Recent conversations have served as a reminder that not all senior leaders regard brands as something they should be involved with. If you’re struggling to get your senior team to put important brand matters on the executive agenda, here’s some reminders by way of making the case for greater consideration.
Brand equity is the added value element of your brand. I often refer to as “emotional margin”. It’s frequently measured as the gap between the price your brand can command through its very presence compared with how consumers value non-branded products in your category.
One of the hardest judgment calls for brand managers is relevance. Brands must change to stay consistent yet they must also remain recognisable in order to preserve brand equity. So what should you change, and when?
There’s some evidence to suggest that brands globally can expect to have shorter and shorter half lives. But do the same dynamics apply to digitally-based brands that have applied to the brands that were built “physically” in the past?
Coke’s new campaign direction feels like a push back towards product-focused advertising. The decision to move away from the more abstract concept of happiness towards a campaign that focuses much more specifically on the taste and the bottle begs the question: are marketers trying to be too clever? Have we forgotten that we’re here to sell?
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.
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.
Ever since the GFC, global markets seem to have become more volatile. Oil prices rise and crash; China’s growth soars and slides. When market dynamics are this dramatic, how should you look to effectively develop a brand? Do you go with the ebb and flow, or act as a beacon of constancy?
An observation from the Havas CES 2016 report that we will increasingly see more companies working together across widely different marketplaces is a reminder of the new bridges that brands must be looking to build going forward. Inevitably these invite new approaches.
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.
