BrandKnew February 2014

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by ISD Global

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07 11 Dear Friends: The New Year has made a frenetic beginning. Just as we were catching up and finishing tying up the loose ends of the year gone by, 2014 has hit us like an avalanche. January has whizzed past us. In this issue we look back and look ahead. Therefore you can soak in the features on The Best Perceived Brands of 2013 and The Most Successful Branding Stories of 2013 whilst looking ahead at The 5 Big Social Media Trends for 2014, What The Best Brands Will Do in 2014 and the Personal Branding Trends that we can witness in this year. We also take a look at good old Above The Line Advertising and why it still remains an pertinent branding tool while we also take in the importance of the ‘Creative Brief‘ and How to Achieve Results Driven Marketing Creatives. There is lots more packed in for you to savor. So until next month, here’s to happy Brand Knewing!

Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran ae.linkedin.com/pub/suresh-dinakaran/67/355/335/

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital Marketing Strategist: Mark Cijo Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

Above the line advertising. It is still a key tool for building brands What The Best Brands Will Do In 2014 Ecosystem management: why marketers must learn to think like ecologists Brief or Grief?

Personal Branding Trends for 2014 Why B-To-B Branding Matters More Than You Think Retail Brand Watch Using free stuff to build your brand without going broke Get Started Building Your Brand on Twitter The Best-Perceived Brands of 2013 Why So Many Companies Get Branding Wrong Is Your Brand’s Reputation Safe In Millennial Hands?

Results-Driven Marketing Creative: Efficient Creative Briefing The Top Branding Stories Of 2013 Five Big Social Media Trends for 2014 Book, Line & Sinker

Above the line advertising.

It is still a key tool for building brands Paul Feldwick

WHAT IS BRAND IDENTITY? Brand identity, as I shall use the term, is not a scientific construct that can be accurately defined or measured. It is more accurately seen as a metaphor. Just as individuals create and define themselves both internally and externally, so do brands.

A brand name, and the organisation or aspect of an organisation that it represents, is associated with a history, a defined position in the world, particular skills and talents and also weaknesses, certain characteristic behaviours which create the impression of a coherent ‘personality’, a life script or set of goals, and a value system.

In all these respects it is closely analogous to the human individual. The total of all these related elements is what I, following Professor Kapferer1 call the brand’s identity.

Not all brand names are associated with a strong or coherent identity, but those that are have two kinds of advantage.

Firstly, the identity focuses the efforts and intentions of all those who are responsible for producing and marketing the brand.

Secondly, and by way of the first, it creates distinctive and attractive perceptions of the brand in the minds of its customers (I am happy to call this by the traditional name of brand image). I have discussed what brands mean to consumers at length elsewhere2.

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I believe that there is an intimate relationship between the internal and external aspects of the brand’s identity. See Figure 1.

This may all sound very theoretical, but I hope it will become much more obvious if I give some illustrations. Here are three campaigns concerning which I have no privileged knowledge, but which I believe, first of all, are considered successful. In each case, I suggest that this advertising did not merely transform the way the public perceived the brand, but perhaps more importantly, changed the way the people working on the brand imagined it too. Thus becoming a catalyst to other aspects of behavioural change - customer service, product development and promotions, new product development.

Examples:

British Airways ‘Face’ It is easy to understand, I hope, that the external presentation of a brand should be driven by its internal goals and value systems, just as a person would dress and behave in a way that reflected how they feel and think about themselves. But it works the other way round, as well.

We all know how the way we dress can affect the way we feel and the way we think of ourselves; in fact we often consciously manipulate our mental states in this way, every time we put on a smart suit for a business encounter, or Bermuda shorts to get into a holiday mood. By changing our external appearance, we change not only the way we imagine ourselves, but also the way others respond to us, which in turn reinforces our changed self image. How often has someone said they ‘feel like a different person’, when they have some new clothes, or a new hairstyle? We can also change our internal, mental state by changing the way in which we behave, but often it is the change in something entirely external, like the new dress or the new spectacles, which acts as a catalyst to the other changes.

I now want to take this human analogy, and apply it back to brands. I suggest that the way a brand presents itself to the outside world has a similar intimate, two way relationship with its internal ways of behaving and its own ‘self image’.

Therefore, advertising or design (to name the two most important elements) are not only external representations of the brand’s internal identity; they are also potentially powerful ways of modifying or enhancing that identity, and can therefore influence other aspects of the brand’s behaviour. See Figure 2.

Tango ‘Slap’ Apple Macintosh ‘1984’ What’s going on here? In all these cases, advertising took an abstract, and therefore often a vague idea, or just a feeling, about where the brand aspired to position itself in the minds of its customers and its own staff. It then created words, images, and/or music that gave these vague ideas a specific and precise expression. In retrospect it is easy to tag these executions with a simple strategic phrase that seems appropriate, and explain what they’ve done:

British Airways: ‘world’s favourite’ Tango:’street cred/ lager values’ Apple Macintosh:’revolution’ But in each case, these words (if you can imagine them divorced from their executions) are vague, unconvincing, often clichs. In order to make people believe in them – and, importantly, this applies to people within the company, as well as its customers – they had to be turned into images.

Bill Bernbach once said. ‘Properly practised creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, urgent’.

I believe he could equally well have said this substituting the words ‘Brand Identity’ for ‘claims’.

Abstractions – and strategies are abstractions – are inert, clichs, general. Turning them into something else is the province of art.

I once went to a poetry workshop with the poet Carol Ann Duffy, who told us ‘remember we’re not in tell business, we’re in show business’.

When people start to write they use abstract, conventional language such as ‘I feel sad’. So what? You tell me how you feel – I’ve heard it a thousand times before, it doesn’t mean anything. But create images and I can share in a precise and immediate and unique emotional experience.

Effective brand advertising does precisely the same thing, the only difference is that it has a commercial objective in doing it.

Brand identity can be expressed often more powerfully in images and in music more powerfully than it could ever be in words. Walter Pater once wrote that

All Art aspires to the condition of music, meaning that art exists to express ideas that can’t be well expressed any other way. Someone once asked T.S. Eliot, what did you mean when you wrote the line,

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree? and he replied, ‘I think I meant something rather like – ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’. If it could have been said better in other words, he would have said it.

Here are two more campaigns that had a profound effect on the way brands were seen, externally and, I believe, internally, which resist paraphrasing in any other way.

Guinness ‘Life on Mars’ Volkswagen ‘Casino’, ‘Changes’ The overused word ‘surreal’ doesn’t begin to do justice to all the strands of meaning in the Rutger Hauer campaign. And I’ve spent many hours trying put into words what ‘Casino’ and ‘Changes’ say about Volkswagen: it’s certainly a great deal more than ‘reliability’, which was the starting point for the campaign. There are many ways of explaining it, many of them equally correct and all of them, ultimately, inadequate.

Because it can express things that can’t be said in other ways, advertising can often achieve things that at first glance appear impossible.

Consider the following three briefs: Make an anonymous brand of lager with a German name and advertising like this something lads want to be seen with in the pub Make a car that’s known for safety look exciting – but without compromising the reputation for safety!

Make a supermarket chain that’s seen as a poor me–three to Sainsbury and Tesco seem more warm and friendly than the other two.

If you can imagine these briefs without having any notion of

the advertising solutions, they sound like impossible dreams.

Hofmeister ‘Forest’ Volvo ‘Control Freak’ Safeway ‘ Harry’

CONCLUSIONS It’s not my object to criticise the concept of ‘integrated marketing’, nor the usefulness of any of the other marketing tools that exist. On the contrary: both I, and the agency I work for, believe that ‘integration’ is essential to effective brand identity building.

But when we talk of integration, let us not forget the unique role that traditional media advertising – especially in audio– visual media – has to play in the overall mix.

Advertising offers a unique combination of creative scope and creative control. You could not do any of the things we’ve just seen in a mailshot.

You could perhaps get a similar degree of dramatic impact by sponsoring an event, but you then lose control over much of the content.

And for all the talk of ‘new media’ and ‘advertising is dead’, nothing else offers the ability to address so many people, both internally and externally, so cheaply. It is this sense of a shared experience that enhances advertising’s ability to change the social meaning of a brand name.

Advertising has the ability to function as a catalyst, providing images that transform perceptions of the brand both among its consumers, and those who are responsible for delivering the brand to those consumers. So apart from its direct effects, it may have equally powerful indirect effects – what Stephen King once called increasing the ‘sale–ability’ of the brand. As a result, other marketing activities may become more productive. But more than this, all those involved with the brand - the staff who deal with the customers, the R&D people, the marketing groups, the other agencies who work on the brand – will share a clear and inspiring vision of how this brand is different.

It is difficult to fully quantify such effects from advertising.

But we need to recognise their importance if we are not to undervalue the real contribution that advertising can make to a brand’s performance.

What The Best Brands Will Do In 2014 Andreas von der Heydt

The pace of change, disruption, and fragmentation in many industries can sometimes overwhelm even the savviest and experienced of us. There is a very solid level of know-how and experience required to successfully drive marketing and brand strategies and to execute in excellence. Even more so in the future.

