found when conducting brand audits for clients using our Auditing Analysis Accelerator™ system that a combination of all these elements, together with face-to-face interviews, field and desk research produce very insightful and valuable information, often throw up unanticipated surprises which can have a significant impact on the brand strategy going forward.

ROI: What You Can Get Out Of A Brand Audit

Brand audits show you how your target audience truly perceives your brand, how your brand is actually performing, and how you compare to the competition. A well planned and executed brand audit will benefit your business in myriad ways:

Gain insight into your brand portfolio and brand architecture

Evaluate and refocus your brand positioning to improve engagement with your target audience

Align your brand collateral with your brand mission, values, and differentiation to strengthen the perception of your brand

Boost internal brand awareness and drive employee brand engagement

Refocus and improve your brand management and marketing communications

Provide direction for your brand into the future to maintain relevancy, consistency, and growth

As the success of a brand audit depends on honest, detached assessment, working with an experienced external brand agency is the most effective strategy to ensure a true picture of your current brand positioning, and to best identify areas for improvement to revitalise your brand.

What do you think?

• Has your organisation undergone a brand audit in the past?

• How could a brand audit help you identify potential reasons for business decline?

• If your sales are stagnating, what areas would you focus on for a brand audit?

• How would you measure the ROI of a brand audit? How many potential new customers would you need to justify the investment?

• What areas of your brand positioning may be slumped and in need of a brand audit?

• Would you consider a brand audit to identify potential loss of relevance and proactively refresh your brand to avoid declining sales?

Feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Naming: Top Ten Methods for Brand Name Creation

September 23, 2014/2 Comments/in Brand Name Origination, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This immortal line from William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” reminds us that names have only as much power as we give them – but Shakespeare didn’t have to worry about branding.

The name of your company, product, service or range etc. is often the first thing anyone will come in contact with. It’s your first impression. The question here is, do you want your first impression with your primary audience to be something that’s interesting and helps tell your story? Or do you want something that sounds like many others, an industry or category norm but consequently has less impact because it blends in with the rest. That might be a strategic choice but often not the one most desired.

So what’s in a name, really? Everything, when it comes to your brand. A great brand name is a vital element for brand success, yet so many companies neglect to place enough emphasis on this key ingredient as a fundamental aspect of what makes a sustainable and impactful part of their branding strategy. Naming is all about strategic rationale, not emotion and not politics. If its comfortable and safe – don’t be tempted, it’s totally forgettable too.

Why is your brand name so important? A good name is a compact easy-to-communicate piece of information. It can grab peoples’ attention and make them want to know more. Ideally a good name should communicate one key objective which is strongly founded on your brand promise, positioning, brand values and tailored to fit with your core customer mind set. An effective brand name is memorable and enables it to carry a hugely significant portion of your brand recognition all on its own. It captures a piece of your customers mind share. On the other hand, a forgettable brand name forces you to work much harder to keep your brand visible or even memorable to your customers.

Here’s some ideas on how you can create a powerful brand name that’s memorable, resonates with your target audience, and serves to strengthen your brand collateral while adding amplification to your overall branding strategy.

Understanding the Different Types of Brand Names

Brand naming should not be a haphazard process or a random occurrence. It’s equally a systematic, holistic and creative process driven by very clear branding and commercial objectives. The first step to choosing an effective brand name is to familiarize yourself with the many styles of brand names, and decide which type is conceptually appropriate for your company, your products or services, and your target audience. Set clear and consistent objectives with a solid brand naming brief for your name selection. Avoid the temptation to choose your name subjectively and rigorously benchmark against your agreed criteria during the creative process. Before we start any work creating names for our clients we’ll have completed the brand profiling work which shapes and provides the direction and rationale for the whole brand together with the brand naming brief and its only then we set to work using our Nail It Naming System™.

Here are several brand name types that can serve as a starting point for your brand naming process.

Top Ten Brand Name Creation Categories

1. Founders’ Names:

Among the simplest type of brand name, this one can also sometimes be difficult to use effectively. This style uses the name of the person who founded the company as the brand, with or without further qualifiers that describe the products. Disney, named after founder Walt Disney, is one of the most famous examples of this. Other examples include Cadbury (after John Cadbury), Tata Group (after Jamsetji Tata), and Horlicks (after founding brothers William and James Horlick).

Image via www.cadbury.ie

2. Descriptive Names:

Another fairly straightforward brand naming convention, this style uses brand names that describe the products or services offered. Some examples of this include Internships Ireland, Slendertone, O’Egg, Whole Foods and Internet Explorer. One important thing to note with this category is that sometimes, brand names which seem to describe a product are actually powerful brands that have become synonymous with the products they offer – such as Xerox for copy machines, Band-Aid for elastic bandages and Scotch tape for clear cellophane tape.

When you get so big you’re your trademark protected brand name becomes the byword for the whole category, it potentially becomes a huge problem for the brand owner. These types or brand names are almost victims or their own success and are now fighting the problem of generification. Whenever we say we want to search for something online we say ‘I’ll Google it’, now the byword for search! Frequently people will say they’re ‘Hoovering’ when they mean vacuum cleaning! When a brand name becomes so commonly used, it can lose its value and in worse case scenarios, it can also lose its legal protections! Although it has to be said the brand’s with these problems are in the minority!

3. Geographic Names:

Once again, this simple naming convention is what it sounds like – the use of a region or landmark associated with a product or service in a brand name e.g. Patagonia, Clonakilty Black Pudding. Connemara Seafoods is a premier shellfish company named after its location, the coastal Ireland district Connemara. Emo Oil is named after the company’s home village of Emo. Global tech company Cisco Systems, Inc., draws its name from a shortened version of the company headquarters’ location in San Francisco.

4. Personification:

These brand names are centered around either a real or mythical person who is not the founder, and may not even be associated with the company. Personification brand names may use historical figures, legends, or may create a brand personality around a fictitious company mascot – such as Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker.

Image via www.bettycrocker.com

5. Evocative Names:

This type of brand name is designed to paint a vivid and relevant image for the customer e.g. The Body Shop, Amazon. For example, Sea Wynde rum evokes images of relaxation on a Caribbean beach with a cool drink in hand.

6. Alliteration or Rhyming Names:

This category includes names that are both memorable and fun to say e.g. YouTube, Piggly Wiggly. Dunkin’ Donuts uses alliteration and a shortened word to create a rhythmic and easy to remember brand name.

Image via www.youtube.com

7. Derivative Names:

This category includes names that are almost like something you’ve heard but have somehow been changed to sound different e.g. Nespresso, Zappos. It can be one of the most creative ways to create a name that is unique and is very reflective of more contemporary naming trends and can be easier to legally register, protect and buy the relevant URL.

Image via www.zappos.com

8. Neologisms (new made-up words):

Some brands use completely made-up new words, which creates a sense of uniqueness and infuses memorable qualities with the brand that help to set it apart from the competition. Examples here include Omniplex, Kodak and Twitter. Neologist brand names, when developed properly, can be among the most powerful brand naming strategies and like Derivative names, easier to register and protect. However they typically require more initial marketing resources to become highly recognized and given meaning through the branding strategy.

Image via www.twitter.com

9. Hybrid Names:

This category refers to brand names like Swissair, ThinkPad, Microsoft, Swisscom and Nice and Easy. All are combinations of current words or recognized syllables which when combined send the right message and potentially highlight attributes and benefits relating to the brand. This form of naming can deliver very creative and memorable results too and like Derivative and Neologist Names are less likely to infringe on other trademarks.

