branding foundations

- Creating and managing brands is one of the most important and challenging activities in all of marketing. A brand can be an enormously valuable asset for your company if it's done properly. In fact, for some companies, brands are the single most valuable asset the company owns. I'm Drew Boyd, and I've been in the marketing profession for over 30 years. I teach branding to graduate students and I help companies improve their branding effectiveness.       

In this course, I'll share with you a step-by-step process for creating a brand, linking that brand to your company's core values, and launching the brand into the marketplace to get it working for you. Whether you have existing brands, or you're starting from scratch to create a new one, this course features the tools and frameworks needed to build brand equity. Strong, effective brands give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace and help you weather the storms of market competition and other challenges.       

Like marketing, branding is an exciting career field of its own, but it takes talent and dedication. Through the concepts I'll share with you in this course, you'll begin to develop the skills to create successful and authentic brands.

- Before you start, you should know that this is a fundamentals course on branding, including an end-to-end process and a set of tools to create a brand. To help you practice these tools, I'll use a case study. We'll focus on wrist watches, specifically one designed for families. You'll learn how to create a new brand in this category. The steps that you'll perform here will be the same you would use in any category. This course is not about graphic design, such as logos and packaging.       

Nor is it about advertising and other marketing communications tools, which can be a part of the branding process. Branding strategy is closely linked to marketing strategy, so it's essential you have a good understanding of marketing principles, especially segmentation, targeting, and positioning before doing this course. If you need to get up to speed on these aspects of marketing, I encourage you to check out the Marketing Fundamentals course here at Lynda.com.       

Now as tempting as it may be, developing a new brand isn't always the right thing to do in certain business situations. I'll give you some guidelines on when you should and should not consider branding. If you're learning about branding as part of your job within a company, it's really important that you understand your company's policies on branding. This includes identity standards and the use of trademarks and logos. Be sure you're familiar with these policies before you apply any of the concepts in this course.

- Are you a trustworthy person? Who says so? Okay, so you have friends and colleagues that say you're trustworthy, but why do these people say so? I'm willing to bet it's because you told them you were going to do something, and you did, over and over. You made, and kept, your promises. And because of that, you now have a brand reputation as someone people can count on. You may not have realized it, but you've understood the basics of branding all along.       

Simply put, a brand is a promise. It's a promise you make to consumers when they do business with you. Now that definition may surprise you because most people think of a brand as a logo or a product's name. It's neither. Let's do an experiment. I'm going to show you just two lines on the screen, and when you see them, I want you to say the first word that comes to mind. Ready? Now if you're like most people, these two curved lines reminded you of the golden arches of McDonald's.       

Even people who don't go to McDonald's will instantly associate this logo with the company. How can just two hand-drawn lines, that aren't even the right color, by the way, cause you to recall a global billion-dollar fast food chain? Let's take the experiment one more step. Close your eyes and think about a McDonald's restaurant. Can you just taste those marvelous french fries? Can you see a Big Mac and other food items? Do you sense what's going on inside the restaurant, with all the families, the parents playing with their kids, enjoying the time together? This is McDonald's brand promise, those emotional feelings and cravings that are triggered when you think about McDonald's.       

The brand logo and the brand name are not the brand itself. Rather, they are the visual cues to trigger that locus of emotions that the brand promises you. Let me share with you Four Keys to Building Successful Brands. First, your brand must be authentic, in that it's truly tied to who you are as a company, meaning your values and core purpose. If these aren't tightly linked, your promise is less believable. Your brand must be relevant, meaning that it promises something that's important to consumers, and that they perceive your brand delivering that promise better than the competition.       

You must keep your brand promise consistent across every touchpoint you have with your customers. Why do people see you as trustworthy? Because you're consistent. It's the same for brands. If you lack consistency, you won't build true loyalty. And finally, you and your organization must have a total commitment to keeping the brand promise. Your leadership and all of your employees, the ones who deliver your brand experience to consumers, must live the brand, support it, and continue to invest in it.       

If you're working to create a brand, start by thinking of the brand promise. What experience do you want your customers to have when they encounter your brand? As you think about the brands you currently work with, ask yourself, is the promise you're making the right one? Because once you make a promise, you gotta keep it.

- Why are brands important? Let's take a look at one of the best brands in the world, Coca Cola. The total market value of the company is around $175 billion, but one asset in particular makes up about 75 billion of that, and it's not the secret recipe. It's the brand. Brands are both a strategic as well as a financial asset. A strong brand creates customer loyalty, and that increases the value of your company, value which can grow if you continue to invest in the brand.       

There are many other benefits of brands. Brands allow you to set higher prices for your products and services. People associate higher quality to branded products, and they'll pay more than for a generic version, even when the two products are identical. Why? Because they trust the branded product more. Brands make and keep their promises. Once your product is branded, you typically earn a higher market share while lowering your cost of sales.       

Loyal customers don't need to be marketed to as much. With an established brand, it's easier to launch new products. When consumers see the brand's logo on a new product, they instantly associate the brand promise to that new product from day one. There are other benefits of brands than just the marketing advantages. For example, studies show that companies with great brands have lower employee turnover. Popular brands help companies recruit the most talented and passionate employees.       

Brands create status and esteem for your company in the minds of industry leaders, community leaders, the media, and financial markets like Wall Street. But despite all these benefits, it may not make sense for you to create a brand. There are certain business situations where it would be a waste of money. For example, in completely new markets where there are very few, if any, customers, you'd be smarter to invest your resources in growing awareness and interest in the category first.       

If you're already the market leader with most of the market share, creating a brand probably won't pay off. If you're in a highly fragmented industry, with hundreds or even thousands of small competitors, a brand may not be able to reach enough customers to make it worthwhile. If your business is such that you have only a handful of customers, perhaps even one customer like the government, branding won't do much. Take a look at your situation before you jump right into it.       

But if your business depends on creating loyal, repeat customers, a strong brand is the surest way to do it.

- The Branding Process has five steps. First, we have to define the brand, and everything that goes into it. A brand is a promise, so we have to clearly define what that promise is, and the core values behind it. Think of the values as the DNA of the brand. At this step, we also define how the brand links to your overall business, and other brands that you may have. Brands don't exist in isolation, so we have to give them a home, so to speak, somewhere in your portfolio.       

We also have to define what are called brand drivers. Brand drivers define how the core values will be manifested into the marketing mix or key business processes that support the brand. It's all the things associated with a brand that help you translate its value into actions. The next step of the branding process is to position the brand. Essentially, we are shaping how customers think about the brand. We identify who those customers are, what benefits they seek from your products and services, and what they currently believe about those products and services versus the competition.       

At this step, we're making the direct link between the product's value proposition and the brand promise. Once you define the brand promise and how it's positioned in the marketplace, you need to express the brand. Imagine the brand as a person. A person needs a name, a personality, and an identity in terms of what they look like. You do the same for brands. At this step, we create brand names and logos to help customers easily recognize the brand and remember the promise that it delivers.       

At this stage, it's time to build awareness of the brand and put it to work for you. We do that by communicating it and we do that both internally to our own organization, as well as externally to the market. Why internally? Your employees and distributors play a critical role in delivering the promise. They create and deliver products and services that deliver benefits that customers expect given the promise the brand has made. Keeping a brand strong means we have to communicate continuously and most importantly, consistently, to reinforce the promise in people's minds.       

If you don't, brands lose their value. And that leads us to the final step of the brand-building process: measure. You want to measure the value of the brand, or what we call brand equity. It's what you accrue when you develop, promote and deliver an authentic brand promise. As brand equity increases, company value increases. You also measure the brand's performance. Is it living up to the promise, and is it doing what you expected it to for your business? The brand-building process takes time and money, but if you do it right, you'll create strong, healthy brands that make your business more successful.

- Let's start building a brand. First, we have to identify the values of the brand. Remember that a brand is a promise, and underneath that promise must be a supporting set of values. They're like a foundation underneath a home, for example. If I make a promise to you, it's because I believe certain things are important. Otherwise I wouldn't make the promise. The same is true of brands that we create in marketing. Think of brand values as the key behaviors, or virtues of the brand, that need to be expressed consistently day in and day out.       

Taken together these values form the essence or theme of the brand. They're like a belief system of the brand. Determining the brand values starts by understanding the overall marketing strategy of your business. What kind of products and services do you offer? What are the key trends and new opportunities in your markets? Who are your customers? And, who are your competitors? Given that, what is your overall value proposition in the marketplace? You've got to have a solid marketing strategy before you can build a solid branding strategy.       

The two are closely linked. Here at lynda.com, check out the Marketing Fundamentals course to learn all about the marketing planning process. For this course, I'm going to use a hypothetical company that wants to create a brand for one of its new products. Let's assume we're in the watch business. We're coming out with a new line of smartwatches that integrate with other tech products like smartphones. Let's say that our strategy is to create a watch ideally suited for families.       

But not just families in general, we are targeting the parents, specifically. We wanna position our watch as the ideal watch for moms and dads. For now, let's call it The ParentWatch. Remember, that's the name of the brand, not necessarily the name of the product itself. Now, given our marketing strategy, we wanna create a brand that delivers this promise of being the ideal watch for parents. We start by identifying the key values that this new brand must have for this promise to have any meaning to it.       

So, I start by listing beliefs that people might have about parents. For example: Parents are special. Being a parent is an important role in the life of many moms and dads. Being a parent is hard work. Parents do everything they can to help their families. By creating this list, I'm looking for one, or a collection of some of these to shape and form the main theme of my new brand.       

I wanna create a sentence that conveys what the brand is all about. Let's try this. "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping parents be the very best they can be." I like this. It's aspirational, it's linked directly to my strategy, and it has a strong emotional appeal. We can always revise and fine-tune this later, but for now, let's stick with this as the core purpose of The ParentWatch brand.       

Both why it exists, and what it believes. Take a look at the brands you have now or the brand you wanna create. Ask yourself these questions: What is the belief system underneath those brands? Is it linked to your marketing strategy? Is it clear what this brand stands for now, and what it wants to be in the future? Building a strong foundation is the crucial first step to bring your brand to life.

- A brand's values form the foundation of the brand, but now on top of that foundation you need to build more about the definition of the brand. Think of it as expanding and stretching it out. You do that by creating brand drivers. Brand drivers are more detailed and descriptive aspects of the brand. They come in different forms. They could be attributes of the brand itself. They could be functional or emotional benefits that the brand delivers.       

They could be self-expressive benefits. In other words, what the customer is saying about themselves when they consume the brand. To create brand drivers, make an exhaustive list of phrases or sentences about the brand that stretch the brand's core purpose. Don't worry too much about the wording of these, and don't try to filter them. Later on you'll group them into similar categories, and that's where you'll edit them to get the most relevant brand drivers.       

Let's go back to our case study. A new brand for a smart watch that's ideal for moms and dads. We call it the ParentWatch. It's core value is, "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping parents be the very best they can be." Given that, what else might this new brand be about? Let's start with the list we had already. ParentWatch believes that parents are special. Being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life.       

Being a parent is hard work. Parents do everything they can to help their families. Let's create more by asking ourselves, what else goes into being a great parent? Let's write these from the parents' point of view. "ParentWatch helps me do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day." "It helps me protect my family." "It helps me perform my duties at home, work, and everywhere else." "It helps me stay connected to my kids." "It helps me teach my kids important life lessons." "It makes it fun to be a mom or dad." "Wearing ParentWatch tells the world that I care about my family above all else." Do you see what's going on here? We're creating a list of specific things that are important to our target audience.       

Then we take those and turn them into attributes of the brand itself or a benefit that the brand delivers. When you do this for your brand, you should have several dozen of these. Try to create as long a list as possible, then group into categories, such as functional benefits, the basic job that the product does. Emotional benefits, how a product makes a consumer feel. Economic benefits, how a product saves time and money.       

Self-expressive benefits, how a product makes us appear to others. Other types of benefits, such as benefits to society or to the environment. Now once they're grouped into categories, we look for ways to refine or combine them into a more coherent list. For example, these two drivers. "ParentWatch helps me do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day." And "ParentWatch helps me perform my duties at home, work, and everywhere else." These seem similar.       

Perhaps I could tighten these up into one phrase, such as, "ParentWatch helps me balance multiple tasks at work, home, and everywhere else." Brand drivers put more meaning into the brand. We call them drivers because these are the ideas that you use to express and communicate what your brand is all about.

- So what is it that you actually brand? Well, that's kind of a trick question. You don't brand things. Rather, you create a brand with its core promise and list of associations as we did in the last two videos. Then, you attach something to that brand promise, like a product or a company name. By attaching that product or company name to the brand, your customers associate it with the brand. Now, I know that may seem like a subtle point, but here's why I make it.       

Don't think of branding like taking an iron and burning it onto the side of a product, or its package, like the cowboys do when they brand livestock. That's the single most common mistake people make when doing branding. They think you can just slap a logo and a clever name on the side of a product, and voila, here's my new brand. To be a savvy branding professional, you want to avoid this mistake, and instead, follow a disciplined step-by-step process with the set of tools to create and manage your brands.       

