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Branding Strategy Insider helps marketing oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'brand management'
Brand Focus Leads to Power and Profits
Building a brand and building a profitable brand are two different things. Take Sony, for example. If you did a survey, you would probably find that Sony is the world’s most admired electronics brand. Way ahead of whoever might be in second...
How To Attack The Leading Brand
You know the kid’s game. Rock (fist) breaks scissors. Scissors (two fingers) cuts paper. Paper (flat hand) covers rock. So what’s the best strategy in a game of rock/scissors/paper? The answer is obvious. It all depends on what strategy the......
Fighter Brand Strategy Considerations
Fighter brands are one of the oldest strategies in branding. In a classic response to low priced rivals an organization launches a cheaper brand to attack the threat head on and protect their premium priced offerings. Unlike flanker brands or......
Anchor Your Brand With Credentials
Three years after Barilla was introduced into the U.S. market in 1996, the brand became the No. 1 pasta in America.Not bad, considering the competition: Ronzoni, Mueller’s, Creamette, San Giorgia and American Beauty, among others. The previous mar...
Saturn’s Marketing Lesson Is One To Remember
Fundamentally, there are two ways to increase sales: (1) Expand the brand, or (2) Expand the brand’s market share. Most companies focus on the first way, expanding the brand. While this might seem to work in the short term, expanding......
Creating The Brand Halo Effect
Marketing and psychology are closely related. If psychology is the systematic study of human behavior, then marketing is the systematic study of human behavior in the marketplace. Good-looking people, for example, tend to be perceived as more intelli...
Category Builders vs. Category Killers
It can cost a fortune for a company to pioneer a new category of product or service. Digital cameras, for example. Or satellite radio. Or Internet grocery service. Webvan, for example, lost $830 million on its two-year venture into the......
Brand Strategy: The Flanking Move
The language of marketing has been borrowed from the military. We talk about defensive marketing, offensive marketing, and guerrilla marketing. Often overlooked, however, is flanking, one of the most powerful military strategies. In 1940, Germany stu...
Category First. Brand Second.
A brand is the tip of an iceberg. How big and how deep the iceberg is will determine how powerful the brand is. The iceberg is the category. If it melts, the brand will melt too. Take Kodak, for example.......
Branding and Morality
As with any discipline, branding can be used to help people and society or it can be used in a way that hurts them. How can branding be helpful? It can: • Clarify or highlight a product’s or organization’s most......
Brand Building and the Love Strategy
"Love" has become a key ingredient in many marketing programs. Some recent rallying cries: • "Get consumers to fall in love with our brand." • "Reach their hearts as well as their minds." • "Create intimate, emotional connections. Smother them....
The Power of the Specialist Brand
When you study the marketing wars, the well-differentiated specialist tends to be the winner. Here are some thoughts on why the specialist brand appears to make an impression on the mind. First, the specialist can focus on one product, one......
Simplicity: A Powerful Brand Strategy
The basic concept of some products predicts failure. Not because they don’t work, but because they don’t make sense. Consider Mennen’s vitamin E deodorant. That’s right, you sprayed a vitamin under your arm. It doesn’t make sense unless you...
5 Reasons Gillette Is The Best A Brand Can Get
Times are tough for marketers right now. So let me take you away to an oasis of consumer loyalty where huge margins and a ridiculously dominant market share are the norm. Where private label is non-existent and your biggest competitor......
Small is Beautiful for Brands
It's a big deal when a new chief executive takes the helm. All eyes, therefore, were on Fabrizio Freda at Reuters Global Luxury Summit in New York last week. Freda is about to become the head of Estée Lauder, and......
Great Moments in Branding: Neil McElroy Memo
After its successes with Ivory and Crisco, P&G developed a new business technique called "brand management." Because it focused attention on a product rather than a business function, brand management turned out to be similar in its effects to the......
The Importance of Brand Heritage
I'm calling out British marketers today. They have a lot to learn about the importance of provenance, heritage and history. May was undoubtedly marketing's month for nostalgia. M&S ran triumphant three-day penny bazaars to honour its 125-year anniver...
Brand Management From The Field
The Damned United, a film charting the tumultuous 44-day reign of Brian Clough at Leeds United FC, opened recently. UK Marketers under the age of 30 will probably remember him as a rather melancholy old man, but the young Clough......
The Birth of Brand Management
Happy birthday reader! Yes, I know you weren’t born on this date. I am referring to a professional anniversary not a personal one. May 13th is a very auspicious date for all of you who manage brands because it’s the......
The Seven Markers of Passion Brands
The topic of passion brands is particularly important to consider in difficult economic times. When pressures mount on companies' bottom lines, they typically look first to the expense side of products, both in their development and marketing. The op...
The Danger of Category Short-Sightedness
Readers of Branding Strategy Insider might wonder why it takes so long for some marketers to respond to obvious threats to their market share. At times the answer can be traced back to a classic quandary: categories. Categories were invented......
Strength for Online Brands
What do United Airlines and Starbucks coffee have in common? Take one of United's U.S. flights, and you'll find out. On every domestic flight you're served Starbucks coffee. In fact, the deal between the two companies requires flight attendants to......
Alternative Brand Alliances
Recently I was in a Copenhagen taxi, heading for the city's airport. My co-passenger was a lady who carried a fancy bag. A very nice bag, I'm sure, but what interested me was the combination of brands it represented. Samsonite......
