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In This Chapter

▶ Branding products, businesses, nonprofits, and even yourself

▶ Following the branding process, step by step

▶ Seizing the best moment to brand or rebrand

More than 5,000 branding books and millions of branding websites give proof to the fact that brands are a hot topic surrounded by a deluge of information – and confusion. To clear up the facts, here are a few easy definitions.

A brand is the essence and idea of what you stand for. It starts with a vision and grows into a promise that’s reinforced every time people come into contact with you or any facet your business or organization.

Branding is the process of positioning, packaging, and presenting the vision and idea of your brand so that others understand and believe what you stand for and the promise you invariably make and keep.

Branding isn’t a veneer that you slap on (usually in the form of a new logo) to mask or transform a product offering. Treating branding like some skin-deep solution is like putting lipstick on a pig: People see through the makeup. Instead, successful branding goes all the way to the core of who you are and what you stand for. When it does, it signifies, simplifies, clarifies, unifies, and magnifies what you are and do. And it adds considerable value as a result.

This chapter gives you a look at when and how to brand and why branding is worth every bit of the effort it involves.

Why Bother with Branding?

To brand or not to brand, that is the question. Or at least that’s the question that hangs in the air until people who aren’t quite sure about whether they really need a brand hear this truth: More than any other quality – even more than strong financial statements, great management, or terrific product or service ideas – brands are the key to winning long-term growth and success.

By building a brand, you cast a strong, clear vision of what you stand for. Without a brand, you blur into a dime-a-dozen, one-seems-just-like-another category called commodities. In a sea of similar choices, branding differentiates and elevates your offering, paving the way for awareness, preference, selection, and profitability.

If you can think of even one way your offering is meaningfully different and better (not just different, but meaningfully different and better!), then you have at least one reason to build a brand that moves it into the prestigious realm of people, products, businesses, and organizations that stand out as distinctly different, preferable, and more valuable than all the others.

Branding to avoid the budget-busting commodity trap

Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the 20th century’s most successful business investor, sums up the formula for business success in four frequently quoted words: Buy commodities, sell brands.

✔ Commodities are offerings that customers can’t differentiate from one another because they all seem to serve the same need, solve the same problem, and deliver the same value. If people can’t see a clear reason to buy one product over another – if they think that they all deliver the same value and quality – they buy whatever’s available at the lowest price, which is hardly a formula for business success.

✔ Brands are the opposite of commodities. A commodity becomes a brand when those in the marketplace understand and value compelling characteristics that make it different and better than others in its category. Branding is a powerful tool that differentiates an offering in ways that develop consumer preference and deliver pricing power – the power to raise prices without losing business.

Airline tickets, laptop computers, and strawberry jam start out as commodities. All competitors address basically the same need in basically the same way, and if customers see no reason to choose one over the others, they simply opt for the one with the lowest price. Yet every day, customers make conscious decisions to buy the offering of one airline or computer manufacturer or jam maker over the others because of the unique attributes they trust to be true about their choice. Maybe they’re won over by the frequent flyer club options, service or warranty program, organic ingredients, or any of a zillion other distinguishing characteristics – the brand promises — that they understand and believe are worth premium pricing.

As proof that brands lift offerings out of crowded commodity categories, look at the following examples:

When you build a brand, you develop value, trust, preference, and the potential for higher prices and profit margins.

Branding to cast your vision

Your brand reflects the vision of the good that you aim to achieve. Just as the images on a country’s flag symbolize the core of what’s important to that culture and nation, your brand reflects the core of what’s important to you and your organization. It’s the banner that signifies what you’re passionate about, your fundamental values, what you aspire to achieve, and the promise on which you stake your reputation.

A well-defined vision is important whether you’re building a personal brand or an organizational brand:

✔ If you’re developing a personal brand, your vision clarifies the qualities and characteristics for which you want to be known. It keeps you on track and steers the presentation of an authentic, well-aligned voice and presentation in all personal communications, whether online and offline.

