Brand Personality Archives : Page 5 of 6 : Persona Design

Brand Profiling: Top 6 Components to Creating a Strong Brand Personality

February 2, 2015/2 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Target Market /by Lorraine Carter

Your brand is much more than merely product or service related features and benefits, or a logo. Brands are an experience—the relationship between your business and your customers. In the words of Simon Sinek “people don’t buy what you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.” In other words people buy what your brand stands for, something that has meaning – which is both personal and important to them. And in order to create an exceptional customer experience, underpinned with strong meaning, your brand must have an irresistible personality.

Typically, customers choose one brand over another because they’ve made an emotional connection with that particular brand because it means something important to them and they trust that brand. While that connection may sometimes be the brand with the lowest price, more often than not it’s due to the distinctive personality, characteristics, values and behaviours of a brand – the emotional experience and meaning that association with that brand gives them.

Martyn Newman, PhD, consulting leadership and emotional intelligence psychologist and best selling author of ‘Emotional Capitalist – The Ultimate Guide to Developing Emotional Intelligence for Leaders’ is one of the leading speakers at Europe’s largest EQ Summit in London in March 2015. Newman talks about emotional capital; the asset on the balance sheet you can’t afford to ignore. In short without sounding cynical, “there’s money in emotion”, “trust is fundamentally built on an emotional experience and emotions are involved with everything a company does. Emotions determine whether or not people will work well with you, buy from you, hire you, or enter into business with you. For this reason, the value of these emotions eventually shows up in financial performance.”

“In the new economy it is no longer sufficient to view a company or a brand simply as a commercial entity and its assets cannot be fully accounted for by inventories of financial capital and not even human capital.” “Ultimately, the only way to create real profit is to attract the emotional rather than the rational customer by appealing to their feelings and imagination.”

Image via www.eqsummit.com

“In the information age and globalised economy where values and meaning matter more in the market place, the value of emotional capital increases. This creates brand value and goodwill and results in repeat sales through customer loyalty, lifetime relationships and referrals. In other words, the brand is more than a name or a logo; it creates trust and recognition and is a promise and an emotional contract with each customer.”

Brands that compete on price alone fight in a commodity driven arena where only those with the deepest pockets win. Brands with strong, compelling personalities are able to rise above this lowest price, dog fight and command premium pricing, greater market share, and an expanded base of loyal customers.

Brand profiling is the systematic process of creating, developing and implementing your brand character and personality through shaping its brand promise, values, the do’s and don’ts of its behaviours, story, emotional benefits, its culture and what it stands for and so forth. It’s this humanized entity that gets your brand message out into the market, cuts through the noise and gets the attention of your primary customers in a way that matters to them. It gives you a clear understanding and expression of what your band offers and what that means for your customers, partners, and key audiences.

When creating and developing the profiles for our clients’ brands we use our bespoke Personality Profile Performer™, a systematic approach which underpins the commercial, rational, and holistic aspects of successful brand profile building. The following six key elements are representative of some of the core ingredients included within this branding process, used to create and deploy a compelling personality for your brand.

1. Know Your Market

Market research is crucial for any successful brand. You need to be absolutely clear on who your target market is in terms of things like their needs, wants, loves, dislikes and aspirations. Where they live, their life stage, what they do in their leisure time and work life, what matters to them, their interests, education, holiday preferences, what other brands they like, buy or aspire to owning etc.

Essentially you need to develop a ‘pen portrait’ or ‘buyer persona’ of who your ideal customer is so that you can create a compelling brand that meets their needs emotionally and rationally. And you need all this information as the basis on which to develop your brands’ profile or personality.

As part of your knowing your market you also need to research your competition. Where are they most successful and why, where do the untapped opportunities lie and what simply doesn’t or hasn’t worked in your market sector and so forth. You also need to find out and evaluate what your existing or potential new customers think about your competitors together with their perceptions. Remember 60% of branding is about perception and only 40% about the product or service.

It’s only then when you have all this groundwork covered that you can create and actively shape your brand the way you ideally want customers to perceive it. Make no mistake, customers are very intelligent and perceptive so whatever you do, or whatever approach you take, you must do it with good intent, authenticity and integrity if you want to be successful. Brands that ‘mislead’ or behave ‘dishonorably’ are always ‘found out’ and invariable suffer the consequences, particularly via social media.

You can gather this market research information through a variety of ways e.g. desk research, surveys, one-to-one interviews etc. Your choice of methodologies is often driven by what is most appropriate to your sector, market size, business or organization size and resources, but usually involves a combination of some of the approaches mentioned.

Customer surveys are a great strategy for gaining some of this important information and insights. You can design longer, more formal surveys for use in email marketing or on your business website, or use your social media channels to post quick, informal surveys. Some helpful survey types may include:

Give customers a list of personality adjectives, and ask them to rate your brand or multiple brands on each one, using a scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 10)
Display photographs of individual people and ask customers which brand(s) in your product category they believe each person would use, and why
Ask customers to perform free association with your brand name or slogan—list the first words or phrases that come to mind when they envision your brand
Provide a list of brands (including your own) and ask customers to relate them to other types of items such as cars, animals, movies, or books—for example: “If this brand was a movie, which one would it be?”

By using these direct-to-customer types of research methods, you’ll not only generate large amounts of information that will help you define the parameter of your brand personality—you’ll also increase customer engagement and interest in your brand.

2. Define Your Brand Personality

In addition to evaluating your market, you must also develop the parameters of your brand in the context of what is relevant to your primary target audience. This means determining a brand personality that will be authentic and believable for the customer, accurately reflect your brand values and brand promise, and is consistently represented across your entire brand platform, and throughout all your brand collateral.

Remember, your brand personality is a set of emotions and characteristics, rather like a real person, it’s a humanized entity that’s underpins your total brand experience. Brand personalities are often reflective of the target market—for example, brands aimed at Millennials may be fresh, energetic, innovative, or “fast,” while brands focusing on an older demographic base may embrace characteristics like tradition, nostalgia, and reliability.

As a basic start to determining your brand personality, consider which of the Big Five Personality Traits your brand falls under. Originally categorized as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, in relation to brands they are: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

These Big Five traits are traditionally used in personality tests, and virtually any brand can be related to one of them. Choosing a broad brand personality category can help you to refine this choice further in your brand profiling.

3. Create Distinction for Your Brand Profile

Once you have an overview of your brands’ personality, you need to refine your brand profile in order to differentiate from the competition. Take certain aspects of your brands’ character traits and amplify them to create increased distinction and memorability. There are many ways to accomplish brand differentiation, ranging from subtle yet continually reinforced messaging to truly stand-out separation. Regardless of the level of your brand differentiation strategy, it all begins with the essentials of your brand profile.

As an example of subtle distinction, major U.S. based department store brands Walmart, K-Mart, and Target share very similar operations and strategies. Yet the Target brand distinguishes itself by focusing on different elements of the brand experience compared to its competitors. Where Walmart and K-Mart typically focus on more affordable pricing, Target infuses its brand collateral and customer-facing content with style, design, and lifestyle choices. The fact that they are competitively priced and offering ‘value’ (which is not just price related) is assumed.

Some brands achieve distinctive personalities through a massive departure from convention. One example we’ve previously discussed is FMGC brand PooPouri, a bathroom odour control product that inverts the traditional discretion and euphemistic elegance of the industry by embracing the idea that poo stinks—and their product stops the stink.

4. Develop or Refine Your Brand Story

Brand storytelling is another powerful strategy and important part of your brand profile. A great brand story should fully incorporate and reflect your brand’s personality with compelling, memorable elements that help reaffirm, explain and exemplify what it stands for, its brand values and brand promise, how it sees the world, its humour type, tone of voice, what it likes and doesn’t like and so forth.

Image via www.hootmarketing.co.uk

There are several methods for approaching brand story creation – ranging from actual brand origin stories that are emotional, compelling, interesting or engaging, to brand stories that restate your brand values in creative ways, to brand stories that revolve around a symbol such as a brand mascot—think the Keebler Elves, the Pillsbury Doughboy, or Tony the Tiger.

FMCG brand OXO created a powerful brand story through their series of commercials aired through the 1980s and 1990s, starring the “OXO Family.” These adverts showed the family growing up and progressively evolving through various stages of life, held together during each stage by a mum who cooked meals using OXO stock cubes. The brand story proved so effective that when the lead actress, Lynda Bellingham, passed away in 2014, more than 150,000 people joined a Facebook campaign to resurrect the advert series.

5. Develop a Strategic Direction

In order to use brand profiling effectively in your brand communications plans, you must have a well-planned strategic direction for infusing the personality and characteristics of your brand into your all brand collateral and various touch points. It’s essential to find creative and engaging ways to communicate your brands’ personality congruently to your customers across multiple platforms, including physical presentation in retail stores, online media and marketing channels, and internal branding with your employees and leadership team.

