What Do You Brand For?

In recent years, “brand” has become somewhat of a buzzword in business.  While a lot of people think it is an intangible and amorphous word with little meaning, your company’s brand is the single most important contributor to your bottom line as an organization.  Successful brands are invaluable.  Conversely, undefined brands are a black hole on your organization’s balance sheet.

Brands have real, actual value behind them, which is known as “brand value” or “brand equity.”  Investopedia defines brand value as “the value premium that a company realizes from a product with a recognizable name as compared to its generic equivalent.  Companies can create brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable and superior in quality and reliability.  Mass marketing campaigns can also help to create brand equity.”   

Let’s use Coca Cola as an example.  It is the most recognizable brand in the world with its brand valued at $77.8 billion, according to the 2012 Best GlobalBrands Report by Interbrand.  This $77.8 billion is the cost of the actual brand…not inventory or real estate or its executives.  It is the value of Coca Cola’s brand recognition throughout the world.  Coke’s consumers pay more for the Coca Cola brand product over competitors and generic labels, and that difference of what consumers will spend is Coca Cola’s brand equity. 

Coca Cola promises fun, freedom, and refreshment to consumers.  Not the lowest price for cola, or the most convenient to find.  Their aim is to sell an experience. 

The reason behind branding is because you are standing for something. 

It’s difficult to near impossible to put a figure on the brand of our credit union or community bank and our financial products and services.  But the important lesson we can learn from Coca Cola is that you have to stand for something, build your brand around it over time, commit to continuous marketing and communication of your brand's elements, and then you won’t have to rely on price as your differentiator.

How can your financial institution increase its brand value with current members/customers and the community?  Develop a brand strategy, which includes a brand promise, positioning statement, and a defined identity and be that brand every day.  Over time, you will earn recognition and loyalty, which should be the true foundation of your financial institution’s marketing efforts.

My next post will focus specifically on how to define your brand promise, so be sure to check back next week. 

Amanda

Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness. Contact me for details.

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Goldilocks and the Three Brands

Make sure your brand is just right.

If you look up the word “brand” in the dictionary, here is what comes up:

brand  (brænd)
— n
1.	a particular product or a characteristic that serves to identify a particular product
2.	a trade name or trademark

But a brand is a whole lot more than a mark or a characteristic.  There are many imperceptibles that go into a brand, and it is a lot more complicated than just an icon or logo as a successful brand has many elements.

Look up “brand” in business or marketing books, however, and it is overcomplicated, impersonal, and ambiguous:

"Unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combinationof these, employedin creating an imagethat identifies a productand differentiates it from its competitors. Over time, this image becomes associatedwith a level of credibility, quality, and satisfactionin the consumer'smind. Thus brands help harried consumers in crowded and complexmarketplace, by standing for certain benefitsand value. Legal namefor a brand is trademarkand, when it identifies or representsa firm, it is called a brand name."

(Source: www.businessdictionary.com)

Getting Your Brand Just Right

A brand is personal.  People choose to buy and/or interact with brands they can relate to and that evoke a set of emotions.  The easiest way to define a brand is to think of your organization as a person.  Everyone has a certain consistent appearance, a tone, a set of personality attributes and quirks, likes and dislikes, ideal friends and partners, etc.  This definition is easy to understand and is just right for any business.

While a brand takes a long time to build and define, there is a science behind it.  The great and successful brands of today are personifying their brands, and many have actually hired someone to embody those attributes in order to amplify their brand awareness with consumers.

Some brands that, in my opinion, do a fantastic job of personifying their attributes are Progressive Insurance, M&Ms, and Geico to name a few.  And, while they are actual people, Oprah, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump and even Jennifer Lopez are successful brands.

What words describe your brand?

If you’ve had trouble knowing where to start in defining your credit union or community bank’s brand, take a step back and start describing it as you would another person.  Then you’ll be on the road to getting your brand juuuuuust right. 

Amanda

***Stay tuned for next week’s blog for tips about how to define the different elements of your brand!  

Let MarketMatch help you harness the power of your brand to impact your bottom line.  Our proprietary branding process will target opportunities to obtain new customer relationships, grow existing customer relationships, and build brand awareness.  Contact me for details.

Follow me on Twitter!

Like us on Facebook