Image via www.swissair.com

10. Acronyms and Initials:

This category refers to brand names that stand for something longer, such as KFC for Kentucky Fried Chicken, VHI for Voluntary Health Insurance, and HP for Hewlett-Packard, GE for General Electric. Names like AA for Automobile Association and BMW for Bavarian Motor Works, only became acronyms after each company had made its mark. They’ve typically rebranded when the long name version no longer served its purpose as effectively e.g. it was so well known and well established in the market place and customers were shortening it colloquially because it was too long winded!

Image via www.bmw.com

Note: Initial or acronym brand names typically work best for companies that are well known or large corporates and have already established a brand under their full names, and shortening the names won’t impact their existing brand equity. For most brands this type of naming convention is best avoided as it effectively amounts to a meaningless mix of letters leaving the customer confused and indifferent.

Image via www.ikea.com

Brand naming can also combine several of these conventions to arrive at a distinctive and powerful name. IKEA is a great example of this. On the surface, IKEA is a neologism, a made-up word that’s easy to remember, and it’s also fun to say. But looking into the origin of the company name, it’s actually an acronym for the founder’s name and the Swedish property and village where he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.

Below are three brand naming methods and tips with strategies you can use to come up with a memorable and effective brand names.

A. Brand Naming Methods: Strategic Brainstorming

Brainstorming, or coming up with as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time, is a great way to get the creative juices flowing. When it comes to naming your brand, you can engage in focused brainstorming by asking and answering a series of questions in as many ways as you can, and then narrowing down to the best choices. It’s important to do this also within the context of an agreed naming brief and a very clear branding rationale based on your brand profile and brand strategy to keep everyone on track.

Some questions you can brainstorm include:

What does your product or service do?
What is the purpose or function of your industry?
How does your product or service benefit your customer?
What’s your brands’ mission?
How does your brand promise solve your customers problems?
What is unique, different, or interesting about your product or service?
How do your brand values enhance your customers lives?
What are some of the common terms in your industry’s lingo or jargon, that apply to your products or services?

Once you have a list of solid possibilities, you can take your brainstorming a step further and list all of the synonyms for the words or phrases you came up with during the session.

B. Brand Naming Method: Name and Word Lists

With this method, you can generate lists of words or names in certain categories that are relevant to your brand, and spin the results into possible brand names. For example, a brand that is based on heritage, classic themes, and timeless roots might look up lists of geologic periods, Latin or Greek roots, historical figures or events, and geographically appropriate legends or myths. Enter “list of [your term]” into Google, and you’ll find plenty of lists to choose from.

When choosing which lists you’ll look up, consider your products or services both literally and abstractly. You may find useful, evocative, or memorable words and names in unexpected places that can create powerful connections with your audience.

C. Brand Naming Method: Puns and Plays on Words

If your brand would benefit from a sense of fun, a touch of whimsy, or cheeky and humorous themes, using a pun or play on words can give you a memorable and highly effective brand name. There are some great examples of brands that use word play like alliteration, alternate spellings, partial word or letter replacement, letter dropping, rhyming, and more, including:

Poo-Pouri®: A toilet odour control product
Krispy Kreme®: An American donut brand
Slim Jims®: A brand of meat jerky snacks
Burt’s Bees®: Natural skin care products made with beeswax

Image via www.burtsbees.com

Play with your brainstorming and word list phrases, and look for opportunities to create plays on words. Experiment with combining and replacing until you come up with several possibilities.

Your brand name is one of the most important elements for the success of your company. Taking the time to create a memorable, evocative, and distinctively unique brand name will give you an unshakeable foundation for an effective branding platform that ultimately leads to your brands success and growing profitability.

What do you think?

• Do you already have a brand name for your company, products, or services?

• How did you come up with your brand name? Was it a process, or did you end up using the first idea that came to mind?

• What brand name type or types is best suited to your brand’s goals, themes, and brand personality?

• Are there any people (real or fictional) or places that tie into your brand? How would you use them in a brand name?

• What categories would you consider relevant to your products or services, either literally or abstractly, that would help you create a great brand name?

• Are your products or services suitable for a brand name that’s a play on words?

• Is your brand naming part of a rebranding strategy and if so how near or far away from the previous old name does it need to be?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Rebranding Strategy: Using Premium Repositioning To Increase Profitability

September 16, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Collaboration, Brand Premiumisation, Brand Strategy, Branding, Rebrand, Rebranding, Revamped Design, Revitalized Design /by Lorraine Carter

Repositioning or revitalizing your brand can be a powerful way to gain new market share and boost your profits. One of the most effective rebranding strategies is premium brand repositioning or premiumisation, which is about establishing higher perceived quality or specialness in order to achieve increased profitability by enabling you to charge more for your products and services.

Premium repositioning involves elevating demand and customers’ willingness to pay higher prices for your brand by adding value, which may be either actual or perceived. Checkout the following premium brand repositioning tips to help you make your rebranding strategy a success and grow your revenues.

5 ‘Premium Positioning’ Rebranding Strategy Tips

1. Increasing Actual Value

It’s only natural that improving the quality of your products or services will allow you to charge more. With a premium brand repositioning strategy, adding actual value typically represents a larger financial investment upfront but in turn leads to steady and substantial long-term growth profitability which considerably outweighs the initial investment. Some examples of actual value increase include new innovations, sourcing higher quality materials for product manufacturing, redesigning with new premium features, or delivering higher service quality.

Technology companies are a frequent example of adding actual value to achieve premium rebranding, in an industry known for rapid evolution and innovation. One of the most well-known rebranding campaigns involved Apple, which faced near bankruptcy in the mid-1980s before founder Steve Jobs returned as CEO to turn the flagging company around.

Image via www.apple.com

Among several dramatic steps that included a partnership with primary competitor Microsoft, Jobs increased the actual value of Apple products and the company overall by eliminating a large, money-draining project, and introducing a new, sleek design for Apple personal computers with higher performance—the iMac, which would lead the way for the company’s best-known premium branded products in today’s mobile technology market.

2. Increasing Perceived Value

Premium brand repositioning that involves an increase in perceived value is a popular strategy because there is often less upfront loading and less ongoing capital investment, compared to the previous strategy mentioned, in order to achieve higher profits.

Adding perceived value to your brand requires engaging a rebranding strategy which causes a change in customer perceptions so that your products or services are considered to be worth more—even though you haven’t necessarily changed anything significant physically about the product or service. There are numerous strategies that can be deployed to increase perceived value. Some of them include:

Product repackaging
Brand name changes
Shifts in brand association, positioning or affiliation
Brand messaging shifts

We’ll explore some of these strategies in detail, all of which we’ve deployed with multiple clients over the years when enaging in premium branding repositioning strategies, with examples of brands that have successfully moved and repositioned to more premium markets through increasing their perceived value.

3. Premium Brand Repositioning Through Packaging Design

Birchbox, a subscription ecommerce company offering beauty products for women and men, underwent a premium rebranding campaign in 2013 that focused on its packaging, together with all its brand collateral. The company created a new global identity which included replacing its logo – with its light, somewhat illegible font and splatter style box – with a stronger modern, elegant sans serif font and a simple diamond, representing the ‘spark’ or ‘aha’ moment of the Birchbox brand experience.

