Brand Builder Box™ Blog

It is important to make a distinction between the term Brand and Branding. If we use the analogy of an iceberg, things underneath the waterline are represented by the term Brand. They are not immediately seen by the audience, like employees, suppliers, and even the company's products or services, customers and other partners represent the brand. In contrast, Branding is an activity that is visible and is considered the process of  designing brand identity .  Items that are the result of branding include all identifying artifacts like the logo, icons, avatars, taglines and the company name. The output of branding activities consists also of a style guide, employee guidelines, the vision and mission statement and a list of company core values. If we go one step further and create branded touchpoints like flyers, business cards, posters, etc., we consider this step Marketing. Marketing is illustrated as ships that come and go from the iceberg. ...

If your customers can choose a product from you or from your competition and only compare prices, quality, customer experience or service, your business is faced with a Brand Preference Competition . In other words, you are operating in the exact same market with your competition without having a real unique selling proposition. In this case, you have only been making incremental innovations to your products or services, and you only win over your competition because your brand is better than the competition. However, if you can make substantial innovations to your product or service, your brand wins because there is no competition. Your improvements have become a must-have to your customers. David Aaker calls this B rand Relevance Competition . He says companies should look at underserved segments and watch their customers closely to find out what substantial improvement can increase their brand's relevance. Marriott has done just that by observing hotel guests and dev...

David Aaker said once, "Higher Purpose Wins." With that, he means that firms should find a higher purpose for what they are doing in order to be able to create what customers are looking for. By making a difference in the world, companies will fill a need and can create a business model around it.

Steve Jobs once said: "Our customers want to know who we are and what we stand for. Where do we fit in this world? Company managers should ask themselves how their company can make a dent in the universe. " Companies need to find ways to allow their purpose to express itself in a way that it's gonna resonate with its core group. There should be a bigger part that the brand is involved with. Then the brand got a bigger agenda, which the core group also gonna resonates with. To achieve this, companies often honor certain groups and make their audience feel like they want to become part of that group.

It is much easier to sell the results of a product than the product itself. That's why you should not talk about the product, you should talk about how this product will change the customer's life. Customers are not interested in a certain product, they are interested in solving their problem. You need to find your customer's sweet spot. Feature Vs. Benefit by Ingemar Anderson Here is a great video on this subject on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-Yr9e7X6wjU

An elevator speech is a clear, brief message about your company or organization.  This message is ideally just one sentence and communicates who your audience is, how your customers can benefit from your offerings, and  what you're offering .  The elevator speech is typically about 30 seconds – the time it takes people to ride from the top to the bottom of a building in an elevator. Here is how you should structure your elevator speech: "We help X to do Y by providing Z." X: Your Target Audience Be as specific as you can who your customer is.  Y: What Problem are you solving? Be as specific as you can what actual, real problem you are solving Z: Your Offering Be as specific as you can what you are offering Examples are:  "We help business owners and leaders create powerful brands and produce all brand touch-points by offering brand sessions and a cloud-based brand development system."  "Our company helps individuals and companies to find the...

Internal branding is the active management of the company culture within an organization. The company culture might be where employees become more customer focused and more business focused. Internal branding is an organized, communications and behavior driven process, which leads to the desired brand identity. Here are 5 steps to build a strong internal brand 1. Develop 3 to 7 Company Values Company values represent to core of your business.  These values are the reason the customers trust you and buy from your company. The best way to develop these values is to work with the executive team and revisit the reason why the company is in business. Revisit the vision and the mission statement and carve out the essence of your business.  2. Create Effective and Attractive Visual Touchpoints Communicating the company values properly is as important as creating them. Don't stop after you created the company values and expect that everybody will start living by them. ...

