How to Build a Great Brand

Everyone who starts a business and most everyone who runs one thinks theirs is the greatest business in the world. But ask them — do you have a great brand? — and they’re likely to give an excuse, such as they sell services not products, their business is not large enough, or brands aren’t important in B2B (or in South Dakota). Why?

Business is making and selling something, right? But from the customers’ perspective — whether wholesale or retail — “the business” is the sale, the transaction. And the sale for a customer is a singular experience, an investment of time and money, which though it may culminate impulsively usually involves a great deal of forethought and anticipation and always a clear expectation for the future.

So, the first step in building a great brand is to know why it’s important to have a great brand. It’s important, because to thrive in today’s crowded marketplaces your company and your products and services must stand out. Large companies know this. For them, brand investment has long been a catalyst for raising value; but today they’ll tell you brands perform a major role in driving purchase decisions. Now, this is as true for a small or mid size company as it is for a large company. Even if you’re not competing globally, you’re pushing up against hundreds of other companies for market share. You need to influence purchase decisions as much as the next guy. But with fewer resources, smaller companies gravitate toward short term objectives. When they do any strategic thinking it’s usually when they begin the business, and they seldom revisit that position until something cramps their growth. For instance, an IT consultancy client rapaciously acquired seventeen software companies in 5 years before they realized they also had acquired seventeen value propositions. It brought them to an operational standstill. Or another client, a mid size bank, after forty years of business, realized it had become a financial department store and was restricted from growing certain lines of high value business because its investment in staff and branches had committed them to being a retail bank. Had either of these businesses paid more attention to their brands — their life lines to their customers — they would have grown differently and at the same time retained more operational flexibility. buy.

It follows then that the second step in building a great brand is to discover the essence of your customer’s experience. Discover? Yes, find it. It’s been there since your first transaction. To illustrate, let’s over simplify: one person sells, another person buys. After an exchange of information, an evaluation, an agreement on price and terms, the buyer takes money out of his wallet, and the seller hands over the product or delivers the service. At that moment, the buyer is filled with anticipation of what they are getting; the seller is satisfied by a reward for ingenuity or hard work. The sale is the emotional beginning of the brand experience. To discover its components, you need to look at purchase behavior very carefully. Somewhere in everything that takes place at the sale, everything leading up to it and everything that happens after, is exactly what your customers want from you.

For instance, when many technology brands launched in the early nineties, they encountered the “beige box” effect. Beige metal computers were not only disappointing to look at, they seemed to promise purchasers a future of boredom. Voila! Along came the iMac G3. An all in one monitor and CPU in a plastic tear drop shape, available in various vibrant colors with a matching mouse and keyboard, the G3 promised intelligence, creativity, and performance in its design. Another approach to communicating a brand’s experience was the famous “Intel Inside” campaign. Knowing the beige box was filled with gizmos called semiconductors, buyers were loathe to “look under the hood” (the way consumers had demystified the automobile). The “Intel Inside” signature, along with television ads of clean room workers stumbling around in haz-mat suits, told buyers not to worry about how it worked (Intel was inside); computing was a playful experience. A third example of technology sellers delivering their brand experiences was after purchase service. Several of the more successful technology companies — Sun, Cisco, IBM — have developed primary lines of business in consulting from initial explorations to provide after purchase services.

By now, these tactics are standard operating procedures, and in today’s marketplaces, brands are looking for new ways to deliver their brand experiences. Starbucks for instance came early to the realization that they were not selling coffee but relaxation. Crystal Geyser understood from the get-go it was not selling water but health. Volvo modified its value proposition of safety to include high performance when it introduced its S60 line in 2004. These brand promises have been communicated in different ways. Starbucks uses store design and location to deliver its experience. Crystal Geyser communicates its brand through event sponsorships. Volvo delivers its brand experience with both on line and in store demonstrations. The common strategy is to submerge the buyer in the experience of the brand in as many appropriate ways and places as possible. Stefan Olander, Nike’s global director for brand connections and one of the brains behind the Nike+ web site, puts it this way: “We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go.” Deliver the experience and they will buy.

