If you wonder what presents to give to your friends this Christmas then I've got an idea for you. This is a great gift for those who can't stop Googling themselves. This VanityRing is the ultimate vanity accessory for technorati: the number on its face shows how many links show up when someone Googles you. Sure this ring can get you a table on Friday's night in the hippest restuarant even without a reservation. Designed by Markus Kison (he received several international awards for his work “Roermond-Ecke-Schönhauser“ 2005), check out the product demonstration here. When the ring is inserted into its docking station, the ring is reloaded & updated to the objective popularity & importance measure of your personality. I am gesssing the next thing you'll get is a feature showing how many people you're linked to via Facebook or MySpace. Get one now.
“Password to Marketers' Meeting: Digital” as reported in a headline today by Suznee Vranica of WSJ. Wonder how many marketers have those secret passwords? In this crazy business environment, marketing is ready to be reinvented. No one is sure to who is taking the lead to drive this change. I have some ideas. I am sure you do too.
As all big players gather for an annual conference in Arizona yesterday and today, the topic that dominated in the seminars and dinner parties is easily predictable to be “How marketers adapt to survive/prosper in the new digital world?” and “What are the new tricks required to play this game?”
According to the study by BAH with American Marketers Association which was released during the conference yesterday, "digital marketing still lags the shift in consumer behavior" prompted by the Internet. The findings indicate that while "8 in 10 Americans are now online" and spend as much time on the Web as on TV, most marketers allocate only 5%-10% of their ad budgets to digital media. Its conclusions reinforced perceptions that many marketers are struggling to figure out digital media. Many are looking for help and are not getting them.
Less than 24% of those polled considered their companies "digitally savvy," citing several issues, including "lack of experience in new media" and "dearth of digital talent," the report said. Some industries are further behind than others: Nearly half of the consumer-goods companies that participated in the study spend less than 5% of their marketing budgets on digital, whereas technology, travel and financial services allocated more of their ad dollars to digital media.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is vocal about his desire to give Microsoft a bigger presence in advertising. "As I look out 4, 5, 6, 10 years from now, advertising will become 15, 20, 25% of Microsoft's business," he said recently during a speech in Paris. Ballmer was speaking today in Arizona and predicted that in 10 years everything you read you will read on a screen. “My parents will never get there” Ballmer asks, rhetorically. “You’re right. But your kids will get there in four years.” It’s very important that as soon as you assume that everything will be delivered digitally; all media, all advertising will have to take that into account. As for what Ballmer calls “personal authoring,” none of it will be separate from the consumption of produced media. All media will have interactivity, community. There will be so many new sources of media. The blogger of today, he predicts, will be, in a sense, just a footnote 5 to 10 years from now.
Other than threats from Microsoft, Google and Facebook, there are good reasons for big agencies to panic.In the list of ad agencies top 20 agencies in 1980, of those top 20 agencies, 17 are now part of the four major holding companies. The four largest holding companies represent close to 85% of the advertising in the US. and 50% of the advertising in the world. The agencies that they owned benefited from a good financial discipline, low cost of capital and market power as a result of scale. Sir Martin Sorrell did a fantastic job creating a global advertising powerhouse. But the nature of the business is changing so much that everyone needs to take a fresh look at what’s going to happen next 5-10 years. As a result of the disruptive change brought about by Web 2.0 and Media 2.0, agencies failed to step up and provide true strategic value to the mix, other than low-cost advertising and media buying factories. There is a lot of truth when Bruce Nassbuam of Business Week wrote in July headlined "Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?"
The next question is how are clients going to fill that vacuum? If they’re not getting strategy and they’re not getting innovation from their ad agencies or the holding companies, where do they go for help? I’ve heard from senior agency executives “We should be doing it,” but they’re generally not doing it, but many are honest to admit they don’t understand it. Ad agencies, direct marketing firms, CRM agencies are all doing a little here and there, but the structural problem is still –if you go to an ad agency, you’re going an ad and a slogan. You’re not going to get a full picture of what is going on with all these Web 2.0 or a strategy (marketing) to drive all marketing activities. Or you’re not going to get an Enterprise Level Digital Roadmap that fully aligns with your brand and marketing goals.
