By Vanessa DiMauro, CEO, Leader Networks, and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board Today’s announcement of the merger between SNCR and The Conference Board is incredibly exciting news! For the past 10 years, the SNCR Fellows have become a cohesive cohort of academics, thought leaders and practitioners working together […]

By Alice Korngold, Co-Editor, Giving Thoughts Blog, and Author, A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit By Solving Global Problems… Where Governments Cannot, and Myung Lee, Executive Director, Cities of Service More than half of the U.S. population lives in cities. Municipal services, therefore, are determining the quality of life for many Americans. At the […]

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was among 14 people to be named an Emerging Innovator by Ashoka Changemakers and American Express today.

Hegranes will join 14 other top innovators from across the U.S. — including Sombit Mishra of QMedic and Barbara Bush of Global Health Corps — for a 2-day innovator’s bootcamp in New York City in May. Ashoka Changemakers and American Express said the winners were, “Pioneers with solutions to some of the world’s most critical challenges in areas such as health, urban planning, economic empowerment, and citizen access to technology.”

Hegranes founded GPI in 2006 and has grown the organization into one of the world’s foremost producers of professional, feature news content from the developing world. GPI employs 133 women in 26 countries.

If your brand is taken over by another company or your company takes over other brands, either as a stand-alone buy or as part of a broader merger and acquisition, what aspects of your current brand should stay as they are and what might you look to change?

Many brands find themselves caught in a change of ownership. Sometimes there is no choice in what is left alone. For example, if a company is acquired by a major power brand, the chances of other brands remaining within the stable are small. If, on the other hand, either the acquirer or the acquired runs a house of brands, there are a number of things to weigh.

Six aspects for deciding what to do with the brand(s) you have:

1. The Circumstances Of The Sale – was the brand flourishing or declining when the sale took place? A strong brand could of course be a key reason for the sale, in which case customers should see as little change as possible. If on the other hand, the brand was weak or weakening, then a change of ownership is a good opportunity to revamp the strategy for that brand (to align with the intentions of the new owner) and perhaps to rebrand to clearly signal this shift.

2. The Equity Of The New Owner’s Brand – this too is all about sending the right signals. For companies looking to visibly expand their presence through acquisition, the lesser brand is likely to change, or at least align, with the new owner. If on the other hand, the new owner is running a managed portfolio (where brands look independent and live or die on their ability to hit their goals) or the owner’s own brand is not visible to consumers (or is meaningful only to investors), then things should probably be left as they are. That can mean making hard decisions about which brand is best suited to the consumer-facing environment, supplanting ego for recognition. Too many brands in my view try to marry brand names through dual branding. While they may believe they are achieving the best of both brands, my personal view is that they are compromising all ways round.

3. The Make-up Of The New Brand Portfolio – When companies with similar product lines join forces, it’s critical that the new portfolio is streamlined and cohesive. That in itself may be a reason to change or keep the brand as is. To decide which brands stay and which go: Discard, sell or merge redundant brands, Identify the brands that contribute the most to your purpose (make these the core of your portfolio), Where you have two strong brands in one category, assign different parts of the market to each brand and reposition accordingly.

4. The New Target Audience – companies looking to use acquisition to change or expand their customer base will need to consider very carefully which brand is most likely to be most attractive to the target audience looking ahead. The opportunity here – and it’s generally an underplayed one in my experience – is to draw the customers of the lesser brand into the fold of the future brand by presenting them with a clear and inspiring vision of how they stand to benefit. Too often, this doesn’t happen. Companies talk about their perspective of why change is important, using phrases and reassurances that are tired, irrelevant and hollow. No-one cares about the fact that you’re bigger or that you have this much in assets. That means nothing to consumers. At all.

5. The Wider Market Environment Post-Sale – what has the sale of the brand done to the dynamics of the competitive landscape? If, for example, the brand is now part of a bigger group with a strong market position, that change has not only potentially enhanced the standing of the brand under new owners but also weakened the relative position of others. Or the change may have stiffened their resolve to compete more vigorously. In which case, will the current brand, under the new arrangement, be strong enough to compete meaningfully in this new environment? It could well be. Or it may require a shift in brand architecture – for example, from a stand-alone brand to an endorsed brand – in order to better meet the new dynamics that have been created.

6. The People Behind The Brand – Who will your people rally to? So often, companies just impose brand change on the culture without enough consideration for what their people stand to lose or gain psychologically from the shift. They focus on the corporate restructure at the expense of the emotional restructure. By failing to leverage the legacy of the existing brand, or the excitement and strength of the new, they often lose the transformational opportunity that a change in brand ownership represents.

What you will do with the brand(s) you acquire is a critical consideration for every company looking to take over another’s assets. You have after all probably paid good money for them. Understanding the value they have, and the value they could have, or will never achieve, is vital to turning balance-sheet goodwill into margin-enhancing brand equity. Too often, companies make decisions after the brands themselves have been acquired and based on policy or structure rather than carefully thinking through ahead of time how they can achieve the greatest emotional impact in their markets and for their customers, current and future.

