“The best brands are built on great stories,”* this remark by Ian Rowden best captures the strategy of diligent brand building. Much more than attractive logos or the products themselves, what builds a brand is how successfully a story is woven around it. Brand marketers have to be good storytellers indeed.
In its dictionary, the American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, symbol, design, or other feature that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of its customers.” With all due respect to the good people at the AMA, that definition is a long way out of date.
As any good marketer will know, a brand is a lot more than just a name or a symbol. They are the attributes that customers associate with a product, service, or company. They are what customers think of when they see the name or logo. The name and the symbol serve as psychological cues, bringing those attributes into the forefront of the mind. But they are not the brand itself.
Brand marks have been around for a long time; Chinese producers have been stamping makers’ marks on products for about a thousand years, but there was little understanding of the cognitive impact that brands had. In the nineteenth century Charles Babbage, better known as the father of the modern computer, wrote about brands in his book The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, suggesting that customers saw the brand symbol as an indicator of product quality. They would be more likely to buy trusted brands, he said, because they knew those brands would deliver value for money.
William Lever, later Lord Leverhulme and founder of a business empire that includes the modern-day Hindustan Lever, understood what Babbage was talking about. Lever designed one of the first soap brands, Sunlight, very much with the idea of communicating a message about quality. The name itself, Sunlight, implies something that is pure and clean; very much the values that people associate with soap. Lever marketed his product as brand that would deliver those values to the product’s end users.
Esta historia es de la edición July-August 2017 de The Smart Manager.
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Esta historia es de la edición July-August 2017 de The Smart Manager.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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Building A Quality Culture
A strong company culture defined by its values, beliefs, and behaviors, has a profound impact on its products and services. More so in today’s VUCA world, where to stay relevant and maintain a competitive edge, it is critical for organizations to build a culture that focuses on quality. Suresh Lulla, author of Quality Fables, elucidates through significant examples how creating a culture of quality is imperative to driving success and productivity.
Customers For Life
The history of General Motors in India can be traced back to the 1920s, when it became the first automotive company to set up an assembly plant in the country. The relationship since then has not been as fruitful as GM would have hoped. GM’s flagship brand, Chevrolet, was introduced in India to build upon the success of the popular Opel marque. However, success has been fleeting at best—an issue that GM India is determined to rectify. It aims to do so by adopting a two-pronged approach: using customer feedback to influence product development, and delivering a superior sales-to-service experience.
The Digital Shift
… technology will radically disrupt HR in the near future. Indeed, it is already changing the way HR works and the role it plays and opening the door to a new type of “digital HR” function.1 The rise of digital and social media is changing the dynamics of HR and creating new ways of hiring, engaging, and retaining employees.
The Story Of Telling
“The best brands are built on great stories,”* this remark by Ian Rowden best captures the strategy of diligent brand building. Much more than attractive logos or the products themselves, what builds a brand is how successfully a story is woven around it. Brand marketers have to be good storytellers indeed.
Complexity Is Simpler Than You Think
Kay Kendall and Glenn Bodinson, authors of Leading the Malcolm Baldrige Way, shatter myths about excellence models such as Baldrige and EFQM.
Proponents of Isolation Never Become Victors
Multilateralism in the political and economic space has always led to frameworks that favor the mighty. WTO was no exception. With agriculture kept out of its purview, it could never become a truly fair and free trading system. China was the only large emerging economy that exploited relative openness in low-cost manufactured goods to take full advantage of the system. Other emerging economies could at best garner minor gains.
A History Lesson (From Year One) for Trump and the Brexit Crowd: Isolationism Has Never Worked!
Professor Stephane Garelli on growing isolationism.
A Win-Win Game
Business is not a sport where some stakeholder has to lose or fare badly for others to do well. Building an atmosphere of trust and transparency between all stakeholders will help companies retain them even during adverse times.
A Sustainable Model
With a total market value of $4.3 trillion and an employment base of at least 1.3 million direct employees and millions of others indirectly employed, platforms have become an important economic force.*Companies today are constantly looking for ways to build platforms—Infosys Ltd announced its plans of monetizing its platforms to make them a $2 billion business by March 2021. But are all platform businesses successful?
Custom Made
…three in four consumers said they receive too many emails from brands, and one-fifth said they could not handle the current volume…69 per cent have ‘unfollowed’ brands on social media, closed their accounts or cancelled subscriptions.*In these times, when the market is flooded with products and services, the most efficent way to engage customers is to offer them customized content. To achieve this, brands need to focus on observing the nuances of individual preferences.