So there are 4 ways that the strategy is going to be developed for a client. One is that ad agencies quickly step up to the role and start delivering this for their clients (impossible). Two, and what’s probably most prominent right now, is the clients are doing these themselves with some consulting boutiques or smart individuals. The third way is outside management consultants are now coming into the business and help picked other agencies to execute the advertising and other tactical activities (happening). The challenge is many traditional strategy firms do not understand the digital space as well as the “experiential” elements of the strategy. There is also a lack of contextual understand of brands due to their strong emphasis in analytical thinking. The fourth way is to use interactive agencies which deeply understand the web culture and how technology works (some success). They lack the rigor of strategy firm and most of them carry too much website legacies. Most of these firms are 10-12 years old and they have created their own legacies.
The problem with the clients doing it is that the clients are as siloed as the agencies are. Within many of these larger organizations, there’s a problem of strategy ownership and coordination. It’s an orchestra of a lot of instruments all playing their own tune without having a conductor who knows what each instrument can add to a symphony and then develop a strategic plan to create a very successful outcome.
What about the future hold for advertising agencies? Well, let me share with you a few slides from my power point on the future of ad agencies (sorry cannot share the whole deck due to business confidentiality reasons). Here is some of the thinking and what I think will be the key trends that further push marketing to the edge (I wrote and posted this in June):
- Clients are questioning the current and future relevance of traditional media & ad agencies. Will large ad agencies ever are able to evolve “fast” enough to meet the needs of this fast changing technology-driven and network-enabled world of marketing? (A study by Sapient, “52% of CMO’s believe that traditional, large advertising agencies are ill-suited to meet online marketing needs.)
- The first generation of interactive shops will step up to help but have a vacuum on the upstream strategy. They are generally more nimble when it comes to experimentation but need to rebuild a strong strategy practice which is another challenge on its own.
- Holding companies will gradually apply pressure for agencies to downsize and re-invest their profits to buy interactive shops. The challenge is there is nothing left to buy. They would not attempt to retrain their agencies people as it costs too much and takes too long.
- Rather than waste money re-training traditional human capital and resources, one might predict lay-offs and downsizing. While holding companies “trim the fat” from decreasingly relevant non-digital media and account management groups, expect to see more digital specialty shop acquisitions. The common thinking is “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” when it comes to ad agencies adapting to new media and change.
What are the new tricks (I first presented this in Jan this year)? Tell me if you think ad agencies can do this in the near future.
- Virtual Corporate Personality - For years, large corporations have been trying to act as big corporations and becoming more and more “faceless”. The need for organization to have a “humanized” face (or interface) and touch is becoming important. This is not just about executives’ blogging, it is about putting a face and brings this face into the virtual world. I have been thinking a lot of about this and I have some interesting ideas.
- Private Search Network - The personal media revolution results in exponential increase in the amount of consumer generated content.This leads users to search beyond the algorithm for new ways of searching what they need beyond just text and images. A method for this is collaborated social search, where people are sorting content on the web, creating their own groupings and sharing that with others. As a result of that you get Private Search Network which you need to be a member or be invited to get access. Marketers may have to pay to get access to these groups.
- Widget Everywhere Marketing - Widgets will becoming a new marketing tool as it is an effective way to add value and be able to link it to some marketing messages or simply create a service. As more and more new technologies will allow open participation for anyone who wants to create a widget. (Facebook is taking that approach and many will do the same)
- Automated Tagging – One day almost everything will be tagged and tagging will become more sophisticated. It will extend into products and services and even customer testimonials. Or even product origins or usage etc. The task of tagging will be automated and that will create a new level of challenge and opportunities for any search engine.
- Social Media Optimization - SMO is slowly evolving into a movement in the online world.Primarily being driven initially by those search marketing folks, I think SMO will continue to get broader use from marketers interested in building traffic as well as buzz. Optimization and measurement will come hand-in-hand.
