Branding Strategy Insider

Seven Critical Factors Of Brand Strategy Success

2010-03-02T17:23:34-05:00

The following seven factors continue to rule the day for building leading brands:

Organization Support

•CEO leadership & support

•Distinctive corporate culture that supports brand promise

•Ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees

•Alignment of brand messages across functions

Brand Presentation

•Strength of brand identity system

•Effective use of visuals/imagery

•Ability to capture the brand in a slogan

Source: The Conference Board’s 1998 “Managing the Corporate Brand” study

Measuring The Strength Of Brand Identity

2010-02-24T00:10:00-05:00

Ever wonder what is really behind this thing we call "identity? "

It's one of those words that attracts a variety of meanings, ranging from a company's name and logo, to its business definition (Fuji: We're a digital imaging company), to its image in the marketplace, to its values.

Sometimes, executives manage to go a level deeper and talk about identity, their company's, and even their own, as the unique characteristics that define how they create value in the world. From this vantage point, identity provides the seeds of differentiation. Ahhh. I think these guys may be on to something.

It doesn't matter what business you're in; if you're going to successfully re-shape your brand, you need to start by knowing who you are. This imperative isn't just a nice-to-have; it's a must-have, which we discovered recently through a research study, the Identity Impact Survey, that quantitatively demonstrates the impact of identity strength, organizational and individual, on employee engagement and business performance. The key findings of the survey, which included nearly 2,000 participants across five diverse companies and industries, were dramatic.

Increases in identity strength translate into predictable increases in revenue and other economic benefits.
Organizational identity strength is more influential than individual identity strength in driving employee engagement and business performance. Their combined effect, however, is greater than either one alone.

Although organizational identity emerges as a prime performance driver, employees don't typically think that their organization actually has a strong identity.

The last finding made me shudder: Organizational identity strength has a major impact on performance, but most people don't believe their company has a strong identity. Now, there's a gap to be reckoned with! The implications get worse. What we found was that for all the innovative workplace activities companies use to boost engagement, better relations with one's boss, more recognition, more work-life balance, none of them can make up for low identity strength. What's a smart executive to do?

That question brings me back to brand. If there's one management portal companies have for building identity strength, it's their brand. Not brand as a measure of consumer attitudes, but brand as the vessel that links the company's identity to how it goes to market, starting with how employees contribute to building brand success. Call it branding from the inside-out, rather than outside-in.

Our research offered many insights into the power of identity as a performance lever that executives can actually control. One of the most useful analysis in this regard was determining where identity strength comes from. What we learned is that it comes from eight building blocks, which constitute the primary "muscles" that account for identity strength and resultant business performance.

These building blocks of identity include: autonomy, differentiation, change, stewardship, purpose, alignment, brand and sustainability. While brand is ultimately only one of eight factors, it is still the best place to start when seeking to build identity strength. That''s because brand reflects, and affects, all parts of the business, simultaneously. (Just ask Starbucks, Toyota, IBM or Disney.)

One of our aims in conducting the survey was to develop a yardstick to measure identity strength, and its performance ramifications, in one number. Thus, was born "IdentityiQ." Derived from the dynamics of human IQ testing, this simple yardstick gives executives a quick, clear read on performance that can be linked to strength or weakness on several key leadership measures including:

- Current financial performance
- Strategy deployment
- Innovation
- Brand
- Culture
- Investment value

What we've learned about identity strength through our research can reshape how companies approach their branding challenges. And it can give business leaders a new way to address employee engagement and business performance.

Someone once asked me who my heroes are, professionally speaking. After a bit of thought, and naming my usual suspects- Peter Drucker, Abraham Maslow, Jim Collins - I came up with one more; maybe the oldest brand consultant in history: Socrates, who famously said, Know Thyself. He was right. That's where success begins.

Contributed to BSI by: Larry Ackerman, President, The Identity Circle

Brand Research and Neuro-Linguistic Programming

2010-02-23T00:10:00-05:00

Focus group participants are often inspired to articulate themselves more fully and accurately than they could have alone. Any moderator worth his or her salt does this daily, without consciously using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques. Many focus group moderators instinctually mirror a participant's representational system when asking a follow-up question or eliciting greater depth from a projective exercise.

Want a participant to keep talking? Then probe in the language of his or her sensory modality.

Sensory Modality and Participant Verbatims

Sensory modalities are part of a NLP model that identifies patterns in how people externalize the information they are processing. When participants talk, they often speak from a state of mind that is more closely aligned with one sense over another. For instance:

Visual That's a bright idea. I see how I can use the car's extra space.

Auditory I hear how this makes sense. Let me tell you — this is a winner.

Kinesthetic How fast can I accelerate? I feel like this car was made for me.

Olfactory Smells like a winner. Some ideas stink, but this is coming up roses.

Gustatory That new car looks yummy. It has the fine flavor of elegance.

When you hear someone speak in a particular sensory modality, and you ask questions in that same modality, the person is more likely to continue talking than if you ask a question in a different sensory modality. You are also more likely to get a congruent answer and more likely to keep the participant engaged.

We can see inside participants' minds — and know how they are processing information or which parts of their brain they are accessing — by their eye movement. Have you ever noticed how a participant's eyes move when you ask him or her a question? Try this sometime soon... Ask someone this series of questions:

What did it look like the last time it rained?
What are the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner"?

Then, watch the person's eyes. His or her eyes will most likely go the same direction each time, because both questions solicit a recollection. Chances are good that the eyes will go to the right (the person's left) after each question because approximately 85% of the Western world's population that has been tested accesses memories by looking to their left. If you want to see a more subtle distinction, when you ask someone to recollect a visual, the person will likely look up and to your right. If you ask someone to recollect a sound, however, the person will likely look directly to your right (his or her left) along a horizontal plane. Here are questions that are a little trickier.

Please imagine a purple elephant with big orange spots.
Can you see it?

Most people have never seen such a critter. Their eyes will go back and forth (their left to their right) as they try to remember the components in Vr and then construct the new variant in Vc. Sometimes, an indication of a fib can be seen when a person only looks up to Vc in response to a question that should be easy to recall. Example: What was the party like last night? If the response is all in Vc, perhaps the person queried never attended or was so drunk that he can't remember. You should always test your assumptions. For practical purposes, when you see someone's eyes move, you can often infer how that person is accessing what he or she knows.

As a focus group moderator, if you ask a participant about buying a new car and you see her eyes go up, you might ask what she looks for because her eyes going up revealed that she was seeing pictures in her mind. Similarly, if you ask a participant about buying a new car and you see her eyes go horizontally, you might ask what she listens for, because her eyes going sideways revealed that she was hearing words or sounds in her mind.

Again, you need to test your assumptions. Lefthanded people often have reversed eye movements from the general population. Some people move their entire head instead of moving their eyes. Important note: Someone leaning back with his eyes staring at the ceiling may simply be accessing the visual part of his mind. You can test whether he is tracking with you by asking, "What do you see?" If his head shakes before he answers, he was probably daydreaming; however, if he keeps staring as he talks you through what he is seeing, chances are he needs to look up to fully access his ability to visualize. When you speak into a participant's primary modality, you make it easier for that person to share what's inside his or her head. Sometimes, the results can look remarkable. People reveal themselves in ways they normally would not.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

NLP is based on the remarkable work of Dr. Milton Erickson, who was widely recognized as the foremost hypnotherapist of his time. Dr. Erikson was able to ingeniously structure sentences full of vague meanings to help his clients discover how to address their problems and the resources that they already had available to them. His success was based on his ability to read non-verbal behavior (sensory acuity), his ability to establish rapport with his clients, his skill with language patterns and his beliefs about his clients. Bandler and Grinder, the founders of NLP, studied Erickson as part of their development of their approach to working with people.

Here's a famous illustration of Dr. Erickson's work. A twelve-year-old boy was brought in to see Erickson about bedwetting. Erickson dismissed his parents and began talking to the boy about other topics, avoiding a direct discussion about bedwetting altogether. Upon learning that the boy played baseball and that his brother had played football, Erickson elaborated on the fine muscle coordination it takes to play baseball, compared to the uncoordinated muscle skills used in football.

The boy listened raptly as Erickson described in detail all the muscle adjustments his body automatically makes in order to position him underneath the ball and catch it. For instance, the glove must be opened at just the right moment and clamped down again at just the right moment. When transferring the ball to another hand, the same kind of fine muscle control is needed. Then, when throwing the ball to the infield, if he lets go too soon, the ball doesn't go where he wants it to go. Likewise, letting go too late leads to an undesired outcome and, consequently, to frustration. Erickson explained that letting go just at the right time gets the ball to go where the player wants it to go, and that constitutes success in baseball.

Therapy with this young man consisted of four sessions that included talks about other sports, Boy Scouts and muscles. But bedwetting (which is often a muscle-control problem) was not discussed, and "formal hypnosis" was not conducted. The boy's bedwetting disappeared soon thereafter. Some of Erickson's tenets appear in the list of NLP Presuppositions. For example:

Every behavior has a positive intention.
This is the best choice available to a person, given the circumstances as he or she sees them.
Respect the other person's model of the world.
Resistance in a client is due to a lack of rapport. There are no resistant clients, only inflexible therapists.

Erickson also used a technique that has been labeled "Pacing and Leading" in NLP. He would start by subtly mirroring a client's physical expression as a way of creating rapport. Think about how a baby delights in being copied. On some level, we all feel "seen" and understood when another person gestures the way we do or uses the same speed of talking and type of language.

