Papagalos Brand Managers Toolkit - The Brand Commandments

Vol 5: No 1

The Brand Commandments
The 7 cardinal laws of brand management

By Nicholas G. Papagalos
President, Papagalos Strategic Communications.

Here are the Brand Commandments, the 7 cardinal rules of brand development. Every brand manager should distribute this list to all the people who work on your brand team to remind them what their true role is in your organization.

A product is on the shelf. A brand lives in your head.
A brand is the summary of all experiences, emotions and perceptions we hold about a product or company. There are a lot of good products. But only a handful of great brands.

In the real world, actual physical differences between competing products are usually minor and temporary. The challenge of a brand manager is to create large perceived differences between our brand and others in the minds of consumers … and to connect with that consumer emotionally, inspiring passion.

Apple, BMW, and Starbucks make ho-hum products. But they make brilliant brands.

The brand is the basic building block of marketing.
Wait a minute. Isn't that too broad? What about distribution, pricing, sales, or even product engineering? It turns out that in the real world, the brand becomes the point of origin for all marketing planning.

Brand strategy defines the very essence of a product, makes it relevant to a customer's needs, and provides inspiration for engineering and future product developments. Brand strategy characterizes a product versus its competitive offerings, specifies target segments and ultimately determines the potential for penetration levels, sales and profit.

Differentiate and dominate.
In a crowded marketplace, you cannot be all things to all people. You must know your strengths, and seek out those for whom your strengths are important. Then you must dominate that turf. You must own that position. You must be a leader, creating mental distance between yourself and other alternatives in the minds of your target audiences.

The clearer and stronger the brand, the wider the moat that separates you from those who seek to get close to your customers.

Connect your brand emotionally to your customer.
Brand management is passion management. Brand management seeks to turn the generic into the personal by creating an emotional connection with your customer.

Low involvement brands are commodities. People don't care about them and switching is easy. Low price becomes the differentiator. Think Kia, Hundai or Ford Escort.

High involvement brands are emotional brands. People connect with them. People are proud of them. People say "That is my kind of brand," "I want to be identified with that," or "That is a cool brand." The brand's emotional halo becomes its strongest differentiator. Think Mercedes, Lexus, or Jaguar.

Make your brand emotional. No matter what your product category, whether consumer or business to business, brand management is the business of selling emotion.

Create a total brand experience, a 360° brand world across all touch points.
People form an image of a brand not just from a single TV ad or a package design, but from every direct and indirect contact they have with the brand. A conversation with the customer service help desk. A product review in a magazine. A comment from a supplier. Graphics on a delivery truck. Every contact you make with your public must be consistent and must support the brand identity positively.

This means you need to establish a uniform visual language for the brand, uniform messaging, uniform personality, uniform expectations and uniform outcomes.

You see this done well at trade show, where the better brands create a controlled visual, thematic, auditory and tactile environment within the confines of an exhibit booth. It becomes a microcosm brand world. Good brand managers extend that uniform experience out across the real world every day.

Build awareness.
A brand that has no awareness has no image. No brand preference. No loyalty. No word of mouth. Nothing. Invisible brands do not exist.

Incremental change is not change.
Brand managers are change agents. They must change minds within their organization. They must change the minds of consumers. They must change the minds of distributors, retailers and channel intermediaries. They must carry a vision and change reality to conform to that vision.

But life is noisy and small changes do not get noticed. Change, in order to be perceived as a change, must be dramatic. Timid thinkers do not make great brand managers.

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The Brand Managers Toolkit newsletter is published by Papagalos Strategic Communications, a brand communications firm offering advertising, public relations, web and design services. To contact Nicholas G. Papagalos, call 602.906.3210 or email at nicholas@papagalos.com.

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