Anton Levy, managing director of General Atlantic LLC's media and consumer practice, believes that digital marketing is still a "high-growth category" compared with marketing on traditional media, "I think a couple of things. One is the secular trends in the overall marketing-services marketplace are particularly attractive for growth investors like ourselves...You have got this massive shift that you are seeing where all consumable media is trending towards digital environments and the huge ad dollars that are going to follow that audience. That large secular trend is creating a lot of different things. It's creating new business models, current companies are trying to adjust their existing business models and a massive amount of people and talent are being attracted to the space. That's why his firm invested (rumored to be) $200mm in buying AKQA (2X revenue). They put the money into where the mouth is.
This has been one busy week and I am back with week six of our Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass. We are continuing on the second part of brand strategy development framework which focuses on brand identity, brand images and brand delivery. The delivery one is probably the most important and interesting aspect.
Two of the key drivers to building brand strength are creating a distinct brand identity and developing a unique brand personality and their associated images. Unfortunately, semantics quite often gets in the way of understanding how these two factors can influence brand strategy. Brand identity, for example, is often used in a limited, graphic-centric manner or used interchangeably with brand image. All too often, identity is seen as just the graphics, logos, colors, and symbols that generally make up corporate identity. Those elements are the appearance (which is very important) but not the substance of a brand, just as the clothes you wear are an important, even distinguishing, part of your identity, but not the substance of who you are as a person. An obsession with image tends to attach greater importance to appearance than to inner reality. But brand identity is a richer, more substantial concept to embrace. The two concepts are quite different. There’s also a simple way to sum up and understand the essence of the two terms: image is how the marketplace perceives you; identity is who you really are. We recommend that companies focus on building brand identity as the driving brand-strategy component. Brand image is not to be diminished at all.It is, after all is said and done, how a company is perceived. But don’t make the mistake of thinking your brand image is your identity. The challenge for brand strategists and champions is to align image and identity. That happens—and can only happen—by careful, proactive management of your brand identity components.
The next big goal is the translation of the Brand Promise into Customer Experience Strategy for brand delivery. It is easy to make the mistake of developing a grandiose brand promise that one cannot deliver. Although you must combine vision with realism, one should not take weakness in any particular dimension as an excuse to do nothing. No company gets it right all the time. The customer experience strategy is used to align the brand promise to customer expectations. It describes the service characteristics objectively. It is important to depict these service characteristics so that employees, customers and managers alike know what the service is, can see their role in its delivery. (One of my business partners Scott Friedmann is a big believer of this, he is trained in service managment at Cornell grad school and believes the crossover of tradtional service deisgn principles and software as services can spark unlimited innovation). Services are delivered through integrated systems consisting of three basic elements. First are the steps, tasks and activities necessary to render the service; in other words, the service process. Second are the means by which the tasks are executed, typically some combination of people, technologies and products. Third is the evidence of the experience and how customer relates to the experiences. All service systems can be visualized by understanding these elements and their interrelationships. This is where things break down.The people who create the brand are not the people who develop the brand. The people who design services and operation standards are not connected to those who develop the brand. The people who design the interfaces are not connected to those who create the ads. Sure we've all seen that.
The customer experience strategy gets complicated these days. The deployment of machine-dominant (automation) interfaces on the front lines drastically improves business economics, but creates a new set of challenges. People are good at conveying empathy and handling exceptions but are challenging to manage and costly to deploy and maintaining consistency, especially in scaleable businesses. In effect, the front office needs computers to compensate for people's shortcomings and people to compensate for comouter' shortcomings. Today businesses are using a hybrid approach. Then comes Web 2.0 and brings a whole new element of disruption. So the interfaces, the communities, the content and the connectivity all becoming part of the band and brand experience.
But that doesn’t stop here, with the success of Starbucks and many are experimenting with the launching of hundreds of Brand Spaces, all those large flat-screen TVs, WiFi and comfy lounge chairs, and are finding ther ways into banks and clinics etc. These are the most tangible physical manifestation of any brand. Here are some interesting examples: from launderettes turned ‘wasch.salon.lounge’, like German Clenaucum, to the boom in private clubs in London or NYC. Even hotel chains such as Hyatt (Hyatt Place) and Sheraton (Sheraton/Yahoo) are waking up to the fact that their long ignored and depressing lobbies could be converted into brand spaces. Others include LG Washbar (Paris, pictuer below) ING Direct (picture above), Nokia (picture below), Apple and Nintendo. Expect this is become the latest experimental front for brand experience innovation.