Let´s have a look at what I think the main focus areas and aspirations of successful brands will be in 2014: Being Best in Product and Services Development and Delivery At the heart of successful marketing and branding is – and also in 2014 and beyond will be- a great product and/or service creation and delivery. Successful brands, products, and services will have a higher level of personalization in order to become more relevant and meaningful to consumers. Besides rational features like quality, price, customer services, etc. the brand decision process will become more emotionally-driven.

Strong brands will identify and communicate appropriate emotional values to differentiate themselves and to establish close bonds with consumers and customers. More than ever, and to actively engage today´s high-expectation consumers, brand will need to be more focused to develop products and offers which grow the whole category they´re operating in and not only their own products.

Being Best in Collaboration In 2014 organizations and marketing managers need to quickly position themselves in this new open, and more collaborative economy. An economy characterized by speedy change and permanent disruption. On the one hand, brands from different industries will work more closely together. From R&D to joint marketing initiatives. On the other hand, the phenomenon of consumers co-creating content and products, and sharing ideas will continue to grow. For instance, Airbnb topped 10 million guest stays since its launch and now has 500k properties listed worldwide.

Being Best in Retail Brands, being confronted with showrooming, e-commerce and cost-conscious, always connected consumers, need to make retail more relevant to consumers and customers by combining off- and online elements into one single multichannel distribution strategy. They need to deliver direct

brand-to-customer interaction with the help of innovative technology (e.g. touch screens, sensors, interactive cameras, Wi-Fi- and 4G-connectivity, LCD screens), by providing opportunities to experience products (see, feel, touch, smell, hear, taste) before and during the purchasing process, by providing easy-to-understand and stimulating product presentations and merchandising solutions, by offering expert staff, consultation facilities, samples, etc. Good examples are Nike, Wal-Mart, and Ikea.

Being Best in Communication Content is king. That´s nothing new anymore. Still, many brands seem to confuse quantity and quality, since there exist so many exciting communication channels and platforms. Just writing up keyword rich blog posts and some articles don’t cut it anymore. Brands have to say something meaningful and insightful to customers while entertaining them at the same time.

There is a great need and opportunity to develop unique brand experiences that engage consumers deeply and comprehensively, that stimulates word of mouth, and that generates a lot of user-generated content. Further business impact will come from very targeted niche communities from co-operations with credible and influential brand advocates.

Utilizing storytelling techniques - while getting away from the transactional relationship – is a very powerful technique and will help to create a strong emotional bond with your customer. Storytelling, although one of the main business buzzwords in 2013, is nothing new and is very much at the core of every great brand´s DNA. Videos, pictures, and songs will become more dominant in the future. Working best they will be blended into one consistent story (e.g. P&G´s Proud Sponsor of Moms). Some weeks ago Instagram announced that it would join the visual playing field, alongside other messaging apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp to enable consumers to share personable moments. On top of being compelling, your content needs to do two things. One, create an emotional connection with your brand, and two, drive customers to action.

Speed and Spontaneousness will be crucial, too. Real-time communication and feedbacking means to interact and to respond quickly to any relevant occurrence, question, etc.

Brands can use e.g. Twitter feeds during certain TV shows, sports events, etc to communicate live and instantly with existing and potential new customers. It will take planning, flexibility, humor, creativity, and courage.

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Being Best in Using Customer-Focused Technology Mobile technology and communication will become even more important. Already now half of all social interaction happens on mobile platforms. In consequence all brand communication must be designed based on a mobile-first perspective. Responsive design has almost become a basic requirement, and it’s important to tailor each piece of content to the device or channel where it will most likely be viewed by the consumer. Mobile technology will soon replace all other communication devices as the predominant means.

No doubt, in 2014 we are going to see a huge increase in location-based marketing.

Other key technologies are Streaming and On-Demand media. They are rewiring the way consumers think and process information. People are getting used to having everything customized and delivered instantly, when and where they want it.

Also Cognitive Computing will further evolve, i.e. systems learning and interacting naturally with people. Rather than being programmed to anticipate every possible answer or action, cognitive systems are trained using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to understand and to predict. Applying this to marketing will help managers to better understand and communicate with customers.

Being Best in Data-Driven Customer Experience and Customer Services Big Data was one of another major buzzword in 2013 in many organizations around the globe. It´s a fact that with today´s technology we can collect, analyze, and process tons of (consumer) data to better understand consumption patterns, to evaluate commonalities and differences, to anticipate trends, and to identify new business and product opportunities. The real task, however, is to use all of these information – and by respecting possible and legitimate privacy concerns – in a way as to match them with real consumer wants and needs in order to improve the experience of your customers: e.g. new wearable devices like Samsung´s Galaxy Smart Watch to improve personal health.

The key is not merely measuring what happened, but trying to predict future outcomes, i.e. to understand why and how it will play out in the future. Analytics have to go from passive to active.

Moreover, collected and stored data need to be used to establish personal, trustworthy, and – most importantly – respectful relationships with existing and new customers. Big data needs to to be seen as a vehicle to dramatically boost an organization´s customer obsession and not its capability to spy on consumers and customers. Companies must implement whichever needed security measures to avoid discussions like currently happening at Target.

Being Best in Corporate Social Responsibility Companies clearly should make some 2014 resolutions to ensure their CSR and sustainability efforts start off on the right foot in the new year. While it’s more or less standard practice for companies to address the environmental and carbon impacts (e.g. resulting from their operations and products) time has come to take a closer look at how climate change (e.g. storms, floods, resources scarcity) could impact

the company from the outside in and across their entire supply chain.

With the gradual depletion of many resources some organizations are e.g. intensively searching for novel alternatives to the materials currently used in their products.

An evolution and necessity which will need to be more widely applied. One example is Nike which already some time ago has started to research for more sustainable textiles by partnering with the U.S. State Department, NASA, etc. Other good examples are Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

Leading brands will further stimulate employee engagement around CSR by having already started turning to gamification or micro-volunteerism to make engagement easy, fun and personalized. German airline Lufthansa has been running for some years a company-wide initiative called HelpAlliance which supports nearly 40 projects in 19. Responsibility for a project of this kind is always assigned to an employee of Lufthansa. These employees donate their free time to helping people in developing economies. In return they receive some support from the company for THEIR project.

Finally: The Need of Having the Right Organization, Processes, and People in Place Misaligned organizational structures and processes often hinder the flow of information and know-how across across brand, marketing, and business goals. There needs to be a close integration between traditional marketing programs and digital initiatives on the one hand and between marketing and other departments on the other hand. As brand managers for the most part are responsible for the overall performance of a brand, and most recently also for an increasing volume of content and messaging, moving forward they should also have the digital marketing managers within their teams and having them report into brand management.Brands need more active senior leadership support and focus than ever.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are in an ideal position to help facilitate and advance these efforts.

There is also a strong need for an improved alignment and reorganization around agency selection and management.

It is known that more traditional agencies often still lack digital expertise (which normally they would not admit). As a consequence brand marketers are managing not rarely various agencies at the same time. In the future this would need to be simplified and streamlined to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing teams.

Last, but not least, when hiring for marketing and branding expertise, it is advised to look for a top technical skill set (e.g. candidates having a very solid marketing basis, first comprehensive digital branding and media experience) and core characteristics such as the ability to cross-communicate, to connect to business goals, to show strong backbone, to be willing to convince senior management to implement new methods, and to be willing to permanently learn and to constantly educate the business.

Marketing and branding in 2014 will require more than ever the integration of marketing into all business efforts and departments, including customer experience, design, sales, and product development.

What do you think? What do you consider as the main marketing and branding trends of 2014?

Ecosystem management: why marketers must learn to think like ecologists Ben Shaw Marketers could learn a thing or two from ecologists on the maintenance of ecosystems.

among younger teens.” Immediately after this, £11.2bn was wiped off the company’s share price.

We live in a world of always-on brand communications across multiple platforms and communities that require the same care and attention as the most delicate wildflower. Over the course of time, new parts of a brand’s ecosystem must be created, grown and nurtured, but with careful thought given to the impact these new presences will have on the rest of the system.

Everyone remembers the infamous collapse of previous alldominating social networks, so, although Facebook is now so big and ingrained it is unlikely to ever become as dried up as MySpace or FriendsReunited, marketers must not take this news lightly. This should be the warning bell for brands to start tracking the shifts in their consumers’ online behaviours and deciding how to change their brand ecosystems accordingly.

Like any good ecologist, marketers know that over-investment and focus on just one organism or resource can leave the rest of the ecosystem malnourished. However, when looking to develop beyond their status quo, new platforms and opportunities are often discarded as a distraction or a gamble compared with the reliability of their main resource.

Brands should be looking to diversify and experiment across new platforms as their online audiences evolve. Snapchat didn’t exist 18 months ago; now, more photos are shared there every day than Facebook and Instagram combined. This should be the time when brands’ ecosystems are reappraised every month, not every year. As audiences develop new behaviours, for example teens with mobile messaging apps, brands must figure out how to connect with and add value to audiences on those platforms.

However, it may be a bigger gamble for marketers to not care for or develop the rest of their ecosystem. What happens when that once fruitful resource dries up?

