What is branding?

According to the American Marketing Association, “branding is the use of a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature to identify a product or service and distinguish it from those of other producers.” there’s a whole fuss on names these days, where same things assume different names depending on the source…choose the one you want, but to me, Branding stands for researching, building and tracking your Brand across your company’s cycle so that it obtains salience, meaningfulness, and distinctiveness among your audience.

Which Questions should Branding be able to address?

Who is your Brand for?

In other words: Who’s your target? This involves having a clear picture of your market -or category- and creating a segmentation. The stronger the segmentation you come up with, the clearer your positioning can be. Segmentation is therefore the real foundation of any Marketing Strategy. Only after having a clear idea of the attributes behind each segment of your market, you can make your very first choice: Targeting. Targeting is a necessity for virtually every company unless they have unlimited resources – or -they play in a Monopolistic market.

What do you want your Brand to be remembered for?

Once you have your clear target segment(s) defined, you need to decide how you want others to see you. Once again, research will come in your help here as you should have clear the attributes your target segment value the most (and you can distinguish yourself for). For those who’ve learned the complex modern marketing dictionary, I am talking about “brand positioning”. Make me a favor now: come up with a maximum of 3-4 attributes you really want to stand for, get your management buy-in, place it on a Powerpoint slide and hand it over to all your colleague to save it as desktop background. From those, your agency should be able to propose you a compelling brand image and copies aligned to your target segment.

Consider this as your epiphany: you’ve identified what customers want, that you can deliver in a more distinctive way than your competitors.

How do you want to deliver your Brand?

You know the target, you know what you stand for, now…what do you need to do to move customers from getting to know you to love you so much to be willing to suggest you to their friend? Yes, I am talking about that old concept of the funnel, now bluntly overused by everyone as the holy grail.

But they have a point here: if your activities don’t have clear objectives lined up with specific stages of the funnel…be prepared to be judged as the shiny marketer who’s studied a whole life and ended up just tweaking logos and PANTONEs…don’t give them that chance, think strategically and be data-driven. Even if your ego doesn’t get in trouble because of others’ opinions…well your branding strategy would be pretty meaningless.

Imagine you are launching a new product in an existing market: your job here is to define both the levers and the objectives across the funnel to achieve so that your Sales Department can close the Sale at the profitability agreed. Now, because you should have an idea of your conversion rates, you should be able to come up with 3 key objectives that allow you to increase, reduce or improve certain KPIs BY a certain date.

The Process of Brand Management

Now that we have introduced the key questions of Branding, let’s dig a bit deeper into the process. I won’t get much into the detail for now as I don’t want you to read a bible, but hopefully, I throw a bit of light for you to start thinking about Branding in a different light.

Brand & Market Diagnostics

Any marketer who deserves this name knows that decisions without data are a guess. And so, (especially if you are a new, digital-first, marketer), you’ll be surprised to know that real marketers used data even before excel was invented. Funny enough, everybody wants to let you believe we now entered the era of data-driven marketing!

So, the first step in the process of branding is to conduct a brand diagnostic via Market Research. This will help you understand the current state of your brand and where it stands in relation to your competitors. It will also help you identify any areas that need improvement. How do you do that? It’s called market research and has nothing to do with CRM mining…those are internal data of your current customers at most, here I am talking about explorative research.

What essentially you need to figure out here is one side of how customers of a given market “see” the market itself and what drives their preferences. You normally mix at minimum a qualitative type of research and then you move on to make it representative of the market with quantitative research. What you want from the quali is to gather the attributes of choices (how they get to know a Brand, how long it gets to convince them to buy something, what features, and under which perceptions stimulate their decisions). Even a Startup does that, the difference is nobody of the founder knows how to structure research.

Once you have the attributes, you then want to quantify (digital marketers this is for you!) the weight of those attributes across a representative sample of the market. Boom! you’ve got “out of the building” as they say in Startup jargon. Now you have a proper segmentation and are able to quantify each segment in both market share and dollar share. Decide your target segment and the two, or three attributes defining your Brand.