That's what this course is all about. Now, once you've created the core brand promise, and list of associations, the correct question to ask is, "What kinds of things can I attach to the brand?" The answer may surprise you. We've already mentioned products. Inside this bottle is fizzy brown water with a syrupy, sweet taste, when we associate it with the Coca-Cola brand, the consumer memorizes this association for future reference.       

Every time a consumer drinks what's inside here, they instantly recall the brand promise, and subconsciously think to themselves, "Promise made, promise kept." That's why we sometimes call a brand a, "locus of emotions". It's all the emotions inside that are triggered by a brand that define it. A brand is a memory-jogger, a shortcut, so to speak. To make that memory-jogging a bit easier, we give the brand a certain look, and sometimes, a name.       

When you wrap that name and that look around the product, consumers have a much easier time making that connection. Maybe that's why it feels like we are branding a product like using a branding iron on livestock. It's not only products that can be branded, you might want to brand just one feature of that product. Hertz, the car rental company, brands its Gold club, an exclusive club for loyal customers. You could also brand a single ingredient within the product.       

My favorite example is when Intel created the now-iconic Intel Inside brand. Most people have no idea what the Intel thing actually did or how it worked. It didn't matter, as long as the computer they were about to buy had Intel Inside, they were satisfied. "Promise made, promise kept." If your product has a unique technology, especially if it's something you own, perhaps with patents, you could also associate it with a brand.       

Toyota for example, branded its Hybrid Synergy Drive, as part of its fleet of eco-friendly cars. Can you brand services? Absolutely, a service is the same as a product, in that they are both benefit delivery vehicles. Google, for example, offers a wide range of services that are branded. In fact, an entire company can be branded, take Starbucks for example. You could also create a string of brands.       

For example, Amazon Kindle delivers books using Whispernet technology. A branded company, a product, and technology, all in one. You may be thinking, "Hey wait a minute, "what if you take this too far?" That's a good question, if you're not careful, you may end up with what I call brand chaos, where you brand too many things in a way that might confuse the customer. To avoid that, take a look at your current brands, or brands you want to create.       

Then try to identify what you've actually branded, a product, a feature, and so on. Good brand builders then start to think about how these different brands exist together to deliver value for the customer.

- Brands need a home, a place to live. They not only need a place to live, but you also need to determine the relationship the brand has with other brands in that home. You do this by creating a brand architecture. Think of architecture the same as you would when building a house. The architect decides how many rooms you'll have, where they're situated in the overall structure of the home, and the role of each room. Bathroom, kitchen, and so on.       

To create a brand architecture we do the same thing. Now, there are many formats and models for this, but here's a general way to think about your options when building a brand architecture. First, you could create what's called "a House of Brands". Each brand stands on its own and has no relationship with the others. Consumers know the names of the brands, but they don't know the name of the company that owns them. In other words, they don't know the name of the house itself, your company, but just the rooms inside.       

The Procter and Gamble company is probably the best example of this. It owns many familiar brands that we use every day. Like Crest toothpaste, Tide laundry detergent, and Febreze. But most consumers won't know that P&G owns these brands, or that these brands are owned by the same company. At the other end of the spectrum is the Branded House. In this approach, the company is the brand. All products and services within that company are associated with that single company brand, but they themselves don't exist as a brand.       

When you think about a company like Caterpillar. Your mind conjures up images of tractors and heavy equipment, but you probably can't think of a product brand within Caterpillar. It's what we call a Master Brand because it governs over all the companies products and services. BMW is another great example. Now, in between these two architectures is a third choice called "a Blended House". Think of it as a mix of the two.       

A little bit of a Master Brand with a few individual brands connected to it. A good example is Marriott International, the hospitality company. It has a strong Master Brand, Marriott, along with 18 sub-brands like Courtyard and Residence Inn. It's a nice approach because consumers associate many good qualities with the Marriott name. But then, each hotel property has its own brand promise for specific market segments.       

When you combine these with the Master Brand, Courtyard by Marriott, consumers instantly understand that unique promise. Pretty cool. So, which approach is best? Well, it depends on your strategy. The Branded House approach is more cost-effective because you're spending money to build one single brand. But this limits where you can expand. It'd be strange if Caterpillar wanted to go into the food business, for example. A House of Brands is expensive, because you have to build each brand from scratch.       

But then, you have total freedom to go into any new market without affecting the other brands. P&G, for example, can expand into just about anything. Many companies use the blended approach to give themselves the best of both worlds. Building the brand architecture helps customers understand your brands the way you want them to, and that's a real advantage to building brand equity.

- Brands can take on a life of their own, almost to the point where they seem like a person. And just like us, they can have their own unique personality. Our final step in the defined stage of the brand-building process is to create this personality, or what we call a Brand Persona. Given the brand's promise, you'd give the brand a set of human-like characteristics that your customers would expect from someone who keeps this promise. Now, why does this matter? Well, your target audience will better understand your brand if they can associate it with, or think of it as a human being.       

Brands with a personality stand out more. We tend to like them more, and most importantly, we wanna maintain a relationship with it. In marketing that's a huge advantage because that relationship causes customers to be more loyal, and that's what valuable brands do. To create a Brand Persona, you have to create a list of personality traits that shape the overall personality of our brand. Now, various researchers in the field of marketing have studied brand personalities to find out what kinds of traits might be available to use.       

One of the most recognized in this field is Dr. Jennifer Aaker. In her classic research report titled "Dimensions of Brand Personality" she outlines a framework of personality traits that brands can take on. The five core dimensions are: Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Now, within each of these are more detailed traits.       

For example, under "sincerity" we would find down-to-earth, honest, genuine, and friendly. Now, these traits are further broken down into sub-traits. For example, under the trait "friendly" we would find the sub-traits of warm, happy, cheerful, and caring. Now, out of this long list of dozens of personality traits, our goal is to select a handful that create this unique Brand Persona.       

Let's go back to our case study The ParentWatch. Let's take a look at our core value. "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be." You also wanna look at your long list of brand drivers. Taken together, ask yourself: if ParentWatch was a person how would you describe its personality? I selected the following traits: Family oriented.       

Caring. Intelligent. Reliable. Strong. Wholesome. Spirited. And, of course, fun. Now, keep in mind that these are not intended to be the traits of an ideal super mom or dad. Rather, these are the traits of a brand that helps parents become the ideal super mom or dad. Do you see the difference? Your brand may have traits that are similar to your target audiences. What's most important is that the brand has traits consistent with someone who would make and keep its promise.       

That makes the brand more trusted and authentic. Speaking of authenticity and trust, will your customers believe these traits just because you picked them from a list? They will as long as you carefully selected them to define someone else besides the brand. That someone else is you, and perhaps your colleagues, the people who ultimately make and keep the promise. Authentic brands are those that reflect the characteristics of the people who deliver value to the marketplace.       

Now, that's great brand-building.

- Creating and defining your brand is only the first step of the brand-building process. At this point, the brand is still an empty vessel. Empty because you haven't made or kept any promises to customers. Remember that a brand is a promise kept over and over to a target audience to that point that they believe and trust it. Trust builds loyalty and that is your next step, to identify the specific customers that you want your brand to be relevant to.       

For that, we use a marketing technique called segmentation. Segmentation means dividing the market of potential customers into similar groupings. There are four way to do it. Demographic segmentation focuses on physical characteristics of customers, like gender, age, their height and weight, even hair color. It's a very useful way to segment, especially if your brand's promise delivers on something related to a customer characteristic.       

If you're marketing a shampoo for redheads, for example, then you'd wanna group your customers by hair color. Closely related to demographic segmentation is geographic. Use this approach when you wanna group people by where they live or where they work. It can also include things like where they go for certain activities or where they just hang out. If your brand promise is related to that location, this way of grouping customers makes the most sense.       

Next is behavioral segmentation. Here we focus on things that potential customers do or how they behave. It includes things like purchase behavior, lifestyles and things like how customers use a product. Once again, it's the right way to segment customers if your brand delivers something of value related to this behavior. For example, people who wanna drive fast are going to appreciate brands that promise speed.       

Finally is attitudinal segmentation. This is what goes on in the customer's head about the benefits they seek. Grouping customers by their needs or benefits they're looking for is extremely powerful because it gets right to the core of your brand's promise. For example, if you're building a new brand for an automobile, you'd wanna group customers around benefits such as fuel economy, luxury, eco-friendly or status.       

Selecting the right segmentation approach is critical because it helps you with the next two steps of the brand-building process: express and communicate.

- Branding is about making and keeping a promise over and over, to the point where consumers trust you, and they become loyal. What do you promise, and when do you promise it? You answer these questions by analyzing your potential customers. When people buy products and services, they're buying a collection of benefits. You can categorize these benefits into three types. Functional Benefits refer to a product's physical performance.       

For example, when buying a car, Functional Benefits include size of the engine, passenger seating, or how the car handles. Economic Benefits are related to saving money, or saving time. With a car, Economic Benefits would include the miles per gallon, annual maintenance costs, or the car's reliability. Finally are Emotional Benefits. These are related to the psychological feelings you get when using a product.       

For a car, it would include things like status, or self esteem. Customers buy things for a mix of these benefits, but some are more important than others. If you know what's most important to them, you can appeal to that need when deciding on your brand promise. You can also raise the sense of importance they place on another factor, and focus your brand on that instead. You also want to understand the steps customers take when buying something.       

That will help you shape the overall experience they have with your brand, and decide the best point to make the promise. Typically those steps are as follows. First is Need recognition phase. This is where customers realize that they want something. The next step is Information search. Once customers feel the need to have something, they start gathering information about solutions for that need. Once the customer gathers the information, they go to the next step, which is to Evaluate the alternatives.       

Customers make choices based on what features are most important, and which brand does the best job in delivering those features. It's critical that you communicate your brand's promise at this point. Eventually the customer will narrow their choices down to one brand, and go to the Purchase phase. Finally is the Post-purchase behavior phase. Once customers start using the product or service, they compare the results with their expectations.       

Did the brand deliver on the promise? How did the product make them feel when they used it? This phase is also critical because customers will form opinions about your brand, and share their experiences, good or bad, with other customers. Great brand builders know they have a role to play in each step of the customer-buying process. They know where these steps take place, when they take place, and who's involved. With these insights, you're ready to develop an effective brand experience.

- Perhaps the most central idea in all of marketing is that of positioning. A company's value proposition is the single-minded claim that it makes to change the customer's mind and cause them to do something. That something could be to buy a product or to try a product or to pay a certain price or to visit a website or just to think about your brand and its benefits in a certain way. How you position your product in the market will ultimately determine the overall promise you make to create your brand.       

Now, let's make a distinction here. In a marketing plan, you create a value proposition that is the central piece of your marketing strategy. So how does that relate to brand positioning? Are they the same? Well, not necessarily, but they're closely related. The brand promise is essentially your overall value proposition. It's a broad, definitive statement of the bundle of benefits to customers by the brand. It's a clear articulation of precisely what it is that gives the brand an edge over competitors.       

Think of brand positioning as the long term, strategic positioning. Your marketing strategy value proposition is more like a short term, tactical positioning. Let's do an example to see this connection. Using our case study of the ParentWatch, we know that our overall brand positioning is, "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be." Now by design, we've set that at a pretty high level.       

But what if you're about to launch a new product? Or perhaps just introduce a new feature on an existing product? For that, you need a more tactical, short term positioning. For example, let's assume our ParentWatch has a new feature that allows us to SMS people automatically. Moms or dads can use it to create reminders for their kids that come directly from them via text messaging. (laughs) I'm not sure kids would like it, but I bet parents would. So how do we position this new feature? For ideas on that, you go back to your brand drivers.       

Recall that brand drivers are more detailed and descriptive aspects of the brand. So let's look over our list created in Chapter 2. Now here is one that might work. "ParentWatch helps me stay connected to my kids." Nice. Our new SMS feature becomes a credible reason to believe this value proposition. And therein lies the connection between brand strategy and marketing strategy. Think of these value propositions designed around your brand drivers as RTBs, or reasons to believe, for the overall brand strategy.       

Promises made, promises kept. So, take a look at your brands. What features and benefits of your products and services are you emphasizing in your marketing strategy? Then look at your brand drivers to find the ones that connect best to those benefits. That helps your target audience believe the brand is doing its job well and can be trusted to do it in the future.

- At this point in the brand-building process you've defined the brand in terms of its values, drivers, and persona. You've positioned the brand in the market and linked it to your marketing strategy. Now you're ready to move into the next phase which is how you express the brand. To do that, you create a name, a visual look and feel for the brand, and you create a total customer experience for the target audience when they encounter the brand. In this video I'll review the important considerations you make when naming the brand.       

The name you select for your brand should do the following: Reflect the values and purpose of the brand. Create an association with the brand's persona. Be easy to say. Be unique and memorable. Now, before coming up with names you need to consider what it is that you're branding. A company? A product or a service? A feature within that product or service? Or perhaps a technology. How do all your brands fit together? In other words, what is your brand architecture, which we covered in chapter two.       

