Archive for the 'Steal this Idea' Category
Brand Illustrated
Brand Illustrated
A lighthearted look at the relationships among marketing roles
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
Here’s a fun set of slides from ZAG that you can use to kick off a meeting, illustrate a point, or spark a discussion. It simplifies (to the point of absurdity) the relationships among the disciplines of marketing, telemarketing, public relations, advertising, graphic design, and branding. What makes it more than a joke is the kernel of truth in each simplification.
What’s Your Brand Worth?
What’s Your Brand Worth?
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
Can you place a dollar value on your company’s brand? You’d be smart to try, and for some companies the estimates are astonishing. Coca-Cola has a brand worth nearly $70 billion, which accounts for a whopping 60% of its market capitalization. As brands become more measurable, companies are focusing on ways to increase their value. Use this tool to powerfully bring brand value to life, and initiate a deeper conversation in your company.
| 1 | PRICE PREMIUM. This approach measures how much you can charge for your products or services over and above what you could charge for their generic equivalents. The difference is the brand’s price premium, which correlates closely to brand value. |
| 2 | CUSTOMER PREFERENCE. If prices are very similar in a category, an alternate way to measure a brand’s value is to find out how likely customers are to buy your brand instead of a competing brand. The value of the brand, therefore, is the marginal value derived from the extra sales. |
| 3 | REPLACEMENT COST. How much would it cost to replace your brand by building it again from scratch? This method is particularly useful if you’re buying or selling a brand. The total market value of the brand would be roughly equivalent to the cost of replacing it. |
| 4 | STOCK PRICE. According to proponents of this method, the stock market will adjust the market capitalization of a company to reflect the future prospects of the brand. The formula that translates stock price into brand value approaches the complexity of rocket science, but it has the advantage of looking forward instead of backward. |
| 5 | FUTURE EARNINGS. This method tries to predict the future earnings attributable to brand assets by using an earnings multiplier. The multiplier is a guesstimate based on historical models or comparable industries. Though somewhat crystal-ballish, this method gets at the real-life issues of brand valuation. |
Your Brand Ecosystem
Your Brand Ecosystem
The gives and gets of a healthy brand community
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
Every brand is built by a community. Not just the community of people inside the company, but its partners, suppliers, investors, customers, non-customers, and even competitors. It’s a complete ecosystem in which there are gives and gets all around. Everyone has a role to play, and all the players are repaid for their efforts.
Use the downloadable PDF to illustrate the brand ecosystem for your team. It prescribes an orderly chain of relationships in which management nurtures employees, employees serve customers, customers attract investors, investors support management, management nurtures employees, and so on around the loop, creating a virtuous cycle of profitability.
The usual cause for a system breakdown is unlinking the chain or linking the chain in the wrong way. For example, since investors owe their gains to customers and not to management, their trying to extract gains directly from management only disrupts the system. Management soon begins paying more attention to investors and less attention to nurturing the employees who serve the customers who make the investors wealthy.
A simplistic view? Perhaps, but it’s a view that allowed Whole Foods to grow from one store in 1980 to 192 stores by 2007 to become one of America’s most sought-after brands. An investor who bought stock for $4 a share in 1996 could have sold it for $45 a share in 2005.
Who are the participants in your brand ecosystem? What can they give and what can they get in order to build a wealth-creating brand community? Start by making a list of all possible stakeholders, then describe how you’ll make each stakeholder successful and loyal to your brand. In a healthy ecosystem, their success will enable your success.
No commentsThe Good and Different Chart
A tool for evaluating customer feedback on brand concepts
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
What prevents most companies from zagging—creating new and different offerings—is the cloud of uncertainty that follows innovation. In an effort to remove the cloud, marketers often conduct focus groups, which, while helpful in some situations, are notably unhelpful for encouraging innovation. This is because radical differentiation doesn’t test well in focus groups. When you ask people what they want, they’ll invariably say they want more of the same, only with better features, a lower price, or both. This is not a recipe for radical differentiation, but for me-too products with minimal profit potential.
A better way to judge a new offering is to map customer feedback against a success pattern. When you draw a chart with two axes, one for “good” and one for “different”, you can see how your business concept stacks up against other successful zags. You can also begin to see why most companies are fooled by focus groups.
On the chart, the “good” axis can include any attributes that customers typically value: quality workmanship, good aesthetics, low price, high functionality, ease of use, speed, power, style, and so on. These are the qualities on which most offerings compete. The “different” axis is for any attributes that make an offering, well—different. These can include attributes that customers may characterize as surprising, weird, ugly, fresh, crazy, offbeat, novel, and so on.
As with other charts of this type, the best place to be is in the upper right corner—in this case, where good and different combine to create a successful zag. Classic examples are the Aeron chair, Citibank, Toyota Prius, Charles Schwab, and Cirque du Soleil. However, successful zags usually test poorly with consumers before they’re launched. They fare pretty well on the “good” axis, but then attract so many negative comments on the “different” axis that companies get nervous and reject them.