Organisations are continually encouraged by Facebook to first invest to build an audience and then spend again to actually reach them (thanks to Facebook’s “clever” EdgeRank algorithm). They get an immediate positive return, their fan numbers shoot up and the reach of each post is in the millions.

But then, as they grow, they have to spend more to reach the same audience. And then Facebook tweaks the algorithm and it becomes harder to reach the original audience, so they spend a bit more. Then the original audience gets bored with all the branded content on Facebook and starts spending more time on other platforms. By this time, the brand has invested so much time and money in this one platform, it would be a waste to stop now. Wouldn’t it?

Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman, recently admitted: “We did see a decrease in daily users, partly

This requires brands to build and develop their ecosystem, which takes planning and continued management, not just to ensure the brand is covered at a basic social-hygiene level, but to ensure it is gaining value from all of its activities.

This need is why social-media teams have developed from a sole community manager overseeing a page to a team of analysts, strategists, creatives, and now editors, ensuring a consistent brand presence, experience and narrative across the ecosystem.

Ecologist Norman Christensen defined eco­ system management as “management driven by explicit goals, executed by policies, protocols and practices, and made adaptable by monitoring and research based on our best understanding of the ecological interactions and processes necessary to sustain ecosystem structure and function”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Ecosystem-management tips 1. Track your audience. Pay close attention to where your audience is moving online and decide where to follow it.

2. Experiment before investing. The best brands act like users on social platforms, so follow their lead by cheaply creating content to see what your audience likes on different platforms.

3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. As with any B2B service, it can be dangerous to rely solely on one platform – build your ecosystem across multiple platforms.

4. Look to build retained data. Ensure you’re building for the future and collating valuable consumer data to add value to future opportunities.

Brief or Grief?

Anand Narasimha

How to create inspiring Creative Briefs It’s one of the most integral parts of any advertising or communications agency, almost as integral as the creative folk themselves; we’re talking about the Creative Brief.

How do we define the Creative Brief?

Putting it bluntly, “It has become the most sterile, unimaginative and ignored piece of paper floating around in the Agency”.

Randomly pick up copies of creative briefs across agencies and you’ll see what I mean. Speak to a cross-section of creative people and they’ll nod in agreement. Attend a typical briefing session and observe that creative people (the recipients of the brief), are yawing, dozing, you-tubing, doodling or drifting. The brief is the most junked, trashed and if you’re the more expressive kind (like David Droga), the most torn, shredded piece of paper today. Briefs have become Griefs!

Yet, there’s hope! Every creative person worth his salt is always quick to acknowledge and applaud a great brief. So, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the brief, it’s just in the way it’s being used, or abused. Putting together a good brief is a dying art, which needs to be revived and how.

Briefs are not just important, they are critical A brief is actually the inflection point in creating advertising and communication. It’s the point where logic (the strategy) starts turning into magic (the idea). It’s where planning ends and creativity begins. We keep indulging in the over optimism of giving a bland brief and hoping to get exciting creative work in return. Garbage-in-garbage-out, is as true here as in computer programming.

Re-branding the brief In an era where re-branding is fashionable, its time we revitalized the brief. Its new definition should read, “The most insightful, inspiring and igniting tipping point in the creation

of advertising.”

Insightful- packed with gems and nuggets that bring the strategy to life.

Inspiring- makes the creative team go ‘Wow!’ and take ownership of the brief.

Igniting- triggers the creative to buzz with ideas that they can’t wait to get cracking on.

In fact, a good brief is like ‘an ad for the creative people’.

What makes a great brief great While most agencies have their own briefing formats, based on their conceptual frameworks and creative philosophies, the basics of a great brief are fundamentally the same.

If you were the Pope briefing Michelangelo on painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, what would it be?

Grief: ‘Please paint the ceiling to cover the cracks.’

Brief: ‘You are commissioned to paint our ceiling for the greater glory of God and as an inspiration and lesson to his people, frescoes which depict the creation of the world, mankind’s degradation by sin, the divine wrath of the deluge and preservation of Noah and his family.’

Here are 5 key changes that can help re-energize our creative briefs and make them smarter and sexier:

From complex jargon to simple expressions Don’t try to impress with how much mumbo-jumbo you know, try to simplify the task at hand.

Rather than saying, ‘Increase TOM and brand saliency’ it’s much better to say, ‘Make the brand famous’.

Instead of ‘Enhance width and depth of consumption’, why not ‘Get more and more people to use more’.

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From long and winding to short and crisp A good brief should be no more than a page, or two.

Supporting information can be provided separately as documents or as links to the web.

When George Bernard Shaw wrote a longish letter, he began by writing, “I am writing you a rather long letter as I did not have the time to make it shorter.”

Stay focused and consistent in your brief and avoid overload.

Imagine Benjamin… He thinks about women a lot. A lot, lot. But he’s not dreaming of romance, he’s a dirty boy who can’t stop thinking about sex with extraordinarily welcoming women. Yet in the real world, women are a completely different country - it’s somewhere he’s never been, it may be a while before he gets to go there and you’re guaranteed he won’t be able to speak the language when he does. Deep down he wishes he could just be himself around girls and that it wasn’t so complicated, that he didn’t have to try so hard. What he wants isn’t a deodorant at all, but a secret babe magnet.

Which one do you think created the ‘Axe Effect’?

From information to story telling Don’t dwell on information, instead dive for gems that bring your strategy to life and help tell a story. Encapsulate your brief with evocative and powerful nuggets.

When Taj Mahal Tea Bags were being launched the nugget in the brief was to position them as ‘The Walkman of Teas’ to encapsulate the mobility, convenience, taste and modernity of the format.

Similary, when Dabur Honey was being repositioned as a health food from a home remedy, the brief summed up the task as moving the brand from ‘the medicine chest to the dinning table’.

Recently, for Virgin Mobile, a brand targeted at the youth, the learning was that Indian youth are not out and out rebellious, but work around problems to get their way.

This was expressed evocatively as, ‘inventive thinking that breaks the firewall of sanctions’. Or as one teenager aptly put it ‘Jugaad’ is their mantra.

An ethnic beauty brand that needed to be made more chic, summed up the brief as ‘from Khadi Bhavan to Fab India’ Such gems are not only insightful, but get the creative juices flowing.

From target audience to target person One of the biggest sacrileges in briefs is the vague and rather generic definition of the target audience. You really can’t get a handle of who are you talking to, in flesh and blood.

Remember to distinguish your ‘marketing target group’ from your ‘advertising target person’ and describe him or her in a manner that helps your brand make powerful connections (and not about generalities of life).

This is how a bland brief will define the target audience for AXE Deo: Young men aged 16-25, who are concerned about their appearance and how they interact with the opposite sex. They buy deodorants to smell fresh and feel confident when they’re in the company of girls; Axe with its masculine fragrance is the perfect choice when they not only want to look good, but smell good too.

Here’s a really sexy and inspiring definition of the AXE target person:

From piece of paper to piece of theatre A brief is more than just a written document, its one-on-one communication. The more dramatic and vivid you can make it the more engaging it becomes. Impersonal and e-mailed briefs are a strict no-no.

Think of the briefing as an ‘interactive event’ that makes the entire team charged up! Set the right mood and anticipation and ‘seduce’ the creative. Don’t barge in with your brief when they are not mentally prepared. Don’t shove briefs at them.

Great briefing is experiential marketing at its best.

Once, a bunch of creative people were packed like sardines into a cramped car and told they were being taken to the client’s office for a briefing. Midway, they were met by the Account Supervisor, driving a Maruti Van rather coincidentally (a move that was engineered). They were immediately transferred into the more spacious confines of the van and as they sprawled themselves, someone exclaimed, “Guys, this is the brief. “Travel in space.” How’s that for a powerful demonstration.

Here’s what a leading creative hot shot told me, “I once had an account executive give me a brief with a hole burnt into it.

That got me curious. Then I noticed it was for Pizza Hut’s fiery pizza. Right there, she got me. It’s not the brief in itself that inspires you, but how it’s presented. It must be filled with an opportunity to make you smile, to make you stop and think.”

It’s time we change the way we look at briefs, because more often than not great advertising is born out of great briefs.

It may be a good idea for the industry to introduce an annual award for the best briefs as an initiative to encourage and reward great briefs. Most agencies could also have internal awards for this.

Can we bring the glory back into briefs? Can we have more briefs than griefs? Yes we can!

Anand Narasimha is the Dean and Professor of Marketing at IFIM Business School, Bangalore.

With over 25 years of experience in Brand Marketing, Advertising and Consulting, he describes himself as a ‘Brand Mentor’. He can be reached at anand.n@ifimbschool.com

Personal Branding Trends for 2014 William Arruda

Throughout the year, I monitor what’s happening in the world of personal branding. At year’s end, I analyze the data to predict future trends. My take on 2014? It will be a year of personal branding evolution—not revolution.

Of course, evolution is the key to survival, especially in our competitive international marketplace. Here’s the first installment of an article on trends that will have the most impact on the brand that’s you.

