Client :
Brand Essentials for Each Stage of Growth
(The Hand Out)
Innovation Centre, Thunder Bay
October 19, 2011
Date :

The power of brand image is in creating the unrivaled belief in your organization that makes everything else possible.

The challenge of brand image is that it is out of your control.
It’s an elusive, changeable thing – subject to many external forces.

The good news is that brand image is something that you can influence…
If you fully leverage the tools of branding and leadership.

1.
Brand Image and Brand
2.
Building a Better Brand
3.
Brand Essentials for Each Stage of Growth
4.
Survey Results Summary
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What Is brand Image?

Brand Image = the Collective Impression of You by all Stakeholders
• Investors
• Clients
• Employees
• Communities
• Media
• Partners
• Volunteers
• And other people interested in you
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.
Your Image
What You
Say
What You
Do
What Others
Say
What Others
Do
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.
Buy • Join • Fund • Support • Partner • Recommend
What You
Say
What You
Do
Your Image
Stakeholder
Experiences
Investors, Clients, Partners,
Employees, Communities,
Government, Media.
Volunteers, etc.
What Others
Say
What Others
Do
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Many brand experts claim your brand is what people think about you. Useful as that can be, it’s not technically accurate. Your brand image is the gut feeling people have of you. Your brand is something else.
Marty Neumeier’s BRAND GAP addresses the fact that you brand isn’t your logo. You can download it in
PDF form. Do a Google search

What Is brand?

Apple = simply cool technology A brand is a promise
Symbolized by identity
Expressed via communications
Kept through action
Realized via experience
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Promise
Think about the promises of products you know. Take cars, for example. What does Volvo stand for? What
Does Mercedes stand for? What does BMW stand for? What does your firm stand for? It is relevant and compelling to all: customers, employees, investors?
Difference
How different are you? Apple is really different, not just their ads. If you mapped what your competitors say and do, how different is that? If you are truly different, do your communications capture it?. If you are not all that different… what can you do about it?
Character
Think about companies that have a clearly defined character, that runs through everything? Porter Airlines.
Disney. Apple. The promise you make is coloured by the character you have. Character helps shape experience. What makes your character unique and engaging? Is it pulled through everything? Or just through your advertising?
Category
Chrysler reinvented the station wagon and “ta dah” the minivan was born. When you are in a category by yourself, it’s easy to be the leader and stand out. Are you in in unique category? What can you do to get there?
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Two Versions of Brand