Let's do an example with our case study. For this example, I need to create a hypothetical company that I'll call the California Watch Company. It makes a variety of watches in these categories: Luxury high-end watches, sport watches for running, biking and so on, smartwatches for technology lovers, and family-lifestyle watches. My brand architecture is House of Brands, so these four categories of watches are branded independently of each other, and not connected with the main company name.       

Let's focus on our new line of family-lifestyle watches beginning with our first entry into the market, the ParentWatch. Helping moms and dads be the very best they can be. My product is a smartwatch that connects with the customer's smartphone, so it can do a lot of things. My strategy is to offer one model of watch but in different styles and colors. Customers can load different functions into the watch depending on the ages of their children. Apps for babies, toddlers, and so on.       

Pretty cool watch. Do you remember the Brand's Persona? One of the traits was "Intelligent". That seems to fit. So, given the tight connection between my brand and the product that delivers on the promise, I'd be smart to name my product the same as my brand in this case. That makes the most sense for my target audience. Once they understand my brand's promise, they'll associate that promise with the watch itself if I name it the same.       

Otherwise they might get confused. The name ParentWatch is connected to the values and purpose, is unique and easy to say, and it seems to fit my brand's personality. The name strikes me as strong, reliable, but at the same time fun. I like it. There are times, though, when it makes sense to come up with a name that is completely new with no literal meaning. The name Sony is a completely made up name.       

The name Apple also has no connections with the companies products and services. In that case, you have to select the name, then communicate the name and its associated values and purpose, so that people start to make the connection. It's usually harder and more expensive to do, but it can yield a powerful brand name that sticks in the minds of consumers. And that's an effective way to create and keep customers.

- The look and feel of the brand is what consumers see when they encounter it. It's like a visual identity system, a way for customers to instantly recognize when the brand is present. To create the visual identity of the brand you'll need the following elements, first you'll want some type of distinctive logo or symbol. A logo can take many forms, it can be an object that represents your brand. A good example is the Apple logo. It can be an abstract symbol, like the Nike swoosh, or it can be a word mark which is the words of your company or brand name set in a specific way.       

The Google logo is considered a word mark. To create a logo it's best to hire the services of a professional graphic designer. The designer will need to know the brand values, the core promise, the brand drivers, the persona, and of course the brand name. Taken together these elements will help the designer create a graphic look that matches what the brand stands for. Once the logo is created, you'll need to have your designer create different versions of it, we call these logo lockups.       

While your master logo should always be rendered consistently, you need variations of it for different placements and usage. For example, you may need color and black and white variations, or you may need versions for small spaces like a business card, or a large version for the side of a building. Your designer should also create a color palette for the brand. Some of these colors are used for the logo itself, but you should also have complementary colors that can be used along with the logo.       

These complementary colors might be used in advertising, or perhaps in product packaging, or even used for the product itself. Your designer should also help you select specific type faces for the brand, a distinctive font helps strengthen the identity of the brand. Along with the fonts, you should also have standard typographic treatments. Your typographic identity should include specific ways of handling key types of texts, such as headlines, or how you write URL addresses.       

Your brand identity should include a consistent style for images, all photos and images used with the brand logo should have a consistent look and feel. Image guidelines should also define when and how certain types of images are used. Will you use photography or illustrations or both? Will they be black and white or color? Nike for example, relies on large close up high contrast images to capture attention, and create a distinctive feel.       

Finally, you want to define a consistent tone for the way you say things. It's like creating a voice for the brand. This applies to everything from headlines in a print ad to the tone of a press release. Outline the specific language and words that can be used. For example, should the tone be formal or more conversational, that depends of course on your brands persona. Take a look at the brands you manage, and check to see that each of these elements are in sync with your overall brand essence.       

These elements must work together in harmony to create a winning brand identity.

- When your customers buy your products and services, they go through a distinct set of steps, sort of a process. We call it the customer experience or sometimes the brand experience, when it's related to a brand. Each step of the experience is called a touchpoint, where you can, figuratively speaking, touch the customer and reinforce the brand promise. This forms a tighter more loyal relationship with the customer. The first step is to define the touchpoints for the typical customer.       

First is need recognition. This is where the customers realize they want something. The next step is information search, where they gather information from a wide variety of sources. This is a critical step, because this is when a customer is most receptive to your brand message. Once a customer gathers information, they evaluate the alternatives, based on what features are most important and which brand does the best job in delivering those features. Eventually, they go to the purchase phase, where they actually buy the product.       

Now you might think that the buying process ends here, with the final purchase, but there's one last step called the post-purchase behavior phase. Once customers start using the product, they compare the results with their expectations. Did the product work as expected? How did the product make them feel when they used it? What do they say to others about their experience? One we define the touchpoints, we go back to our list of brand drivers. Our goal is to select a driver from the list that we can emphasize at each touchpoint.       

We have to decide where the touchpoint happens, when it happens, and what to say to the customer that relates to that brand driver. Now it's a bit tricky, but it's a key ingredient of successful brand building. Let's try it with our case study, the ParentWatch. For the need-recognition step, I want to use the driver, "Being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life." I'll use this driver in my advertising, because of the strong emotional message within it.       

For information search and evaluate the alternatives, I'm going to emphasize all the benefits of the ParentWatch, like protecting my family, stay connected to my kids, and so on. I'll do this on the brand's website. When customers buy the product, I'll emphasize that "Parents are special." We'll create a store environment and a shopping experience that makes moms and dads feel great about being a parent. And finally, in the post-purchase phase, I'll drive home the message, "Wearing ParentWatch tells the world that I care about my family above all else." Perhaps I'll do this with text messages directly to the ParentWatch or perhaps follow up with direct mail.       

I want to reinforce that the customer made a smart choice. Great marketers know they have a role to play in each step of the customer experience. They know where these steps take place, when they take place, and who's involved. With these insights, you're ready to communicate the brand to the marketplace.

- Branding is all about making and keeping a promise. As a brand builder you're the one who makes the promise, but who keeps it? Is it the product, service, well if so then who is it that stands behind your products and services? It's your employees and partners, like distributors who keep the promise. Brand delivery boils down to people, and if they don't understand the brand they're likely to struggle trying to keep that promise.       

Employees have to believe in the brand, and live it every time they come in contact with a customer. In this video let me share with you some ways to effectively communicate your brand internally. There are two parts to this, first you have to train your team, and then you need to consistently reinforce it. Otherwise, people stop believing that the brand is important. When you develop training programs about the brand you should consider developing different programs for different types of employees.       

Front line employees for example, deal with customers every day, the training program for them will be much different than for people back at headquarters, including your senior executives. Ideally, every employee is trained, new ones and especially old ones. Existing employees might have to change their mindset a lot to embrace and believe in the brand. Take an airline, next time you fly watch the airline's employees, listen to what they say, imagine how training on the brand would be different for a pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, as well as reservation agents who sell tickets.       

Every job and every contact with customers is different, so the training should match that. What do you train? Employees need to know the brand promise, how it links to the company's values, the drivers customers will experience when they encounter the brand, the brand identity including look and feel, the name, and of course the persona. Most importantly, they need to know how they should think, feel and act.       

What words come out of their mouths? What actions do they take to deliver the promise? You have to help them make that bridge from the brand promise to their actions, or they won't be able to truly live the brand. Training is important, but it's not enough, you must reinforce it to keep the brand closely tied to the culture of the company. First of all, make sure the brand identity is visible throughout the company. Later I'll talk about how to create branded spaces like your company's front lobby as a way to reinforce the brand.       

Every time the employee walks through it, they're reminded of the brand. Most companies appoint a brand champion, and a team of brand ambassadors. These are the influential company employees who represent what the brand stands for. They can help others understand how their words and deeds link to the brand and its drivers. Speaking of employees, many companies focus on hiring the right people from the very start. Given the characteristics of the brand, what characteristics of potential employees would best align with the brand? Your human resources partner may be able to help you with that.       

Perhaps the best way to reinforce the brand internally is to do a great job delivering on the promise externally. When employees see that the company consistently lives up to its promises even in tough times, it strengthens their resolve and commitment to the brand. Take a look at how your company communicates internally to its employees. Good brand builders look for these everyday opportunities to reinforce the brand.

- One of the most important steps in the brand-building process is to create a Brand Book. Just as the name implies, the Brand Book is the complete story of the brand and all the elements that go into it. It establishes strict guidelines on every aspect of how a company's brand will be managed. This affects everything, from how the logo can be used, the look of your website, how social media is used, advertising, product design, and so on. A basic Brand Book should include: An overview of brand values, the core promise, the drivers, and persona.       

Logo specifications and examples of how to use it. Logo lockups for different uses. The color palette. Font styles. Typography. Image and photography guidelines. And, writing style and the tone of voice. Now, a good Brand Book is a reference document to help employees and your marketing agencies execute the brand properly. That's why it's sometimes called "a style guide".       

You might also include things like: Brochure guidelines. Specifications for signage and outdoor advertising. Design layouts for prints and web-based projects. Your store design. Social media guidelines. Even your letterhead and business card design. Now, be sure to include visual or written examples of each of these. The more detailed information you include in the Brand Book, the more helpful it'll be to make sure the brand is managed consistently.       

While these guidelines are important, a great Brand Book goes even further. It could be used to train your entire team. It could help employees understand the brand's essence. It could be created in a way that inspires people to believe in the brand. It might include stories about the brand, and how it's served its customers. It could outline brand goals, and how it links to the company's overall strategy. A Brand Book can help employees know what it means to live the brand day in and day out.       

Great branding is about making and keeping promises in a consistent way. A Brand Book is an essential tool to help you do just that.

- A very important component of branding is the product or service that you put in the marketplace. They need to do their jobs in delivering the benefits that were promised. Now, keep in mind, they're not the only things that have to live up to the brand's promise. Every touchpoint in the customer experience can potentially play a role. But it's usually the products or services that are the focal point of your branding effort. That means, you must teach the people who create your products and services about the brand.       

Take a look at your current products. You may notice perhaps the most common problem when getting into brand-building. The benefits that your products deliver currently are not the same ones promised by the brand. Oops. (laughs) In other words, there's a gap between product performance and the brand. And it can happen in two ways: Your product may be underfeatured, or it may be overfeatured. Here's how to find out. Make a list of all the key features on your product or service.       

Then, for each feature, write down the main benefit that the feature delivers. Remember that benefits come in different forms: Functional, economic, emotional, self-expressive, and so on. Then, with that list of benefits take out your long list of brand drivers, for each benefit try to connect it with at least one of the drivers. Ask yourself, does the benefit link to or somehow support any one of the brand drivers? Let's do a quick example with our case study, "The ParentWatch." Let's imagine the watch has an app that automatically sends SMS text messages to kids to remind them to do their homework.       

I can scan down the list of our brand drivers, and yes, I see two on the list that seem to connect with this feature. "The ParentWatch helps me stay connected to my kids." And the other driver that fits it is this: "Parents do everything they can to help their families." Now, if you find that many of your features and benefits do not connect to your brand drivers, you have a problem. Your product is overfeatured with unrelated benefits, and this will confuse your customers.       

In this case you need to go back to your development team, and start creating a new version of the product that closes this gap. You may find that the features and benefits on the product only cover a small number of drivers. Once again, you have a gap that needs to be closed, and you do that with new product development. Take a look at your product development pipeline and do the same analysis. You may be able to collaborate with your development team to modify these products now, to be more aligned with the brand promise.       

If so, those products will do a better job at keeping the promise that the brand has made. Now, don't forget that when I say the word "product" the same applies to any service that you offer in the marketplace. A well-developed brand informs how your products and services will perform, what they look like, and how they deliver an experience consistent with the brand's essence.

- To make a promise, you have to communicate it. The key is to select those communication channels that are most consistent with the essence of the brand, its authentic persona. A simple framework for this is answering the questions: who, what, why, where and how. First, you have to decide on why you want to communicate. Are you telling the market your overall strategic brand positioning, the core brand promise? Or are you building tactical awareness around some new feature or benefit of the product? If so, this type of campaign would link directly to your tactical marketing positioning.       

During the positioning step of the brand-building process, we answer the next question: who? That of course is your target audience. You identify the specific customers that you want your brand message to be relevant to. You group your customers using one of four Segmentation Approaches: Demographic, Geographic, Behavioral or Attitudinal. The one you use depends on what you're about to communicate. If it's a new feature, you may want to use behavioral segmentation.       

If it's about an emotional benefit of your brand, attitudinal is likely the best choice. Narrowing your target audience makes your communications campaign more efficient. Next is what you are communicating, and for that you need to refer to your long list of brand drivers. The brand drivers give ideas about the specific message you want to include in the communications. Pick the brand driver that is best suited for what you're announcing to the market and the target audience you've selected.       

Using brand drivers this way in all your communications reinforces the brand promise and it builds brand equity. Where you communicate depends on several factors. Remember the customer experience touchpoints and the steps of the buying process in Chapter 4? Select which step is most relevant to the brand driver and what you're announcing to the market. You may want to reach the target audience in their homes, places of work, during leisure time, or perhaps online.       

