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Brand Basics Part 2: Defining Your Brand John Bowen, Alex Millet and Mohammad Saigol Brand Consultants

11 April 2013

Presented by

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• Brand consultancy

• B2B and corporate focus

• Strategy and design


• Part 1: Understanding Brand (4/4/13)

What we mean by brand, what value it can offer to a business, and how you might begin to think about creating or improving your own brand.

• Part 2: Defining Your Brand (4/11/13)

Guidelines for helping you define what your brand stands for in the context of your competitors, your customers, and your own company and culture.

• Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life (4/18/13)

Information and advice about translating your company’s brand strategy into customer brand experiences through messaging and design.


• How to define your brandscape

• How to chart the future path of your brand

• How to create and use some simple brand positioning tools

• Some tips for making your brand strategy tangible

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“Patents expire. Copyrights expire. Only brands can be owned forever.”

Larry Light, from “Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace”


Understanding your customer

Understanding your competition

Understanding your company


The people who exchange money for your products and services are a critical component of your brandscape.

• Talk to three of your best customers

• Talk to three customers who are dissatisfied

• Conduct desk research on your category and target


In order to understand how to stand out in your customer’s mind, you need to know who they are comparing you to.

• Look at three direct competitors

• Look at one or two aspirational competitors

• Look at one or two out-of-category brands you admire


Lasting brands are authentic, meaning that what they promise is directly linked to why they were created and how they operate.

• Look to your company’s history and achievements

• Look to your company’s leaders and cheerleaders

• Look to your company’s business model


insight | [in-sīt] | noun (1) The capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing, or (2) an understanding of this kind.

Oxford Dictionary


Stay on top of industry trends and competitor moves.

Identify unmet customer needs that can improve your product or sales / service model

Keep your company focused on your most important goals


Your company’s goals for the future

What tomorrow looks like, in a best case but credible scenario

How you and your stakeholders measure long term success

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At the highest level, what you offer to all your audiences

A summation of your differentiated benefits

The organizing principle for all communications and actions


Bringing people together.

Cisco Brand Promise


Your brand promise is internal language that inspires external language and action – to develop it, look to your insights.

• What higher order value do you provide to customers?

• What do you do different and better?

• What attributes and equities does your company own?


“Branding is about taking something common and improving upon it in ways that make it more valuable and meaningful.”

Scott Bedbury, “A New Brand World”


Avoid confusing tactics with strategy and strategy with goals

Attract customers and employees that are right for your business

Align promise with delivery to increase customer satisfaction and drive repeat business


A focusing of your brand promise to increase relevance to a target

Answers the question: “Why should I exchange money for what you have to offer?”

A core component of internal and agency briefs


For [target customer] who [customer need], [your brand] is the [offering description] that [differentiating benefit].


For independent, proactive women 25-39 who, in seeking balance, put so much into their day they need to replenish what’s been taken out, DASANI is the new bottled water that provides total body hydration and a feeling of pure satisfaction.

Value Proposition


Is it relevant?

Is it differentiating?

Is it compelling?


Reasons to believe, sometimes called RTBs or proof points, are the tangible facts that back up your promises

• They are not aspirational – they are unassailable

• The good news – you’ve probably already gathered most of them

• Grouping specific RTBs into buckets can lead to useful themes


Purity Reverse osmosis filtering

Added minerals

Availability Distribution

Portable

Sustainability Plant based bottle

Recycling initiatives

Reasons to Believe


• Internally – deploy RTBs to prove to your people that your brand is authentic and actionable

• Externally – use them to support the higher order benefits and promises you lead with in headlines and sales presentations

• Some companies prefer to include RTBs in their value proposition by adding a clause beginning with “because” at the end


Ensure that your offering is right for your target and adjust either to optimize your business

Have an industry standard tool to brief your marketing agencies

Prepare a convincing story for sales presentations


Focus

Relevance

Differentiation


What can you do right away to start making a difference?


• Designate brand guardians

• Conduct brand workshops

• Learn from the front line


• Conduct a web survey

• Share knowledge and best practices

• Ask the opinion of outsiders


• Introduce distinctive language

• Simplify, simplify, simplify

• Own a distinctive color


A promise to the outside world is meaningless if your people aren’t internally prepared to deliver on it.


In this section you learned how to assess your brandscape by looking at your customers, your competition, and your own company.

You were also given tools to develop key components of your brand like the Brand Promise, Value Proposition, and Reasons to Believe.

In Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life, you will take all of these and begin to translate them into tangible brand assets like identity and messaging strategy.

See you next week!

Thank you.

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