13 posts tagged “branding”

Yep, another of those "you can have any two of the three" type scenarios (quality-service-price) is out. Of course, if you position yourself in the middle, no one will even know you are there. You can find it at Branding & Marketing.

Some research reported on Marketing & Strategy Innovation says if the product or service is complex, give the buyer a simple reason to go with you. On the other hand, simple products and services need more complex approaches - mainly to separate that product or service from the herd. One thing I did not see in this summary of the research was the amount of decision-making as dictated by the cost of the buy.

Turns out they are a good market for the drug, but the real story from Proctor & Gamble is about making sure your employees - not just the marketing department know who your customers are. They will decide what your brand is, not you, and dictate to you what drives trust and decision making. Take that, you branding know-it-alls! 

Over at Caffeine Marketing, this myth - branding is primarily a function of communications - has been laid to rest. Essentially, brand building IS a function of all of the Four Ps. The relative weight of each of the Ps will vary product to product and company to company depending upon the nature of the product. 

I missed the first iteration of this back in November, but an article in Media 2.0 on brand promiscuity led me back to the possible source at The Economic Times where Marian Salzman says, "The term 'brand slut', which I began using in ernest last winter . . . half-jokingly refers to a faithless consumer with little brand loyalty -- one who belongs to everybody and nobody." Marketing Canapes wonders if there is an adequate way of telling the difference between a brand slut and someone, like me, who sees several brands as being indistinguishable and goes from one to anotherbased on price or other criteria? Ms. Salzamn would erroneously refer to me as a brand slut. I am not. I am indifferent. MC is wondering why she went to the word "slut" instead of "indifferent?" Ahhh, her 15 minutes of fame.

Brandcurve covers Smallbusinessbrandingblog.com giving some interesting numbers on customers abandoning a brand: 43% of customers who leave a brand do so due to poor service, 77% of those people blame poor employee attitudes, and then, to top it all off, 83% of people who have bad service tell someone else. Not only that, as I have posted before, they will YouTube you. It is not how many people they tell directly, but the cascading that may occur.  

The International Herald Tribune posts, "For many, many decades, successful branding — one of the corporate world's holy grails — involved a clear set of rules: Produce quality goods at the right price. Frame the value in memorable messages seen by millions on television and in print. Then fine-tune the pitch by measuring sales and evaluating consumer responses through letters, phone calls, focus groups and surveys." Then, they remark: "But the branding game has changed radically, largely because of the myriad choices the Internet provides consumers and because of the economic influence of widespread Web pontificating, known as the blogosphere, which barely existed as a popular force until about four years ago." And finally, ". . .a straightforward question confronts brandmeisters: who wins and who loses as time- tested practices of mass production and mass marketing are undermined by the often-cranky voices of the knowledge age?" 

Brandcurve has a riff on branding that says, while the name IS important, it is a drop in the bucket of everything that goes into branding. 

Branding & Marketing reports, "Your brain may be determining what car you buy before you've even taken a test drive. A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains."

Goodness gracious, we marketers sure have our fill of tools to work with ranging from the 4P's, 3C's, plus this and that and so on and so forth. One of the old standbys, AIDA - awareness, interest, desire, action has been updated because there are two more levels needed to really make a brand work and work right. So, we have Agent Wildfire's Hierarchy of Evangelism (via BuzzCanuck). You need to make the customer move up to advocacy and then to evangelism/zealots. So, you end up with a five-step process. Here is what it looks like: 

Scale