Students Of Success

In order to help you develop an image, or to enhance your “added value” in a product or service, look for a unique attribute on which to capitalize. The theory says, “You can’t get this special from anyone but me, and not having it will cost you!” Obviously you don’t want to use those exact words, they convey the concept.

There was a survey done by a Spanish newspaper for restaurants. They wanted to determine what was the major factor that caused patrons to frequent any particular restaurant. Two thirds of the respondees said that “they liked to eat where they could find something, a dish or sauce, that they could not create at home.” Unique sells!

Examples:

Be the only hamburger stand in town that has discount coupons for desserts at the grocery store - the grocer will pay for them; it’s “free” advertising.

Be the only sporting goods store that gives away “free” sunglasses with a $20 purchase.

Be the only contractor in town that does triple-pane windows.

Be the only restaurant in town that feeds the high-school football team.

Be the only grocery store in town that sells buffalo steaks (or some other exotic meat).

Be the only bookstore in town with a great selection of books-on-tape.

Be the only realtor in town that knows how to decorate, plant, wallpaper, or do something else in a house.

Be the only car lot in town that gives away defensive driving training with a purchase.

Be the only carpet cleaner that knows all about air filters.

Be the only store that keeps the Dow-Jones index and latest sports scores running on a marquee.

Be the only plumber in town that installs toilet bowl fresheners with every service call. Be the only _____in town that is “authorized” to service a ___________.

“Me too” isn’t enough. Grab a unique product, habit or added value. Get identified with it, and people who do business with you will be more likely to recommend you (by bragging about how smart they are) to others.

Daniel Wadleigh is a nationally published marketing consultant and has programs for start-up and existing businesses including effective web sites, e-mail/database, other non-internet ways to drive them to your website, and low cost ways to get more new customers.

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Developing brand value is critical to every organization and when professionally executed, delivers a clear and measurable competitive advantage to your firm. It does so by helping you establish a positive connection and value-relationship with your customer, which, over time, will build brand equity and increase brand value.

Once this value-relationship is established, both internally and externally, it can be measured, monitored and enhanced periodically, as needed, to strengthen your brand’s effectiveness and increase your bottom line. Whether you’re building a new brand or energizing an existing one,
developing brand value maximizes the value-relationship between corporate profitability and the perception of your brand.

The Assessment

The first step in the fine art of branding

Customers factor brands into every purchase. The stronger the brand, meaning the clearer the position it occupies in their minds, the more value it has and the more likely they are to choose it — again and again. The goal is to get them to choose your brand over your competitions. And that’s where a strong brand value can help.

I recommend an in-depth assessment, a strategic survey used to determine the state of your company’s brand. It helps you discover key elements important to satisfying your customer base utilizing brand research findings. The assessment provides a foundation upon which to develop the best model for customizing your brand communications master plan.

The Assessment allows you to accurately measure the present effectiveness and value of your brand. It establishes brand value as a benchmark for future enhancement. How? By zeroing in on which qualities and attributes of your products, services and company make you different from your competition. And, how well they are perceived in the market. It helps you modify and align products, positioning messages and communications with laser point accuracy on your customers’ specific needs and wants.

The Assessment is really a personality profile of your brand. It describes your good points, but more importantly, highlights where you are weak. It does so by using a system of inter-related measurements to gauge brand perceptions and effectiveness.

Using a grading scale of 1-10, the assessment can test vital aspects of your brand as it relates to:

• Products or services

• Target markets

• Messaging

• Communications.

An assessment conducts interviews with management, marketing, sales and other key employees. It will uncover segments of company operations that can do more to nourish the brand, helping you pinpoint areas ripe for improvement. The external research of an assessment includes surveys with clients, prospects, vendors and key industry personnel. It will conduct a “competitive analysis” which tells you how targeted audiences see you, your products or services and how you stack up against the competition.

After your assessment is complete tabulate the results and ask for a customized Brand Analysis Report. These are usually very informative. Often revealing. Only after analyzing all the essential components of the branding assessment can information be provided. This detailed document shows exactly where you can improve.

The Brand Plan

How your brand can become a work of art

Your brand is your company’s power base, its number one asset. Developing a Brand Plan is designed to ensure that your company delivers on its brand promise. It provides companies with a guidebook for continually building, measuring and enhancing brand value and helps you achieve clarity of branding focus and direction.

First, I recommend an Assessment to find your brand’s present position and value. Then I recommend developing The Brand Plan, an in-depth master Brand Plan that defines the strategies, which can strengthen and improve your brand’s performance and market position by establishing a connection and value-relationship with your customer.

