Successful brands have a story that connects them with their audience and that forms the backbone of their strategy. But if you’ve been around a while, the story that your loyal customers know is not yet shared by those who are new to the brand. Here are 4 ways to connect your longer story to those who don’t know it as well.
Many Roads, One Goal is based on my most popular blog post ever. It’s about why it takes more than one strategy to find the best strategy and how you can develop a portfolio of strategies to overcome challenging times, implement and test them in batches, and then manage the portfolio down from many to whatever the market has revealed works best.
How should you think of your brand when you have a product that costs a lot to use? Is an expensive product automatically luxury? How should we draw a distinction between luxury and, say, premium?
Everything your brand does happens within a context. You can’t ignore that, nor should you. But here’s the irony – if you allow that wider context to drive how you manage your brand, then you risk losing control because the course you are steering is no longer yours.
Any brand manager worth their salt is looking to cultivate and manage a brand that is noticed and valued. But how far should a brand go in that quest for distinctiveness? Interestingly, the answer doesn’t just come down to taste.
In The Smarter Screen, Shlomo Benartzi lays out a world where we are besieged by choices; choices that, far from helping us to make better decisions, confuse us into behaving in ways that are actually less informed.
I really like Ed Woodcock’s description of what it takes to build a fascinating brand story. Creativity, resonance and purpose are all key attributes of successful brand storytelling strategy, he observes, in a recent piece on top storytelling brands. It’s fascinating to observe how those characteristics are playing out across the economy.
The rules for developing and managing brands are laid out in a range of principles and frameworks developed by extraordinary marketing minds. Time and time again, we’re told brands follow these rules to achieve success. But every so often, you encounter a highly successful brand that seems to defy the theory. And there are lessons for all of us in that success as well.
As we start another year with all the usual wishes to do better, it’s sobering to review how your intentions from this time last year panned out. What didn’t happen, and what do those disappointments tell you about your brand and the state of your brand heading into 2016?
