Reading Time: 2 minutesIt’s tempting to think that talent and tenacity are all your brand needs to succeed. But the biggest challenge every brand faces is disparity: the ability to forge a profile in their sector that stands them apart from everyone participating around them. Right now, across the world, hundreds of different people are opening a coffee […]
Tag: differentiation
Different ways to think about differentiation
Reading Time: 4 minutesIf you can truly find a difference for your brand, you should pursue it. But the difference needs to be meaningful to your audience. And you need to recognise it won’t last. Differentiation is an idea that has become controversial in recent years. Acknowledging that, here are some different ways to think about differentiation. The […]
Set your brand’s strategic direction with these three decisions
Reading Time: 5 minutesRobust brand strategy is responsive, taking its cues from a range of places that together provide a clear and simple map for what a brand needs to do to move forward. With so many ways you could go, here’s where we recommend you look to pinpoint what’s really needed to set your brand’s strategic direction. […]
Know thy brand enemy
Reading Time: 7 minutesIt’s healthy to adopt a brand enemy. Handled well, having such an adversary works for your customers and your culture. Brand enemies are a powerful source of motivation and focus. It’s human nature to be united by the things we have in common and those we want to see change. But choose your enemy carefully […]
Challenging a brand category
Reading Time: 5 minutesSectors have conventions. In fact, a brand category is really a set of vertically-held behaviours and attitudes. That’s what you’re really confronting when you set about challenging a brand category. As Paige Lansing Valle of Emotive Brand identifies in a white paper on brand category creation, “People hold on tightly to their established understandings of […]
Turning your brand into the authority
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn this article in Business Week, Howard Schultz talks about how the mighty Starbucks brand lost its way – mistaking aroma rather than coffee for the core of its business and embraking on a strategy that saw it shift seriously off-course. The problem, as Schultz explains, is that by the time the company realised that […]
Does efficiency jeopardise brand?
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn the hunt for more streamlined businesses that are less resource intensive, how real is the risk that brands are actually putting people off dealing with them? When does an efficient process become so rationalised that it loses its humanity and therefore its appeal? On the face of it, brand and efficiency have similar objectives. […]
Will they or won’t they?
Reading Time: 2 minutesSo often it seems to me brand owners hope to bring about change rather than planning to bring about change. They see persuasion as an awareness issue rather than as a behavioural issue – often because they regard their product as the obvious choice that somehow, miraculously will spark a “road to Damascus” moment as […]
Getting real value from your CSR
Reading Time: 3 minutesThis thought-provoking article from McKinsey looks at what really drives value in corporate responsibility. As the authors point out, CSR continues to influence how companies and brands go about their business: carbon footprint, ethical and greener supply chains, volunteer programmes and philanthropy are now all par for the course. We all know that not being […]
Seen and not herd
Reading Time: 3 minutesWhat’s the real cost of the sales seasons on the high street? That’s the question posed and answered by Laurence Green in this well-considered article in The Telegraph. Green quickly hones in on what he sees as two of the biggest enemies of effective branding today: the impulse to discount; and the compulsion to appeal […]
Transformation secrets: Please don’t try to change your brand
Reading Time: 3 minutesChange is on everyone’s mind at this time of year – or more particularly people are preoccupied with resolutions of change. Hopes of transformation fly high. But most of us will lapse from whatever pledges we make, not because we don’t really want to change necessarily but because the habit of what we have done […]
Sense and Serotonin
Reading Time: 2 minutesRecently in response to a post by David Meerman Scott about the need to apply left and right brain thinking to content creation, I suggested in the comments that brands should apply that same approach to most aspects of marketing. As I pointed out at the time, blending right and left brain signals is critical […]