Unlike The Assessment, the picture that is painted is not a snapshot of what you are today. The Brand Plan helps you redefine brand personality in the marketplace. It’s how your company will be tomorrow, how it will be seen and perceived by customers, potential customers, your managers, employees and vendors. When managed properly, The Brand Plan increases financial security, growth and earnings potential. It will establish a clearly defined brand vision for employees and management. Both their motivation and commitment to the delivery of the brand promise will greatly increase.

The Brand Plan is a strategic master Brand Plan that will contain specific internal and external strategies and tactics, all with the goal of turning your brand into a work of art. It’s a brandmaster action Brand Plan that encompasses:

• Brand objectives

• Brand positioning, the promise of the brand

• Brand strategy & tactics

The Brand Plan aligns products, services, and communications for uniform delivery of the brand
promise throughout your enterprise. Everything is spelled out, integrated, and ready for execution. This vital tool empowers every person in your company to show the true colors of your brand. It gives form and unity to communications that differentiate your brand in the marketplace. It provides a rallying point for employees and provides a cornerstone document of all corporate resources to support brand core competencies.

As people understand the defined objectives, more ideas blossom, making the brand grow even stronger. After all, the true test of any Brand Plan is for it to appreciate over time. The Brand Plan is not a static document to be hung in some dusty museum. It’s a living, breathing, dynamic statement of change based on proven scientific testing, data analysis and measurable results.

Capture more mindshare with a Brand Value Plan… your palette for branding success.

Scott White is President of Brand Identity Guru a leading Corporate Branding and Branding Research firm in Boston, MA.

Brand Identity Guru specializes in creating corporate and product brands that increase sales, market share, customer loyalty, and brand valuation.

This Article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and this resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

Over the course of his 15-year branding career, Scott White has worked in a wide variety of industries: high-tech, manufacturing, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, banking, restaurants, fashion, healthcare, Internet, retail, and service businesses, as well as numerous non-profit organizations.

Brand Identity Guru clients include: Sun Life Financial, Coca Cola, HP, Sun, Nordstrom, American Federal Mortgage, Franklin Sports and many others, including numerous emerging growth companies.

A graphic designer spoke to me last week. His graphic design firm — let’s call it XYZ Design — was numero uno in designing labels for a large wine company. Let’s call that ABC Wines. Now ABC wines had some really super wines. They loved the incomparable graphic design of XYZ design, and continued to use them for several of their major brands. This one client alone generated tons of work and income for XYZ design right through the year.

Then It Happened…

ABC Wines sold out to another wine company. This new wine company had its own in-house graphic designers. That effectively meant XYZ Design’s income and work flow were severely hit, causing them to scramble for new clients to fill the gap.

“If only I had done what you said,” said the owner of XYZ Design, ” and not line extended into web design and other forms of graphic design and communication, I would have gone down the gurgler too”

Not true.

Line extension doesn’t mean you run just one business or have one product.

No, it doesn’t mean that at all.

Multi-tasking existed long before the advent of computers and the more skills you have, the better off you are in today’s world. However, you have to name each ‘twin’ differently to give it a very distinct identity. When you do that, your client recognises the difference and chooses that ‘twin’ for its own individual personality and character.

How Do You Line Extend Without Line Extending

In the case of XYZ Design, it would have to work in this manner. To all wine companies, they would enter the door as a ‘wine label design Specialist.’ To every wine company in the country and overseas, they would be known, not as XYZ Design but more so, as XYZ Wine Design Specialists.’

This would give the wine companies a specialist to deal with. It would help XYZ Wine Design specialists to build their reputation in the wine industry to a point where if any wine company decided to design a label, XYZ Design would be one of the main contenders.

Now, wine companies don’t do just labels. They do brochures, leaflets, annual reports, websites and tons of other stuff. Your question would be, how can I afford to lose out on that market?

Why You Never Lose Out On The Rest Of The Stuff

It’s called backdoor entry. Everyone (including your competition) is banging on the front door, trying to get in. You, on the other hand, quietly slip in through the backdoor, pick your goodies and slip out.

This is how it works in practice. If you do really good work designing wine labels, it’s almost inevitable that clients will ask you if you can design other associated material. That’s when you introduce your other company, “JKL Graphic Design” and “PQR Web Design”. Same company, different positioning and certainly different brand names. What this does, is it helps clients compartmentalize their thinking. They now think you have specialist groups working on specialist projects taking extra special attention.