Online channels like your company website and social media channels can provide excellent opportunities to reinforce your brand personality. Use things like your company’s “About Us” page to creatively reflect the main characteristics of your brand profile—replace stiff images and droning corporate copy with carefully selected content and brand image collateral that conveys the personality you want to communicate. Engage your customers on social medial with posts that reflect your brand’s chosen qualities and characteristics.

Image via www.papajohns.com

Pizza chain Papa John’s employed a smart strategy when expanding their U.S. based market into the UK—translating larger-than-life chain owner John “Papa” Schnatter’s sports enthusiasm into an association with the UK’s Football League and weaving this association heavily into their social media channels. As a result, Papa John’s market share in the UK has risen dramatically over the last 12 months.

6. Maintain Brand Consistency

Consistency is critically important in every aspect of your brand strategy, and this applies to your brand’s personality as well. The more consistently your brand’s personality is reflected across every platform, every customer touch point, and every piece of brand collateral, the stronger and more established your brand becomes.

Brand consistency must apply to both the tangible and intangible aspects of your brand—everything from your logo and corporate colors, to your packaging, to your employees’ attitudes and customer experiences and engagement strategies.

With a compelling brand personality, applied consistently, you can establish a strong brand profile that increases your market share—and ultimately your profits.

So, what do you think?

• How well do you understand your brand personality as it’s perceived by your customers?

• Do your brand’s current market perceptions reflect the embodiment of the brand personality you’d like to achieve for your brand?

• What distinction or distinctions separate your brand’s personality from your competition?

• How does your brand story tie into your brand profile? Could it be better aligned?

• What is your strategic direction for reinforcing your desired brand personality?

• Is your brand profile reflected consistently across all touch points and brand collateral? How could you be more consistent and more congruent?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

CEO Brand Leadership: How Does Your Leadership Impact Your Brand?

October 21, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Leadership, Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Branding, Business /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is the dominant decider for competing successfully in today’s business world. Organisations with the strongest brands are able to achieve far greater market share, higher profits, and long-term viability and sustainability. Whilst most companies focus their branding efforts on marketing, platform and brand collateral, many neglect one of the most important drivers of their brand – their chief executive’s or managing director’s brand leadership.

Particularly in a small, medium or large businesses (SMEs), the company leader is the single most powerful influencer on branding, the visionary behind the brand. Downplaying or ignoring your role in shaping your company’s brand often weakens your potential success and dilutes the potential impact of your brand. Whereas on the other hand, embracing your brand potential as the leader and visionary behind your brand provides the additional direction and focus much needed to help your brand grow and flourish.

We work with a lot of SME owner managers, helping them by adding distinction, structure, substance and more compelling meaning (from a customers perspective) to their vision of their brand. This is a key part of our work and ultimately critical to our clients brand success and the work we do in supporting them in their businesses.

Why Strong Leadership has a Powerful Brand Influence

A business brand is so much more than a name and logo. It’s the total brand experience from the moment a customer first interacts with anything that represents your brand. This could be an employee, a referral or conversation about your business, an article in the media, a person or an indirect affiliation which represents your business. It involves every piece of brand collateral, from your business cards to your website and product packaging, the look of your retail location or business interior, and every visual representation across all customer touch points. What’s more, your brand encompasses all the intangible aspects of your business – it’s reflected in your employees behaviour, your customer service, your pricing policies, the internal culture of your organisation and your total customer experience offered.

All of these elements together shape customer perceptions of a brand. In an SME business, the leader has the final say on every ingredient that goes into creating, developing, directing, growing and maintaining the brand. Each decision you make has the potential to impact your brand, for better or worse. Branding begins from the inside out – as a leader, you set the tone that resonates throughout your company and extends to your customer-facing brand experience, all of which is critical to your businesses survival, growing profitability and long term success.

One of the most familiar examples of this concept in action exists in chains and franchises. For instance, most people have been to more than one McDonalds, or Starbucks, or KFC. You’ve probably noticed that while they are the same stores, selling the same products in the same way, they can be quite different in brand experience. One chain location may be clean and well-lit, with a fast and friendly service, while another may be unkempt and slow, with terrible service and miserable employees.

This sometimes striking difference is the result of indifferent leadership, typically the store manager or franchise owner. If the leader of a franchise store is disengaged and out of touch, the brand suffers even with the backing of a national or global brand name behind it.

CEO Brand Vision: How Influential Leaders Shape Brands

In contrast, to the leader who pays little or no attention to their influence on their branding, some leaders carry a company’s brand and drive it with incredible success. Having a strong brand vision as a leader creates a powerful ripple effect that starts with the internal company culture, and extends into customer interactions and overall brand perceptions. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a well-known example of this. The brand floundered and nearly went into bankruptcy when Jobs left in 1985, but bounced back stronger than ever with his return in 1997.

Image via www.nikeblog.com

Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike and CEO of the company until 2004, when he resigned but remained involved as chairman of the board, has continuously served the Nike brand through a powerful brand vision. Knight’s leadership ensured that the company maintained an internal culture that lives and breathes sports. Employees at Nike are highly competitive, careers are envisioned as extended sports seasons, and committees are quarterbacked rather than led. This pervasive dedication to the industry, to fans, and to players has cemented Nike as a global leader in the sports sector. Customers respond to the passion behind the company with a strong brand loyalty that mirrors the internal culture.

Image via www.virgin.com

Among iconic brand visionaries, Sir Richard Branson is another standout example with a powerful personal brand that unifies more than 400 companies under the Virgin umbrella. Branson himself understands the supreme importance of branding, and knows exactly how he wants the Virgin brand to be perceived. He is a great living example of the visionary behind the brand. In an interview with Inc. magazine, Branson says, “I think people see the Virgin brand as not taking itself too seriously. It’s a fun brand, an adventurous brand. It generally offers great quality at great value…It’s a people brand.” Fun and adventurous certainly describe Branson himself, who’s attempted several outrageous stunts, such as flying around the world in a hot air balloon and trying to break the trans-Atlantic sailing record.

CEO Brand Leadership: Driving the Customer Brand Experience

Visionary leaders understand exactly how they want their brand to be perceived, and take steps to ensure that the brand is represented consistently throughout all channels and at every touch point. A consistently strong brand strategy creates powerful customer experiences that engenders strong loyalty.

Image via www.buildabear.com

Maxine Clark is the visionary leader of Build-a-Bear Workshop, a retail toy outlet that creates a highly personalized experience for its customers, the young and the young at heart. Clark’s official title is Chief Executive Bear (CEB), which is just the beginning of the consistent branded experiences she brings to the company.

Image via www.buildabear.com

Build-a-Bear is a completely customer-centric organisation. This unique toy retail model allows customers to design their own stuffed toys, and then watch the personalized toy made right in the store. The Build-a-Bear brand stands for whimsy, love, and the magic of childhood, and every aspect of the company is designed around amplifying that brand story, its values and promise.

Image via www.buildabear.com

In addition to hiring employees and managers based on customer-focused personality and the ability to see themselves through the eyes of a child, Build-a-Bear engages their young customers at every opportunity. The company website lets children create virtual versions of themselves and their stuffed creations, and interact with other bear owners online. They provide each bear with a built-in barcode and a “birth certificate” so that lost bears can be returned to any store and matched with their owner. The company also recruits and maintains a team of kids called “Cub Advisors” who provide feedback, ideas for new animals, and thoughts on other Build-a-Bear products and services.

In an interview with TeleTech, Maxine Clark said, “You don’t have to have all the ideas. Let customers give you ideas. It’s not about being psychic. We are just really good listeners.” The customer-focused brand has achieved tremendous success, with more than 400 retail outlets around the world and nearly $400 million in annual revenue.

CEO Brand Leadership: Influencing Brand Originality

Distinctive brands truly thrive, standing head and shoulders above their competitors, and visionary brand leadership typically is the secret catalyst behind driving that brand success.

Image via www.johnnycupcakes.com

Such is the case with Johnny Cupcakes, a unique apparel company that sells branded t-shirts and more with a baking theme. The company’s ironic shirts are packaged in baking styles like frosting cans and donut boxes, and the stores display merchandise on oven racks and baker’s shelves, with decorations like industrial mixers.

Image via www.johnnycupcakes.com

This unique brand is highly successful with thousands of fans, some of which are dedicated and loyal enough to have tattoos of the Johnny Cupcakes’ cupcake-and-crossbones logo!

Image via www.johnnycupcakes.com

Johnny Earle, the founder of the company, started Johnny Cupcakes when he was in his early 20s. Earle committed himself fully to developing the distinctiveness of the brand, investing almost nothing in advertising in favour of creating an incomparable brand experience in his retail locations, from the displays and shelving right down to the smells of a bakery, achieved with frosting-scented air fresheners.

