Client: Date:

The Power of ImageBrand Essentials for Each Stage of Growth

(The Hand Out)

Innovation Centre, Thunder Bay

October 19, 2011

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.

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Contents

1. Brand Image and Brand2. Building a Better Brand3. Brand Essentials for Each Stage of Growth4. Survey Results Summary

Brand Image and Brand

What Is brand Image?

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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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How Brand Image Gets Shaped .

Your Image

What You Say

What Others Do

What You Do

What Others Say

Control

Influence

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Brand Image Is Created By Experience.

Your Image

What You Say

What Others Do

What You Do

What Others Say

Buy • Join • Fund • Support • Partner • Recommend

StakeholderExperiences

Investors, Clients, Partners, Employees, Communities,

Government, Media. Volunteers, etc.

Brand Image ≠ BrandMany 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?

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What Is a Brand?

Apple = simply cool technologyA brand is a promise

Expressed via communications

Kept through action

Realized via experience

Symbolized by identity

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Four Essentials of an Enterprise Brand

PromiseThink 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?

CharacterThink 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?

DifferenceHow 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?

CategoryChrysler 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?

Two Versions of Brand

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The MarCom Brand: Driving Sales

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Context

CustomersProduct Brand Marketing

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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Your Decisive Opportunity

Brand Promise

StakeholderExperience

What You Say

What You Do

The Enterprise Brand: Driving the Org.

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.

Apple’s opportunity was to create technology that fit people, rather than requiring people to fit technology

Building a Better Brand

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Helps You Pass the Sniff Test

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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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Identity: Design + Message Image

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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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Differentiation

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FREDs

Also

∧

To enhance the urbanMost organizations in the same category say the same thing in pretty much the same way. Ideally you want to be different first, then look and sound different. In creating 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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A Differentiated Promise

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“To enhance the urban culture of Hamilton by providing an upscale, curbside dining experience – with personality.”

If a humble food cart in the City of Hamilton can find a way to BE different, you can too.

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Identity and Efficiency

Initial Company Name

Initial Product Name

New Company & 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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Tell the Value StorySPM: From Project Management to Initiative Management

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.

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 silo-based inertia.

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Tell the Value StorySPM: 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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The Product is Proof of the Parent Brand

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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Your Sale Pitch or Demo

Value Story? Flea Circus?or

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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Brand Score Card

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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.

Brand Essentials For Each Stage of Growth

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Image at the Innovation Stage

Goal

Need Brand & Image

Funding Supporters & advisors

Value story

Vision of the Future

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Start up

Goal Needs Brand & Image

Launch your product or service

Brand platform

Package the offering and organization

Business model

Communications

Making the value of the products visible

Belief in the long term viability of the company

Buzz

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Early Stage

Goal Needs Brand & Image

Build out the company

Staff

Products

Sales channels & partners

Communications

Alignment and leadership

Setting the culture

Communications impact and efficiency

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Image at the Established Stage

Goal Needs Brand & Image

Grow or renew the company

Sales machine

Product machine

New markets/acquisitions

Capital

Owning your space

Adapting to change

Energizing and shaping the culture

Pervasive awareness

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Survey Insights

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Survey: What We LearnedIssue Standing

General understanding of brand Good – but most conflated brand with image

Promise Most couldn’t articulate a clear brand promise

Difference Most couldn’t define a true brand difference

Standing out from competitors Almost all felt they stood out

Formal positioning statement Almost all had no positioning statement

Formal core messages Almost all had no core messages defined

Formal brand guidelines Almost all had no brand guidelines

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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.

SiderenOpportunity-Based Branding

Harry H. Corneliushcornelius@sideren.com

416-410-5075

© Harry H. Cornelius, 2011