Once he established that connection, he would begin to lead the client into a different space, generally what hypnotists call a trance or downtime, where the person is encouraged to explore his inner world. (In NLP terms, uptime is when your senses are focused on the outside world, while downtime is related to your inner thoughts.) As we go through our daily activities, we are continually cycling through uptime and downtime and are often somewhere in between.

So, to pace a respondent, begin by matching her postures and gestures, choice of verbs, tone of voice, etc. Once the connection is made, you can change the tempo and sensory system to elicit responses from all senses — e.g., what did you see, hear, feel, smell, taste or think? This is particularly helpful in any guided imagery exercises you may design. Clients are amazed when respondents report on the colors they saw and the scents they smelled in their reveries.

Contributed to BSI by: Dr. Sharon Livingston, President, The Livingston Group

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Brand Building and Emotional Benefits

2010-02-22T00:10:00-05:00

People buy benefits rather than features.

For example:

Time-release (feature) products are purchased because they are long acting (benefit).

Clear bottles let us see the purity in color and consistency of waters.

Dissolving tablets allow us to take medicine on the go.

Roller ball pens write faster.

Rubberized handles on scissors provide a sure grip.

And many marketers would agree that we buy products and services that enhance our positive sense of self-esteem, in some way. They believe that all brands, products and their features are associated with a rewarding emotional payoff. Moreover, all features and benefits are linked to emotional end benefits.

Think of iPod, BlackBerry, Fiji Water, Poland Spring, Mercedes, Ford, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Hershey, Godiva, Tiffany, Kay, Disneyland, Maui. We seek out these brands with their USPs, features and functional benefits because we like the way they make us feel and what they allow us to communicate about ourselves.

Claritin quick-dissolve tablets ladder up to sharp thinking and insightfulness.

Fiji's clear bottle and purity communicate a sense of spirituality.

Time-release analgesics allow us to accomplish more.

Alarm systems sell because people want to feel safe and secure.

Mercedes appeals to a need for recognition.

iPods sell because people want to feel a sense of belonging.

iPods also sell because people want to show how smart they are.

Woody Allen appeals to people who like feeling sophisticated, brainy and unique (if not uniquely neurotic).

But let's backtrack for a moment. People get confused between emotions and emotional benefits. There is an important distinction between them.

The Differences between Emotions and Emotional Benefits

An "emotion" is best defined as a state of physiological arousal to which we attach a cognitive label. There are only four core emotions " mad, glad, scared and sad.

Of course, there are various gradations, combinations and shades of gray regarding all of the four core feeling states. Sad includes disappointed, gloomy, heart broken, distressed, etc. Mad includes frustrated, raging, bitter, annoyed. At an even simpler level, we either feel "good" or "bad." (How often have you been frustrated in a research project when someone responds to your sensitive plea for his or her feeling response by energetically answering, "It makes me feel good/better/great/wonderful!")

Knowing how our brand, features and functions or brand activity (concepts, advertising, names, taglines, etc.) makes someone "feel" is only minimally useful. We definitely want to know if our new commercial makes people feel "glad" or "bad,"but that is ONLY a measure of valence; it does little or nothing to lend direction to our creative efforts. It tells us nothing about how to set the mood and tone for our advertising or even necessarily how to FIX any bad feelings that emerge.

It is the "emotional benefit" and not the raw "emotion" that is most informative, motivating and useful for brand development. An emotional benefit, not a physiological state of arousal with a simplistic label, is an often complex, positive, cognitive statement that our respondents are able to make about themselves due to their use, display and attachment to our brand and its features.

More succinctly, an emotional benefit is nothing more than "something nice I can say about myself because I use your product or service."

The critical differences between emotions and emotional benefits are:

Emotional benefits are entirely cognitive, whereas emotions include a state of physiological arousal.

Emotional benefits are specifically attached to brands, their particular features and marketing applications. In contrast, emotions are more diffuse human physiological reactions with a limited set of simple labels.

Emotional benefits relate directly and powerfully to enduring self-concept, while emotions are more closely associated with temporary and instinctual physiological reactions.

This last distinction is most important, and it most closely identifies the reason that emotional benefits are so vital to branding.

Emotional marketing helps us link our brand to our target's enduring self-concept. We want a lifetime relationship with our target, and this is possible only if we understand our target's core values.

A vital brand has a "relationship" with loyal users not unlike a healthy relationship between two people. People maintain ongoing affiliations as long as each person in a relationship feels as though the other contributes positively to his/her positive sense of self. Relationships fall apart when perceived negatives begin to outweigh the rewards of the association. For example, being coupled with a successful friend casts a positive halo onto someone who values success.

Of course, in branding, we are a little more limited in providing emotional benefits than we are in our actual human relationships because there are only certain elements of self-concept that we can viably support with a brand. Our self-concept is admittedly constructed of much more than just the brands we buy or the brand features that attract us. Nevertheless, it is this very ability to support self-concept that is the most potent glue available for branding.

The Impact of Emotional Benefits

Now, armed with this more precise definition of an emotional benefit, let me proceed to discuss exactly how emotional benefits influence purchase and branding. Emotional benefits, although mostly unconscious, are attached to specific elements of a brand and to the brand itself as a whole.

You can actually think of them entirely without reference to the word "emotion" and remain fully in the rational sphere, if you prefer, because really it is just the "kind of person" that a particular rational feature supports. The emotional benefit/ value is the adjective describing the self:

I am an attractive person because I chose this particular long-lasting lipstick.

I am a productive person because I because I purchased a BlackBerry with a fast microprocessor.

I am a sexy person because I drive an aerodynamic car.

I am a powerful person because I bought a rowing machine from an infomercial with that muscular guy.

I am an energetic person because I replenish electrolytes after exercise with Gatorade.

A brand, then, becomes nothing more than the profile of self-concept-supporting statements that people make via their attachments to its features and advertising/messaging.

There are two more important points.

The first is to answer an extraordinarily common objection to emotional brand research. The objection is that certain categories are purely rationally driven and preclude emotional branding. This is highly debatable, given our above understanding, because EVERY rational feature is desired for the support of some aspect of self-concept. EVERY LAST ONE!

Let me prove this to you by taking the most extreme example. Consider, for a moment, a market that is known to be driven entirely by price sensitivity (we shudder to think!). In such a market, according to the "I don't need to do emotional branding" theory, competitors believe they need to compete only via their respective abilities to keep their cost structure low and progressively out-bid each other in a pricing war. (Disastrous, of course, but that's another topic.)

This is not the case, however, because there are emotional benefits attached to price, and these emotional benefits will differ depending upon the particular market and category that you are assessing.

For example, there are two primary emotional benefits we have found to be associated with saving money. One is freedom; the other is security. Doing emotional branding research to understand which one is more important to your market, to what extent this is the case and how these emotional benefits might attach to other aspects of the brand would lead to very different approaches for the creative mood and tone of brand messaging. (Clearly, we would want to talk differently to people who most desire freedom than we would to people who most desire security). Herein would lie the competitive branding advantage in what the rest of the world viewed as a virtually unbrandable, price-driven commodity!

The same argument can be made for the use of emotional branding in pharmaceuticals. Suppose all drugs in a category have virtually equal efficacy; let's say, in antihistamine response. The marketer who knows what emotional benefits underlie antihistamine response is in a competitively better position to set the mood and tone of advertising that will attract the physician's attention. (Physicians of different specialties also tend to have different personality needs, which can also be assessed via indirect techniques and leveraged in marketing.)

The last point (which also answers a common objection to emotional brand research) is this. Emotional benefits are able to wield their influence precisely because they work behind the scenes, beyond the awareness of the customer. It is the very fact that they are so elusive and hidden that makes them so very powerful and persuasive.

If you were to read the above benefit statements (e.g., "I am a sexy person because I drive an aerodynamic car") to a respondent directly and ask for levels of agreement, you would get a much lower level of agreement than is, in fact, the case, and market behavior would differ greatly from what you tried to evaluate in your study. This is because of four major obstacles to asking questions directly.

Social Desirability Bias: the fact that respondents prefer not to reveal certain emotional motives to interviewers, nor sometimes even to themselves.

Rational Purchasing Consciousness: the fact that respondents prefer to believe that they make decisions based upon purely objective and observable criteria about the product or service at hand. Emotional motivation threatens this belief system. (Indeed, this is why so many people say that advertising does not affect them, despite the industry's willingness to spend billions each year.)

Fear of "Hidden Persuaders": many respondents fear that if we really knew what made them tick, we would take advantage of them and sell them things they don't really need.

And, again, the Presence of Emotional Motivation is Beyond Conscious Awareness.

Because of all of the above, emotional motivation usually operates below the surface, beyond the ability of respondents to easily access and articulate. These obstacles hold true even more so for respondents in medical marketing research and business to business, where the professional positions are held by the decision-makers (physicians, purchasing dept. executive, etc.), who are taught to base their decision on the facts and dismiss their emotionality and personal response.

People do not want to believe that they are emotionally influenced towards brands or purchase. They find the idea repugnant and aversive. That is why many qualitative researchers encourage the use of projective techniques to overcome these obstacles.

The fact that people do not want to admit to using brands as a method of partially supporting their self-esteem forces these associations out of consciousness, and it prevents people from cognitively reasoning about emotional benefits or articulating them out loud. And it is THIS fact "that our consumers erect a strong barrier, preventing them from becoming aware of or admitting the influence of emotional benefits" that makes them so incredibly powerful.

