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Building Brand Momentum: Chapter 1 Other chapter for review: Overview | Contents | About the Author | To Order | Home |
Note: Sample chapter does not contain illustrations and is abridged.
Chapter 1
What is a brand and why you need one
What is a brand?
Before we look at the elements of a brand marketing strategy, it is important to answer the question: what is a brand? As part of that discussion, let's examine a handful of definitions drawn from the literature:
A brand is a promise that links a product or a service to a customer (Adamson).
A brand is a promise expressed as a benefit that your target audiences value (Forster).
A brand is the symbolic embodiment of the information connected with a product or service.
More than a name, logo, and other outward symbols that would distinguish a product or
service from others in its category, a brand is an assortment of expectations established by a
seller that, once fulfilled, forms a covenant with its buyers (Upshaw).A brand is the sum of all the characteristics, tangible and intangible, that make the offer
(organization) unique.A brand is the sum of all the experiences that an individual has with your organization.
A brand is the sum total of all existing relationships.
A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company (Neumeier) .
Brands are spheres of influence and they get repeatedly chosen over the competition (Ragas & Bueno).
A brand is a promise made with the customer and built up over time through consistent communication and delivery of that promise. The very mention of the brand's name should trigger a series of expectations not only about the product or the company, its quality, purpose, etc., but any number of images and associations, which consumers can relate to, both emotionally and rationally (McGurk).
Characteristics of brands
Even a brief consideration of these definitions should reveal some constant themes:
A brand is more than a mark or symbol
A brand fills a need
A brand exists in minds and hearts and not marketplaces
A brand has both physical and emotional dimensions
A brand differentiates an organization from its competitors
A brand is synergistic and integrated
A brand attracts resources
We discover, too, that brand promises:
Focus on a specific people, a specific thing, or a specific geography; some of the best brands
are focused on all threeAre often very personal
Generate genuine enthusiasm among internal stakeholders such as faculty, staff, and
administratorsAre of value to the marketplace (remember, someone has to pay for the promise)
After looking at the definitions presented above, and making a few adjustments for our educational context, I want to settle on the following definition:
A brand is a valued and differentiating promise that a college, university, or school makes to its most important audiences to meet a need or fulfill an expectation.
But don't some college brand promises sound alike?
Even a quick look at college brand promises might cause the reader to ask a question: don't some college brand promises sound alike. The answer is yes, perhaps, and no. Let me explain.
Like cars, colleges and universities often contain the same elements: their versions of tires, hoods, and engines. However, there is a vast difference between a Jaguar and an Oldsmobile Achieva. They may feature the same basic ingredients, yet these are vastly different cars. This difference, no doubt, is driven (sorry, couldn't resist) by how artfully the components are melded together and the audience that it seeks to serve.
There is another factor to the "don't they sound alike" issue. Remember, the purpose of the brand is not to differentiate your institution from the other 3,600 colleges and universities in America. Rather, its purpose is to differentiate your institution from your competitors. It is OK for two schools to cite a commitment to the liberal arts as a central tenant of their brand strategy as long as these two schools do not compete with one another.
Finally, while it matters what you say, it matters a great deal more what you do. The real power of a brand promise rests in how well it is executed. Many, perhaps all, schools promise academic excellence, but how many truly deliver? How many truly "Wow!" their students?
A brand communication strategy will not provide a lasting point of differentiation. How that promise is used to drive strategy, will.
Are brands passé?
Some believe that brands are passé. Like a child that tires of a new toy, some marketers seek the next new thing rather than understanding the full value and potential of the thing in hand. The fact is, in today's increasingly hectic marketplace, an effective brand has more utility than ever. I make this statement for the simple reason that the competition for students, donated dollars, and public and media attention, will become even more critical in the years ahead. A well-branded institution, in an era of contested resources, will be first at the table.
Why brands matter to people
It is clear that brands are of great value to the "seller." What is sometimes less obvious, however, is that brands serve the "buyer" as well. For example, we know that brands:
Save time in decision-making
Provide clarity in the midst of marketplace confusion
Project a clear message
Provide an identity
Give permission
Instill confidence
Why brands matter to colleges and universities
Brands matter to institutions as well. Based on both empirical and anecdotal evidence, for example, we can make the case that strong brands attract:
The best students and faculty
More full- and fuller-pay students
More students who will persist
Talented administrators and staff
More media attention
More research dollars
Finally, strong brands require less direct marketing expenditures.