✔ If you’re developing a product, business, or nonprofit brand, your vision defines – for every person in your organization – why you’re doing what you’re doing and the ultimate good you want to achieve through your success. Establishing a clear vision keeps your entire team on track and makes branding an almost-transparent process. You don’t have to tell people why upholding the brand promise is important. By understanding the long-term vision you’re working to achieve, the brand promise becomes a commitment that’s caught, not taught, throughout the organization. Chapter 6 guides you through the process of putting your brand into words.

Great brands stem from the beliefs, personalities, and values of those leading the brand. They result in a brand culture that’s authentic and heartfelt.

Branding to win trust and increased value

Amid a deluge of unfamiliar options, brands stand out as friends you can count on. That trust leads to selection, purchase, and, for the brand-builder, profitability.

Instinctively, you’ve proven the influence of brand trust thousands of times over. Think of the last time you reviewed job applicants, or scrolled through screen-after-screen of shoe choices, or scanned reviews for movies playing in town. You had to make a choice, and chances are good that you opted for the offering you thought you could trust. Branding, or lack thereof, led to your selection.

If you viewed all the choices as similar and fairly risk-free, you probably let convenience or low price tip your decision. That’s because no single offering inspired your trust or presented distinguishing benefits, so you went with the quickest, least-expensive option. (The section on commodities earlier in this chapter has more on the topic of undifferentiated offerings.)

But if, after scanning all your options, you settled on an offering that took you out of your way or caused you to pay a little or a lot more, your decision was likely based on a sense that the one you selected was worth the price or the trouble because you believed it wouldn’t let you down. That trust, almost certainly, was the result of good branding.

So, What Do You Want to Brand?

You can build a brand for a product or service, a small or huge company, or a nonprofit organization. You can build a brand for yourself, called a personal brand, which is a brand category so hot that we’ve given it its own chapter (Chapter 4). In this section we give you an overview of all the kinds of brands you can build.

Product brands

Products are tangible, physical items that you can hold in your hands or see with your own eyes before you make the purchase.

If a product lacks any perception of distinct quality or value, it’s known as a commodity (think salt). When a manufacturer wins awareness in the marketplace that its product has characteristics that make it different and better than others in the product category, that commodity turns into what’s known as a consumer brand (think Morton’s). (Refer to the preceding section for more on commodities.)

Branding is a powerful way to differentiate a product in ways that create consumer preference and premium pricing.

Service brands

People buy services sight-unseen. Unlike tangible, three-dimensional products that shoppers can see and feel and try out before buying (or at least look at on your website), people buy services purely based on their trust that the person or business they’re buying from will deliver as promised.

If you sell a service or run a service business, you absolutely, positively need to develop and manage a strong brand image for the following reasons:

✔ People buy your service based entirely on their belief in your brand promise. People need to have faith in you, your ability, and your reputation before they decide to commit their business.

✔ Before signing on the dotted line to purchase a service, customers need to believe that their expectations will be met. If they know nothing about you or lack confidence in the quality of your service, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Examples of globally recognized service brands include Google, eBay, H&R Block, Charles Schwab, and FedEx. For examples of local-level service brands, think of your region’s leading law firm, best hair salon, most innovative homebuilder, or most trusted medical clinic. Each earned its reputation by building a clear identity and consistently conveying a believable promise that people trust in while they wait for the purchased service to be performed and their high expectations to be met.

Business or corporate brands

Many large companies and corporations build product or service brands in addition to their business brands. (The section later in this chapter titled “Brand Architecture 101” describes how business and product or service brands relate to each other.)

Procter & Gamble, for example, has a corporate brand in addition to a portfolio of consumer brands. On a smaller scale, you probably can think of a local land developer that builds product brands for each new residential community in addition to a brand for the land development company that holds the individual brands.

Table 2-1 summarizes how product or service and business brands differ from and complement each other.

