“Honestly,” the college professor said to me about the branding course he was asked to teach, “I only have six seconds worth of material: follow through on your promises and provide great service. What else is there?”
The professor is basically correct: building a brand requires you to deliver on your promises with excellent service. It’s the old “under promise and over deliver” mantra.
But he’s missing a critical piece of the branding picture. Branding is the act of distinctly positioning your brand in the mind of your target consumer. It is no longer enough to just provide great service, and branding gives your customers and employees a framework to understand what makes your company unique and special.
Here are five branding concepts you may not be thinking enough about:
- Great brands are distinctive. Think about a company like Google, the world’s most valuable brand. When you think about Google, you probably think “Internet search.” Now think about Yahoo! What do you think? Nothing really springs to my mind either. Even though Yahoo! had a 4 1/2 year head start on Google as a Web search engine, it was Google that threw its muscle into one area, indexing the Internet, and dominated. Great brands stand for one thing, and one thing only. They can have many sub-brands, but the primary brand must stand for one thing (i.e., Microsoft stands for Windows, Apple stands for computers that work, etc.).
- Great brands know their target audience. If you close your eyes and picture the one person who is most likely to use your product, what does he or she look like? How old is she? What is her ethnicity? How much money does she make? Is she married with children or single for life? Does she have pets? You get the picture. Your product needs to initially be built for one specific type of person. As your brand gains acceptance and popularity over time, your audience will diversify, but being all things to all people is a sure way to keep your brand small and weak.
- Great brands are your friends. There is an old adage that says, “people buy people, not products.” This is absolutely true, and it always will be. But what if your customers saw your brand as a person, or better yet, as a friend? Friendships are built on trust, so what if the trust your customers placed in your company was greater than the trust they put in most other people? Branding is the art of successfully personifying your company so that customers can identify with your brand as if it were something real and tangible. Again using Google as an example, when you want to find something online, what do you do? You Google it, because just like a close friend, Google is always available and very reliable.
- Great brands have remarkability. Great brands have the ability to “wow” people over and over again. One of the reasons the Apple iPod has created such a strong brand and dominates portable music players is because they always come out with a new feature that makes people want to tell their friends (they have also created a very loyal and committed fan base who always wants the new Apple toy). Amazon is another example of a company with remarkability-they continually offer amazing recommendations (their use of the “you looked at this, so you might also like …” feature is truly amazing), and I get better customer service from calling Amazon than I do going to a Barnes & Noble retail store.
- Great brands are a culture. Whether you think about it or not, the branding habits your company has directly impact your customers’ experience with your brand. Zappos.com is a company that has created a culture of service in all levels of their organization, and it has paid off big time (their sales were over $1B in 2008). If you aren’t focusing on your brand promise with every single employee and during every single customer interaction, you are not building a successful brand culture. Good branding habits are difficult to form, but equally difficult to break!
So next time someone says, “branding is simple,” tell them that sometimes it’s the simple things in life that are the most complex.
photo credit: Marco Bellucci
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Drew,
Agree with all of these points. I would also add another overlooked facet of branding which is the culture created for the employees inside your organization. All great brands are built from the inside out. Just look at 2 of your examples in Google and Zappos. When your employees buy into the brand and are treated exceptionally they live that brand for the customer as well.
Excellent point! Employee morale is an often-overlooked component to creating the brand culture. How can you expect your customers to repeat your brand message until each and every employee in your company is able to?
Drew,
Agree with all of these points. I would also add another overlooked facet of branding which is the culture created for the employees inside your organization. All great brands are built from the inside out. Just look at 2 of your examples in Google and Zappos. When your employees buy into the brand and are treated exceptionally they live that brand for the customer as well.
Excellent point! Employee morale is an often-overlooked component to creating the brand culture. How can you expect your customers to repeat your brand message until each and every employee in your company is able to?