Image via www.birchbox.com

The previous single shipping boxes were replaced with an inner box in a clean sophisticated brown with a silver foil embossed logo on it, designed to set off the boxes tissue wrapped interior contents to their best, and a colour-coded outer box with a large, monogrammed version of the new logo design – fuchsia pink for women’s products, and teal blue for men’s.

Image via www.birchbox.com

Adding an inner ‘gift’ box not only increased the aesthetic appeal of Birchbox, but also improved customer service, as the outer box tended to become slightly crushed or damaged during the typical rough and tumble of shipping or postage. In addition to the new packaging, Birchbox redesigned its website and messaging across all its brand collateral and communication channels.

Image via www.birchbox.com

Redesigning brand packaging as a premium rebranding strategy can be highly effective in shifting customer impressions of your brand and adding a stronger perceived value to your products or services, provided the total brand and product or service experience is congruent with what the packaging sells or communicates!

You won’t get a second sale or good ‘word-of-mouth’ if your packaging oversells and underdelivers in terms of product or service. In fact you’ll deservedly get so much negative customer sentiment both on and offline you’ll likely undermine your brand and its reputation, not to mention potential profitability even further.

4. Affiliations and Testimonials for Premium Brand Repositioning

Associations with well-known public figures, VIPs or trusted organizations can enhance your brand identity immensely and help accelerate your rebrand as a premium provider of products or services. A clear example of this theory in action are celebrity endorsements. People are willing to pay more for products or services when they have the perception that celebrities use them, which is why big brands continuoulsy shell out millions for endorsements from celebrities and VIPs, relevant to their target audiences.

Image via www.stylist.co.uk

And some brands just have the good fortune to be chosen by the much admired. High street brands such as LK Bennett, Reiss and Whistles when worn by the Duchess of Cambridge are well know for selling out of the favoured items in less than a couple hours – as are items from brands such as J.Crew when worn by the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. In fact Michelle Obamas’ endorsement of J.Crew has helped the fashion brand rebound from plummeting sales enabling it to reposition itself as a premium line of casual wear.

Image via www.jcrew.com

However aligning your brand with premium affiliations doesn’t have to cost your company millions either. Local celebrities can have a significant, positive impact on your brand positioning and contribute to a more premium perception too. For some companies, professional certifications and ties with trusted organizations also work to create premium brand repositioning and enhanced brand credibility.

5. Brand Messaging and Premium Brand Positioning

Your brand can achieve a shift into the premium market through refined messaging that targets a more discerning marketing demographic. Many luxury brands use this strategy to increase perceived value of their products or services, by conveying their brand as a desirable “must have”.

Stella Artois is among the most in-demand beer brands in the UK. However, in 1976 when the brand was introduced, it was considered too strong, too different, and too expensive. When Frank Lowe took over marketing for the company, he launched an innovative campaign that transformed the perceived disadvantages into strengths. Using the tag line “Reassuringly expensive,” and a focus on the experience of the brand, rather than the taste, Stella Artois was effectively repositioned as a premium brand that still holds strong today.

Whether the focus is on increasing actual or perceived value, premium brand repositioning can be a powerful strategy for boosting your brand’s visibility, demand levels, and profitability.

Creative brand repositioning can revitalize a flagging brand and give new customers reasons to try your brand and existing customers new reasons to remain loyal to your products or services for years to come. As a rebranding strategy, repositioning is one of our most requested services from clients and one which has reaped them the most rewards, assuming everything else in the mix lives up to customer expectations or ideally exceeds them!

What do you think?

• Does your brand have a viable way to increase the actual value of your products or services?

• Would you focus on production values, customer service values, or both?

• What types of perceived values could you increase in association with your brand?

• Could your products benefit from a packaging redesign? How would you add premium value through your packaging?

• Are there any affiliations or professional organizations that would create a good premium association or match for your products or services?

• How would you shift your brand messaging to appeal to a higher value customer?

Brand Personality: Is Your Brand’s Character Big Enough to Compete?

September 9, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Just as people can be larger than life, a brand’s personality can take on a life of its own. Creating a brand with an authentically strong character is central to your branding strategy success and effectively the decider between just another average price fighter or a truly magnetic and profitable brand.

And the good news for smaller brands – who frequently think branding is purely the remit of deep pocketed big national or global entities – it’s entirely within your grasp too, if you develop the right ‘know-how’. With a solid brand profile and the right brand strategy in place, your brand can punch above its weight and become bigger than another mere product or service, and consequently generate tremendous brand impact and instill an unshakeable brand loyalty in your target audience.

Here’s how you can be a small player with a big heart—and big profits—by using brand profiling and amplification strategies to create an magnified personality that brings your brand to life and makes it truly compelling to your primary target audience.

Note: These tips are some of the magic sauce we use coupled with our ‘Personality Profile Performer System™’ when working with our clients to help them develop their brand profiling.

Key Ingredients for a Compelling Brand Personality

What goes into a great brand profile? Brands with compelling, customer centric personalities are able to reach out to, and engage their target audiences in ways that elicit strong emotional responses.

An effective brand profile provides the direction for creating a customer centric, brand resonance or affinity with your customers through the emotions your brand endeavours to elicit in them, whether it’s gritty and real, sophisticated, entertaining, decadent, or simply warm, feel-good pleasures. Regardless of the overall effect, brands with strong personalities share characteristics that include:

A Compelling Brand Story: Delivering an incredible brand story gives your core target customers a foundation for engagement and loyalty, and adds depth to your brands’ embodiment.

Clear Brand Values: When your brand stands for something that matters to your target audience, your customers can feel like they’re part of something bigger whenever they engage with your brand.

Evocative Emotions: Funny or poignant, lighthearted or dramatic, brands that make customers feel strongly about something that matters to them are far more memorable, referable and engaging than the bland, boring or just another ‘me too’ average. People buy with emotion and justify with rationale!

Your Big Why? Your Brands’ Mission: Coca-Cola wants the world to be happy. Apple wants everyone to enjoy and intuitively use their cutting edge technology and enhance peoples’ lives. What does your brand want to accomplish? A great mission statement is an authentically lived experienced which encapsulates the DNA or core essence of your brand and not only generates buzz and excitement for your brand but gives it substance and depth. It’s not something clinical and stark living on the corporate wall gathering dust or buried somewhere in your annual report or on your website. It’s an integral part of the way you fundamentally do business and interact with the world around you and most importantly it’s about what you do, with or for your customers and how you want them to feel.

Absolute Consistency. Developing and sustaining an incredible brand profile requires consistency across all aspects of your brand, throughout every channel and touch point. Each customer interaction should reinforce your brand personality and keep your brand promise.

1. Building an Emotional Response

Strong emotions are central to a larger-than-life brand personality. The most effective brand profiles are developed to evoke a specific feeling that your primary customers value and experience each time they choose to buy that product or service from you.

An effective brand profile is also developed in order to amplify the brand’s difference and set it apart from all the other pretenders competing for wallet share. And this is the fundamental core of the work we do with our clients in helping them build their brands.

Many companies believe an emotional brand is customer-generated, and therefore unattainable—but successful brands understand that emotional responses can be evoked through creating a strong brand personality coupled with strategic brand engagement. Successful branding is a two way interaction between the brand and the customer.