CEO Brand Leadership: Connecting Your CEO Brand to Your Company Brand

Sir Richard Branson is highly conscious of the Virgin brand and treats it as not just as a company, but as a lifestyle. Throughout every piece of brand messaging that bears Branson’s name or participation, he repeatedly reinstates and lives the Virgin culture and core values, ensuring a clear vision, mission, and direction that is echoed through the vast Virgin empire.

As a leader, you have the opportunity to exert a powerful influence on your brand, from all the internal processes and details to external customer and stakeholder perceptions and experiences.

“Living the brand” is a very effective strategy for any leader, regardless of the size of your company. When you channel your leadership skills into directing and building both your company brand, while ensuring your personal brand is fully aligned to those product or service brand values, you ensure both internal and external brand consistency. This relentless focus to constantly deliver on your brand promise to both your employees and customers alike is what ultimately makes brands successful, gives them longevity and helps grow your company’s long term profitability.

What do you think?

• Does your current leadership style reflect your company brand?

• What is the internal perception of your brand at your company?

• How many brand elements do you have direct control over within your company?

• Do you have a strong brand vision that guides your leadership actions?

• What changes can you make in your day-to-day leadership to encompass and support more of your brand’s core values?

• Are you “living the brand” and leading by example in living the brand? Are your employees living the brand?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Strategy: Getting Your Brand Noticed at Fingal Enterprise Week 2014

October 17, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Last weeks event at Fingal Enterprise Week 2014, run by Fingal Local Enterprise Office, was a huge success judging by all the enquiries and warm messages we’ve since received.

I was speaking alongside Terry Prone from The Communications Clinic together with Al Dunne, Breda Browne and Padraig McKeon on the theme of “Getting Noticed: Branding, Communications and PR for SME’s”.

Terry Prone, well known internationally as an authoritative commentator and leading advisor on reputation management, and the most frequently used crisis management consultant in Ireland, a regular on TV (NBC, CNN, PBS, BBC and ITV) and radio and the author of twenty six books, eight of which are critically acclaimed, was as compelling as ever. A highly informed and masterful story teller she had everyone riveted with her presentation “Effective Communications: How to Find a Voice for Your Business”.

Left to right: Lorraine Carter, Terry Prone, Al Dunne and Breda Browne

Breda Browne and Al Dunne of Unique Media also had the attendees hooked on their every word with very interesting insights into the world of journalism, PR and media. Breda, a well know journalist who’s written for multiple national publications and held the post of Head of News for Dublin’s Q102 and 98FM shared some very useful information and actionable tips which really engaged the audience. Al, a director, programmer and veteran broadcaster in both domestic and international media (Dublin’s Q102, 4FM, Atlantic 252) for over 30 years, and still much in demand as a stand-in news and talk show presenter, equally engaged and entertained the attendees in his shared presentation with Breda “Generating PR and Media Opportunities for Your Business”.

Padraig McKeon, of McKeon Communications, also with an illustrious career in communications, which include former Managing Director for Drury Communications and currently holding various director and advisory roles such as with Adare HRM, Ocean FM, Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute coupled with acting Director of Alumni Relations at DCU, shared some invaluable insights on “Building Business Relationships” and how this has been and continues to be the backbone to his very successful career.

I spoke about “Your Brand’s Personality: Is it Compelling Enough to Grow Your Business? Top Tips to Get You Noticed and Increase Your Customers” which included insights into brand strategy, how brands work, how to use the key elements of our Mastermind Branding Blueprint System™ to build your brand – with a particular focus on the Personality Profile Performer™ module of our system for creating your brands’ personality to make it really captivating and irresistible to your primary target audience.

I also shared real life insights into why people buy brands, together with examples of three highly successful SME brands from the USA, UK and Ireland which, not only generated huge amusement for all, but gave attendees information they could take away, evaluate against their own brand building activities and implement in their businesses immediately.

All in all a very successful event and a big thank you to all involved for making the day a huge success.

Left to Right: Oisín Geoghegan CEO of Fingal Local Enterprise Office, Lorraine Carter of Persona Branding and Design, Paul Reid CEO of Fingal County Council

Social Branding: The New Rules for Brand Success on Social Media

October 14, 2014/3 Comments/in Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Integrated Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Media /by Lorraine Carter

There’s no doubt about it: If you want a successful brand, you need to incorporate social media into your branding strategy. Customer interactions are increasingly taking place online rather than in person or over the phone, and your audience expects to find a strong social media presence for their favorite brands.

Just how important is social media?

Here’s what the landscape looks like as of January 2014, and the statistics just keep growing:

74 percent of the world’s Internet users are active on social networks

44 percent of users in Western Europe are active on social networks

Mobile is increasingly used for social, and Western Europe’s mobile penetration stands at 128 percent—or 1.28 devices for every person

Social penetration is 78 percent in the UK

Source: US Census Bureau, ITU, CIA

In the early days, brands were successful on social media if they had a lot of fans or followers. The bigger the numbers, the better your brand was perceived. But now that social has exploded into a vast sea of noise, effective social branding has moved out of the numbers game. It’s not the size of your customer base on social media – it’s what you do with it that counts.

Top 4 of today’s most important rules for social media branding success.

Rule 1: Be Consistent

As with any other element of your branding strategy, consistency is vital for social media success. Each of your social channels and platforms should clearly belong to your brand – but remember that consistency extends to much more than your logo and signature colours. With social media, you also need to develop consistent brand messaging, and a consistent tone and voice. Your company can’t be formal and serious on Facebook, yet irreverent and fun on Twitter.

Being consistent on social media requires your brand to develop and adhere to a style that is followed without fail. If you have more than one employee participating in your social media campaigns, especially if they work on different platforms, make sure they’re on the same page when it comes to your brand messaging, promise, values, voice and your brand tone.

Etsy is a strong example of a brand that maintains social media consistency. The online community marketplace with an emphasis on hand-crafted and vintage items has a branded presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest, that makes use of the Etsy brand’s simple, memorable logo and distinctive orange brand colouring, paired with plenty of stunning product photos. Etsy frequently and consistently cross-posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and makes full use of Pinterest with dozens of organized boards arranged into product categories.

Rule 2: Be Active

Simply being on social media will not help your brand. In order to drive social branding, you need to have an active presence on the platforms you use, and interact with your audience frequently. In fact, having an inactive social media page can turn potential customers off, because your brand will be perceived as not interested in hearing from your audience.

For this reason, it’s important to choose the right platforms for your social branding strategy. Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the more social networks they join, the stronger their social marketing will be – but creating accounts on dozens of social platforms and ignoring most of them is actually detrimental to your brand.

Instead, look for the networks where most of your target audience is, and focus on building a strong presence on those networks. Facebook and Twitter might be totally suitable for some brands and a lot less relevant for others. Your chosen social platform is driven by what is most appropriate for your core target audience and where they interact most. LinkedIn is very effective for professional and B2B brands. If your brand has a strong visual component, Pinterest is an excellent platform.

Once you’ve chosen the right platforms, get active. Post frequently – but don’t make all your content about marketing. The goal of social media is not to sell, but to build relationships. Your social media posts should entertain, inform, inspire, or interest your audience.

Taco Bell has a highly active social media presence that gets results. With a brand platform dedicated to fun and delight, and frequently posted content that focuses on customers, the restaurant chain’s Facebook page has more than 10 million fans, and 1.37 million follow them on Twitter.

Rule 3: Be Engaging

An important part of Taco Bell’s social media success, and many other brands that understand how social works, is engaging the audience. The best brands on social media don’t broadcast – they have conversations. They post content that invites audiences to participate, and encourages them to share with friends for even more visibility. From simple questions to elaborate contests, these brands make followers feel like part of the brand experience.

In 2012, Domino’s UK ran a Twitter campaign called “Tweet for Treats” that engaged audiences in a very direct way. For a time period of two hours, they invited followers to tweet with the hashtag #letsdolunch, and stated they’d knock a minimum of £0.01 off the price of their pizzas for every tweet sent that day for lunch. The campaign knocked the pizza price from £15.99 to £7.74. Anyone who followed Domino’s UK on Twitter or liked their Facebook page could order pizzas at the final discounted price through the Tweet for Treat Facebook Tab between 12:00 – 15:00 GMT on their Facebook page. The campaign gained the brand lots of interaction and hundreds of new followers, and helped them sell a lot of pizzas.

Rule 4: Be Social

Another highly effective strategy for social branding is to make it social – in the name of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Practicing good CSR boosts brand perceptions and brand awareness, and social media is an ideal channel for spreading the word about your brand’s social consciousness.

Brewing company Molson Coors Canada uses social media to leverage CSR and increase reach for their responsible drinking initiatives. The company’s social media team focuses not only on selling beer, but also connecting with communities for their programs that include responsible drinking education, the TaxiGuy program that provides cab rides for people who’ve had one too many, and covering the costs of public transportation for drinkers on New Year’s Eve.