Your tagline or slogan is what describes what sets you apart from your competition. It is the reason why you earn the market share that you aim for. For example, Lyft's tagline is “your friend with a car.” Uber's tagline is “your private driver.” It becomes clear that Lyft's market share are riders that look for a more casual and easy-going ride, whereas Uber riders are looking for a more reliable, business-like experience. Here is an infographic of four very different industries that own a certain market share and their taglines. Important to note is that every single company owns this certain category in the industry. Industry Infographs by Ingemar Anderson Every brand tagline should fulfill the following criteria: The tagline resonates with your target audience The tagline captures your mission   The tagline reflects your persona 

Top Ten Branding Mistakes   – Series #1 of 10 – Mistake #1: "Starting Marketing Without Clear Branding" Can you market   your   products or services without having a brand name? No, you can't.  During 36 years in business,  Kitsap Printing  has seen the best and the worst in corporate branding when printing our customer's marketing material. This experience has led us to the decision to share our knowledge, so we are introducing   Kitsap Inspire™   and   Brand Builder Box™   under our umbrella company   Reprospace, LLC in Poulsbo . My name is Ingemar Anderson and I am working with my assistant Cheryl Wasser and my team to develop new services that our customers have been asking us about. We are now offering branding workshops that use a new and unique cloud-based tool that captures and evaluates everything about your brand. So, we thought we would start a series of emails to share our experience and tips with...

Top   Ten   Branding   Mistakes  – Series #2 of 10 – Mistake #2 "Assuming creating a cool logo is enough" Everything your customer sees tells a story. Branding  touches everything you say, do, and ... not do. Good Morning, First of all, I need to apologize to you. Many of the recipients of my last email might have received an email starting with the greeting: "Hi there at, <company name>”. My intention was to fill in your company name but I mixed up the fields, so some only received “Hi there at,”. Such a greeting is certainly not only a turn-off but also bad  branding . So, this is the unplanned  branding  mistake #1 and 1/2:  make sure you build a complete lead and customer list, test every  branding  touch-point you create and make sure it looks and feels right . Again, I am sorry for my mistake. Now, I am working on our database that has over 1,000 customer records to complete the...

Do you want to know what's hidden deep down in your brand? Deep Branding is when you look carefully at both sides of your brand: Inside your business: dive deep into your own business vision, mission, and values. Outside of your business: look every possible touchpoint between your company and your potential audience.  Deep Branding is a relatively new term that describes activities performed by company owners, managers or third-parties that plan to look at more than just their logo and their website when branding a company, product or service. We have developed Brand Builder Box™ to provide a platform that allows deep branding. Our online-platform enables to run and document brand workshops and audits. You can create a free account here  Brand Audit Account .  I ngemar Anderson Schedule an Appointment Ingemar Anderson President   |  Reprospace, LLC Mobil:  +1-206-849-6855 Main...

Success is all about values. Steve Jobs said once:  “Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs And it all starts with internal branding . Internal branding is the active management of the company culture within an organization. The company culture might be where employees become more customer focused and more business focused. Internal branding is an organized, communications and behavior driven process, which leads to a desired brand identity.

In branding, focus is maybe the most important task to follow. But it also means giving something up. Have you seen these cluttered places and you ask your self, "what are they actually selling, why would I come to this store?" Just imagine a store like this one. Obviously, this store might be out of business. Be #1 in a small category than #2 in a big one Brand guru David Aaker Positioning Expert Jack Traut: differentiate or die Differentiate Collaborate Innovate Validate Cultivate

Branding is a very complex task. In my opinion, this might be the most adequate statement about branding. This is not only because branding touches everything you do, say and ... not do, or because branding is a life-long task, or because branding is complex and requires to be insanely consistent. What makes branding really complex is that fact that you need a whole web of people and companies working together to make a brand really successful. Here are just a few: Executives Strategy  Consultants  Design Firms  Advertising Agencies  Research Companies  PR Firms  Industrial Designers  Environmental Designers  Employees  Suppliers  Distributors  Partners  Stockholders  Customer‘s  Now, of course, many of the tasks can be done in-house with your own people. But the bigger a company gets and the more tasks are done in a more deeper fashion, the brand management team needs to think abou...