The entire customer experience gives you many options. And finally, is how you communicate. The media channel you select, depends on the target audience, how many of them you want to reach, the complexity of the message you're sending, and how frequently they need to hear the message. Marketers have a wide choice of traditional media, including television, radio, print advertising, outdoor billboards, and digital media, which includes social media, websites, and mobile channels.       

Each type of media has advantages and disadvantages. TV commercials, for example, can reach millions of people, but it's expensive. Billboards, on the other hand, are not that expensive, but they're limited in what they can achieve. It would be hard to explain how to use a complicated product in a billboard. Whichever channel you use, be sure to refer to your brand book to make sure all the design elements and tone of the communication are on brand.

- Social media is an essential part of any brand building effort, no matter what business you're in. Consumers expect a way to learn about your products and share their experiences with others online. Social media is a powerful way to communicate your value proposition and enhance your brand. The most valuable and respected brands in the world use digital channels for brand building. Cocoa-Cola, for example, uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and other channels, and these are all integrated around its main social platform, a website called Coke Journey.       

According to Coke, its mission is to inspire moments of optimism and happiness and build our brands. To use digital channels effectively, follow these guidelines. First, make sure all the sites have a common look and feel. They don't have to be identical in their design, but they must adhere to the standards defined in your brand book. That means all logos, trademarks, colors, font styles, and typography are exactly per standard, otherwise you may confuse customers if a social media site doesn't look like the brand.       

Second, be sure all sites use the same voice of the brand. The tone and style of writing should be consistent with the brand's personality. Third, be sure to define who can and cannot post things to the various social media sites. It's essential they be properly trained on the brand and how to communicate the brand's values and how to comply with the company's social media policies. Finally, be sure to specify the role of each social media site.       

Overall, they exist to support the core brand promise, but individually they might each have a different role, and for that you need to refer to your list of brand drivers. Each social media site is another touchpoint in the customer experience, and just as you do with your other touchpoints, you can link each social media touchpoint to a different brand driver. Let's do an example with our case study, the ParentWatch. Our overall brand promise is, The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be.       

But I'm going to create my brand's Facebook page to be all about this brand driver. How busy parents do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day. It'll be full of helpful tips on all the things parents do. The brand's Twitter feed will be about high profile moms and dads and their successes. The Pinterest board, on the other hand, will be full of inspirational quotes about parents and how important they are to their families. I'll also create a mobile campaign, where moms and dads can opt in to receive helpful tips on teaching their kids important life lessons.       

Pretty cool. So take a look at your digital channels. Make sure they adhere to the brand book, that they have a specific role tied to a brand driver, and that they are properly managed. Taken together, social media sites create a community of brand-loyal customers who interact with each other and with your company. That's the foundation for a strong customer relationship.

- The packaging around your product is another great way to communicate your brand and build equity. It's one touchpoint within the total customer experience, but packaging is such an important touchpoint because it may be the first physical encounter your customer has with the brand. It may also be the last physical encounter they have right before they buy the product. It's that last 10 seconds right before the consumer decides to buy that makes it so important to get the design of your packaging right.       

As a brand builder, you'll wanna work closely with your internal or external design team, and you'll need to give them guidance on these three factors. First, what is the functional role of the packaging? A product's packaging can do a lot of work. It can protect the product that's inside while it's in the store or warehouse, while it's being shipped, as well as when the product's in your customer's home or work location. The packaging can explain important information about how to use the product or any warnings that might apply.       

It could explain how to store or care for the product, what ingredients are inside, or the price of the product. The packaging might have other roles such as making the product easy to find in a store, serving as a gift box, or being easy to dispose of or recycle. Next, you need to decide the key brand and promotional messages to go on the packaging. Take a look at your value proposition and reasons to believe. Also, take a look at your list of brand drivers and review the functional, economic and emotional benefits that the packaging may be able to convey.       

Use the packaging to reinforce your positioning and the brand promise. Here's an example from Coca Cola. Look at the various images on the can, a beach ball, sunglasses, surfboard, barbecue grill. Hmm, I get it. Coke means fun at the beach. That brand driver is communicated very nicely by this simple and clever design. Finally, you need to give guidance around the design of the packaging, and for this, take a look at your brand book.       

The packaging most likely will have the brand name and tag line, it should have the brand's visual identity including logos and color schemes, but also look at the brand persona. What are the personality traits of the brand and how can the packaging be designed to embody these traits? For example, take a look at this packaging from Gatorade. Even the bottle itself looks like the distinctive G in the word Gatorade. Very clever. Take a look at your current product packaging and compare it to the guidelines in your brand book.       

Is the packaging living up to all the expectations of the brand? Could your packaging take on more responsibility in the customer experience? Great packaging is much more than a slick protective wrapper around your product. Packaging design offers a unique opportunity in both the consumer and business-to-business markets to influence customers and brand perceptions. Leveraged to its fullest, it can work hard to create and maintain long-term brand loyalty.

- A unique way to communicate your brand is to create a branded space. A physical environment can deliver a meaningful brand experience to make the personality, values, and even key messages of your brand tangible. Think of it as a 3D multisensory experience versus what customers get with traditional two-dimensional media like print advertising. Now you can create branded spaces virtually anywhere. For example, your company's lobby is an excellent way to have the brand greet your visitors, like the one here at Lynda.com.       

Almost any retail store environment will carry the look and feel of the brand, like the Apple store here or this Starbucks kiosk. Any physical space is a candidate, whether on company property or off, such as trade shows, conventions, concerts, sporting events, city parks, and so on. Some companies go all the way by creating a branded museum, complete with exhibits and tours, like this one, The World of Coca-Cola.       

But you don't have to brand on such a grand scale. Even a little old park bench is a candidate for branding, like this one for the well known KitKat candy bar. Creating a branded space is more than just adding a logo. To create branded spaces, follow these steps. First, decide on the location and whether the branded space will be permanent or temporary. Be sure to select a location that's consistent with the brand's essence. Ask yourself, where would my customers expect or be happy to see my brand? Next, decide on the role of the branded space, and for this you'll need your list of brand drivers.       

Depending on the size of the space, you may want to convey just one driver, or you may decide to have different parts of the space convey separate brand drivers to create a richer customer experience. Next, decide on what specific components within the space will have the job of communicating a brand driver. To come up with really creative ideas, I like to use an innovation technique called task unification. Task unification forces you to consider every component in the space, including the nonobvious ones, like the floor, the ceiling, windows, and then you assign it the job of communicating a brand driver.       

For a complete description of how to use this technique, view the course, Business Innovation Fundamentals here at Lynda.com. Let's do an example using our case study, the ParentWatch, and we want to create a branded space in the company lobby. I want to convey the brand driver, being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life. Then I would work with my internal or external design team to transform the lobby to be all about this driver.       

For example, perhaps the walls are covered with large images, floor to ceiling, of mothers and fathers with their children. The images would show parents at all age groups, and, of course, they're all wearing the ParentWatch. As with any project related to your brand, be sure to adhere strictly to the guidelines in your brand book. Branded spaces make customers more loyal, and they make your loyal customers feel right at home.

- To keep your brands healthy, you need to measure their performance on several factors. First, what is the basic awareness of the brand? You need to conduct market research to measure the percentage of people that recognize the brand when shown the logo or hear the name of the brand. Basic awareness is especially important within your target audience, so be sure to direct your marketing research efforts to those specific customers. After a basic awareness, you also wanna measure how well the target audience understands the brand.       

Can they tell you what the brand stands for? Do they understand its distinctive qualities and characteristics? What do they associate the brand with, and how closely does it match with your core promise and brand drivers? You may have very broad awareness of the brand, but if customers aren't understanding it the right way, then you need to go back and either sharpen the drivers or communicate your brand more effectively. Finally, you wanna measure how well the brand is creating customer loyalty. And for this, you measure customer retention rates, or repeat purchases.       

Or you might measure how likely they are to recommend the brand to others. If you find yourself slipping in customer loyalty, it could be a sign of several things. First, the brand may be losing its relevance. It might not be delivering benefits that are important anymore to the customer. Or the brand lacks differentiation, the degree to which customers perceive the brand to have a differentiating possitioning distinctive from the competition. Or finally, it could be a problem with consistency, in terms of how well the brand delivers across all the touchpoints.       

If you're inconsistent in keeping the promise, people lose trust. Now, these are all the external factors that you measure out in the marketplace. You should also measure a few key internal indicators. For example, measure the clarity that employees have about what the brand stands for, and its values and positioning. How well do your employees understand the target audience, customer insights, and brand drivers? Your employees are the ones who keep the promise, so they have to have a clear understanding of it.       

Be sure to measure the commitment your company has to the brand in terms of how much support it gets. Is it getting its share of the budgets and investments needed to keep it strong? Are key individuals devoting enough time to it versus other brands or programs? Finally, try to assess how well protected the brand is. Are other companies infringing on your trademarks or designs? Are others taking unfair advantage of your brand by violating your patents or proprietary methods and materials? Hey, you've invested a lot to create and manage the brand, so it's essential that you keep others from diluting it.       

Measurement is important. If you measure these factors routinely, you'll be able to spot trends and head off any problems with your brand before they happen.

- Measuring brand performance is not enough. You've got to actively manage the health of the brand, and keep brand equity growing. But things in the world around you change, and if you're not prepared, your branding strategy may derail, and you end up losing ground in the marketplace. Sometimes those unexpected events happen internally. The priorities in any organization are constantly shifting. A change in leadership, a new acquisition, a change in strategy, or perhaps a sudden downturn in financial results might impact your branding efforts a lot.       

Disruptions can occur externally as well. New competitors emerge, new regulations or legal actions might affect your ability to market a product. A bad customer experience or a product recall may be going viral on social media sites. Consumer trends change, and all of these things might affect your ability to address the brand from moving forward. So here are some tips to help you cope with these types of challenges, and manage your brands effectively. First, all brands should have a brand steward, which is the single individual responsible for managing brand compliance within an organization, everything from product development to brand identity.       

What often happens in a company is that employees drift away from the brand standards. They're not doing it intentionally, but they might create a new version of the logo or color palette, to fit what they need at that moment in time. A brand steward watches over the organization, and reins in any initiatives that aren't in compliance. That's why many companies have the CEO or other senior officer of the company serve as the brand steward. Along with brand stewards, you need brand champions, people to represent the brand throughout the organization, and there should be one from each cross-functional department of the company, not just marketing.       

These brand champions form a committee that should hold regular brand review meetings. They have the job of reviewing brand performance measures, and recommending ways to improve performance. The committee should review and update the brand drivers, cutting out the ones that are less relevant, and creating new ones that better reflect the trends in the market. At least once a year the brand champions should conduct a brand audit. How is the brand performing on all measures, both internally and externally? What trends are encouraging, and which ones cause some concern? Finally, the brand team is responsible for reinforcing and energizing the company around the brand, and everything it stands for.       

Creating branded spaces in your company lobby or corporate training rooms is a great way to do this. Events and employee activities that celebrate brand performance get people to see how committed management is to the brand, and it helps clarify the brand's essence. Brands are both a financial and a strategic asset. They deserve all the time and attention managing them as you would any other critical asset of the business.

- The branding industry is a huge and exciting one, with many types of firms and many types of roles. Branding professionals are highly sought-after because of their ability to create and manage these important assets. In this final video, I'm gonna share with you some guidelines on how to continue developing your skills and practice your craft. First, you need to decide where you want to focus. Careers in branding fall into four broad areas, strategy, brand management design and communications.       

But within these are many different types of jobs and specialties. In communications, for example, there are jobs in digital branding, including social media and mobile brand building, or you could concentrate on more traditional media in advertising. You should also decide on the types of industries that interest you most. You want to work within the corporate side, or the agency side? You want to specialize on consumer brands, or business-to-business brands? You have many choices, once you narrow your focus, you'll need to create a development plan.       

When I give career advice, I remind people to never let a year go by without developing some part of your professional skill set. Here are some tips. First, study the classic, as well as the new academic research about branding. Always think of yourself as a lifelong learner. Read about what other companies are doing. Stay on top of new technology, watch for new trends. Branding is all around you, so take advantage of it.       

When you see a new product in a store, or you see a commercial on TV, try to figure out the branding aspect of it, and the strategy that the company is trying to use. If you consider yourself a branding professional, then I advise you to join the community of practice. Get out there and engage in organizations like the American Branding Association. Attend one of the many branding conferences held each year. Join branding-related groups on LinkedIn. Attend networking events and get to know other branding professionals.       

Be sure to practice your craft. Learning is a process of taking an action, reflecting on what happened, learning from it, and then, improving for the next time. You'll want to learn at a rate faster than the rate of change. That means you need to experiment, practice new techniques, while perfecting the old ones. And finally, keep a strong ethical base when building brands. Hey, brands are powerful, and influential.   

   

- Creating and managing brands is one of the most important and challenging activities in all of marketing. A brand can be an enormously valuable asset for your company if it's done properly. In fact, for some companies, brands are the single most valuable asset the company owns. I'm Drew Boyd, and I've been in the marketing profession for over 30 years. I teach branding to graduate students and I help companies improve their branding effectiveness.       