Your brand can’t afford to ignore social media. Effective social branding doesn’t have to be complicated – when you maintain consistency. Focus on the best platforms for reaching your audience in terms of what is relevant to them, keep an active brand presence, and engage audiences with informative, interesting, entertaining, or interactive content that meets their needs.

When done strategically and consistently social media can amplify your brand visibility and boost your bottom line.

What do you think?

• How many social channels is your brand on? Are any of your pages inactive?

• Have you integrated social media into your brand strategy or rebranding strategy?

• Which social networks are most likely to attract your target audience?

• Is your brand displayed consistently across all of your social platforms?

• Are you using a consistent brand tone and voice for social media?

• Does your social presence reinforce your brand messaging and values?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Personality: Is Your Brand’s Character Big Enough to Compete?

September 9, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Just as people can be larger than life, a brand’s personality can take on a life of its own. Creating a brand with an authentically strong character is central to your branding strategy success and effectively the decider between just another average price fighter or a truly magnetic and profitable brand.

And the good news for smaller brands – who frequently think branding is purely the remit of deep pocketed big national or global entities – it’s entirely within your grasp too, if you develop the right ‘know-how’. With a solid brand profile and the right brand strategy in place, your brand can punch above its weight and become bigger than another mere product or service, and consequently generate tremendous brand impact and instill an unshakeable brand loyalty in your target audience.

Here’s how you can be a small player with a big heart—and big profits—by using brand profiling and amplification strategies to create an magnified personality that brings your brand to life and makes it truly compelling to your primary target audience.

Note: These tips are some of the magic sauce we use coupled with our ‘Personality Profile Performer System™’ when working with our clients to help them develop their brand profiling.

Key Ingredients for a Compelling Brand Personality

What goes into a great brand profile? Brands with compelling, customer centric personalities are able to reach out to, and engage their target audiences in ways that elicit strong emotional responses.

An effective brand profile provides the direction for creating a customer centric, brand resonance or affinity with your customers through the emotions your brand endeavours to elicit in them, whether it’s gritty and real, sophisticated, entertaining, decadent, or simply warm, feel-good pleasures. Regardless of the overall effect, brands with strong personalities share characteristics that include:

A Compelling Brand Story: Delivering an incredible brand story gives your core target customers a foundation for engagement and loyalty, and adds depth to your brands’ embodiment.

Clear Brand Values: When your brand stands for something that matters to your target audience, your customers can feel like they’re part of something bigger whenever they engage with your brand.

Evocative Emotions: Funny or poignant, lighthearted or dramatic, brands that make customers feel strongly about something that matters to them are far more memorable, referable and engaging than the bland, boring or just another ‘me too’ average. People buy with emotion and justify with rationale!

Your Big Why? Your Brands’ Mission: Coca-Cola wants the world to be happy. Apple wants everyone to enjoy and intuitively use their cutting edge technology and enhance peoples’ lives. What does your brand want to accomplish? A great mission statement is an authentically lived experienced which encapsulates the DNA or core essence of your brand and not only generates buzz and excitement for your brand but gives it substance and depth. It’s not something clinical and stark living on the corporate wall gathering dust or buried somewhere in your annual report or on your website. It’s an integral part of the way you fundamentally do business and interact with the world around you and most importantly it’s about what you do, with or for your customers and how you want them to feel.

Absolute Consistency. Developing and sustaining an incredible brand profile requires consistency across all aspects of your brand, throughout every channel and touch point. Each customer interaction should reinforce your brand personality and keep your brand promise.

1. Building an Emotional Response

Strong emotions are central to a larger-than-life brand personality. The most effective brand profiles are developed to evoke a specific feeling that your primary customers value and experience each time they choose to buy that product or service from you.

An effective brand profile is also developed in order to amplify the brand’s difference and set it apart from all the other pretenders competing for wallet share. And this is the fundamental core of the work we do with our clients in helping them build their brands.

Many companies believe an emotional brand is customer-generated, and therefore unattainable—but successful brands understand that emotional responses can be evoked through creating a strong brand personality coupled with strategic brand engagement. Successful branding is a two way interaction between the brand and the customer.

It’s a shared ‘meaningful’ exchange that the customer values. In short its a humanly emotional engagement where the customer electively participates in the exchange because it positively enhances their lives in some way that they value. And this is what brand profiling is all about – using systems like our ‘Personality Profile Performer™’ for creating the character of your brand and then developing the ‘road map’ of how it will be brought to life.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Such is the case with Bésame, a niche cosmetics company with a powerful brand personality rooted in the glamour heydays of the 1920s to 1950s. This entrepreneurial business set out to develop its brand profile from the beginning, and intentionally created a nostalgic brand with old-fashioned values that evokes wistful memories of a bygone era.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Gabriela Hernandez, the founder of Bésame, was inspired by the vintage original cosmetics of her grandmother. Prior to launching her company, she decided that her brand’s personality would be very feminine, romantic, nostalgic and elegant in a traditional sense, while delivering very modernly efficacious products.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Every aspect of the Bésame brand was developed to amplify this glamorous and nostalgic personality to create differentiation in an incredibly busy category noted for the billions spent on selling hope and aspiration to its largely female audiences!

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

The company’s distinct packaging design uses very tactile high quality materials including rich fabrics, metals and colour palettes designed to stand out from the oceans of plastic containers. Consistency across all brand channels, a distinctive experience from start to finish, and internal branding that extends to the way the company’s phones are answered and staff interactions all contribute to underpinning this distinctly nostalgic brand profile. Collectively it’s what makes Bésame a highly successful brand that’s carried in major department stores around the world.

2. The Bold and The Brave

A strong brand personality, even if it’s controversial, can elevate your business to success. The key to this strategy is to start out bold and stick to your guns, regardless of any potential criticism or public outcry from a small minority. Taking a stand—preferable a defensible one—can help you define a brand profile that outshines your competition consistently.

Image via www.benjerry.com

For specialty ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, that stand is irreverent fun. The entire company, which began with founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield selling homemade ice cream from a renovated gas station, is built on the idea that if you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be doing it!

Image via www.benjerry.com

The small brand made a big impact early on with its whimsical and cartoonish packaging, outrageous flavour names like Cherry Garcia and Wavy Gravy, and a high-demand strategy of selling only pints instead of half-gallons, offering exclusive batches and retiring flavours. In fact, the Ben & Jerry’s website maintains a Flavour Graveyard that showcases “de-pinted” flavours throughout the company’s history.

Ben & Jerry’s has never shied away from controversy—it’s all part of the fun. The company has embraced such controversial flavours as Black and Tan, named after an alcoholic beverage but perceived as associated with a paramilitary police force, and Schweddy Balls, named for a Saturday Night Live character and decried as “too explicit for grocery store shelves.” Ben & Jerry’s consistently bold stance has earned their ice cream an outrageous brand personality and a strong, loyal customer base.

3. Redefining a Niche

Finding a new twist on an old industry standard is a fantastic strategy for building powerful brand profiles. This involves highlighting and amplifying one or more aspects of your brand differentiation, and turning those amplified characteristics into a brand personality that can stand on its own.

Image via www.poopourri.com

An incredible example of this comes from an FMCG brand making a huge stink, namely Poo-Pourri! Founded in 2006, the odour control company has already made a huge impact by turning the usually discreet nature of bathroom odour product marketing on its head and flaunting the fact that its product deals with poo!

Image via www.poopourri.com

The secret blend of essential oils and other natural compounds eliminates bathroom odors by creating a protective film on the water’s surface. More than 4 million bottles have been sold, according to the company’s official website. When I first wrote about this brand a few years ago they were already making waves but take a look at what they achieved now – and they’re not a massive company!

Image via www.poopourri.com

This brand has absolute clarity over who their target market is, namely glamorous, silk robe wearing, youngish women and they’re not afraid of who they might offend. They’ve developed their whole brand personality around suiting this target audience’s needs and they never waiver from it. Yes they have other secondary products aimed at men, parents and even pets with Pooch-Pourri, but their primary audience is a very particular kind of women and everything is geared to engage her in a certain way!

Image via www.poopourri.com

Take a look at how their brand personality extends onto their product scent names:

• Hush Flush – A fresh Floral Blend of Wildflowers in the Spring, Before You Go, Give the Bowl a Spray, the Air Stays Fresh as a Spring Bouquet

• Deja Poo – A Soft Sweet Blend of White FLowers and Citrus, You’ve Been Here Before But Now With a Scent You Adore

• Party Pooper – A Fresh Crisp Floral Blend of Mandarin, Tangerine, and Lily, When Glasses CLink, Don’t Ruin the Party With a Stink

• Poo La La – An Elegant Blend of Peony, Rose and Citrus, Embrassing Odors… Say Adieu

• Sh*ttin Pretty – A Delightful Fresh Blend of Rose, Jasmine and Citrus, It Ain’t Awesome Till Smells Like a Blossom

And this is just a small sampling of a pretty extensive list!