It’s a shared ‘meaningful’ exchange that the customer values. In short its a humanly emotional engagement where the customer electively participates in the exchange because it positively enhances their lives in some way that they value. And this is what brand profiling is all about – using systems like our ‘Personality Profile Performer™’ for creating the character of your brand and then developing the ‘road map’ of how it will be brought to life.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Such is the case with Bésame, a niche cosmetics company with a powerful brand personality rooted in the glamour heydays of the 1920s to 1950s. This entrepreneurial business set out to develop its brand profile from the beginning, and intentionally created a nostalgic brand with old-fashioned values that evokes wistful memories of a bygone era.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Gabriela Hernandez, the founder of Bésame, was inspired by the vintage original cosmetics of her grandmother. Prior to launching her company, she decided that her brand’s personality would be very feminine, romantic, nostalgic and elegant in a traditional sense, while delivering very modernly efficacious products.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Every aspect of the Bésame brand was developed to amplify this glamorous and nostalgic personality to create differentiation in an incredibly busy category noted for the billions spent on selling hope and aspiration to its largely female audiences!

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

The company’s distinct packaging design uses very tactile high quality materials including rich fabrics, metals and colour palettes designed to stand out from the oceans of plastic containers. Consistency across all brand channels, a distinctive experience from start to finish, and internal branding that extends to the way the company’s phones are answered and staff interactions all contribute to underpinning this distinctly nostalgic brand profile. Collectively it’s what makes Bésame a highly successful brand that’s carried in major department stores around the world.

2. The Bold and The Brave

A strong brand personality, even if it’s controversial, can elevate your business to success. The key to this strategy is to start out bold and stick to your guns, regardless of any potential criticism or public outcry from a small minority. Taking a stand—preferable a defensible one—can help you define a brand profile that outshines your competition consistently.

Image via www.benjerry.com

For specialty ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, that stand is irreverent fun. The entire company, which began with founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield selling homemade ice cream from a renovated gas station, is built on the idea that if you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be doing it!

Image via www.benjerry.com

The small brand made a big impact early on with its whimsical and cartoonish packaging, outrageous flavour names like Cherry Garcia and Wavy Gravy, and a high-demand strategy of selling only pints instead of half-gallons, offering exclusive batches and retiring flavours. In fact, the Ben & Jerry’s website maintains a Flavour Graveyard that showcases “de-pinted” flavours throughout the company’s history.

Ben & Jerry’s has never shied away from controversy—it’s all part of the fun. The company has embraced such controversial flavours as Black and Tan, named after an alcoholic beverage but perceived as associated with a paramilitary police force, and Schweddy Balls, named for a Saturday Night Live character and decried as “too explicit for grocery store shelves.” Ben & Jerry’s consistently bold stance has earned their ice cream an outrageous brand personality and a strong, loyal customer base.

3. Redefining a Niche

Finding a new twist on an old industry standard is a fantastic strategy for building powerful brand profiles. This involves highlighting and amplifying one or more aspects of your brand differentiation, and turning those amplified characteristics into a brand personality that can stand on its own.

Image via www.poopourri.com

An incredible example of this comes from an FMCG brand making a huge stink, namely Poo-Pourri! Founded in 2006, the odour control company has already made a huge impact by turning the usually discreet nature of bathroom odour product marketing on its head and flaunting the fact that its product deals with poo!

Image via www.poopourri.com

The secret blend of essential oils and other natural compounds eliminates bathroom odors by creating a protective film on the water’s surface. More than 4 million bottles have been sold, according to the company’s official website. When I first wrote about this brand a few years ago they were already making waves but take a look at what they achieved now – and they’re not a massive company!

Image via www.poopourri.com

This brand has absolute clarity over who their target market is, namely glamorous, silk robe wearing, youngish women and they’re not afraid of who they might offend. They’ve developed their whole brand personality around suiting this target audience’s needs and they never waiver from it. Yes they have other secondary products aimed at men, parents and even pets with Pooch-Pourri, but their primary audience is a very particular kind of women and everything is geared to engage her in a certain way!

Image via www.poopourri.com

Take a look at how their brand personality extends onto their product scent names:

• Hush Flush – A fresh Floral Blend of Wildflowers in the Spring, Before You Go, Give the Bowl a Spray, the Air Stays Fresh as a Spring Bouquet

• Deja Poo – A Soft Sweet Blend of White FLowers and Citrus, You’ve Been Here Before But Now With a Scent You Adore

• Party Pooper – A Fresh Crisp Floral Blend of Mandarin, Tangerine, and Lily, When Glasses CLink, Don’t Ruin the Party With a Stink

• Poo La La – An Elegant Blend of Peony, Rose and Citrus, Embrassing Odors… Say Adieu

• Sh*ttin Pretty – A Delightful Fresh Blend of Rose, Jasmine and Citrus, It Ain’t Awesome Till Smells Like a Blossom

And this is just a small sampling of a pretty extensive list!

Poo-Pouri’s marketing has a very definitive brand voice that features loads of toilet humour woven throughout its website, commercials, and other brand collateral. The brand’s very first social media marketing campaign, featuring a video called “Girls Don’t Poop,” went viral almost immediately with over 6 million views within a week, doubling Poo-Pouri’s Twitter following and increasing Facebook fans by 70 per cent in just a few days, not to mention their bottom line!

And while this advert might be ranked by USA Today as one of the worst adverts of 2013 it’s got 29,334,105 views and counting, with 67,298 likes and only 3,572 dislikes. They don’t give a ‘crap’ about anyone else – other than their primary target market!

Brand Amplification Strategies for Spreading Your Brand Personality

Once you’ve defined a distinctive and larger-than-life brand personality, there are multiple ways in which to leverage your brand profile through brand amplification strategies. When your brand has an attention-grabbing personality that stands for something your audience cares about, amplifying that brand message will get you noticed in a crowded market place. However you must consistently deliver on that personality and brand promise in everything you do.

Brand consistency is critical to any amplification strategy and especially effective for smaller brands too. Being truly consistent with your brand means ensuring that your website, packaging, brochures, vehicle livery, social media accounts, brand collateral etc. and all customer-facing touch points congruently mirror your brand profile and echo the same ‘exaggerated’ characteristics that infuse personality into your brand and everywhere it lives or interacts.

Your company’s public relations should also reflect your brands’ personality and the stories associated with it in the media. Community activities and corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns are also an important part of your brand strategy, especially for brands with feel-good, give-back mission statements and socially mobile brand stories.

When it comes to brand personality, the size of your brand truly doesn’t matter. Larger-than-life brand profiles help you rise above the noise and breathe life into your brand, so you can capture the imagination, emotions and ongoing support of your primary target customers.

What do you think?

• What kind of personality does your brand have? Does it match the profile you envisioned for your brand?

• How can you differentiate your brand and amplify those differences into a brand personality?

• What emotional response do your customers expect from your brand?

• Are you delivering your brand personality consistently across all channels?

• Does your brand packaging reflect a larger-than-life personality?

• Which aspects of your brand platform fail to capture your brand personality? How can you change that?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Resurgence: 4 Lessons Learned from Amazing Brand Comebacks

August 26, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Relaunch, Brand Revitalisation, Brand Strategy, Branding, Innovation, Rebrand, Rebranding, Revamped Design, Revitalized Design /by Lorraine Carter

Brands fizzle out all the time. From historic flops like the Ford Edsel to problematic launches from established brands, such as Crystal Pepsi and the disastrous introduction of Apple Maps, brand disintegration can hit any company for any number of reasons. But some brands are agile enough to adapt, adjust their strategies, learn from their mistakes, and re-emerge stronger than ever.

Brand revitalization can generate a powerful response for any business, whether your brand is guttering out completely or simply losing steam. Here are some lessons to learn from amazing brand comebacks that have revitalized some of the most successful brands in the world.