In this course, I'll share with you a step-by-step process for creating a brand, linking that brand to your company's core values, and launching the brand into the marketplace to get it working for you. Whether you have existing brands, or you're starting from scratch to create a new one, this course features the tools and frameworks needed to build brand equity. Strong, effective brands give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace and help you weather the storms of market competition and other challenges.       

Like marketing, branding is an exciting career field of its own, but it takes talent and dedication. Through the concepts I'll share with you in this course, you'll begin to develop the skills to create successful and authentic brands.

- Before you start, you should know that this is a fundamentals course on branding, including an end-to-end process and a set of tools to create a brand. To help you practice these tools, I'll use a case study. We'll focus on wrist watches, specifically one designed for families. You'll learn how to create a new brand in this category. The steps that you'll perform here will be the same you would use in any category. This course is not about graphic design, such as logos and packaging.       

Nor is it about advertising and other marketing communications tools, which can be a part of the branding process. Branding strategy is closely linked to marketing strategy, so it's essential you have a good understanding of marketing principles, especially segmentation, targeting, and positioning before doing this course. If you need to get up to speed on these aspects of marketing, I encourage you to check out the Marketing Fundamentals course here at Lynda.com.       

Now as tempting as it may be, developing a new brand isn't always the right thing to do in certain business situations. I'll give you some guidelines on when you should and should not consider branding. If you're learning about branding as part of your job within a company, it's really important that you understand your company's policies on branding. This includes identity standards and the use of trademarks and logos. Be sure you're familiar with these policies before you apply any of the concepts in this course.

- Are you a trustworthy person? Who says so? Okay, so you have friends and colleagues that say you're trustworthy, but why do these people say so? I'm willing to bet it's because you told them you were going to do something, and you did, over and over. You made, and kept, your promises. And because of that, you now have a brand reputation as someone people can count on. You may not have realized it, but you've understood the basics of branding all along.       

Simply put, a brand is a promise. It's a promise you make to consumers when they do business with you. Now that definition may surprise you because most people think of a brand as a logo or a product's name. It's neither. Let's do an experiment. I'm going to show you just two lines on the screen, and when you see them, I want you to say the first word that comes to mind. Ready? Now if you're like most people, these two curved lines reminded you of the golden arches of McDonald's.       

Even people who don't go to McDonald's will instantly associate this logo with the company. How can just two hand-drawn lines, that aren't even the right color, by the way, cause you to recall a global billion-dollar fast food chain? Let's take the experiment one more step. Close your eyes and think about a McDonald's restaurant. Can you just taste those marvelous french fries? Can you see a Big Mac and other food items? Do you sense what's going on inside the restaurant, with all the families, the parents playing with their kids, enjoying the time together? This is McDonald's brand promise, those emotional feelings and cravings that are triggered when you think about McDonald's.       

The brand logo and the brand name are not the brand itself. Rather, they are the visual cues to trigger that locus of emotions that the brand promises you. Let me share with you Four Keys to Building Successful Brands. First, your brand must be authentic, in that it's truly tied to who you are as a company, meaning your values and core purpose. If these aren't tightly linked, your promise is less believable. Your brand must be relevant, meaning that it promises something that's important to consumers, and that they perceive your brand delivering that promise better than the competition.       

You must keep your brand promise consistent across every touchpoint you have with your customers. Why do people see you as trustworthy? Because you're consistent. It's the same for brands. If you lack consistency, you won't build true loyalty. And finally, you and your organization must have a total commitment to keeping the brand promise. Your leadership and all of your employees, the ones who deliver your brand experience to consumers, must live the brand, support it, and continue to invest in it.       

If you're working to create a brand, start by thinking of the brand promise. What experience do you want your customers to have when they encounter your brand? As you think about the brands you currently work with, ask yourself, is the promise you're making the right one? Because once you make a promise, you gotta keep it.

- Why are brands important? Let's take a look at one of the best brands in the world, Coca Cola. The total market value of the company is around $175 billion, but one asset in particular makes up about 75 billion of that, and it's not the secret recipe. It's the brand. Brands are both a strategic as well as a financial asset. A strong brand creates customer loyalty, and that increases the value of your company, value which can grow if you continue to invest in the brand.       

There are many other benefits of brands. Brands allow you to set higher prices for your products and services. People associate higher quality to branded products, and they'll pay more than for a generic version, even when the two products are identical. Why? Because they trust the branded product more. Brands make and keep their promises. Once your product is branded, you typically earn a higher market share while lowering your cost of sales.       

Loyal customers don't need to be marketed to as much. With an established brand, it's easier to launch new products. When consumers see the brand's logo on a new product, they instantly associate the brand promise to that new product from day one. There are other benefits of brands than just the marketing advantages. For example, studies show that companies with great brands have lower employee turnover. Popular brands help companies recruit the most talented and passionate employees.       

Brands create status and esteem for your company in the minds of industry leaders, community leaders, the media, and financial markets like Wall Street. But despite all these benefits, it may not make sense for you to create a brand. There are certain business situations where it would be a waste of money. For example, in completely new markets where there are very few, if any, customers, you'd be smarter to invest your resources in growing awareness and interest in the category first.       

If you're already the market leader with most of the market share, creating a brand probably won't pay off. If you're in a highly fragmented industry, with hundreds or even thousands of small competitors, a brand may not be able to reach enough customers to make it worthwhile. If your business is such that you have only a handful of customers, perhaps even one customer like the government, branding won't do much. Take a look at your situation before you jump right into it.       

But if your business depends on creating loyal, repeat customers, a strong brand is the surest way to do it.

- The Branding Process has five steps. First, we have to define the brand, and everything that goes into it. A brand is a promise, so we have to clearly define what that promise is, and the core values behind it. Think of the values as the DNA of the brand. At this step, we also define how the brand links to your overall business, and other brands that you may have. Brands don't exist in isolation, so we have to give them a home, so to speak, somewhere in your portfolio.       

We also have to define what are called brand drivers. Brand drivers define how the core values will be manifested into the marketing mix or key business processes that support the brand. It's all the things associated with a brand that help you translate its value into actions. The next step of the branding process is to position the brand. Essentially, we are shaping how customers think about the brand. We identify who those customers are, what benefits they seek from your products and services, and what they currently believe about those products and services versus the competition.       

At this step, we're making the direct link between the product's value proposition and the brand promise. Once you define the brand promise and how it's positioned in the marketplace, you need to express the brand. Imagine the brand as a person. A person needs a name, a personality, and an identity in terms of what they look like. You do the same for brands. At this step, we create brand names and logos to help customers easily recognize the brand and remember the promise that it delivers.       

At this stage, it's time to build awareness of the brand and put it to work for you. We do that by communicating it and we do that both internally to our own organization, as well as externally to the market. Why internally? Your employees and distributors play a critical role in delivering the promise. They create and deliver products and services that deliver benefits that customers expect given the promise the brand has made. Keeping a brand strong means we have to communicate continuously and most importantly, consistently, to reinforce the promise in people's minds.       

If you don't, brands lose their value. And that leads us to the final step of the brand-building process: measure. You want to measure the value of the brand, or what we call brand equity. It's what you accrue when you develop, promote and deliver an authentic brand promise. As brand equity increases, company value increases. You also measure the brand's performance. Is it living up to the promise, and is it doing what you expected it to for your business? The brand-building process takes time and money, but if you do it right, you'll create strong, healthy brands that make your business more successful.

- Let's start building a brand. First, we have to identify the values of the brand. Remember that a brand is a promise, and underneath that promise must be a supporting set of values. They're like a foundation underneath a home, for example. If I make a promise to you, it's because I believe certain things are important. Otherwise I wouldn't make the promise. The same is true of brands that we create in marketing. Think of brand values as the key behaviors, or virtues of the brand, that need to be expressed consistently day in and day out.       

Taken together these values form the essence or theme of the brand. They're like a belief system of the brand. Determining the brand values starts by understanding the overall marketing strategy of your business. What kind of products and services do you offer? What are the key trends and new opportunities in your markets? Who are your customers? And, who are your competitors? Given that, what is your overall value proposition in the marketplace? You've got to have a solid marketing strategy before you can build a solid branding strategy.       

The two are closely linked. Here at lynda.com, check out the Marketing Fundamentals course to learn all about the marketing planning process. For this course, I'm going to use a hypothetical company that wants to create a brand for one of its new products. Let's assume we're in the watch business. We're coming out with a new line of smartwatches that integrate with other tech products like smartphones. Let's say that our strategy is to create a watch ideally suited for families.       

But not just families in general, we are targeting the parents, specifically. We wanna position our watch as the ideal watch for moms and dads. For now, let's call it The ParentWatch. Remember, that's the name of the brand, not necessarily the name of the product itself. Now, given our marketing strategy, we wanna create a brand that delivers this promise of being the ideal watch for parents. We start by identifying the key values that this new brand must have for this promise to have any meaning to it.       

So, I start by listing beliefs that people might have about parents. For example: Parents are special. Being a parent is an important role in the life of many moms and dads. Being a parent is hard work. Parents do everything they can to help their families. By creating this list, I'm looking for one, or a collection of some of these to shape and form the main theme of my new brand.       

I wanna create a sentence that conveys what the brand is all about. Let's try this. "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping parents be the very best they can be." I like this. It's aspirational, it's linked directly to my strategy, and it has a strong emotional appeal. We can always revise and fine-tune this later, but for now, let's stick with this as the core purpose of The ParentWatch brand.       

Both why it exists, and what it believes. Take a look at the brands you have now or the brand you wanna create. Ask yourself these questions: What is the belief system underneath those brands? Is it linked to your marketing strategy? Is it clear what this brand stands for now, and what it wants to be in the future? Building a strong foundation is the crucial first step to bring your brand to life.

- A brand's values form the foundation of the brand, but now on top of that foundation you need to build more about the definition of the brand. Think of it as expanding and stretching it out. You do that by creating brand drivers. Brand drivers are more detailed and descriptive aspects of the brand. They come in different forms. They could be attributes of the brand itself. They could be functional or emotional benefits that the brand delivers.       

They could be self-expressive benefits. In other words, what the customer is saying about themselves when they consume the brand. To create brand drivers, make an exhaustive list of phrases or sentences about the brand that stretch the brand's core purpose. Don't worry too much about the wording of these, and don't try to filter them. Later on you'll group them into similar categories, and that's where you'll edit them to get the most relevant brand drivers.       

Let's go back to our case study. A new brand for a smart watch that's ideal for moms and dads. We call it the ParentWatch. It's core value is, "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping parents be the very best they can be." Given that, what else might this new brand be about? Let's start with the list we had already. ParentWatch believes that parents are special. Being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life.       

Being a parent is hard work. Parents do everything they can to help their families. Let's create more by asking ourselves, what else goes into being a great parent? Let's write these from the parents' point of view. "ParentWatch helps me do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day." "It helps me protect my family." "It helps me perform my duties at home, work, and everywhere else." "It helps me stay connected to my kids." "It helps me teach my kids important life lessons." "It makes it fun to be a mom or dad." "Wearing ParentWatch tells the world that I care about my family above all else." Do you see what's going on here? We're creating a list of specific things that are important to our target audience.       

Then we take those and turn them into attributes of the brand itself or a benefit that the brand delivers. When you do this for your brand, you should have several dozen of these. Try to create as long a list as possible, then group into categories, such as functional benefits, the basic job that the product does. Emotional benefits, how a product makes a consumer feel. Economic benefits, how a product saves time and money.       

Self-expressive benefits, how a product makes us appear to others. Other types of benefits, such as benefits to society or to the environment. Now once they're grouped into categories, we look for ways to refine or combine them into a more coherent list. For example, these two drivers. "ParentWatch helps me do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day." And "ParentWatch helps me perform my duties at home, work, and everywhere else." These seem similar.       

Perhaps I could tighten these up into one phrase, such as, "ParentWatch helps me balance multiple tasks at work, home, and everywhere else." Brand drivers put more meaning into the brand. We call them drivers because these are the ideas that you use to express and communicate what your brand is all about.

- So what is it that you actually brand? Well, that's kind of a trick question. You don't brand things. Rather, you create a brand with its core promise and list of associations as we did in the last two videos. Then, you attach something to that brand promise, like a product or a company name. By attaching that product or company name to the brand, your customers associate it with the brand. Now, I know that may seem like a subtle point, but here's why I make it.       

Don't think of branding like taking an iron and burning it onto the side of a product, or its package, like the cowboys do when they brand livestock. That's the single most common mistake people make when doing branding. They think you can just slap a logo and a clever name on the side of a product, and voila, here's my new brand. To be a savvy branding professional, you want to avoid this mistake, and instead, follow a disciplined step-by-step process with the set of tools to create and manage your brands.       

That's what this course is all about. Now, once you've created the core brand promise, and list of associations, the correct question to ask is, "What kinds of things can I attach to the brand?" The answer may surprise you. We've already mentioned products. Inside this bottle is fizzy brown water with a syrupy, sweet taste, when we associate it with the Coca-Cola brand, the consumer memorizes this association for future reference.       