I got quite a few emails repsonding to my yesterday's post and so I decided to share the first part of the full presentation here. I hope you'll enjoy it. Many of the ideas were as a result of my conversations with thought leaders both academics and industry leaders over the last six months and they definitely get it. But most big ad agencies folks I've talked to were so behind the curve that you won't believe it. Bruce Nassbuam from Business Week wrote a piece in July headlined "Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?", and that is a really good question to ask if you were a client.
Nassbuam wrote: "I've been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that--with some exceptions--they are mostly clueless. Three years ago they had a traditional knowledge about consumers but didn't know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology. Today, most of them don't know about consumers and don't know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology either. Mainstream ad agencies have one refrain--one message to their corporate clients--do social networking, do social networking, do social networking."
Earlier this year I was at the MIT Media in Transition conference, Dr. Thomas Pettitt (University of Southern Denmark )spoke about Web.20 and the participatory cultures and how they signal the closing of what he calls “the Gutenberg parenthesis". (Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was a German goldsmoth and printer, who is credited with inveninting movable typeprinting in Europe and mechanical printingglobally). Pettitt's idea is that we are just emerging out of a period dominated by print in general and the printed monograph (book and magazines). This process, lasting five hundred years, disrupted the idea of what a work is and who owns it. In fact, knowledge creation now recalls cultural norms that prevailed before the advent of printed texts pre-Gutenberg 1440. In oral and folk culture of the Middle ages, practices such as adaptation, appropriation and recombining – what our modern hip-hop culture calls “sampling” – were not only accepted but encouraged. The printing press introduced a new order in knowledge-creation in which individual printed works were held to be unique, and an author’s ownership sacred. How does that compare to the Media 2.0 movement?
Pettitt said "...[the Gutenberg parenthesis] is a divide which occurs when cultures change from a primarily oral or hand-copied tradition to one of reliable, consistent mechanical reproduction. Once this happened, a privileged reified place was given to the concept of the complete original text “as the author intended” - rather than seeing it as an interpreted work. Prior to this transition, works evolved and changed over time, and the performative aspect was more important than the accuracy."
I wrote about Media 2.0 a few weeks ago and I want to write more on this subject. I have been meeting with a lot of senior executives and clients these days and when I ask people what is Web 2.0, some are quick to list an inventory of tools (trust me, we have numerous debates on this among ourselves before we started idea couture and we were beating it to death on what is Web 2.0). I answered that these are only enablers, Web 2.0 or Media 2.0 is about emerging consumer/ cultural practices. Rather than saying Ajax or consumer generated content, we must start with understanding the underlying forces shaping the new media landscape which fuels Web 2.0. What does the new media landscape looks like? Media executives please read on.
Let’s start with better understanding the nature of our relationship with media is that “peer2peer networking”, “personalization” and “participatory” culture. Some think that Web 2.0 is sometimes misleading as that implies that the whole of the web has changed, the way a 2.0 service pack package replaces its 1.0 predecessor, but that's not really the case here. Some simply refers Web 2.0 to the Web's usability and the technologies behind it. This so-called new version is defined by blogs, social networking sites, wikis and RSS feeds etc. In contrast to Web 1.0, where users were largely restricted to simply reading web pages, Web 2.0 makes for interactions. Consider this metaphor: instead of just reading a book, the reader is helping to write it. Some will doodle on it and resell it. Some might tear off pages and bind them together as an art book.
Some executives will ask "what does this has to do with my company?
Many executives might be tempted to think that 2.0 won't affect their companies, other than a few angry customers posting their videos on YouTube . Indeed, Forrester Research, Inc. in March this year polled 119 CIOs at firms with 500 or more employees and found that a lack of current need stopped them from Web 2.0 adoption 47% of the time. A little more than half of these CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary. Think about it…. “A lack of current need?”Come on, what are these people thinking? They need a little imagination. This ad helps.
Media 2.0 is the number one driver of Web 2.0, it is about “innovation” that happens as a result of “convergence”.We are seeing a period of prolonged and profound technological change.New media are created, distributed, adopted, adapted, remixed, redistributed and absorbed into the culture at rapid pace. And that’s causing headache for all media executives. Everyone wants to know what’s next and what to do to prosper or survive this change.