1. Social Access at Work—From Restricted to Required Many companies have been reluctant to allow employees access to social media while at the office. In fact, according to a study by Statista released in September 2013, one in five US employees are not allowed access to Facebook, one in six aren’t allowed access to Twitter, and one in ten aren’t even allowed access to LinkedIn. YouTube and other sites are also restricted at many companies. It would be almost impossible for you to do your job as a marketer at such a company.

Over the past year, however, I have seen numerous companies loosen their restrictions or eliminate them entirely, and that trend will accelerate in 2014—for two reasons:

First, companies realize they are losing the war. They can block social media sites from corporate infrastructure, but they can’t prevent employees from using their mobile devices to tweet, check in on Facebook, and update their LinkedIn status.

Second, they understand that employees need social media to do their job—because every employee is a brand ambassador.

2. Social Savvy—From Optional to Essential If you don’t have social media skills, your personal brand will wither up. Period. Social media is no longer simply a lighthearted, youth-oriented way to differentiate yourself.

Adopted by virtually every demographic segment, social media is now perhaps the most powerful tool in your competitors’ suite of marketing tactics.

Most employees, regardless of their role or generation, will be expected to participate in their organization’s social branding efforts. As a marketer, social media savvy is even more important for you.

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As you know, in branding, we highlight the distinction between rational brand attributes and emotional brand attributes. Rational brand attributes are concrete, deliverable traits—the table stakes that get you into the game. Emotional brand attributes help you connect with your audience on a much more meaningful and emotional level, allowing you to differentiate in a compelling way that tips the scales in your favor. Having social savvy enables you to tap the impact of authenticity and immediacy, building a personal bridge to your audience.

Today, regardless of your role or level, understanding how to use social media to do your job better is a requirement.

Whether you’re sourcing staff, building marketing campaigns, enhancing relationships, developing new products, designing print ads, or performing market research, you will thrive only if you know how to harness social media to deliver greater value to your company.

3. Digital—From Final Frontier to Launchpad At Reach (my company), we always say, “Be real before being virtual.” We mean that you must work on your brand in the real world before building your brand online. That’s still true, but the timeline is nowcompressed. Your online identity should be drawn from your authentic traits, but that digital identity needs to go live as soon as possible. For your audience, digital now precedes real.

As a society, we continually research brands online, and we often search for a digital profile of people before we meet them. Before heading to the conference room, we check out our colleagues who are on the meeting attendee list.

We scour prospects’ LinkedIn profiles before meeting them.

We Google potential candidates when deciding whether to interview them.

I had a great conversation with Mitch Joel for the Reach Personal Branding interview series. In his new book, Ctrl Alt Delete, he talks about “digital first”—how our first place to go for information or services is online. That trend will gain momentum. Accordingly, you need to be vigilant about building and managing your online brand, because it now delivers your first impression.

4. Video—From Black Tie to Business Casual If you’ve been reading my personal branding trends for the last several years, you know that video features prominently.

It’s the next best thing to being there, allowing you to deliver a complete message and build memorable, emotional connections with viewers.

Until recently, a lot of video-related personal branding activities were limited to studio shoots. And although highly polished videos aren’t going away, user-generated video using online video applications is on the rise.

I’m not referring to the YouTube approach, this is video

captured and created by amateurs using professional online tools that assist in professionalizing the video presentation.

As Catharine Fennell, CEO of videoBIO said, “In 2013, we have seen over 500% growth in the SaaS-based online application side of our business compared with 100% growth in our video production services division. People are learning when they need the full production, polished video and when user generated video is adequate, and sometimes more authentic.”

Just as our comfort level with apps and social media has soared, so will our comfort level with video. More and more people work remotely, so video will become even more important for workplace interactions, allowing you to “be there” no matter where you really are.

We’ll also incorporate it into our regular communications.

That means using video to send thank-you notes to account executive at the ad agency who went the extra mile, to create introductions to new internal clients, and to feed weekly “goteam” messages to geographically dispersed staff. We’ll hold Google+ hangouts to chat with colleagues and network contacts. Conference calls will no longer be confusing audio experiences, thanks to real-time video conferencing with our team.

As these formats become more common, don’t let their casual and impromptu nature become an excuse for poor quality. If you’re video-conferencing from home, you should still dress for success. If you’re recording a pitch, take time to rehearse so that your voice is carefree but not careless.

The days of canned videos are on the wane, but a video that screams “amateur” will have an equally negative impact on your brand.

To make sure that even your casual videos are brand builders, find a place with the right lighting and background, and make sure the audio quality is great. Create a consistent place to produce your videos. Like the set for favorite show, your setting can create a unique visual symbol for your brand itself.

5. LinkedIn Profiles—From Employment Line to Branding Lifeline Virtually every personal branding keynote and workshop I delivered in 2013 included LinkedIn content, and almost one-third were devoted to LinkedIn. That was not my doing; it was requested by my corporate clients.

The corporate mindset about LinkedIn has shifted from “this is a job search/hiring tool” to “LinkedIn is a valuable branding tool for my company, and I need my employees to take it seriously.” I have some clients who are investing time and talent in helping their employees build stellar profiles and learn how to use LinkedIn to do their jobs better.

As a marketer, you can see the potential of having every employee following your LinkedIn company page and sharing your updates. Take the lead this year. Build a program to get all your employees on LinkedIn, and work with them to amplify your marketing communications.

In addition, thanks to the vast feature enhancements LinkedIn rolled out in 2013, the site is quickly becoming the hub of your online identity—sometimes outpacing the impact of your personal website. Your LinkedIn profile often shows up first in a Google search, so it’s likely the first place people visit to learn about you. And it allows you to build a truly threedimensional profile of who you are, complete with images and embedded videos.

6. Mobile—From Desktop to Handheld Your personal branding activities are becoming easier to do on the fly. That’s because more and more mobile apps make it easy for you to build your brand on the go. In the coming

their own content machine—creating original content—even if they didn’t enjoy writing or have much to say.

That has gotten old. The Blog has become another mouth to feed—one more item to maintain on a seemingly bottomless “to-do” list. That rush to become Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner has subsided. And with good reason. It’s not always about the content you create; more often, it’s about the content you curate—your ability to be on top of everything that is happening in your industry/job function that will be in demand in 2014. After all, that’s what Murdoch and Turner did: they didn’t become successful by personally writing content themselves. Instead, they created outlets that showcase what their staffs and other professionals have produced, from journalism to entertainment.

With the volume of media messages skyrocketing, being on top of what is happening in your area of expertise—being able to find the right content, comment on it, and share it with your brand community—will be an even more valuable skill than penning thought-leadership content yourself.

Distilling volumes into valuable nuggets while providing your commentary will make you more valuable and your brand more visible.

8. Charitable Causes—From Afterthought to Starting Point Every major company engages in some type of philanthropy, but there is a trend toward companies that tie their entire mission to giving back.

year, more of us will spend more of our brand-building time with our mobile apps than with an old-fashioned browser on a desktop computer. In fact, many of us don’t even have a conventional desk anymore.

Here are just a few of the most valuable and user-friendly apps available today: • LinkedIn Contacts gives you a way to bring together your contacts that are spread across address books, email accounts, and calendar apps.

• Lunchmeet helps you find geographically appropriate contacts so you can expand your network over lunch.

• VideoBIO lets you record video from your iPad or iPhone, edit it, and share it via Twitter, Facebook or email.

• UStream Live Broadcaster lets you broadcast yourself in real-time.

Find the apps that make personal branding easy to do as part of your regular routine.

7. Online Content—From Create to Curate When social media became hot, it seemed as if every careerminded professional started his or her own media channel.

PR professionals and marketers were among the first to jump in. “I must have a Blog,” many thought. They set out to build

In a recent article published in Strategy+Business, James O’Toole talks about the new business structure—the B (for benefit) corporation. Patagonia is perhaps the best known example of this model, which has been gaining traction in the US. Facilitating the growing social entrepreneurship movement, B charters permit boards to make decisions that benefit society, even when those actions aren’t in the immediate interest of shareholders (note how different this is from the nonprofit structure).

As more and more Millennials enter the workforce and move into more senior roles, values will enter into the equation more than they have in the past. In Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World, David Burstein writes, “Millennials are highly connected to—and are extremely conscious of—their values. They see the world from a values perspective. Reaching [them] requires a real investment in social responsibility.”

As companies become more serious about social responsibility, you’ll want to think about your role. In branding, it’s important to know your values and connect them with what you do and how you do it. Your values, and the causes you support, are facets of your brand. In the past we have talked about the blending (not balancing) of work and life. Now there is one more element: your world—how you want to contribute to something bigger than yourself. *** What do these trends add up to? Incredible opportunities!

There have never been so many powerful ways to tell your brand’s story—not only for your company’s benefit but also for the benefit of your communities, both local and global.

Why B-To-B Branding Matters More Than You Think Agnes Claye, Blair Crawford, Sascha Lehman, Thomas Meyer

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On March 8, KKR made a $3.74 billion bid for Gardner Denver. In case you haven’t heard of Gardner Denver before, they are the go-to guys when it comes to all kinds of pumps, compressors, blowers, loading arms, and fuel systems. As Mercedes is to cars, Gardner Denver is to pumps.

