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What a difference a decade makes. Since 2006, when the first edition of Branding For Dummies hit bookshelves, the world in which brand-builders operate has undergone seismic shifts. Although the definition of what brands are and do remains unchanged, the expectations of today’s always-screen-connected consumers have vastly affected branding tactics. Here are the new realities:
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✔ Online search results make or break brand images. In the now-famous words of former WIRED Magazine editor Chris Anderson, your brand is what Google says it is. Before they meet you in person or consider a purchase of your products or services, people in ever-greater numbers check you out online. Their search results often form the first impressions of your brand. And even after making initial contact, they tune into and trust word-of mouth-comments and online rants, raves, and mentions more than they trust (or tune into) your marketer-generated communications. Your brand has to be visible, engaged, and interactive online to stay part of the dialog. Chapter 11 makes the job easier.
✔ You have only seconds to pull people to your brand, no matter the communication channel. Only good branding can turn your name and logo into a familiar face that wins a second glance, and only messages that reach out and grab interest can convert that interest to action. Make Chapter 12 your guide as you plan ads, promotions, and publicity efforts.
✔ Customers expect a consistent experience whether they’re encountering your brand online or in-person. They expect your brand to look, act, and deliver on the same promises whether they’re dealing with your website, social-media pages, brick-and-mortar location, products, promotions, or staff – before, during, or after the purchase. And they expect your online and offline locations to interact seamlessly, with web pages offering one-click phone contact and arrival directions and physical locations supporting online purchases. Turn to Chapter 13 for help building, auditing, and strengthening an across-the-board brand experience capable of winning and keeping customers and loyalty.
The never-ending branding process
Chapter 2 walks you through the steps involved to build a brand from the essence of an idea to the esteem of a known and trusted offering. For a glimpse of what’s involved, look at Figure 1-1.
People associate the word brand with ranching in the Old West, but the history of branding goes way farther back in time.
Archaeologists trace the concept of branding back to marks on 5,000-year-old Babylonian and Greek pottery shards, and relics from the medieval age show makers’ symbols seared onto everything from loaves of bread to gold and silver products.
In the 1800s, brands emerged as a marketing force when manufacturing breakthroughs led to mass production that generated a glut of products vastly beyond the needs of any one local market area. Manufacturers who were used to presenting, explaining, and selling their goods to friends and neighbors were suddenly shipping products off to fend for themselves in distant locations. Realizing that their goods were leaving home accompanied by little more than their product labels, manufacturers worked to gain far-reaching awareness and belief that their names stood for quality, distinction, and honesty. In short order, the concepts of branding, publicity, and advertising gained momentum.
Two centuries later, when eight out of ten purchases are influenced by information found on websites and 80 percent of people research and establish the credibility of businesses and individuals through web searches, online visibility of brands has become a prerequisite for business and personal success.
Through it all, the purpose of branding remains the same: To build, maintain, and protect a positive image, high awareness, and product preference in consumers’ minds.
© Barbara Findlay Schenck
Figure 1-1: An at-a-glance view of the branding cycle.
Branding is a circular process that involves these actions:
1. Product definition: You can brand products, services, businesses, people, or personalities. The process starts by defining what you’re branding and whether your brand will be your one-and-only or one of several in your organization. Chapter 2 provides assistance with this beginning step.
2. Positioning: Each brand needs to fill a unique, meaningful, and available spot in the marketplace and in the consumer’s mind. To determine your brand’s point of difference and the unique position it (and only it) fills in the marketplace, see Chapter 5.
3. Promise: The promise you make and keep is the backbone of your brand and the basis of your reputation. Chapter 6 helps you put it into words.
4. Presentation: How you present your brand can make or break your ability to develop consumer interest and credibility in your offering. Start with a great name and logo (see Chapters 7 and 8), and then launch communications that establish your brand, convey a compelling message, engage your audience, and foster the kind of two-way brand communication and interaction demanded by screen-connected and empowered consumers. The chapters in Part III tell you when, where, and how to send your brand message into your marketplace.
5. Persistence: This is the point in the branding cycle where too many brands lose steam. After brands are established, brand owners often begin to improvise with new looks, new messages, and even new brand personalities and promises. Just when consistency is most necessary in order to gain clarity and confidence in the marketplace, brands that lack persistence go off track. To save your brand from this pitfall, turn to Chapters 8 and 17 for help writing and enforcing brand presentation and management rules.
6. Perception analysis: In a consumer’s mind – which is where brands live and thrive – a brand is a set of beliefs about what you offer, promise, and stand for. Great brands continually monitor brand perceptions to see that they’re in alignment with the brand owner’s aspirations and in synch with consumer wants and needs. (Chapter 16 provides advice for conducting this assessment.)
Based on the results of perception analysis, brand owners begin their loop around the branding cycle again, this time adjusting products, fine-tuning positioning statements, strengthening promises, updating presentations, rewriting brand-management rules, and, once again, monitoring perceptions in preparation for brand realignments and revitalizations.
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