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Building Brand
Identity, A Strategy for Success in a Hostile Marketplace.
Lynn Upshaw, with twenty-five years of experience in marketing, brings hands-on experience to the question of "branding." Mr. Upshaw is COO of Ketchum Advertising in San Francisco, and has worked with some of the strongest brands in the world. Upshaw cautions his readers that there is increasing ability for brands to be attacked. They are fragile at best. The best way to protect them, is to make them stronger and more resilient. Consider the attack on Nike's "swoosh" today, that is being linked with the staged sit-ins of college students protesting companies that use cheap third-world labor to produce products. No doubt Nike is taking a hit from the current media swarm. The question is whether Nike is sufficiently strong to withstand this onslaught. Upshaw would argue that a weak brand could be permanently damaged. It doesn't take much in today's world for a single person to wage war against a brand name. Jeremy Dorosin has continued his onslaught against Starbucks. Starting some 5 years ago with carefully placed ads in the Wall Street Journal, Dorosin is picking up his attack again with more Wall Street Journal ads. He also has a web page (www.starbucked.com) in which he invites people to describe their Starbucks' horror stories. He has collected thousands of them in one month's time. At some point, the actions of a single person can begin to weaken the foundations of a brand. Incidentally, if you are relatively new to the concept of branding, Upshaw's summary of the various terms that surround branding are succinctly summarized on a chart on page 14. That chart alone could well be worth the price ($27.95) of the entire book. He defines brand "soul," "character," "personality," "essence," and "character" among other concepts. Here is Upshaw's advice: • Make your brand fit "individual" needs. He cautions that what you think the customer wants be totally different from what the customer actually wants. Upshaw summarizes DDB Needham research in which they asked 200 of their employees to fill out a life-style questionnaire, and then compared these results to a survey of consumers. They released their survey findings in a publication entitled, "I Have Met the Customer & He Ain't Me." • Identify your brand assets and then work a plan to leverage these assets. These assets are probably uncomplicated and easily recognizable. It's amazing how many companies don't know what theirs are—in the public's eyes. • Position your brand in terms of its intangible place in the consumer's mind. Upshaw argues that too many companies act like sellers instead of buyers, they think too small, they get a position in the marketplace and then stop working, and they fall in love with their own work. All capital sins in Upshaw's mind. • Humanize your brand. Discover it's personality, and then humanize it. Upshaw calls this the human side of the identity. In other words, go for the emotional side of branding to get to the hearts of consumers. I just recently heard one of the founders of The Sports Club Company talk about branding of the corporation in a speech delivered to her managers in Food and Beverage. She made a strong and impassioned plea that everything they did when working with the customer, right down to the color of the stamps they use for their mailers, has an impact on the brand. She urged everyone present to focus on how their behaviors impacted the image of the company. I don't know if this Founder has read Upshaw's book, but she is speaking his language! If you are looking
for a good introductory book that will take you way past introductions,
I would strongly recommend Building Brand Identity.
Janelle Barlow, President
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