Posts Tagged brand identity
“Brand Identity:” a Closer Look
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Identity on August 31, 2010
“Brand identity.” It just may be one of the more misunderstood and under-appreciated terms in marketing.
More often than not, it seems people simply associate “Brand Identity” with the graphic identity of the brand — the logo, graphic design system, and perhaps the slogan. While that’s part of it, there’s more to the story.
Your brand identity is the DNA of your brand. It defines how your brand lives and breathes. It prescribes what you want your brand to look and feel like. How you want customers and prospects to experience it. And how your brand-related employees should conduct their day-to-day activities as they work to support the brand.
Ultimately, your brand identity has everything to do with your ability to sell more of your stuff.
Key brand identity building steps and elements are these:
Competitive and Opportunities Assessment: Fundamentally, your prospects are seeking a solution to a problem; that’s why they’re shopping. Beyond the solution you provide, how else can the problem be solved and by whom? What makes these alternatives better or worse than your brand offering? Do prospects need the kind of solution you and your direct competitors provide, or are there other approaches they can consider? What makes those solutions different than yours? Why are they more or less effective? A thorough and objective competitive assessment is critical to illuminate the competitive brandscape. Much of this can be accomplished with secondary research, but primary research tools might be considered here as well.
Brand Vision & Values Statement: Just like asking yourself what you want your kid to be when she grows up, consider a long view for your brand. What values and standards do you want your brand (and related decisions) to unwaveringly reflect, no matter what? You likely have a vision and values statement for your overall business. You should have one for your brand(s) as well, as this will define the foundation and boundaries from and within which you’ll operate the brand. Consider the competitive and market environment as well as your own organization, and be honest and realistic.
Value Proposition and Positioning: A value proposition is simply the promise of a brand benefit, expressed on a functional, emotional, or self-expressive level. Positioning is expressing a decisive advantage over competitive solutions. Together, they form the distinctive reasons why prospects should use your brand instead of someone else’s. Both of these are developed in the context of the competitive and market environment, and within the framework of the brand vision and values statement. The objective here is to differentiate your brand from other solution providers, and to do it in a clear and highly compelling way. Don’t try to be all things to all people when you craft this so long as you focus on attracting the best prospects for your brand, to your brand. Something to consider is the differences in your target audiences: to ensure relevance, you’ll likely need to tweak your brand value proposition and position for your different audiences.
Brand Messaging Platform: Here is where you’ll take the brand value proposition and positioning and identify the specific messaging and support points which will be actively communicated to your target audiences. Sticking to this platform over time will ensure the messages take root among your target audiences.
Brand Touchpoint Management: Identify all the possible ways your brand will interact with your target audiences; there will likely be hundreds. Next prioritize these based on the role they play in selling your stuff. Finally, manage the delivery of these important touchpoints. First, by defining the standard for how those touchpoints should be delivered relative to the brand vision and values and the value proposition and positioning. Second, by educating those responsible for their delivery about your expectations and the performance standard. And, finally, by constantly monitoring the actual delivery to ensure it’s meeting that standard.
More than a logo, for sure. But well worth the time and effort.
Viewing Your Employees As Brand Touchpoints
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on August 27, 2010
This much is obvious: your employees are vital to the success of your business. They make the engine go. But they’re not just employees; they’re potentially vital brand touchpoints.
Depending on your business, you’ll have many types of front line and behind the scenes employees:
- Sales force
- Factory workers
- R&D staff
- Marketing personnel
- Admin folks
- Customer service reps
- Delivery workers
- IT wizards
- Legal and accounting
- and many others
Step back and consider this: could any individual performing one of these functions — front line or behind the scenes — cost us business in any conceivable way? Conversely, beyond the obvious candidates, can any individuals performing one of these functions somehow gain us more business?
The answer is likely yes to both.
All employees should be viewed as ambassadors of your brand identity – that strategic platform you and your team have slaved over which defines what your brand is and how it should be presented to your target audiences. Each holds a certain degree of power in how your brand identity is actually presented to the market. So it’s imparative that each be trained about the details of your brand identity and know what your expectations are for delivering their respective brand touchpoints. It’s not just their successfully performing their job tasks, it’s about their doing so in complete alignment with your brand identity.
A sales clerk who couldn’t be bothered to assist a shopper. A delivery driver who recklessly weaves in and out of rush hour traffic. A poorly written correspondence. An inaccurate invoice. A customer service rep who blatanly comes across as making his 999th call of the day. A service technician who leaves a mess. An inattentive — or overly so — restaurant server. A welder who misses just a couple here and there. And on and on.
These poorly delivered brand touchpoints can cost you business initially, or eventually.
Right now, today: actively inform your employees about what your brand identity is and their role in carrying it out, and then proactively manage their efforts in delivering the brand touchpoints that support that identity.
View your employees this way and you’ll be viewing a healthier P&L in no time.
“Influencing” Brand Touchpoints Are Vital For Your Business, Too.
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on August 18, 2010
I’ve written in the past about pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase brand touchpoints — all those interactions that take place between the customer and your brand before, during, and after the sale.
In the world of brand touchpoints, there’s a special category of equally important interactions, although they’re less direct. Influencing touchpoints are the interactions with your brand that indirectly drive business to or away.
An annual report usually isn’t used as a tool directly in the sales process, but prospects might review this document to gain a sense of stability, progress, leadership, etc. Or not.
Referrals, reviews, testimonials, and other word of mouth and social media interactions are influencing touchpoints. So are your event sponsorships, speaking engagements, community involvement, and goodwill.