Table 2-1 Comparison of Business Brands and Consumer Brands

If you build only one brand – and that’s the advice we give to any business with limited marketing expertise or budget – build a business brand because business brands accomplish the following:

✔ Lead to awareness, credibility, and good reputations

✔ Pave a smooth road for product introductions

✔ Inspire employees

✔ Attract the interest of job applicants, investors, and business reporters

✔ Contribute to customer preference for your products and services, often accompanied by a willingness to pay more for the association with a leading, high-esteem business

Branding individuals (namely, yourself)

Individual brands are a hot topic and the focus of Chapter 4. They come in two types: personal brands and personality brands.

✔ Personal brands reflect personal reputations. They differentiate individuals by creating awareness of who they are, what they stand for, what they do best, and how they contribute to the world around them. By developing your personal brand, you establish yourself for your expertise, enhance visibility, develop preference, gain influence, and power success toward your personal goals. You prepare yourself to take every opportunity to make a great first impression.

✔ Personality brands are personal brands gone big-time. They’re individual brands that are so well-known that they not only become celebrities (think Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Donald Trump, and, like ’em or not, any of the Kardashians) but also create significant value when associated with products or services (for example, think of George Foreman, David Beckham, Beyoncé, LeBron James, and a long list of other celebrities who launch or endorse product brands). But personality brands aren’t exclusively for the uber-famous and ultra-rich. For example, community leaders become local personalities whose endorsements of projects or fundraising campaigns turn otherwise obscure efforts into overnight successes.

Whether you aspire to be a successful job applicant, a sought-after speaker, or a star in your community or industry, start by building a personal brand. Chapter 4 gets you started. Then look into Susan Chritton’s book Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Wiley) for in-depth guidance.

Branding: A Bird’s-Eye View

Branding starts before most brand-builders even know it. As soon as people form an opinion about you or your business, product, or service – perhaps based on real-world or online encounters you don’t even realize are happening – they form the basis of your brand image in their minds, which is where brands live. Branding is the process that aligns the opinions people hold about your brand with the image you want them to believe.

The path from brand essence to esteem

This section covers major branding steps and where to turn in the upcoming chapters for step-by-step branding advice.

Step 1: Decide what you’re going to brand

Are you branding a product, a service, a company, or an individual? If the distinctions are a bit blurry, flip back to the section in this chapter titled, “So, What Do You Want to Brand?”

As part of your decision about what you’re going to brand you need to decide if the brand you’re developing will be your one-and-only or if it will live alongside or under the umbrella of other brands in your organization. The upcoming section on brand architecture helps you plot, plan, and decide the relationship between your business and your brand or brand.

Step 2: Do your research

When you’re clear about what you’re branding, the next step is to analyze your offering and the market in which it will compete. Think of this as your discovery phase, which is comprised of two major steps:

1. Find out everything there is to know about your market.

Begin by researching your prospective customers – who they are, where they are, and what motivates their buying decisions. Then analyze your competition to discover what solutions already exist in the marketplace and exactly how the offering you’re branding is different and better.

2. Find out everything there is to know about your product or service.

You need to know what makes your offering unique, what attributes make it excel over competing alternatives, and how it solves your customers’ wants or needs.

Flip to the first pages of Chapter 5 for help with this fact-finding mission.

Step 3: Position your product or service

Positioning defines how you’ll differentiate your brand and how you’ll slot it into an available space in the market and in customer minds.

Determining your brand’s position is an essential early step in the branding process because people will make mind space for your offering only if you can convince them, in a split second, that you provide unique solutions to problems or needs that aren’t already being addressed by competing solutions.

To determine your market position, follow these four steps:

1. Determine which distinct and meaningful consumer needs or desires only your product or service addresses in the marketplace. Don’t try to take an already established position away from a competitor unless you have the budget, expertise, and time to do so.

