Brands from Asia -Singapore Airlines

Recognised by travellers as one of the best airlines in the world ....... Singapore Airlines has chosen to focus on one aspect of the experiential brand strategy - in-flight hospitality and warmth symbolised by the Singapore Girl . The brand promise has been built around this experience rather than the product features and benfits...

Ever wonder what the story behind the Singapore girl is ..and how many of us are aware that Madame Tussaud’s Museum in London started to display the Singapore Girl in 1994 as the first commercial figure ever....Martin Roll delves deeper

Singapore Airlines - An Excellent Asian Brand

branding tips

All gurus seem to be consistent in their views on branding...and the advice is fairly simple
...brands are not built overnight. They need time , authenticity, patience, consistency, focus , energy and an unabiding attention towards building an outstanding customer experience.


Philip Kotler’s Top Five Marketing Tips.


1. Come in under the radar"Building a brand is a roll-out process, not a drop everywhere in the world at one time. The key to brand-building is to have something good that you roll-out in a very intelligent way. Maybe even invisibly for a while because you want to be under the radar screen of competitors."

2. Know Your customer"… marketing has evolved to be not only product centered but customer centered. We are saying you've got to understand and choose the customers you want to serve. Don't just go after everyone. Define the target market carefully through segmentation and then really position yourself as different and as superior to that target market. Don't go into that target market if you're not superior.”

3. Own your branding"We are not in a state of competition anymore; we're in a state of hyper-competition. So people are desperately looking for handles -- functional features, emotional appeals -- that will draw people to their product. We should think of owning a word or a phrase that helps to build customer retention and loyalty.”

4. Stay ahead of the competition"The worst thing is that if something works, your competitors are going to clone it and before you know it anything that you had as a differentiator is imitated by the others. So you're in the business of constant innovation. Constantly asking yourself, 'Three years from now, what will our differentiator be?'"

5. Make it an experience"There's a big movement to say, 'we're not just adding services to our business and our product, we're actually trying to design an experience.' You'll see that language being used. We're in the experience design business. Starbucks is a very good example where coffee is coffee but they decided to sell it differently, put a higher price, make it good-tasting and make it an experience rather than just some coffee."

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source : brand autopsy

branding terms

some frequently used terms in brand management

Brand positioning :The distinctive position that a brand adopts in its competitive environment to ensure that individuals in its target market can tell the brand apart from others. Positioning involves the careful manipulation of every element of the marketing mix.

Brand Patterns :“Brand Patterns” cause consumers to migrate their value from existing brands to other brands. These patterns help brand managers understand “what might come ahead” in terms of changing consumer needs and how innovation/modification changes to meet their needs.

Brand promise :The spoken or unspoken expression of the continuing, important and specific benefits clients connect with a firm, service or product

Brand commitment :The degree to which a customer is committed to a given brand in that they are likely to re-purchase/re-use in the future. The level of commitment indicates the degree to which a brand's customer franchise is protected form competitors.

Brand You

Investments in building brand YOU...ever given entrepreneurship a thought...

Rajesh Jains emergic.org ( Rajesh's internet portal Indiaworld was acquired in 1999 for a cool US$ 115mn in what was then one of Asia's largest internet deals) has some of the most profound thoughts on entrepreneurship. follow the link as Rajesh unfolds his own experiences....

Check out how they can help the brand called YOU....

http://www.emergic.org/collections/tech_talk_my_life_as_an_entrepreneur.html

trivia

some little known facts

The Gap began as a chain of outlets to sell Levi's jeans only...
It was Mickey Drexler who gradually transformed The Gap into a brand that beat Levi Strauss in its own game and became a global power to reckon with.
The company that started out selling Levi's jeans ended up leaving Levi Strauss behind..

Phil Knight , taught accounting before starting Nike

source: A new Brand World - Scott Bedbury

Time your story well...

Steve Jobs "You've got to find what you love" speech has inundated the web and blog world..the speech is almost on all blogs i visit..( including mine)...

for one ..it is straight from the heart.....when you mean each and every word you speak..people read and re - read and pass around..

then it definitely is a great speech....( actually all stories that urge you to follow your dreams always are....)

and most of it all it comes from a brand called Steve Jobs...wonder if in the pre ipod days ...the speech would've generated the same response...

Do you have a great story...make sure it is heard...and time it well...

a great story

Starbucks....a great story...beautifully told....

All brands need a great story ....and the story HAS TO BE TOLD...You cant just sit on a story and expect the world to know about it

Whats your story??

Brands are Fractal

Metacool reinforces the fact that a brand is sum total of all experiences a consumer has of the brand...

"Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary:

A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no matter how close you zoom in)

Good brands are fractal. Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you'll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself. Since "brand" is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything -- large and small -- is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing."

Why we buy

An interesting insight on why we buy from brand play "As marketers, we often talk about demographics and customer segmentation as if people make buying decisions based on who they are right now. Yet personal experience tells a different story. I find that I buy based on who I want to be, not who I am.
Think about that nice suit you bought, or a Rolex, or a Lacoste polo. You're not trying to make a good impression, you're trying to make a better impression.
Think about the health drink you bought this morning, or the Nike watch that tells you how far you've run and at what incline. Those weren't about who you are, they were about who you're trying to become.
As customers, we constantly look to a future self. If I buy this, what will that make me? As marketers, we'd better know the answer. If you buy us, you'll become X. The fact that "aspirational" is still absent from most dictionaries (including Microsoft Word) is baffling to me.
Where do you want to go today, and what brands will help you get there?"

a few books on brands

Brandplay recommends some books on branding
Link: Confessions of a Brand Evangelist: Top 10 Brand Books

You

A must read : 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

credibility

A friend recently asked me as to what i attribute as the single most important factor for a successful brand..In all the brand terms you use he said....brand awareness, relevance, culting, dissonance, pollution etc etc..what would you single out..

Credibility

The single most important factor why a brand is a brand ...Just take a look at your own purchase behaviour..why are you buying that toothpaste you just bought..experience tells you this is the best tasting, or the best tartar control solution available...you are buying it because it holds a credible position built from either experiences or recommendation again from a credible source

The customer experience is what builds credibility and that is what builds brands....

cult brands

my impression of a harley owner...a 44 yrs old accountant...wakes up at the crack of dawn..checks if theres a speck of dust on his magnificient machine...cleans it..goes to work...looks out of the window every few hours while out for a smoke to check his mean machine...keeps on taking deep breaths while riding the machine...again takes a deep breath when he parks it and checks his garage at least two times before the end of the day..

and on his way to the regular HOG( harley owners group)....wears a harley jacket and boots amongst other accessories even at 45degrees.. has a harley tattoo somewhere on his arms or back.... He does not buy a Harley..he joins it..

A harley tattoo, not buying but joining.......i do not think there can be any bigger example then that of a brand transcending the brand relevance hemisphere into a cult....

Branding of days..

Its a Sunday morning....and it reinforces how a brand to a consumer is a sum total of all the experiences he has had around the brand .....case in point brand saturday and brand monday...

brand saturdays brand mantra the way most consumers would see it could be envisaged in a single word..........YAHOOOO and brand mondays( or more like a precursor to brand monday)......reactivate the alarm clock

And these have been shaped purely on the wholesome experience these brands have provided ...and just look at how the brand proposition of brand saturday gives it such an edge over all othere day brands.... the brands relavance is it..??? Any takes on what would be the brand mantras of the other days???

On brand awareness

quite some discussion going on there..on the importance or not of brand awareness ..one compelling observation of scott bedbury's is that massive amount of brand awareness will not improve a flawed business model..top of the mind recall for a brand that does not have relevance to you remains that; just recall..so while i recall bata as the first branded shoe that i was exposed to..i go and buy a Nike because Nike is what has relevance to me...and millions of $'s that Bata might be spending to create an awareness goes down the drain .....so the key lies in not just brand awareness but brand relevance....

having said that , how does a brand become relevant without creating awareness...can awareness be damned..no ...the challenge here is to create an awareness of the brand's relevance to the target consumer.

Points to ponder

Al and Laura Ries have been the strongest proponents of narrowing the focus. Laura's rant on coke zero and C2 holds true for all businesses where brand extension is looked upon with excitement ..To me most brand extensions are either desperate attempts to rejuvenate or move away from existing brands...

Having said that it is important to get an understanding as to why a product like coke zero would be envisaged at all..Is it more of a prop for an existing brand....so when it falls let it fall on the brand extension..

Similarly on the subject of narrowing focus..would Nike be what it is today had it stuck to its narrowed focus of shoes for athletes only...It moved to the fitness segment..and that is what helped it to grow beyond the sub billion dollar brand to what it is today.....not exactly a case of moving into a completely different catergory but yeah they had to move on and engage a larger audience...

Same on Kodak..yes their forte is print photography and not digital but when the entire industry is going digital..what were their options..??

Little would've the Norse Brandr known that it would give birth to one of the most talked about phenomenon in todays organisations..almost accorded the status of an organisational religion..

finally the blog has kicked off..