Most Requested Areas of Brand Help

We see and respond to a lot of RFPs and we work on a lot of branding projects. Because we focus on brand strategy, we do not typically receive requests for more tactical initiatives such as social media or direct mail campaigns. However, we do receive requests for a wide variety of brand research and strategy initiatives. Here are the areas in which we have received the most requests in the past two years:

• We need help repositioning our brand.
• We need a stronger point of difference for our brand.
• We need a better brand elevator speech.
• We want to better tell our brand's story.
• We need to create a name and a new identity for our merged organizations.
• We need to create a name and new identity for a new product or service. 
• We want to build more emotionality into our brand. 
• We need help with our brand's strategy and our business model strategy.
• We need to radically transform our brand and store concept. 
• We want to measure the equity of our brand.
• Our brand architecture is a mess. We need to simplify it.
• We want to take our brand out to new customer segments without alienating our current target customers. 
• We need help merging our organizations (combined through merger or acquisition), including creating a new combined brand and a new combined culture.
• We need to reenergize our employees in support of the brand. 
• We need to get the leadership team back on track regarding alignment with our agreed to brand strategy.
• We need to transform our business and brand from a transactional approach to an engagement approach.
• We need to become a marketing-driven organization. 

Maybe you recognize some of these needs as ones your organization has. Anyway, I thought you would be interested in the types of requests we have been receiving regarding brand strategy.

Luxury Brands and Exclusivity

Exclusivity is an important aspect of true luxury brands. People who purchase these brands want something that few others can have. A few different things contribute to their exclusivity: limited distribution, prohibitive price points and highly targeted marketing. Often, luxury brands are "insider brands," that is, they are so "high end" that most people have never even heard of them. Only others who are in the same socio-economic circles will recognize and truly appreciate them.

Limited distribution may mean that they are only in high end specialty boutiques in high end shopping districts in only the most elite enclaves around the world. This not only rules out Walmart but also Macy's and maybe even Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. 

The price points may also be prohibitive for most people, for instance a $5,000 Rubin Singer party dress, a $4,000 pair of Christian Louboutin evening shoes or $600 Vilebrequin men's swim trunks. Or consider the $2.4 million Bugatti Veyron Super Sports car, the $66 million Bombardier Global 8000 private jet, or a variety of super yachts that range from $200 million to $1.2 billion each. And consider purchasing an Ocean Pearl 2-person mini-submarine for your yacht. It is one of several brands that are priced between $80,000 and $4 million+.

Regarding marketing, consider Rolex. Rolex is the primary sponsor of many elite yachting and equestrian events. I doubt you would ever see Rolex sponsoring a hockey, baseball, basketball or football event.

Here is the interesting thing about luxury brands - some of them are also intended to be aspirational brands for people from the next socio-economic rung down who aspire to enter the higher socio-economic circle. Sometimes those brands create lower price point products as entry products to the brand. While this may expand sales significantly, it can also turn off the original customers if they perceive that the brand is becoming less exclusive. The brand loses its mystique or cachet.

What is it about exclusivity that is so appealing? Is it its ability to turn heads and cause hushed conversations? Is it its ability to provoke envy? Is it just knowing that you have something that few others in the world can have? Is it firmly reinforcing your social status? Is it just finding and possessing something that you have never seen before? Or is it the item's rarity itself?

If you are responsible for a true luxury brand, you must consider the notion of exclusivity as part of your brand's essence.

Brand Experience

Back in the 1980s, when I was responsible for new product development at Hallmark, I recall reading an SRI International report that pointed to the emergence of experiences as something increasingly salable even over tangible products. Based on that report and other research, I developed a new business proposal for Hallmark that focused on providing and enhancing gift certificates for "experiences as gifts." These included massages, dinners at nice restaurants, balloon rides, wine tastings, movie tickets, etc. We even included services such as housecleaning and yard clean-up. 

While there is still a need for tangible products as we all still have functional needs, experiences are becoming an increasingly important part of our portfolio of purchases, especially for people with disposable income. 

When I think of my own spending, a significant portion of it is on leisure travel, adventure travel, dinners out, skiing, sailing, scuba diving, massages and similar experiences. Even my tangible purchases include a large element of experience - traveling to Napa Valley, touring wineries and tasting wines before I purchase them and visiting public and commercial art galleries before I purchase art. 