Not surprisingly, where companies find the most encouragement is in the upper left corner. Offerings here test extremely well, and the “good” comments are rarely undermined by negative comments such as “weird”, “ugly”, or “offbeat”. But the reason customers don’t make negative comments about offerings in this corner is that there’s nothing new or different to dislike. So while offerings in the upper left may test extremely well, there’s little chance that they’ll open up profitable new market space.
Offerings in the lower left corner, where “not very good” meets “not very different”, test fairly well with customers, since there’s little to dislike or misunderstand about them. While this can encourage companies to proceed, in the end these offerings fail because there’s either too little demand or too much competition.
Offerings in the lower right corner usually don’t get off the ground at all. They’re perceived from the start to be dogs—and guess what?—they are.
What makes the good/different chart tricky, though, is that some of the potential winners in the upper right corner look a lot like the losers in the bottom right corner. The line is often blurred, and the consequences for making a bad call can be extreme. It may take an experienced innovator to tell the difference—someone who can match the customer research to a previous pattern of success.
HERE ARE FIVE STEPS FOR USING THE GOOD/DIFFERENT CHART:
1. Prototype a wide range of concepts for any brand expression, whether it’s a product, service, experience, or communication.
2. Expose potential customers to your top 2-4 options in a realistic brand environment—not a testing lab.
3. Ask questions that probe what each offering “means” to the customer in relation to competing offerings.
4. Plot the answers on the good/different chart to see which options fit quadrant 2.
5. Repeat as necessary until you find your zag.
Download this PDF deck and get buy-in for your next zag.
No commentsThe Superpower of Trends
An excerpt from ZAG
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
You can certainly build a brand without harnessing a trend, but you won’t get the raw, youthful energy of a zag. When focus and differentiation are powered by a trend, the result is a charismatic brand that customers wouldn’t trade for love nor money. It’s the difference between paddling a surfboard and riding a wave.
What trends can you ride? The variety is virtually endless, since each industry, region, and subculture spawns its own trends. Sometimes a trend is a reaction to a previous trend that has lost its cachet, such as the way rock stars replaced crooners in the fifties. Other times it’s the result of a technological innovation, such as the manufactured molecule Kevlar igniting a revolution in textile manufacturing. Some trends, such as democracy, are still gaining strength after hundreds of years, while others, such as body piercing, may end up as a half page in the history of fashion.
Examples of current trend-riders are Samsung with high-design gadgets, Anthropologie with eclectic clothing, Progressive with self-service insurance, Dean & Deluca with gourmet groceries, Aveda with prestige eco-friendly cosmetics, Design Within Reach with neo-modernist furniture, and Volkswagen with its new “transparent” factory and car-recycling facility. When you look under the hood of a high-performance brand, you almost always find it’s powered by a trend.
Download a PDF that illustrates a few trends you might recognize. Steal it. Post it in your office. Instigate a conversation. Put it in your next presentation. Start a “trends” trend in your business.
No commentsDesign Matters Interview
Marty Neumeier’s Interview On Design Matters
Listen now or download the podcast.
Design Matters with Debbie Millman is an opinionated and provocative internet talk radio show. The show combines a stimulating point of view about graphic design, branding and cultural anthropology. In a business world dependent on change, design is one of the few differentiators left.
Explore the challenging and compelling canvas of today’s design world with Debbie Millman and her weekly guests live every Friday from 3-4pm est. www.sterlingbrands.com/DesignMatters.html
No commentsBrand Names That Zag
In ZAG I offer a list of brand names that I classify as either strong or weak. Who says they’re strong or weak? Well, I say. But rather than let my assertions just hang there unsupported, here’s a brief critique of each name, according to the criteria below:
A strong name is:
1. Differentiated. It should stand out from competitors’ names, as well as from other words in a sentence. This is sometimes called “speech-stream visibility”, the quality that lets the eye or the ear pick out the name as a proper (or capitalized) word instead of a common word.
2. Brief. Four syllables or less. More than four, and people start to abbreviate the name in ways that could be detrimental to the brand.
3. Appropriate. But not so descriptive as to sound generic. A common mistake is to choose a name that doubles as a descriptor, which will cause it to converge with other descriptive names. Actually, a strong brand name can be “blind”, meaning that it gives no clue as to its connection with the product, service, or company it represents, yet still “feels” appropriate.
4. Easy to spell. When you turn your name into a spelling contest, you introduce more confusion among customers, and make your brand difficult to access in databases that require correct spelling.
5. Satisfying to pronounce. A good name has “mouthfeel”, meaning that people like the way it sounds and are therefore more willing to use it.
6. Suitable for “brandplay.” The best names have creative “legs”—they readily lend themselves to great storytelling, graphics, PR, advertising, and other communications.
7. Legally defensible. The patent office wants to make sure that customers are not confused by sound-alike names or look-alike trademarks. A good name is one that keeps legal fees to a minimum.
