Best Practices in Branding

The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) and the American Marketing Association (AMA) have joined forces to conduct a study of best practices in branding. They went out looking for the key things you can do to build your company or product brand. 

What is "Branding," Anyway?

APQC and the AMA define the primary purpose of branding as to "establish a meaningful, differentiated presence that will increase the ability to attract and retain loyal customers and improve marketplace ability.%

I see that as increasing name recognition and awareness in your target market so that it's easier to sell what you have to sell. When it's done right, branding builds on the natural way that human beings make buying decisions.

Years ago there was a great trade magazine ad. It showed an obviously unfriendly purchasing agent staring out of the page at you. The caption went something like this. "I don't know you. I never heard of your company. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?"

Branding is about building positive awareness and recognition. No matter what business you're in, whether it's a one-person service business working out of a desk in your bedroom or a multinational selling manufactured goods in hundreds of countries, people have to be aware of who you are so that the little recognition bell goes off in their heads when they hear your name or see your logo. "Ding!!

Mostly you gain that recognition by having them see your message a number of times. How often? For most products and services four to six times within a six month period is good. That's where continuous advertising and publicity work for you.

As folks keep hearing or seeing your message, they learn a bit about what you do. Now, when the bell goes off they say, "Oh yeah, they make ·"

Branding begins by building recognition and awareness, but it doesn't stop there.

Branding Builds Profit

The Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies study found that "perceived value in the target market was the single greatest determinant of profitability. That tells us that branding has to go beyond simple awareness building to a recognition of quality and value as well.

Advertising great David Ogilvy said that, "Great advertising can sell anything once." Beyond once you need to have a quality product or service, one that delivers value. Branding needs to build natural recognition in your market and then move on to telling the story of the value that you deliver.

That's what the builders of great brands do -- build awareness of their quality product. Let's see how the best do it, according to the APQC and AMA study.

The preliminary findings of the study identify four key practices that appear to be "best practices.

• Best practice organizations focus on a few key brands.
• Senior management plays an active role.
• Best practice organizations use a brand holistically.
• Top branding organizations have their own process or model to measure and monitor brand value or equity.

Best practice organizations focus on a few key brands.

You can't say everything to everybody. There's not enough time and there's not enough money. So the top branding companies concentrate their efforts.

How do you decide which products or services to feature in your branding efforts? There are two approaches that seem to work.

You can pick the products or services that deliver the greatest profit or potential profit. In other words, promote your identity based on what brings the greatest return.

Or, you can pick the products or services that are what you do best. Sometimes you have to find that out by going out to your current customers and finding out what they think about this.

Senior management plays an active role.

Branding is a major strategic activity. Top management has to set the tone and pay attention to the effort. If that happens, everybody else will do it, too.

Best practice organizations use a brand holistically.

In case you're wondering what that little bit of jargon means, it means that the best practices in branding do research into the attitudes and perceptions of customers and prospects but also of their own people. In other words they take a holistic view of the views of their brand. Whew!

Best practice organizations also use all the means available to promote the brand. They work at coordinating advertising and marketing and public relations and net/web efforts, even the slogans on coffee cups so that the message is pervasive and consistent.

Top branding organizations have their own process or model to measure and monitor brand value or equity.

That overly fancy statement means simply that top branding organizations figure out some way to measure how they're doing in the branding effort.

Successful promotional programs of any kind need clear targets and regular feedback on progress. With something like branding, that means that you have to come up with some way to measure what you're doing because there's not great "branding meter" out there.

It's not so important what you use for measurement, but it is important for you to have a consistent measurement system that lets you know how you're doing.

One thing that's not mentioned in this study is perhaps the most important thing. Great brands are based on quality products and services that are promoted consistently for a long time. This is one of those "simple-but-not-easy" things.

You have to know what story you want to tell about your quality. Then you have to tell that story again and again, with unremitting diligence, day after day and month after month. Consider brands like Kraft or Campbell Soup that reap rewards in the 90s from promotion they've done since the 30s. That's your challenge.

I'm Tony Wilson

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