Brand Builder Box™ Blog

The new Amazon Cube will be shipped on June 21, 2018. This is the first TV "remote control" that is 100% voice controlled, and it is not a marginal improvement over conventional remote controls. It is certainly considered as a technology and usability jump of magnitudes. But this is not the first time Amazon jumped the curve. In the mid 90's, Amazon was the first to sell books online and became a major player in the book retail industry. Amazon has announced to implement the delivery of products via drones. These are two more examples where Amazon is creating solutions that are not just improvements of a certain offering. They mark milestones in the evolution of the usage of technology. Amazon seems to follow the same path as Apple did by doing what Steve Jobs said once: make products not twice as good but 10 times better . Does your company have the ability to jump the curve? Let's assume you have an insurance brokerage firm. Can you create a service for your cl...

Imagine a product that is very unique but does not have any value for anyone. You might agree that this product would not be worth much. Now, think of a product that is very valuable but not unique, then the product would not be worth much either because a lot of competitors produce the same product and there is an over-supply, which causes prices to plummet and margins for the producer become only sustainable for mass production. In other words, a company has the best selling proposition when its products are unique and valuable to the customers. The same is true for brands. A brand will need to be unique and valuable, so people feel drawn to the brand. It is remarkable that big brands have figured out their formula for brand success and are constantly developing their brand to stay relevant. So, it is no wonder that big brands become bigger over time.  Brandz.com analyzes hundreds of brands and creates an annual report for each country and for the world. These repo...

I grew up in Europe in a country next to a very small republic called " German Democratic Republic" GDR . There was nothing democratic about that country, it was a dictatorship and economic development was non-existent.  Because we had relatives in the GDR my family was allowed to visit once a year, so we crossed the  Iron Curtain  a few times before and after The Berlin Wall came down. The city we went to is called  Jena , a small town located about 100 miles south of Berlin.  Volks Eigener Betrieb (VEB) means in English publicly-owned business. Every business in the GDR was a member of an industry-wide Kombinat that managed all vertical departments like production, research, development, and sales.  What I witnessed then left a deep impression on me. I was a teenager at the time and I only understood later what I saw then: a country where brands had been completely suppressed .  This experience has given me my mot...

Every time a person sees, feels, hears or smells anything about your brand it will make an impression on the person. It will tell a story about your brand. These events are called touchpoints. The sum of all touchpoints a person has with your brand is the experiences the person has with your brand. If it is a good experience and it creates good feelings for that person, your brand might gain that person one day as a customer. The above graphic that looks like a sun is an illustration of (almost) all possible touchpoints people can have with a brand. The job of a brand manager is to control as many touchpoints as possible. 

On October 6, 2011, the day after Steve Jobs died, Guy Kawasaki gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO Summit. He talked about lessons he learned from Steven. And one lesson he mentioned was "jump the curve". What Steve meant by that statement is not really a new concept but it makes clear what entrepreneurs really need to do if they want to become and stay relevant.  You certainly have seen a typical product life cycle curve that every product runs through. The picture below illustrates this curve. What Steve is referring to is the fact that if companies, especially start-ups, want to avoid the harsh headwind from their competition, and if they like to grow their business, they need to be innovative and bring a new product onto the market, which is unique and valuable to the customers – they need to jump onto a new product lifecycle curve.   

The day after Steve Jobs died, Guy Kawasaki gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO Summit. After watching his speech I felt that many of his lessons really touch on doing great branding, so I  summarized these 12 lessons in this post. Experts are clueless, don't listen to them if you want to create a new product sub-category. You cannot ask customers what they want if you plan to develop a new sub-category. They will think status quo and just try to improve the existing products marginally.  The biggest challenge will win. Challenge your team to make big jumps, they will pay off.  Design truly counts, use big graphics and big fonts. Jump curves from one product cycle to another and don't follow one to the end. His motto is Change or Die.  It is important to make big inventions – make products not twice as good but 10 times better. Think telegraph to telephone.  All that really matters is if it works or not. Real entrepreneurs don't compete on pri...

After we develop a new brand we love to measure the performance of the brand. So, we have developed a simple method to evaluate our client's new brands on a regular basis. We measure brand performance by looking at the following three parameters: Demand : monthly sales volume  Speed : how fast is a customer going through the buying process Price : selling for a premium without offering discounts Typically, we expect to see a significant change in all of the three parameters. Below is a sample graph showing the trendline for one year. The re-branding was done in April that year. https://stickybranding.com/3-metrics-to-manage-brand-performance/