Each of these touchpoints — and more — are indirect brand interactions that don’t actively promote your brand messaging, but still serve a vital role in supporting your brand identity and pushing the formation of a brand image. And, in many instances, these interactions are not something that can be effectively controlled or managed.
What you can do, however, is carefully craft your brand identity (which includes identifying the standard by which all of the brand brand touchpoints you identify should be delivered) and then actively manage this brand identity to promote the formation of the desired brand image by your target audiences.
For example, by providing the level of service, product quality, pricing, product features and benefits, warranty service, packaging, etc. that is prescribed within your brand identity platform, you cultivate positive associations that will carry over into your influencing brand touchpoints like consumer reviews, event sponsorships, community involvement, and the others you’ve defined in your touchpoint management list.
You wouldn’t stand up and actively discuss why one should buy your brand during a local United Way fundraiser, but the associations listeners have about your brand will follow you up to the podium.
The prevalence of social media tools widely being used now enables customers to become active brand advocates — for or against – with non-users. Product reviews, user testimonials and recommendations, forums and blogs: each and all have become major elements of the indirect selling process for b-to-c and b-to-b brands.
Each and all are driven by how the brand performs on its other touchpoints.
Identifying, prioritizing, and managing all of your brand touchpoints is simply the best way to stay on top of things, whether you have direct control or not.
A Brand Vision Statement You Can Live With
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Identity on August 16, 2010
As a new parent many years ago, I remember gazing into my newborn’s scrunched eyes and painting a detailed picture in my mind of where he’d be many years later. What he’d look like. How he’d act. The kind of education he’d have. What he’d be doing for a living. How he’d live.
Some parents even write this out and create a plan to follow in raising their children. For better or worse, I wasn’t that disciplined, but I did resolve to do my best to ensure he’d be happy with his life.
If you have kids, you probably visualized their future like this as well.
In many ways, this is what a brand identity is all about: how you want your brand to grow up in the real world. And the starting point for any effective brand identity platform is a brand vision statement.
A brand vision statement is simply this: how you see your brand down the road — five years, ten years, twenty years, whatever. It’s the destination for your planned cross-country trip. It’s what you envision for your grown child. It’s your goal.
And, while flexibility in today’s business world is a necessity — particularly for small- to mid-sized companies – keeping an unchanging brand vision statement in sight at all times will become the path to keep you from getting lost in a maze of distractions. It provides the standard for operations, the litmus test for future opportunities and temptations. It’s a valuable component of your brand identity. And, ultimately, it will guide the formation of a business-generating brand image in the marketplace.
So. What do you see?
What is a “Brand Touchpoint?”
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on August 12, 2010
A year ago, I purchased a new Onkyo a/v receiver. Before making my purchase, I visited several product review websites and online retail sites, looked through various home theater magazines, and even stopped by some good old brick and mortar retailers to thoroughly check out the landscape. I made a short list of product candidates, then set about finding the best pricing. I believed the Onkyo product I eventually bought offered the best feature set for the price, plus I’d owned an Onkyo stereo receiver for the past 25 years and never had trouble so I had no problem deciding to buy another of their products.
A couple of months ago, my new receiver began faultering. I checked the Onkyo website for local authorized repair centers and also confirmed my unit was still under warranty. The warranty service was completed and the receiver worked fine for a few weeks until it faultered once again. Frustrated, I once again sent the unit in for warranty service and, once again, the receiver was repaired. It worked fine until a week or two later when the same problem occurred yet again. I contacted Onkyo directly and was informed that, under the terms of the warranty, if a unit continued to faulter after three warranty repairs, Onkyo would replace the product. So, off my reciever went for the third repair. Within a week, the problem presented itself again and I once again contacted Onkyo to arrange for a replacement. They sent me a pre-paid carton via which I was to return the unit, which I dutifully did. A few days later, a brand new (and upgraded) receiver was delivered to my doorstep.
So far, it’s working beautifully and I expect it to continue to do so in spite of the fluke I experienced with the faulty unit.
During this process, I counted nearly 30 individual interactions I had with the Onkyo brand — brand touchpoints. Everything from online reviews and recommendations, to articles and advertising, to the retailer I experienced as I made my purchase, to my previous experience with product quality, to the product feature set, to the Onkyo website, to the authorized service center, to the warranty, to the customer service rep who processed my warranty claim, to the return shipping box I received — and more.
Each and every one helping me to form an image about the brand that would lead me to become even more loyal than I already might have been, or drive me away (perhaps forever) to one of the many competitive brands I likely could be just as happy with.
As my experience with Onkyo suggests, brand touchpoints can usually be grouped into four interrelated but distinctive customer activity sets:
- Pre-purchase touchpoints
- During-purchase touchpoints
- Post-purchase touchpoints
- Influencing touchpoints
Successful management of these brand touchpoints requires that you:
- Identify all of them you can think of for your brand, considering the four basic sets
- Prioritize them relative to their importance in supporting the creation of brand loyalty
- Develop an operational standard for how the touchpoint should be delivered
- Manage and assess the delivery of them accross the brand organization to ensure the standard is met
This process should be tied into developing your brand identity – your plan for what you want your target audiences to take away from interactions with your brand. How well you perform on managing the delivery of your touchpoints will determine what kind of brand image is actually formed by those audiences.
Why all the trouble? Because, in spite of what you say or do, how your customers and prospects interact with your brand leads to the formation of their image about your brand which determines whether or not they’ll do business with you the first time, or ever again. I’d say that’s worth the trouble.