A brand is a business person’s best friend

This presentation was authored by Richard Huntington. In accordance with the Creative Commons Licence for adliterate you may use any or all of this presentation for commercial use. Attribution would be nice though. Revisions and additions are very welcome and can be emailed to me at huntingtonr@mac.com

A brand is the sum of all the associations about a product, service, or organisation that live inside a consumer’s mind

The richer and more focused the associations the more powerful the brand

You don’t own your brand…your consumers do. Without the associations in their heads all you have is a product, service or organisation

Your job is to shepherd, marshal and direct all those associations so that they are richer and more productive

Why bother?

Monopoly

Monopolies are good for businesses because in monopoly conditions businesses get to name their price…

… within reason

Few of us operate in actual monopoly conditions

But we can create effective monopolies…

… if consumers want our brand enough to resist substituting it even when it is priced at a premium to the alternative

Innocent don’t have a monopoly over smoothies but they do over Innocent – no one else can provide consumers with the innocent brand

1 litre of Innocent smoothie at Ocado £3.29 1 litre of PJ’s smoothie at Ocado £2.79 Innocent’s share of the UK smoothie market 48%

Similarly Apple don’t have a monopoly over MP3 players but they do over IPods

Ipod’s share of the UK MP3 player market 80% Cost of a 30GB IPod at Micro Anvika £219 Cost of a 40GB Gigabeat MP3 player at Micro Anvika £149

You can usually tell if a brand is healthy if it is being sold at a premium

Or if the consumer is happy to make another trade off, like the shopping experience at Ikea or the lack of allocated seating on Easy Jet

Brands are brilliant but…

They must have substance not just image

Innocent make great smoothies Apple make great mp3 players

And these days no brand is invincible faced with a superior competitor

Hoover thought they had a great brand until Dyson arrived and stole their lunch