4 Lessons Learned from Amazing Brand Revitalizations

1. Apple: An Unconventional Partnership

Despite the company’s problem with its map application, Apple is among the most powerful and well-known global brands today—but they weren’t always. It’s a well know story, the company started out strong in the 1980s with a decisive and profitable position in the computer industry. But following Steve Jobs’ resignation in 1985, performance dwindled, and by the mid-1990s the organization faced imminent bankruptcy.

Image via www.apple.com

Jobs returned as CEO in 1997 to face the daunting task of restructuring the company and salvaging the brand. After scrapping the expensive Newton, Jobs took a bold and controversial step by entering into a partnership with Apple’s biggest competitor, Microsoft.

Apple’s customers weren’t thrilled with the idea of sleeping with the perceived enemy. But the $150 million investment from Microsoft not only allowed for the development of popular Microsoft programs like Office for the iOS system, but also paved the way for the iMac—Apple’s sleek, innovative all-in-one PC that represented the new brand positioning and served as a landmark for the company’s signature products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Jobs’ risk-taking may have met with initial resistance from his primary audience, but the partnership paid off and ultimately helped Apple claim the dominant position in the mobile device market.

2. Old Spice: Shifting the Target Market

Classic American brand Old Spice introduced its grooming products for men in 1938. The brand experienced steady growth, and by the 1970s was the top brand in its product class. However, the Old Spice brand aged along with its customer base, and by 1990 it had lost its appeal—Old Spice was an old man’s staple, and brand loyalty was at an all-time low.

Image via www.pg.com

At this point, Procter & Gamble purchased the Old Spice brand from parent company the Shultan Co., and launched a brand retargeting campaign aimed at capturing the younger generation. A new deodorant line called Old Spice High Endurance was marketed to teens, and the brand’s performance slowly ascended. Then in 2010, the company released the first of a series of quirky online commercials featuring the “Old Spice Man,” aimed at the younger generation.

The video quickly went viral, and propelled the Old Spice brand to the top spot in the body wash market. Sales of Old Spice increased by 107 percent in June 2010, shortly after the video’s release.

Image via www.pg.com

With a package redesign, new product releases aimed at a new demographic, and a video campaign that targeted younger markets by appearing in the channels they frequent, Old Spice created a brand resurgence that is still going strong today.

3. Dr. Martens: Banking on Nostalgia

Footwear brand Dr. Martens, known for patented air-cushioned soles and trademark yellow stitching, was a UK favorite for years. Dr. Martens boots saw peak success in the 1970s, when British punk rockers adopted the brand and created a craze. But when grunge moved in during the 1990s, Dr. Martens moved out—in a big way.

Image via www.drmartens.com

The brand fell out of favour in the fashion industry, forcing the company to downsize together with production stopping in the UK. In 2003, Dr. Martens’ production facilities relocated to more economically favorable China, leaving just a handful of design and office staff behind.

Image via www.drmartens.com

But in 2007, the company took advantage of a growing retro movement to relaunch the brand—and pulled off a successful brand resurgence simply by changing the name of its product. The original Dr. Martens shoe was introduced as the Dr. Martens “Vintage” line, with campaigns appealing to their customers’ sense of nostalgia. By 2010, the brand appeared in multiple designer collections on fashion show runways, and in 2012 Dr. Martens was assessed as the eighth fastest-growing company in Great Britain.

4. Nintendo: Pushing Brand Innovation

The Nintendo Co. has existed for longer than most people realize. The Japanese company was founded as a playing card manufacturer more than 120 years ago, but is better known as one of the first video game companies in the world. Nintendo entered the video game market in 1974, and found incredible success in the 1980s with enduring classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.

By the 1990s, the company dominated the home gaming console market with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo, and handheld Gameboy system. But competition from Sony and Microsoft heated quickly, and sales of the Nintendo 64 system launched in 1996 lost out to Sony’s PlayStation. The next iteration from Nintendo, the GameCube, performed dismally against both PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox.

Image via www.wii.com

Following the GameCube, Nintendo stopped focusing on improving its existing design, and moved into a new more innovative direction. In 2006, the company released the Wii—an entirely new design that resembled no other system. It was easy to use, highly interactive, and marketed not just to video game players, but to families with children. In addition, it was no coincidence that the name of the product is pronounced “whee,” which strongly associated it with fun. The Wii sent Nintendo surging back to the top, far outselling both of its main competitors’ same-year system releases, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

Image via www.wii.com

A focus on brand innovation and a redirected marketing campaign allowed Nintendo’s fizzling brand to come back stronger than ever. To date, the company has sold more than 86 million Wii units and continues to outperform its competitors.

There are many ways to revitalize your brand with a brand resurgence or rebranding strategy, from a simple product name change to an extensive overhaul of brand packaging, brand positioning, and strategic brand partnerships. Regardless of the size of your business, these brand comeback lessons can help you revive a flagging brand and experience greater customer engagement, higher brand recognition, and increased profitability.

What do you think?

• Would a strategic partnership with a competitor help you leverage your brand? How about partnering with a complementary business?

• What kind of strategic risks have you considered taking with your brand?

• Is there a new market demographic you could reach by refining your positioning or brand strategy?

• Would you consider relaunching your products under new names to spark a brand resurgence?

• What innovations can you implement in your products or promote in your marketing to strengthen your brand?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: Tips for CEOs & Senior Executives

August 19, 2014/2 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Reputation, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Business, Personal Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is essential for the success of your business, but your products or services aren’t the only aspects of your company that need a strong brand. As a CEO or executive, and the public face of your business, developing a distinctive and consistent personal brand complements and further solidifies your business brand—while at the same time helping you achieve personal development, growth and enhanced career success.

Personal branding is a natural extension of your leadership. Your personal brand encompasses your expertise, your career accomplishments, and your professional reputation. In large part, it is the emotional response your customers have when they hear your name—it is the experience of ‘you’.

As a CEO or executive, you don’t have to be Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos to enjoy the benefits of a well-developed personal brand. The following four tips will help you create a consistent personal brand that will help elevate your professional reputation and drive brand effectiveness for your business.

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

Whether or not you’ve worked to develop it, you already have a personal brand. The problem is that it may not be the brand you want.

Your personal brand is defined by your reputation, and by other people’s perceptions of you. This is especially critical in today’s digital world, where trusting online information and resources is the rule rather than the exception. What kind of picture does a Google search for your name paint?

Controlling your personal brand begins with awareness of the reputation that’s already out there. Your professional website, social media profiles, and published content should all reflect the brand promise you want to deliver to your customers. Without active participation in shaping your personal brand, it will be created for you—and you may not be pleased with the results.

Some of the most crucial ingredients for managing your personal brand online include:

A professional photo: Maintain personal brand consistency with one high quality, professional headshot that’s used for all of your online platforms, from your website to Linkedin to Facebook to Google Authorship etc. Having a great photo not only encourages brand recognition and visibility, but also helps to create personal connections with your customers.
A unified profile: As with your photo, use a single, succinct and compelling personal bio for every aspect of your online presence that encapsulates your personal brand and strengthens brand recognition.
A defined and consistent brand position: Make sure your personal brand philosophy is reflected in every piece of content that appears under your name online. Conflicting or incongruent presentations can undermine or dilute your brand and raise doubt in the minds of your audience about your integrity.

2. Define Your Niche

You may know how to define a niche for your products or services, but what about your personal brand? You can’t identify a target audience, because your customers aren’t buying you—or are they?