Is This How Your Audience Sees You? One of the tasks early in the brand building process is doing research about your audience. In my definition, your audience are all people who get or can get in touch with your brand at one point or the other. This also include people or groups who see your brand even if they did not specifically look for what you are offering, or even if they are not even remotely potential customers. In the "Listening" stage of your brand building process you will find out what your audience sees. Here are some techniques that help find out what they see: Asking for a review on your website or in invoices that you send out to your customers Personally ask individuals  Research the Internet to find comments and mentioning about your company

What an exciting moment. Our new blog all about branding is up and running. Our goal is to provide a wealth of information all around the subject of branding, rebranding and marketing. Please do not hesitate to comment on any of the posts. You do not need to log in or have an account to post. We look forward to hearing from you. Ingemar Anderson Schedule an Appointment Ingemar Anderson President   |  Reprospace, LLC Mobil:  +1-206-849-6855 Main:   +1-360-697-2286 Ext. 404 Direct: +1-360-626-0241 Email:   ingemar.anderson@reprospace.com 1450 NW Finn Hill Road PO Box 572 Poulsbo, WA 98370 WWW.REPROSPACE.COM         Stay Branded –Stay Relevant ?  Visit us at   BrandBuilderBox.com Affordable  Graphic   Design  – Stunning Results?  Hire us for your Design Project   KitsapInspire.com We publish Local Authors . Find out about ...

Back in the 1990's when I went grocery shopping one thing that was often on my list was orange juice. I had purchased Tropicana orange juice many times before and enjoyed it, so that is the brand I always had on my list. I searched and searched and could not find it, so I ended up buying another brand. This happened many times until I found out that Tropicana has suddenly changed their branding. Everything had changed, starting with the logo, the fonts and the overall packaging. If you are wondering what happened to this new confusing branding, Tropicana has reversed the brand to its original, and you will only find the original design in stores today. This is one crass example how you can confuse your brand audience. Brand confusion is maybe the biggest branding mistake of all. You should avoid the following to not confuse your audience: Inconsistencies with the company or product logo Inconsistencies with brand fonts Inconsistencies with brand colors Change of the compa...

Over the last decade, it has become more apparent that one of the ways the mega-tech companies grow is acquiring smaller startups. Business Insider has created a graphic that shows a great chart of larger companies and the brands they have purchased over the years. What's interesting is that many of these acquisitions were based on a brand that a startup has created. http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2017/ranking/

A tagline says in 3 to 5 words what sets your business apart. The tagline sets your focus on what your brand core is. Famous examples are Got Milk, Just do it by Nike, Think different from Apple, The Ultimate Driving Machine by BMW.  Why did they become so memorable to us? The two things you should consider when creating your tagline are made your tagline unique and simple .

Edward de Bono* brought up the term Unique Buying State, UBS. He wanted to set this in contrast with USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Nike's success is a solid proof that de Bono’s concept works. "As a weekend athlete, my two nagging doubts are that I might be congenitally lazy, and I might have little actual ability. I’m not really worried about my shoes. But when the Nike folks say ‘Just do it’, they’re peering into my soul. I begin to feel that, if they understand me that well, their shoes are pretty good. I’m willing to join the tribe of Nike”  Cohesivethinking.com So, in other words, brands are the little gods of modern life, each fulfilling a different need, activity, mood or situation. *) Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono (born 19 May 1933)[1] is a Maltese physician, psychologist, philosopher, author, inventor and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote the book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the teaching of thinking as a subj...

A brand creates kind of a tribe

Every branding effort must be a combination of a creative mind and a rational approach. The reason is that a brand touches the emotional and the organizational aspect of a business. This is just another reason why branding is such a difficult undertaking. Marty Neumeier describes the gap in his book The Brand Gap as the gap between the creative and the rational brain. A good brand manager is able to combine these to sides of the gap and makes the creative and the organizational, rational side work together. As you have experienced in your career, creative departments and the administrative departments don't typically work together smoothly.

If a company can create a product or a service that has features that are valuable and unique they have created a new subcategory.  New industry sub-categories are based on existing industries but add a component to it that has a crucial impact on its usage? Best examples are Apple's invention of the Personal Computer, Henry Ford's production of better cars, and Lyft's filling a new niche in the rideshare industry. The most successful brands have created a new category in their industry. Once I heard the saying that nerds & hippies were typically the ones that create new categories because they tend to dislike mediocracy or status quo. They typically don't make decisions based on a set number of choices. They would decide for a solution outside of the norm.  Steve Jobs also calls this phenomenon "jumping curves." What he means by that is that every product or any other development follows a life cycle that typically starts slow, accelerates ...