Toluu

Branding Strategy Insider

The Branding Blog

Marketing Mistakes, Marketing LessonsToday

Long ago and far away, I started my career at General Electric. It was the early 1960s and, in hindsight, it was a wonderful time. Competition, as we know it, just didn't exist.

GE's main full-line competitor was a company called Westinghouse, but by today's standards, it was barely a real one. Westinghouse was a player, but GE actually saw the company more as a necessity. If that competition ever went away, the government would pounce on GE to break its hold on "electricity."

Back then, nobody really worried much about mistakes because CEOs figured they would be able to get any lost business back in the end. (Jack Welch hadn't yet arrived at GE. After he took over, everyone worried a lot more about mistakes.)

What's Changed

Today there are so many competitors that they quickly take your business if you make a mistake. Your chances of getting it back are slim unless someone else in turn makes a mistake. Hoping for competitors to make mistakes is like running a race with the hope that other racers will fall down. It isn't a very smart strategy.

Even worse is the large number of participants in each race. Every category is haunted by what I call the "tyranny of choice." Consumers have so many choices that one false step brings not just one, but an army of competitors to take advantage of your misstep. And what's especially tragic is that you don't get that business back. It's gone. Does General Motors come to mind?

Now let’s take a look

Building A Brand CommunityYesterday

Even though it may seem a simple marketing concept, building brand communities that resonate with loyal customers is indeed a Herculean task. There are four defining characteristics that allow companies to actively involve customers in creating communities around their brands. Each are essential in building brand communities.

   1. Create a strong brand story/myth: Brands in today’s world are not mere inanimate ‘things’ but thriving entities with identities and personalities that allow customers to express themselves through its consumption. As such, to attract customers to it and encourage them to actively participate in varied branding activities, brands must have a strong story or myth that customers can easily identify and relate to. A story/myth not only provides authenticity to the brand but also allows customers to express their sense of self through the consumption of the brand.

   2. Create a need for collaboration among consumers: For a community to be actively adopted, customers must feel a need to connect with each other in the context of the brand’s consumption. A need to connect with other brand users can arise for a number of reasons such as:

         1. Sharing information – Members of many video game communities, technical products communities become members in the first instance because such communities allow members to share information with others and learn many technical details easily.
         2. V

One Fighter Brand Strategy That Just Might WorkDecember 1

The marketer who is bored with the world's 4th largest retailer is bored with life. If you have been into a Tesco store recently, you will already have seen a new line gracing its aisles. The 'discount brands at Tesco' range has been hailed by chief executive Terry Leahy as the biggest change in the brand's offering in more than a decade.

The range includes 34 brands across 400 categories. Among them are Country Barn cornflakes, Mermaid Buy fish fingers, Gold Sun vitamins and Shanghai Garden sauces. According to commercial director Richard Brasher, Tesco has seen 'an opportunity between the various levels to make sure there is a different proposition for consumers'.

In the 'good, better, best' own-label triptych that Tesco made famous, the discount range is priced above its Value line, but below branded offerings.

The products look more Aldi than Tesco. The German retailer has traditionally avoided using its own brand name on any of its products, instead using a house of brands architecture featuring two-dimensional brand names such as Tundra Bleach and Golden Nectar Honey, which it invents with the help of the major manufacturers who supply the products.

This approach is typical in Germany, where the name of the store is rarely used on private-label goods. The array of brand names also helps foster the illusion of choice in a store that usually contains fewer than 1000 stock-keeping units, of which 9

Blazing Trails to Brand LeadershipNovember 30

How come some brands are great, while others just manage to be good? Is there a trick up the sleeves of those great brands – a trick that good sustainable brands can adopt to become great household names?
The answer is yes.

Happily, the financial investment required to adopt this trick is modest. The biggest investment has nothing to do with your marketing budget, and everything to do with your readiness to change the way you manage and grow your brand.

The ironic fact is that the key tool to building a great brand is your competition, because your competition makes your brand stronger. As my dad used to say, if you want to get ahead of the leader, don’t follow his tracks in the snow. Too many brands have become obsessed with their competitors, shadowing and imitating their moves and becoming nothing more than ‘me2’ brands. Often practicalities necessitate this apparent uniformity. You’ll know that milk, water, cheese and countless other items come in similar packaging. These are groceries which, undifferentiated, offer the same benefits as each other. Price often motivates the purchase. And then, from time to time, a product stands out.

Remember Listerine? The mouthwash your grandparents probably used? With a history of over 100 years – first created in 1865 - Listerine is a product which has seen nothing but steady increases in its market share of the mouthwash category. Yet, that category has been diminishing and, with it , Listerineâ

David Ogilvy: Direct vs CreativeNovember 29

One of the greatest advertising geniuses of the 20th century was David Ogilvy.

Although he was the head of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, he sided firmly with direct advertising over creative advertising.

Here is an excerpt from a speech he gave to advertising executives in Paris where he laid out the difference between the two approaches and why, in his opinion, direct advertising is the more effective form:.

“There is a yawning chasm between you generalists and we directs. We directs belong to a different world. Your gods are not our gods.

“You generalists pride yourselves on being creative – whatever that awful word means. You cultivate the mystique of creativity. Some of you are pretentious poseurs. You are the glamour boys and girls of the advertising community. You regard advertising as an art form – and expect your clients to finance expressions of your genius. We directs do not regard advertising as an art form. Our clients don’t give a damn whether we win awards at Cannes. They pay us to sell their products. Nothing else.

“You must be the most seductive salesmen in the world if you can persuade hard headed clients to pay for your kind of advertising. When sales go up, you claim credit for it. When sales go down, you blame the product. We in direct response know exactly to the penny how many products we sell with each of our advertisements. Your favourite music is the applause of your fellow art directors and copywr