The goal of personal branding is to sell your audience on ‘you’ as a professional, an expert, and a business leader. This means you do have a target market, and it includes your business customers as well as your colleagues, strategic partners, stakeholders and the thought leaders in your industry. So defining your personal brand niche means deciding who your ideal audience is, and determining how you can best connect with them on a personal level.

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep. This holds true for personal branding, where a few strategic endorsements from industry influencers can enhance your personal reputation and allow you to be perceived as successful by association with known name brands.

Image via www.timferriss.com

Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, has seen phenomenal success as a personal brand, bolstered by multiple endorsements from highly recognizable names. The bio page of Ferriss’ website places him in the company of big business and personal brands, from working with Google, Harvard, and Nike, to appearances in Forbes and on CNN, to receiving mentions in the class of Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey.

As a CEO or executive, networking with influencers in your industry and gathering testimonials is a powerful way to build your personal brand and draw on the success of association.

4. Own Your Brand

Even in an impersonal medium like video or the Internet, your audience can tell when you’re being authentic—and they can spot a phoney. Your personal brand will not be successful if it’s not authentic. In fact, authenticity forms the foundation of a unique personal brand that helps you stand out. As writer and poet Oscar Wilde (who was a strong personal brand before the term was defined) said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Many CEOs and executives fear the possibility of polarizing their audiences with a strong, authentic brand. But it’s essential to realize that, like your business brand, your personal brand won’t appeal to everyone—and it doesn’t have to.

Image via www.apple.com

Take, for example, Steve Jobs. The former CEO of Apple was unquestionably a powerful personal brand. Innovative, dynamic, and widely respected, Jobs was also known for his strict perfectionist tendencies and for being harsh on his employees. He never tried to hide these qualities or apologize for them, yet even after his death, Jobs remains a beloved icon and a symbol of technological innovation.

Jobs’ less desirable personality traits remained a known but low-key quantity throughout his life and career. But even more polarizing personal brands can be successful, whether at the positive or negative end of the spectrum. Consider the unprecedented success of UK entrepreneur and celebrity chef Gordon James Ramsay, Jr, OBE. Abrasive, brusque, and demanding, Ramsay has built his personal brand on unending criticism delivered in crude language that has actually reduced his guests—his customers—to tears on occasion.

Image via www.gordonramsay.com

Still, Ramsay’s audience can’t get enough. The reason is that despite his caustic demeanor, Ramsay is absolutely authentic. He has a genuine interest in, and a passion for, helping others succeed, and that passion shines through. And while he may seem to work at cross-purposes, at its core, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aims to create more successful restaurateurs through the application of Ramsay’s demonstrated expertise.

Defining, shaping, and promoting your personal brand as a CEO or executive requires concentrated effort and some brand strategy inputs, but the results are worth the challenge. By maintaining a powerful and consistent personal brand that is distinct from, yet complementary to, your business brand, you can engage your customers and strengthen your platform for ongoing success.

What do you think?

• Are you aware of your existing personal brand? Is it positive, negative, or neutral?

• How can you monitor and shape your personal brand online?

• What niche audience does your personal brand appeal to, and how will you reach them and engage them positively?

• Where would you start looking for influencer endorsements in your industry?

• How can you define and enhance your authentic personal brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

FMCG Branding: Top 4 Tips For Competing Profitably Against Own Label Brands

August 12, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Branding, FMCG, Own Label, Private Label /by Lorraine Carter

The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market is one of the most competitive and aggressive in the world. Whether your products are foods or beverages, toiletries, cleaning products, household or office supplies, or consumer electronics, your customers have a vast array of brands to choose from—and it’s up to you to build a brand platform, with a sustainable business model, that attracts, retains and grows your target market.

As every FMCG brand owner or manager knows, today’s FMCG brands are not only competing against comparable brands at equal retail pricing levels. In fact, the stiffest competition comes from private label brands offering similar products with significant price discounts, which your business may not be able to match. In a suppressed global economy where customers are looking to make every dollar, pound or euro count, you need a multi-pronged branding strategy that addresses the price fighting battles and enables your brand to flourish more profitably, at higher price points.

4 tips to help you increase your FMCG brands profitability and take market share from private label brands

1. Highlight Innovation

Customers are always hungry for something new and different—as the long lines or queues at Apple retail stores whenever a new iPhone is released can attest. Building a brand promise around innovation can also work for FMCG products. Innovative brands have inherent value to the customer, and can therefore command higher prices.

To bolster sales in its flagging UK and European markets due to damaging competition from private label brands, Unilever has shifted its brand strategy emphasis to innovation. The company has seen early success in UK markets with the introduction of compressed deodorant cans, presented as an environmental innovation in sustainable living across its Sure, Dove, Vaseline and Lynx brands and, the recent introduction of a new toothpaste brand called Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 which highlights a “unique enamel science formula” for rebuilding tooth enamel. This highly innovative new brand has achieved a significant price premium for the category, retailing at $17 /£10 / €13 per tube—much higher than regular toothpaste prices.

Image via www.unilever.com

The innovation lies in the formula they came up with which combines calcium silicate and sodium phosphate to regenerate enamel by up to 82 per cent in three days, while also making the tooth three times stronger. When you consider 80 per cent of tooth problems in adults are caused by enamel erosion Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 is a very compelling brand innovator.

However the brand didn’t just stop at this one highly innovative $17 / £10 / €13 Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 toothpaste for daily use, to achieve the best effect is has to be used in conjunction with a second product, a ‘Boosting Serum’ if you want to achieve the full 82 per cent effect, which retails at a further $51 / £30 / €38 and gives the user just the ‘once a month’ required 3 day usage amount! The consumer has to spend $51 / £30 / €38 per month on the ‘Boosting Serum’ plus $17 / £10 / €13 on the Regenerate Enamel Science toothpaste, requiring a monthly expenditure of $69 / £40 / €51 per person on their ‘at home’ dental care! So where the average humble regular toothpaste with an RRP of around $7 / £4 / €5 or less endeavours to prevent erosion, Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 is the first to reverse it. Similar to Apple this is a superb example of brand innovation with premium positioning achieving a premium pricing strategy.

2. Focus On Your Brand Story

Stories hold a timeless attraction for everyone, and brands with strong stories behind them are much more memorable and compelling with customers. Tradition, heritage, and history are classic elements for many successful brands, allowing companies like Burberry, Rolls Royce, and Smythson to cash in on higher price points by emphasizing the timeless qualities and standards of their brands. The same principles apply to FMCG goods, with brand heritage delivering a promise to customers that the extra cost is worth paying for. Note: Your brand story must be authentic, irresistible and consistent in a way that’s relevant to your target audience throughout every touch point of your brands’ existence and engagement on or offline.

Image via www.pg.com

The UK brand Fairy Liquid has effectively utilised history and heritage to increase market share and surpass competition from private label brands. Beginning in 2010, Fairy Liquid launched a commemorative heritage campaign celebrating the iconic brand’s 50th anniversary, and a consistent brand vision of mildness and domestic harmony. The nostalgic hark back to simpler times, including a re-launch of its original white bottle packaging, drove impressive year-on-year growth of 13.1% in the hand dishwash category and 24.2% in the auto dishwash category.

