Ready to learn
18th February 2006 by Shel Holtz, ABC
I’ve been in the communication business for nearly 30 years, but I’ve never done any external marketing branding work — my career has focused on the corporate side of things. (Branding a benefits program for employees is hardly the same as branding a company or a product for customers!) That’s why I’m particularly interested in reading the collective wisdom of the experienced branding thought leaders who have agreed to become the Commons authors for this blog. In the meantime, I do read a few other branding blogs, and I’ve added some of my favorites to the blogroll; I’m sure the Commons branding bloggers will have their own favorites to add.
I hope readers will join in the conversation by adding their own comments to what you read here. In the meantime, it might help to kick things off to define just what we mean by “branding.” I’ve often heard it defined as the perception audiences have of an organization, product, or service — the way they react when they see a logo, for instance. In other words, the audience controls the brand, not the organization. How would you define branding?
February 21st, 2006 at 2:39 pm
I like Shel’s customer-centric definition of brand, which is very like mine: The sum of a customer’s experience with a company, product or service–how a customer perceives the company as a result of all his or her points of contact. The trouble is, many of those perceptions are beyond most marketers’ control. For example, a customer may hear an employee gossiping about the company at a cocktail party or see the company truck on the highway with “wash me” written in grime. These experiences are tough to prevent and tougher to measure. But we can do research to determine what customer perceptions are, and make sure those perceptions are in sync with how we want customers to perceive our brand.
February 21st, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Well, lately the catchphrase has been “a brand is a promise” — often invoked in reverential tones. But there’s some truth to that, at least when you’re talking about successful brands: for example, it’s noteworthy when Nordstrom staff are unhelpful; when an Apple product fails; when a Mariah Carey CD is listenable (sorry, couldn’t resist). That’s because these (and other) brands have established characteristics and personalities that create expectations for us.
Branding to me then is creating this expectation — this service is the cheapest, that product is the most durable, and so on. Our perceptions and experiences are the feedback that then change that brand’s experience for us. For instance, maybe the cheap service really is not so cheap once you get hit with a bunch of hidden costs, or maybe you learn that the “durable” product your neighbor had broke after just a month of use. At that point, the promise made by the brand changes.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:55 pm
By golly, I think IABC/Hyperspace has just been reinvented. And that’s great news. If this keeps on as it has started, the experts have a place to “give back” and the less-expert readers who visit regularly will be rewarded with a priceless education, just as I was more than 15 years ago.
February 24th, 2006 at 10:11 am
When it comes to branding I particularly like the quote made some years ago by Kristine Kirby Webster of The Canterbury Group who said:
“Branding allows a company to differentiate themselves from the competition and, in the process, to bond with their customers to create loyalty. So a position is created in the marketplace that is much more difficult for the competition to poach. A satisfied customer may leave. But a loyal one is much less likely to.”
February 27th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Somehow it is comforting to know that everything old is new again, Tim. Guess there’s hope for me yet!
February 28th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
This isn’t really a definition of “brand,” but it is something I’ve always kept in mind when doing work that involves branding. I think I read it in one of Al Ries’s books, but it is the idea that the brand exists in the mind of the consumer.
Why is this important? Because too often, marketers try to “create” a brand from scratch rather than to consider the attributes consumers assign to a product or service. Think about the things that come to the consumer’s mind about your business, product, service, etc. For better or for worse, that is its brand. Obviously, there are a lot of things we can do to influence how people perceive our products/services, but the brand already exists.
March 1st, 2006 at 7:57 am
My definition of brand as “perception based on experience with the company’s product or service” is similar to Mary’s and Shel’s, however, I believe that a focus on the customer - while important - doesn’t go far enough. I think it’s also what paralyzes many corporate communicators: they haven’t been taught to think about communicating with customers.
Customers’ experiences are much broader than with the company’s marketing or sales function. They learn from the company’s other customers, from the company’s vendors, from the company’s employees who aren’t in sales or marketing, from the company’s retailers, from the company’s competitors, from the media, etc. Knowing all these touch points allows communicators to affect these perceptions, but only if we think strategically and boldly.
Employee communication is a critical tool to get that done. If an organization empowers employees to take ownership of the brand and live it every day by sharing the brand vision, providing brand management guidelines and tools, and getting out of the way, they cn have a profound impact on perception - on the brand.
This is the tool communicators can use to get at the management table…but that’s another topic entirely:)
March 1st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
My apoligies, Merry, for calling you “Mary” in my post.:)
March 1st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
My apologies, Merry, for calling you “Mary” in my post.:)
May 9th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Ok - here’s my first blog…
The only thing definitive about brand definition is that there is no one definitive brand definition. The following is a small sample of some published definitions:
. set of assets (Aaker 1996);
. distinguishing name and/or symbol intended to identify and differentiate (Aaker 1991, Keller 1998, Kotler 1994, Lovelock 1999);
. identity (Ushaw 1995);
. tangible product plus intangible values (Brandt & Johnson 1997, Gilmore 1997);
. identifiable product, service, person or place . . . added value (DeChdernatony and McDonald 1997);
. complete corporate ethos and experience summed up in reputation, consciously projected to audiences (Gregory and Wiechmann 1997);
. a singular idea or concept owned inside the mind of the prospect (Ries 1998);
. distillation of the entire organization reflected through identity and organizational contact (Institute of Canadian Advertising 1997-98);
. what people buy (they don’t buy products) (Kapferer 1992);
. pact (based on trust) (Haigh 1998, Stobert 1994);
. customer experience (Davis 1998);
. the mark of a group you belong to (Holland 1998);
. promise (Gilmore 1997, Peters 1997, Houghton 1998);
. differentiation strategy (Gilmore 1997); and,
. added value over competition (Weilbacher 1995).
Regardless of label, most authors agree that the brand is the only thing that provides enduring company value. Without brands, entire companies can be replaced as they are merely the sum of tangible assets. (Think about it - no value is placed on having a ’sales pipeline’.)
I see that these definitions can be clustered into three distinctive categories, operational, customer and functional. Operational perspectives such as ‘a promise’ assume that a company can manage everything in their universe. That definition assumes that the competition and other external forces play no role in brand evolution. Customer perspectives such as ‘a memory or experience’ assume that it is impossible to reprogram or manage what already exists. Functional perspectives that connect solely to the logo or some other icon consider neither company nor customer as the foundation. None of these definitions fully encompass the broad range of brand experience - what a company does and says and how a customer responds to the company and other external stimuli.
So stripping away the text books, my definition is: A brand is an emotional asset comprised of all past and present signals created by and about a company and the market. Signals come from within the company - corporate philosophy, the product, the marketing mix, logistics and finance - and from within the operating environment - trends, consumers, competitive factors, etc. Brands help consumers make sense of their world.
January 6th, 2007 at 7:25 am
I’ve been a techie, a journalist, a corporate communicator and a marketer for some 21 years now and its always refreshing to revisit ‘What is branding?’.
How do you build a brand? At an operational level, I believe you do this by building and communicating the corporate story centered on three questions:
- What are we selling and how is it relevant to our customers?
- Why should they buy from us and not from someone else?
- How can they trust us to deliver what we promise?
This approach works for both product and corporate branding. In the latter case, the company is the product.
Every company has a story (or it shouldn’t be in business!). It is the job of marketing/ communications to make that story exciting and relevant to customers, employees, the media, and investors. The trick, of course, is to understand the very different needs of these varied audiences and design your communication to match those nuances. Now that can be a lifetime’s work!