Brand Strategy Tag

August 27, 2014 In Branding, Corporate, Health, Higher Education, Identity, Identity and Brand Strategy, Video By Carlie Danielson

Why Large, Complex Organizations Need a Strong Brand Identity

If you read a lot of the branding and naming advice that’s out there on the Internet, it would be easy to think that the only time an organization should worry about its brand identity is when it is first getting started. What should you name your company? How should you position it against competitors? These are important questions for startups and new brands, but the truth is that large, complex organizations are just as often in need of identity strategy.

August 21, 2014 In Brand Research By Philip Durbrow

The Smart Way to Use Market Research

In agency life there is a spectrum of projects that range from all-research on one end to all-creative on the other. I could never sell Steve Jobs research. He didn’t want to hear about it. And it was the same with Steven Spielberg. Both men had gut feelings about what they wanted. And all the research in the world wasn’t going to change that.

Now, if you’re working with visionaries of their caliber, you might be able to proceed with huge costly projects based on their gut feeling.

But that’s not the reality for most of us. The question is, then, when should you use research, and how much research should you do?

Market research is expensive. It adds cost and takes time, but it also reduces risk. So it’s important to understand how to allocate your research budget to different types of projects.

July 2, 2014 In Identity, Identity and Brand Strategy, Video By Philip Durbrow

The Benefit of Organizational Identity

Having worked on more than 300 identity programs over the course of our careers—for all types of clients, ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies like GE, Boeing, Apple and Walt Disney—we’ve seen that the value of a strong brand identity cannot be underestimated. It can be the difference between success and failure for an organization, no matter how big or small.

From marketing and advertising to operations, investments and recruiting, everything you do begins with identity. It’s the organizing principle that makes your organization unique and meaningful. And because it is of such strategic importance, a strong identity drives tremendous value through your organization.

We recently made a video that distills our thinking about the value of organizational identity—why it’s important and what it can do for you.

Please take a look and share to anyone you think might be interested in learning more about why identity matters.

June 25, 2014 In Branding, Consumer, Identity and Brand Strategy, Positioning Strategy By @MarshallStrategy

Relevance: A Brand’s Fountain of Youth

Recently I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Leah Garchik. She recapped a story that involved a pilot, who, while navigating a flight to the East Coast, suggested over the intercom that passengers look out the window for a scenic “Kodak moment.” As Garchick reported, one flight attendant then asked, “What’s Kodak?”

Once a ubiquitous tagline, “A Kodak Moment” made its way into casual speech to describe a moment worth remembering, but awareness of Kodak’s popular tagline, as well as its brand relevance today, has almost completely evaporated.

This is a huge lesson. Success can be fleeting, even for the most iconic brands; The question is, how can you prevent that from happening?

May 28, 2014 In Audits, Brand Architecture, Brand Research, Branding, Higher Education By Ken Pasternak

Managing Brand Complexity: Staying Ahead of the Curve

Large companies—like GE, Google, Samsung and others—know this law of branding firsthand: As you grow in size, you will grow in complexity. Acquisitions, organic growth, market segmentation and product and service extensions all add complexity to brand portfolios. How should large successful brands such as these manage brand complexity?

Growing companies realize they need to support the strength and cohesiveness of their corporate identities, while also accommodating the needs of their individual brands and sub-brands. We call this “brand balance.” This balance gets harder to control as you grow; there is a very real complexity curve that gets steeper with a company’s size. To remain successful as you grow, it is important to learn how to stay ahead of this complexity curve.

January 10, 2014 In Positioning By @MarshallStrategy

Brand Positioning: What to Convey vs. What to Say

Jean-Claude Van Damme does the splits When it comes to branding positioning and messaging, there’s a fundamental distinction between “the idea” and “the message.”

We sometimes work with clients who come to us for positioning help, but then ask us to tell them what to say as their message. This typically happens after we’ve worked together to drill down what their complex organization does into a single, compelling idea. We’ve helped them articulate who they are, what they do and why they matter to their critical audiences, and it’s at this point where they run into trouble. We hear comments such as, “this positioning statement doesn’t just roll off the tongue.” Our clients are hoping they can take the positioning statement we’ve given them and simply drop it as messaging language into communication material. It doesn’t work like that.

