The CEO of BMW Korea has this to say about branding within the automotive industry:

“The gap in automobile technology will be getting more closer in the future. The real opportunity for everyone is to figure out how to map out a distinct business approach in brand…”

Reminds once again of the CEO role as brand builder, and how closely tied branding is to business strategy.

Read more about this story here.

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Our coffee landed on a variety of surrounding flat surfaces this morning upon seeing this report:

“Over the years, ad makers have tried various methods to learn about consumers, from focus groups to online polls. But many on Madison Avenue are skeptical of these methods, believing consumers don’t always share their true feelings in those types of traditional settings. So a growing number of ad agencies are expected to try a different approach: having researchers spend long periods of time with consumers to find out more about how they live.

Some have already tried this.”

And this is news?

Indeed, some have tried this. And, a small number of specialized firms are expert at it.

However, as more and more business leaders are learning, ad agencies are ill-equipped to tap into the minds of audiences they seek to influence. The old way of opinion polling and focus groups parroted too often today by ad and PR agencies could not be more inadequate for the task than if one selected a toilet roll for use as a table napkin.

Read more about what caused us to go back to the coffee pot in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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Blogging is a powerful brand builder. It is a low-cost, high-return tool that can raise a company’s profile and shape it’s reputation.

How best to blog? A report in the New York Times offers a variety of suggestions from successful bloggers, including the story behind Free Money Finance, a blog hosted by Denali, makers of Moose Tracks ice cream.

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How should any organization own the conversation about itself or its product? By paying attention to what people say about you.

One method is to understand and tap into the use of social media.

Social media can be a valuable research tool. For example, organizations can go online for real time conversation and feedback through social networking Web sites.

A report in the Chicago Tribune discusses the opportunity:

For consumers, social media “gives them an opportunity to tell us exactly what they want and what’s important to them in an uninhibited environment,” Andy Markowitz, Kraft’s director of digital media, said in an e-mail.

It also offers consumers the opportunity to tell you what is wrong—inauthentic, irrelevant, unengaging, and highly forgettable—about your product. In today’s environment, social media creates a greater accountability for organizations and their brands than ever before. Again, from the Tribune:

Deborah Schultz, who consults on social media strategies for Procter & Gamble, calls the emerging social practice “conversational marketing.”

While we appreciate the likely unintended reference to our trademark, this own the conversation strategy offers a range of benefits. For the responsible organization, blogs, social networks, and other forms of social media can be made to work for you if your organization understands the benefits of transparency. To be successful at it requires a greater emphasis on finding your brand, truly understanding it, and delivering on your promise every day.

In tapping into social media, be prepared. As with most any effort to build human connection:

“Relationships take time, and they are messy. There is a give and take, and companies have to realize it can take a long time.”

Read more in the Chicago Tribune.

Conversation, the painting shown above, is the work of British artist Barnaby Menage. You may see other works of the artist at this online gallery.

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Former Unilever CEO, now Chairman of Reuters, Niall FitzGerald, says the poorest consumers are the most brand loyal. In a speech delivered during the Business in Africa symposium at CASS Business School in London, he offered these comments:

Unilever has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Africa. Why? For the same reason it is investing in Europe, Asia, Latin America and North America: to do business, grow and make money.

The poorest consumers are the most brand-loyal consumers. They cannot afford to make a mistake with meagre incomes. There is no second choice. If your brand earns trust, it will be rewarded with fierce loyalty. You enter a real contract with your consumer. Deliver for them and they will stick with you.

Tell us what you think.

You can read more about Mr. FitzGerald’s comments and their context in this report from The Times.

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A blog can be a powerful brand builder.

We brand by blog, as do others.

This story from USA Today discusses another example of an organization relying upon a brand by blog strategy, based upon this business plan:

[S]tart an online news site, fueled by blog reports from her celebrity and influential friends. And have them all work for free, in exchange for using her bully pulpit.

The blog that has become a brand? This one.

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Buried deep within this report from Australia’s Dynamic Business magazine is this gem of a statement on brand naming:

[S]electing a name is the most important element of branding.

We agree. No one component of brand development offers a greater opportunity to attract the desired audience than the name of a product or organization. As shared at this link:

A brand name, often tagline, key messaging and visual identity, combine to form the tip of any brand, with the brand name the most powerful of these components. Without the spear tip, no brand secures the opportunity to create for its owner the sustainable competitive advantage every business craves.

Unless this spear tip quickly and precisely connects with imagery, thoughts, and feelings present within the mind of your market, there is little chance of engaging your audience in real conversation about who you are and what you do. The reason is that you have all of five seconds to make an impression, to create a mental stop prompting the listener/viewer to pay attention by paying with their time, as your message competes in a contemporary culture suffering from message overload.

As an example of how this works in the real world, it’s why respected brands have been created around names such as Apple and Flatbread.

And, its why we created our tip-of-the-spear around the brand name Whisper.

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If there were any doubt that brand strategy is business strategy, one need only read the this report discussing the strategic review underway at U.S. based Talbots, to sharpen its brand and ensure that the women’s clothing and specialty retailer remains “relevant, fresh and consistent.”

According to the Talbots CEO:

The goal of the review is to provide a comprehensive plan to improve profitability and improve business performance… [The review will include] operating matters, store growth, productivity, noncore concepts and distribution channels.

For Talbots, more than a logo or slogan at play here.

To assure success, hopefully Talbots selected a pure brand strategy consultancy which comes to the task with brand as the primary focus, rather than as an afterthought.

