Jim Bechtold of the ANA’s Alliance for Family Entertainment (AFE) discusses how the #SeeHer initiative will work with industry to accurately portray women and girls in advertising and how marketers can get involved

A couple of weeks ago I started a blog post series on how to scale-up your brand.  Today I’m going to discuss five critical dimensions of brand power.  These dimensions indicate the strength of your brand to establish and maintain competitive advantage, command a price premium, and win customers’ loyalty.  They provide a simple way to assess your brand power.

Refer to these five dimensions as you scale your organization.  If you’re just starting out, use them to shape your brand vision.  If you’re in the early stages of scaling, use them as a filter for decisions about what to do and what not to do.  If you’re in the later stages, use them for periodic assessment and course correction.

Consider rating your brand on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of these dimensions and tracking if your ratings improve over time.  Also ask key stakeholders — partners, employees, primary customers — to rate your brand and then work together to address differences in responses.

By no means are these the only dimensions of brand power, but in my experience, I’ve found that they are the most fundamental ones.

1. meaningful — A meaningful brand is relevant and compelling to a valuable customer target(s). Let me break that down a bit:
   • relevant — Your brand should connect to a customer need or want.
   • compelling — Your brand should prompt action or reaction.
   • valuable customer target — Your brand should appeal to customers who want to buy your product/service or add value to you in some other way.

2. differentiating – A brand should be distinct from other options. And here’s the important part, it should be distinct in a way that customers perceive is important.  Your brand differentiation can’t be negligible or simply a veneer.

3. believable – Your brand should be grounded in the natural and inherent strengths of your product/service. I always say,

   A brand can’t just be a promise; it must be a promise delivered.Click To Tweeta brand can’t just be a promise; it must be a promise delivered.  A corollary is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Customers must believe that you can and will deliver on your brand promise — and sometimes you have to earn their permission to even make a claim.

4. transcendent — A transcendent brand conveys value beyond a specific offering. This means it connects with customers at a higher level.  In my book, What Great Brands Do, I write about how great brands avoid selling products.  I explain that people are emotional creatures and we make purchase decisions based on our feelings.  So your brand should satisfy customers’ emotional needs and/or offer access to an identity they want to experience and express.

5. sustainable – A brand should be based on an enduring idea that enables your business to resonate and compete now and in the future. The appeal of a brand that is tied to a fad or fleeting trend is short-lived and entirely dependent upon circumstances outside your control.  You should conceive of your brand to make both an immediate and a long-lasting impact.

I’m curious to hear which of these brand dimensions resonates with you the most — and which one(s) you think are the most difficult to achieve.  Please leave your comments below.

In my next post, I’ll start introducing you to different tools and exercises you can use to develop or refine your strategic brand platform.  Consider subscribing to my feed so you’ll be notified when the next in this Scale-Up Your Brand series is ready.  (And here’s the link if you missed my first post, How to Conduct a Brand Diagnostic.)

The post scale-up your brand — assess your brand power appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

ANA’s Dan Jaffe provided an update on the advertising impacts of the 2016 election and discussed major court cases and two important and potentially damaging rulemakings at the FCC – and how ANA is responding.

By Shel Holtz, Communication Strategist, Public Speaker, Author, Trainer, and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR) Each week, I develop an overview of news stories, posts, studies, and reports designed to help organizational communicators stay current on the trends and technology that affect their jobs. This post is […]

ANA, in partnership with GfK, conducted research to help bring clarity to the current state of this category and make predictions about where it’s headed.

Marketers love patterns. But repetition is not always the most reliable metric for brand loyalty.

The push to gather consumer insights quickly leads many to that hunt for recurrence. If we have people continuing to buy from us, the argument goes, they must be loyal. Not necessarily. Consumers may choose to buy a brand for reasons that have nothing to do with affinity. They may buy because of price. They may buy because of time. They may buy because of features. And none of these factors is a marker for unerring commitment because each of them can be superseded by a competitor, and that shift can prompt an immediate change in preference.

Some will argue of course that brand loyalty doesn’t exist; that it is a myth created by marketers basically to give them something to chase. As Philip Graves puts it, “Describing someone’s repeated use of a brand as ‘loyal’ is a projection of emotions that simply aren’t being experienced.” Steve Kesselman goes further, suggesting that marketers shouldn’t even expect to be able to lock consumers into a single relationship. On the contrary, brands should look to be part of a choice set. “People seek variety, exploration and discovery, yet we define loyalty as a monogamous customer-brand relationship.”

Some claim that we confuse the motives of consumers not because of what they do but because of what we would like to think they do. According to Help Scout, while brands believe that customers want to have relationships with them, the reality is that 77 percent don’t. And while many believe that an increase in interactions is always the answer, customers quickly suffer from overload.

So if convenience and loyalty both play out as repeat transactions, how are they different? I think it’s because they get there from very different consumer mindsets. This might suggest they represent responses to different value equations.

Loyalty is about access, sharing, joy, maybe even devotion (in the case of sports or tech brands for example). Brand platforms that inspire loyalty are built around ideas that people find intrinsically attractive and that they want to deliberately interact with.

Convenience is about speed, predictability and ease. Most consumers buy convenience brands to achieve something quickly and well. That doesn’t necessarily make those consumers loyal. In fact, in some cases, it may talk more to the absence of viable options than an irrational decision to stay with a brand because it just feels ‘right’. That said, I don’t believe enough brands, especially in the retail space, pack enough convenience into what they’re about to make them noticeably competitive. They’re too focused on the ease of the transaction at the expense of the payback.

The value of a convenience brand doesn’t necessarily lie in what you get directly, but rather in what buyers don’t have to keep doing or what they get to do with the time they would otherwise have spent inconveniently.

When you think about the behaviors you want from your customers, what are you looking to lock in – a philosophy or a daily habit? Do you want your brand to be one people share or one they reach for without thinking twice?

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Loyalty And Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

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

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