And while charitable giving should be altruistic, we often attend galas in which we have a chance to wear our formalwear,  dance to live bands, enjoy nice food and drink, socialize with old and new friends and bid on silent auctions, which I particularly enjoy. Clearly, galas are experiences. 

Even our local brewery (Genessee Brewing Company) has added tours, tastings, restaurants, bars, a beer museum and views of a 95 foot waterfall in downtown Rochester -- all clearly part of an experience. And, thanks to a local not-for-profit organization, an adjacent bridge across the Genesee River gorge from the brewery will soon be the home of a horizontal garden akin to New York City's High Line or Shelburne Falls, MA's Bridge of Flowers.

So, I would have you consider what sort of experience your brand is creating. When you consider how much we enjoy sensory stimulation - sight, taste, scent, touch and sound - it is important for brands to create experiences that play to these senses. 

I wish you great success in creating your brand's sensory experience. 

Interesting Brand Extensions

I have featured a number of interesting brand extension examples. You decide if they are or will be successful or not along with your reasons for your assessment. While thinking about these examples, consider what makes a brand extension successful and what works against its success.

Brand Extension

A BRAND MAY enter new product categories, new product formats within a category (line extensions), or new markets or market segments. Examples of the latter include taking a brand currently targeted to women and extending it to the male market, or taking a brand that currently appeals to adults and extending it to the teen market. Another example of extending a brand into new markets is extending it down from its current position to the value segment or up from its current position to the premium segment. Often, to designate a premium version or offering, special words or phrases are used in association with the brand name—words such as gold, platinum, limited edition, signature collection, premier, elite, marquis, reserve, private, professional, or executive class. But, in general, the more subtle the allusion to a brand’s premium status, the more effective the approach. The brand can be extended with or without using another associated brand. If another brand is used, it may be a subbrand or a brand endorsed by the original brand. Another option is cobranding. Hallmark created the “Confections” subbrand to extend into gift candies, but it did so in conjunction with Fannie May Candies Celebrated Collection (premium) subbrand. The product is cobranded with each company’s brand and subbrand. Cobranding may be a faster way to enter a new category and gain credibility within it.

Ways to Extend the Brand

Regardless of the branding treatment, extensions can occur in the following

ways:

• You manufacture the product (or supply the service) yourself.
• You acquire a company that makes the product (or supplies the service).
• You source the product or service from some other organization, but put your name on it.
• You license your name for use by another company that makes the product or supplies the service. Use brand licensing to extend the brand into new categories, expand the meaning of the brand, reinforce key brand associations, build your brand as a badge, or bring your brand to life in new ways. You should avoid licensing your brand where it doesn’t make sense just to make a few extra revenue dollars. Where the licensing department resides in your organization structure will have a large impact on how well licensing is used to build (vs. bleed) the brand.
• You form an alliance or joint venture with another company to supply the product or service.

Obviously, the pros and cons of the various methods include speed to market, fit with core competencies, upside revenue and profit potential, asset risk, amount of control over the brand delivery, and the degree to which you are committed to the category in the long term.

(c) 2015 by Brad VanAuken, excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition.

Client Taxonomy

Having worked with more than 200 organizations in a consultant-client relationship, I am well qualified to identify the different types of clients. So, I am calling this post "Client Taxonomy." I present it as a form of entertainment rather than a point of reference. Here are my classifications:

