Posts tagged "Brand Management"

Some time ago, I took two of my young grandsons to a West Michigan Whitecaps baseball game. The Whitecaps are the Class A farm team for the Detroit Tigers that play ball in my hometown, Grand Rapids. Like many of the minor league venues, the ball game is just part of the entertainment experience. It’s fun. There’s funky food (like a “dietary disaster” 4800 calorie Frito burger—I’m not kidding), contests, door prizes, promotions, and the gamut of seating options—lawn, box, reserved, corporate suites and party decks for hosting private events. That’s where the brand ambassador comes in for Batteries Plus. (more…)

As competition heats up and sales start to stagnate, companies often seek to breathe new life into the brand through rebranding. In all too many cases, however, those expensive rebranding efforts fail to yield the desired business results. Here are some of the key reasons why rebranding often fails. More than executional mistakes that blunt the effectiveness of rebranding efforts, these are critical errors that almost always lead to failure.

Lack of True Change

Sure, sometimes rebranding is done solely to sharpen the image of a company or brand; periodically things need to be freshened up. However, unless you operate in the world of packaged goods, don’t expect great things from launching some new designs and fresh copy.

Rebranding signals change. A new image will cause people to take a fresh look at you—and people’s primary motivation in taking a new look is to see what’s changed. If you’re the same old place dressed up in new wrapping and ribbons, you’ll merely confirm the existing position you own in their minds. You’ll have wasted a valuable opportunity to change their perceptions. There are only so many times your prospects are going to reconsider you. Use them wisely. (more…)

By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard about Getty Image’s PicScout bot that’s crawling the internet searching for unauthorized use of their images. It looks like it’s been around for at least a couple years. If you haven’t, well, Getty Images is a client of PicScout [www.picscout.com], an Israeli-based company employing technology that essentially trolls the internet searching for images and comparing algorithms to libraries of companies they represent. Getty Images is one of several stock image sources PicScout lists as clients. With a glance on their customers webpage, you’ll see they also list Corbis, Image Source, Super Stock, and others. (more…)

Today I ran across a great blog posting at Brandeo regarding positioning strategy. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments expressed in it. While the blog post mentions two consumer-marketing examples, the issues are equally relevant and critical to B2B marketing.

Concurring with the author, I believe that there is often too little time paid to developing the proper positioning, and that too often positioning strategy is confused by ambiguous talk about the amorphous “brand.” Discussions about the brand usually get people thinking about things they can see, like visual identities and taglines. While brand strategy should be nearly synonymous with positioning strategy, in today’s world it generally isn’t. (more…)