New York Advertising Agency & Marketing Directory: Albany Buffalo Hudson Valley Long Island NYC Rochester Southern Tier Syracuse Utica Westchester
|
|
|||||
Brand management cannot succeed without research. Brand Creation -- Research uncovers the underlying customer values, attitudes, needs, motivations and perceptions that lead to a brand's positioning. It identifies competitors' strengths and weaknesses, helping you further differentiate your brand from the competition, and perhaps even allowing you to reposition their brands to your brand's advantage. Research can help you identify the most powerful brand identity configuration, one that delivers the highest recognition and recall and the most positive associations. It can help you choose the advertising execution that best meets your brand's objectives. Research will help you determine the most advantageous pricing strategy for your brand. It can also help you determine the optimal mix of product/service attributes that deliver the greatest customer value for the least cost. Brand Management -- Ongoing brand equity monitoring can help you identify ways to strengthen your brand's equity and customer's loyalty to the brand. It can also help you identify when the brand might need to be repositioned to remain vital. A wide variety of brand equity components should be monitored in this process -- from awareness, relevance, differentiation, value and accessibility to emotional connection, vitality, preference, personality and other key associations. Brand Growth -- Research significantly increases the probability of success when entering new geographic markets with a brand. And research is essential in maximizing the likelihood of success when extending the brand into new product and service categories. In summary, research is essential to your brand's success as you create, manage and grow it. I will devote the next several columns to the effective use of research in each step of the brand management process. This will include a discussion of the different research methodologies available and the most important considerations when using them. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is especially true of a brand and its equity. A robust brand equity measurement system will accomplish the following objectives:
These brand insistence drivers work together to move customers from being aware of your brand and preferring your brand to purchasing your brand and being loyal to your brand. The next chart shows how this works
We recommend that brand equity measurement studies:
Typical brand positioning map plotting importance of various brand benefits against delivery of those benefits by different brands
Social Networking and Consumer Power The emergence of social networking on the Internet (MySpace, LinkedIn, facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) has led to new brand building opportunities and perils. While brands can take advantage of these networks to promote themselves (see the iPod video at YouTube), these same networks have given individuals increased power to make their own positive and negative statements about brands. For instance, view what a disgruntled Comcast customer communicated about Comcast on YouTube. Brand marketers would do well to constantly monitor these social networks for references to their brands. At a minimum, they would learn allot about how customers perceive and use their brands. If they are fortunate, they may also be able to address/diffuse potentially disastrous references to their brands before they become ‘viral.’ ‘It's great to have a strong brand customers love and are happy to pay a premium for, but when a brand gets overextended, underadvertised, overpriced or develops other problems, few entrepreneurs know what to do. In Brand Aid (Amacom, $24), author and marketing consultant Brad VanAuken goes a long way toward remedying these problems.’ By Mark Henricks, Entrepreneur Magazine, September 2003 Another Unusual Advertising Medium
Brad VanAuken is president and founder of BrandForward, Inc., a full-service brand management consultancy with clients throughout the world. Previously, Brad was the vice president of marketing for Element K, a leading e-learning company and director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards, Inc. During his tenure as Hallmark’s chief brand advocate, Hallmark received the Brand Management of the Year award. Recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on brand management and marketing, Brad is a much sought after speaker and writer. He wrote the books The Brand Management Checklist and Brand Aid. His free online brand management and marketing newsletter is read by thousands of marketers throughout the world. Brad has a BS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Email:
vanauken@brandforward.com
|