The Blake Project Can Help: We have extensive experience helping organizations make key decisions that help ensure successful mergers & acquisitions.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

One big question regarding the US economy is whether wage growth is accelerating. You might think that this is a pretty straightforward question to answer, but it’s not. There are many measures of wage growth, and they don’t all point in the same direction. For example, we can compare the year-over-year wage growth in recent […]

Here’s something we learned last week in LA: Blink, the best-seller from TED favorite Malcolm Gladwell, will be made into a feature film, adapted/directed by Stephen Gaghan (“Traffic”), and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Gladwell will stay involved as executive producer. We’re great fans of Blink — and, let’s face it, just about anything Gladwell writes — so we were curious to hear what he had in mind for the movie. He tells us, “It takes a single character from Blink — Silvan Tompkins — and fashions an entirely new story around him, about what it means to be someone who can read other people’s thoughts.” Our snap judgment says: Success.

By Alex Parkinson, Senior Researcher and Associate Director, The Conference Board The Conference Board has been brimming with excitement since we entered 2016. Not only is it the year of our centenary—The Conference Board was founded in 1916 as the National Industrial Conference Board—but we’re also welcoming a groundbreaking organization to the fold: the Society […]

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, I bumped into him at a story-telling fundraiser last night, and reminded him of the brilliant talk he gave at TED2004 about Howard Moskowitz and the search for perfect pasta sauces.  Turns out that at the same conference he bumped into another TEDster who wanted to talk to him about cookies.  The result: another great story  that the New Yorker just released to the Internet, starring Steve Gundrum of Mattson (and his colleague Barb Stuckey, who joins in February for the first time).

You might think that a five-year obsession to create a new cookie is a little strange… except this is no ordinary cookie. It had to be both mass-market… and healthy: A hard problem; and one solved not so much by the wisdom of crowds, but a little individual inspiration.

If you have an interesting tale that sparked from a recent TED, please let me know… 

The jobs report from last week was disappointing. Economists expected employers to create 217,000 jobs in August; we got only 173,000. And more adults are simply calling it quits — they don’t work and they’re not looking. Labor force participation is at its lowest in almost two generations.

The news wasn’t all bad. Unemployment hit a seven-year low and the economy is adding jobs at a decent clip, 212,000 a month on average so far this year.

Falling unemployment sounds good, but it doesn’t count working-age Americans who have dropped out of the labor force. Last month, the share of adults working or looking for work held at a 38-year low. Typically, labor force participation is around 68 percent, but it’s been at 62.6 percent for three months now.

“You have a big segment of the working-age population that’s shut out of the labor market. That lowers demand for goods, services and investment,” Redfin Chief Economist Nela Richardson said. “Without demand, we can’t get robust economic or wage growth. The economy gets stuck.”

Maybe some of those labor force dropouts won the lottery and are just living large. But a lot of them simply have given up. In the end, the reasons why they’ve checked out don’t matter.

“Whether it’s by choice or not, we’ve been in a really low productivity cycle,” Richardson said. “The economy in the first half of the year grew at only 2.2 percent. We’d expect at least 3 percent growth by now.”

So what? Today’s report sends no clear signal on the Fed, which will decide this later this month whether to raise interest rates.

“The evidence tells you two different things. You have to pick which part of the chart you want to focus on,” Richardson said.

While the central bank doesn’t control your mortgage, its actions do affect the economy and financial markets, which can affect the cost of a home loan. For now, we expect mortgage ratesto stay low.

This article was written by Lorraine Woellert from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Oregon Recruiters and California Recruiters.

August Jobs Report: The Good and Bad in One Chart

August Jobs Report: The Good and Bad in One Chart

Today’s interview is with my friend Robbie Grayson from Franklin Tennessee. Robbie is the CEO of TraitMarker, a way for you to discover the “real you.” As it states on the website: “Chances are that your personality lies buried beneath years of expectations and demands that life has heaped upon you. TraitMarker uncovers the genuine you lying beneath it all…” 

Robbie works with many well known artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, and so on. I’m curious as to if there are any similarities in the traits of those that are most successful. I’m also interested to find out what Robbie told a number of highly successful business people as well as Grammy Award winning artists that he invited to his house, in Franklin TN, to meet me a while back.  On very short notice he put together two days of meetings that he hosted at his house, but what was it that he said or did that inspired these people to show up?

I have met a lot of people in my life and continue to build my network on a weekly basis. After a while you start to find similarities in people’s ways and actions. I have come to recognize the types of people that have a large network of loyal relationships. There is just something about these people that make them connectors. Robbie is one of these people. 

We talk about trust and honesty and their role in business success and living the life we want. Not only that but how to build and establish trust in order to develop our careers. 

I hope you enjoy this weeks podcast!

Aaron Bethune. Music Specialist. Creative Collaborator.

PlayItLoudMusic   Above The Noise   @playitloudmusic

Interview with Robbie Grayson

For more information on TraitMarker please visit: www.TraitMarker.com