• THE SHEEP: This client has been told she needs to initiate a complete rebranding project and has the budget for it but leaves it to the chosen consultant to structure the project, lead the project and make all of the recommendations. Her understanding and confidence levels in this subject area are quit low. She accepts and implements whatever the consultant proposes without question. 
• THE CONROL FREAK: This client hires the consultant but then micromanages the consultant. She changes the process, reorders the project steps, asks for different deliverables, reanalyzes the research herself and tells the client what to put on each PowerPoint slide. Sometimes she is knowledgeable enough to make improvements and better tailor the project to her organization's specific needs. But most of the time, she just complicates the process, slows it down, creates gaps in the information and ends up with unusable deliverables. But she is happy because she has been in complete control of the project for its duration.
• THE DENIER: This client hires to the consultant to discover what the brand's customers think. When he finds out that the customers are not happy and the organization's strategy is not working, he terminates the consultant-client relationship and destroys all copies of the research, which, by design, he had not shared with anyone else in the organization. 
• THE EMPEROR: This client hires a well-known consultant to add credibility to changes he wants to make. He holds up that the new brand and business direction are the output of a rigorous process. However, he knows where he wants to take the brand and the business before the consultant is hired. If the process leads to alternative conclusions, he artfully steers everything back to what he wants to see happen. Often, this is quite obvious to everyone involved, which is quite enervating.
• THE POLITICAL WARRIOR: This client hires a consultant to prove a rival wrong. She is in a political battle with another marketing executive to assume the role of the organization's CMO. Throughout the process, the consultant witnesses secret meetings, altered documents, the formation of alliances, destroyed data and other acts of aggression. This is war and now the consultant is a part of it. 
• THE PROFESSIONAL: This client is the ultimate professional. He is deeply experienced, highly knowledgeable and quite confident. He knows exactly what he wants and hires the consultant with the perfect skill set to help him get it. He is collaborative with the consultant, adds value where he can and knows exactly how to make the best use of the project's deliverables. 
• THE HOPEFUL ONE: This client knows what he wants but does not have the time or budget to get it. He hires the consultant anyway hoping that the budget might become available and that people in the organization might have time for the project. Neither of these turns out to be true. The project drags on because there is no internal support for it. It dies a very slow death of malnutrition.
• THE LONELY ONE: This person hires a consultant because she wants a confidant, someone to talk to. She confides in the consultant about her love life, her latest purchases, the dinner party she just threw and her personal assessment of each of her colleagues. 
• THE STUDENT: While this person has a real project that would benefit from a consultant's input, the person's real motivation is to learn as much as he can from that consultant for his own personal development. He has read the consultant's books and blog posts but now wants intensive one-on-one time with the consultant focused on a real-world problem to become increasingly proficient in the consultant's area of expertise. 
• THE CONSULTANT'S BENEFACTOR: This client has hired several different consultants and marketing agencies, each of which is working on a separate strategic project for her. But none of the consultants are talking with one another or sharing information with each other. One is working on mission/vision/values, another corporate culture, another brand positioning, another business model refinement, another on an upcoming acquisition and another on the latest marketing campaign. I hope the client is highly skilled at weaving the output of all of these projects together in a seamless fashion. 

Luckily, the vast majority of clients that I have worked with fall under the label, "THE PROFESSIONAL." However, I am sure some of you might recognize a person or two you encountered in your professional career that might have fallen under one or more of the other categories. 

The Power of Focus In Branding

I have had the opportunity more than once to focus an organization's marketing efforts and the results have been extraordinary. I have done this as vice president of marketing for an e-learning company, as the volunteer chair of two not-for-profit organizations' marketing committees and in helping multiple clients craft their brand plans.

It has been my observation that organizations spread their marketing budgets too thin. They invest in too many marketing activities which result in diminished impact and ROI. I worked with one not-for-profit organization that outlined dozens of disparate products and services targeted at as many or more target audiences. Their marketing budget was minuscule and they were trying to spend something for each of these products for each of these markets. I had them perform an analysis of participation, revenues, profits and alignment with core mission (and brand promise) for each product/customer bucket of marketing activities. This process made it clear where they should focus their resources. 

At the e-learning company, I reduced the number of trade shows we participated in from dozens and dozens to three or four key ones. I also focused our marketing efforts on two trade publications and two industry experts along with three industry analysts. We discovered each of these information sources to be the most influential in our customers' decision making in our category. This process helped us to move from one of hundreds of e-learning companies to one of the top five e-learning companies in less than two years. 

The scatter-gun approach to marketing spending demonstrates a lack of strategic thinking and a lack of discipline. 

As you are developing your brand management and marketing plans and budget requests for the upcoming year, consider cutting back on many activities so that you can become the industry leader in other more important activities. And focus on those marketing activities that produce the highest ROI. There is power in focus, not only for brand positioning and messaging, but also for customer targets and marketing activities. 

I wish you great success in unleashing the power of focus for your brand.