The company is so well regarded in its field, in fact, that its latest annual report calculated 43 percent of its value to be goodwill and other intangible assets.

That’s a number any company could feel good about. In fact, by that measure, the Philadelphia company has more value tied up in its brand than Procter & Gamble PG +1.2%, whose goodwill represents about 40 percent of its asset value.

And Gardner Denver is not atypical. While B-to-B brands don’t get as much press, they are very valuable and often, as a percentage of assets, more valuable than their betterknown B-to-C cousins. Some analysts estimate that B-to-B brands may be worth well over $100 billion.

Brands drive profits Brands of even less well-known companies such as Gardner Denver can be valuable because B-to-B purchases arguably matter more than B-to-C ones: buy the wrong toothpaste, and you can always change brands when the tube runs out.

Buy the wrong turbine and you could hurt your company’s earnings for years – and find yourself looking for another job.

All this translates into more profit for the B-to-B supplier.

B-to-B companies with brands that are perceived as strong generate a higher EBIT margin than others. In 2012, strong brands outperformed weak brands by 20 percent, up from 13 percent in 2011. Decision makers are willing to pay a premium for strong brands because established brands make their lives easier. They aggregate information and reduce risk. Strong supplier brands may even aid companies in building their own reputation by association.

Brands have a strong influence on purchase decisions Business marketers have traditionally believed that the key to differentiation in a B-to-B market is to provide service, availability, pricing, and quality. Obviously, these things matter. But in our 2012 study in which we surveyed more than 700 executives with substantial influence on supplier selection in the United States, Germany, and India, we found that as with consumers, business buyers’ purchase decisions tend to be a lot less value-driven than they like to think. Like consumers, professional buyers use the vendor’s reputation as a short cut that reduces risk and simplifies the evaluation process.

In fact, our survey found that B-to-B purchasing decision

makers consider the brand as a central rather than a marginal element of a supplier’s value proposition. Our survey found that decision makers say that brand is almost as important as the efforts of sales teams in encouraging them to make out a purchase order. In the US, for example, brands are seen as having an 18% share in the purchasing decision, compared to the 17 percent tied up in the sales effort.

The importance of brands in purchase decisions does vary by market and sector. In India, our survey found that brand-related factors were especially important to buyers, constituting roughly 19 percent of all buyers’ motivation.

In Germany, however, brand mattered somewhat less (14 percent ). Brands are perceived as particularly relevant in tangible goods sectors, such as machines and components, and somewhat less so in some less tangible sectors, such as utilities and financial services, according to our survey.

Banks and financial services, for example, must work harder initially to earn loyalty and respect, perhaps because of the more intangible nature of their offering. While the stakes in banking or financial services can be high, mistakes are more easily remedied: a few phone calls and you can start the process of opening a new line of credit at another bank. But you can’t easily swap out an ERP system, for instance, without a lot of money and a lot of pain.

Companies are missing the brand message Most B2B communications campaigns do not focus on those elements that their customers case most about. Our research shows that while B-to-B suppliers focus their messages on corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and global reach, their customers care most about their honesty, responsibility across the supply chain, and level of specialized expertise. This disconnect may be partly because of a lack of confidence in the strength of the brand’s value proposition. Refocusing on the issues their target customers care about most is critical if B-to-B want to stay relevant to their customers.

Given the proliferation of touchpoints and stakeholders – from customers to employees to shareholders – it is more important today than ever before to communicate a consistent brand experience. For this reason, brand strategy needs a cross-functional team that incorporates perspectives from outside of the marketing department, such as finance, sales, and customer service. That team cannot stop at aligning on what the brand is. It needs to clearly articulate how the brand comes to life across touchpoints.

The B-to-B brand is a source of tremendous value to both customers and companies. Organizations need to be more deliberate about developing the strategies and tactics that safeguard this asset.

Retail Brand Watch Showrooming is Down, But Retailers Need to Exploit Big Data to Connect with Consumers Dale Buss Showrooming is way down, sharing is way up. Those are two pieces of good news for retailers from a new study by IBM about consumer behavior in and expectations about the new era of “omnichannel” retailing.

Yet huge challenges remain for retailers that want to optimize relationships with their customers using big data and digital technologies. “You have to be able to gather all the unstructured data and understand what is the next best action for you as a retailer,” Keith Mercier, associate partner in the IBM Retail Center of Competence, told brandchannel.

“That’s where they’re trying to build the next phase.”

The new IBM study—shared today at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference—surveyed more than 30,000 consumers around the world. It showed a nearly 40 percent drop in online purchases resulting from showrooming, Mercier said.

That’s a remarkable development, considering that retailers such as Best Buy warned over the last couple of years that showrooming— in which consumers browse merchandise and prices at brick-and-mortar stores and often take advantage of free advice, then buy the merchandise online instead for less, from that retailer or another brand—could be an existential threat. Major retailers including Target and Walmart stopped selling Amazon’s Kindle devices in 2012 after the e-commerce giant launched several efforts to undermine physical retail sales.

But retailer stores have learned to play the digital retail game.

“Retailers have done a good job of understanding that the phenomenon is happening, and can use it to their advantage or defend against it better,” Mercier explained. “Also, channels are blending so much today that no [shoppers] truly understand where the true retail-shopping journey begins or ends.”

As a result, only 30 percent of online purchases last year

resulted from showrooming versus 50 pecent a year earlier, the IBM survey found. Retailers also are benefiting through increased personalization of their digital relationships with consumers. “In starting down the personalization path and learning more about their consumers,” Mercier said, “they’re able to convert more purchases in the store. They’re pricing better in real time in the store. And they’re starting to understand consumers’ cross-channel behaviors better.”

Mercier said more retailers are succeeding in “drawing consumers into loyalty, pricing and personalization programs to keep them locked into the brand—to not allow them to stray into generic pricing tools.”

Big data and cloud computing, provided by IBM and others, offer huge opportunities for retailers to do even better in this area. “Every consumer interaction has a piece of data attached to it, something retailers can learn” with consumers’ permission, Mercier said. “But to capitalize on it, retailers have to be able to manipulate that data very fast. It’s highly unstructured, such as point-of-sale data and information about social interactions and online navigation—and all of this is coming form multiple sources.”

Thus, for example, retailers could be monitoring the online sphere and see that a registered customer is tweeting about “wanting a pair of boyfriend jeans”; About 30 percent of consumers now are posting about items they’ve purchased, Mercier said, up from just 23 percent a year ago. A retailer then could quickly “reach out to the consumer and say, ‘We have boyfriend jeans and, by the way, you’re just five blocks from one of our stores.”

And to get to that point, Mercier said, “is where cloud computing and big-data analytics come into play—they’re key enablers that allow these interactions between retailers and consumers to happen. And they help make that experience part of the retailers’ brand.”

Using free stuff to build your brand without going broke Max Knoblauch If you’ve attended a conference, sponsored mixer or networking event lately, you’ve likely gone home satisfied, pockets overflowing with your newfound free swag. From the standard (pens, t-shirts and tote bags) to the more lavish (slightly nicer pens, coffee mugs and phone cases), freebies seem to be a requirement for startups these days.

For many bootstrapped businesses, liberal giveaways could be the icing on the cake of financial downfall. If your freebies aren’t part of a productive marketing investment, you’re probably doing it wrong.

We spoke to a few experts and businesses to get an idea how startups should change the way they look at freebies.

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1. Your freebies should match your brand.

For BarkBox, a startup that assembles and ships monthly packages for the pup in your life, maintaining brand identity is key.

“We’re kind of an irreverent, silly company, so our marketing stuff and giveaways match that,” says Chris O’Brien, puplick relations director at Bark & Co. “Our aim is to make dogs happy and healthy. So if we’re going to discount BarkBoxes with coupon codes, we make sure that it benefits dogs.”

Basically, it wouldn’t make sense for a company like Bark & Co. to be giving away, say, human watches. Bark & Co.’s quirky giveaways and freebies align with the brand and products its customers have come to know.

2. Don’t give away your best sellers.

While handing out free iPads with your sticker on the back might make your booth the most popular at the conference, it’s not going to help in the long run. For SparkFun Electronics, an online retail startup that sells electronic components and creative building kits, there’s a delicate balance between what to give out and what to keep in inventory.

“We tend to give out products that are low risk and can last for multiple events,” a SparkFun spokesperson told Mashable.

“We do have a lot of free swag, but we’re not giving out our top sellers.”

3. Know your audience.

While SparkFun and Bark & Co. are established startups, the team at Kiwi Wearables makes due with a smaller, newer team.

“With freebies, from a founder’s perspective, you have to get some kind of return,” says Ashley Beattie, vice president of marketing. “I’m not going to get much value from you if I’m giving you a t-shirt. It’s about making sure the right people are getting your product.”

Kiwi has given away development kits at development-centric events, such as hackathons, making it more likely that their

market audience gets their product.

4. Make freebies work for you.

Though products like t-shirts and pens will make for a nice goodie bag, they aren’t going to do much for your business’ future.

“I saw a booth that gave away freebies if you tweeted about them,” Beattie tells Mashable. “Creating viral products like that allows you to analyze your audience.”