Poo-Pouri’s marketing has a very definitive brand voice that features loads of toilet humour woven throughout its website, commercials, and other brand collateral. The brand’s very first social media marketing campaign, featuring a video called “Girls Don’t Poop,” went viral almost immediately with over 6 million views within a week, doubling Poo-Pouri’s Twitter following and increasing Facebook fans by 70 per cent in just a few days, not to mention their bottom line!

And while this advert might be ranked by USA Today as one of the worst adverts of 2013 it’s got 29,334,105 views and counting, with 67,298 likes and only 3,572 dislikes. They don’t give a ‘crap’ about anyone else – other than their primary target market!

Brand Amplification Strategies for Spreading Your Brand Personality

Once you’ve defined a distinctive and larger-than-life brand personality, there are multiple ways in which to leverage your brand profile through brand amplification strategies. When your brand has an attention-grabbing personality that stands for something your audience cares about, amplifying that brand message will get you noticed in a crowded market place. However you must consistently deliver on that personality and brand promise in everything you do.

Brand consistency is critical to any amplification strategy and especially effective for smaller brands too. Being truly consistent with your brand means ensuring that your website, packaging, brochures, vehicle livery, social media accounts, brand collateral etc. and all customer-facing touch points congruently mirror your brand profile and echo the same ‘exaggerated’ characteristics that infuse personality into your brand and everywhere it lives or interacts.

Your company’s public relations should also reflect your brands’ personality and the stories associated with it in the media. Community activities and corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns are also an important part of your brand strategy, especially for brands with feel-good, give-back mission statements and socially mobile brand stories.

When it comes to brand personality, the size of your brand truly doesn’t matter. Larger-than-life brand profiles help you rise above the noise and breathe life into your brand, so you can capture the imagination, emotions and ongoing support of your primary target customers.

What do you think?

• What kind of personality does your brand have? Does it match the profile you envisioned for your brand?

• How can you differentiate your brand and amplify those differences into a brand personality?

• What emotional response do your customers expect from your brand?

• Are you delivering your brand personality consistently across all channels?

• Does your brand packaging reflect a larger-than-life personality?

• Which aspects of your brand platform fail to capture your brand personality? How can you change that?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: Tips for CEOs & Senior Executives

August 19, 2014/2 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Reputation, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Business, Personal Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is essential for the success of your business, but your products or services aren’t the only aspects of your company that need a strong brand. As a CEO or executive, and the public face of your business, developing a distinctive and consistent personal brand complements and further solidifies your business brand—while at the same time helping you achieve personal development, growth and enhanced career success.

Personal branding is a natural extension of your leadership. Your personal brand encompasses your expertise, your career accomplishments, and your professional reputation. In large part, it is the emotional response your customers have when they hear your name—it is the experience of ‘you’.

As a CEO or executive, you don’t have to be Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos to enjoy the benefits of a well-developed personal brand. The following four tips will help you create a consistent personal brand that will help elevate your professional reputation and drive brand effectiveness for your business.

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

Whether or not you’ve worked to develop it, you already have a personal brand. The problem is that it may not be the brand you want.

Your personal brand is defined by your reputation, and by other people’s perceptions of you. This is especially critical in today’s digital world, where trusting online information and resources is the rule rather than the exception. What kind of picture does a Google search for your name paint?

Controlling your personal brand begins with awareness of the reputation that’s already out there. Your professional website, social media profiles, and published content should all reflect the brand promise you want to deliver to your customers. Without active participation in shaping your personal brand, it will be created for you—and you may not be pleased with the results.

Some of the most crucial ingredients for managing your personal brand online include:

A professional photo: Maintain personal brand consistency with one high quality, professional headshot that’s used for all of your online platforms, from your website to Linkedin to Facebook to Google Authorship etc. Having a great photo not only encourages brand recognition and visibility, but also helps to create personal connections with your customers.
A unified profile: As with your photo, use a single, succinct and compelling personal bio for every aspect of your online presence that encapsulates your personal brand and strengthens brand recognition.
A defined and consistent brand position: Make sure your personal brand philosophy is reflected in every piece of content that appears under your name online. Conflicting or incongruent presentations can undermine or dilute your brand and raise doubt in the minds of your audience about your integrity.

2. Define Your Niche

You may know how to define a niche for your products or services, but what about your personal brand? You can’t identify a target audience, because your customers aren’t buying you—or are they?

The goal of personal branding is to sell your audience on ‘you’ as a professional, an expert, and a business leader. This means you do have a target market, and it includes your business customers as well as your colleagues, strategic partners, stakeholders and the thought leaders in your industry. So defining your personal brand niche means deciding who your ideal audience is, and determining how you can best connect with them on a personal level.

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep. This holds true for personal branding, where a few strategic endorsements from industry influencers can enhance your personal reputation and allow you to be perceived as successful by association with known name brands.

Image via www.timferriss.com

Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, has seen phenomenal success as a personal brand, bolstered by multiple endorsements from highly recognizable names. The bio page of Ferriss’ website places him in the company of big business and personal brands, from working with Google, Harvard, and Nike, to appearances in Forbes and on CNN, to receiving mentions in the class of Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey.

As a CEO or executive, networking with influencers in your industry and gathering testimonials is a powerful way to build your personal brand and draw on the success of association.

4. Own Your Brand

Even in an impersonal medium like video or the Internet, your audience can tell when you’re being authentic—and they can spot a phoney. Your personal brand will not be successful if it’s not authentic. In fact, authenticity forms the foundation of a unique personal brand that helps you stand out. As writer and poet Oscar Wilde (who was a strong personal brand before the term was defined) said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Many CEOs and executives fear the possibility of polarizing their audiences with a strong, authentic brand. But it’s essential to realize that, like your business brand, your personal brand won’t appeal to everyone—and it doesn’t have to.

Image via www.apple.com

Take, for example, Steve Jobs. The former CEO of Apple was unquestionably a powerful personal brand. Innovative, dynamic, and widely respected, Jobs was also known for his strict perfectionist tendencies and for being harsh on his employees. He never tried to hide these qualities or apologize for them, yet even after his death, Jobs remains a beloved icon and a symbol of technological innovation.

Jobs’ less desirable personality traits remained a known but low-key quantity throughout his life and career. But even more polarizing personal brands can be successful, whether at the positive or negative end of the spectrum. Consider the unprecedented success of UK entrepreneur and celebrity chef Gordon James Ramsay, Jr, OBE. Abrasive, brusque, and demanding, Ramsay has built his personal brand on unending criticism delivered in crude language that has actually reduced his guests—his customers—to tears on occasion.

Image via www.gordonramsay.com

Still, Ramsay’s audience can’t get enough. The reason is that despite his caustic demeanor, Ramsay is absolutely authentic. He has a genuine interest in, and a passion for, helping others succeed, and that passion shines through. And while he may seem to work at cross-purposes, at its core, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aims to create more successful restaurateurs through the application of Ramsay’s demonstrated expertise.

Defining, shaping, and promoting your personal brand as a CEO or executive requires concentrated effort and some brand strategy inputs, but the results are worth the challenge. By maintaining a powerful and consistent personal brand that is distinct from, yet complementary to, your business brand, you can engage your customers and strengthen your platform for ongoing success.

What do you think?

• Are you aware of your existing personal brand? Is it positive, negative, or neutral?

• How can you monitor and shape your personal brand online?

• What niche audience does your personal brand appeal to, and how will you reach them and engage them positively?

• Where would you start looking for influencer endorsements in your industry?

• How can you define and enhance your authentic personal brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: The Difference Between Product and Personal Branding

July 23, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Reputation, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Personal Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is crucial for any business looking to be competitive in today’s marketplace. When most organizations mention branding, they’re referring to the carefully crafted perceptions surrounding their products or services designed to create an emotional response in their target audience. But there’s another type of branding that can be equally important in marketing your business—namely, your personal brand.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, a professional or an executive, a spokesperson, marketing associate or CEO, drawing a distinction between your product and personal brands, and working to position each of them, can help you propel your business forward and increase public recognition, customer loyalty, and profitability.

What is a Product Brand?

Defining a product or service related brand is paradoxically simple, yet also quite complex. A brand is what your product or service ‘stands for in people’s minds, what it means to them,’ and ‘branding is the process of executing and managing things that make people feel the way they do about your brand’. What your brand stands for—its values, promise, customer experience, and those associated feelings your brand provokes through its story, and so forth—is what makes up a product or service brand. It’s a combination of all those intangible and tangible elements associated with your products, services, or the organization as a whole that gives your brand meaning in a way that’s relevant to your target customers.

Companies endeavor to suggest and influence customer perceptions and predispositions to buy through their branding strategies—and this is where the definition becomes more complex. Defining a product brand on the company side can involve a number of components, all working together to reinforce a desired brand perception. This can include brand positioning, brand values, the brand story, and the brand promise.