Language is the food of the intellect. Without language (cognitive or symbolic representation), logical reasoning is much more difficult, if not impossible. When a thought is put into language and made conscious, a person's adult mind is able to make adult, rational decisions. In our analogy, when the consumer becomes conscious of the emotional benefit, it becomes somewhat nullified because they then say to themselves, "Oh, I'm being ridiculous. Buying this product doesn't really make me a different person."

The point is, though, that most customers don't allow themselves to raise emotional benefits to this level of consciousness, so the impact remains.

In fact, many brands make the mistake of raising the emotional benefits to a level of awareness that takes away their power. They try to FORCE the psychological insight benefit by telling the consumer directly. This doesn't work nearly as well as INDIRECTLY communicating these benefits via an emphasis on specifying the features and functions of the brand that support them, while the creative mood and tone of marketing applications convey the emotional benefit.

The mind likes to have to work to solve the mystery (aiding recall and attention), and by not forcing the consumer to recognize that they use your brand to support their self-esteem, you permit them the grace of ignorance (to maintain their rational purchasing consciousness, avoid admitting socially undesirable motives, etc.). Emotional-benefit motivation is knowledge for marketers, not consumers yet another reason to utilize projectives and psychological exercises to delve beneath the surface.

The ultimate end emotional benefit/ value is always enhanced self-esteem. That, however, does not give creatives and marketers a handle to hang their campaign on. Instead, it is the rung just before positive self-worth that provides insight and gives direction to advertising and marketing.

Contributed to BSI by: Dr. Sharon Livingston, President, The Livingston Group

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

What Is A Global Brand?

2010-02-19T00:10:00-05:00

Today, another request from the BSI Emailbag. Georgina, a student of marketing at Midlands State University in Gweru, Zimbabwe asks…

“What is a global brand? How can an organization build and sustain a global brand?”

Georgina, thanks for your question, we’re happy to answer it. Global brands are brands that are recognized throughout much of the world. Companies intending to create global brands need to do the following:

· Identify the relative attractiveness of each market for your brand

· Conduct attitude and usage studies in each country in which you are considering entering

· Identify the sequence of brand launch by country/region of the world

· Know the category and brand indices in each country in which your brand operates

· Establish a branding scorecard that can be applied country by country

· Agree to which decisions are made centrally and which ones are made locally

· Through research, understand if there are any part’s of your brand’s identity that won’t work in a given country or for a give language. Consider the name itself, the symbols, the colors, the tagline, etc.

To some small degree, with the pervasiveness of the Internet, all brands that are in cyberspace have the potential to become global brands, however being on the Internet does not guarantee top-of-mind awareness or distribution ease. A comprehensive, well-funded and well-executed global marketing plan is required for successful global brands.

Have a question related to branding? Just Ask…

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Tiger Woods: Rehabilitating A Human Brand

2010-02-18T00:10:00-05:00

It's been announced that Tiger Woods will be sitting down in Florida tomorrow with "friends, colleagues and close associates," not, as some might think to make additional apologies for his off-the-course activities, but to launch a new, 2010 version of Tiger Woods.

Think of it as this year's Human Brand re-launch, a re-introduction into the marketplace of an actual human being who represents 100% of the values, imbued meaning, and differentiation in the category in which they compete. The operative phrase being in the category in which they compete. And make no mistake about it, no matter what you've read or heard about hotel bedrooms, the category in which Tiger's human brandness resounds is still golf.

But Human Brands - Tiger Woods IS still a Human Brand no matter what you think of his record for fidelity whether coasting along or under assault, do better in the milieu that represents their values and skills best. Closure and contrition is come to against a background that resonates with the Human Brand's skill set. Kitchens for Martha Stewart, construction sites (highest floor possible, please) for Mr. Trump. Places they can be themselves or, more accurately, be the brand they are. For Woods, the setting is a golf course.

The golf course was the one place (aside from sponsorship and promotional and advertising venues that showed Tiger playing golf) that Tiger captivated the world, until the world was captivated by the stories of how he cheated on his wife. Think of it as his outdoor rehab facility, very effective for refurbishing images and mending marketing fences.

Because for most of the people out there who watch or play at golf (including the ones who slap palms every time a new lover of Woods shows up in a supermarket tabloid and those who find his extramural pursuits repugnant), there are enough people who only want him to come back, play golf, and start winning tournaments again.

In a recent study we conducted in the UK updating our Commodity-to-Human-Brand Continuum we included Tiger in the mix to see where he'd end up. For fans and foes alike, we can report that consumers still see him as a Human Brand, which provides a good deal of flexibility when it comes to sponsorships, promotional opportunities and marketing.

For anyone who’s played the game before they know that there are lots of Rules in Golf. In professional golf there are very few when it comes to rehabilitating a Human Brand: Be contrite, find closure, and work on that 375-yard drive.

Contributed to BSI by: Robert Passikoff, President, Brand Keys

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

What Are The Basics Of Branding?

2010-02-17T00:10:00-05:00

Regular readers of Branding Strategy Insider know we welcome and answer marketing questions of all types. Today, Kristen, a marketer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin writes…

"I am in the process of trying to explain to the upper management of my non profit (pastors) that branding runs much deeper then the brochure, business cards, and stationary. Branding is composed of the entire experience of the end user (people who attend our church).

Do you have any resources laying out the different components of branding? (customer service, first experience, follow up, perceived content value). The leaders are not taking my word for it, they think I am throwing out my opinion. I just need some hard evidence or facts or reports to point to."

Kristen, thanks for asking. A brand is the source of a promise to its customers. It promises relevant differentiated benefits and then it must deliver on those benefits. So, branding starts with brand identity (name, logo, tagline, colors, etc.) and marketing messages, but it is reinforced over time by the total brand experience that is actually delivered at each point of customer contact. The brand is the sum total of each customer's brand experiences as they are encoded in that customer's mind. Brands can offer a wide variety of benefits ranging from fully functional benefits to emotional, experiential and self-expressive benefits. My guess is that churches mostly deliver on the last three types of benefits. And by definition, brands are positioned against other brands, so your church is competing against other local churches within and perhaps outside of its denomination and perhaps even with nationally televised/broadcasted churches and individual spiritual practices.

On any given Sunday morning, it also might be competing against an extra hour or two of sleep, an early round of golf, a leisurely cup of coffee and reading of the newspaper or even a hike in the woods. I would recommend the book "The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature" by William James as a starting point for understanding the types of benefits that churches could deliver to their parishioners. Churches are likely to be more or less unique in delivering any or all of the following:

Hope for the future

Reassurance

Support through difficult times

Physical, mental and spiritual healing

Encouragement to be a good person

Intellectual stimulation

A space for silence

Camaraderie with people of like values

An hour or two of beauty (stained glass windows, music, etc.)

A feeling of closeness to God

Reinforcement that "I am a good person"

Guilt

Fear of hell

Fear of stepping outside of their denomination's "box"

The sense of fulfilling an obligation

The feeling of belonging

Self-improvement - challenging me to be a better person

Increased self-esteem -- I am loved by God

A broadened view of the universe

A narrower view of the universe

A sense of well-being

A sense of order in the midst of perceived chaos

Feeling separate from others

Feeling more connected to others

Personal empowerment

A feeling of spiritual union with God

An avenue for community (or world) service

A deep sense of peace

Grace

Gratitude

Joy

Expansiveness

Constriction

Inspiration

A sense of mission or purpose

It all depends on what your church wants to stand for and which benefits it deems to be most important.

Have a question related to branding? Just Ask…

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

The Fall Of The Purchase Funnel

2010-02-16T00:06:00-05:00

Once upon a time people lived in a state of positive expectations. There were relatively few products, great demand and most products enjoyed high brand differentiation. This was circa 1960, when most marketing models in use today were developed, like the purchase funnel, which measures advertising effectiveness.

The world has since changed dramatically. And, despite the rise of digital and the economic downturn, most old marketing axioms are still operative, miring marketers in an approach designed for a bygone era.

Take the relationship between supply and demand - its reversed. Today demand is scarce, supply plentiful. Second, over the past half-century we have learned so much about how people engage with brands.

We now understand that people are not two-dimensional datum to be manipulated by coupons or the latest hot-button offer. Current anthropological, linguistic and neuro-scientific evidence demonstrates that humans attach to things (product, person or idea) through a process of identification that coalesces longings at the personal, social levels.
Human behavior cannot be comprehended by the old-school logical conceptions of action. What Don DeLillo said about how he writes a book is true for life, "Things begin to happen just outside the range of the immediate action. There's very little sense of logic behind it.''

Life, No Straight Line
Now that we agree life is not a straight line, marketers need to accept tools that address reality. Case in point, the Purchase Funnel, a guest that attends most new business meetings: Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty. But people Are Not Linear.

When one considers consumers as people, one immediately appreciates that logic is a puny force in the face of emotion and belief. Identity trump interests and narrative transforms products into relevant stories crafted by one's own brand of meaning. In this cuisineart-like, improvisational, non-linear process, awareness does not precede consideration, then tumble into preference and finally into action.

Zig-Zagging to Attachment
In actuality, the attachment process carves a zigzag route in the service of emotional reasoning as people make symbolic associations with what is familiar, participatory and self-expansive in their image of the product. Only if and when the product is successfully transformed into a personally meaningful idea, does manufacturer reap the benefit of one's loyalty to self. This process can take time, or immediately convulse, but the best a marketer can hope for is a spasm of sentiment that bears no logical relationship to product attributes.