The third step in creating a great brand is just that: deliver a great brand experience. Of course, the brand experience may not be the same for all customer segments. Do separate segments require separate brands? Not usually. A brand experience can be common in different ways to different segments. However, sometimes consumers respond very personally to a company’s products or services. For instance, Marlboro, a brand of the Phillip Morris Company, was introduced in the early decades of the last century as a woman’s cigarette. Marlboro never caught on until PM switched its audience in the mid fifties to 25-45 men. Zing. The “Marlboro Man” campaign touched a nerve. Men began to buy the cigarette brand because they saw it as a way to express rugged individualism. Certainly, there’s nothing intrinsically “rugged” about a cigarette, the way it’s sold, the experience of its purchase or enjoyment. Marlboro simply associated the product with an idea, an American myth. With its initial success, PM multiplied the Marlboro Man icon everywhere: on outdoor, radio, television, at Point of Sale, in addition to purchasing sponsorships — such as NASCAR and rodeo — and Marlboro cigarettes have been inextricably linked to the myth of the American cowboy and the frontier ever since.

Many marketers miss the point of this example. They think they can just develop some compelling imagery and people will fall all over it. Well, the history of marketing is littered with examples of the wrong compelling imagery. Chances are PM did its research, found the male market craving a testosterone injection. (Prior to Marlboros, after all, men did little in cigarette advertising other than offer a lady a light or stand suavely in a corner like an unused piece of furniture.) The brilliance was not in finding the audience, it was defining what the audience really wanted and positioning Marlboro as the only brand to give it to them. Ordinarily, consumers talk about three kinds of product benefits: functional, emotional, and self-expressive. Functional benefits abound; they flow from the functionality of the product or service: it works the way it says it does. Emotional benefits usually arise out of service components and are found when consumers describe emotions associated with brand usage, for instance, feelings of accomplishment (“I just plugged it in”), belonging (“they really listen”), and reward (“it’s just fun.”). Self expressive benefits are rare, although they are found commonly enough among lifestyle products and services: cars, appliances, hotels and restaurants, and real estate developments. Consumers find that many of these products and services allow them to express unique aspects of their own personalities or aspirations. Marlboro was unique among cigarettes in offering men at the cusp of the feminist revolt a self expressive benefit.

The skills required to understand the customer experience point up the fourth step in building a great brand: commitment. Branding always requires serious commitment. Generally, branding is a process of research and analysis. The research is qualitative. Open ended questions lead to answers which inevitably lead to more questions which lead to more answers in order to get to the deepest feelings at the heart of the experience. No one who has studied this subject denies its enormous impact on the bottom line; two and three times short-term earning spikes in value, revenue, and sales are not uncommon. But acknowledging and following through with the loops and backtracks of an investigation takes commitment. Is it surprising that companies often do not understand or appreciate what consumers say about them or their products? The process can involve real discomfort, not only from criticism but from looking at your business from your buyer’s point of view. Branding puts flesh and blood on purchase, forcing ordinary left brained thinkers with their reliance on data, metrics, and quantitative analyses to embrace the economic value of right brained skills, such as empathy, design, story, and play. The reason is simple: consumption is emotional and risky, and the work of branding is to find and understand how buyers are satisfied – in a new car not a finance office, with plug and playing not reading a manual, by arriving at the gate not sitting on the tarmac.

The results of a great brand? Off the sound of the bat: stronger customer loyalty and easier customer acquisition. Loyalty comes from reinforcing and consistently satisfying your customer’s value set; customer acquisition comes from promising prospects what they truly want and what you’re really good at. However, that’s the top line. There will be substantial benefits to your marketing and marketing communications. Marketing will have more horsepower. Without a great brand, companies struggle to be in the consumer’s consideration set. With a great brand, the struggle is minimized by awareness and interest. Once they’re interested, consumers will know what you stand for. Their decisions will be quicker, because your competitive difference and value will precede their consideration. Finally, your marketing will have solid foundations: a core identity, a value proposition, and a positioning. You can build whatever initiative you want and be confident it rests on your brand.

And – oh yes – you’ll finally have the drop on Viscount Leverhulme. Don’t know Leverhulme? He’s the guy who supposedly said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.” With a great brand, you’ll know exactly what causes your cash registers to ring.

To learn more about branding, give Fred Barson a call today.