This Does Two Things…

1) It helps each of your businesses take on a ‘character’ of its own without affecting the other, much like Air New Zealand is premium and Freedom Air is budget. The public knows they’re one company but still compartmentalizes them into two. You can change the character of each company, and help boil it down to the smallest possible niche, making you an expert in the category.

2) The client sees your multiple brands as different brands. When they need web design services, or when they need to recommend them, they call the web design experts. And so on with graphic design and wine labels or just about anything that you are handling.

Everyone Loves A Specialist

Would you allow a GP to work on your triple bypass? OR would you prefer a heart specialist? Even better, a doctor who does only triple bypass surgery? If you feel the difference, so does your client and to ignore this basic human instinct is to do so at your own risk.

How It Works Not Just In Business But In The Workplace Too

If you’re working in a job, the same rule applies. Be known as a genius for something. Know how several things work. But branding yourself in one skill makes you the expert. Every time the company has a fire in that section, you will be known for your fire-fighting skills.

On an ordinary basis, most employees are not known for any particular skill and wonder why they are on top of the redundancy list. Bosses don’t know what you do and why you’re special, because you haven’t been doing the ‘branding bit’. It’s better to be a specialist than the ’safe unknown.’

As Dire Straits sang in one of their songs, “Sitting on the fence is a dangerous course: You could get a bullet from the peace keeping force.”

Funny (But True) Phrases When You Forget To Obey The Rules

Jack of all trades, master of none. A bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush. And the best one of all: Keep it simple, stupid!

Keep putting these principles in action and you will see a marked improvement in your business.

Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas on marketing strategy, psychological tactics, and branding. Judge for yourself when you read these small business ideas

A client of mine once called after I had given a presentation to him about his company’s brand. He was calling to say we needed to change the shade of taupe we had all agreed upon for the firm’s logo.

I was surprised to hear this busy man talking taupe, convinced he had more important things to attend to. I found it particularly strange because just that day, he had approved the color scheme.

As the conversation progressed, he confessed that his wife didn’t like the color. She had experimented with that very shade of taupe for their living room curtains and hated it. Ignoring our strong suggestion to the contrary, the color was changed.

What does this 20 year old story have to do with anything? Most people think of branding as a pretty logo. Instead, branding embodies the entire customer experience, with the logo merely acting as the visual mark.

The brand experience should reflect the soul of the company. More important than whether or not you “really like” everything about it, your brand should represent your company’s “image attributes.”

Image attributes are adjectives and descriptive phrases that capture the essence of a company and their creative project. They describe the core values of an organization, the feeling that a brand should evoke or the essential goals of a Web site.

At the start of a project, I work with my clients to elucidate a set of brief terms to identify the basic precepts of their project. These image attributes become a list that we can all agree on, easy-to-remember reference points that help everyone on the team, both client and developer, stay on target throughout the process.

Developing them may be the most important exercise of the project, because it helps ensure that the final result—the brand identity or Web site—embodies those descriptors. For every project, I have many levels of goals, but as long as my work reflects the image attributes on presentation day, I have done my job.

So what do image attributes have to do with my client’s wife who doesn’t like taupe? One of the most common mistakes in purchasing creative services is that clients judge results based on personal likes and dislikes.

Unlike choosing a curtain color for your living room or buying artwork for the space over your fireplace, creative choices related to business have nothing to do with your (or your spouse’s!) personal preferences. They have everything to do with solving your business problems and improving your customers’ experience.

Many clients think they have to “like” the artwork that creative services firms produce for them. But what if those clients’ likes and dislikes don’t line up with their corporate needs? What if they aren’t qualified to determine what works visually for their firm? By agreeing on image attributes that will guide and gauge the outcome of an assignment, we assure ourselves that the end result achieves the business goals that we set at the beginning.

Look at brands that work: Coke, Nike, Apple Computer; their brands on packaging and products, Web sites and brochures, carry a simple, compelling visual message that elicit very specific feelings in their audience. Whether or not people like the red used in the Coke lettering or the simple apple icon used by Apple Computer, they are compelling and significant icons that evoke strong recognition and often positive feeling.

That’s what a brand is about: embodying the attributes of your company or product. Everything else is window dressing.

Kara Brook is the founder and President of Brook Group, LTD, a Web design firm devoted to online branding and customer experience design. For more FREE branding resources, visit http://www.brookgroup.com/brand. To learn more about Brook Group’s branding services, visit http://www.brookgroup.com/branding.