Image via www.pg.com

In 2011, Fairy Liquid once again realized sales growth with the launch of a commemorative bottle to celebrate the royal wedding and another to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Further, the brand is the most popular for parent company Procter & Gamble on Facebook, with a strategy of frequent engagement on social media through nostalgia-based topics. With the right brand strategy, even newer brands can employ history and heritage to add value to their FMCG products.

3. Inspire Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a driving force behind the power of a brand, particularly for FMCG brands. Customers who are loyal to your brand will buy your products every time, regardless of cost – but you’ve got to consistently give them a compelling reason for their loyalty! When you develop a loyal customer base, you enjoy not only repeat business, but coveted word-of-mouth advertising as your brand fans tell their family and friends that they’ll only use your products.

Procter & Gamble, the parent company to dozens of FMCG brands, creates customer loyalty for not only individual product lines, but the corporation’s umbrella as a whole. The company’s loyalty-driven ongoing Olympics campaign is one of the most notable and effective in the world, with a series of commercials celebrating international mothers and their everyday work in raising Olympic champions. Each of these inspiring, heartstring-tugging commercials ends with a series of brand placement images, and the campaign’s tag line: “P&G. Proud sponsor of Moms.”

4. Create Exclusivity

Many luxury brands rely on exclusivity to maintain sales and customer levels at premium price points. Creating exclusivity can also be an effective strategy for FMCG brands in two ways—by developing the perception of exclusivity for customers, and by building retailer relations for exclusive product distribution.

Image via www.kraftfoodservice.com

FMCG brand Grey Poupon has built a brand on exclusivity. The “luxury” mustard brand has always catered to a higher end customer, creating a brand that is synonymous with discerning tastes. Early in 2014, Grey Poupon applied the exclusivity concept to social media marketing with a unique Facebook campaign that only allowed customers to “Like” their page if their application was approved and they were able to “cut the mustard.”

The ‘Like Applications’ were weighed using several factors, including education level, number of friends, and books read. Those who failed to hit the mark were offered tips to improve their standing and invited to try again.

In 2013, Duracell rose to 46% of the alkaline battery market share after developing an exclusive distribution relationship with wholesale retailer Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart company. While the wholesale deal required a slight discount on bulk sales, Duracell was still able to maintain a higher price point than private label battery brands and realize an additional $140 million in sales.

As the competition increases between FMCG brands and private label discounters, companies must develop multi-faceted value-added branding strategies to differentiate their products, attract new customers, and earn customer loyalty at higher price points. As always, a consistent brand promise built on delivering incomparable ‘perceived’ value remains essential to long term success in the FMCG arena.

What do you think?

• Does your brand have an innovative element you can highlight in your marketing campaigns?

• How can you highlight your brand story in a way that adds value for customers?

• Are there any traditions or heritage stories you can tie to your brand to invoke nostalgia or pride?

• Who is your ideal loyal customer? How does your brand marketing strategy reach them?

• Can you develop exclusivity around your brand, either through customer perceptions or distribution and retail relationships?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Pinterest: Top 5 Tips for Building Your Brand & Increasing Sales

August 6, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Collaboration, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Branding, Customer Engagement, eCommerce, Pinterest, Social Engagement, Social Media /by Lorraine Carter

In the early days of Pinterest the image-based platform, described as a “big online corkboard”, was viewed as little more than a place to exchange recipes, home decorating tips, fashion and craft ideas. But while Pinterest may be a relative newcomer to the world of social media, this highly visual network now has more than 70 million users and a wealth of untapped potential for businesses of all sizes endeavouring to build their brands.

Just how effective is brand building on Pinterest? According to data from marketing research firm Annalect:

Pinterest leads social media networks for brand discovery, with 40 percent of social media users learning about a new brand (compared to 27 percent on Facebook, and less for other social networks)

67 percent of users source and share for special occasions on Pinterest, with second place going to Facebook at only 21 percent

More than half (55%) of Pinterest users click through images they like to the company’s website to learn more about a product or service

Users pin products they are considering purchasing (62%) and products they have already purchased (21%)

Using Pinterest for your business is easier than you might think. These tips will help you create your brand strategy and engagement on Pinterest coupled with driving brand visibility across all of your digital marketing channels.

1. Show Your Brand Story

Your brand story serves as the foundation for your company’s brand, ensuring memorability, recognition, relevance and resonance with your target audience. If a picture sells a thousand words then the visual nature of Pinterest is an unbeatable strategy for illustrating your brand story in a way that ensures significant impact with your customers, especially when you consider that social media content with images drives three times more engagement than text-based content.

Because Pinterest is visual in nature, the platform is highly effective for creating an emotional connection. Remember people buy with emotion, not rational! Well-chosen and powerful images or attention grabbing video that features your products, services, key people in your business or relates to the core of your organisation’s brand, all serve as visual story amplifiers that communicate who you are, and what you stand for, in a really visceral way.

Pantone Colour Institute makes excellent branding use of Pinterest with its boards for Colour of the Year. Each board features images of the highlighted colour featured in foods, flowers, hairstyles, event ideas, and even celebrities wearing the year’s colour. The visual marketing strategy has earned Pantone nearly 50,000 Pinterest followers for 2014’s board alone, and more across the company’s 45 boards.

2. Use Pinterest to Drive eCommerce Growth

Images are inspiring, and the right images can truly transport an audience. Another highly effective brand strategy for Pinterest is to show your customers just what their lives would be like with your brand in them, so they can easily picture themselves owning and enjoying what you have to offer. Pinterest is particularly effective, when used appropriately, with tangible products as part of an integrated brand strategy to help drive eCommerce growth. Illustrating your products or services in action works really well in this regard.

You can also take your lifestyle brand a step further by recommending or joint venturing with other complementary brands products or services and showing your customers a fuller picture that brings the brand elements together. For example, a gourmet dessert company might pin images of a friends celebrating with everyone enjoying their products on a particular occasion or holiday event using the table décor of another popular lifestyle brand.

Once you’ve identified complementary brands, consider partnering with other Pinterest business users to cross-promote and increase your followers and visibility. Re-pinning content is one of the most effective ways to grow Pinterest traffic to your boards.

3. Maintain Brand Consistency Across All Content

As with any social media platform, the key to success on Pinterest is converting followers into leads and ultimately loyal customers. Pinterest provides several ways to reinforce your brand consistency and funnel visitors to your website, landing page, or email list signup.

Pins can be linked to your website, both the images themselves and the text in the description. Every piece of original content you pin to your boards should be linked to an actionable target, making it easy for customers to learn more about the images you’re displaying, and how or where to purchase them or the service they relate to. With linked images, you’ll also gain more visibility as other Pinterest users re-pin your content to their own boards where their followers can also click through.

UK online fashion retailer ASOS is a strong example of brand consistency on Pinterest. The company joined Pinterest in 2012, but didn’t see much traction until an overhaul in 2013 when it streamlined and consolidated its boards, and began posting only branded and linked pins. Now, with 35 boards and nearly 80,000 followers, ASOS enjoys strong customer engagement on Pinterest.

4. Engage Others to Spread Your Brand

Pinterest is a community, and getting others to share your content helps to grow your brand exponentially. More than 80 percent of the total content on Pinterest are repins from other boards, so it’s essential to interest your audience enough to repost your content and share with their own followers.

Having other Pinterest users highlight your brand is a far better endorsement than plugging your business on your own. This holds true not only for repins, but also for user-submitted content that you pin to your boards. There are many creative ways you can invite users to submit pins. For example, auto manufacturer Honda created a campaign called “Pintermission,” where the company chose five influential pinners from among their followers, and gave them each $500 to bring a pin from their own boards into reality.