Note what two people say about Apple's iPhone. "Apple is a smile. It makes me smile. I'm a happy person. Apple and me are the same." "The iPhone, like Apple, is a circle, it's smooth and glides. It's easy and feels good. All other phones are boxes; they have corners and squares, are highly structured, have many rules, are too technical and linear. The iPhone is fun and natural and let's me do my own thing."

Purchase Funnel vs. Yellow Brick Road
The emotional logic of human longing is as merciless as the laws of gravity, but more curvaceous. The time is right for marketers to come to terms with the meanderings of authentic life, and reflect back to people their true nature: poised and unsettled, majestic and mundane, courageous and hesitant, marooned and moored, tough and tender.

Only then will marketers share in attracting people while, at the same time, having people soar.

Marketers must respect people as curvaceous souls, and supplant the purchase funnel with the idea of The Yellow Brick Road. This will both re-humanize advertising and make it, again, a cultural act. Then people may incline towards more products and once again love advertising as they did in the era of Bill Bernback and David Ogilvy.

Contributed to BSI by Dr. Bob Deutsch, Brain-Sells

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

The Chief Marketing Officer – A New Boardroom Role

2010-02-15T00:10:00-05:00

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has become one of the more commonly talked about corporate designations in recent years. Given the tremendous marketing potential offered by the new media and proliferation of distribution channels, companies have begun to realize the huge potential of marketing in guiding corporate level strategies and substantially contributing to the financial bottom line. In spite of such an understanding, it is startling to note that the average tenure of a CMO is merely 23 months compared to a CFO that typical lasts 4-5 years on average.

Further, not many companies have a senior marketing representative in their C-suite. This begs the question – do companies need a CMO or is the role of a CMO a mere hype? This article probes this question and offers companies some guide posts for better strategic directions.

Why do companies need a Chief Marketing Officer?

As the business landscape evolves, marketing also evolves into an organization wide strategic discipline. Given marketer’s knowledge of the customers, it is imperative that the CEO and the corporate board have a representative of the customer to continually educate them. Additionally, companies need a strategic CMO to benefit from:

Align marketing with the corporate business strategy: Newer technology, powerful channel partners, and empowered customers have made the competition highly intense and marketing a very involved and strategic discipline. Marketing can no longer be confined to the 4P framework. Marketers, with their in-depth knowledge about markets and customers, should act as a major resource for strategy formulation. In all issues of corporate strategy – what markets to compete in, what segments to target, what entry mode and strategy to adopt, which partners to strategically ally with – marketing offers substantial information. In order to convey these holistic perspectives, it is imperative the marketing is represented by the CMO in the corporate boardroom who can speak to the directors and the CEO in their language.

A classic example is of the iPhone from Apple. Given the tremendously successful iPod and iMac, Apple could have become complacent. But the marketing acumen of the executives recognized the need to constantly excite the customers. Further, they built their growth strategies on satisfying the unmet needs of the customers. Marketing played a crucial role in guiding Apple’s corporate strategy.

Connect the corporate boardroom with the customer: As Peter Drucker said, the only two functions of any organization are innovation and marketing. Irrespective how innovative a company is, how committed the employees are, and competent the top management is, unless the company connects with the customer, success will be elusive. The top management should constantly evaluate their strategic decision in the context of customer feedback - what do the customers’ value and how can the customers help the company in co-creating value.

CMO plays a crucial role in constantly updating the boardroom and the CEO about latest customer preference, how well the corporate resources are aligned to meet hose evolving customer needs. Companies such as Levis Strauss, Sony, Toyota, Nike and Singapore Airlines are some of the pioneering companies that manage to constantly feel the pulse of their customers. As such, the marketing takes a central role in guiding the corporate strategy by having the top management team and the CEO regularly updated about customers and markets.

Create a customer centric organization: Given the innumerable choices that customers have, ensuring long term customer loyalty and sustainable competitive advantage becomes highly challenging. The difference between the successful companies that achieve those objectives and those who fail is the corporate orientation. Customer oriented companies design and operate every aspect of the company with the customer in mind. To build a customer centric organization requires a highly concerted effort of all functions within a company along with every employee becoming a customer champion.

These issues deal with organizational culture, organizational structure and corporate policies. The CMO can influence the boardroom and the CEO to implement measures that would allow to build a customer centric organization. Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts is a classic example that showcases such a customer centric philosophy. The founder has managed to instill a culture that allows constant interaction between marketing and other functions with the company. Such an emphasis has resulted in world class resorts that always manage to delight the customers.

From this discussion, it is evident that CMOs are strategic requirements of any corporate boardroom. But in spite of such a significant role played by the CMO, companies have not completely embraced the concept of a CMO. The next section discusses some of the main challenged faced by CMOs which make them vulnerable to boardroom dislike.

Challenges faced by the CMO

The challenges faced by the CMO are the problems increasingly faced by marketing as a discipline off late. It has been long argued that one of the fundamental challenges of marketing that has undermined the credibility of marketing, threatened the standing of marketing within a company, and even threatened the existence of the very discipline as a distinct entity is marketing’s failure to quantify its outcomes and justify investments into marketing activities.

The three main impediments in this regard are: (1) Relating marketing activities to long-term effects; (2) Separation of individual marketing activities from other actions and (3) Use of purely financial methods for justifying and benchmarking marketing investments. As such, CMOs are not given the opportunity to participate in the strategic decision making of the company. Two such daunting challenges are:

Measuring marketing outcomes: Marketing fundamentally differs from other functions with a company like finance or operations in a couple of aspects. As marketing deals with people, their attitudes and eventual behaviors, they are not as predictable as a machine process. As such, there can be considerable time lag between marketing actions and the intended outcomes. Further, measuring these outcomes will have to involve both financial and non-financial metrics. Given these underlying challenges, it is often challenging for the CMO to convince the top management of marketing’s ability to competently allocate resources and significantly contribute to the company’s growth.

Explaining marketing’s centrality in a company: Many companies continue to equate marketing with advertising and sales. But marketing has long evolved from being a tactical departmental function to an organization wide strategic discipline. Given marketers’ knowledge about customers and other stakeholders, marketing plays a central role in leveraging the internal capabilities. But to assert such a central role within any company, marketers should be able to understand the different aspects of the company, its strategies, its resources and its limitations. Marketers usually are involved in their own jobs and fail to leverage their centrality in a company. CMOs face immense uphill task in educating and convincing the C-suite of their capabilities and their rightful status.

The CMO and the corporate boardroom

Given the rather strong antipathy towards marketing within any company and especially within the top management team, CMOs should keep up with time and optimally utilize every resource at their disposal to address some of the fundamental complaints against marketing.

Leveraging the new media: Even as the Internet and other new media channels continue to challenge many of the fundamental ways of doing business, it also offers some tremendous advantages hitherto not within the reach of companies. As a majority of the companies compete to create a presence online, they also should establish structures in their websites that would help measure many a marketing variable. Softwares allow companies to track their customers’ footprints, the stickiness – the amount of time a customer stays on a site, the click through rate of online advertisements, effective optimization of layout design and feel to measure changes in attitudes and behaviors and so on.

These tools can be effectively leveraged by the CMOs to begin the process of quantifying marketing outcomes. These early experiments also allow companies to gradually design their own set of useful metrics. Such an essential first step not only brings credibility to marketing, but also allows marketers to make a strong impression with the top management teams and the CEO.

Internal training: In order for marketing to rise up to the boardroom level, marketers should be thoroughly able to understand the strategic imperatives of the company across functions and be able to speak the boardroom language. Such a state can be attained through formalized internal cross disciplinary training. Such a training system would allow marketers to understand the dynamics of corporate strategy and also enable marketers to effectively leverage the collective internal resources towards ensuring profitability and optimal results.

On the horizon

This blog post has raised some very fundamental questions about the way the companies should be run in the future. The role of marketing within a company is only going to become even more central as managing customer interactions and co-creating value become the building blocks of any corporate strategy.

In the future, the CMO will emerge as the strategic connection between the corporate boardroom, the top management team, the CEO and the customer. Companies should offer the CMO the requisite status and power within the company. Furthermore, companies must create an organizational structure where CMOs can guide the company’s vision and mission by integrating the myriad functions within the company. The time is not too far when the success of the company depends on the strength of its marketing and the CMO.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Maximizing Research Budgets in a Recession

2010-02-13T00:10:00-05:00

Clearly, this deep global recession has taken it toll on marketing departments and market research and competitive intelligence budgets. Senior executives, strategic planning and marketing departments face the following challenge of how to continue the following initiatives with a reduced research budget:

Global expansion plans

Customer satisfaction tracking

Competitor intelligence monitoring

Market opportunity/market sizing projects

Customer and brand loyalty projects

New product development tests

Ad tests

The Challenge and Opportunity of a Reduced Research Budget

A reduced research budget forces executives to re-think their long term and tactical strategy. It also forces them to prioritize initiatives in this downturn. To this end, global expansion plans may be curbed. On the other hand, this presents a risk as their competitors may still move forward into global and emerging markets, thus putting them at a strategic disadvantage when the market turns up. The key is to prioritize and to “get the most from your reduced research budget” so your firm will not fall behind in the next few years. This paper will discuss general strategies on how to efficiently utilize a reduced research budget and to provide this intelligence to senior management during this market downturn.

Competitive Intelligence Monitoring

It is important to consider not cutting the competitive intelligence monitoring budget. Companies should still be monitoring your competitors’ movements in the global market place. To this end, the following are examples of cost effective competitive intelligence monitoring techniques that companies can utilize from either internal resources or research suppliers.

