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.
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?
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.
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.
Everyone’s torn this way and that. It’s easy to lose concentration or to find yourselves prioritising the wrong things. If your brand feels like it’s drifting, here’s 7 sure signs that you’re not focusing on the right things.
We could argue at length about the influence that social media actually has on people’s thinking day to day, but there is mounting evidence to suggest that the conversations people are having over longer timeframes are reframing their attitudes to sectors at a macro level.
When Al Ries took aim at McDonald’s decision to broaden their menu, saying that introducing more items had not worked as a strategy and would not so do into the future, his piece raised questions for me on the differences between diversification and adjacency.