Every time a consumer drinks what's inside here, they instantly recall the brand promise, and subconsciously think to themselves, "Promise made, promise kept." That's why we sometimes call a brand a, "locus of emotions". It's all the emotions inside that are triggered by a brand that define it. A brand is a memory-jogger, a shortcut, so to speak. To make that memory-jogging a bit easier, we give the brand a certain look, and sometimes, a name.       

When you wrap that name and that look around the product, consumers have a much easier time making that connection. Maybe that's why it feels like we are branding a product like using a branding iron on livestock. It's not only products that can be branded, you might want to brand just one feature of that product. Hertz, the car rental company, brands its Gold club, an exclusive club for loyal customers. You could also brand a single ingredient within the product.       

My favorite example is when Intel created the now-iconic Intel Inside brand. Most people have no idea what the Intel thing actually did or how it worked. It didn't matter, as long as the computer they were about to buy had Intel Inside, they were satisfied. "Promise made, promise kept." If your product has a unique technology, especially if it's something you own, perhaps with patents, you could also associate it with a brand.       

Toyota for example, branded its Hybrid Synergy Drive, as part of its fleet of eco-friendly cars. Can you brand services? Absolutely, a service is the same as a product, in that they are both benefit delivery vehicles. Google, for example, offers a wide range of services that are branded. In fact, an entire company can be branded, take Starbucks for example. You could also create a string of brands.       

For example, Amazon Kindle delivers books using Whispernet technology. A branded company, a product, and technology, all in one. You may be thinking, "Hey wait a minute, "what if you take this too far?" That's a good question, if you're not careful, you may end up with what I call brand chaos, where you brand too many things in a way that might confuse the customer. To avoid that, take a look at your current brands, or brands you want to create.       

Then try to identify what you've actually branded, a product, a feature, and so on. Good brand builders then start to think about how these different brands exist together to deliver value for the customer.

- Brands need a home, a place to live. They not only need a place to live, but you also need to determine the relationship the brand has with other brands in that home. You do this by creating a brand architecture. Think of architecture the same as you would when building a house. The architect decides how many rooms you'll have, where they're situated in the overall structure of the home, and the role of each room. Bathroom, kitchen, and so on.       

To create a brand architecture we do the same thing. Now, there are many formats and models for this, but here's a general way to think about your options when building a brand architecture. First, you could create what's called "a House of Brands". Each brand stands on its own and has no relationship with the others. Consumers know the names of the brands, but they don't know the name of the company that owns them. In other words, they don't know the name of the house itself, your company, but just the rooms inside.       

The Procter and Gamble company is probably the best example of this. It owns many familiar brands that we use every day. Like Crest toothpaste, Tide laundry detergent, and Febreze. But most consumers won't know that P&G owns these brands, or that these brands are owned by the same company. At the other end of the spectrum is the Branded House. In this approach, the company is the brand. All products and services within that company are associated with that single company brand, but they themselves don't exist as a brand.       

When you think about a company like Caterpillar. Your mind conjures up images of tractors and heavy equipment, but you probably can't think of a product brand within Caterpillar. It's what we call a Master Brand because it governs over all the companies products and services. BMW is another great example. Now, in between these two architectures is a third choice called "a Blended House". Think of it as a mix of the two.       

A little bit of a Master Brand with a few individual brands connected to it. A good example is Marriott International, the hospitality company. It has a strong Master Brand, Marriott, along with 18 sub-brands like Courtyard and Residence Inn. It's a nice approach because consumers associate many good qualities with the Marriott name. But then, each hotel property has its own brand promise for specific market segments.       

When you combine these with the Master Brand, Courtyard by Marriott, consumers instantly understand that unique promise. Pretty cool. So, which approach is best? Well, it depends on your strategy. The Branded House approach is more cost-effective because you're spending money to build one single brand. But this limits where you can expand. It'd be strange if Caterpillar wanted to go into the food business, for example. A House of Brands is expensive, because you have to build each brand from scratch.       

But then, you have total freedom to go into any new market without affecting the other brands. P&G, for example, can expand into just about anything. Many companies use the blended approach to give themselves the best of both worlds. Building the brand architecture helps customers understand your brands the way you want them to, and that's a real advantage to building brand equity.

- Brands can take on a life of their own, almost to the point where they seem like a person. And just like us, they can have their own unique personality. Our final step in the defined stage of the brand-building process is to create this personality, or what we call a Brand Persona. Given the brand's promise, you'd give the brand a set of human-like characteristics that your customers would expect from someone who keeps this promise. Now, why does this matter? Well, your target audience will better understand your brand if they can associate it with, or think of it as a human being.       

Brands with a personality stand out more. We tend to like them more, and most importantly, we wanna maintain a relationship with it. In marketing that's a huge advantage because that relationship causes customers to be more loyal, and that's what valuable brands do. To create a Brand Persona, you have to create a list of personality traits that shape the overall personality of our brand. Now, various researchers in the field of marketing have studied brand personalities to find out what kinds of traits might be available to use.       

One of the most recognized in this field is Dr. Jennifer Aaker. In her classic research report titled "Dimensions of Brand Personality" she outlines a framework of personality traits that brands can take on. The five core dimensions are: Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Now, within each of these are more detailed traits.       

For example, under "sincerity" we would find down-to-earth, honest, genuine, and friendly. Now, these traits are further broken down into sub-traits. For example, under the trait "friendly" we would find the sub-traits of warm, happy, cheerful, and caring. Now, out of this long list of dozens of personality traits, our goal is to select a handful that create this unique Brand Persona.       

Let's go back to our case study The ParentWatch. Let's take a look at our core value. "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be." You also wanna look at your long list of brand drivers. Taken together, ask yourself: if ParentWatch was a person how would you describe its personality? I selected the following traits: Family oriented.       

Caring. Intelligent. Reliable. Strong. Wholesome. Spirited. And, of course, fun. Now, keep in mind that these are not intended to be the traits of an ideal super mom or dad. Rather, these are the traits of a brand that helps parents become the ideal super mom or dad. Do you see the difference? Your brand may have traits that are similar to your target audiences. What's most important is that the brand has traits consistent with someone who would make and keep its promise.       

That makes the brand more trusted and authentic. Speaking of authenticity and trust, will your customers believe these traits just because you picked them from a list? They will as long as you carefully selected them to define someone else besides the brand. That someone else is you, and perhaps your colleagues, the people who ultimately make and keep the promise. Authentic brands are those that reflect the characteristics of the people who deliver value to the marketplace.       

Now, that's great brand-building.

- Creating and defining your brand is only the first step of the brand-building process. At this point, the brand is still an empty vessel. Empty because you haven't made or kept any promises to customers. Remember that a brand is a promise kept over and over to a target audience to that point that they believe and trust it. Trust builds loyalty and that is your next step, to identify the specific customers that you want your brand to be relevant to.       

For that, we use a marketing technique called segmentation. Segmentation means dividing the market of potential customers into similar groupings. There are four way to do it. Demographic segmentation focuses on physical characteristics of customers, like gender, age, their height and weight, even hair color. It's a very useful way to segment, especially if your brand's promise delivers on something related to a customer characteristic.       

If you're marketing a shampoo for redheads, for example, then you'd wanna group your customers by hair color. Closely related to demographic segmentation is geographic. Use this approach when you wanna group people by where they live or where they work. It can also include things like where they go for certain activities or where they just hang out. If your brand promise is related to that location, this way of grouping customers makes the most sense.       

Next is behavioral segmentation. Here we focus on things that potential customers do or how they behave. It includes things like purchase behavior, lifestyles and things like how customers use a product. Once again, it's the right way to segment customers if your brand delivers something of value related to this behavior. For example, people who wanna drive fast are going to appreciate brands that promise speed.       

Finally is attitudinal segmentation. This is what goes on in the customer's head about the benefits they seek. Grouping customers by their needs or benefits they're looking for is extremely powerful because it gets right to the core of your brand's promise. For example, if you're building a new brand for an automobile, you'd wanna group customers around benefits such as fuel economy, luxury, eco-friendly or status.       

Selecting the right segmentation approach is critical because it helps you with the next two steps of the brand-building process: express and communicate.

- Branding is about making and keeping a promise over and over, to the point where consumers trust you, and they become loyal. What do you promise, and when do you promise it? You answer these questions by analyzing your potential customers. When people buy products and services, they're buying a collection of benefits. You can categorize these benefits into three types. Functional Benefits refer to a product's physical performance.       

For example, when buying a car, Functional Benefits include size of the engine, passenger seating, or how the car handles. Economic Benefits are related to saving money, or saving time. With a car, Economic Benefits would include the miles per gallon, annual maintenance costs, or the car's reliability. Finally are Emotional Benefits. These are related to the psychological feelings you get when using a product.       

For a car, it would include things like status, or self esteem. Customers buy things for a mix of these benefits, but some are more important than others. If you know what's most important to them, you can appeal to that need when deciding on your brand promise. You can also raise the sense of importance they place on another factor, and focus your brand on that instead. You also want to understand the steps customers take when buying something.       

That will help you shape the overall experience they have with your brand, and decide the best point to make the promise. Typically those steps are as follows. First is Need recognition phase. This is where customers realize that they want something. The next step is Information search. Once customers feel the need to have something, they start gathering information about solutions for that need. Once the customer gathers the information, they go to the next step, which is to Evaluate the alternatives.       

Customers make choices based on what features are most important, and which brand does the best job in delivering those features. It's critical that you communicate your brand's promise at this point. Eventually the customer will narrow their choices down to one brand, and go to the Purchase phase. Finally is the Post-purchase behavior phase. Once customers start using the product or service, they compare the results with their expectations.       

Did the brand deliver on the promise? How did the product make them feel when they used it? This phase is also critical because customers will form opinions about your brand, and share their experiences, good or bad, with other customers. Great brand builders know they have a role to play in each step of the customer-buying process. They know where these steps take place, when they take place, and who's involved. With these insights, you're ready to develop an effective brand experience.

- Perhaps the most central idea in all of marketing is that of positioning. A company's value proposition is the single-minded claim that it makes to change the customer's mind and cause them to do something. That something could be to buy a product or to try a product or to pay a certain price or to visit a website or just to think about your brand and its benefits in a certain way. How you position your product in the market will ultimately determine the overall promise you make to create your brand.       

Now, let's make a distinction here. In a marketing plan, you create a value proposition that is the central piece of your marketing strategy. So how does that relate to brand positioning? Are they the same? Well, not necessarily, but they're closely related. The brand promise is essentially your overall value proposition. It's a broad, definitive statement of the bundle of benefits to customers by the brand. It's a clear articulation of precisely what it is that gives the brand an edge over competitors.       

Think of brand positioning as the long term, strategic positioning. Your marketing strategy value proposition is more like a short term, tactical positioning. Let's do an example to see this connection. Using our case study of the ParentWatch, we know that our overall brand positioning is, "The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be." Now by design, we've set that at a pretty high level.       

But what if you're about to launch a new product? Or perhaps just introduce a new feature on an existing product? For that, you need a more tactical, short term positioning. For example, let's assume our ParentWatch has a new feature that allows us to SMS people automatically. Moms or dads can use it to create reminders for their kids that come directly from them via text messaging. (laughs) I'm not sure kids would like it, but I bet parents would. So how do we position this new feature? For ideas on that, you go back to your brand drivers.       

Recall that brand drivers are more detailed and descriptive aspects of the brand. So let's look over our list created in Chapter 2. Now here is one that might work. "ParentWatch helps me stay connected to my kids." Nice. Our new SMS feature becomes a credible reason to believe this value proposition. And therein lies the connection between brand strategy and marketing strategy. Think of these value propositions designed around your brand drivers as RTBs, or reasons to believe, for the overall brand strategy.       

Promises made, promises kept. So, take a look at your brands. What features and benefits of your products and services are you emphasizing in your marketing strategy? Then look at your brand drivers to find the ones that connect best to those benefits. That helps your target audience believe the brand is doing its job well and can be trusted to do it in the future.

- At this point in the brand-building process you've defined the brand in terms of its values, drivers, and persona. You've positioned the brand in the market and linked it to your marketing strategy. Now you're ready to move into the next phase which is how you express the brand. To do that, you create a name, a visual look and feel for the brand, and you create a total customer experience for the target audience when they encounter the brand. In this video I'll review the important considerations you make when naming the brand.       

The name you select for your brand should do the following: Reflect the values and purpose of the brand. Create an association with the brand's persona. Be easy to say. Be unique and memorable. Now, before coming up with names you need to consider what it is that you're branding. A company? A product or a service? A feature within that product or service? Or perhaps a technology. How do all your brands fit together? In other words, what is your brand architecture, which we covered in chapter two.       

Let's do an example with our case study. For this example, I need to create a hypothetical company that I'll call the California Watch Company. It makes a variety of watches in these categories: Luxury high-end watches, sport watches for running, biking and so on, smartwatches for technology lovers, and family-lifestyle watches. My brand architecture is House of Brands, so these four categories of watches are branded independently of each other, and not connected with the main company name.       

Let's focus on our new line of family-lifestyle watches beginning with our first entry into the market, the ParentWatch. Helping moms and dads be the very best they can be. My product is a smartwatch that connects with the customer's smartphone, so it can do a lot of things. My strategy is to offer one model of watch but in different styles and colors. Customers can load different functions into the watch depending on the ages of their children. Apps for babies, toddlers, and so on.       