Positioning vs. Copy
The position of your company sets you apart from everyone else. Used strategically, positioning should be the foundation for the messaging and communication that comes next, such as taglines and tactical advertising slogans. Positioning is internal and timeless—it is what you want to convey holistically, not what you literally say in each communication piece.

The message you then put forth should reflect your position and target the key opportunities and audiences you want to address. If every message comes from a common conceptual foundation and engages with its target audience in relevant ways, the effect of the brand will be greater than just the sum of its parts.

A good example of this is when Volvo Trucks wanted to highlight the precision and dynamics of Volvo Dynamic Steering in 2013. Volvo produced a memorable commercial featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits between two moving semitrailer trucks. Volvo is famously positioned around safety; the ad effectively conveyed both the company’s positioning and the key point they wanted their customers to understand using inspired, memorable imagery.

Tips for a successful positioning/messaging relationship

Treat your positioning as your galvanizing idea. Once you’ve identified what you want to convey, you can take creative latitude to express it based on specific communication needs.
Don’t use positioning as your communication boilerplate. You should always be thinking of what you want your audience to understand, instead of simply looking for language you can plug in.

When used effectively, positioning and messaging takeaways are the litmus test for brand communications. They help guide communications—they are the key ideas, not the literal words.

October 4, 2013 In Brand Architecture, Branding, Positioning Strategy By @noblestudios

The Brand Impact of Mergers

Last year saw a n ear-record high in M&A activity, which at $3.5 Trillion was the highest activity recorded in seven years, according to the New York Times. Tiny startups (WhatsApp: $19 Billion) and major blue chip companies (DirecTV: $49 Billion) were swallowed up by larger acquirers for astronomical sums.

The conventional wisdom fueling these buying sprees goes like this: once a company gets to a certain size, organic growth becomes very difficult to sustain. Acquiring into new areas or capabilities is a much faster route to growth in revenues, capabilities, and ideally profitability.

But what happens to brand value in these transactions? How should brands be managed to retain or augment their combined value? Which company gets to keep its brand name and promise, and what happens to the other? In our experience, too few companies invest in the upfront strategic thinking and decisions required to get full brand value, and hence business value, out of their mergers.

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April 27, 2012 In Consumer, Technology By Marshall Strategy

When Corporate Brand Strategy & Company Culture Collide, Culture Wins

Hal King of King Brown Partners has said of corporate brand strategy, “When strategy and culture collide, culture always wins.”

Those words ring true in today’s marketplace. Having a corporate brand strategy is essential for a business, but it is not enough if the enterprise is unwilling to embrace change and modify behaviors to align with customers’ needs, to keep the brand relevant.

Two stalwarts of the consumer products industry have recently suffered the fallout of the strategy/culture collision, and yet another appears to be facing a similar fate. Kodak recently filed bankruptcy, Sony posted its worst annual operating loss in company history, and now Best Buy is on the ropes with a huge first-quarter loss.

Neither Kodak nor Sony was ambivalent about changing times. Both companies made strong statements about where they needed to go, yet neither appeared prepared to steer their corporate cultures in that direction. On the other hand, Best Buy continues to cling to the culture that earned the retail giant its reputation of a big-box powerhouse in the 1990s, ignoring major changes in consumer buying habits in the process.

Kodak’s downfall was blamed on its inability to make the leap to digital media. But Kodak has been positioning itself as a digital imaging company for more than a decade. Why was it unsuccessful? Because at its core, Kodak is a chemical company whose culture embraced film coatings and processing. When digital media came along, Kodak rebranded itself as a digital imaging company, but the move took it further away from its chemistry-based roots, and company culture could not adapt.

The Sony brand faces similar challenges. Sony has spent billions of dollars marketing itself as an entertainment company, yet has not been able to make the transition in the eyes of the consumer or its employees, who still see it as a manufacturer of premium hardware.

Best Buy may be next. The culture of the company is deeply rooted in consumer choice and selection at its retail stores, but it is exactly this choice that dooms the company; consumers now choose to buy their movies, music, and electronic equipment online. They no longer comparison shop in stores, they comparison shop on the internet, and Best Buy is not a value leader in online sales.