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From the “at this very moment as a viewer you are participating in a demonstration of the power of this idea” file.

A story from the New York Times illustrates how blogging can be a more powerful brand builder than public relations or advertising:

Putting a small business online used to be a relatively simple matter: buy the domain names that matched your company’s identity, set up a Web server and send out a press release and a few e-mail messages. No more…

“We launched our company in May 2006 with a blog, not a Web site,” said Jody DeVere, the president of AskPatty.com, an advice site that helps women find car showrooms and repair shops that are friendly to them. “Our blog has been the driving force of our branding effort and become the way we find our readers and our customers.”

…An active blog helps draw visitors to a corporate Web site and can improve a company’s search rankings… “Blogging isn’t just about promoting you or your business…” Instead…corporate blogs [should] focus on a niche or industry segment and become an authority by publishing advice and commentary on it.

“The old ways of hiring a public relations firm and putting out press releases just don’t cut it anymore,” …said [John Patrick, a former I.B.M. vice president for Internet technology]. “Today’s businesses have to be more hands-on, grass roots, interactive and maintain this flow of continuous communications.”

Examples of companies putting these theories to practice daily, including building their own respective brands through their blogs, include this San Francisco firm, and this international consultancy.

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A report in The McKinsey Quarterly, How Companies Are Marketing Online, offers a good synopsis of Web 2.0 tools and how they are being used to create engagement. The report also includes this forecast:

…[B]y 2010 the Web will play a role in the first two stages of the consumer decision-making process—product awareness and information gathering—for a sizable majority of all consumers… The expectation that most consumers will seek out new products online may be a factor in the plans of companies to increase spending significantly on several digital-advertising tools they see as most useful in building brands.

A smaller proportion of customers…will use the Web to execute transactions or access services.

A PDF of the report is available here.

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We recently discussed the topics of resurrected dormant brands, otherwise labeled Zombie Brands, and their value due to latent brand equity.

A follow-up story appears at the online magazine Slate, speaking to revived brands such as the Indian Motorcycle, the McDonald’s McRib sandwich, Polaroid recast as a flat panel TV brand, and the MG motor car.

Read more about similar dormant brands here.

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Why are dormant brands such as Tab, Ford Taurus, and Vionnet resurrected and relaunched? The answer is in power of brand equity, often in brands with a long dormant legacy. It’s the reason the Ford 500 becomes the Ford Taurus, Tab becomes Tab Energy, and the Vionnet fashion brand is revived under the leadership of another respected fashion house.

For more on what one source refers to as “Zombie Brands,” click here to listen to an MP3 audio version of the story.

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Seeking a new CEO and recovering from a string of missteps, including a recent announcement to shutter Forth and Towne, Gap Inc. [NYSE:GPS] faces a number of challenges to revitalize the company and its brands.

The first challenge is strengthening it’s flagship GAP brand.

One suggestion of how to tackle the problem comes in this from Adrants:

There’s a simple solution to fixing Gap, the brand. Get rid of the celebrities and start investing in the emotional meaning of the word Gap itself. The brand name has gotten lost in the celebrity shuffle.

The feelings that rub off on the word Gap need to come from a genuine place, not from a never ending parade of celebrities. The core values of the brand need to be defined in a personal and intimate way that plays off the word itself.

One example of how this idea could be brought to life as a story of the brand:

A teenage boy and a girl are sitting on a bench with a “gap” between them. Neither one has the courage to start a conversation, but clearly they are enamored with each other. Suddenly a no name street musician sits down between them and starts belting out a soulful ballad. Then he walks away. The two kids immediately start talking to each other. The Gap logo [appears with a new] Tagline: Get Together.

It’s this feeling that needs to drive the inner core of the brand. Without it, the brand is lost in the emotional retail space. By developing a series of “Gap” stories, there’s a way to reinvigorate the brand from the inside out, rather than the outside in.

If you get the emotional story right, the feelings rub off on the merchandise.”

As a starting point, good advice for an iconic brand that has lost its way.

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A thoughtful Op-Ed from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel brings clarity to the struggles faced by the Milwaukee 7 in their efforts to brand the seven counties of Southeastern Wisconsin.

Among the insights offered by the Journal Sentinel editorial are these:

…Milwaukee is a brand.

If we look only at how we might resemble other cities, we’re missing the point. To be one more city with financial services, restaurants and coffee shops does not let us compete.

All cities have that.

And this:

[W]e can’t be ashamed of how we’re perceived. We have to be ourselves, celebrate ourselves, and invite others to the party.

And this, reinforcing how an effective brand strategy must tap into the authenticity of a place:

It’s easier to ride a horse in the direction it’s going. When Las Vegas stopped pretending to be a family destination and returned to its roots (”What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”), it took off like a rocket.

Read more here.

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Brand demonstration:

Brand explanation:

…[B]lank spaces. Advertisers seem determined to fill every last one of them. Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes.

Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines. But consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn.

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Or, perhaps, ubiquity is the new nausea. As the New York Times further reports:

One company that says…nontraditional advertising has worked is Perry Ellis, the clothing designer…

“We’re always looking for new mediums and places that have not been used before — it’s an effort to get over the clutter,” said Pablo de Echevarria, [senior vice president of marketing].

“But,” he added, “I guess we end up creating more clutter.”

For an advertising agency, ad placement ubiquity is all about chasing the customer to drive revenues…of the ad agency.

In stark contrast, effective branding engages the consumer.

Demonstrate vs. Explain.

Engage vs. Chase.

Brand vs. Advertise.

For any organization, which would you guess is by far the more cost effective?

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