You have just answered question number 1, Congratulations!

Brand Strategy

The strategy follows the Market/Brand Diagnosis phase and precedes the actual Campaign Development/Brand Building stage. You’ve got your target segment, maybe a couple of them, you know its size and what those customers want but most importantly what moves them along the funnel. Now, assuming you have a proper offer for that segment. review your funnel bottlenecks and develop some smart objectives for a maximum life span of 12 months.

It’s common practice to run a 3-5 years plan but focus on the next 12 months. Most Brand Plans (or Marketing Plans) I developed were 3 years based and I guarantee you that the second and 3rd years were both completely revised after the first year. This is not to say you should be short-sighted, but certainly, you can’t predict how the market is going to appear in 12 months’ time. Those who try to persuade you of the contrary, don’t quite have clear that the market is made of externalities and competitors.

One more thing about objectives: they can’t be a mere “+20% Sales” or “increase Sales in the segment by 31st December”. Sales are not Marketing objectives, it’s a Sales objectives. Pick the funnel, understand the levers you have, and develop something more like “Increase Awareness in this specific segment from X to Y, by 31st of December”. This is a top-of-funnel objective for Marketing example, with peace of all Digital Marketers who beef up strategic plans with all sorts of channel metrics.

Brand Planning

“Strategic planning does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions.” (Peter Drucker).

It’s all about formalizing the operative plan that will allow you to reach the objectives set at the strategic level. In simple terms, these steps involve lining up together initiatives and marketing programs along the funnel. For those who like the classical way of thinking; it involves planning for a product, price, promotion, and places (channels).

Once again, no guesswork: use the internal data you surely have to quantify conversion rates across channels and estimate the budget needed to reach your objective. It might not be perfect if you are launching a new product you lack specific conversion rates about, but it is the best and most educated option you have.

Brand Measurement

There are many methods of measuring brand equity. Some common methods include:

– Brand awareness: This measures how well consumers recognize and remember a brand.

– Brand associations: This measures the strength of the associations consumers have with your brand (they should rate you against the attributes you’ve chosen to represent you AND those that represent your contrary) and those of your competitors.

And of course, you want to know how you score against the competitors. As you start embracing this approach, and you track your Brand yearly, results will surprise you.

Brand Building

I’ve left this stage at the end intentionally as it breaks up slightly the logical flow of the other steps, but of course, between planning and execution, you have to build up what your brand is going to look like and say in its execution.

There are a bunch of things to be done that are very critical, all responding to the quest of finding a way to be clearly recognizable on market. If you want to impress, use Salience, Distinctiveness, and Meaningfulness as conceptual words, your boss will like it and you have one step less for your pay rise at the end of the year.

You’ve got to define your Brand Identity (or Brand Code), namely: brand name if you are launching a new one, slogan, design, symbol, color palette, etc…this is exactly what Finance, Supply Chain, and especially Sales think Marketing guys (and girls) do the whole day behind the desk. And this is also what marketers love to blame agencies for if objectives are not achieved. Next year? Next one, please.

Except for one key element: you have passed them on your positioning and you have approved what they charged!

I’ve just realized I might have forgotten to talk about positioning, isn’t it? If you answer YES, then re-read the last paragraph of the previous step (hint: there is one sentence that gives you the essence of positioning); if you answered NO, I start believing you’ll be promoted before you’ll convince your boss to spend money on Research.

Do you remember the shootings and the colorful logos we talked about before? In my experience, this is the “messy middle” of Branding Everybody has an opinion on creativity, like if they were judging a Picasso painting and normally the big elegant in the room explicit its preference quite boldly. Would be better to take evidence-based decisions? That’s why (when you have the budget) you can go back to research and ask people to evaluate your Brand Design or to assess multiple variations to find out who’s the winner. It’s not mandatory but highly suggested if you lack any previous data points.