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Blog posts tagged positioning
Sticking your brand together
February 24, 2010
Once set, you’ll need to ensure all of the things you can influence are glued together and working toward that unique brand positioning. If you're spending money on marketing materials with different straplines, changeable designs, copy that sounds different or doesn't match up to what you stand for, or products that don't match your brand promise then it's wasting the full potential of your marketing investment. People won’t recognise you, or understand what your brand is about.
Good strong brands do this well and are more stable because of it. Lets take Apple. They tirelessly work on creating innovative new products that work, that people love because of the way they work and because they are at the forefront of the latest technology. They just love making great stuff! So what do they do to back this up and support the positioning? Everything!
Their advertising, website and product brochures all fit together - you know it's Apple as soon as you see it. The products all look cool, even the accessories. Functionally people love to show the product off - look, it can do this! The shops, well they're cool too. And the people in them know their stuff, they help and reflect the brand. They run workshops in the shops on how to get the most out of the products, as well as the usual online support and video tutorials. You can even book time one on one with a ‘Genius' in their shops if you just want some help face-to-face. Everyone loves to show off the product because it's so good. It's just relentless pursuit of their brand positioning.
Apple have got their brand positioning and direction totally clear, and then they execute everything to support it ruthlessly and consistently. Take one area of the business and fail to deliver, or do something a bit different and things start to unravel. Done well, even knitting the simplest marketing activity together like a website, van, you and a business card, and you’ll see dividends.
Branding - let's start with the basics
January 27, 2010
A healthy and strong brand will stand above the competition, standing more chance of being chosen if it's not been tried before as well as having a loyal customer base once it's been purchased.
It all started with cows and making sure you could distinguish your cow from someone else's cow. That led to the most basic form of branding with a unique stamp on your cow's rear end region. With most businesses being a little more complicated than cows nowadays, branding and brand management have had to become more and more sophisticated.
Even now this rather more basic cow example of branding is what people think it's all about - the name and the logo. It's not that simple, and lots of different inputs from all around your business will work together to make up your brand. What is blissfully simple however is the benefit of a well managed, clearly thought through and strong brand. And that is the very catalyst behind the cow example above: being unique, standing out and being identifiable.
That's because a strong healthy brand can:
- Act as a short-cut to what your brand is and how it's different from the competition
- Stand for a central promise - a brand positioning
- Become familiar
This is all fairly critical to us humans, especially when you account for the fact that your average person is exposed to over 5000 messages each day. That's huge. People process information very quickly, and so you have to be at the top of your game to ensure your brand can cut through quickly, be understood, resonate and then become part of a consideration choice. Notice we haven't got to purchased yet!
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