In contrast with these companies is Amazon. Amazon has grown from the world’s largest bookstore into the world’s largest retailer, and is now extending its brand to hardware (the Kindle e-Reader) and cloud computing and storage. Since it began, Amazon’s brand strategy and organizational culture have always been aligned with customer satisfaction, scale, and delivery. This enables them to remain a global player, even in changing economic conditions.

We believe strongly in brand-driven business strategy. What that means is, a solid corporate brand strategy should inspire a company to be have in a certain way. This requires cultural resonance. If those new behaviors aren’t imbued or embraced, the strategy will likely fail. The longevity of a brand relies on a culture within the corporation that thrives on meeting customers’ needs at every level, while at the same time retaining core values.

February 20, 2012 In Blog By Marshall Strategy

The Fallout of a Flip-Flop: When Brands Gets Political

Any brand that thinks it is above reproach need only look back as far as the recent Susan G. Komen Foundation debacle for a taste of reality. Organizations out of step with their audience find themselves foundering in the wake of public outcry when business decisions appear to be based in politics. Komen, arguably the most visible women’s health advocacy group in existence today, spent last week backtracking and apologizing to constituents and supporters for political missteps it made not once, but twice. The first when it apparently bowed to political pressures from the right to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, and the second when it apparently bowed again, this time to political pressure from the left, to restore funding.

The original decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood appears to have been based on an existing internal policy. But the move outraged supporters, convinced it was politically driven. The Foundation was inundated with angry emails, tweets, and Facebook posts. After two days of threats, resignations, and retracted pledges, Komen ceded and reinstated funding for the organization, sparking a second wave of anger from the other side.[1]

The fervor has since died down, but the damage left behind to the Komen Foundation’s brand is irrevocable. Contributors who, in the past, may have had concerns about the Foundation’s political affiliations but chose to overlook them for the betterment of women’s health are now voicing those concerns, and donations to the Foundation may never return to their former level. In addition, some of the past affiliations of the organization’s leaders are resurfacing, complements of media groups adamant to keep the controversy alive. This is slowing whatever recovery the organization expects to make as it responds to these new allegations.

Brands deliver a promise – what customers should expect from a product or service. When expectations and reality are not aligned, the promise is broken, and it can be very difficult to regain trust. If a brand does misstep and must reverse course, the reversal should be swift and apologetic, and make things better than they were before; not just return to the status quo. The Susan G. Komen Foundation was out of touch with its key audience, and failed to appropriately judge the response of its supporters to a politically-based decision, real or perceived. How the organization got to be so distant from its audience is a mystery, but in the minds of many, the Komen Foundation broke its core customer promise, and its trust among many may never be regained.

[1] “Who is Behind Susan G. Komen’s Split from Planned Parenthood,” Feb. 1, 2012, Nicholas Jackson

January 27, 2012 In Blog, Branding, Finance By Marshall Strategy

Three Key Brand Success Factors: Clarity, Relevance and Engagement

Every afternoon, we get an email called the Chart of the Day from the Silicon Alley Insider, a unit of the larger content publisher Business Insider. This chart is always current, relevant, topical, and easy to digest in under a minute. A minute is about the amount of time that we give it each day, but we remember these charts, and the simple points they make, and find ourselves referring back to them often.

These charts tell a simple story, visually, relevantly, and succinctly. They tell us who is responsible for the most bandwidth usage on the Internet (Netflix by far), where Apple’s astounding revenues come from (iPhone more than 50%) and who pays the most for software developers (Facebook, $110K). They never try to do any more beyond connecting the reader to a deeper article in which he or she may be interested.

These Charts of the Day, while highly focused and specific, represent a clear, relevant and engaging promise – one that can be delivered every day with consistency. Each chart tells different brand success stories, but the overall promise, of a quickly digestible snapshot into the business of technology, is fulfilled every time.

It is a helpful exercise to look at brands like this, and to consider the questions, “What is the promise we can make with our brand that gives us the flexibility to deliver over time, and the challenge to continue to fulfill customer expectations?” and “How can my brand deliver on its promise in a clear, relevant and engaging way, every day?” and, in this particular case, “If I had only one minute to deliver value to my customers, what would I say?” When brands get this right, customers recognize, appreciate and remember the value they create.