Pretty cool watch. Do you remember the Brand's Persona? One of the traits was "Intelligent". That seems to fit. So, given the tight connection between my brand and the product that delivers on the promise, I'd be smart to name my product the same as my brand in this case. That makes the most sense for my target audience. Once they understand my brand's promise, they'll associate that promise with the watch itself if I name it the same.       

Otherwise they might get confused. The name ParentWatch is connected to the values and purpose, is unique and easy to say, and it seems to fit my brand's personality. The name strikes me as strong, reliable, but at the same time fun. I like it. There are times, though, when it makes sense to come up with a name that is completely new with no literal meaning. The name Sony is a completely made up name.       

The name Apple also has no connections with the companies products and services. In that case, you have to select the name, then communicate the name and its associated values and purpose, so that people start to make the connection. It's usually harder and more expensive to do, but it can yield a powerful brand name that sticks in the minds of consumers. And that's an effective way to create and keep customers.

- The look and feel of the brand is what consumers see when they encounter it. It's like a visual identity system, a way for customers to instantly recognize when the brand is present. To create the visual identity of the brand you'll need the following elements, first you'll want some type of distinctive logo or symbol. A logo can take many forms, it can be an object that represents your brand. A good example is the Apple logo. It can be an abstract symbol, like the Nike swoosh, or it can be a word mark which is the words of your company or brand name set in a specific way.       

The Google logo is considered a word mark. To create a logo it's best to hire the services of a professional graphic designer. The designer will need to know the brand values, the core promise, the brand drivers, the persona, and of course the brand name. Taken together these elements will help the designer create a graphic look that matches what the brand stands for. Once the logo is created, you'll need to have your designer create different versions of it, we call these logo lockups.       

While your master logo should always be rendered consistently, you need variations of it for different placements and usage. For example, you may need color and black and white variations, or you may need versions for small spaces like a business card, or a large version for the side of a building. Your designer should also create a color palette for the brand. Some of these colors are used for the logo itself, but you should also have complementary colors that can be used along with the logo.       

These complementary colors might be used in advertising, or perhaps in product packaging, or even used for the product itself. Your designer should also help you select specific type faces for the brand, a distinctive font helps strengthen the identity of the brand. Along with the fonts, you should also have standard typographic treatments. Your typographic identity should include specific ways of handling key types of texts, such as headlines, or how you write URL addresses.       

Your brand identity should include a consistent style for images, all photos and images used with the brand logo should have a consistent look and feel. Image guidelines should also define when and how certain types of images are used. Will you use photography or illustrations or both? Will they be black and white or color? Nike for example, relies on large close up high contrast images to capture attention, and create a distinctive feel.       

Finally, you want to define a consistent tone for the way you say things. It's like creating a voice for the brand. This applies to everything from headlines in a print ad to the tone of a press release. Outline the specific language and words that can be used. For example, should the tone be formal or more conversational, that depends of course on your brands persona. Take a look at the brands you manage, and check to see that each of these elements are in sync with your overall brand essence.       

These elements must work together in harmony to create a winning brand identity.

- When your customers buy your products and services, they go through a distinct set of steps, sort of a process. We call it the customer experience or sometimes the brand experience, when it's related to a brand. Each step of the experience is called a touchpoint, where you can, figuratively speaking, touch the customer and reinforce the brand promise. This forms a tighter more loyal relationship with the customer. The first step is to define the touchpoints for the typical customer.       

First is need recognition. This is where the customers realize they want something. The next step is information search, where they gather information from a wide variety of sources. This is a critical step, because this is when a customer is most receptive to your brand message. Once a customer gathers information, they evaluate the alternatives, based on what features are most important and which brand does the best job in delivering those features. Eventually, they go to the purchase phase, where they actually buy the product.       

Now you might think that the buying process ends here, with the final purchase, but there's one last step called the post-purchase behavior phase. Once customers start using the product, they compare the results with their expectations. Did the product work as expected? How did the product make them feel when they used it? What do they say to others about their experience? One we define the touchpoints, we go back to our list of brand drivers. Our goal is to select a driver from the list that we can emphasize at each touchpoint.       

We have to decide where the touchpoint happens, when it happens, and what to say to the customer that relates to that brand driver. Now it's a bit tricky, but it's a key ingredient of successful brand building. Let's try it with our case study, the ParentWatch. For the need-recognition step, I want to use the driver, "Being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life." I'll use this driver in my advertising, because of the strong emotional message within it.       

For information search and evaluate the alternatives, I'm going to emphasize all the benefits of the ParentWatch, like protecting my family, stay connected to my kids, and so on. I'll do this on the brand's website. When customers buy the product, I'll emphasize that "Parents are special." We'll create a store environment and a shopping experience that makes moms and dads feel great about being a parent. And finally, in the post-purchase phase, I'll drive home the message, "Wearing ParentWatch tells the world that I care about my family above all else." Perhaps I'll do this with text messages directly to the ParentWatch or perhaps follow up with direct mail.       

I want to reinforce that the customer made a smart choice. Great marketers know they have a role to play in each step of the customer experience. They know where these steps take place, when they take place, and who's involved. With these insights, you're ready to communicate the brand to the marketplace.

- Branding is all about making and keeping a promise. As a brand builder you're the one who makes the promise, but who keeps it? Is it the product, service, well if so then who is it that stands behind your products and services? It's your employees and partners, like distributors who keep the promise. Brand delivery boils down to people, and if they don't understand the brand they're likely to struggle trying to keep that promise.       

Employees have to believe in the brand, and live it every time they come in contact with a customer. In this video let me share with you some ways to effectively communicate your brand internally. There are two parts to this, first you have to train your team, and then you need to consistently reinforce it. Otherwise, people stop believing that the brand is important. When you develop training programs about the brand you should consider developing different programs for different types of employees.       

Front line employees for example, deal with customers every day, the training program for them will be much different than for people back at headquarters, including your senior executives. Ideally, every employee is trained, new ones and especially old ones. Existing employees might have to change their mindset a lot to embrace and believe in the brand. Take an airline, next time you fly watch the airline's employees, listen to what they say, imagine how training on the brand would be different for a pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, as well as reservation agents who sell tickets.       

Every job and every contact with customers is different, so the training should match that. What do you train? Employees need to know the brand promise, how it links to the company's values, the drivers customers will experience when they encounter the brand, the brand identity including look and feel, the name, and of course the persona. Most importantly, they need to know how they should think, feel and act.       

What words come out of their mouths? What actions do they take to deliver the promise? You have to help them make that bridge from the brand promise to their actions, or they won't be able to truly live the brand. Training is important, but it's not enough, you must reinforce it to keep the brand closely tied to the culture of the company. First of all, make sure the brand identity is visible throughout the company. Later I'll talk about how to create branded spaces like your company's front lobby as a way to reinforce the brand.       

Every time the employee walks through it, they're reminded of the brand. Most companies appoint a brand champion, and a team of brand ambassadors. These are the influential company employees who represent what the brand stands for. They can help others understand how their words and deeds link to the brand and its drivers. Speaking of employees, many companies focus on hiring the right people from the very start. Given the characteristics of the brand, what characteristics of potential employees would best align with the brand? Your human resources partner may be able to help you with that.       

Perhaps the best way to reinforce the brand internally is to do a great job delivering on the promise externally. When employees see that the company consistently lives up to its promises even in tough times, it strengthens their resolve and commitment to the brand. Take a look at how your company communicates internally to its employees. Good brand builders look for these everyday opportunities to reinforce the brand.

- One of the most important steps in the brand-building process is to create a Brand Book. Just as the name implies, the Brand Book is the complete story of the brand and all the elements that go into it. It establishes strict guidelines on every aspect of how a company's brand will be managed. This affects everything, from how the logo can be used, the look of your website, how social media is used, advertising, product design, and so on. A basic Brand Book should include: An overview of brand values, the core promise, the drivers, and persona.       

Logo specifications and examples of how to use it. Logo lockups for different uses. The color palette. Font styles. Typography. Image and photography guidelines. And, writing style and the tone of voice. Now, a good Brand Book is a reference document to help employees and your marketing agencies execute the brand properly. That's why it's sometimes called "a style guide".       

You might also include things like: Brochure guidelines. Specifications for signage and outdoor advertising. Design layouts for prints and web-based projects. Your store design. Social media guidelines. Even your letterhead and business card design. Now, be sure to include visual or written examples of each of these. The more detailed information you include in the Brand Book, the more helpful it'll be to make sure the brand is managed consistently.       

While these guidelines are important, a great Brand Book goes even further. It could be used to train your entire team. It could help employees understand the brand's essence. It could be created in a way that inspires people to believe in the brand. It might include stories about the brand, and how it's served its customers. It could outline brand goals, and how it links to the company's overall strategy. A Brand Book can help employees know what it means to live the brand day in and day out.       

Great branding is about making and keeping promises in a consistent way. A Brand Book is an essential tool to help you do just that.

- A very important component of branding is the product or service that you put in the marketplace. They need to do their jobs in delivering the benefits that were promised. Now, keep in mind, they're not the only things that have to live up to the brand's promise. Every touchpoint in the customer experience can potentially play a role. But it's usually the products or services that are the focal point of your branding effort. That means, you must teach the people who create your products and services about the brand.       

Take a look at your current products. You may notice perhaps the most common problem when getting into brand-building. The benefits that your products deliver currently are not the same ones promised by the brand. Oops. (laughs) In other words, there's a gap between product performance and the brand. And it can happen in two ways: Your product may be underfeatured, or it may be overfeatured. Here's how to find out. Make a list of all the key features on your product or service.       

Then, for each feature, write down the main benefit that the feature delivers. Remember that benefits come in different forms: Functional, economic, emotional, self-expressive, and so on. Then, with that list of benefits take out your long list of brand drivers, for each benefit try to connect it with at least one of the drivers. Ask yourself, does the benefit link to or somehow support any one of the brand drivers? Let's do a quick example with our case study, "The ParentWatch." Let's imagine the watch has an app that automatically sends SMS text messages to kids to remind them to do their homework.       

I can scan down the list of our brand drivers, and yes, I see two on the list that seem to connect with this feature. "The ParentWatch helps me stay connected to my kids." And the other driver that fits it is this: "Parents do everything they can to help their families." Now, if you find that many of your features and benefits do not connect to your brand drivers, you have a problem. Your product is overfeatured with unrelated benefits, and this will confuse your customers.       

In this case you need to go back to your development team, and start creating a new version of the product that closes this gap. You may find that the features and benefits on the product only cover a small number of drivers. Once again, you have a gap that needs to be closed, and you do that with new product development. Take a look at your product development pipeline and do the same analysis. You may be able to collaborate with your development team to modify these products now, to be more aligned with the brand promise.       

If so, those products will do a better job at keeping the promise that the brand has made. Now, don't forget that when I say the word "product" the same applies to any service that you offer in the marketplace. A well-developed brand informs how your products and services will perform, what they look like, and how they deliver an experience consistent with the brand's essence.

- To make a promise, you have to communicate it. The key is to select those communication channels that are most consistent with the essence of the brand, its authentic persona. A simple framework for this is answering the questions: who, what, why, where and how. First, you have to decide on why you want to communicate. Are you telling the market your overall strategic brand positioning, the core brand promise? Or are you building tactical awareness around some new feature or benefit of the product? If so, this type of campaign would link directly to your tactical marketing positioning.       

During the positioning step of the brand-building process, we answer the next question: who? That of course is your target audience. You identify the specific customers that you want your brand message to be relevant to. You group your customers using one of four Segmentation Approaches: Demographic, Geographic, Behavioral or Attitudinal. The one you use depends on what you're about to communicate. If it's a new feature, you may want to use behavioral segmentation.       

If it's about an emotional benefit of your brand, attitudinal is likely the best choice. Narrowing your target audience makes your communications campaign more efficient. Next is what you are communicating, and for that you need to refer to your long list of brand drivers. The brand drivers give ideas about the specific message you want to include in the communications. Pick the brand driver that is best suited for what you're announcing to the market and the target audience you've selected.       

Using brand drivers this way in all your communications reinforces the brand promise and it builds brand equity. Where you communicate depends on several factors. Remember the customer experience touchpoints and the steps of the buying process in Chapter 4? Select which step is most relevant to the brand driver and what you're announcing to the market. You may want to reach the target audience in their homes, places of work, during leisure time, or perhaps online.       

The entire customer experience gives you many options. And finally, is how you communicate. The media channel you select, depends on the target audience, how many of them you want to reach, the complexity of the message you're sending, and how frequently they need to hear the message. Marketers have a wide choice of traditional media, including television, radio, print advertising, outdoor billboards, and digital media, which includes social media, websites, and mobile channels.       

Each type of media has advantages and disadvantages. TV commercials, for example, can reach millions of people, but it's expensive. Billboards, on the other hand, are not that expensive, but they're limited in what they can achieve. It would be hard to explain how to use a complicated product in a billboard. Whichever channel you use, be sure to refer to your brand book to make sure all the design elements and tone of the communication are on brand.