2. Communicate your point of difference.

3. Win a unique position for your offering in the market and in the consumer’s mind.

4. Perform so well that no competitor can compete against or unseat your position.

Chapter 5 takes you on a step-by-step walk through the positioning process, including how to locate your market position, how to communicate your position, how to win your position in your consumers’ minds, and how to protect your position so that your brand can claim and own the defined niche in which it will live and grow.

Step 4: Write your brand definition

Your brand definition is a true statement about what your brand stands for. It describes what you offer, why you offer it, how your offering is meaningfully different and better, the unique benefits your customers can count on, and the promise or set of promises you make to all who work with and buy from your business.

You have to know your brand definition before you begin to develop and project the public presentation of your brand. Otherwise the external face of your brand – everything you present through marketing efforts – won’t match up with the internal base of your brand, and your brand will lack credibility.

Figure 2-1 uses an iceberg to represent the relationship between the base and face of your brand:

✔ The external face of your brand rises into public view in the form of your name, logo, website, ads, packaging, promotions, and marketing messages that everyone from employees to consumers, suppliers, friends, and colleagues can quickly and easily see, understand, and believe. Like the tip of the iceberg, the face of your brand is only a representation of the larger brand base that lies out of consumer view.

✔ The internal base of your brand is the substance of what your brand is and stands for. It includes your services, products, culture, mission, vision, and values, as well as the leadership, management, and organization that together create the strong basis for your brand.

As you define your brand, turn to Chapter 6 for help with every step involved.

Illustration courtesy of Bill Chiaravalle, Brand Navigation

Figure 2-1: A strong brand definition reflects both the face and base of your brand.

Step 5: Develop your name, logo, and tagline

This is the point where branding gets exciting. The minute you give your brand a name and face – or logo – you can watch managers, employees, and others inside the company start to buy into the branding process. Here’s a brief introduction to these important brand elements:

✔ Name: Your name is the key that unlocks your brand image in your consumer’s mind. Turn to Chapter 7 for help creating or revising your brand name, including advice for how to recognize qualities of a great name, pick or create the name, test the appropriateness and availability of the name you want, and turn the name you choose into a vehicle that conveys your brand promise and contributes to brand value.

✔ Logo: Your logo is the mark or symbol that serves as the face of your brand on your signage, packaging, stationery, websites, advertising, sales material, and every other communication vehicle that carries your name into the marketplace. Coauthor Bill is the guru on this subject, and he’s filled Chapter 8 with information on how to develop a great logo, avoid logo design taboos, apply your logo with consistency throughout your marketing program, change your logo when and if it’s time for a revamp, and manage your logo so that no one tampers with or misuses it.

✔ Tagline: Your tagline is the memorable phrase that provides consumers with a quick indication of your brand position and promise. Some marketers make their taglines an essential part of their identities, whereas other marketers don’t create taglines at all. Taglines are particularly useful, though, for brands with names or logos that don’t clearly convey their brand position or personality and for businesses that rely heavily on communications in which logo presentation isn’t possible. See Chapter 8 for help deciding whether or not your marketing would benefit from a tagline and, if so, how to create one for your brand.

Step 6: Launch your brand

Your brand launch happens in two phases and in this order:

1. Internal launch

Whether you’re launching a new brand or relaunching a revitalized brand, be sure to launch from the inside out. Before you even think of introducing your brand to prospects, explain it to all the people who have or feel that they have a stake in your business, including the following:

• Shareholders, managers, and employees: These are the people most invested in your business and most apt to serve as ambassadors for your brand. Be ready to answer questions like “Why are we spending money on this?” and “How will this strengthen our business?” by linking your branding program to your business mission and goals. By all means, take extra care with those who sell your product, providing them with a complete set of tools to help them present your brand position and story to prospects and customers (turn to Chapter 9 for advice).

• Key partners and major customers: Before loyal supporters and clients see your new or revised brand identity on packaging or in ads, give them a preview. Chapter 9 helps you plan your approach.

