Branding Best Practices: Differentiation Vs Distinctiveness

 

Talk to most brand marketers and you will likely hear that brands need to be differentiated. Most “positioning” exercises are directed at finding the one (hopefully major) thing that will make a brand stand out from the competition. Positioning is about connecting the dots between what your target customers need, want, or aspire to with what you offer (or can offer). It’s about getting into customers’ minds and occupying a unique “mind space” with your brand.

That is the ideal.

The reality is more difficult. Many products and services today are “also-rans”—basically the same. And customers know it. Finding features and benefits that are uniquely different is getting harder and harder, thanks in no small part to global competition and supply chain optimization.

Fortunately, brands can be differentiated on other variables than actual functional benefits (like product features). For example, brands can also be differentiated on the basis of emotional benefits (how they make you feel) and self-expressive benefits (what they say about you to others).

However, when differentiation is not to be had for a given brand, all is not lost. Regardless of whether a brand can be differentiated from the competition, a brand can ALWAYS be distinctive.

Making your brand distinctive is the least you must do for brand success. A brand that does not stand out from competition in terms of its look and feel has little to no chance of succeeding and will be relegated to competing on price.

At Six Degrees, we use the model below to help identify how to make brands differentiated and/or distinctive from their competition.

The lower half of the model describes the areas for potential differentiation and the top half shows the areas for making a brand distinctive. Ideally, a brand can be both differentiated based on benefits and distinctive based on look & feel. But even if differentiation is elusive, any brand can be made distinctive.

Brand distinctiveness can be articulated in a variety of ways, including a name (e.g., Frusen Glädjé), a logo symbol (e.g., London Symphony Orchestra), the brand look & feel (e.g., Lemonade Insurance) or personality (e.g., Nike).

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Regardless of how you choose to make your brand distinctive, the key is to stick to it and stay consistent over time. Brand image, like the reputation of people, takes a long time to build up but can be lost quickly and easily.

Aim to differentiate, but always be distinctive.

Digital Marketing Efforts Not Paying Off? What's Your Brand Platform?

MAKE SURE YOUR BRAND PLATFORM IS IN PLACE FIRST!

In the “good old days”, life for brand marketers was a whole lot more simple. There were a limited number of TV and radio stations and a handful of important magazines and newspapers in any given market. If you had a strong message, you stood a good chance of achieving your sales goals.

Today, brand marketers live in a different world. Marketing channels for brands have exploded in recent years, especially digital marketing channels. As if Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, webinars, webcasts (and good old favorite: podcasts) didn’t add enough complexity to your brand marketing activities, along come “automated” marketing, video on Twitter and Facebook, advanced targeting algorithms on Facebook and Twitterchats—to mention just a few of the newer things.

Brand marketers used to spend their time identifying needs, segmenting customers and communicating brand benefits. Now, brand marketers must also develop and manage immersive brand experiences and dialog with customers and potential customers—on a group and individual level—across a wide range of digital channels and virtually 24/7. It’s no wonder many brand marketers are feeling overwhelmed today as they confront the ever-evolving world of digital marketing. So, how can a brand marketer manage?

The Brand Platform

One way to find solid ground amidst all the shifting sands is to make sure you have a brand platform firmly in place. It is your “lodestone” that will inform your digital marketing efforts in terms of content, voice and format.

A brand platform is the foundation of your brand and defines why the brand exists, what it does, what it stands for, how it does it and who it targets and what they should expect to receive from the brand. It is the brand’s strategy expressed succinctly in words (and sight, sound, etc if you also chose to develop a sensory position). For a brand platform template and brand platform example, see the one for our digital branding agency, Six Degrees, below:

By establishing your brand platform, you inform the content you need to create for your brand and how to express that content. Content creation is, in fact, one of the most important activities required for successful marketing, both traditional and digital, of your brand. But beyond that, the brand platform also defines the tone and manner of your brand’s interactions with prospects and customers across all digital marketing channels. Finally, your brand platform defines your target customers and core message, so that you can stay true to your brand with all your content across all your marketing channels.

How to Build Your Brand Platform

If you don’t already have a brand platform, you can do it yourself by following the standard process of conducting market research among your key target audiences, auditing the competition and facilitating one or more workshops with internal stakeholders to populate the brand platform template. Candidate brand platforms should be evaluated against some key criteria including, at minimum: (1) Is the brand platform compelling to your target audiences, (2) is it different from the competition and (3) is it credible for your organization. Alternatively, you can engage a branding agency to drive the process. At Six Degrees, we use psycho-sensory tools and techniques throughout the standard process to ensure the resultant brand platform is optimized for the brand at hand as well as for the digital world in which brands now live and compete.

Recommendations for Creating Your Brand Platform

Over the years, we have learned a few things about developing a more effective brand platform, that we will share here.

