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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ✔ Develop a brand experience that never fails or fluctuates. If you can’t have the most dazzling brand identity and presentation, aim instead to have the most amazing and amazingly consistent brand encounters. Chapters 13 and 14 help you deliver a brand experience that never lets consumers down and never leaves them wondering what you stand for.

      When people choose your offerings, what they really buy into is your brand. How well you define and deliver your brand determines the ultimate value and success of your business. View branding not as an expense but as an investment that delivers value over the long haul.

Pop Quiz: Are You Ready to Brand?

      Is branding the right next step? If you answer “yes” to a good many of the following questions, you have good reason to turn the page and get started!

      ✔ Are you launching a business, product, or personal effort that will benefit from a clear identity and high awareness?

      ✔ Have you been in business for a while but feel you lack consumer awareness and understanding about who you are and what you stand for?

      ✔ Do you worry that prospects don’t know your name or the distinct benefits you offer?

      ✔ Do you feel that people in your own organization are unclear about how to explain your offerings, your distinctions, your target market, and how you excel over competitors?

      ✔ When you study your marketing materials, personal presentations, and the ways that people encounter you or your business, do you see inconsistencies in the look, message, and personality being presented?

      ✔ Is the leader of your organization prepared to devote time, staff, energy, and dollars to develop, launch, and grow a brand?

      And the final question is “Can you think of even one reason why people should choose your offering over competing solutions?” If so, turn the page and start building your brand!

Chapter 2

      Why, What, How, and When to Brand

       In This Chapter

      ▶ Branding products, businesses, nonprofits, and even yourself

      ▶ Following the branding process, step by step

      ▶ Seizing the best moment to brand or rebrand

      More than 5,000 branding books and millions of branding websites give proof to the fact that brands are a hot topic surrounded by a deluge of information – and confusion. To clear up the facts, here are a few easy definitions.

      

A brand is the essence and idea of what you stand for. It starts with a vision and grows into a promise that’s reinforced every time people come into contact with you or any facet your business or organization.

      Branding is the process of positioning, packaging, and presenting the vision and idea of your brand so that others understand and believe what you stand for and the promise you invariably make and keep.

      Branding isn’t a veneer that you slap on (usually in the form of a new logo) to mask or transform a product offering. Treating branding like some skin-deep solution is like putting lipstick on a pig: People see through the makeup. Instead, successful branding goes all the way to the core of who you are and what you stand for. When it does, it signifies, simplifies, clarifies, unifies, and magnifies what you are and do. And it adds considerable value as a result.

      This chapter gives you a look at when and how to brand and why branding is worth every bit of the effort it involves.

Why Bother with Branding?

      To brand or not to brand, that is the question. Or at least that’s the question that hangs in the air until people who aren’t quite sure about whether they really need a brand hear this truth: More than any other quality – even more than strong financial statements, great management, or terrific product or service ideas – brands are the key to winning long-term growth and success.

      By building a brand, you cast a strong, clear vision of what you stand for. Without a brand, you blur into a dime-a-dozen, one-seems-just-like-another category called commodities. In a sea of similar choices, branding differentiates and elevates your offering, paving the way for awareness, preference, selection, and profitability.

      If you can think of even one way your offering is meaningfully different and better (not just different, but meaningfully different and better!), then you have at least one reason to build a brand that moves it into the prestigious realm of people, products, businesses, and organizations that stand out as distinctly different, preferable, and more valuable than all the others.

       Branding to avoid the budget-busting commodity trap

      Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the 20th century’s most successful business investor, sums up the formula for business success in four frequently quoted words: Buy commodities, sell brands.

      ✔

Commodities are offerings that customers can’t differentiate from one another because they all seem to serve the same need, solve the same problem, and deliver the same value. If people can’t see a clear reason to buy one product over another – if they think that they all deliver the same value and quality – they buy whatever’s available at the lowest price, which is hardly a formula for business success.

      ✔ Brands are the opposite of commodities. A commodity becomes a brand when those in the marketplace understand and value compelling characteristics that make it different and better than others in its category. Branding is a powerful tool that differentiates an offering in ways that develop consumer preference and deliver pricing power – the power to raise prices without losing business.

      Airline tickets, laptop computers, and strawberry jam start out as commodities. All competitors address basically the same need in basically the same way, and if customers see no reason to choose one over the others, they simply opt for the one with the lowest price. Yet every day, customers make conscious decisions to buy the offering of one airline or computer manufacturer or jam maker over the others because of the unique attributes they trust to be true about their choice. Maybe they’re won over by the frequent flyer club options, service or warranty program, organic ingredients, or any of a zillion other distinguishing characteristics – the brand promises — that they understand and believe are worth premium pricing.

      As proof that brands lift offerings out of crowded commodity categories, look at the following examples:

      When you build a brand, you develop value, trust, preference, and the potential for higher prices and profit margins.

       Branding to cast your vision

      Your brand reflects the vision of the good that you aim to achieve. Just as the images on a country’s flag symbolize the core of what’s important to that culture and nation, your brand reflects the core of what’s important to you and your organization. It’s the banner that signifies what you’re passionate about, your fundamental values, what you aspire to achieve, and the promise on which you stake your reputation.

      A well-defined vision is important whether СКАЧАТЬ