Ongoing CI Monitoring and Tracking Programs

This can be accomplished by monitoring the web, blogs, and the media. This information can be validated by outside research suppliers with people on the ground. Research suppliers can offer ongoing tracking programs to cost effectively yield the maximum amount of CI intelligence tracking for the budget.

Focused Competitor Profiles

Rather than commissioning multiple competitor profiles, it may be possible to prioritize budgets with the top 1 or 2 competitors that can be covered for the budget. It is important to share the intelligence that resides internally with the research supplier to save time and money to avoid their reinventing of the wheel.

Conducting Business Intelligence Prior to Commissioning Qualitative and Quantitative Field Work

Companies can first consider conducting Business Intelligence, prior to costly qualitative and quantitative research projects. Business Intelligence reports include a mixed methodology of desk research and interviews with key opinion leaders. This snap shot of market intelligence, will provide a road map for qualitative and quantitative research budgets.

Ways to Get the Most Value for the Price of Qualitative Market Research

1. Focus Groups

From the business intelligence report, companies may likely be able to target the geographical area and respondent profiles for the development of their research design for focus groups. This leads to a more “streamlined rifle” approach rather than focus on a large scale geographical coverage approach to country research.

2. In-Depth Interviews

In-Depth Interviews [IDIs] can be conducted cost-effectively with a higher degree of emphasis on the profile of the respondents over the number or quantity of respondents. Secondly, IDIs can be conducted in sequence. Rather than conducting all of the IDIs at once, they can be phased in 5-10 increments and evaluate the intelligence gained from each set, prior to continuing with the rest of the interviews.

Ways to Get the Most Value from the Price of Quantitative Research

Large scale quantitative research is most often the most expensive to commission. With a reduced budget, companies may be tempted to reduce the sample size. However, this reaction often produces results with a lower confidence level.

Some companies may consider the following:

1. Rethinking research objectives and consider prioritizing [or phasing] research objectives.
2.    Reduce the scope of the project
3.    Select high priority market segments or countries
4.    Consider online interviews [where they can be successfully completed] rather than CATI [computer assisted telephone interviews] or face to face interviews in less developed countries
5.  Utilize your sales offices and international offices to gather competitive and market intelligence. You can utilize this information and share it with research suppliers to reduce their research costs.

What to avoid in a Recession with a Reduced Research Budget

Reflecting on 25 years of experience with reduced research budgets in recessions, I have noticed that the following should not be done during a recession for the vast majority of cases:

1. Cutting out ALL qualitative and/or quantitative research

2. Reliance on secondary reports which have limited scope and to which competitors have access.

3. Cutting out all of the trade shows, conferences and place whereby you interact with customers and stakeholders. Often, these venues are great sources of competitive and market intelligence.

Contributed by: Ruth Stanat, President of SIS International and research partner of The Blake Project

Building Brand Momentum

2010-02-11T00:10:00-05:00

Owned for many years by H&R Block, CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It was founded in 1979, dominated the field in the 1980s and was still a major player through the mid-1990s. Prodigy, the second major online service provider, was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between CBS, IBM and Sears. It offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features. In 1990, CompuServe had 600,000 subscribers and Prodigy had 465,000 subscribers. But then AOL entered the scene and quickly dwarfed both companies. Begun as Control Video Corporation and focusing on games using specific computer platforms in the early to mid-1980s, the company altered its strategy over time and changed its name to AOL in late 1989. Positioned as an online service for people unfamiliar with computers, at its peak, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers worldwide. How did it do this?

AOL was infamous for saturating the market with its FREE CD-ROMs and diskettes containing computer software for accessing the America Online service in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I recall personally receiving at least 20 of these disks during that time period through multiple distribution vehicles. Each one offered 700 or 1000 free hours of service. They featured such a wide variety of designs (more than 4,000) that people began collecting the disks. This is the momentum that pushed AOL over the top. (Unfortunately, AOL began a steady decline soon after its merger with Time Warner in 2001.)

Amazon.com also experienced huge momentum that has brought the company to its current size today. It was the darling of the business press and rode a wave of increasing publicity throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1999, Time magazine named Jeff Bezos “Person of the Year” for Amazon.com’s pioneering and popularizing of online shopping. While Amazon.com’s business plan allowed for four to five years of red ink before it became profitable, its constant publicity built its brand name quickly not only among the business community but also with the general public.

When I took over as marketing vice president at Element K, a leading e-learning company, our intent was to be one of the first companies to “cross the finish line” in the very new and crowded e-learning space. In less than two years, we emerged from one of thousands of e-learning companies to one of the top four due to aggressive and unrelenting awareness building among our primary target audience, chief learning officers of Fortune 1000 companies.

These are three examples of brand momentum, something we measure in our brand equity studies. Think of brand momentum as the general perception that the brand is an exciting up-and-coming brand, a brand to be watched and a brand to be tried. It is the opposite of a legacy brand that “rests on its laurels.” A brand with momentum will receive high scores on the following measures:

I seem to hear and see more about this brand lately
I feel like this brand is changing for the better

It will also be perceived to possess the following personality attributes:

Dynamic
Up and coming
Leading edge
Progressive

And not the following personality attributes:

Boring
Traditional

We have found that brands that are perceived to be vital and possess positive momentum will have sales that exceed those predicted by purchase intent scores, while legacy brands that are perceived to be the opposite will have sales that lag those predicted by purchase intent scores.

The trick is to create the perception of strength, vision, forward momentum, popularity and thought leadership without breaking the bank or running out of capital. This can be best accomplished by laser like focus on the primary target audiences and then through aggressive and relentless communication to those people. Investing resources in substantial public relations efforts, keeping industry and financial analysts and other industry experts well informed, writing white papers, authoring popular blogs, dominating the most important industry trade shows and conferences and other such activities are critical to building and maintaining this momentum, as is delivering legendary service whenever possible to generate “buzz.”

In a way, this goes back to the evergreen advice, “Fake it until you make it” or “Act as though you are what you aspire to be.” That is, be confident and assume the leadership role in the industry even if yours is the smallest organization in the industry. Perceived momentum creates the conditions for further momentum. That is at the core of the concept of momentum. A caution: an organization will not survive in the long run if it is all hype and no substance. Ultimately, you will need to bring something unique, fresh or superior to the market, but the perception of momentum will attract more confidence in and resources to your organization while it is on its path to industry leadership in a crowded market.

I wish your brand significant perceived momentum in its industry.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Trademark and Brand Naming Q & A

2010-02-10T00:10:00-05:00

Choosing a new trademark is a thorny task for many companies. So we asked Tara Benson, Esq., a seasoned intellectual property attorney, for her thoughts on how to avoid the most common pitfalls. Benson is a senior member of the trademark practice group at Giordano, Halleran & Ciesla, P.C. During her career, she has handled trademark work for such clients as Tazo Teas and Amazon.com; and also served as in-house counsel for Library Video Company/Schlessinger Media, the leading distributor and producer of educational media.

Q: Tara, it often seems that tension between marketing and legal departments is the start of trademark troubles. Do you agree?

Absolutely. In my experience, marketing departments often gravitate towards a mark which describes the product or service. Descriptive marks ensure that the customer can easily identify the product. Unfortunately, descriptive marks will not likely win the right to be registered and probably don’t do much to distinguish your product in the marketplace.

Q: So does that mean you should avoid descriptive marks at every turn?

In short, yes, it is best to avoid them whenever possible. The strongest marks (and those that are able to achieve trademark protection) are fanciful, arbitrary or suggestive marks. A fanciful mark is a word, which has no meaning aside from its use as a trademark, such as Kodak or Exxon, while arbitrary marks are existing words with meanings that are generally unrelated to the product with which they are used, such as Apple for computers. Finally, suggestive marks are those which suggest the identity of a product, but do not merely describe the product (e.g. Coppertone for suntan lotion). It is important that a marketing department be aware of these necessary qualities while brainstorming names for new products or services.

Q: Do clients become emotionally attached to names they are considering?

Yes, often companies will create an internal development name for a product or service. Sometimes people will become so attached to this development name that they are not willing to part with it once the product or service is ready to be launched. Falling in love with an internal development name prior to completing a full trademark search and legal review is one of the most common problems which companies encounter. I always stress the importance of completing a trademark review on a mark before company employees become too attached to a name.

Q: What other pitfalls do you see?

One is the selection of a name that is simply too confusingly similar to that of a competitor. Selecting a name that is too similar to a competitor not only impairs a company’s ability to federally register that name, but also may result in a trademark infringement lawsuit against the company. Companies should always strive to select names that are easily distinguishable from those of their competitors.

Q: Our surveys show that 20% of large companies use employee naming contests as one way to generate new names. Good idea, or bad idea?

There are a few famous names that have been the result of an employee naming contest. But this is not the norm. While organizing an employee naming contest for a company’s newest product may be a fantastic morale booster, it rarely generates protectable marks. Employees may not understand the legal issues that exist such as avoiding trademark infringement, generic or merely descriptive marks and foreign equivalence issues. Foreign equivalence issues include avoiding marks which may be offensive in another language or those marks which may otherwise be culturally insensitive. Instead of hosting a naming contest, companies should consider hiring a naming company, using naming software or relying on the input of its internal marketing professionals.

Q: What about the use of consultants to generate new names?