Looking back at the last 200 years or so, the shift from orality to literacy, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media during the last 100 years represent important paradigm shifts in the way we communicated and expressed our ideas. Generally a burst of technological change was followed by a period of adjustment. So Print 1.0 to Print 2.0 etc. The explosion of new technologies at the end of the 19th century started a period of profound self-consciousness which the sociologist called modernism.
This modernism is impacting all institutions (marketers and media owners), it is constantly reshaping all modes of artistic expression (24/7 and global), and is sparkling a series of intellectual breakthroughs of which the full extent of the impact is still unknown. If anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated and social networks are evolving into new entities. It is breeding a new generation of subculturalist. Many of these are the new creative classes of our societies. For the last ten years, my job required me to analyze the impact of these trends on business. I’ll be honest; it has not been an easy one.
The very nature of the digital space is the ability for brands to speak with – not to, but with -- the micro communities and individuals themselves. Inthe digital world, marketing will be about finding them, excites them, engages them, empowers them and builds relationship with them.Advertising over the past two decades has provided more and more production spectacle, more and more belly laughs but less and less relevance and information.Because information is core of digital, digital marketing will soon enough fill the vacuum. That's Agency 2.0.
According to ZenithOptimedia $10.5 billion will be spent on display, including video, but $14 billion will be spent on search for 2007. Why? Simply because search is contextual, measurable and information rich. As digital advertising itself becomes more targeted and measurable, it will be best deployed as a sort of street signage -- posted on extremely vertical social networks or served based on user profiles -- directing the audience to where the real information is: brand or third-party websites, or embedded in highly utilitarian content. That’s why we will see over 75% of all ads will be digital in 2-3 years. Case in point, the $500 million mkt budget Microsoft allocated to the introduction of its new Vista OS, 30% went online. Imagine, if all marketers decided to follow Microsoft and spend 30% of their budgets on digital tomorrow? This would be Madison Avenue’s worst nightmare.
The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay.Thecultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection.It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue. This grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and is now around the world, I've met smart Indian, Brits, Dutch, French, Chinese, Korean entrepreneurs joining this march seeing the great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the '60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the '90s. This seduction is known to to the world as the Web 2.0.
The rapid diversification of cultural productioninspires a diversity of aesthetic (we have seen that in graphic design) responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities or users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective expression.Social networks then become storage of collective meanings.In a previous post, I wrote about the relentless commodification (and virtualization) of all areas of social life, and there is a lot of opportunities for brands to play a role. Unfortunately, not many marketers get this.
The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay.Thecultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection.It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue.
So what is the new role of brands here?
Every bite of image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media (fixed and portable) channels and remixed by different people. What’s going on now is consumers are exercising their newfound power thatempowers them to shape and control the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it.
The mass media era pushed amateur cultural production underground, in the form sub-cultures niche music and publications, though it were never totally destroyed by the rise of mass media. The web has brought this layer of amateur production back to the surface, providing an infrastructure where amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in a massive explosion of grassroots movement from expression to taste-making. So the "big media"--the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses--now represent the enemies of the Media 2.0 movement. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative "bourgeoisie," and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the "proletariat". Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Your thoughts please.
Should the brand vision be limited only to the business? Is there a different way of thinking about a brand vision? Patragonia was the first one that came to my mind, I know it's the same case for Bart. "Their environmentally based brand vision is very visible in everything they do." according to Bart. I am in full agreement. A brand vision needs to be connected deeply o the brand and what the company belivies. Should brand vision go beyond winning in market shares and create shareholder wealth? How about brand vision is something more.. how about changing the world? (Patagonia, Body Shop, Google) It is the essential dream that inspires people inside the company to keep striving even when the financial rewards are uncertain(i.e. stock options under the water). Brand vision need to survive even the loss of a beloved founder. It is not something to be framed on the wall but quietly whispered inside the heads of each employee, from brand managers to service personnel, it is embedded in the companies that are bound for greatness, the dream that only every employee believes is possible. And once the dream becomes reality, once you’ve achieved the vision, the brand vision is fully realized, then it's time to expand the vision or lose the troops to complacency. The human spirit loves (and needs) a good challenge – especially if it is directed at an attainable and meaningful ideal.
