Branding For Dummies. Chiaravalle Bill

online purchases. Turn to Chapter 13 for help building, auditing, and strengthening an across-the-board brand experience capable of winning and keeping customers and loyalty.

       The never-ending branding process

      Chapter 2 walks you through the steps involved to build a brand from the essence of an idea to the esteem of a known and trusted offering. For a glimpse of what’s involved, look at Figure 1-1.

The red-hot history of branding

      People associate the word brand with ranching in the Old West, but the history of branding goes way farther back in time.

      Archaeologists trace the concept of branding back to marks on 5,000-year-old Babylonian and Greek pottery shards, and relics from the medieval age show makers’ symbols seared onto everything from loaves of bread to gold and silver products.

      In the 1800s, brands emerged as a marketing force when manufacturing breakthroughs led to mass production that generated a glut of products vastly beyond the needs of any one local market area. Manufacturers who were used to presenting, explaining, and selling their goods to friends and neighbors were suddenly shipping products off to fend for themselves in distant locations. Realizing that their goods were leaving home accompanied by little more than their product labels, manufacturers worked to gain far-reaching awareness and belief that their names stood for quality, distinction, and honesty. In short order, the concepts of branding, publicity, and advertising gained momentum.

      Two centuries later, when eight out of ten purchases are influenced by information found on websites and 80 percent of people research and establish the credibility of businesses and individuals through web searches, online visibility of brands has become a prerequisite for business and personal success.

      Through it all, the purpose of branding remains the same: To build, maintain, and protect a positive image, high awareness, and product preference in consumers’ minds.

      © Barbara Findlay Schenck

      Figure 1-1: An at-a-glance view of the branding cycle.

      Branding is a circular process that involves these actions:

      1. Product definition: You can brand products, services, businesses, people, or personalities. The process starts by defining what you’re branding and whether your brand will be your one-and-only or one of several in your organization. Chapter 2 provides assistance with this beginning step.

      2. Positioning: Each brand needs to fill a unique, meaningful, and available spot in the marketplace and in the consumer’s mind. To determine your brand’s point of difference and the unique position it (and only it) fills in the marketplace, see Chapter 5.

      3. Promise: The promise you make and keep is the backbone of your brand and the basis of your reputation. Chapter 6 helps you put it into words.

      4. Presentation: How you present your brand can make or break your ability to develop consumer interest and credibility in your offering. Start with a great name and logo (see Chapters 7 and 8), and then launch communications that establish your brand, convey a compelling message, engage your audience, and foster the kind of two-way brand communication and interaction demanded by screen-connected and empowered consumers. The chapters in Part III tell you when, where, and how to send your brand message into your marketplace.

      5. Persistence: This is the point in the branding cycle where too many brands lose steam. After brands are established, brand owners often begin to improvise with new looks, new messages, and even new brand personalities and promises. Just when consistency is most necessary in order to gain clarity and confidence in the marketplace, brands that lack persistence go off track. To save your brand from this pitfall, turn to Chapters 8 and 17 for help writing and enforcing brand presentation and management rules.

      6. Perception analysis: In a consumer’s mind – which is where brands live and thrive – a brand is a set of beliefs about what you offer, promise, and stand for. Great brands continually monitor brand perceptions to see that they’re in alignment with the brand owner’s aspirations and in synch with consumer wants and needs. (Chapter 16 provides advice for conducting this assessment.)

      Based on the results of perception analysis, brand owners begin their loop around the branding cycle again, this time adjusting products, fine-tuning positioning statements, strengthening promises, updating presentations, rewriting brand-management rules, and, once again, monitoring perceptions in preparation for brand realignments and revitalizations.

       Assembling your branding team

      

Brands grow from the top down and from the inside out. What that means is that your brand needs commitment and clarity from the highest levels of leadership and support from employees at every point in your organization.

       Involving your whole organization

      Whether you have a one-person team or a 1,000-person team, every person in your organization has to be involved in building and maintaining your brand. Here are the key players:

      1.

Organization leaders: Enlist the leadership and buy-in of those whose names appear at the very top of your organizational chart. Great brands are expressions of the vision, mission, and core values established by leaders, and therefore leaders need to head up the branding effort.

      2. Marketing team: This group takes on the day-to-day responsibility for advancing, maintaining, protecting, and fine-tuning the brand. From this team, name one person to serve as your brand manager and chief brand protector, choosing a top-level executive who has the authority and commands the respect necessary to oversee what, in time, will become your organization’s most valuable asset – your brand.

      3. Team of brand champions: If one person fails to uphold your brand promise – at any point from an initial inquiry to a post-purchase product or service concern – the strength of your brand is weakened. That’s why great brands begin with internal launches that achieve team understanding and support (see Chapter 9). They also include ongoing brand orientations and training sessions to ensure flawless brand experiences (see Chapters 13 and 14).

       Enlisting help from branding professionals

      Brand development requires professional expertise and effort from those within and outside your organization. Pick and choose from the following professional resources:

      ✔ Brand consultants: These firms specialize in soup-to-nuts creation, building, and management of brands. They’re experienced at positioning, naming and trademarking, logo development and all aspects of launching and managing brands. If you’re seeking to build a brand that reaches into large markets or competitive fields, the expertise of a brand consultant can be worth the expense many times over.

      ✔ Public-relations specialists: New brands are newsworthy. An experienced PR professional can help you develop the right news hooks and angles to get your story into circulation. Depending on the size and ongoing nature of your needs, a public-relations freelancer may be able to handle your task as a one-time assignment. If brand publicity