Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category

According to the new book, Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company In A Customer-Driven Marketplace, by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover, a wikibrand is a “progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas and causes that tap the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration to drive business value.”

This philosophy requires a massive organization culture shift. Wikibranding is about having the guts to allow the customer co-pilot your business. We only need to look at companies like Zappos, Dell, Southwest, FedEx, Target, and Cisco to see that wikibranding is not only possible, but it makes for a very profitable company. (Here are wikibrands by industry, if you are curious to see what your competition might be up to.)
Keep Reading…

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Yes, it is a double entendre if you didn’t catch it.

When was the last time you asked, “what is the lifetime value of our customers?” (also known as customer lifetime value ), or –more importantly— “what is the lifetime value we offer our customers?”

Is it smart to have one without the other? I don’t think so.

Is calculating CLV a normal event for your organization? I don’t know about you, but calculating ROI seems like child’s play compared to calculating CLV.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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“If your organization’s employees aren’t on your side, it doesn’t matter how good your relationships with other publics are.” -Guth & Marsh

This is a concept that I wish most organizations would understand—especially when it comes to social media.

While many organizations are struggling with the notion of being social, they cannot idly sit by until they determine the best course of action. At the least, they need to implement a social media policy (with the help of a consultant or agency with actual social media experience, of course) as a first course of action to protect their brand. This is important because employees might be using social networks and potentially identifying themselves as employees of said brand.

In today’s social world, an organization’s publics do not end with employees or the media. There are shareholder, stakeholder, government (national, state or local), and latent publics that an organization didn’t even know existed but now come out of the woodwork because they are offended by an employee’s actions or comments, which is exactly what happened with Chipotle’s recent social media debacle.

Keep Reading…

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When Aaron Strout tapped into a bunch of us to do a haiku regarding a brand experience we’ve had, I just couldn’t say no to the opportunity to be creative (reminds me of my 8th grade English class!) and to share a great brand experience that I recently had.

If you don’t remember, Haiku is written as 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.

Enjoy!

Damn! Bluescreen of death.
Went MacBook Pro and iPad,
Couldn’t be happier.

For your next brand haiku, head on over to the super smart and savvy blog of the one and only Valeria Maltoni.

P.S. This goes on record as one of the shortest posts I’ve ever written!

P.P.S. Be sure to check Twitter for the hashtag #brandhaiku.

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

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Last night on our weekly PR 2.0 chat on Twitter (anyone can join this weekly chat Wednesdays at 8pm EST. Search on hashtag #pr20cat and join in!),  we discussed branding and PR 2.0 and why PR folks (and marketers, that’s a topic on integration for another day!) need to understand branding and how it affects their interactions with constituents (or publics). 

If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure you’ve heard “you don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Nothing can be further from the truth and why we need to be very careful with how we phrase this as marketers, consultants, agencies, etc. 

FACT: You do own your brand and brand messaging
FACT: You don’t own relationships customers have with your brand 

I kicked off by asking people’s definitions of branding and a lot of people responded with a brand relationship definition, which is great but I think it also leads us to, as marketers implementing social media, to want to easily hand over the keys to the castle a little too easily. 

For some people it’s a chicken and egg situation. Do you love the logo or the company that produces the product/service first? Vanessa French asked me (paraphrased) “what if your mom gave you Pepsi as a kid, you’d have a relationship with Pepsi (based on emotion).” My response was “what if your mom served you Pepsi in a plastic cup and you never saw the bottle?” 

People tend to identify with a brand (i.e. logo, message, etc.) first and then they relate to it. I think it explains why there are so many fake bags (Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Hermes, etc.) not to mention other products on the market. It’s not that people relate to the company that owns the brand it’s that the brand (in this case a logo) gives them a perception of inclusion without the sting of the price tag. If they truly had a relationship with the brand they would never by fakes. Unfortunately, the perception of others is what spurs on the fakes market. 

From “Driving Brand Value” by Tom Duncan & Sandra Moriarty (what I shared during the PR 2.0 chat): 

Brand relationship is driven by: 

• Trust
• Consistency
• Accessibility
• Responsiveness
• Commitment
• Affinity
• Liking

(Sounds a lot like what we talk about with social media, huh?)

Five Levels of Bonding:

• Awareness
• Identity
• Relationship
• Community
• Advocacy 

I think we also tend to mixed up brand perception with branding and brand relationship. My perception of a brand comes after my relationship with the brand. For example: 

I bought a Jaguar and it was a piece of junk that could never be fixed. The Jaguar dealer and Jaguar wouldn’t do anything about it. I bought based on the brand (awareness/identity), my relationship was affected by lack of trust, consistency, accessibility, etc. My perception is that Jaguars are bad cars. I am sharing my story (WOM) on my blog (social media). 

So, if you are Jaguar’s PR folks and I had consistent blog about this and chatted on forums, you might want to pay attention. I would hope.

The tenets of branding are still viable, but just like everything else with social media they are more visible today and brand relationships and perceptions are out in the open. 

But we DO have control over our brand and messaging! You might want to reconsider using “trust” in your brand (logo) or messaging if the case is that the brand relationships and perceptions indicate that you are not an organization to be trusted. 

By the way, Driving Brand Value was written in 1997, and yet offers lessons that we still have not learned. It’s available on Amazon starting at $0.38 USD. I suggest you snap up a copy. 

Also, grab Integrated Branding by LePla and Parker while you’re at it… 

What do you think?

[Image: David Armano]

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