Building a powerful brand starts at the strategic level and continues with actions that support the brand promise. If you’re looking to maximize the value of your brand, it’s imperative that your brand is believable, defendable, and distinctive. By carefully blending the right mix of these three brand ingredients together, you can give you can give your company a competitive advantage in today’s crowded marketplace. Here’s what you need to know:
Making your brand believable
All branding strategies attempt to position a company in a way that’s advantageous to the organization. This typically involves a brand promise and corresponding attributes that define your branding strategy. To make consumers believe your brand promise, your company must simply deliver on it. Netflix did—and its brand value continued to soar. Blockbuster didn’t—and its brand value plummeted. The first step is making your brand promise believable. Walmart, for example, cannot position itself as a retailer to the rich and famous because its brand (along with its organizational strategy) does not currently support this position. In other words, customers simply would not believe this claim because Walmart did well on focusing its strategy as becoming as a low cost provider for its niche market. As you can see, making your brand believable is important for creating the right type of perceptions in the marketplace—and it’s a perquisite for making your brand defendable.
Defending your brand
Once you build a brand strategy that’s believable, you must defend the brand promise through action. If your company is attempting to build a brand around superior customer service, for example, your company must simply deliver on it. Companies like Bank of America and Direct TV are unable to defend claims of good customer service because callers are placed on hold for long period of times. In today’s competitive marketplace, consumers are getting more demanding every day—and companies that make claims based on internal standards (instead of customer standards), they risk reducing their brand value. That’s one of the many reasons why it’s imperative to build a brand around areas you can defend. If your company makes statements it cannot defend, your organization’s credibility suffers, thus making all future claims less believable.
Making your brand distinctive
While making your brand believable and defendable are certainly prerequisites for building a strong brand, making it unique is what’s needed to separate it from the competition. Netflix is a great example of a brand that made it itself distinctive by staying to true to its core business model and delivering on its brand promise. Apple continues to deliver on innovative products with clean design elements and added functionality to make its brand stand apart from the competition. To get the most out of your brand, you need to blend the three branding ingredients with strategic precision in order to make sure your brand recipe provides maximum value to the organization.
