Branded Content

There is now general acceptance that a company's brand plays an important role in generating and sustaining financial performance. A company's brand can help attract new customers, keep existing customers from switching to a competitor, help pave the way for entry into new markets and regions, and even affect stock valuation.

To this last point, stock price, a BusinessWeek/JP Morgan study found that some companies enjoy most of their stock valuation as a result of their strong brand. The study found that McDonald's, for instance, attributes more than 70% of its shareholder value to its strong brand. Disney's brand contributes 68% to the company's market capitalization and Coca-Cola's brand chips in just over 50%.

To some degree or another, every company's brand contributes to its overall financial performance. That's why a company's brand story, along with its clearly articulated business objectives, should form the foundation upon which a content-centered communications plan is developed.

As has been discussed before on this site, content is the engine that drives customer engagement. To ensure the interaction with the customers is fully realized, a content-centered communications plan should map directly back to the company's business objectives and stay true to the company's brand; given a brand's powerful influence on customer perception as well as stock valuation.

A few years back I did some consulting for a publicly traded, global telecommunications company that had a brand reputation as an inventive and innovative company, which was based largely on the licensing of its extensive patent portfolio.

Every time we generated content for this company -- be it press release, an executive presentation, a video, a theme for a developer conference, or a social media program -- we always made sure that it was highlighting the company's inventive and innovative persona. In this way, every time the company used content to interact with any number of its target audiences, the company's brand image was reinforced.

If your company hasn't gone through the process recently, you might want to conduct a brand audit prior to development of your content-centered communications plan. The audit is a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of the brand involving activities (both tangible and intangible) to assess the health of your brand. This process should either confirm the status of your company's brand story, or suggest modifications to it. In any case, the audit should help you develop 3-5 brand messages, any one of which can, and should, be used when you develop content to interact with your customers.

Having your brand story clearly defined -- along with easily articulated business objectives -- will help guide the development of all of your company's content. As a result, your customer engagement will be more meaningful for you, and your target audiences.

Energizing Brands

The number of brands in the world is increasing rapidly. With that, you would think there would be a renewed effort to think about brand strategy, brand positioning etc. as the key to differentiation and the driver of corporate strategy, since research shows as much 33% of the valuation of public companies is linked to their brand. Just look at the companies with high two of the highest valuations in technology -- Apple and Google -- and think about how good they are at creating, enhancing and expanding their brands. Heck, we are so impressed by these brands that we don't even focus much on their mistakes or failures. We buy into their vision and are left in awe of their inventiveness.

These are, what the authors of a great article entitled "The Trouble with Brands," define as "energized brands." The article was published in Booz Allen's magazine Strategy + Business.

The article is well worth reading as it presents both a strong point of view and rare analytical data regarding brands (the authors developed and use Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator tool). But to summarize it , energized brands are comprised of three major components:

1. Vision. Brands with vision embody a clear direction and point of view on the world. They convey what they’re on this planet to achieve.

2. Invention. Brands that score high in invention change how people feel and the way they behave.

3. Dynamism. Brands with dynamism create excitement in the marketplace through the way they present themselves to consumers. Dynamism is the most emotional and immediately visible of the three components. It reflects the brand’s ability to inspire consumer affinity.

Clearly consumer brands are more the sweet spot for this, but you only need to overlay these three aspects as a lens to see how Apple, Google and a handful of other brands elevate themselves above the thousands of others that compete for our attention, our engagement and our loyalty. It is not just about marketing or communications to manipulate a brand. It is about vision, planning, aligning products with unmet needs in the market and defining the right customer for the product. And it only works when there is passion for excellence balanced by a culture that understands failing at times is part of the process of innovation -- as IDEO, the terrific market leader in engineering and design, likes to say, "fail often to succeed sooner!"

What Really Matters in Business

Sep/21/09 08:50 While the promise of social media continues to create a frenzy, a growing number of industry thought leaders are sorting out the proper place in the marketing food chain for this exciting new form of communications. There is no doubt social media represents new and varied opportunities for brands to engage their customers. Those among us with a bit of gray in our hair recall that it isn’t the media itself that makes the story. Our friend Ted Simon posits that this discussion is too tactical in nature as media, social or traditional, are merely channels, and that the real discussion and value is in defining the message or story and ensuring it drives business objectives. Communications is best when it tells a story and that story reflects a brand’s true attributes and supports its business objectives as opposed to frivolous, ad hoc messages haphazardly distributed with the hope that they reach a friendly ear. The executive suite still assesses business not by the number of followers the company has, but by valuation, sales, revenue and operating income. It is crucial that communications support these metrics. Measuring by followers, media clips, impressions and press releases falls far short since they are all calculations of activity not bottom line impact. It is important to take an agnostic approach to media, evaluating the merits of all media channels and tools based on their ability to deliver the right message to the right audiences in the right context to achieve business goals. Social and traditional media intersect and interact, each contributing to the other. Marketers are wise to recognize this interdependence and embrace both, evaluating the efficacy of specific channels of communication as it relates to the business needs of the brand.