Indicators that you may have a brand problem
There are a number of indicators that your institution may have a brand problem. Some of them include:
You can't describe in one sentence how you are different from your competitors
Tuition revenue is flat or declining
Your discount rate is increasing or is higher than the discount rate at key overlap schools
Prospective students and parents have undue price sensitivity
Your institution is increasingly seen as a commodity
First-year to second-year retention rate is below norms
Lesser quality competitors are gaining ground
The percent of key audiences who rate you "excellent" on important metrics is declining
The factors rated "important" by customers is inconsistent from your core values
Donors and foundations outside your immediate "community" do not respond to your overtures
Alumni involvement and giving is flat or declining
Job ads fail to attract best candidates
Pronounced negative word-of-mouth
What great brands do
Merging some comments and insights from Scott Bedbury, author of A Brand New World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century and Alan Bergstrom of The Brand Consultancy, we discover that great brands accomplish a number of very important things:
Great brands are in it for the long haul. If you take a long-term approach, a great brand can travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to multiple customer segments simultaneously, create economies of scale, and let you operate at the higher end of the positioning spectrum where you can earn solid margins over the long term.
A great brand knows itself. Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand who they are. The real starting point is to go out to customers and find out what they like or dislike about the brand and what they associate as the very core of the brand concept. Now that's a fairly conventional formula and it does have a risk. If you follow that approach all the way, you'll end up with a narrowly focused brand. To keep a brand alive over the long haul, to keep it vital, you've got to do something new, something unexpected. It has to be related to the brand's core position. But every once in a while you have to strike out in a new direction, surprise the buyer, add a new dimension to the brand, and reenergize it. Of course, the other side of the coin is true as well: A great brand that knows itself also uses that knowledge to decide what not to do.
A great brand invents or reinvents an entire category. The common ground that you find among brands like Disney, Apple, Nike, and Starbucks is that these companies made it an explicit goal to be the protagonists for each of their entire categories. Disney is the protagonist for family entertainment and family values. Not Touchstone Pictures, but Disney. Apple wasn't just a protagonist for the computer revolution. Apple was a protagonist for the individual; any one could be more productive, informed, and contemporary.
A great brand raises the bar. It adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience, whether it's the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you're drinking really matters.
Brands have a personality and a style, and are expressed through emotional attributes. The common ground among companies that have built great brands is not just performance. They recognize that customers live in an emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. A brand reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting experience. It's an emotional connection point that transcends the product. And transcending the product is the brand.
A great brand is a story that's never completely told. They are timeless. A brand is a metaphorical story that's evolving all the time. This connects with something very deep, a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of things at a higher level. We all want to think that we're a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful.
A great brand is relevant. Brands are about meaningful and valued relationships with customers. They convey strong images and expectations. A lot of brands are trying to position themselves as "cool." More often than not, brands that try to be cool fail. They're trying to find a way to throw off the right cues. They know the current vernacular, they know the current music. But very quickly they find themselves in trouble. It's dangerous if your only goal is to be cool. There's not enough there to sustain a brand.
Brands are experienced by customers through many different encounters. Each represents an opportunity to influence and shape the overall brand image.
Brands are everybody's business. They can be the glue that ties the organization together toward a common identity and purpose.
Brands rarely succeed when they try to be everything to everyone. Focus is everything.
What I believe about brands
At this point, I want to briefly mention my five core beliefs about brands:
Strong brands are built on three sturdy legs: 1) current and comprehensive market research; 2) respect for your institution's heritage; and 3) a clear and shared vision for its future.
A brand strategy will more likely involve the clarification of your institution's current core values rather than the creation of new values.
The goal of a brand strategy is to establish and hold a position of perceived and real value in the minds of your most important internal and external audiences.
Brands return value to the institution. They have utility. They are less about art and more about commerce.
An effective brand strategy should engage, equip, and energize the campus community.Strong brands generate excitement in the marketplace.
We will explore many of these themes in the chapters that follow.