First things first…
What Exactly Do We Mean by Brand?
Most people, including many successful marketing professionals and business executives, get this wrong. They use the term “brand” to describe a company’s product, or its logo, or the look and feel of its marketing materials. Nope. Those things might account for a tiny portion of what makes a brand, but they all miss the real definition.
Your brand is what people think and feel when they come in contact with your company or your products.
A brand isn’t any one thing or any one campaign. It’s the sum total of the memories of all past experiences that your prospects and customers, the media and industry analysts, and the general public have had with your company.
In other words, your brand doesn’t actually live in your advertisements, or on your website, or anywhere that your company can completely control. Your brand exists in your customers’ minds. It’s that thought or emotion they have—good or bad—when they see one of your products or hear your company’s name.
A few examples of the many things affecting your brand
When you understand that your brand will be built on the emotions your products and company evoke for your customers, you can see that a lot more goes into shaping your brand than the color-scheme your marketing team chooses.
In fact, pretty much every step your organization takes—and this includes your resellers acting on your behalf—can affect your brand. For example:
- How does a customer feel she’s treated when she interacts with your employees?
- What story does your product enable customers to tell themselves about themselves?
- How do people perceive what your executives say in the media?
- How does your company handle negative customer feedback or bad media reviews?
- What are your company’s core values? What would buying one of your products say about your customer’s values?
- What promises do your products make, and does the public believe those promises?
- How do you price your products? What does that say about your company? What would buying your products a those prices say about your customers?
- How does doing business with your resellers make your customers feel?
This list could go on and on. As we hope we’re making clear here, every time anyone across your company (or at any of your resellers) makes a decision that affects your company, or has an interaction with anyone in the public, that incident can influence your company’s brand—for better or worse.
Of course, no matter who you are or how much company authority you have, you can’t police every move that every person in your organization makes.
But if you have brand protection responsibility, it’s important for you to understand that your brand has the potential to be affected, shaped, improved, or damaged by anyone at your company, at any given moment of every day.
This course will focus on those threats to your brand that you can help guard against—such as preventing resale price erosion and keeping your products out of the hands of gray-market sellers.
First, though, let’s take a look at a concrete example of the right way to build and protect a brand. This will be fun…
Branding done magically—the Disney example
When you think of the name Disney, what immediately comes to mind?
Maybe your first thought was family-friendly entertainment, or Mickey Mouse, or the Pixar movies, or theme parks, or cruises. That’s all part of what makes Disney Disney. But the name probably conjures up a lot more, even if you don’t realize it at first. Try this thought experiment.
If you had a problem at a Disney theme park…
Imagine you were at Disneyland, and something went wrong. Maybe you couldn’t get your locker opened. Or your Fast Pass didn’t work for a particular ride. If you went to Disney’s Customer Service, what do you expect would happen? How do you imagine they’d treat you?
Spectacularly, right? They would fix the issue, whatever it was. They would make every effort to get you back on track and having fun as quickly as possible. And they would make you and your family all feel special while they did it.
You’d never expect to encounter a rude or uninterested “cast member” (Disney’s term for all of its employees at its theme parks). You’d never expect to be turned away unsatisfied, or told that helping you “isn’t my job.” You’d expect outstanding service. And you’d get it.
Because that’s what Disney means to us: An entertainment experience that’s—go ahead, admit it—magical. That sense of magic is built right into our feelings about Disney.
How does Disney do it?
Think about this. We hear everywhere in public discourse that our culture is coarsening. Network TV regularly features profanity and nudity. Politics has become cruder and nastier than it’s ever been. Commercials, billboards, magazine covers at supermarket checkout stands — all are more graphic, more explicit, and more potentially offensive than ever.
Often in this public discussion, you’ll hear parents complaining that they worry about allowing their kids unsupervised access to any popular culture: TV, video games, websites, social media, even books.
And yet, if they see the name Disney attached to it, those same parents won’t think twice about allowing their kids to see the movie, watch the show, or play the game.
Disney has earned a reputation for child-appropriate entertainment that parents can trust not to compromise their children’s innocence or undermine the parents’ own values. As a result, simply knowing that it is a Disney product is almost always enough to earn the approval and comfort of even the most protective parents.
So how have they accomplished this? How has Disney built such a powerful, trusted brand? There are a lot of factors at play in Disney’s brand magic, but let’s consider just one of things they’ve done so brilliantly:
Disney built its brand around positive, family-friendly fare—and it protects and reinforces that singular message every day.
Whatever the actual product or experience a customer purchases—a day at an amusement park, a movie, even a cruise—that customer knows it was designed for families and the content will be appropriate for young children.
In other words, Disney has made a clear promise to customers, and it has always kept that promise.
They certainly could have gone for edgier content, and perhaps earned some short-term profits by shocking customers with out-of-character experiences at their parks or in their films. But that would have meant breaking Disney’s family-friendly promise. And that would have undermined the company’s multibillion-dollar long-term brand value.
Making a clear promise to a specific type of customer, and keeping that promise year after year for decades, is one way that Disney has made its products the default choice for customers—even if all they know about the product is that Disney made it.