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“Organizations are not the result of great branding. Great branding is the result of great organizations.”

Dominique Hanssens
Head of Marketing Department,
The Anderson School at UCLA
 

Managing your brand and strengthening your market position is the key to success for any corporation.

Brand management overview

Brand management process starts with a deep understanding of consumer and competitor. It is important to establish a common brand management vocabulary in your organization.

This will help your employees, clients, consumers, vendors, partners and other organizations communicate with fewer misunderstandings and more important, it will help communicate and reinforce key brand management principles. By agree on one set of terms will help organize and simplify the brand architecture.

What is Brand?

The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from their competition".

Design your Brand


In designing your brand, there are four elements that I focus on.
  • Target Audience : Define your target customer ( example : Target audience of CleanEn, Inc. is People who are concerned about clean air and energy conservation mostly single Male age from 20 to 35 y/o with annual income starting from $22,000 to $120,000 and single Female age 25 to 37 y/o with annual income starting from $19,000 to $100,000.
  • Brand Essence : Articulate the "heart and soul" of the brand - Brand's fundamental nature or quality. Usually stated in two to three words. In a rare circumstance brand essence and slogan will be the same. Brand Essence and also be called "Brand mantra". Brand mantra define the type of business and sent your brand boundaries. Brand mantra also clarity what is unique about your brand. It should be easy to remember, short, crisp and vivid in meaning. Brand mantra would also stake out ground that is personally meaningful and relevant to as many employees as possible.
  • Brand Promise : Develop the relevant differentiating benefits the brand promises to deliver to its target audience. To be successfully positioned in the market place, a brand must promise differentiated benefits that are relevant and compelling to the consumer. The benefits can be functional, experiential, emotional or self-expressive. To be believable, brand promise must have reasons to believe in support of the band's promise.

    A brand promise must :
      1. Address important consumer needs
      2. Leverage your organization's strengths
      3. Give your competitive advantage through differentiation
      4. Inspire, energize, and mobilize your people
      5. Drive every organizational decision, system, action and process
      6. Manifest itself in your organization's products and services
  • Brand Personality : Describe the brand as if it were a person (such as fun, sexy, sincere, sophisticated, old fashioned, reliable, progressive, etc)
After addressing these four elements, you need to map out how your brand is positioned against competitors. Once the brand is designed, this design must drive all of your consumer communication, all your marketing elements, and your company persona, its design and more importantly your culture. Also the brand must drive customer value chain - this process add value to your organization and your target audiences and consumers through activity your company or organization undertake. If it does not, it should be reevaluated or possibly eliminated.

 

The brand design should be directly translated into and supported by the brand identity standard and systems. The will make sure that the brand design noticed at each point of contact with consumer, that is resulting in a total brand experience. In essence, you are selling the band experience more than anything else.

 

Managing your Brand

Here are the most important tasks of a brand management function
  • Develop and execute brand plans, including brand marketing plans
  • Build brand awareness
  • Position the brand for sustainable competitive advantage
  • Transform the organization's leadership team into brand champions
  • Transform all employees into brand champions
  • Measure and actively manage your brand's equity
  • Actively manage the brand's identity, including enforcement of its guidelines and standards
  • Legally protect the brand
  • Always keep the brand customer focused
  • Design and implement and plans to create emotional connection between your brand and its customers
  • Develop and execute brand loyalty programs
To find out how I can help you with your brand please contact me at jp@idealpad.com