100 Great Branding Ideas

Sarah McCartney

Description

Every company, product and service is considered to be a brand today. How you manage and grow that brand can make or break your business. This book contains 100 great branding ideas, extracted from the world's best companies.Ideas provide the fuel for individuals and companies to create value and success. Indeed the power of ideas can even exceed the power of money. One simple idea can be the catalyst to move markets, inspire colleagues and employees, and capture the hearts and imaginations of customers. This book can be that very catalyst. Each branding idea is succinctly described and is followed by advice on how it can be applied to the reader's own business situation. A simple but potenitally powerful book for anyone seeking new inspiration and that killer application.

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814382618
• Langue: English

Extrait

GREAT BRANDING IDEAS
Sarah McCartney
Copyright 2012 Sarah McCartney Cover art: Opal Works Co. Ltd.
First published in 2012 by Marshall Cavendish Business An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International PO Box 65829 London EC1P 1NY [e-mail] and 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196 [e-mail] www.marshallcavendish.com/genref
Other Marshall Cavendish offices: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196 Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited
The right of Sarah McCartney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.
The author and publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book and disclaim liability arising directly and indirectly from the use and application of this book.
All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain necessary copyright permissions. Any omissions or errors are unintentional and will, if brought to the attention of the publisher, be corrected in future printings.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-981-4382-61-8
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Limited, Padstow, Cornwall
CONTENTS
Introduction
The ideas
1 Know what a brand is
2 Sound like your values
3 Know where you stand
4 Stay consistent
5 Make it cute
6 Stealth branding
7 Open a Museum
8 Naming 1: Give yourself two meanings
9 Naming 2: Renaming your brand
10 Naming 3: Name your company after yourself
11 Naming 4: A Big Hint
12 Naming 5: Be shocking
13 Naming 6: Wordplay
14 Naming 7: Be poetic
15 One Product: Limited edition packaging
16 Revive a vintage brand
17 Raid the archive for classics
18 Logos 1: Logos go large
19 Have the nicest people
20 Play a tune
21 It s what s inside that counts
22 Pricing 1: Setting your selling price
23 Pricing 2: Never discount
24 Pricing 3: Be the cheapest
25 Pricing 4: Keep a bargain basement
26 Pricing 5: Give great value
27 Pricing 6: Be the most expensive
28 Customer tiers
29 Be good
30 Move the goalposts
31 Be an exemplary employer
32 Being Green 1: Reusable packaging
33 Being Green 2: Eco bags
34 Fearless designs
35 Tell your people what you stand for
36 Live your brand values
37 e-Branding 1: Building your brand s website
38 e-Branding 2: Emails
39 The stamp
40 Why not stick with the generic?
41 Help the media
42 Make friends with the press
43 When it all goes right, stay with it
44 Carrier bags, in colour
45 Sell your own samples
46 Shape
47 Specialise
48 Be an expert
49 e-Branding 3: YouTube
50 Brand your vehicles ...
51 ... and drive well
52 e-Branding 4: Email signatures
53. The building 1: Recreating the history
54. The building 2: Go out
55. The building 3: A careful copy
56. Hop on the bandwagon
57. Go where the action is
58. Flag it up
59. Be part of the experience
60. Pick a colour
61. Been there, done that ...
62. Add to the atmosphere
63. Be friendly
64. Get a gran in
65. e-Branding 5: Cut the FAQs
66. Try the NPS
67. e-Branding 6: Twitter
68. e-Branding 7: Facebook
69. Mascot
70. Sponsor a team
71. Have a catchphrase
72. Get it right and no-one notices.
73. e-Branding 8: Search engines
74. Localisation
75. Music
76. Distinctive Designs
77. e-Branding 9: Your own blog
78. Logos 2: The symbol
79. Logos 3: Lettering
80. Write the book
81 Follow your nose
82 Question everything
83 Brand tone of voice
84 Brand extension
85 The biscuit test
86 Send customers away empty-handed
87 Tell your story
88 Innovation
89 Creative partnerships
90 Spot the celebrity
91 Brand guidelines
92 Beware the brand s evil twin
93 Entrepreneurial brands
94 Logos 4: Initials
95 Straplines
96 Be the generic
97 The tag
98 Add a sofa
99 Support your cause
100 Do something outrageous