Product Brand
Marketing
Context
Customers
This is a traditional view of branding. It is very effective from a sales point of view. It has to follow trends because it speaks to people in the language of the moment. But when trends change, the brand can change with them. Your can become weathervane branding unless there is something to anchor it that is unchanging.
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In the enterprise model of branding, you identify your ongoing decisive opportunity.
Then frame your promise, actions and communications to deliver the experiences that will get people to go along with you.
Your brand should stay stable over time. What should change is they way you communicate your promise. Not the promise itself.
Your Decisive
Opportunity
Stakeholder
Experience
Apple’s opportunity was to create technology that fit people, rather than requiring people to fit technology
What You
Say
Brand
Promise
What
You Do
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The first few seconds make all the difference. Elephants like to dance with elephants. With small companies and start ups, bigger clients what to know things like:
“Will you still be here tomorrow?”
“Do you get the way business is done at my level?”
They often make a snap, gut decision in the first few second. So that means you have to dress your brand for success and get a clear, compelling message across in an instant.
Identity and positioning are keys to sniff-test success.
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
The New LIVE
Dejero is a company that makes mobile HD broadcast equipment. You strap on a backpack attached to a camera and broadcast using cellular coverage. They had to sell to the big networks on a revolutionary technology that could replace the half million dollar broadcast trucks that took hours to set up.
Dejero’s old logo looked clumsy. The standard issue black letters a downer. The word
“Labs” made them look like a science experiment, not a finished product.
New colours, better lettering and a cleaner symbol made them look like they had their act together and were “ready for prime time.” The
New LIVE positioning told exactly what they did and how they were different. Dejero is kicking butt
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Most organizations in the same category say the same thing in pretty much the same
To enhance the urban your difference, look beyond you product or service. A different culture, business model and relationship style can be just as important.
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If a humble food cart in the City of Hamilton can find a way to BE different, you can too.
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Initial Company Name
New Company & Product Name
Initial Product Name
It costs a lot to care and feed a brand. Two brands can be more that than twice as expensive. Everyone knew MPS, the product, few knew that CTA Systemsource was the company that made it. We changed the company name to Univeris and applied that to the product. They began to look like a real technology company. This was key to winning Bank of Montreal as a client.
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SPM: From Project Management to Initiative Management
Here’s a model of the effective enterprise. It requires developing strategy in a way that can be implemented. A framework for implementing strategy. And cultural change to overcome silobased inertia.
SPM was in the Project Management Space. Over the years project management became a commodity. There were project management recipes published by the Project
Management Institute… so there was no more “secret sauce” in the industry. SPM lost access to CEOs and wanted it back.
We realized, that what’s most important to CEO is to be able to implement their strategic initiatives, knowing that most strategic initiatives fail. We re-invented SPM as a Strategic
Initiative Management firm that would enable clients to become more effective enterprises – that was the promise.
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SPM: From Project Management to Initiative Management
To express the promise of an effective enterprise, we modeled the effective enterprise… and then showed how we could help the client bridge the gap between strategy and execution. That’s what the Realization Framework does
We created a credible value story form the client’s perspective.
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Products come and go. Features come and go. What remains. Usually it’s the corporate brand. Each new product, service or feature should help reinforce the corporate brand and be true to it.
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Value Story?
or Flea Circus?
Are you telling a value story.
Do you paint a picture of the destination
(Think Emerald City) and then does your demo show how you will get the client there? (Think Yellow brick Road)
Do you edit your story down to the simplest set of points need to paint the picture of the outcome and the path?
Or are you showing off all the details of your product or service. Everything that it can do – and then some.
Clients usually can’t absorb it all and you will lose them from the first.
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✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
Are We “Trying Harder?”
Customer Service
Employee Service
Product
Performance Evalutations
Compensation
Processes
Systems
Policies
Do you use your brand promise as a litmus test of all you say and do? If not, you are likely not living your brand. Your brand is likely just for decoration. And that’s not authentic. People can sense that. You know, the sniff test.
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Goal
Funding
Need
Supporters & advisors
Value story
Brand & Image
Vision of the Future
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Goal
Launch your product or service
Needs Brand & Image
Brand platform Making the value of the products visible
Package the offering and organization Belief in the long term viability of the company
Business model
Buzz
Communications
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Goal
Build out the company
Needs
Staff
Products
Sales channels & partners
Communications
Brand & Image
Alignment and leadership
Setting the culture
Communications impact and efficiency
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Goal Needs
Grow or renew the company
Sales machine
Product machine
Brand & Image
Owning your space
Adapting to change
New markets/acquisitions
Energizing and shaping the culture
Capital Pervasive awareness
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Issue
General understanding of brand
Promise
Difference
Standing out from competitors
Formal positioning statement
Formal core messages
Formal brand guidelines
Standing
Good – but most conflated brand with image
Most couldn’t articulate a clear brand promise
Most couldn’t define a true brand difference
Almost all felt they stood out
Almost all had no positioning statement
Almost all had no core messages defined
Almost all had no brand guidelines
If you don’t have a clear promise, and you haven’t defined your difference, can you really stand out? And if your messages are a) worked out and b) aligned with your promise, you are likely all over the map…. And sending mixed messages.
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Sideren
Opportunity-Based Branding
Harry H. Cornelius hcornelius@sideren.com
416-410-5075
© Harry H. Cornelius, 2011