Mindshare Marketing

This weekend I was tasked with explaining the difference between “branding” and “branding” to some old friends of mine.  When most people hear the word “brand” they immediately think of logos; likewise, most “branding” agencies are really creative design or advertising firms that specializing in creating and promoting logos.

When I say brand, I refer to the entire character, behavior, and driving principles of an individual or corporation.  Branding is the act of discovering the driving characteristics of a company’s behavior and using those to deepen existing customer relationships and build new lines of loyalty within the market.

A colleague of mine forwarded me a great article on the same subject today.  “Brand Work is No Job for Ad Agencies” highlights the differences between traditional advertising firms and branding consultancies.  While I give sound advice on advertising strategy, my work is focused on discovering, examining, and building solid strategy around your brand.  These are two very different fields, which are commonly mistaken as being the same thing.

A friend of mine suggested I open an account with Twitter.  It’s an interesting system that allows you to update your friends on your to-the-minute status while keeping up to date with them as well.  It’s guaranteed up-to-date because all the communication can be mirrored to your cell phone via SMS messaging!

For the rest of March, I am going to try Twitter.  I will keep as many people up-to-date as possible and, hopefully, find some added value in the system.  I’ve never been a fan of being constantly connected to the online world, but this experiment could be fun.

If you want to track my updates, open a Twitter account of your own and follow me!  We’ll see where this adventure takes us!

Finally, a metric for measuring the comparative equity in a brand name across markets, industries, and products.

For years, people have talked about brand value and brand equity in difficult to define terms.  Brand value was one of three things: 1) the current financial worth of a brand entity, 2) the future financial worth of a brand entity (valuation), or 3) the allowable premium businesses could charge for branded goods over generic goods.  It is nearly impossible to have a meaningful discussion on brand without defining which brand value we’re talking about.  Here is my definition:

Brand Value = The current financial cost of building your brand (i.e. if your brand suddenly disappeared, how much would it cost to build it back to the place it is today?)

Brand equity has an even more elusive definition.  As a matter of fact, most of the definitions I listed for brand value are also used for equity!  Some others create subjective scales that measure the quality of the customer experience or the ability of the brand to deliver on promises made in advertising.  Yet other definitions use broad conventions to define the overall reputation of a brand based on media reports and personal anecdotes.  All of these are sufficient definitions, but none of them are consistent enough to provide a cross-industry (or even cross-segment) metric.  Here is my definition:

Brand Equity = The overall ability of a brand to demand a price premium when compared to the market as a whole.

To test my theory on Brand Equity, I performed a very un-scientific survey of several people online.  I asked questions about various automobile brands, soft drink brands, and even personal computer brands.  The results were exactly what I expected.  Through a more refined survey, I suspect Brand Equity tracking will give us a more detailed and informative market health barometer.

Continue Reading »