25 questions for start-up brands
Some searching questions, by way of a guide, for the leaders of companies expecting to build lucrative brands in the years ahead.
All posts filed under: Competitive strategy
Decisions for brands under new owners
If your brand is taken over by another company or your company takes over other brands, either as a stand-alone buy or as part of a broader merger and acquisition, what aspects of your current brand should stay as they are and what might you look to change?
How to effectively manage under-performing brands
Smart brand managers actively manage their brand portfolios for maximum collective and individual brand return. If you’ve recently re-assessed your brand portfolio and identified what appear to be one or a number of under-performers, there are a range of options you can pursue to fix that situation.
10 things that break brands (and how to fix them)
There’s a lot of things that brands keep doing that can turn their value south. By way of a checklist, these are the things I see happening far too often.
Presentation: Go big, go small or go home
As the middle market takes a battering in many sectors, size matters more than ever. It matters up and it matters down – because the positioning options themselves are becoming more extreme. You either expand to compete regionally or globally or you go the other way entirely and focus on specific opportunities.
Questioning brand size
Is flexibility replacing footprint as the new black for global brands? That’s the inevitable question as Walmart announces a major redraft of its stores policy.
What went wrong for your brand last year?
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?
What is your brand competing for?
The intuitive answer is market share. But perhaps there’s another way of looking at this: one that is increasingly being pursued by brands with a strong purpose agenda. If your brand must be bigger than what you make, perhaps the basis on which you compete must be greater than what you can distinctly own.
Do you really want to be a famous brand?
In a world where popularity is the ‘it’ metric for so many marketers, have you really thought through how your brand would cope if all your wishes came true? If your brand strategy is based on building your popularity, here’s some things you might like to consider as you rush to be noticed.
Judging your brand distance
Distance is an interesting concept in brand positioning terms. How closely you look to cluster with others and how determined you are to remain some way away depends on your strategy and what you stand to gain from getting up-close.