A product or service brand shapes customer perceptions of the things they purchase, everything from eggs to airline travel! These types of brands can become so powerful that they’re perceived as synonymous with the function of the product or service provided. For example, many people refer to all disposable tissues as Kleenex, all copy machines as Xerox, or all clear adhesive tape as Scotch tape or Sellotape.

What is a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is all about you, as a person, but in the more public sense of how you project your image to the outside world. A personal brand doesn’t necessarily reflect every detail of an individual’s private life, unless an individual chooses to live their life in a ‘reality TV’ way! Just as with product or service brands, personal brands are (or should be) carefully crafted in terms of both perception and authenticity. In a very fundamental sense, your personal brand is your reputation.

A personal brand includes the perceptions, qualities, and characteristics people associate with you, your name, how you conduct yourself (professionally and privately) and your professional position. Personal brands can be leveraged in brand strategy terms just as effectively as product or service bands. They too represent the emotional experience others will expect when encountering you in a professional capacity. Your personal brand is a unique promise of value that can be attributed to you as an individual, which can also tie in to your company’s brand promise on some level as well.

Image via www.virgin.com

Take Sir Richard Branson and Virgin or Michael O’Leary and Ryanair. Both have very separate, individual personal brands that are distinct from the product or service brands they head up. They are, in effect, the spokespersons and visionaries behind the product brands, with brand personas which are aligned to the brands they stand beside—but neither are one and the same.

Image via www.02b.com

The most successful personal brands are an authentic reflection of that person’s true qualities, without necessarily divulging every micro detail on a private level in their personal lives.

Image via www.marthastewart.com

One strong example of a successful personal brand is Martha Stewart. In this instance, her personal brand is tightly linked to her products and services, which typically also carry her name. The public face of a vast business empire, Martha Stewart the person is also Martha Stewart the brand. Customers associate her as an individual with taste, quality, and comfortable living. Interestingly Martha Stewart’s personal brand was strong enough to carry her through a legal ordeal that had her serving time in prison—after her release, her reputation recovered and her business empire continued to grow.

Product and Personal Brands: What They Share, What’s Different

While personal and product brands are different, they are not totally separate either. Regardless of your personal brand’s standing in the market in terms of its recognition and associations, the strongest personal brands are often linked in some way to your company’s product or service brand. There are often commonalities—for example, Martha Stewart’s personal style is reflected by the brand promise of her company to lend that style to customers’ home décor, clothing, and other Martha Stewart Living product lines. Richard Branson’s personal brand is reflected in some of the characteristics of the Virgin brand, such as being seen as a game-changer, a challenger of the status quo, and an innovative risk-taker that puts the customer at the heart of everything.

Image via www.marthastewart.com

Generally, product and personal brands are similar in that they stand for something that’s meaningful to their audience, and must be consistent in how they are reflected or presented to the world. Consistency is an important key for both personal and product branding. The more customers experience the same values and emotions through each interaction with you, or your products and services, the more they will trust, expect and value a similar relevant experience every time.

There are several differences between product and personal brands, and the most important is one that’s inherent to the nature of what these brands represent. Product or service brands are created by branding and marketing campaigns, which help to shape customer perceptions. On the other hand, personal brands are a deliberate choice by the person who is that brand.

Image via www.starbucks.com

A cup of Starbucks coffee can’t choose to be a social status symbol, representative of discerning cultural tastes and community responsibility. But Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, can choose to launch an initiative to create more jobs and encourage entrepreneurs, and kick-start that initiative with a $5 million donation.

Establishing Your Own Personal Brand

One vital realisation in personal branding is that, no matter who you are or how you comport yourself professionally, you already have a personal brand. If you’re known to people in a professional capacity, you have a reputation and a set of expectations that surrounds your involvement—good or bad. And you can allow others to continue establishing your personal brand according to their own perceptions, or you can take control to actively shape, promote, and grow the personal brand you want to project.

Sir Richard Branson, founder and CEO of Virgin Group, takes an active role in shaping his personal brand. Branson is widely perceived as pioneering and inventive, which has led to the formation of an array of diverse, yet wildly successful industry groups—from Virgin Records to Virgin Mobile, Virgin Airways, and Virgin Trains. Branson’s business pursuits are continually evolving, and they continue to succeed based on the strength of his personal brand as much as the aggressive effectiveness of his business decisions and the perceived value of the Virgin brand itself.

Building a personal brand involves first defining the perceptions of yourself that you want others to expect, and then remaining consistent in your presentation of those perceptions throughout your professional appearances, both online and in person. Creating central pieces, such as your biography and professional photo, and using them to identify yourself consistently wherever you appear online or in more traditional media are important tools to manage and reinforce your personal brand.

In general, your personal brand won’t require as much research, campaigning, and analysis as your product or service brand—but the effort to shape and maintain personal branding can be highly effective in supporting the growth and success of your product or service brand or indeed your career!

What do you think?

• Is a personal brand important to you as a professional?

• Have you developed a strongly established personal brand? When did you last audit how others perceive your unique personal brand?

• How can you tie your personal brand to your product or service brand and maintain authenticity to yourself?

• What opportunities can you identify to showcase your personal brand?

• Will your personal brand evolve separately from, or in tandem with, your product or service brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Destination Branding: The Key Essentials for Success

June 17, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Culture, Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Story, Brand Values, Branding, Celebrity Endorsement, Destination Branding, Marketing, Tourism /by Lorraine Carter

Travel is one of the largest industries in the world, with several trillion dollars spent globally by travellers each year, and within that mix, destination branding has become an increasingly important part of the marketing strategy for locations and the businesses that serve their area’s tourist demographic.

Destination branding, or place branding, can be complex. There are a multitude of brand strategies specifically related to the needs of products or services – but location branding is effectively a combination of all those offerings collectively. Building a destination brand strategy can focus on several top line or key targets, depending on the area and the offerings, which may include:

Understanding and highlighting the market perceptions of your destination
Capturing the unique essence of your destination and its special attributes
Building on media and cultural references that link to your destination

Creating and Amplifying Market Expectations

When it comes to destinations, many people already have a certain perception in mind. Everyone “knows” that if you’re visiting England, there’s a high likely hood it might rain and the royal family with its historic associations (pomp and circumstance, events or historic locations) might also feature on your radar, and in Egypt first time visitors might expect to be surrounded by pyramids and camels wherever they go! Of course those clichés and people’s perceptions aren’t always right!

The first step for any successful destination branding campaign is to understand how your destination is perceived and then either change tired expectations, or amplify more unique positive ones. The expectation of the experience is all in the brand promise of destination brand, and your branding needs to really ‘dial up’ the experience that you want your destination to reflect, and be associated with, in a way that’s truly unique and relevant to your primary target audience.

Fáilte Ireland, the National Tourism Development Authority of Ireland, does this very well through one of their more recent marketing campaigns of the Wild Atlantic Way where you can experience one of the wildest, most enchanting and culturally rich coastal touring routes in the world. Wherever you travel along the Wild Atlantic Way you’ll find magic, adventure, history and beauty in abundance. Divided into five main sections each part offers you memories that will last a lifetime. The brand story and video are very compelling – whether you’re native Irish born or an overseas visitor!

Another example of a successful image-changing campaign based around expectations comes from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), the official destination marketing organization of Las Vegas. When tourism declined in “Sin City” following the 9-11 attacks and a number of unsuccessful attempts by some businesses to position themselves as “family friendly,” the LVCVA developed a massive campaign called “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”

The branding campaign, which included a dedicated website and several brief and humorous TV commercials, worked to recapture audience perception of Las Vegas as a place for adults to have slightly risky fun with no lasting consequences. Overall, the strategy was successful at driving tourist traffic and creating a strong brand for Las Vegas.

New Zealand has been highly successful at capitalizing on audience expectations that were created through the worldwide hit movie series The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, based on the classic fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien and filmed in New Zealand.

Air New Zealand cashed in on the Hobbit craze with its safety video and Tourism New Zealand embraced the idea that their country was now seen as “Middle-Earth,” and created an ad campaign around that perception to reinforce the brand.

Aside from the country itself, some New Zealand businesses have also capitalized on the worldwide fame resulting from the movies—such as The Green Dragon pub, the original film set for the Hobbit pub in The Lord of the Rings movies, which became an actual pub that’s open to the public.

Image via www.dailymail.co.uk and London Media

Capitalizing on Personality and Character

One of the most effective strategies for destination branding is the ability to define, articulate, and convey the unique qualities of your particular destination. This strategy delves into the primal mindset of the traveller – people head out on holiday to get away from their everyday lives and experience something completely new.