Third party naming companies can be a tremendously useful tool if utilized properly. If a company opts to engage a third party naming company for its new product, I recommend that the naming company work closely with an employee who has a strong working knowledge of the product, as well as with the company’s legal team. This will help ensure that the proposed mark not only enhances the marketing strategy, but also is legally protectable.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Brand Protection in a Global Market

2010-02-09T00:10:00-05:00

Not long ago, brand owners could take comfort in the intrinsic barriers hampering black marketers. While most large cities have places known by its dwellers to be sources of cheap goods of dubious origin, consumers have to consciously decide to explore these markets in addition to or in lieu of conventional establishments. Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown is a well-known example. The street is lined with densely packed shops offering watches, purses, and other luxury items at prices that are corruptively low. Until relatively recently, these markets did not pose a significant threat to brand owners. The remote locations of these markets created a sufficient bulwark to market entry. As a result, brand owners knowingly conceded that a small percentage of its would-be buyers bought cheap knock-offs instead.

Many brand owners justified their tolerance of these bazaars on the belief that someone shopping for a twenty-dollar Rolex watch is not even a would-be customer. This customer is simply looking for a cheap gimmick or perhaps his or her economic reality precludes any possibility of buying a genuine product for several thousand dollars more. Brand owners were also untroubled because the knock-offs were so obviously inferior to the genuine goods they sought to mimic. While a Gucci purse may have looked just like a Gucci purse from across a dimly lit cocktail lounge, a casual glance in an unobstructed environment could quickly distinguish the two. Because such a terse inspection could expose these products as feeble imitations, brand owners concluded that no real threat existed.

Times have changed. Customers looking for bargains found in the black or gray market now have the ability to virtually browse anywhere there is an Internet connection. Equally vexing for brand owners is the modern difficulty of spotting illegitimate products. Indeed, the obstacles that were once sufficient to relieve concern for brand owners have been removed. The gray and black market economies have enjoyed incredible growth extending their reaches from Canal Street to our laptops.

A Little Perspective

In 2005, Arnold Schwarzenegger joined his friend and fellow action star Jackie Chan in Hong Kong to promote a campaign against film piracy in China. The 30-second anti-piracy public service announcement featured both actors in leather jackets zooming down a road on motorcycles, dodging exploding cars and other hazards. “When you buy pirated movies and music, you support criminals!” Mr. Chan says. Mr. Schwarzenegger adds, “Let’s terminate it!” Today, many countries are haplessly devoid of the necessary resources and infrastructure to adequately protect intellectual property. Countless articles and books can be found lamenting the lack of international enforcement to protect American innovation. It is worth remembering, however, that America is an ex-pirate itself:

One of the undeniable reasons Charles Dickens had gone to America in 1841, was to work for the acceptance of International Copyright so that his books, among those others to be sure, would no longer be pirated by unscrupulous American publishers. It was a mission in which he entirely, humiliatingly failed, and a copyright agreement between England and the United States was not concluded until 1891.

Assaults on innovation are nothing new. What is novel is how easy mounting these assaults has become. Today, laser printers, scanners, and computer graphics software allow fraudsters with limited budgets and sophistication to mass produce fake labels, trademarks, and other documentation. Other technologies similarly allow for low cost replication of CDs and DVDs. These latter technologies hurt many industries beyond music and film. Software and hardware products (that require software) are similarly duplicated further depriving revenues to the legitimate brand owner.

Technological progress has also made transporting pirated products faster and easier. Advancements in cargo containers, better roll-on and roll-off tools, superior port management, and even modern refrigeration techniques have all played a role in improving worldwide shipping. In addition, companies like UPS, FedEx, and PayPal provide business owners with a litany of tools to make efficient the machine of national and international commerce. From tracking products and confirming delivery to ensuring payment and tracking invoices, the world’s smallest business can now seamlessly participate in the global economy. These tools remove what were once barriers to market entry and create a much more level playing field. Because technological innovation is unbiased, the modern tools of transportation and logistics assist marketers just as they assist brand owners.

In this era of fast and easy duplication, the realities of globalization are forcing companies to have a paradoxical business strategy. While intellectual property is enduring a season of heightened vulnerability, American businesses are essentially forced to share their secrets with outsourced foreign partners to remain viable. Less than honorable partners may over-manufacture genuine goods, manufacture their own copycat goods, or share secret processes to other individuals or companies. The accounts of American businesses getting burned by foreign deceit are endless. And yet, remaining domestic for all operations is rarely a viable option. Brand owners must therefore be willing to go oversees but prudent enough go oversees prepared.

The speed and simplicity in which people communicate, buy, sell, and ship products across oceans and borders have paved the way for a worldwide outburst of infringement. While many brand owners were savvy to take advantage of the benefits modern globalization offered, the attendant harm to brand integrity caught most companies completely flat footed.

Moving Forward

Because the bells of globalization and modern technology cannot be un-rung, brand owners must learn to capitalize and cope with the rewards and risks in this new economy. To generalize, American businesses have done a fine job capitalizing on the rewards. Where American companies have fallen short has been with respect to stepping-up efforts to protect their brands and intellectual property. The benefits of global expansion reach far beyond legitimate trade. Illegitimate trade has been equally eager to take advantage of the efficiencies and economies of scale that globalization offers. As a result, threats to brand owners in the form of black or gray market activity have skyrocketed in size and scope since the 1990s. Revenues derived from counterfeiting and piracy have increased by more than 400 percent since the early 1990s. During the same time period, legitimate trade only increased by 50 percent.

There are few, if any, industries immune from attack. From the luxurious to the mundane and the simple to the complex, there is now a global network of illegitimate traders willing to copy or divert genuine products for their own profits’ sake. Given the ease in which these illegitimate products can be bought and sold, it is important that brand owners take preventative action.

Contributed to BSI by: David Sugden, the managing shareholder of Call & Jensen, specializing in intellectual property litigation. He is the author of Gray Markets: Prevention, Detection, and Litigation (Oxford University Press 2009), which highlights the strategies and theories to protect brand owners from the black and gray marketing of their products.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Brand Messaging: Visual Over Verbal

2010-02-08T00:10:00-05:00

In a song, what's more important, the words or the music?

I think most people would agree that the music is more important.

Take "Moon River," first sung by Audrey Hepburn in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The song itself won an Academy Award for composers Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, one of four won by Mercer.

Later, Andy Williams adopted "Moon River" as his theme song. Here is the first verse.

Moon river, wider than a mile

I'm crossin' you in style some day

Old dream maker, you heartbreaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Johnny Mercer, in my opinion, was the best lyricist of the 20th century, but I'm sure those words on a piece of paper, even repeated millions of times, would not have made "Moon River" famous.

It was the music that made the words "Moon River" famous. Advertising needs visuals in the same way that lyrics need music, if you want to drive your words into the minds of your prospects. Without a visual hammer, an advertising campaign is almost certain to fail.

Years ago, we were making a new-business presentation, and I could see it wasn't going over very well. Wherever we were going, the prospect wasn't going our way.

Finally he said, "Your advertising is all visually oriented, and today the trend is towards verbally oriented advertising."

He was right. The number of advertisers today that are totally focused on a verbal approach is staggering.

Even a visual medium like TV is often used primarily in a verbal way. Take a recent Ford F-150 commercial. Here is what was used for both the voice-over and, unbelievably, the text on screen:

"ALL RIGHT, SO YOU'RE DRIVING DOWN THE FREEWAY DOING ABOUT 60 WHEN YOU NOTICE THE GUY NEXT TO YOU IS STEERING WITH HIS KNEES, EATING A CHEESEBURGER AND TALKING ON THE PHONE, AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHY THE ALL-NEW '09 F-150 IS THE SAFEST TRUCK IN AMERICA. IT'S GOT HIGH-STRENGTH STEEL SAFETY CAGE, SIDE-IMPACT AIR BAGS, SAFETY CANOPY, 5-STAR CRASH RATING AND ROLL STABILITY CONTROL. BECAUSE IT'S NOT JUST CRAZY OUT THERE, IT'S CERTIFIABLY INSANE. OK IT'S NOT JUST ANY TRUCK, IT'S THE 2009 MOTOR TREND TRUCK OF THE YEAR."

My guess is that this verbal diarrhea turns off more truck buyers than it turns on. But who am I to complain? If the advertising is so bad, why is the Ford F-Series the largest-selling vehicle in the U.S.? Momentum. Ford's F-Series has been the best-selling vehicle of any kind in the United States for 33 consecutive years.

But just because an advertisement has a visual doesn't turn that visual into a hammer. Most visuals are what we call a "rebus," a picture that stands for a word.

Take a Chevrolet Malibu ad with the headline: "By definition an Accord is a compromise." The picture is a rebus which stands for "Chevrolet Malibu." It doesn't hammer the words "an Accord is a compromise" into a reader's mind.

When developing a marketing strategy, verbally oriented left-brainers spend most of their time trying to find the best words to describe the brand's position. "Honda's Accord is the chief competitor for our Chevy Malibu," goes the thinking, "so let's nail them with the compromise idea."

But those words don't translate into a visual hammer, so they are virtually useless as an advertising concept. Look at the difference between the Malibu ad and what Verizon has been doing recently.

For years, No. 1 Verizon and No. 2 AT&T have been blasting each other with massive amounts of advertising. A typical Verizon slogan: "Switch to America's largest and most reliable 3G network."

For most consumers this slogan was just "we're-the-biggest-and-the-best" advertising puffery. Nor did the slogan lend itself to a visual hammer.

Then last October Verizon launched its "There's a map for that" campaign. Its commercials showed two U.S. maps, one marked "Verizon Wireless," the other marked "AT&T." The caption: "5X more 3G coverage."