The company asked the pinners to collaborate with each other, and to upload photos of their projects to Pinterest once they were completed. Honda also created promotional posters for the campaign that parodied popular motivational images. As a result, the Pintermission board received more than 4.6 million views and over 5,000 repins—and the campaign also spread to Twitter with the hashtag #Pintermission.

5. Your Brand, Visualized

With a compelling brand design, and easy tools for linking and sharing, Pinterest is a really powerful branding tool for most businesses. You can strengthen your brand visibility significantly through the use of meaningful images, engaging video, consistent brand messaging coupled with encouraging user engagement through pins, comments and competitions on Pinterest.

What do you think?

• Is your brand a good fit for Pinterest?

• Are you sharing your brand story through images or video?

• What might complement your brand lifestyle messages and help customers envision your brand as part of their lives?

• How are you ensuring you maintain brand message consistency with your images or video content creation?

• Have you used Pinterest effectively yet to help drive your eCommerce growth?

Feel free to share your thoughts or comments in the box below. We’d love to hear from you!

World Cup Branding: What Can You Learn from the World Cup Campaigns?

July 28, 2014/0 Comments/in Advertising, Ambush Marketing, Brand Placement, Brand Sponsorship, Brand Strategy, Branding, Global Branding, Integrated Marketing, Online Marketing /by Lorraine Carter

Much like the Olympics, every four years the World Cup captures the attention of the globe—and global marketers. World Cup branding is a powerful way for businesses to elevate their brand profiles and strengthen brand visibility on a global scale.

But the branding techniques used by companies during World Cup fever don’t have to be confined to once every four years. Here are some branding lessons your business can take away from the latest World Cup marketing campaigns.

Take A Risk With Something Different

World Cup advertising sponsorships aren’t easy to come by—they’re highly limited, extremely costly, and competed for fiercely. Only a handful of big brands manage to score these coveted sponsorships. Non-sponsor companies, therefore, usually arrange for star-studded branded advertising that conveys support for the game and suggests affiliation.

Image via www.nike.com

Nike, who wasn’t a sanctioned World Cup sponsor for 2014—though competitor Adidas was—managed to grab an early win by going against the trend. The company created a video, released right before the start of the tournament, that broke all the rules: it’s animated (though some of the characters are futbol celebrities), it never directly mentions the World Cup, and it’s a whopping five and a half minutes long—nearly twice the maximum length of three minutes that’s usually recommended for customer engagement.

The video, which is really a mini-film, uses subtle and strategic product placement throughout. The theme of the video’s story is “risk everything”—and it’s a risk that paid off significantly for Nike, who garnered over 65 million views and experienced more user engagement than its sponsored competitor, with less effort.

What can your business learn from “The Last Game”? When you take risks and deliver something unexpected, your brand benefits.

Be A Good Sport

When it comes to sporting events, especially global tournaments like the World Cup, passions can run high. Everyone will have their favorites, but not all of them can win. Brands in particular need to carefully monitor their support for one team over another, and be cautious when posting their sentiments in public spaces.

KLM Airlines learned the hard way with what happens when you offend your audience with your fan sentiments. The European company tweeted about Mexico’s defeat to the Holland team with a stereotyped picture of a mustached, sombrero-sporting figure next to a departure sign, captioned with the words “Adios Amigos!” The tweet went rapidly viral in a negative way, incurring backlash from the online community that included a profanity-laced attack from Hollywood A-List actor Gael Garcia Bernal tweeting his 2 million plus followers that he’ll never fly KLM again! Though KLM soon deleted the tweet, the damage had been done.

The takeaway here is to choose your brand alignment carefully, and be a good sport when it comes to wins and losses. Your brand sentiment should never offend your customers.

Link Your Offline and Online Campaigns Together

The most successful global brands present a consistent customer experience throughout all aspects and representations of their brands. One of the best ways to maintain consistency is to create links between various campaigns that will drive customer engagement on multiple channels.

During the World Cup, several brands strove for integration across channels, from television to social to mobile. Global auto manufacturer Hyundai created a particularly successful integrated World Cup campaign with television commercials that called on a popular internet meme and created a user-friendly Twitter hashtag to continue the theme online.

The video incorporates the “because something” meme that’s frequently used on social media and pop culture websites. While the subject is the Spanish team and their 2010 World Cup win, the advertisement is universal, with just one line of subtitled dialogue and the rest of the story told in actions and flashbacks. It’s funny and endearing, and the use of the #BecauseFutbol hashtag helped to engage audiences and increase Twitter activity for Hyundai.

The lesson here is that a consistent and integrated brand strategy across multiple channels can help your business succeed any time, not just during global sporting events.

What do you think?

• How can your brand capitalise on global events, even without official sponsorships?

• What are some unique ways you can present your brand, or unexpected twists you could deploy over typical marketing themes?

• How carefully are you monitoring your brand alliances to ensure you’re not offending your audience?

• What are you doing to tie your online and offline campaigns together?

• Do you create a consistent customer experience across all channels, on and offline, with your brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Top 4 of today’s most important rules for social media branding success.

Rule 1: Be Consistent

Rule 2: Be Active

Rule 3: Be Engaging

Rule 4: Be Social

When Should You Perform a Brand Audit?

Why Do You Need a Brand Audit?

Brand audits can help you:

What Does A Brand Audit Involve?

Internal Brand Audit Support: Getting Employees On Board

Enlisting Your Customers For Your Brand Audit

ROI: What You Can Get Out Of A Brand Audit

What do you think?

Understanding the Different Types of Brand Names

Top Ten Brand Name Creation Categories

1. Founders’ Names:

2. Descriptive Names:

3. Geographic Names:

4. Personification:

5. Evocative Names:

6. Alliteration or Rhyming Names:

7. Derivative Names:

8. Neologisms (new made-up words):

9. Hybrid Names:

10. Acronyms and Initials:

A. Brand Naming Methods: Strategic Brainstorming

B. Brand Naming Method: Name and Word Lists

C. Brand Naming Method: Puns and Plays on Words

What do you think?

5 ‘Premium Positioning’ Rebranding Strategy Tips

1. Increasing Actual Value

2. Increasing Perceived Value

3. Premium Brand Repositioning Through Packaging Design

4. Affiliations and Testimonials for Premium Brand Repositioning

5. Brand Messaging and Premium Brand Positioning

Key Ingredients for a Compelling Brand Personality

1. Building an Emotional Response

2. The Bold and The Brave

3. Redefining a Niche

Brand Amplification Strategies for Spreading Your Brand Personality

What do you think?

4 Lessons Learned from Amazing Brand Revitalizations

1. Apple: An Unconventional Partnership

2. Old Spice: Shifting the Target Market

3. Dr. Martens: Banking on Nostalgia

4. Nintendo: Pushing Brand Innovation

What do you think?

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

2. Define Your Niche

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

4. Own Your Brand

What do you think?

4 tips to help you increase your FMCG brands profitability and take market share from private label brands

1. Highlight Innovation

2. Focus On Your Brand Story

3. Inspire Customer Loyalty

4. Create Exclusivity

What do you think?

1. Show Your Brand Story

2. Use Pinterest to Drive eCommerce Growth

3. Maintain Brand Consistency Across All Content

4. Engage Others to Spread Your Brand

5. Your Brand, Visualized

What do you think?

Take A Risk With Something Different

Be A Good Sport

Link Your Offline and Online Campaigns Together

What do you think?

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