By Wally Bock

"Branding" has become one of the hot marketing buzzwords of the day. But the most successful corporations in America know that branding is more than just a buzzword — it's an integral part of their marketing strategies.

Recently, the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) and the American Marketing Association (AMA) joined forces to conduct a study of best practices in branding. They went out looking for the key things you can do to build your company or product brand.

What is "branding," anyway?
The APQC and the AMA define the primary purpose of branding as to "establish a meaningful, differentiated presence that will increase the ability to attract and retain loyal customers and improve marketplace ability."

I see that as increasing name recognition and awareness in your target market so that it's easier to sell what you have to sell. When done right, branding builds on the natural way that human beings make buying decisions.

Years ago there was a great trade magazine ad. It showed an obviously unfriendly purchasing agent staring out of the page at you. The caption went something like this: "I don't know you. I never heard of your company. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?"

Branding is about building positive awareness and recognition. No matter what business you're in — whether it's a one-person service business working out of a desk in your bedroom or a multinational selling manufactured goods in hundreds of countries — people have to be aware of who you are so that the little recognition bell goes off in their heads when they hear your name or see your logo. "Ding!"

Mostly, you gain that recognition by having them see your message a number of times. How often? For most products and services, four to six times within a six-month period is good. That's where continuous advertising and publicity work for you.

As folks keep hearing or seeing your message, they learn a bit about what you do. Now, when the bell goes off they say, "Oh yeah, they make. . ."

Branding builds profit
Branding begins by building recognition and awareness, but it doesn't stop there. The Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies study found that "perceived value in the target market" was the single greatest determinant of profitability. That tells us that branding has to go beyond simple awareness-building to a recognition of quality and value as well.

Advertising great David Ogilvy noted, "Great advertising can sell anything once." Beyond once you need to have a quality product or service, one that delivers value. Branding needs to build natural recognition in your market and then move on to telling the story of the value that you deliver.

That's what the builders of great brands do — they build awareness of their quality product. Let's see how the best do it, according to the APQC and AMA study.

The preliminary findings of the study identify four key practices executed by "best practices" branding organizations:

1. They focus on a few key brands. You can't say everything to everybody. There's not enough time and there's not enough money. So the top branding companies concentrate their efforts.

How do you decide which products or services to feature in your branding efforts? There are two approaches that seem to work. You can pick the products or services that deliver the greatest profit or potential profit — or in other words, promote your identity based on what brings the greatest return. Or, you can pick the products or services that are what you do best. Sometimes you have to find that out by going out to your current customers and finding out what they think.

2. Senior management plays an active role. Branding is a major strategic activity. Top management has to set the tone and pay attention to the effort. If that happens, everybody else will do it, too.

3. They use a brand holistically. In case you're wondering what that little bit of jargon means, it means that the best practices in branding do research not only into the attitudes and perceptions of customers and prospects, but also of their own people. In other words, they take a holistic view of the views of their brand. Whew!

Best practice organizations also use all the means available to promote the brand. They work at coordinating advertising and marketing, public relations and Internet/Web efforts — even the slogans on coffee cups — so that the message is pervasive and consistent.

4. They have their own process or model to measure and monitor brand value or equity. That overly fancy statement means simply that top branding organizations figure out some way to measure how they're doing in the branding effort.

Successful promotional programs of any kind need clear targets and regular feedback on progress. With something like branding, that means you have to come up with some way to measure what you're doing because there's no great "branding meter" out there. It's not so important what you use for measurement, but it is important for you to have a consistent measurement system that lets you know how you're doing.

Quality and consistency
One thing that's not mentioned in this study is perhaps the most important thing. Great brands are based on quality products and services that are promoted consistently for a long period of time. This is one of those "simple-but-not-easy" things.

You have to know what story you want to tell about your quality. Then you have to tell that story again and again, with unrelenting diligence, day after day and month after month. Consider brands like Kraft or Campbell Soup that reap rewards in the '90s from promotion they've done since the '30s. That's your challenge.

Wally Bock is the publisher of the Monday Memo and Briefing Memo newsletters and is a popular speaker and author. He writes, speaks and consults with companies about life and business in the Digital Age. You can reach Wally via e-mail at wbock@bockinfo.com or by calling (800) 648-2677, or visit him on the Web at www.bockinfo.com.

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