5. Cut down on branding.

For Danielle Morrill, CEO of Mattermark and former director of marketing for Twilio, freebies are best when they’re store quality.

“I think it’s important to focus on design, more than just branding,” she tells Mashable. “Think about when you go into a store; what do you want to pick up?”

“Think about when you go into a store; what do you want to pick up?”

According to Morrill, it’s important to get value out of every single piece you give away, whether that value is in driving awareness or driving sales. If you’re creating and giving away products that people don’t want, it’s likely a waste of resources.

“The best giveaway is one that creates community,” says Beattie. “You’re always going to be in a limited resource situation, so if you’re just giving away material, you’re probably wasting money.”

Get Started Building Your Brand on Scott Levy

Word-of-mouth is the biggest marketing tool you could possibly ask for (and one of the cheapest). Tweets, posts, emails, texts and other means of sharing are the primary way numerous brands evolve today and remain leaders in their industries. And people get excited about your brand if you’re excited about your brand. At its core, brand building comes down to two key factors: enthusiasm and likability.

Unlike the fast-talking, late-night TV salespeople of years ago who could sell anything they were handed, today, if you don’t show genuine enthusiasm and passion, and truly believe that what you’re selling is the best product or best service available, nobody else will either. You can’t just think it’s okay; you can’t think it’s just better than others. You need to believe that what you have to offer is the best thing since sliced bread!

Steve Jobs once said of Apple’s core values, “We believe people with passion can change the world for the better ... and that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.”

Along with that innate confidence in your product or service comes the likability factor. Whether they realize it or not, people talk about and promote brands that they like every day. Whether it’s Heineken or Budweiser, Ford cars or Chevy trucks, people talk about, recommend, share or suggest a brand because they like the company, what they stand for, how they treat their customers, and the products and services they offer. If people don’t like you, trust you as a brand or can’t connect with you, they won’t be spreading the word about your brand.

Before you can build a brand today, particularly in social media, you need to understand that you’re not there to sell or promote. The people you’re reaching out to aren’t just people with money or those you want to sucker into buying your products or using your services. They’re people whom you want to identify with your brand and like what you do and what you stand for. So if you’ve been indoctrinated to simply sell, sell, sell anything to anyone at any cost, you need to change your mind-set before trying to build a brand via social media.

At the core of brand building is having an understanding of who you are. This will be your identity in the world. If done correctly, your identity will positively influence people.

To figure out who you are, start by asking yourself the following questions:

What does your business have to offer?

You may be offering products, services, or even wisdom and knowledge abouta particular topic. Your business needs something that people can like,which can be anything from designer apparel to home remodeling tips.

What does your brand stand for?

This encompasses your beliefs and your passions other than your productsor services. For example, are you passionate about being green? About technology? About supporting a particular cause or charity? Aboutgovernment reform?

What makes your products, services or business as a whole different from your competitors?

What can you offer that sets you apart from everyone else?

Perhaps you offeunsurpassed technical support; faster, more reliable service; unique,one-of-a kind handcrafted items; or a return policy unmatched in your industry.

Why are you doing this?

If every entrepreneur were strictly in business to make money, everyone would look at most lucrative industries and launch a business in thosefields. Clearly people are in different industries for different reasons.My passion for computers, technology, the web and helping people led me to launch Fuel Online. Florists had a dream of working with flowers, dancestudios are run by people who love dance, actors have a passion forperforming, retailers believe their products are the best, and financialadvisors love the world of investments. Think about the big picture and why you’re passionate about your business and what mark you can leave bydoing what you do.

These are all-important questions to answer when you try to brand yourself and your business, especially online and in social media where everything is completely transparent, or should be.

The Best-Perceived Brands of 2013 Which were the biggest improvers and who fell off the list?

Lucia Moses

Steve McKee Of all the assets any company owns, its brand is the single most valuable.

A bold statement? Sure. But think about it: A brand is the only corporate asset that, managed properly, will never depreciate. Never depreciate. Those are magic words.

Patents expire, software ages, buildings crumble, roofs leak, machines break, and trucks wear out. But a well-managed brand can increase in value year after year.

Despite this unique characteristic, branding has long been misunderstood. It seems soft and fuzzy. It’s often incorrectly defined. And (at least historically) it hasn’t been a hard, measurable internal metric like sales, market share, stock price, or price/earnings ratio that can be tracked on a spreadsheet or reported to the board. But neglecting a brand is both naive and shortsighted for any company.

In some ways branding is a victim of semantics; call it “reputation” and nobody in management would ever argue that it’s anything less than critical. All companies are careful to avoid doing anything that would harm their reputations, intuitively understanding Will Rogers’s quip: “It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.” But management teams commonly underachieve in the application of reputation management best practices—in a word, branding.

Too many business leaders believe branding is a discipline that lives in the marketing department. But it’s much broader than that; branding includes everything a company does, from the logo on its letterhead, to the way it handles customer complaints, to whether its uniformed personnel keep their shirts tucked in. It’s easy to limit your perspective of branding to the verbal and visual expressions your company puts into the marketplace, but there isn’t anything that anybody within your organization does (or fails to do) that doesn’t affect at some level how your brand is perceived. Company leaders who ignore this do so at their peril.

Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. Not long ago I purchased a fountain drink at a convenience store that featured a pithy slogan on the cup: We always treat you like royalty. I’m sure the people who came up with that line had the best of intentions, but the clerks charged with carrying it out didn’t get the message. The unkempt counter and sticky floor made that clear.

Similarly, a few years ago in the midst of the Great Recession, a full-page newspaper ad from Citibank caught

my eye. Considering the mess-of-its-own-making from which the bank was suffering, the ad featured an unusual headline: “Providing Stability. Securing the Future.” Clearly, I thought, someone in the marketing department is not paying attention. Citi was not only being buffeted by the storm, it was one of the causes of it. A company whose actions had led to so much financial upheaval laying claim to stability seemed detached at best, disingenuous at worst. (Ironically, the ad also featured the bank’s longstanding slogan “Citi never sleeps,” which, given the mess the company was in, I surmised was truer than ever.)

Contrast that with an encounter a colleague recently had when she purchased a new pair of shoes from a local running store. Not only did she enjoy shopping there, a few days later she received a call from a pleasant customer-service representative who wanted to ensure everything was still ok.

That impressed her. Shortly thereafter, the store, unprompted, delivered a gym bag to her as a thank-you for her business.

Needless to say, she now considers herself “in the club” and is telling everyone she knows about it. And there wasn’t an ad or website in the mix.

Branding is anything but lightweight, but too few companies intentionally manage their brands as the valuable assets they are. Effective branding improves the visibility of and respect for a product, service, or company. It attracts attention and drives sales. It also enhances margins, as customers are willing to pay more for products and services from companies they know and trust. Branding can also improve the internal dynamics of an organization and influence both recruiting and employee turnover. And research now demonstrates that branding even affects financial metrics.

It’s easy to think about branding just in terms of the latest-and-greatest social media platform, viral video, or smartphone app. Doing so means missing the fundamental, timeless principles of the discipline that go well beyond the trendy and transient. It’s not like mathematics, engineering, or accounting, in which there are rules to be followed or regulations to be adhered to, but there are a significant number of commonsense, sometimes-counterintuitive truths based on how real humans interact in the real world that can make a significant impact on any business.

Is Your Brand’s Reputation Safe In Millennial Hands?

J. Maureen Henderson

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Pop quiz: You run a company, maybe a big one with a highprofile public image, and you know that your brand needs to be represented on all the major social media outposts.

You want to make sure that the person managing these platforms knows their ins and outs, but you also don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to have someone spend the day on Twitter. Do you turn the keys to your digital kingdom over to a junior employee, or even an intern? For every story of community management done right – a pharmacy chain customer service rep pretending to be an operative from the future comes to mind – there are a dozen other examples of the damage Millennials with social media passwords can do to a brand – think about HMV’s experience, the resignation of the UK’s “teen police commissioner” for tweeting about her own scofflaw way, or the multi-part Matthew Keys saga, in which the twentysomething former social media manager for Reuters was charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly providing the password to the L. A. Times website to members of Anonymous. Is your brand image actually safe in Millennial hands?

Susie Hall, president of Vitamin T, likens community management to cat herding on the internet.

“Community managers are the social voice of a brand or organization, which can mean they are the person behind the complete social strategy or the people solely responsible for executing that strategy. They’re typically responsible for finding and sharing content daily to help grow a network, responding to and engaging audiences on various platforms, managing and measuring social campaigns and following marketing trends and the constant changes in social media,” she says.

Sounds like a weighty responsibility and it’s one that’s predominantly shouldered by young women, according to research from Social Fresh. Allie MacPherson is one such community manager. A digital consultant for Text100 and community manager for one of their clients, KAYAK, she believes that affinity for the tools involved and familiarity with the nature of online interpersonal interaction is a big reason why online community management tends to be the domain of younger employees.