Verizon's coverage is almost solid red on a white map. AT&T's coverage is very spotty blue areas on a white map. In other words, with Verizon you get five times as much 3G coverage. That's what I mean by a powerful visual hammer.

You know the campaign is working because of what AT&T is doing in response. Soon after the Verizon campaign was launched, AT&T struck back with "When you compare, there's no comparison" and a new website, TruthAbout3G.com. Unfortunately, the ads are all words:

"Nation's fastest 3G network."

"Talk and surf the web at the same time."

"Most popular smartphones." (Translation: We've got the iPhone. They don't.)

"Access to over 100,000 apps." (The iPhone again.)

Now who do you suppose is winning the wireless war? My bet would be on Verizon. A visual campaign will always be more persuasive than a verbal campaign.

Tested 72 hours after exposure, people remember only about 10% of information presented orally, according to one study, but 65% of information presented visually.

There's a paradox here. The objective of a marketing campaign is to own a word in the mind. "Driving" in the case of BMW. "Safety" in the case of Volvo. "Change" in the case of Barack Obama. Logical left-brainers are quick to assume that the best way to do that is jump on the word verbally and then to lay out the verbal reasons why -- much like a lawyer's brief.

Hence the AT&T campaign: "When you compare, there's no comparison."

Do words like these mean much to consumers? I think not. The assumption is that you can say anything, but a picture is proof. Hence the Verizon campaign: "There's a map for that."

Verizon's coverage maps are powerful visual hammers. Nothing is as powerful in marketing as a combination of a simple verbal nail ("the real thing") and a powerful visual hammer (the contours of the Coke bottle). You have probably noticed how Coca-Cola is making extensive use of its unique visual in packaging and marketing even though very few contour bottles of Coke are now being sold.

It's not just advertising that is so verbally oriented. What is striking to me is how verbally oriented many company presentations are. It's not uncommon for a corporate executive to stand behind a podium reading a speech on a teleprompter while the same words appear on a huge screen with absolutely no visuals.

I recently saw a 50-slide presentation by a world-renowned management consulting firm on an issue of international importance. The slides contained nothing but words -- some 2,000 words, according to my rough calculations.

Compare that with a presentation by Steve Jobs, everyone's choice as the world's most effective communicator. In June of 2008, Steve Jobs announced the introduction of the iPhone 3G. He used 11 slides to do so, but only one slide contained words. The other 10 slides were photographs.

Look at PowerPoint, the presentation program of choice for most executives. My daughter Laura and I use the program because we think we have no other choice, but the slide masters are totally useless because they are all verbally oriented and our slides are almost all visually oriented, with very few words.

Wherever you're goin', you'll go faster and farther with a visual hammer. What good are the words without the music?

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Brand Naming Origins: Academy Awards 'Oscar'

2010-02-05T00:05:12-05:00

It’s Academy Award season again, and movie buffs everywhere await the results of the annual competition.

So how did Hollywood's beloved Oscar, the 8-pound gold statuette get its name?

Most awards nicknames have obvious sources. For instance,

The Tony Awards on Broadway are nicknamed in honor of actress/director Antoinette Perry, who died in 1946. The Tony Awards began the next year.

The Grammy Awards, given by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, are a diminutive of "gramophone,” coined way back in 1887 to describe a device to record and reproduce sound. (Gramophone was a trademark based on the inversion of “phonogram.”) AsVariety tells the story, there was discussion in 1958 of calling the award the “Eddy,” to honor Thomas Edison. But the name “Grammy” prevailed, backed by Academy governors such as Elmer Bernstein and Stan Freberg.

Television’s Emmy Awards get their moniker from a pioneer TV engineer and the third president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He suggested “Immy,” a term commonly used around 1950 for the early image orthicon camera. The name stuck and was later modified to Emmy, which was considered more appropriate for a female symbol.

But the origin of Oscar, as the award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is commonly known, is shrouded in showbiz lore. Consider:

In its earliest years (1929-1933), the award – a naked knight standing on a reel of film with his hands gripping a sword – was simply called “The Statue.”

In 1934, a Hollywood columnist supposedly used the name “Oscar” in referring to the Best Actress award to Katherine Hepburn. He said he invented the nickname to deflate the “pretension” of the ceremony.

Walt Disney is also reported to have called it by that name in the same year at the Awards ceremony.

The most popular story about the name's origin involves the Academy’s librarian and future executive director. The story goes that, upon seeing the statuette sitting on a table, she exclaimed, “It looks just like my Uncle Oscar!" The staff began jokingly referring to the statue as "Oscar” and by 1939, that was the official name.

The best story of all? According to the TV program Myths and Legends, the name came from actress Bette Davis (pictured above). Upon receiving her first Academy Award, she took a glance at the little gold man’s rear end, and said something like, "It looks like Oscar's derriere!" (She was referring to her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson.) His later wife, Anne Nelson, substantiated this story, and even agreed about the likeness of the buttocks.

And the debate about the origin of "Oscar" goes on...

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Legal Influence And Marketing Decisions

2010-02-03T00:26:31-05:00

Lawyers are retained to minimize legal exposures and risks. Marketers are employed to sell more stuff. This is oversimplified but generally true. Lawyers can help marketers better understand trademark law, trade dress, copyright law, trade secrets and false or deceptive advertising.

Companies vary quite a bit in the power afforded their attorneys. Most use them to deal with corporate legal issues and agreements and contracts. At Hallmark, I was advised by my boss, a corporate officer, that legal advice was just that, advice. He recommended that I seek legal advice when appropriate but that I needed to weigh the consequences of my decisions based on my own judgment.

One area where organizations occasionally get confused about the need for legal influence on marketing decisions is that of brand architecture and naming. The sole purpose of brands, sub-brands and product names is to simplify customers’ understanding of the entities with whom they are interacting. Ideally, these entities should make promises to their customers, stand for something compelling and have appealing personalities. They do not need to mirror legal entities or organizational divisions. Mirroring one or both of these is a very common mistake. Yes, legal contracts need to use legal names, but other than that, brands and other outward facing entities need only to make sense to customers. And, the simpler the architecture is, the more advantageous it tends to be.

I had one client whose entire management team felt constrained about how they could present their organization to its customers based on legal entities whose names made little sense to their customers. I was quite sure that there was no need for these constraints and was later able to confirm this with their legal staff. I have another client whose marketing executives indicate that much of what they recommend is rejected based on legal risks.

On occasion, I have witnessed managers using lawyers and legal advice as a smoke screen to nix things that they do not want to see happen. These managers exert their control over others by invoking the judgments of the legal department, whether the legal department was involved in the issue or not.

Regarding potentially misleading or deceptive advertising, sometimes it is legally misleading or deceptive and at other times it is just a harmless boast or puffery that no one interprets literally anyway. If in doubt, your lawyers can help you determine the potential risks, if any.

Sometimes lawyers want all sorts of disclaimers to be added to marketing copy to minimize the organization’s legal risks. Some of this makes sense. Much of it doesn’t. Consider the impact of pharmaceutical company-type legal disclaimers making their way into the marketing copy of companies, brands and products in general. “You are buying this at your own risk. It contains chemicals that if breathed in excess may cause dizziness, asthma, brain damage, cancer, etc., etc.” “This purchase should not be considered to be an investment. Its value may go up or down. You are purchasing this purely for your own pleasure.” “If used improperly, this product could cause electrocution.” “This product may disrupt your yard’s ecosystem, causing the destruction of certain plants and animals.” “There is no implied advice in this offer. It is purely for entertainment purposes.” “This product may or may not perform as described based on the context in which it is used.”

Clearly, companies should not be selling dangerous products and they should make their customers aware of potential risks, however, almost anything can be the source of some risk, no matter how small or improbable. Assuming you are marketing a generally safe product, the question is to what extent you need to fill marketing documents with legal disclaimers.

Attorneys can be very helpful advisors to marketers and other business people. The trick is to understand their concerns, listen to their advice and then decide what to do with it within the larger context, which for marketers is selling more stuff – hopefully ethically and with a minimal amount of legal risk.

As marketers, I wish you productive working relationships with your attorneys. May you work together to further your organization’s mission and your brands’ promises.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

How Color And Flavor Names Affect Choice

2010-02-02T00:00:25-05:00

Is Moody Blue a better name for a flavor than Glacier Freeze? How will consumers react to a color named Razzmatazz instead of Bright Orange? And what’s wrong with good old Fire Engine Red?

Two marketing professors have been studying these shades of meaning and publishing provocative papers on color-coding and what it does to buyers’ expectations. So we went to Barbara E. Kahn (at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) and Elizabeth G. Miller (at Boston College) for some answers.

Q: Is there anything wrong with good old “Fire Engine Red” to identify a nail polish?

We find in our research that consumers tend to react positively to ambiguous names and specific, unexpected names. If Fire Engine Red is surprising to consumers, then they will react more positively to it. If it’s not, then it’s similar to just calling it “red.”

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this description, but with the multitude of choices that a consumer faces every day, marketers are increasingly looking for ways to stand out and coming out with an unusual name is one way.

Q: You have commented that it’s astonishing when Crayola comes out with names that don’t describe the color of crayons. Why so?

Well, usually the point of a color name on the side of a crayon is to describe the color hue or shade. At least that’s the way it was when we were kids! So it was a surprise to see a list of Crayola color names that were not descriptive. But in fact, when you think about it, if a child is holding the crayon in his or her hand, then s/he does know the color, and the name could indeed be whimsical.