The (primarily) internal platform components of vision and mission have the greatest potential to motivate your team and organization. But in order to live up that potential, they can’t be the trite, boring and non-inspiring statements we’re all too familiar with. Examples of how not to write vision and mission statements abound: “To be the leader in [whatever] by delivering outstanding customer service” or “Continuing our legacy of commitment to consumers, community and children, we provide high-quality products while conducting our business in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable manner”.

By contrast, a compelling and inspiring vision statement reflects the actual philosophy of the organization. It is the organization’s guiding principle…something that drives but is never a job done (or else it would be the end of the organization’s purpose). Examples of such vision statements are:

• “Everyone who has a body is an athlete” (Nike)
• “The PERFECT search engine” (Google)

Good mission statements then describe how the organization works toward their vision:

• “To develop products that help athletes of every level of ability reach their potential” (Nike)
• “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google)

Brand pillars form a bridge from the organization to its external audiences by describing what external audiences can expect in terms general offering, behavior and personality from the brand. Good brand pillars guide the organization’s behavior and are as specific as possible. They need to have enough specificity to be actionable. Good examples of brand pillars are: “youthful, cool & stylish” (personality: Mazda) and “Insightful & Inventive” (offering: Herman Miller). Examples of poor brand pillars are: “innovative” and “high-tech”, because they are too generic. At Six Degrees, we use psycho-sensory brand-building techniques to further define brand pillars by identifying the sensory cues that will trigger these perceptions in the target audiences.

The brand promise and reasons to believe form the brand’s competitive position in the market place. The brand promise is the most concise articulation of the benefit the organization provides compared to the competition. It must be differentiating from everyone else who competes in that space and compelling to the chosen target audience. A good example is Volvo: “To professionals, especially women with young children” (target audience), “Volvo is the only manufacturer of entry level luxury vehicles that puts safety above all else” (brand promise). These externally facing elements of the brand platform are often the hardest, because they require taking a stand and sacrificing (i.e., admitting we are not for everyone). But, once you have done this, marketing of the brand has become much easier because you now clearly know who you’re going after with what offering that is different, compelling and credible.

Managing Your Brand Across Digital Marketing Channels

Unlike the past where marketing campaigns were more likely to lead directly to brand purchase, today brand marketing campaigns are more likely to result in an internet search. The upside of this is that prospects’ behaviors can now be tracked and analyzed nearly in real time and campaign adjustments made on the fly. The downside is that competitors can now fairly easily re-target and convert “your” prospects. Be warned: In this digital age, building awareness without the follow through can be detrimental to your brand and benefit your competitors!  And brands are not just corporate assets anymore, but communities of people united in attitude, belief and/or purpose. A brand’s reputation, while taking much effort, investment and commitment to grow, can very quickly be eroded.

Now, for the question of which digital channels to focus on, the simple answer is this: As many of the major channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) as you can without compromising your ability to engage regularly and authentically. The major channels are a must for brand awareness and search engine optimization. Add other channels as appropriate to your sector/industry and where your target audiences tend to interact. The number of channels, while important, is less important than being dedicated to providing valuable content and providing a high level of engagement on the channels you do use.

A completed and vetted brand platform is your number one tool for directing your digital marketing efforts. 

The Way You’re Thinking about Branding May Be Ruining Your Brand

Many companies get less out of branding than they could or should because they are thinking of it the wrong way. For example, many simply think of branding as a name or a logo—something the marketing department does. It’s an artsy-fartsy activity, neither associated with hard business metrics nor something executive management really worries about.

Wrong.

Companies that make this error aren’t recognizing their most important asset. An asset, that if properly managed, will NEVER DEPRECIATE AND ONLY APPRECIATE.

Name another company asset that is capable of that! Only a brand can.

For instance, would you rather own the brick and mortar hospitals…or the Mayo Clinic brand? How about the bottling operations, formula and supply chain…or the Coca-Cola brand? The factories and patents…or the General Electric brand?

With over 30 years of branding experience, I can confidently say the proper way to think about a brand is as—reputation. Building a reputation takes time, effort and consistency. Unfortunately, that reputation can be lost in an instant. Consider the reputation collapse of brands like Arthur Andersen, Worldcom and even the most recent fall of the brand Bill Cosby.

Once a company equates its brand(s) with its reputation, it becomes clear that branding is not just a function that marketing is involved in, but something that needs to be managed at the highest levels of the organization, as well as cascaded and reinforced throughout the entire organization. Branding relates to how the organization interacts with product/service development, customers, suppliers, competitors, employees and the media. In order words, absolutely everything the company does.

Along with thinking about branding as reputation-building and management, companies need to measure and track brand value. Accepted methods exist for putting a financial value on brands.

Only once a company measures the value of their brand(s) and manages them like reputation, are they in a position to optimize this most valuable company asset. While the marketing department is an essential resource in branding, it is up to the company’s leadership to “own” their brand(s) for maximum business success.

The brand is your most valuable asset. Treat it as such and it will only ever appreciate.