About the Author
For all the things I ve picked up about brands along the way, I d like to thank colleagues at D Arcy McManus Masius and the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and clients past and present.
I d like to say thankyou (which is one word, despite spellchecker s determination to break it into two) to the people who make me think hard, including Mary Linehan (PR goddess), Stephen Zades, Nick Randell, Ben Afia and the board of 26.
Particular thanks to Martin Liu at Marshall Cavendish who listens to my ideas, quite often commissions them, then lets me get on and write them.
INTRODUCTION
Whether you run a multinational or a social enterprise, a charity or a one-man-band, you have a brand.
Branding is all about deciding where you stand, and what makes you different from the others, then showing and telling the difference as clearly as you can to make you brand stand out.
Everything that a brand is and does forms part of its identity.
Building a brand s identity makes it more recognisable, familiar and reassuring-as long as you get it right. If it s all going well, then people are more likely to chose your brand, use it and tell their friends about it.
Your branding is working when you ve got people saying, Yes, I know them. They re the people who ...
... have the big blue building in the centre of town.
... make those delicious biscuits.
... sponsor our football team.
... designed my favourite jacket.
What s important is that people remember the good things about your brand, come back to it or recommend it to people they know, and don t get you mixed up with someone else.
In this book, there are 100 branding ideas; some are about brand strategy and some about specific actions you could take. Use them to give you direction, or to help evaluate the branding you re already doing. You can read it from start to finish, or you can also pick a page at random.
All the stories are here to make a point, not just as anecdotes. I use them to shed light on a situation that might arise again, and which you might approach differently for your own brand.
They won t all be relevant to you right now but some of them will, and I do hope they give you something new to think about, debate and adapt for your own use.
Brands are people s and organisations intellectual property, so you ll have to adapt some of the examples I ve written about before you can apply a similar idea to your own organisation. But that s where innovation and creativity come in; define what you can and can t do, and this will help you to invent a your own solution to a particular problem.
PS
Point 101: Tell the truth. In these days of social media and the speed that news can travel around the Internet, if you try to put a glossy face on a grubby reality, you ll get found out. The best branding comes from building a great organisation, then letting people know all about it.
KNOW WHAT A BRAND IS

People think they know what brands are, but often they don t. I ve heard business people say, Oh no, we don t really have a brand, we just run a business. Clothes shoppers will tell me, I don t buy brands, they re too expensive. I go to the Gap, Next or Uniqlo.
A brand isn t something that s too expensive for most of us to buy-that s a luxury brand. A brand is any product or service (and occasionally an individual) that stands out from the others around it because of its positioning or its personality. All organisations are brand owners whether they like it or not, and they ve a responsibility for how other people regard that brand.
The most important thing is to stand out.
The idea
A brand is much more than a logo or a name. As well as its easily defined features, like its colour and its location, it s made up of the feelings it evokes in people. Each individual will feel something different about the brand according to personal experience, and this is something a brand owner can t control.
However you should still give it your best shot. As the brand owner, it s your responsibility to influence the way people think about your brand, and you do that by taking care of each experience your customers have when they come into contact with the organisation. Dividing a brand into positioning and personality comes from an excellent academic book, Branding In Action, by Graham Hankinson and Philippa Cowking.
When they talk about positioning, they mean where your brands fit compared with all the others you compete with. Where do you fit in the price versus quality scale? And what do people use your brand for?
With personality, Hankinson Cowking s book includes things that you definitely control, like the typeface you use your corporate colours your logo, where you re based, where people come into contact with you.
Personality is also made up of perceptions which are much more difficult to pin down. How do people see you? Are you traditional or modern? Are you safe or risky? Do people think you re really good value or cheap? Do people think your excellent quality or way too expensive, or both?
When you know what s at the heart of your brand, it can help to define what you should do next.
In practice
Look at your brand positioning. On the price scale, where do you fit among the brands you compete