Q: If a color or flavor name is not particularly descriptive – like “Voltage” – will the consumer react in a positive way?

Depends. What we found is that for some categories like candy or sweaters where the exact color or flavor need not be precise, having an ambiguous name makes the consumer stop and think – and that extra attention, that extra elaboration about the product, on the margin gives a boost to the product – which we have found to be positive. Although we did not find it in our research, one could imagine situations where there is some risk in not knowing the exact color or flavor, and then having an ambiguous name would not be positive.

Q: Then why would someone prefer an ambiguous name over a name with built-in meaning?

In our research, we found that when a consumer encountered an ambiguous name, s/he stopped and thought about it a little. And given that the information came from a marketer who is likely only to give positive information about the product, the consumer is apt to assume the information embedded in the name implies something positive about the brand. On the margin, this assumption about positive attributes adds value to the product.

Q: You have written about the consumer becoming “engaged” in solving the “puzzle” of a name. Is this speculation on your part, or is it based on the way our minds actually operate?

People like the world to make sense. So when they encounter surprising information, they try to make sense of it.

We found some evidence in our research of this process. When the name was not ambiguous but was just unusual, but in fact descriptive, then the consumer got some pleasure out of solving the “puzzle.” For example, when we presented sweaters that were the color of “coke red” – consumers enjoyed thinking about the unusual color description that in fact did identify the color.

Q: What about product categories that don’t rely on the sense of taste or smell? What happens then with wild and offbeat names?

Our research didn’t cover those areas.

Q: There was once a popcorn candy named “Screaming Yellow Zonkers” that got attention because of its wacky name. But sales stalled. Do colors or flavors such as “Deep Throat” or “Orgasm” have any real point of difference other than their edgy names?

Ambiguous names do prompt additional thought which can lead to increased preference, but such effects are unlikely to compensate for a bad product. In addition, when a consumer gets used to the name it is unlikely to continue to offer the advantages we are talking about.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project

Leading Brands And Being First In The Mind

2010-02-01T00:08:40-05:00

Marketing people spend 95 percent of their time on brand maintenance when the real opportunities lie in brand creation.

Look what the iPod has done for Apple Computer. In the first quarter of 2005, Apple sold 5.3 million iPods. This year alone, iPod sales should reach $5 billion. The iPod brand dominates its market segment, accounting for 91 percent of all MP3 players with disk drives.

How do you create a brand like the iPod? It’s simple and at the same time difficult.

You become the first brand in a new category. No other strategy is as effective as this fundamental law of brand creation. Be first.

Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable brand, was the first cola.

McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food company, was the first hamburger chain.

Nescafe, the world’s largest-selling coffee, was the first instant coffee.

Yet where in the lexicon of marketing is the idea of being first ever mentioned? I have read every issue of Advertising Age since 1952 and except in the articles written by my daughter, myself or my former partner Jack Trout, I have never read an article about the importance of being first.

Quite the contrary. The emphasis is always on creativity, research, sales promotion, media spending and especially ‘the big idea.’ Or perhaps the fad of the moment, be it the Internet, one-to-one marketing or the latest fad, branded entertainment.

I have attended numerous industry meetings and have heard numerous industry spokespeople make numerous speeches and except in the speeches given by my daughter, myself or my former partner Jack Trout, I have never heard someone say, the secret to creating a powerful brand is to be first.

It’s a message that marketing people don’t want to hear. They think that it downgrades the marketing function. They think it implies that marketing doesn’t matter. That all you need to do to be successful is to be first.

Too many marketing people hear only the first half of the message. The importance of being first. They don’t hear the second half. What we mean by being first. What we mean is being first in the mind, not in the marketplace.

Anybody can be first. It takes good marketing thinking to get into the mind first.

As a matter of fact, being first is worth nothing. Being first in the mind is worth everything. This is the essence of creating a brand.

In our investigation of brands, very few leading brands were literally ever first. Usually there were a few mis-starts before someone figured out how to get into the consumer’s mind.

Duryea built the first automobile in America, but the brand never got into the mind. Ford was the first brand in the mind (and is still the leading automobile brand in America today.)

Du Mont built the first television set in America, but the brand never got into the mind.

Hurley built the first washing machine in America, but the brand never got into the mind.

When you look around the world, you find many brands like Duryea, Du Mont and Hurley. First in their categories, but not first in the mind. What could have been big winners turn out to be modest successes at best.

Take Krating Daeng, a popular health tonic in Thailand. The product is a lightly-carbonated, highly-caffeinated concoction containing liberal quantities of herbs, B-complex vitamins and amino acids. But it wasn’t anyone in Thailand that took the concept and built a worldwide brand. It was an Austrian named Dietrich Mateschitz who discovered the drink and saw its potential.

A temptation that’s hard to resist is to give a new category an ‘exotic’ name. Mateschitz could have bought the rights to the name ‘Krating Daeng’, for example. Or perhaps he could have called the new drink, ‘Thailand Tea’.

What Mateschitz actually did was to call his Asian compound, ‘an energy drink’. As it happens, the first energy drink. As a brand name, he picked Red Bull, an English variation of Krating Daeng.

Simple names work best when defining a new category. Not only is ‘energy drink’ a simple name, it also benefits from an analogy with PowerBar, the first ‘energy bar’.

Marketing can be visualized as ‘filling an empty hole in the mind’. If there’s a category called ‘energy bar’, the consumer thinks, there must be a category called energy drink (Red Bull.) Or sports drink (Gatorade) or fitness drink (Propel.)

Energy drink works as a category name even though there is little relationship between the ingredients in a can of Red Bull and the ingredients in energy bars like PowerBar, Balance bar, Clif bar and Atkins bar.

Marketing people are sometimes too literal when they try to dream up a name for a new category. What matters most is not describing the benefits of the new category, but expressing the essence of the new category in as simple a way as possible.

After all, Red Bull became a powerful brand because it is perceived as a drink that improves performance especially during times of increased stress or strain, which some people take to mean sexual performance. (‘Energy’ is just a way of expressing that idea in a socially-acceptable way.)

Red Bull has become a runaway success. Worldwide sales are now more than $2.1 billion a year.

The real question is, why didn’t somebody in Thailand do what Dietrich Mateschitz did? Or somebody at Coca-Cola in Atlanta? Or somebody at PepsiCo in Purchase, New York?

The truth is, the folks at the established soft-drink companies were too busy trying to squeeze the last ounce of value out of their existing brands. That’s why there are now 14 different varieties of Coca-Cola. (Marketing people spend 95 percent of their time on brand maintenance when the real opportunities lie in brand creation.)

Then there’s the iPod, the brand that turned around Apple Computer.

But Apple wasn’t the first MP3 player with a disk drive. The iPod was first sold in retail stores in America on November 11, 2001. More than a year earlier (in July 2000), Creative Technology Ltd., a Singapore company, was selling the Creative Nomad Jukebox, an MP3 player with a disk drive, in the U.S. market. Furthermore, the Jukebox had a 6-gigabyte hard drive versus only 5 gigabytes for the initial iPod.

The Creative Nomad Jukebox got into the market first, but not into the mind first.

It didn’t have a chance to get into the mind because the company made a number of marketing mistakes. Let’s look at some of them.

1. Line extension. Creative Technology was already selling two other MP3 players. The Creative Nomad II and the Creative Nomad II MG (magnesium case.)

Both of these products had a 64-megabyte flash memory which meant they could hold only about 20 songs instead of the thousands that a disk drive could hold.

In other words, the disk-drive MP3 player is a totally separate category. Using the Creative name on both categories causes confusion that undermines the brand-building process.

2. A generic name. Even worse, ‘Creative’ is a descriptive, generic name. You can’t build a brand with a generic name. You need a brand name.

What’s a brand name? It’s a manufactured name like iPod, or a generic name used out of context. (Apple doesn’t sell apples.) And there are a host of other criteria to determine whether or not a given name would make a good brand name or not.

3. A long, complicated name. Compare ‘Creative Nomad Jukebox’ (7 syllables) versus ‘iPod’ (2 syllables.)

If you want to build a worldwide brand in today’s overcommunicated marketplace, you need a short, simple brand name. (Red Bull is also two syllables.)

Keep in mind that for a brand name to become truly successful, it needs to become the nickname for the category. Nobody calls the category ‘hard-disk-drive MP3 players’. They call them ‘iPods’, even the iPods are made by other manufacturers. That’s another reason a name like Creative Nomad Jukebox would never work.

4. A lack of focus. In addition to making MP3 players, Creative Technology also makes a host of other products. The Creative Zen Portable Media Center (another terrible brand name), digital cameras, graphic accelerator cards, modems, CD and DVD drives, PC speakers, audio chips and electronic musical instruments.

Did Creative Technology see the potential of the disk-drive MP3 player? Probably not, or they would have dropped everything to focus on this product.

Look at Nokia, the world’s fifth most valuable brand. Nokia wasn’t the first company to introduce a cellphone. The first company to introduce a cellphone was Motorola.

Nor was Dell the first company to introduce a 16-bit business personal computer. The first company to introduce such a product was IBM.

Yet Motorola lost out to Nokia in cellphones for the same reason that IBM lost out to Dell in personal computers. Nokia meant cellphone and Motorola meant a wide range of products from communications equipment to global satellite systems.

Oddly enough, Nokia used to make a wide range of products: paper, rubber products including tires & boots, electronics, machinery and personal computers. But Nokia dropped everything in order to focus on cellphones.

Creative Technology should have done the same.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop