“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”
I'm going to take a week break from the sports angle to talk about a book I just read for my Marketing Management class that discusses the topic we covered with a guest speaker we had last been about branding. The Brand Gap, a whiteboard overview by Marty Neumeier explains how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. The main focus of Neumeier was the five disciplines to branding: differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, and cultivate. Just a brief overview of the five points he touched on are as follows:
Differentiation: If a company adds too many different unrelated products and services to their line than the brand can get stuck because their message can be overshadowed by all the different products and services. The way our cognitive system works allows differentiation to be possible. Out of all our senses, vision is the one we rely on the most for differentiation. With our sight we are able to tell the difference between new product, packaging, and layouts.
Collaboration: Differentiation depends on co-development according to Jane Jacobs in her book “The Nature of Economics". It takes not only the work of executives and marketing people, but also strategy consultants, design firms, advertising agencies, research companies, PR firms, industrial designers, environmental designers, and many more to develop a brand. A brand cannot come to be without the help of thousands of people. Peter Drucker says: “the most important shift in business today is from “ownership” to “partnership”, and from “individual tasks” to “collaboration”.”
Innovation: Creativity is the heart of innovation. The more creativity you have in a company the more identifiable your brand becomes, which in essence is innovation. Companies get nervous by this word because creativity is a risky thing when you don’t know how consumers will respond. If a company makes changes with wanting to update their logo, or have a new campaign it could either make or break the company. Gap is a good example of this, out of no where they changed their logo after years of building their image with the simple navy blue box. Then without any warning they changed this logo, consumers hated it. Not only after the millions they spent on their new image, but they also lost customer loyalty. Since Gap was such a huge company they were able to bounce back from the loss, however this is not always the case with every company.
Validate: Everyone wants to have validation that their idea will be well received or accepted. A lot of brands and companies will have focus groups, surveys to sample a certain demographic that they maybe targeting for their products and services. Movies and music are one of the biggest industries with advertising months in advance to a release date. This allows them to see if the consumers are interested in what is to come. I will never forget when Beyonce dropped her album last year with no warning, no advertisement. No one knew that she even had a album in the works. With her brand being so strong, she had no problem being on the top of the charts for multiple weeks and selling millions of albums.
After the differentiation, collaboration, innovation, and validation you then need to be able to cultivate your brand. Cultivation is the process of instilling brand values throughout the organization. This is internal branding. Using these five steps with branding your product and service can make a huge difference with establishing your brand and setting your brand apart from the rest.
Just Kicking It,
Kristina
I'm going to take a week break from the sports angle to talk about a book I just read for my Marketing Management class that discusses the topic we covered with a guest speaker we had last been about branding. The Brand Gap, a whiteboard overview by Marty Neumeier explains how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. The main focus of Neumeier was the five disciplines to branding: differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, and cultivate. Just a brief overview of the five points he touched on are as follows:
Differentiation: If a company adds too many different unrelated products and services to their line than the brand can get stuck because their message can be overshadowed by all the different products and services. The way our cognitive system works allows differentiation to be possible. Out of all our senses, vision is the one we rely on the most for differentiation. With our sight we are able to tell the difference between new product, packaging, and layouts.
Collaboration: Differentiation depends on co-development according to Jane Jacobs in her book “The Nature of Economics". It takes not only the work of executives and marketing people, but also strategy consultants, design firms, advertising agencies, research companies, PR firms, industrial designers, environmental designers, and many more to develop a brand. A brand cannot come to be without the help of thousands of people. Peter Drucker says: “the most important shift in business today is from “ownership” to “partnership”, and from “individual tasks” to “collaboration”.”
Innovation: Creativity is the heart of innovation. The more creativity you have in a company the more identifiable your brand becomes, which in essence is innovation. Companies get nervous by this word because creativity is a risky thing when you don’t know how consumers will respond. If a company makes changes with wanting to update their logo, or have a new campaign it could either make or break the company. Gap is a good example of this, out of no where they changed their logo after years of building their image with the simple navy blue box. Then without any warning they changed this logo, consumers hated it. Not only after the millions they spent on their new image, but they also lost customer loyalty. Since Gap was such a huge company they were able to bounce back from the loss, however this is not always the case with every company.
Validate: Everyone wants to have validation that their idea will be well received or accepted. A lot of brands and companies will have focus groups, surveys to sample a certain demographic that they maybe targeting for their products and services. Movies and music are one of the biggest industries with advertising months in advance to a release date. This allows them to see if the consumers are interested in what is to come. I will never forget when Beyonce dropped her album last year with no warning, no advertisement. No one knew that she even had a album in the works. With her brand being so strong, she had no problem being on the top of the charts for multiple weeks and selling millions of albums.
After the differentiation, collaboration, innovation, and validation you then need to be able to cultivate your brand. Cultivation is the process of instilling brand values throughout the organization. This is internal branding. Using these five steps with branding your product and service can make a huge difference with establishing your brand and setting your brand apart from the rest.
Just Kicking It,
Kristina