Mindshare Marketing

An individual’s brand can be just as important as a corporate one.  Most corporations start with an idea of what they want their brand to be and build off of that.  The issue is that goals and reality rarely coincide in the market.  We end up instead with out-of-touch executives and ineffective corporate hierarchies. 

My 9-5 job is helping companies understand what the brand is they have ended up with.  By recognizing your strengths and public image, you can build on past success and create an even stronger brand.  What you end up working with will always be different from the image you’ve built up in your mind.  It can be difficult to shift your strategies to this new paradigm, but you will nonetheless become more successful.

An alternate model, which I am still working to develop, is to change your internal structures and corporate culture to fit a particular brand.  Whether or not this model will be successful is something that remains to be seen.  This is where you come in.

Over the next month, I will begin to outline this new model here.  I welcome as much feedback as possible from you, my loyal readers.  Let me know what you think works, what you think still needs development, and what you think is utter nonsense.  I’ll try to implement as much of your collective opinion as possible.

To start out, I will analyze my personal brand.  Eric A Mann Marketing Solutions is nothing more than an extension of my own identity, and Mindshare Marketing is but a further extension.  I will put together a short survey for all of you sometime this week, please take the time to fill it out and get back to me.  If nothing else, it will be a learning opportunity for me to see your honest opinions (it will be anonymous, so I welcome critique).

Here is my first set of questions:  As a consumer, what are the most important elements of your favorite brand?  What about Coca-Cola convinces you to spend up to 200% more on a bottle of soda?  What about the iPod keeps you loyal to Apple over its less expensive (and sometimes higher-performance) competitors?

Likewise, what are the most important character elements of your favorite employee/supervisor?  What about his or her personality gains more respect from you over others?  What characteristics do you have that keep your employees loyal to you?

Everyone wants their brand to be distinct, but most people are too afraid of failing to step far away from their competition.  This is the essence of ‘fear-based branding,’ discussed in an incredible article I was emailed yesterday: http://www.editorialemergency.com/content/view/181/51.

Does your company suffer from a fear of unique branding?  What do you think you can do to fix the problem?

First of all I want to thank everyone who responded for their thoughtful remarks.  I especially want to thank Rodger Cook for including the “Brand Strategy Insider” article.  I thought it had some great insights and I want to address them as well as everyone else’s comments.

The fact of the matter is that there is no consistent standard with which to measure brand equity.  By brand equity, I mean the power of a brand, not it’s market value.  If my terms have been confusing to anyone, I apologize.  Brand equity, as Rodger’s article put it so well, is like a mysterious pond from which managers draw their ability to build customer relationships, sell products, and develop their business.  The pond may be deeper at times, or shallower, but we assume it will always be there in some form.

Measuring the pond’s volume is the hard part.

Almost everyone referred to the emotional aspect of a brand.  While brand recognition is the “mindshare,” an emotional attachment to the Zales jingle, contoured Coca-cola bottle, or Starbucks logo is the “heartshare.”  It is harder to win and can only be gained when branding “flows from the heart” (thanks Cleon!).  We can measure market recognition of a brand as easily as we can its market value, but knowing “if an affinity for a trendy brand will stick through the decades” is an elusive art (thanks Molly!).

Asking someone today to gauge their loyalty towards a specific brand gives you zero insight into the brand’s true potential.  This is a statistic that must be measured over time - the change in day-to-day customer loyalty gives you an idea of the brand’s strength, particularly when paired with the ebbs and flows of market sentiment.

Knowing that 86% of people prefer Coke to Pepsi (note: random statistic that I made up!) on February 11, 2008 doesn’t show much.  Knowing that, after a massive negative PR article on the 12th, that 80% of people still prefer Coke to Pepsi tells you the power of the Coke brand.  It’s more elusive, and potentially more expensive, to figure out but is really the idea we’re after.

What are your ideas on how to measure this long-term affinity for a brand?  How would you do so in your industry?  Would knowing your brand equity affect the way you do business?