Successful destination branding is all about that tangible experience at every touch point for your primary audience. This starts from the moment they start thinking about visiting your location, possibly prompted by your successful marketing campaign, to the moment they arrive. Every one of those ‘brand experiences’ must positively reinforce what your brand stands for and what makes it different to your competitors, reaffirming they made the right choice and your destination is even better than they expected! You want them to leave ‘wanting to come back’ and enthusiastically referring your destination to friends and family or better still extolling ‘your destinations virtues’ on social channels.

Australia is most assuredly a unique location, and Tourism Australia has found incredible success with their destination branding efforts by highlighting the characteristics of the land, the people, and the wildlife that can be found nowhere else. The organisation’s advertising campaign, “There’s Nothing Like Australia,” uses powerful visuals and dramatic music and narration to project the excitement of Australia directly to viewers.

In addition, Tourism Australia offers multimedia presentations through their Bringing the Brand to Life website section, which explore their branding concepts and strategies through video series and a book.

Hitching Your Wagon to the Stars

Media tie-ins are a powerful branding strategy, and there are plenty of resources for destination branding. One particularly strong example can be found with the UK and VisitBritain, a tourism organisation that is working to change the sometimes slightly grey or stuffy perceptions some of the world associates with the UK, and highlight the beauty and excitement to be found throughout this stunning and incredibly culturally rich country.

For example, VisitBritain created an international commercial that was shown in theatres around the world in conjunction with Skyfall, one of the more recent iconic James Bond movie series. The commercial shows the evolution of Bond through various actors who have played the British superspy, and brings it all together by urging audiences to visit Britain and “live like Bond.”

VisitBritan has also launched a series of celebrity commercials, in which globally recognized Brits explore what they love about the country. Dame Judy Dench performs a spot that revolves around Hever Castle in Kent, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry VIII many wives! Other commercials in this series star Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame, prominent English model and actress Twiggy, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

Bringing Them to You

At its heart, destination branding follows the same principles as any other successful branding strategy, though typically on a much larger scale. One of the keys to successful destination branding is to be very clear on ‘what your brand stands for’, what makes your brand different to your competitors and to follow through on this with a very clear and compelling picture of how you’re going to fulfill that promise and meet those expectations.

You’ve got to connect with your audience on their terms at a very personal level, maintain consistency through every aspect of your branding – from the distillation of your branding promise throughout, to your brand experience at every customer touch point and how everything ‘looks and feels’ from a brand style perspective. It must all look and feel like it all unmistakably comes from the same ‘stable’ and be irresistible to your primary target customer in a way that’s truly relevant to them.

What do you think?

• How does your potential audience currently perceive your destination?

• What are the perceptions you’re looking to create for your market?

• How can you develop an expectation of your unique experience, and follow through on your brand promise?

• What makes your destination unique and worth visiting and how can you leverage that more powerfully?

• Are there any global media tie-ins you can connect with your destination brand?

FMCG Branding: Going for Gold with Fast Moving Consumer Goods

March 5, 2014/3 Comments/in Brand Champions, Brand Culture, Brand Experience, Brand Loyalty, Brand Personality, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, FMCG, Global Branding, Packaging /by Lorraine Carter

The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector is one of the most volatile and toughest categories in which to succeed and sometimes considered the birthplace of modern branding. The competition has always been fierce and the fight for wallet share never more challenging then it is now.

Today’s FMCG industry is a multi-billion dollar sector that’s typically dominated by well-established household brands around the globe, from Coca-Cola to Kraft to Henkel. Breaking into that market as a new brand can be a serious challenge, particularly when you’re up against global powerhouses that have ruled their respective niches for decades with deep pockets. Having said that though, smaller brands have more opportunities to make their impact with limited resources than they ever had before, which helps level the playing field a little!

Image via www.kraftfoodsgroup.com

The question is how do you move from a ‘C’ or ‘D’ tier, largely unknown, consumer product to become a recognized household brand? Success in the FMCG sector is no longer epitomized by just ‘nice’ logos and good packaging alone—modern consumers expect far more.

The most successful brands are consistently creating an authentic customer experience around their consumable products, one that is worthwhile and personally engaging. These brands give their core target audience a more compelling reason to buy and create brand perceptions through their brands personality, promise, values, story and total brand world per se, which their customers find irresistible.

The following is an insight into what some of the most successful FMCG companies are doing to maintain consistently captivating brands. What keeps them front of mind in terms of customer preferences, and how you can incorporate these strategies into your own brand building efforts.

Aligning With And Focusing on Your Core Target Audience

While it may seem counterintuitive, the key to becoming a household brand is not to try appealing to a broader audience—it is to be desirable to the right core target audience. You need to know your market, your competitors, and your sector’s environment intimately, so you can focus on developing your branding strategy specifically tailored towards your primary customers – those who are most likely to buy fully into your brand and what it stands for.

Understanding not only what your ideal customers wants, but also how your offering can enhance their lives is hugely important. It’s only when you truly understand their needs, wants, loves, hates and aspirations that you can really craft a concise and focused brand message that cuts through the noise.

Consumers are bombarded with thousands of messages from multiple channels 24/7. Your challenge is to deliver the right message, on target to catch their much sought after attention, at the right time and then, most importantly, to hold their attention. You need to develop a customer avatar which you then use to underpin your brand proposition and profile.

Image via www.johnsonsbaby.com

Your brand should clearly indicate why and how you’ll meet your customers needs and that you understand what really matters to them. If yours is a family orientated brand then broadly speaking it might be important to communicate reliability, safety, and trust. However you need to dig deeper beyond just the general to the specific and identify more detailed characteristics to bring your brand alive in a way that’s meaningful, distinctive and different to your audience.

Millennials might enjoy quirky humor that helps mark your offerings as innovative but you still need to add something more unique to your brand story to help it standout and stick. Overall luxury brands focus on quality and prestige but they still need to develop other attributes, messages and stories that make their brand experience exclusive to them alone.

Developing Brand Loyalty

Returning customers are the heart of every successful company—and this is especially true in the FMCG sector where products are typically consumed quickly and frequently. Brand loyalty is critical to your long term success and you need to develop a brand strategy that helps ensure your customers become tunnel visioned with regard to your brand when they go shopping.

You want them to become blinkered to see only your brand offering so they buy it automatically because they aren’t even open to considering others. When you continue to meet their needs your loyal customers will not only continue to purchase your brand, they’ll become brand advocates encouraging family and friends to switch to your brand too.

How do you create brand loyalty? Many businesses make the mistake of trying to compete on price alone where only those with the deepest pockets can win. Customers aren’t necessarily looking for just the cheapest product. Cheap rarely engenders ongoing brand loyalty. Customers typically look for the right blend of quality and value, and many are willing to pay more for a brand they can trust and meets their needs on multiple other levels too. It’s also important to note that value doesn’t mean just price, it’s the complete mix of what the brand has to offer – your brand promise, brand values, brand culture, corporate social responsibility, customer experience, your way of doing things in your brand world etc. that collectively all add up to enhance perceived brand value.

One strong example of this is Johnson & Johnson, the global leader in baby care products. Johnson’s Baby has been helping parents and doctors give babies a healthy, happy start in life for more than 100 years – what a brand legacy. This company understands what its primary customers want – to give their babies a healthy, happy start in life because ‘every moment with your little one is precious’.

Saving money might feature somewhere in the mix with parents but babies health and happiness is the primary focus, and not at the expense of their child’s care. They are looking for products with safe, gentle ingredients, backed by a company that genuinely cares about the well-being of babies. Everything Johnson & Johnson does is done to reinforce that message, be it through the products themselves, its CSR strategy or advocacy in baby skin care or baby sleeping advice etc. This is an ethical, quality-focused ‘caring’ brand, successfully engaging its audience by pulling at the heart strings through all its communications strategies – which all but the cynical and hard nosed would find hard to resist.

Telling Your Brand Story in a Way That’s Relevant

Storytelling is more than just a buzzword. Creating authenticity with an emotional connection and an element of curiosity is very important to help distinguish your brand from the barrage of the external market. When you communicate your own brand journey, your growth and your message to potential customers, you’re able to connect with them on a more meaningful level.

The Askinosie chocolate brand story shows how its really important and worked for this relatively new confectionary company. Their target market consists of environmentally aware customers who typically shop in organic health food stores. Askinosie sets their brand apart through their packaging and their brand story which really resonates with their customers. Each of their chocolate bar wrappers relates personal stories about the cocoa farmers that supply the company with raw ingredients. The focus is on their relationship with Askinosie as business partners who are well compensated with prices that are higher than Fair Trade.

Image via www.askinosie.com

Great brand stories can help you elevate your products into the top tier and are a critical part of the successful brand mix and keep your customers coming back for more. A note of warning though – the brand values from your story and the promise it articulates must be consistently lived and demonstrated throughout the business at every level of interaction internally and externally every day.

Changing With The Times

The market is constantly evolving, and your brand must be flexible enough to keep up with the changing times. Successful FMCG brands understand how to recognize trends and implement shifts in strategy that will help them continue to stay relevant and meet market requirements over the years and decades.