“I think we see so many Millennial community managers as a result of the natural comfort level that most Millennials have with social media. This isn’t to say that Millennials are better fit to be community managers than older generations, simply that most of us grew up with these platforms and have a more innate sense of comfort. Combine that with the entrepreneurial spirit and confidence that Millennials are so frequently labeled with and you have a generation of social media users comfortable taking on the voice of a brand on the internet.”

those things, the right person for the job could be someone more junior than expected. But without those things, junior or not, you’re putting your brand at risk.”

She’s right. Even company owners themselves, especially those unschooled in social media etiquette, aren’t immune to falling prey to brands behaving badly syndrome. Consider the recent the tidal wave of negative media attention that deluged Amy’s Baking Company after the owners had a public meltdown on Facebook after appearing on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares reality show.

For Debi Kleiman, president of MITX, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, training from corporate higher ups is what makes all the difference in separating a well-oiled social media presence and a slipshod one. Hire competent communicators and then teach them how to represent the brand, she advises. Preparation and contingency planning can prevent PR disasters.

“Not only is it important for companies to hire well, but it’s important to provide these people with the tools they need to be successful at it. They need to clearly understand their target customer, the brand they are representing – what are their beliefs and values, what are their corporate guidelines about what’s acceptable and what is not. Some companies don’t even bother to write this stuff out, but they should. It makes everyone more comfortable and confident in this area.”

When Findlay Hilchie, the senior community manager at Equals6, stepped into his role, it was newly created and no formal training plan existed, but developing procedures and policies for future hires has now become part of his job.

“I worked with the CEO and marketing people to determine how we would act, how we would build and how we would push our message. It was much more a discussion than training. Now that we are more established, I tend to be the one writing training materials and policy that newer CMs follow. Currently, our training is very much a coaching style training where I sit down with the new staff and we go over our methodology on content, communications, tone of message, etc. We do now have policy and procedures for what can and cannot be done over company channels and we also have procedure for what to do in difficult situations.”

Hilchie admits that while his peers may be digital natives, making the transition from using social media for personal purposes to using it as a brand ambassador and customer liaison in the relatively new field of community management is a learning process.

It’s a view shared by Hall. She claims that when a brand’s social media presence goes awry, it’s more likely to be an issue of lack of maturity and big picture thinking vs. mistakes that can be blamed on youthful indiscretion alone.

“You need to break some of those habits and trust them in what they are doing so that they trust themselves. They often try and churn out work as quickly as they can rather than take the time they have and produce something of higher quality because they aren’t used to working on something that way,” he says.

“Regardless of experience level, the most important thing is for a CM to understand the brand, the voice and how to reach their audience. If there is a solid understanding of

In other words, think twice, post once or maybe not at all.

And if you do entrust your brand to a Millennial community manager, opt for one who isn’t a narcissist.

Results-Driven Marketing Creative: Efficient Creative Briefing Cameron Avery Digital Creative Drives Results As marketers, we know that the only thing that’s more important than generating ROI is showing how we did it.

Doing so wins us increased budgets and resource allocations year after year and demonstrates marketing’s value to our organization.

Many factors determine the extent of that ROI, but there’s one that can’t be ignored—the quality of your marketing creative.

Together with placement and execution, creative can make or break your campaigns.

Throughout this series we will explore the four steps you or your creative agency should take to achieve better results from your marketing creative.

Today, we tackle the first.

Efficient Creative Briefing Experience tells us that when creative content is focused on a single outcome, it delivers great results. And that process starts with defining what that outcome will look like.

Creative directors would agree that the creative brief is the most important document in any creative campaign. Most would refuse to fire up Photoshop or attend a campaign meeting without one. So it’s fair to say that you can’t expect anything useful from your agency or designers unless you take the time to effectively brief them.

But it’s not all about helping the creatives. Rather, the more time you spend on getting a concise brief together for your team, the less time you’ll spend on the phone or in meetings to clarify your directions. It’s an investment in productivity.

What’s more, you’ll also be able to better gauge the outcome of the brief, by measuring your goals against actual outcomes.

So if you spend a little more time on briefing at the start of a campaign, your dividend is in the form of a lot of time saved and stress headaches avoided throughout the rest of your campaign timeline—and you will have made it easier to prove your marketing ROI. What Is Efficient Creative Briefing?

An efficient brief inspires the creative team with clear, concise directions, with no fancy marketing language and no unnecessary information. It clearly outlines the important background information and the details that creative teams need to deliver a successful project.

I recommend that all creative briefs include the following sections:

• Details: General project information. Include who’s in charge of approvals, budgets, and deadlines.

• Background: What are you selling? Provide details that must be included in the campaign and the SWOT analysis.

• Creative drivers: What is the main goal of this project, and what are the top three objectives? Don’t just cut and paste sections from a list of marketing goals. Make the outcomes and objectives specific and measurable, then challenge the creatives to reach them.

• Audience: Who are you talking to? Here you need to provide all the details that the creative team should know about your audience: What do they think of your company and the product/solution? Why should they care?

• Competitors: Who is the competition? Talk about what differentiates your company and your product/ solution, but don’t forget to include the details on what your competitors are saying to your audience.

• Tone: How do you communicate with the audience?

This section provides the details that your creative team needs to determine how messaging and content will be delivered. What appeals to your target market?

• Message: Exactly what should this project say to the world at-large? Tell the team what you want your audience to take away from the creative.

• Designs: Does the project need to stick to corporate branding guidelines, or can it have its own image and styles? This is where you need to provide creatives with restrictions (if there are any) that will guide the look and feel in the right direction.

Following these basic guidelines helps ensure that your creative team has the information needed to deliver resultsdriven content that matches your needs.

You may be tempted to fill out a brief quickly so that your project can get under way. But I would suggest that it’s better to offer a concise and considered brief. A page of clichés isn’t going to help anywhere near as much as a simple, single paragraph that tells the creatives what they need to know.

If you follow the above guidelines and keep your answers clear and concise, the creative team will be on its way to delivering a killer concept for your new campaign (something we’ll go through in the next post).

So it’s OK to spend a little more time on your creative briefs.

Actually, spend a lot more time on creative briefs... As I said before, it’s an investment that saves time, cuts confusion, and helps you show that what you can deliver brings better results across the board.

The Top Branding Stories Of

2013 Margaret Rhodes

FROM SHAPESHIFTING BRAND IDENTITIES TO DEATH METALINSPIRED CORPORATE LOGOS, HERE’S A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE YEAR IN BRANDING. Rebranding is tough work. A logo isn’t just a logo--it’s a way of telling the world what your company stands for (it can also incite serious consumer rage. Remember Gap’s notorious misstep in 2010?). In some cases branding can almost turn into marriage counseling for companies: how do you want to grow, and who (or what audience) do you want to grow with?

Over the course of 2013 we spoke with mega companies like American Airlines and Starbucks, fashion-focused groups like Kate Spade and Refinery29, and even individual designers with their own bold, non-commissioned ideas about branding, all to find out about how they’re repositioning themselves for 2014 and the years to come. Here›s some of the best of what we saw.

American Airlines

This year American Airlines said goodbye to their iconic logo, designed in 1968 by Massimo Vignelli, and introduced a new logo from Futurebrand. The Flight Symbol is both a bird and a wing, without the original logo’s Cold War-era talons.

Mesosphere

For the cloud storage start up Mesosphere, Ammunition designer Brett Wickens (who created the logo for The Sopranos) conceived of an animated, ever-evolving logo.

The letter “M” forms the core of the icon, but it’s also an abstraction of the cloud.

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Kate Spade

Tokyo Kate Spade used to release a new product in stores every Saturday. The resulting paper marketing built up quickly, so Kate Spade tapped design firm Control Group to reinvent its signage, on iPads. The rebranding turned into an entire new retail effort. The online only shop--dubbed Saturday--is geared toward young consumers.

Google

Black metal band logo designer Christophe Szpadjel took on the challenge of making brands like Google, Microsoft, and Prada (and Fast Company) appear just as hardcore as his typical clients.

Newsweek

When Newsweek decided to stop publishing in print and move everything online, the publication approached Brooklyn-based Huge to help them design the transition.

The digital experience is meant to mimic the feeling of print journalism thanks to clean pages and big, beautiful images.

Mail Chimp

Designer Jessica Hische documented the very subtle series of nips and tucks she gave to the Mail Chimp logo. At first blush, the logo hasn’t changed much. But a closer look reveals some canny aligning and spacing in the lettering-which together show off the power of good graphic design.

Starbucks

Starbucks opened its flagship Teavana store in New York this fall. The shop caters to tea-lovers in search of a more calming experience. To achieve that, the coffee company created a new double-walled cup with a softer, rounder spout.

Refinery29

Online fashion news site Refinery29 has dramatically expanded its readership since launching in 2005. The founders worked with Wolff Olins to both rethink the graphics of the site and logo, and sharpen the company’s editorial focus.

Five Big Social Media Trends for 2014 Aaron Everson 2013 was a big year for social media as more organizations than ever turned to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest to learn from and engage with their customers. As we enter 2014, it’s important not only to look back at the past year to determine what worked and what didn’t in social but also to think about the year ahead: What major trends will persist, which new ones will arise, and how can social marketers make the most of the changing landscape?

