In the previous post, 4 Sure-fire Ways To Screw Up Your Brand, we looked at ways a brand management strategy could go awry. In a continuation of this series, we will look at ways to mitigate brand risk and protect your brand’s mind share.
Read the market pulse. Well, sounds clichéd but if there was ever a Brand Management 101 this is it. Ask customers. Drop in on channel partners. Chat with your advertising agencies. Peek into online discussion forums. Keep a tab on analysts views and reviews in print. Keep the hotlines to your marketing departments hot. You will be surprised how much ground your brand can cover if a realistic and holistic perspective is taken.
Go for wallet-share. There was a period in the last decade when this mantra had been accorded a quiet burial. With the recent economic downturn and consequent tightening of purse strings, the concept is resurrecting itself.
The customer of today is willing to spend but selectively and on items of real value. He is beyond stereotypical definitions of product form factor or service levels, and does not really care who or what solves his problem. Video conferencing solutions are denting occupancy rates in the aviation sector. Social media optimization providers are eating into conventional marketing agencies’ share of the marketing spend pie. Cost effective cloud computing services have begun replacing traditional licensed software. Reference-based hiring is going up in the budgetary preferences of many organizations at the expense of recruitment partners.
Brands that do not take cognizance of this trend and reinvent themselves stand the risk of being commoditized at best or making themselves obsolete at worst. Ford, for example, is tagging itself as a “mobility solutions provider” and no longer as an automobile maker. AT&T is working with utility companies to provide wireless meter reading services using their machine to machine (M2M) communications services suite.
Message – Mileage - Media - Moment. Break down your marketing mix into components relevant from a brand manager’s perspective. Stringently analyze your core marketing message and centrifuge out all fillers that add no real information while ensuring the resultant message itself has high in-market relevance. Develop a time-space heat map to chart out instances (media and moments) where your message is exposed to the market and see if that’s ideal given the brand’s strengths and the market’s preferences and buying patterns. Lastly, check if the branding strategy is giving the kind of return on investment (mileage) that was envisaged in the drawing board phase. The returns on marketing spend in this case must ideally approximate a form of Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns.
The Blind Test in reverse. This is an exercise that is likely to throw up some intriguing results. Ask people you know to sample your brand and describe it in three words. Then ask them to describe it in three lines. If these do not approximate your brand’s punchline and marketing message, you have work on your hands. The best people to approach for this random sampling would be people in your own organization who are not connected to marketing or branding activities. You could also approach those in your close personal networks for a more unbiased voice.
These four simple devices can help a brand manager extract the biggest bang for his buck and build a robust brand identity or corporate identity framework. Managing your brand is all about staying attuned to your customer and ensuring that change becomes a habit, not an afterthought.