2. External launch

Your brand goes public when you unveil your name, logo, and slogan and when you begin to tell your market the story of how your brand reflects what you stand for. Coauthor Barbara is the marketing guru on our author team, and she’s designed Part III to guide you as you write the marketing plan for building awareness for your brand through digital communications, social media, advertising, publicity, promotions, sales materials, and all other communications that carry the announcement and story of your brand into your marketplace.

Step 7: Manage, leverage, and protect your brand

This is the “care and feeding” phase of the branding process. This stage also requires the most persistence, and it’s where too many brands lose steam. Just like good parenting, good branding management can be summed up in a single word: consistency.

✔ Display a consistent look.

✔ Project a consistent message and tone.

✔ Deliver a consistent level of quality through all communications, products, and services.

✔ Be diligent about consistently protecting your brand from misuse.

✔ Stay consistently true to your brand.

Begin managing your brand from the moment you introduce it for the following reasons:

✔ The minute your name or news of your offering enters the marketplace, you begin making first impressions of your brand, whether they’re the ones you intend to make or not.

✔ By etching your brand onto a blank slate in the marketplace, you don’t have to undertake the difficult task of erasing erroneous impressions and rewriting your brand image.

The chapters in Part IV begin with advice for keeping a tight rein on the way people encounter your brand, called your brand experience, followed by chapters full of tips for creating brand allegiance and loyalty, leveraging value, and, when the time’s right, revitalizing your brand by giving it a partial or full makeover to fit market or business conditions, tastes, and trends.

The chapters in Part V focus on how to protect your brand by establishing and standing up for your legal rights. They also help you create usage rules that protect your brand from well-meaning but misguided attempts by staff members, freelancers, printers, sign makers, and others who are all too willing to help you “refine” or “tweak” your brand image, which usually leads directly to an erosion of the consistency you’re fighting to maintain. And, should conditions rock your brand strength, Chapter 18 helps you take action through both preemptive actions and, if necessary, crisis communications.

Step 8: Realign your brand to keep it current

When you hear people talk about their (or your) need to rebrand, think long and hard before tuning into the conversation or signing them on as your branding consultants. In all but the most extreme cases, when people talk about rebranding what they really need is a brand update, also called a brand refresh or a brand realignment.

✔ Rebranding involves abandoning the essence of what a brand stands for and starting from scratch to build a brand new brand. Rebrands are rare and costly and should be approached only with the greatest of care. Chapter 16 can help you make the decision.

✔ Brand realignments begin with recognition that your brand is the essence of what you or your business stands for. You can’t just change essence; you can’t just change your brand. What you can (and should) be willing to change is how your brand is presented. Market trends and conditions change. Purchase behaviors change. Design looks or cultural aesthetics change. When they do, brand realignments refresh your brand by updating its look and message – but not by changing the essence of the brand or the brand promise.

Here are some examples of successful brand realignments and rebranding efforts:

✔ Realignment: Starbucks made a self-declared “meaningful update to its brand identity” by updating its iconic green mermaid or siren image and eliminating the words Starbucks and coffee from its logo. By refreshing the brand, Starbucks freed the business to move beyond its signature beverage and asserted its entry into a pantheon of brands recognizable even without a wordmark identifying the business name.

✔ Rebranding: Responding to environmental concerns, British Petroleum changed its wordmark to the initials BP to signify Beyond Petroleum. It also unveiled a logo featuring a bursting flower, explaining that the changes reflect “the revolutionary quality of our business.”

When and if your brand presentation gets out of step with its market, work hard to keep the brand esteem you’ve carefully built as you refresh and realign your brand presentation to match the market’s evolving interests.

The branding process at a glance

If you’re a visual person, Figure 2-2 lays out the branding process in a diagram that presents the eight steps involved to develop a brand from the essence of a vision to an understanding and preference that results in choice, marketplace esteem, and greater success.

© Barbara Findlay Schenck

Figure 2-2: The branding process at a glance.

