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Macomere: Branding Agency
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Price |
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How much an item costs is as much a part of its brand and positioning as its design and advertising. Price is perhaps the least glamorous element of branding, but it is one of the most crucial because it's the price that really indicates what strength a brand has.
A brand is what allows a product to rise above "parity" pricing and commodity status; to be sold for more than an equivalent product that lacks the brand. If a customer is considering only the price when buying a product, then the item is a commodity. If a customer is buying because of other factorsdesign, quality, features, ease of use, glamour, pleasant associations, a recommendation, personal memories and is willing to pay more because of them, then the brand is working. The more a seller can charge, and still have customers clamoring for the product, the stronger the economic value of the brand.
Price setting is often the domain of corporate marketing departments. This is because pricing is widely recognized as an integral part of a brand strategy. Firms don't just charge what they need to recover costs of production, nor do they charge "whatever they can get for it," although both of |
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Trademark |
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A brand consists of a single insight or idea in the customer's mind, wedded to a signa name and symbolthat serves as a convenient shorthand for that idea.
Trouble may arise if two or more ideas (products or services) share the same name or symbol. Apple Computer was sued in the early 1980s for using the same name as the Beatles' record company. The suit ended with an agreement that the computer firm would stay out of the music business.
This is a common sort of arrangement. There is no problem with the same name (or a similar logo) being used by companies that operate in completely different categories or geographic areas: customers are not likely to be confused. However, disagreements can arise when the boundaries blur, as when Apple started selling songs through its online iTunes service, or when the American Budweiser beer tried to move into European markets claimed by the Czech Budweiser, resulting in protracted legal disputes.
A strong brand is the most powerful means for fending off competitors when other tactics such as copyright protection or exclusive distribution are exhausted. When LEGO invented its interlocking plastic bricks in the 1940s, it was able to patent them. But patents eventually |
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Valuation |
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Brand valuation is controversial. Putting a precise financial value on such a great intangible is impossible, although there are plenty of brand experts who are prepared to make an estimate, and plenty of corporate leaders who take the results very seriously. On the one hand, how can a lawyer put a dollar figure on his reputation? Why do some companies "retire" popular brands if they are worth money? Can we measure precisely how much customers "love" Honda more, or less, than Toyota? On the other hand, it could be argued that the respected law firm is able to charge higher fees because of its good name. Campbell's soup sells for more than the generic brand, representing a return on the brand for every can sold.
Basically, formal methods of brand valuation try to separate the abstract "thing" that is a brand from the more concrete assets whose value is easily measurable in a company, including factories, equipment, and know-how such as patents. The different approaches to brand valuation, and the accounting rules in various countries that allow for recording brand value as an item in a company's financial statements, have the same aim: to provide tools for businesses to plan investments, |
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Values |
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It's not hard for a brand to be aligned with certain values. Being aligned with the right ones can give a boost to customer loyalty. Values are the things a brand stands for. Customers are generally savvy enough to perceive a brand's values through the behavior of its corporate parent; actions speak louder than PR. Values should be fundamental to a brand's self: they are precisely what keep a brand from being superficial or trivial. Nonetheless, it is not always apparent to customers just what values a brand stands for.
Integrity is commonly espoused, but not always adhered to. Companies can spend years building up an image of integrity, only to see it torn down by a single act of foolishnessfor example, knowingly shipping customers a shoddy product, mistreating workers, hiding financial malfeasance, or polluting the environment. Hypocrisy makes any PR disaster all the more damaging; brand stewards, from the CEO down, must take care always to act on their values, rather than just talking about them.
A commitment to excellence is something else companies talk about, though fewer seem to know how to make excellence a cornerstone of their brand. Tom Peters, the management expert, defined excellence as (among other things) |
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Visual Style, Part 2 |
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It should go without saying that the content and style of images should reflect the brand: if your car is supposed to be luxurious and roomy, the photos shouldn't make it look cheap and small. If your service is meant to appeal to a certain class of person, the models in the ads should really exude the attributes of that class.
When brands cross borders, brand managers must re-evaluate the visuals, especially those showing people. Ads are frequently reshot in each country so the models depicted don't look "foreign." This isn't prompted by racism; it is a realistic adaptation to audience response. It is human nature for customers in, say, Thailand to relate to different "types" than customers in Poland. A diverse group that is attractive to a multicultural market like the UK or the US will seem irrelevant to customers in places with more homogeneous populations.
Style is as important as content. The UK cell-phone company Orange used strong black-and-white images in the 1990s to differentiate its brand by giving it a cool realism. When the brand expanded from the UK to countries like Slovakia and Israel, its image was reconceived using color photography, as it was judged that black-and-white create |
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