Book Details
- Author:: [[Denise Lee Yohn]]
- Full Title:: What Great Brands Do – The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate The Best From the Rest
- Book Type:: Kindle
Why
Brand building as a strategy has long term impact on the longevity and profitability of a company. While you cannot measure in quarterly or annual reports necessarily, it provides a guiding framework on how to build and grow a company
Short Summary
Great brands have a strong core. They are confident of who they are and what they stand for. They are not swayed by the trends of the season. Great brands attract customers, they don’t go chasing after them. Any minute detail that impacts the brand is of vital importance. Brand building is a marathon that never ends and successful brands keep at it. Brand building is the same as building a business.
Long Summary
- [[Brand]] is what your company does and how you do it. It’s your unique way of doing business. They are complete strategic platforms (Brand as business)
- Advertising or marketing that is divorced from the realities of the company’s actual offering is counterproductive.
7 Brand-Building Principles:
1. Great brands start inside
- Put internal brand culture first
- Make culture matter
- Using a [[Brand]] tool box for brand management #Tools
- Brand strategy explanation – background and rationale that provides context
- Principles & guidelines that deliver brand values and attributes to the outside world
- Sample applications of brand expression and delivery
- Guides that walk people through important decisions
- Increasing [[Brand]] understanding through Brand Engagement Sessions #Tools
- Presentation of the brand platform followed by discussions, games, interactive exercises
- Get employees excited about working on the brand and help them identify decisions and behaviors aligned to the brand
- Address common misconception that brand building is the job of marketing people
- Organize a “Brand Day” by gathering all the employees/stakeholders
- “Models of success” – cross functional groups research nd discover best brand building steps taken by other brands and apply it to the company
- “Breakthrough sessions” – where department teams identify how to align their work
- Extend your brand building culture externally and align stakeholders
- Culture drives business – benefits of culture must be felt and benefited by customers
- Execute first, communicate later
2. Great brands avoid selling
- Emotions first, product features second
- Emotional brand building requires you to develop a personal dialogue with your customers on issues that are most meaningful to them
- Discovering insights at the moment of truth:
- Segment the market based on customer’s needs instead of the usual demographic segmentation
- Connect at the moments when these needs are the greatest
- What business is your brand in?
- Google – organizing information
- USPS – connecting communities
- Airlines – business productivity
- Mapping your brand #Tools
- Traditional v/s new competitive landscape map
- eg: Food product
3. Great brands ignore trends
- Avoid “-er positioning” problem which puts you just a better version of something
- Challenge “business as usual” approach
- THE BUSINESS VERSION of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building? (Location 236)
- Ideas = possibilities x constraints x uncertainties #[[Mental Formulas]]
- Challenging conventions
- Anticipating & advancing cultural movements
- Looking to horizon – scanning, listening and forecasting
- Performing a Brand Diagnostic #Tools #[[Brand Audit]]
- Look at your brand through 3 lenses:
- Customers – needs/wants #[[Buyer Persona]] #[[Audience]]
- Context – Competitors
- Company – Core ideology, Core purpose [[Brand Purpose]], Core values [[Brand Values]], strategies [[Brand Strategy]] and tactics [[Brand Tactics]]
- Steps involved in a brand diagnostic
- Research & analysis
- Interviews with employees, stakeholders and customers
- Investigative audit of brand experiences [[Audit]]
- [[Social Media Audit]]
- Look at your brand through 3 lenses:
4. Great brands don’t chase customers
- Segment markets and find customers who have a natural brand affinity
- Great brands put brands (not customers) at the center of their customer strategy
- “Lighthouse approach” vs “Spotlight approach”
- A strong brand identity attracts the ideal customer
- Using Need-States to identify target segments #Tools #Audience
- Need state = purchase attitudes + purchase occassions
- Need state answers the “why”
- Building a brand platform with a competitive brand positioning #Tools #Positioning #[[Mental Formulas]]
- Strategic [[Brand Platform]] = [[Brand Identity]] + Brand Positioning
- For X, we are the A who does B, because of C
- X – #[[Buyer Persona]]
- A – Frame of reference. #Analogies – Mental file folder
- B – Unique value delivered
- C – Reason why customers believe you deliver value
5. Great brands sweat the small stuff
- Brand expression is in the details
- Attention to detail is not about being obsessive compulsive, but being intentional
- Visualizing your Brand Touchpoints #Tools [[Brand Touchpoints]]
- Audit all the company’s external communication and interactions
- Organize into before purchase, at purchase and after purchase
- Add non-customer interactions
- Organize all static touchpoints like ads, packaging
- Human touchpoints like sales and customer support
- Interactive touchpoints like social media and websites
- List all departments and processes responsible for each
- Identify gaps, estimate cost to reduce gap and prioritise
- #Download
- Audit all the company’s external communication and interactions
- Customer Experience Architecture #Tools [[Customer experience]]
- Brand platform – define what you want the brand to stand for
- Customer experience strategy – translate brand platform into an overall feeling you want customers to have
- Channel requirement & objectives – specific considerations & priorities for each channel
- Customer segments – delineate your target customers as they have different needs #[[Buyer Persona]]
- Prioritisation – Table – Channel requirements as columns x target segments as rows
- Each intersection is a business opportunity and discrete experience to design and deliver
- Assign values and priority
- Focus on synergies between intersections that have a knock on benefit
- Experience design – outline the tactic to meet the need in each channel and segment
- Assessment & integration – Look at overall integrity of the architecture & ensure its aligned to the brand
- Description – Use narrative, images, videos to convey vision for each priority customer experience
6. Great brands commit and stay committed
- Great brands have a core ideology
- Preserve the core; preserve the business
- Leads to commitment and focus
- Commitment leads to dilemma of growth vs brand integrity
- Pitfalls of focus if you become customer focused, marketing focused, sales focused or tech focused.
- Brand is the only focus
- 5 Ways to sharpen Brand focus #Tools
- Shoot a brand documentary
- Write brand’s obituary
- Analyze your using “BARATA”
- Benefit – tangible benefit of using your brand
- Attribute – specific feature that distinguishes your brand
- Role – function brand serves in customer’s lives
- Attitude – Strong voice or point of view of your brand
- Territory – place invoked by the brand
- Awareness – Brand as a visual icon
- Put your brand on trial
- For – brand is a formidable competitor
- Against – brand is a copycat
- Identify your brand’s archetypes
- Exercise 7: Brand Personality
- The Innocent – goodness, morality, nostalgia, childhood
- The Regular – regular person with a sense of belonging
- The Explorer – break with conventions, new experiences
- The Sage – educational, longevity of experience
- The Hero – solves difficult and socially significant problems
- The Outlaw – rebellious, caters to disenfranchised
- The Magician – transformative experiences
- The Lover – helps people connect with others – sensory and visceral
- The Jester – helps people have a good time
- The Caregiver – altruistic values, supports families
7. Great brands never have to “give back”
- From CSR to CSV (creating shared value)
- Creating Shared Value with Level5 Relevance Framework #Tools
- Industry relevance
- Community relevance
- Target relevance
- Brand positioning relevance
- Values relevance
Brand as business
- There is no gap in managing a brand and managin business
- Brand building is more important than branding
- Success factors in executing Brand-as-Business approach:
- Strategy implementation knowledge
- Implementation planning
- Process coordination
- Strategy translation
- Brand leadership shifts from strategic to orchestration
