Des Moines Business Record
06-09-07
Shine on
By Sarah Bzdega
sarahbzdega@bpcdm.com
With Jordan Creek Town Center under construction in early 2004, Abbell Credit
Corp., the managing company of Merle Hay Mall, wanted to make sure the
venerable shopping center remained competitive. So it decided to invest in
developing a brand identity.
Working with the ZLR Ignition advertising agency, which researched what
consumers were looking for and how residents viewed the mall, Abbell began
using the tagline "Shop Merle Hay Mall." Through this slogan, the shopping
center rolled out advertisements on television, radio and billboards, stressing the
mall's relaxed atmosphere and variety of stores to a female audience.
Companies are beginning to spend more time and money upfront to learn how
their products and services resonate with consumers before investing in
marketing materials.
This trend is a result of an increase in the number of similar products and
services and companies' efforts to compete for consumers' attention through a
multiplying number of channels. A need to stand out as a brand and connect on
an emotional level with the consumer has become key to a business' success.
"Conventional wisdom dictates that there's a kind of reached frequency idea, in
other words, the more often your message gets out, the more likely it is that it is
going to be effective," said Doug Van Andel, vice president and executive
creative director of Strategic America, an integrated marketing services agency.
"The problem is, if you don't have that key thing, relevance, then it really doesn't
matter how often it gets seen."
The ultimate goal in developing a brand identity is to reach a level where a group
of consumers become "loyal to a product beyond reason," Van Andel said. At this
level, a company has developed a "love mark" with its audience, a term coined
by Kevin Roberts, CEO of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, to describe
consumers' loyal relationships to brands such as Starbucks and Apple.
"I call it brand intuition, a brand intuitive truth that makes the brand significant or
relevant, and if you tap into that, then you can build a brand that's going to
resonate and somewhere down the line ... it turns brand enthusiasts into
evangelists," said Van Andel, who launched Toyota Prius' campaign while
working at Saatchi and was recognized as one of the world's top 10 creative
directors in 2002 by Boards magazine.
Localizing brands
Brand principles apply to national as well as local companies trying to attract a
core audience within a limited geographic area.
Having gone through the process of developing a brand identity "gave us a new
focus," said Elizabeth Holland, CEO of Abbell Credit, "what we needed to do to
be better, what other types of stores people were looking for."
Other local organizations have had similar successes.
Iowa State University became one of the first public universities to develop a
brand identity in the late 1980s, said Carole Custer, ISU's director of
university marketing, with the tagline "Iowa State University. It works." Over the
years the school has continued to redefine its message, but throughout has
stressed its image as a large campus with a small-school feel, focusing on ISU's
wide range of degree programs and activities within a comfortable setting. Custer
said this has been a way of bringing a large university with hundreds of programs
under one image that can then be presented to prospective students, and that
branding campaigns have paid off in its admission numbers.