Image via www.starbucks.com

Starbucks in spite of all its ups and downs has largely maintained a strong grasp of its market combined with a willingness to change, and has managed to remain one of the most recognized global brands. The Seattle-based company began as a local retail coffee store, and grew into a worldwide chain that caters to customers looking for an upscale coffee experience. By combining quality coffee with a diverse range of related products, a pleasant relaxing environment in which to enjoy their coffee and engaging with their customers more personally—and treating their employees better than other coffee chains—Starbucks has dominated its niche.

However, there is a fine line between staying relevant and incorporating new trends versus losing sight of what your brand really stands for by inadvertently ‘muddying the waters’ so to speak with an excessive plethora of confusing brand messages. You must always remain true to the core of what you stand for, whether yours is a well established brand or more recent launch to market.

Image via www.hersheys.com

Hershey’s has seen a decline in recent times compounded by overenthusiastic trend-chasing activities. In recent years, the company’s brand promise of simple, tasty chocolate has been lagging behind in their efforts to anticipate changing tastes. Extreme diversification has resulted in a confusing tangle of confectionery varieties: milk, dark, and white chocolate with a variety of fillings, coatings and new flavours—all of which is somewhat confusing in its marketing to customers who just want an original Hershey bar.

Developing Your Brand Message

Strong branding is a vital factor for long term success in the ultra-competitive FMCG industry. In order to create a strong and compelling brand message, you need to fully understand your target customers, including:

Who they are: Demographics, motivations, trends, and demands
Why they buy: Specific needs and wants (rational and emotional)
What they buy: The look and feel of the products they prefer
Where / how they buy: Channel preferences, point of sale activities
How they consume: Key usage situations for your products

Pinpoint your target audience, and develop your brand strategy to focus on the things that matter most to them. Transform your offerings into an experience that will keep your customers returning, and create brand ambassadors who will recommend you to like-minded customers. Focus on what helps elevate and grow your brand and your customer base will expand with you.

What do you think?

• How does your FMCG brand differentiate from your competitors?

• What message are you conveying with your brand? What should you convey?

• How can you tell the story of your brand more effectively?

• What steps are you taking to create brand loyalty?

• Has your brand evolved to stay relevant with the changing market—without losing sight of your core?

Brand Promises: Are You Consistently Delivering Yours?

February 20, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Champions, Brand Experience, Brand Loyalty, Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Rebrand, Rebranding /by Lorraine Carter

A brand promise is what your company or brand commits to delivering for everyone who interacts with you. Your brand promise is a pledge, an assurance, or a guarantee that identifies what your customers can expect each and every time they connect with your company—whether it’s through your people, your marketing materials, or your products or services.

What makes a brand promise compelling? An effective brand promise must create distinction for your company’s offerings, and connect your purpose, positioning, and strategy. It must describe what customers can expect to receive beyond your product or service. It is more than a purchase—it is an experience, engaging your customers emotionally and allowing you to differentiate from your competitors. When working with our clients to help them develop their brand promise successfully we use our ‘Personality Profile Performer System™’.

Your brand promise presents a compelling reason for customers to buy from you, to return for repeat business—and most importantly, to become brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your company organically and enthusiastically.

Image via www.virgin.com

What Your Brand Promise Should (and Should Not) Be

Organizations often make the mistake of conflating brand promise with marketing. At one end, they may trot out clinically dry descriptions of products or services, on the premise that a brand “speaks for itself.” And on the other, they might make grand and ultimately meaningless statements, replete with abused superlatives such as “best practice”, “world class”, and “market leader.”

However, what truly works as a brand promise is not something in the middle, but rather a presentation that takes an entirely different approach to your offerings. A strong brand promise describes how people should feel when they interact with your brand, how your company delivers its products or services, and what sort of character your company embodies.

Image via www.nfl.com

To illustrate this idea in action, here are some powerful brand promises from highly successful brands:

The NFL: ‘To be the premier sports and entertainment brand that brings people together, connecting them socially and emotionally like no other’

Virgin: ‘To be the consumer champion while being genuine, fun, contemporary and different in everything we do at a reasonable price’

Apple: ‘To make insanely great, imaginative, cool, easy-to-use, cutting edge products that enrich peoples lives’

Coca-Cola: ‘To inspire moments of optimism and happiness’

Typically, a strong brand promise will achieve three key objectives:

It must convey a compelling benefit and emotionally resonate
It must be authentic and credible
The promise must be kept…every time

Any brand can create a compelling brand promise. However, the best and most successful brands will also demonstrate a proven track record of delivering on those promises. A powerful brand does not simply “talk the talk” — it “walks the walk,” consistently and reliably.

The Brand Promise At Work

McDonalds is the brand heard ’round the world. With over 33,000 restaurants in 119 countries, the company has to be doing something right—and the core of their success is their brand promise. They are the first job for many, involved with local communities and always seeking new ways to improve what they do best. When customers see the Golden Arches, they know what they can expect: simple, easy enjoyment with great service, cleanliness and value.

This is the brand promise McDonalds stands behind. Their more recent slogan, “I’m lovin’ it,” is a simple phrase in itself, one that can be translated easily within every international market the company serves. The McDonalds brand promise is effective, because the company consistently delivers uncomplicated fun with value and service to customer after customer.

Image via www.mcdonalds.com

Effective brand promises aren’t limited to the inexpensive and widely available, either. Successful luxury brands are also making a promise—that customers are paying a higher price, and in return receiving exceptional quality, value, and prestige.

European hotelier Kempinski has a stated purpose of “serving guests who expect excellence and value individuality.” As Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group and a five star prestigious brand, Kempinski promises more than lodgings—the company delivers an unforgettable experience for each and every customer by providing “luxurious hospitality in the grand European style.” They believe life should be lived with style!

Start Where You Want To End Up, and Watch Your Brand Take Off

If your brand is already successful, chances are you’re already clear on what you promise your customers—and you’ve managed to consistently keep your brand promise.

On the other hand, if…

You’re in the process of redefining a flagging brand
You haven’t started your branding process yet or developed a strong brand strategy
You want to know more about the reasons behind your successful brand, so you can maintain that success in the future

…then its time to conduct a brand audit, do a little research, and or re-evaluate your branding strategy.

It’s essential to define exactly what your brand promises to your customers. This process begins with research into your market, your target audience, competitors, and business environment. What do your customers really want? How are they getting it now—and how can your offering add even more value to those desires?

Your brand promise should deliver something your target audience really wants, but can’t get elsewhere. Remember, you’re creating an experience for your customers. When you define a unique brand promise first, and then consistently deliver, you’re making it easier for your business to keep that promise and realize branding success.

Earning Your Brand Promise

Once you’ve defined your brand promise, you need to focus on ensuring that you’re delivering on that promise—every time. Every aspect of your business should reflect what you stand for in your brand, from marketing to employee-customer interaction.

A brand that keeps its promises is virtually unbreakable. This is what kept Microsoft from knocking Google off the search engine throne with its “Bing It On” campaign, which attempted to convince consumers that real people choose Bing’s search results over Google.

The campaign failed to make a dent in the search engine giant’s market share—because Google’s brand promise is too strong. Their search engine consistently delivers what people want.

You Don’t Have to be Huge

Many smaller businesses make the mistake of thinking that only large corporations have the resources to consistently keep brand promises. The truth is, great branding is powerful enough to carry any business model successfully—when it’s done right.

Take, for example, The Ginger Pig. This London artisan butchery uses the brand promise of quality meats that taste great due to the care and effort they put forth in raising farm animals. The company emphasizes this brand promise through The Ginger Pig website, which opens with a brief and intriguing story about how they came to be—and their philosophy that well looked-after livestock simply tastes better.

Image via www.thegingerpig.co.uk

Is your company still looking for that perfect branding strategy? Prepare for success by taking the time to really think about your brand promise—and to ensure that you can, and do, deliver. Whether you’re a brand new start-up, a local supplier, or a national or global business, decide what will make your brand distinctive and memorable—something that’s worth talking about—and focus on delivering every time.

When you deliver on your brand promise, you build customer trust. This translates into brand loyalty that markets itself. Word-of-mouth, particularly through social media, will carry your brand promise to an ever-widening audience. As new customers realize they’re actually getting what they were promised, you’ll find more brand ambassadors out there recommending your offerings, all of which will help increase your profitability.

The earlier you establish and maintain your brand promise,

the more successful your branding will be.

What do you think?

How is your brand walking the talk?

Can a brand exist without brand promise?

Is your brand promising something you can’t deliver?

How can you communicate your brand promise to your customers?

Share your thoughts in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.

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What Your Brand Promise Should (and Should Not) Be

The Brand Promise At Work

Start Where You Want To End Up, and Watch Your Brand Take Off

Earning Your Brand Promise

You Don’t Have to be Huge

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