Social marketers should keep in mind the following five insights to help their brands and organizations prepare for and succeed in 2014 by connecting with customers.

1. Clever, smart marketing is more important than ever Recent trends have forced brands to compete for consumer attention unlike ever before. Audience behavior is fragmenting, people’s personal and professional selves are merging, and there is a tremendous shift in how consumers make purchase decisions.

To successfully address those changes, brands must first understand their audience. Despite the ability to pull all kinds of customer data, many brands fail to uncover meaningful audience insights. Making use of customer data allows brands to determine their audience’s preferences, and, accordingly, how to effectively engage them.

In addition, increasingly marketing must come from a place of helping, rather than selling. As we move into the New Year, we’ll see brands continue to focus on content that’s useful rather than solely promotional.

2. Social data will guide the future of relationship intelligence Millions of actions are taking place on social networks every minute, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity.

The challenge lies in actually analyzing and developing meaningful insights from the data, to take advantage of the great opportunity to learn and strengthen customer relationships.

Whether it’s high-level, mid-level or individual-level data, information from social sites, campaigns, or other customer interactions can provide brands with the data necessary to accomplish their goals.

Brands are fully expected to have a social analytics team in place so they can effectively monitor and engage audiences

they’re trying to reach on social media platforms, especially because community managers cannot fight this battle alone.

3. The next phase of social business is integration Social media can no longer exist as an entity separate from the rest of the business. Altimeter found although 78% of companies have a dedicated social media team, and the number of employees on those teams is expanding, there is still work that needs to be done. Coordination and integration are missing: Just 26% of companies currently approach social media holistically, according to Altimeter.

Marketers must connect social data to other enterprise data sources to deliver actionable insights.

As 2014 approaches, there are several important factors to identify around effectively integrating social media, including which channels are relevant for your messaging, how social data should be handled, and what technology tools you need to implement the tactics behind your strategy.

4. Online meets offline for customer engagement As brands take advantage of social tools to encourage local customer engagement, online and offline will collide. Unique campaigns that focus on bringing online content to the real world will excel and make a splash in the significantly noisy social media world. Moreover, these types of campaigns allow brands greater integration with the communities where they want to have an impact. That said, brands will need to listen locally to determine what the community cares about.

5. Relevant, real-time content marketing is here As we move into 2014, it’s important to keep in mind that more content isn’t the key; it’s relevant content that counts.

By waiting for the moment, acting in the moment (think, Tide’s Shark Week tweet), and anticipating the moment, brands and marketers can drive traffic, engagement, and high-quality leads. Smart brands already have a handle on acting in the moment, but the trend is only going to grow in 2014. Who will be this year’s Oreo at the Super Bowl?

We’re not exactly there yet, but what if your team could anticipate what topics your customers will be talking about and have content ready for them when they need it? Moreover, brands would be able to not only stay ahead of topical trends but also determine which devices to optimize campaigns for, what product users are likely to enjoy next, and what the most effective calls to action will be.

2014 will certainly be an exciting year for social media!

Book, Line & Sinker Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

Brand Together: How CoCreation Generates Innovation and Re-energizes Brands

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries.

Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It’s essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world’s most exciting marketplace.

A new tool for marketers and brand managers, co-creation is fast becoming a recognized and effective way to drive business growth and enhance and protect brand reputation. Brand Together shows how to involve all stakeholders employees, clients and customers - in the process of co-creation and innovation to enable the brand to succeed in the new world of customer engagement and participation. It shows how to intertwine creativity with brand strategy and provides practical guidance on how to co-create with customers from a brand perspective.

By Nicholas Ind, Clare Fuller, Charles Trevail

By Geoffrey A. Moore

Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders

FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future by brand futurist Nick Wreden represents a fresh look at branding imperatives, especially for companies selling to other businesses. Core principles of FusionBranding are illustrated with numerous case studies. Each chapter includes a FutureView, which looks at branding in 2005 and beyond, Takeaways, in-depth questions that can help apply FusionBranding principles, and Resources that features books and Web sites about FusionBranding principles.

It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of the main chapters, a range of new exercises, supplies weblinks to view interviews online and offers supplementary downloadable information.

By Adam Morgan

By Alice M. Tybout, Tim Calkins, Philip Kotler

By Nick Wreden

Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of the Kellogg School of Management

Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes

The Foreword by renowned marketing guru Philip Kotler sets the stage for a comprehensive review of the latest strategies for building, leveraging, and rejuvenating brands. Destined to become a marketing classic, Kellogg on Branding includes chapters written by respected Kellogg marketing professors and managers of successful companies. It includes: The latest thinking on key branding concepts, including brand positioning and designStrategies for launching new brands, leveraging existing brands, and managing a brand portfolio.

Katya Andresen, a veteran marketer and nonprofit professional, demystifies winning marketing campaigns by reducing them to ten essential rules and provides entertaining examples and simple steps for applying the rules ethically and effectively to good causes of all kinds. The Robin Hood rules steal from the winning formulas for selling socks, cigarettes, and even mattresses, with good advice for appealing to your audiences’ values, not your own; developing a strong, competitive stance; and injecting into every message four key elements that compel people to take notice.

By Katya Andresen

The Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers into Loyal Followers (and Yours Can, Too!) Like religious cults that can attract thousands of devoted disciples, is it possible for company brands to build legions of loyal followers? In a marketer’s dream come true, can certain products—with the right combination of positioning and branding— take on magnetic characteristics and galvanize die-hard customers who become walking, talking viral marketers? Can your company harness the power of cult branding without blowing a fortune on advertising?

By Matthew W. Ragas, Bolivar J. Bueno

Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity THINKING IN NEW BOXES is a revolutionary process for sustainable creativity from two strategic innovation experts from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). To make sense of the world, we all rely on assumptions, on models on what Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny call “boxes.” If we are unaware of our boxes, they can blind us to risks and opportunities. This innovative book challenges everything you thought you knew about business creativity by breaking creativity down into five steps

By Luc De Brabandere, Alan Iny

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The Branded Mind

Brand Relations Management: Bridging the Gap Between Brand Promise and Brand Delivery

Those interested in emotional branding take note. The Branded Mind provides an in depth and contemporary analysis of how people think, and how that relates to branding. De Plessis describes consumer behavior, emotions and moods, decision-making, market segmentation, and brand strategy in the context of science and philosophy. This not an easy read, but those in search of a rich and comprehensive understand of neuromarketing should look no further.

Brand Relations Management is a book for all those interested in strategy and marketing. The primary intention is to show that both brand promise and brand delivery are necessary in order to build a sustainable brand. The book’s greatest strength is that it gathers and presents all the relevant theories of brand building.

By Tony Apéria, Rolf Back

By Erik du Plessis

Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success

StoryBranding: Creating StandOut Brands Through The Power of Story

Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success analyzes important breakthroughs in brain science and facial coding to inform author Dan Hill’s compelling conclusions and insights on storytelling, sensory payoff, defusing skepticism and other branding essentials. A blend of psychological lessons and industry applications, Emotionomics bridges the humanity of the heart and the logic of the mind in an artful and skilled discourse on the business of life.

By Dan Hill

Having worked on many famous brands as an advertising executive, Jim Signorelli has found that today, in order for advertising to be truly effective, the brand being promoted must work the way a good story works. Many brands continue to get in their own way with an over-reliance on editorialized benefits. “Today, that’s a deathwish,” says Signorelli. “To remain competitive, brands must provide consumers with story themes they can relate to, identify with, and share with their tribes.

By Jim Signorelli

The Brand Gap

By Marty Neumeier

THE BRAND GAP is the first book to present a unified theory of brand-building. Whereas most books on branding are weighted toward either a strategic or creative approach, this book shows how both ways of thinking can unite to produce a “charismatic brand”-a brand that customers feel is essential to their lives. In an entertaining two-hour read you’ll learn: the new definition of brand the five essential disciplines of brandbuilding how branding is changing the dynamics of competition the three most powerful questions to ask about any brand why collaboration is the key to brand-building how design determines a customer’s experience how to test brand concepts quickly and cheaply the importance of managing brands from the inside 220-word brand glossary

Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore In, Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, Neale Martin explains how consumer response is guided by the subconscious mind. Martin provides a practical guide to the human psyche and the behaviors that form a habit: discovery, purchase, and use. From analyzing neurons in scientific experiments to broad theories regarding advertising campaigns, this book explores the psychology of consumers without reducing them to brainless purchasing machines.

By Neale Martin

The Power of Habit

Brand Risk: Adding Risk Literacy to Brand Management

In “The Power of Habit, “award-winning “New York Times” business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

By Charles Duhigg

By David Abrahams

Risk is unpredictable by nature, but without it success wouldn’t be possible—or even interesting, for that matter. In Brand Risk: Adding Risk Literacy to Brand Management, David Abrahams delves into the murky realm of the unknown as it applies to branding and business. He explains how effective brands do not avoid risk, but find ways of determining acceptable levels of risk and navigating them to leverage their branding power, influence, exposure, and value. This book not only details the strategies behind risk literacy, but the attitude as well—an attitude that must be embraced not only by CEOs and managers, but the entire brand architecture.