- Social media is an essential part of any brand building effort, no matter what business you're in. Consumers expect a way to learn about your products and share their experiences with others online. Social media is a powerful way to communicate your value proposition and enhance your brand. The most valuable and respected brands in the world use digital channels for brand building. Cocoa-Cola, for example, uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and other channels, and these are all integrated around its main social platform, a website called Coke Journey.       

According to Coke, its mission is to inspire moments of optimism and happiness and build our brands. To use digital channels effectively, follow these guidelines. First, make sure all the sites have a common look and feel. They don't have to be identical in their design, but they must adhere to the standards defined in your brand book. That means all logos, trademarks, colors, font styles, and typography are exactly per standard, otherwise you may confuse customers if a social media site doesn't look like the brand.       

Second, be sure all sites use the same voice of the brand. The tone and style of writing should be consistent with the brand's personality. Third, be sure to define who can and cannot post things to the various social media sites. It's essential they be properly trained on the brand and how to communicate the brand's values and how to comply with the company's social media policies. Finally, be sure to specify the role of each social media site.       

Overall, they exist to support the core brand promise, but individually they might each have a different role, and for that you need to refer to your list of brand drivers. Each social media site is another touchpoint in the customer experience, and just as you do with your other touchpoints, you can link each social media touchpoint to a different brand driver. Let's do an example with our case study, the ParentWatch. Our overall brand promise is, The ParentWatch celebrates parenthood by helping moms and dads be the very best they can be.       

But I'm going to create my brand's Facebook page to be all about this brand driver. How busy parents do the impossible by balancing tasks and getting it all done in a day. It'll be full of helpful tips on all the things parents do. The brand's Twitter feed will be about high profile moms and dads and their successes. The Pinterest board, on the other hand, will be full of inspirational quotes about parents and how important they are to their families. I'll also create a mobile campaign, where moms and dads can opt in to receive helpful tips on teaching their kids important life lessons.       

Pretty cool. So take a look at your digital channels. Make sure they adhere to the brand book, that they have a specific role tied to a brand driver, and that they are properly managed. Taken together, social media sites create a community of brand-loyal customers who interact with each other and with your company. That's the foundation for a strong customer relationship.

- The packaging around your product is another great way to communicate your brand and build equity. It's one touchpoint within the total customer experience, but packaging is such an important touchpoint because it may be the first physical encounter your customer has with the brand. It may also be the last physical encounter they have right before they buy the product. It's that last 10 seconds right before the consumer decides to buy that makes it so important to get the design of your packaging right.       

As a brand builder, you'll wanna work closely with your internal or external design team, and you'll need to give them guidance on these three factors. First, what is the functional role of the packaging? A product's packaging can do a lot of work. It can protect the product that's inside while it's in the store or warehouse, while it's being shipped, as well as when the product's in your customer's home or work location. The packaging can explain important information about how to use the product or any warnings that might apply.       

It could explain how to store or care for the product, what ingredients are inside, or the price of the product. The packaging might have other roles such as making the product easy to find in a store, serving as a gift box, or being easy to dispose of or recycle. Next, you need to decide the key brand and promotional messages to go on the packaging. Take a look at your value proposition and reasons to believe. Also, take a look at your list of brand drivers and review the functional, economic and emotional benefits that the packaging may be able to convey.       

Use the packaging to reinforce your positioning and the brand promise. Here's an example from Coca Cola. Look at the various images on the can, a beach ball, sunglasses, surfboard, barbecue grill. Hmm, I get it. Coke means fun at the beach. That brand driver is communicated very nicely by this simple and clever design. Finally, you need to give guidance around the design of the packaging, and for this, take a look at your brand book.       

The packaging most likely will have the brand name and tag line, it should have the brand's visual identity including logos and color schemes, but also look at the brand persona. What are the personality traits of the brand and how can the packaging be designed to embody these traits? For example, take a look at this packaging from Gatorade. Even the bottle itself looks like the distinctive G in the word Gatorade. Very clever. Take a look at your current product packaging and compare it to the guidelines in your brand book.       

Is the packaging living up to all the expectations of the brand? Could your packaging take on more responsibility in the customer experience? Great packaging is much more than a slick protective wrapper around your product. Packaging design offers a unique opportunity in both the consumer and business-to-business markets to influence customers and brand perceptions. Leveraged to its fullest, it can work hard to create and maintain long-term brand loyalty.

- A unique way to communicate your brand is to create a branded space. A physical environment can deliver a meaningful brand experience to make the personality, values, and even key messages of your brand tangible. Think of it as a 3D multisensory experience versus what customers get with traditional two-dimensional media like print advertising. Now you can create branded spaces virtually anywhere. For example, your company's lobby is an excellent way to have the brand greet your visitors, like the one here at Lynda.com.       

Almost any retail store environment will carry the look and feel of the brand, like the Apple store here or this Starbucks kiosk. Any physical space is a candidate, whether on company property or off, such as trade shows, conventions, concerts, sporting events, city parks, and so on. Some companies go all the way by creating a branded museum, complete with exhibits and tours, like this one, The World of Coca-Cola.       

But you don't have to brand on such a grand scale. Even a little old park bench is a candidate for branding, like this one for the well known KitKat candy bar. Creating a branded space is more than just adding a logo. To create branded spaces, follow these steps. First, decide on the location and whether the branded space will be permanent or temporary. Be sure to select a location that's consistent with the brand's essence. Ask yourself, where would my customers expect or be happy to see my brand? Next, decide on the role of the branded space, and for this you'll need your list of brand drivers.       

Depending on the size of the space, you may want to convey just one driver, or you may decide to have different parts of the space convey separate brand drivers to create a richer customer experience. Next, decide on what specific components within the space will have the job of communicating a brand driver. To come up with really creative ideas, I like to use an innovation technique called task unification. Task unification forces you to consider every component in the space, including the nonobvious ones, like the floor, the ceiling, windows, and then you assign it the job of communicating a brand driver.       

For a complete description of how to use this technique, view the course, Business Innovation Fundamentals here at Lynda.com. Let's do an example using our case study, the ParentWatch, and we want to create a branded space in the company lobby. I want to convey the brand driver, being a parent may be the most important role in a person's life. Then I would work with my internal or external design team to transform the lobby to be all about this driver.       

For example, perhaps the walls are covered with large images, floor to ceiling, of mothers and fathers with their children. The images would show parents at all age groups, and, of course, they're all wearing the ParentWatch. As with any project related to your brand, be sure to adhere strictly to the guidelines in your brand book. Branded spaces make customers more loyal, and they make your loyal customers feel right at home.

- To keep your brands healthy, you need to measure their performance on several factors. First, what is the basic awareness of the brand? You need to conduct market research to measure the percentage of people that recognize the brand when shown the logo or hear the name of the brand. Basic awareness is especially important within your target audience, so be sure to direct your marketing research efforts to those specific customers. After a basic awareness, you also wanna measure how well the target audience understands the brand.       

Can they tell you what the brand stands for? Do they understand its distinctive qualities and characteristics? What do they associate the brand with, and how closely does it match with your core promise and brand drivers? You may have very broad awareness of the brand, but if customers aren't understanding it the right way, then you need to go back and either sharpen the drivers or communicate your brand more effectively. Finally, you wanna measure how well the brand is creating customer loyalty. And for this, you measure customer retention rates, or repeat purchases.       

Or you might measure how likely they are to recommend the brand to others. If you find yourself slipping in customer loyalty, it could be a sign of several things. First, the brand may be losing its relevance. It might not be delivering benefits that are important anymore to the customer. Or the brand lacks differentiation, the degree to which customers perceive the brand to have a differentiating possitioning distinctive from the competition. Or finally, it could be a problem with consistency, in terms of how well the brand delivers across all the touchpoints.       

If you're inconsistent in keeping the promise, people lose trust. Now, these are all the external factors that you measure out in the marketplace. You should also measure a few key internal indicators. For example, measure the clarity that employees have about what the brand stands for, and its values and positioning. How well do your employees understand the target audience, customer insights, and brand drivers? Your employees are the ones who keep the promise, so they have to have a clear understanding of it.       

Be sure to measure the commitment your company has to the brand in terms of how much support it gets. Is it getting its share of the budgets and investments needed to keep it strong? Are key individuals devoting enough time to it versus other brands or programs? Finally, try to assess how well protected the brand is. Are other companies infringing on your trademarks or designs? Are others taking unfair advantage of your brand by violating your patents or proprietary methods and materials? Hey, you've invested a lot to create and manage the brand, so it's essential that you keep others from diluting it.       

Measurement is important. If you measure these factors routinely, you'll be able to spot trends and head off any problems with your brand before they happen.

- Measuring brand performance is not enough. You've got to actively manage the health of the brand, and keep brand equity growing. But things in the world around you change, and if you're not prepared, your branding strategy may derail, and you end up losing ground in the marketplace. Sometimes those unexpected events happen internally. The priorities in any organization are constantly shifting. A change in leadership, a new acquisition, a change in strategy, or perhaps a sudden downturn in financial results might impact your branding efforts a lot.       

Disruptions can occur externally as well. New competitors emerge, new regulations or legal actions might affect your ability to market a product. A bad customer experience or a product recall may be going viral on social media sites. Consumer trends change, and all of these things might affect your ability to address the brand from moving forward. So here are some tips to help you cope with these types of challenges, and manage your brands effectively. First, all brands should have a brand steward, which is the single individual responsible for managing brand compliance within an organization, everything from product development to brand identity.       

What often happens in a company is that employees drift away from the brand standards. They're not doing it intentionally, but they might create a new version of the logo or color palette, to fit what they need at that moment in time. A brand steward watches over the organization, and reins in any initiatives that aren't in compliance. That's why many companies have the CEO or other senior officer of the company serve as the brand steward. Along with brand stewards, you need brand champions, people to represent the brand throughout the organization, and there should be one from each cross-functional department of the company, not just marketing.       

These brand champions form a committee that should hold regular brand review meetings. They have the job of reviewing brand performance measures, and recommending ways to improve performance. The committee should review and update the brand drivers, cutting out the ones that are less relevant, and creating new ones that better reflect the trends in the market. At least once a year the brand champions should conduct a brand audit. How is the brand performing on all measures, both internally and externally? What trends are encouraging, and which ones cause some concern? Finally, the brand team is responsible for reinforcing and energizing the company around the brand, and everything it stands for.       

Creating branded spaces in your company lobby or corporate training rooms is a great way to do this. Events and employee activities that celebrate brand performance get people to see how committed management is to the brand, and it helps clarify the brand's essence. Brands are both a financial and a strategic asset. They deserve all the time and attention managing them as you would any other critical asset of the business.

- The branding industry is a huge and exciting one, with many types of firms and many types of roles. Branding professionals are highly sought-after because of their ability to create and manage these important assets. In this final video, I'm gonna share with you some guidelines on how to continue developing your skills and practice your craft. First, you need to decide where you want to focus. Careers in branding fall into four broad areas, strategy, brand management design and communications.       

But within these are many different types of jobs and specialties. In communications, for example, there are jobs in digital branding, including social media and mobile brand building, or you could concentrate on more traditional media in advertising. You should also decide on the types of industries that interest you most. You want to work within the corporate side, or the agency side? You want to specialize on consumer brands, or business-to-business brands? You have many choices, once you narrow your focus, you'll need to create a development plan.       

When I give career advice, I remind people to never let a year go by without developing some part of your professional skill set. Here are some tips. First, study the classic, as well as the new academic research about branding. Always think of yourself as a lifelong learner. Read about what other companies are doing. Stay on top of new technology, watch for new trends. Branding is all around you, so take advantage of it.       

When you see a new product in a store, or you see a commercial on TV, try to figure out the branding aspect of it, and the strategy that the company is trying to use. If you consider yourself a branding professional, then I advise you to join the community of practice. Get out there and engage in organizations like the American Branding Association. Attend one of the many branding conferences held each year. Join branding-related groups on LinkedIn. Attend networking events and get to know other branding professionals.       

Be sure to practice your craft. Learning is a process of taking an action, reflecting on what happened, learning from it, and then, improving for the next time. You'll want to learn at a rate faster than the rate of change. That means you need to experiment, practice new techniques, while perfecting the old ones. And finally, keep a strong ethical base when building brands. Hey, brands are powerful, and influential.       

The products and services that are linked to your brands should be safe, and effective. The actual quality of the products should match the perceived quality as represented by the brand. Always communicate honestly, and create brand drivers that are authentic and credible. Great brand builders are as trust worthy as the brands they build. I encourage you to always do the right thing, and strive for being one of them. Congratulations on completing the course. I'm excited to see what you do with the knowledge from it, and seeing examples of your great brands in the market place.

The products and services that are linked to your brands should be safe, and effective. The actual quality of the products should match the perceived quality as represented by the brand. Always communicate honestly, and create brand drivers that are authentic and credible. Great brand builders are as trust worthy as the brands they build. I encourage you to always do the right thing, and strive for being one of them. Congratulations on completing the course. I'm excited to see what you do with the knowledge from it, and seeing examples of your great brands in the market place.