Archive for the 'B2B' Category
Celebrity endorsement: The road to fame or the road to shame?
Sometimes celebrity partnerships work out very well. And sometimes they can be a disaster.
For example, In 2004 Glaceau VitaminWater recruited the rapper 50 Cent to help promote the brand. He created his own VitaminWater flavor and sales of the brand skyrocketed among young consumers. Nike’s relationship with Michael Jordan is the stuff of legend. And Priceline has done well with William Shatner for over a decade; and lately Dr. Dre is using his own brand to help promote HP’s Envy notebooks. These partnerships have worked out very well.
Of course, that’s not always the case. Tiger Woods’ personal issues became a fiasco for several brands – while allegations of drug use by Kate Moss led to Chanel, Burberry and H&M terminating their relationship with the model.
Do the benefits of working with celebrities outweigh the risks? Can a troubled celebrity seriously damage a brand that is being endorsed by them? What can brands do to protect themselves from negative publicity generated by celebrities associated with the brand? What’s the best way to structure such relationships? Which brands have done this well? When do brands drop the relationship and how?
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please post your comments!!!
3 commentsIncorporating Consumer Branding Models into B2B Brand Marketing
The latest Silicon Valley Brand Forum was hosted by Symantec at their beautiful Executive Briefing Center in Mountain View. The event addressed questions such as: Should Silicon Valley companies try to adopt the techniques used by consumer brands? What can tech marketers learn from companies like P&G and RJ Reynolds to make our own brand management more effective? What strategies are transferable and which aren’t?
Here’s a summary of the event’s highlights:
The Silicon Valley Brand Forum
The Silicon Valley Brand Forum was formed by Kevin Heney, who welcomed the participants and reminded the audience that the SVBF was established 10 years ago – at a time when tech companies believed that all they needed was technology. Tech brands have learned that technology innovation alone is not enough in today’s world, and now branding has become essential to create differentiation and to get traction.
Brands can use extensions and create verbs to build brands.
John Maver, from Maver Inc. is a former P&G veteran and Tide Brand Manager. He opened his presentation by shocking the crowd by saying that many B2B CEOs do not believe in “branding”. According to John, B2B CEOs believe that branding holds value only in B2C companies. According to John, B2B CEOs believe that the sales person is the brand…and all they need to sell is a set of data sheets.
John suggests that the brand is way more than sharing data sheets. John thinks that there must be an emotional experience with the product…and here are a few ways he said this can be achieved:
Extend the life cycle: Find a different use for the product
Create line extensions: “to go” version, liquid form, powder.
Establish a “persona”: Name/brand is recognized as objects (TiVO)
Become a verb: “I’m going to google it.”
Borrow some equity: Join forces with complimentary brands
Inventing a new identity that spans three brands.
Lisa Dardis Harrup, Symantec’s Director of Brand Strategy, introduced the new Symantec brand identity. The new design incorporates all 3 of Symantec’s brands: Norton, Veritas/Verisign, and Symantec. These three brands are brought together with a “circle check” symbol, representing both security and trust. This project was implemented from beginning to end in under a year’s time. Challenges include selling it internally, overcoming silos, and establishing the end result as a signet recognized and respected. Before the launch, intensive testing was done, and the new brand was very well received both internally and externally.
Panel Discussion
Greg Sieck, a 25 year veteran branding and marketing expert led the panel discussion part of the event. The panel members were:
Larry Vincent, Strategic Leader from Siegel + Gale
Martin Olivero, Senior Director of Brand and Design at Symantec
Allen Olivo, who has served as a Senior VP at various tech companies.
Overall, the panelists agreed that the key to a successful relationship with customers lies in fulfilling customers expectations with the brand. Dell was mentioned as example of a brand that has lost its “core”. Faulty motherboards, SEC investigations and mismanagement have damaged trust in Dells brand.
The panelists suggested that brands should find out what their customers think of them, and initiate an open dialog. This feedback is essential to building a brand. Think more about creating Customer Delight than simply selling products.
This shift in conversation allows the relationship to be built on what a brand does and why it matters: Establish a value system and make sure that your company and/or brand does not lose it’s way. Find out what is more important for your organization: Is it the engineering or the customer point of view?
In B2B business there are often long sales cycles which make it tough to adjust to short term problems – Build a plan to make it happen – optimize you budget & build on successful areas. If your organization is flexible and tells a story it will be much more prominent in the market place – a story travels.
Making sure that the Brand Strategy and Brand Promise permeate the whole organization is crucial in order to creating the collective awareness needed to succeed.
1 commentMarty Neumeier at Brand ManageCamp 2010.
Brand ManageCamp 2010 is an intensive two-day conference that features the most engaging and dynamic speakers in branding. This year, Marty Neumeier, Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency has been selected along with twelve peers to speak at this renowned event in Las Vegas, September 21-22.
Created by experienced branders over eight years ago, the Brand ManageCamp marketing conference has become a place to generate new ideas today’s brands need in order to survive. Industry mavericks, best-selling authors, world-renowned experts – these leaders in innovative brand thinking will cover a wide variety of topics to help broaden perspectives, generate fresh, actionable ideas, and become a stronger marketer and a more dynamic leader. Some topics will include: Determine where to spend your precious marketing dollars, Drive innovation and creativity through a discipline of inspiration, Get big results by thinking and acting small, and much more.
“Industry professionals attend this conference because they want fresh inspirations on how to take their brand to the next level,” said Marty Neumeier. “I’m both honored and excited to be able to share what I’ve learned at an event like this.”
Marty will be speaking on Wednesday, September 22 about “How to build a culture of nonstop innovation” from his latest book, The Designful Company. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovators, companies can no longer merely “unlock” wealth. Today they have to actively “create” wealth, or end up in the fossil layers of business history. As a result, brand-builders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in the next management revolution.
Find out more about Brand ManageCamp 2010 here.
No commentsWhat happens at CES…
What happens at CES…does not stay in Las Vegas.
This year’s show attracted more than 130,000 attendees. The city of Las Vegas was inundated with techno-geeks from all over the world, showing off their new products and drooling over the latest gadgets. Getting a cab was a nightmare…and every restaurant was booked.
But all of this tells us that the technology sector is healthy – and people’s appetite for tech products is still strong.
The convention floor featured venerable tech brands alongside newcomers that are giving established brands a run for their money.
The level of activity – from deal-making to entertainment were as hectic as ever, with each company vying for attention in a very crowded environment. Standing out at CES is no easy feat.
We’re putting together our annual CES Report, with photos of booths and other branding activities that we observed while cruising the show floor. So, stay tuned…and we’ll post it on our site over the next few days.
No commentsGoogle and Dell co-brand TV advertising
In a prior post, I made an observation about some Google banner ads I had seen in an online forum, and an assertion that it might be the beginning of the end to google’s reputed aversion to traditional advertising. Since that observation I have seen the new TV spot cobranded between Dell and Google. The Ad features the unique looking Google Search appliance as part of a server rack. The appliance is built by Dell, but branded by Google, the story and video can be found here.
Wonder what we’ll see next……
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