This document discusses key aspects of building a successful brand, including knowing your customers better than yourself, understanding your competitive environment, defining your brand personality and promise, developing a brand strategy and game plan, and being consistent in your branding actions over time. Some key points made are that customers buy based on emotion and branding must create an emotional connection, your brand encompasses organizational elements like your logo but is more than just these tangible aspects, and your brand strategy should come from understanding customer and competitive insights. The document provides guidance on assessing elements like your brand personality and promise to appeal to your target audience.

1. What is your brand?

2. Every company has a brand whether
they created it through design
or by accident.
Your brand is everything you
offer, say, and do.

3. Effective brands
evoke strong emotions.
(Customer’s buy from emotion and back it up with their head.)

4. These are the top three ranked
brands in 2013 which denote the
strongest emotive customer
connection.

5. QUESTION
Why is Apple the #1 rated brand?

6. ANSWER
Apple has created a
community based on
imagination, design, and
innovation.

7. *Apple is like having a good friend. That's what's
interesting about this brand. Somewhere they have created this really
humanistic, beyond-business relationship with users and created a
cult-like relationship with their brand. It's a big tribe, everyone is one of
them. You're part of the brand.
Branding has become as powerful as religion. People's connections
with brands transcend commerce. Nike sparked customers' ire when it
was revealed the company's products were assembled in sweatshops.
Customers were not pissed about the products. It's about the
company's ethics. It's interesting how emotionally involved people are.
*Commentary from Marketer Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding

8. Emotional brands have
three commonalities:
The company projects a humanistic corporate
culture and a strong corporate ethic, characterized
by volunteerism, support of good causes or
involvement in the community.
Nike blundered here. Apple, on the other hand, comes across as
profoundly humanist. Its founding ethos was power to the people
through technology, and it remains committed to computers in
education. It's always about people.

9. Emotional brands have
three commonalities:
The company has a unique visual and verbal
vocabulary, expressed in product design and
advertising.
This is true of Apple. Its products and advertising are clearly
recognizable. (So is Target's, or even Wal-Mart's).

10. Emotional brands have
three commonalities:
The company has established a "heartfelt connection" with
its customers. This can take several forms, from building
trust to establishing a community around a product.
In Apple's case, its products are designed around people: Take
the iPod, it brings an emotional, sensory experience to computing.
Apple's design is people-driven.

11. Identifying Your
Brand Level

12. Unbranded Goods
• Little effort to brand goods, consumer perception of goods is utilitarian
Brand as a Reference
• Competitive pressure leads to changes in physical product attributes
Brand as a Personality
•As manufacturers make same product claim, brand personalities develop
Brand as an Icon
• Brand is “owned by consumers.” Recognized globally, inherent to consumer.
Brand as a Company
• Post Modern Marketing- Brand has complex identity – many points of contact
Brand as Policy
•Few companies have achieved this status- Brand aligns with ethical, social, and
political causes.

13. Your Brand
Components

14. Your Point of View
• Branding is a strategic point of view, not a select set of marketing activities
Your Customer Value
• Branding is central to creating customer value
A Competitive Advantage
•Branding is a key tool for creating and sustaining competitive advantage
An Engineered Plan
• Brand strategies must be “engineering” into the strategic planning process
A Living Essence
• Brands get their identity from your company culture and standards
Logical and Emotional Elements
•Branding is part science, part art.

15. Your Brand Encompasses These
Organizational Elements:
(often mistaken for the brand itself)
•Your Trademark- these are legal properties
•Your Mission Statement- this is a reminder
•Your Logo or Slogan- these are your
signatures
•Your Product or Service- these are your
tangibles

16. How to Design a
Successful Brand

17. Know your
Be Consistent in customers better
Action than yourself
Identify your Understand your
Branding Game competitive
Plan environment
Define your
Brand Strategy Define your
Brand Personality
Make a Brand
Promise

18. Know Your Customers Better Than You
Know Yourself
Customers buy for their reasons, not yours. If you want to sell
them your product, you must sell to their concerns, not your own.
Every piece of marketing copy must focus upon them. If you don’t
speak their language, you don’t get their money. With branding as
with selling, if you don’t understand your customers, you won’t
build a brand of which they want to be a part.

19. Understand your Competitive
Environment
Start by asking your existing customers “If you weren’t with us,
with whom would you be working?” Identify the companies to
whom you most often lose business. Learn as much as you can
about these competitors, including:
• how customers perceive them
•what makes them unique
•and why they win the business they do.

20. Define Your Brand Personality
People choose brands based upon whether or not the
characteristics of the product or company brand fit them. If you
have defined your ideal customer well and understand your
competitive environment, you can select a brand personality which
will appeal to your audience.

21. Make a Brand Promise
Find out what is important to your customers about choosing a business
like yours and what benefits they get from doing so. Make sure your brand
promise is important and valuable to the customers you want most. Your
brand promise should be stated clearly, in concise language so everyone
in your organization and your customers understand it.

22. Define your Brand Strategy
You now understand your customer and your competitive environment.
Your strategy comes out of that information. You need to develop a brand
that is distinct from your competitors.
Where will you position yourself?
How are you going to approach your customers?

23. Identify Your Branding Game Plan
Moving to action, you need to define the specific actions you will take to
create your brand. They must be the tangible demonstration of your
company’s values and beliefs. They come directly from your brand
personality, brand promise, and brand strategy. The hardest part of your
branding process will not be designing your tactics. The hardest part is
being consistent in supporting your brand.

24. Be Consistent in Action
A brand builds over time. A brand becomes successful after years of
consistent action. Keep that in mind as you move forward in building your
brand

25. Your brand needs constant tweaking.
You have to start somewhere.
So, you launch your company and brand, see
what works, and you keep adjusting.
What ultimately matters is what the
customer thinks and feels.

26. Ways to check your brand ranking:
1. Google+ Reviews
2. Yelp
3. Search Engine
4. rankingthebrands.com