Brand Architecture 101

The verbal and visual relationship between your business brand and your product brand – also described as the relationship between your parent and subsidiary brands – is called brand architecture. Most brands follow one of two types of brand architecture:

✔ Master (or parent-dominant) brand architecture, resulting in a branded house

✔ Multiple (or product-driven) brand architecture, resulting in a house of brands

The following sections describe each category.

Master brand/parent-driven architecture: A branded house

Businesses that follow master-brand architecture introduce each product under the strong brand identity of the parent organization. FedEx is an example of a parent-dominant brand. Whether you choose FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Office, or any other FedEx offering, the FedEx parent brand dominates.

Adopt a master brand strategy if any of the following situations apply to your business:

✔ Your business has a modest marketing department and budget. If your resources are limited, build one strong parent brand to represent your core business and then introduce each new offering under the umbrella of your business identity. By doing so, you eliminate the need to create and manage the identity of multiple self-standing brands, which requires an intense investment of time, people, discipline, and dollars.

✔ All your products support your business brand image and promise. For example, if your business brand issues a promise to deliver top-tier quality to the most discerning customers, you can’t introduce a product that serves the bargain-basement market.

✔ You want to heighten the value of your business brand as part of a long-term plan to prepare your business for growth or sale. Parent-dominant products enhance the equity of the parent brand.

Unless you’re a deep-pocketed megamarketer, your brand will probably fall under the category of master brand/parent-driven brand architecture. We feel so strongly about the practicality of creating a single brand that we dub it the Rule of One. Heed the rule by building a single business brand. If you decide you need to brand individual products or services, build parent-endorsed subsidiary brands under your single, strong business brand.

Multiple brand/product-driven architecture: A house of brands

A multiple or product-driven brand architecture is used by companies that offer a range of products within a single or various market segments. For example, Tide and Pampers are among major brands owned by Procter & Gamble, yet P&G is virtually invisible as each brand is presented to consumers.

To consumers, subbrands are brands, period

A subbrand, also known as a parent-endorsed subsidiary brand, is a brand that’s closely tied to a parent brand but that has its own identity and values, which distinguish it from the attributes of the top-level brand. If that definition confuses you, imagine what the concept of a subbrand does to the consumer!

Often a brand introduces a subbrand as a way to offer a lower-priced line without harming the esteem of the top-level brand; Four Points by Sheraton and United Airline’s Ted are examples of subbrands.

Coauthor Bill Chiaravalle tells his clients to proceed cautiously with subbrands. For one thing, brands (whether top-level brands or subbrands) need esteem to succeed, and it’s hard to build esteem out of an identity that begins as subordinate to something else. For another thing, subbrands confuse consumers and weaken brand management.

Bill goes so far as to say that there’s really no such thing as a subbrand, at least not in the consumer’s mind, which is where brands live. To the consumer, a brand is a brand, not a subset of a brand. As a brand manager, you should look at it the same way.

Bill’s stance is reinforced by plenty of other brand thought leaders. James Burgin and Jon Ward, coauthors of Branding For Profit (Trump University Press), put it this way: “When it comes to brands, the consumer can only count to one.” In today’s overloaded marketing environment, the human mind takes in and remembers only so much, including one brand at a time.

For example, the consumer sees Diet Coke either as its own brand or as a flavor variety of the Coke brand, not as a subbrand of Coke. Likewise, consumers see Jetta and Passat either as their own brands or as flavors of VW.

The consumer keeps it simple, and as a brand manager, you should, too. When developing the branding strategy for a new product, rather than creating some second-cousin-once-removed relationship, ask “Does this product fit best as a flavor or variation of our established brand? Or does it have a unique enough set of attributes, or fit into a unique enough product category, that it should live under its own brand?” In any case, consider “subbrand” the wrong answer.

Multiple brand or product-driven brand architecture is the most costly branding strategy. You need to build a strong, stand-alone brand for each and every product, plus you need to build a corporate or business brand that carries its weight in the financial and corporate worlds while also serving as a magic carpet for each brand to ride in on until it establishes itself as a seemingly independent entity in the marketplace.