Brand vision provides the focus that ensures a stable, cohesive foundation through the rollercoaster ride of growth and industry cycles. Who’s job is this? As Flavio puts its, “…someone should be really taking care of the job of transforming vision into reality on the shelves. And not only on the manuals.” On this note about “manuals”, that reminds me of fast food and restaurants.
So here’s another one for us to think about. I remembered in 03, McDonald launched a brand new brand vision: "our customers' favorite place and way to eat," a theme they wanted their ad agencies to embrace. McDonald's marketing chief challenged 14 of its biggest agencies from 10 major world markets to brainstorm new ideas based on this brand vision. "This was a meeting about brand direction," according to Larry Light, McDonald's global marketing chief, "We're going to reinvest in local store marketing...we are going to be passionately focused on the customer." The question for you is ..What does this brand vision has to do with customers?
Welcome to week five of our Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass. We are now getting into the nuts and bolts of how to develop a brand strategy. I have divided that into two parts. And here’s part one.
Brand strategy development is a business process as much as a creative process. Branding is a business process—one that is planned, strategically-focused and integrated throughout the organization. Branding establishes the direction, leadership, clarity of purpose, inspiration and energy for a company's most important asset—itsbrand. Even the most potentially powerful strategy will fail if not executed effectively and consistently.
Here’s an important point: A brand strategy is not the consequences of planning, but the opposite: it’s the starting point. Here are the three basic requirements before you start:
1/ We need a clearly articulated business strategy / business plan with a view of the scale and scope of the business and how you want to compete.
2/ We must have good customer insights and understanding of evolving business economics. This requires you to look at evolving nature of different target segments and their existing and potential profitability.
3/ We need to first determine the role of branding as perceived by your corporation which will help shape many strategic brand decisions during the development process (Going back to the brand taxonomies introduced in week one).
The most common pitfall is many companies have no long term business strategy, at the very least, they should have an articulated description of the business such as how it creates value and how do they compete in their chosen industries. An effective strategy should act as abridge between the past and the future. It involves judgments and decisions about when to commit and be willing to bet, when to delay making a commitment, when to kill something that won’t work and when to change the rules of the game. Strategy is a complex system of acting and talking, a system that occasionally manifests itself in rational designs. Many brand strategy development efforts are unintentionally turned into corporate strategy discussions and as a result these efforts are blamed for not delivering any value. REMEMBER You cannot develop a meaningful brand strategy with the absence of a business strategy. Although you can still create a name, a logo, tag lines and a set of graphic elements for brand identification purposes to deal with short term marketing needs.
The key task here and the most challenging one is to craft a brand vision. Crafting a brand vision forces you to think through where you want the brand to be over the longer term to support the corporate strategy.It helps the management team achieve consensus on the longer term goals and the level of branding support that is required to achieve those goals. It also provides guidelines to determine what kind of research to put in place to monitor brand building progress and return-on-investment. Most of all it gives you a starting point and a mandate to start developing other elements to support the delivery of the brand promise.
A brand vision statement has no fixed length or style of composition.It should be relevant, and therefore specific to the business and the world within it operates. A brand vision statement is by definition long-term and transcends particular products, markets or even current executive leadership. A brand vision statement should be complimentary to the company’s vision statement and sometimes can be combined. (click on the slides above to see some examples) Ultimately, it is the interconnection between aspirations, values and the brand that is important, not what the statement is called.
Take a look at this example from Sony:
SONY. We Help Dreamers Dream. Sony is a company devoted to the CELEBRATION of life. We create things for every kind of IMAGINATION. Products that stimulate the SENSES and refresh the spirit. Ideas that always surprise and never disappoint. INNOVATIONS that are easy to love, and EFFORTLESS to use, things that are not essential, yet hard to live without.
What do you think of Sony’s brand promise? Are they delivering on this? Do you think it is too aspirational or it is realistic? Is there anyone out there that execute better than Sony on this? If this brand promise is to drive the future of the company, where Sony should be going next?
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