What is your brand worth on the open market or as a key part of the selling price of your business?
How do great brands become worth their weight in gold?
Is your name just another noodle in the soup?

Brands fail miserably when they are based upon their own opinions and theories instead of customer needs and wants.  Breck, via the “Breck girl”, was one of the most successful brands to reach out to women; it was such an American icon that the Smithsonian Institute devoted an exhibit to her.  The Breck executives ceased the ads when they became tired of an advertising campaign that was the most successful in company history and that had shattered all previous sales records.  Sales dropped dramatically, the company scrambled to bring her back as the breck women.  When that didn’t work, executives slashed pricing and added almost three-dozen varieties of Breck.  Breck management lost sight of consumer preferences and tried to over market their customers.  Consumers were so confused that the brand was never able to recover.

In comparison, staying aware of and true to your customers’ motivations has a proven brand-building effect. Look at the strategic brand transformation BMW made with its brand that reversed its sales ratio from one to three to outselling Mercedes Benz three-to-one.  Through research of their own distinctive attributes, combined with research of their customer base’s perceptions and desires, BMW developed the message  “The ultimate driving machine” and deployed it internally and externally in a variety of tactics.

Apple has been struggling with their brand for many years.  They lead the computer market in product innovation and have the most loyal customers of any product brand.  They’ve had only two percent market share in their product category however.  They have never been able to penetrate the household computer market and consequentially drive their sales and market share up.  Enter ipod; they answered consumer demands with innovation and service to back it with an entirely new product segment.  Apple created a need in the market and delivered it.  They followed it with integrated marketing techniques and have continued to stay on top of it.  The true test for Apple is ahead as the trans-mobile music device market heats up.

The common elements in these brand successes are not just inside-out or outside-in approaches, but using both to create an integrated and interrelated strategy built on these cornerstones

Cornerstone 1:  You must determine your organization’s Unique Selling Advantages.
Pull together six to ten people in your organization for an intense session of soul-searching.  You’ll need a good cross-section of positions in this session; you need to get beyond management and in the trenches of the organization.  This half-day session will surprise you, as it will pull out many surprises.

Cornerstone 2:  Research down to the core and solidify your customers’ Unique Buying Advantages.
Plan out your channel of distribution on a dry-erase board and then transfer it to paper.  This should include everything from revenue-stream channels, competitor issues, to opportunities and industry details.  How will you talk to each audience segment?  Create the right questions to produce a survey.  This data will be extremely essential in getting it right!

Cornerstone 3:  Crafting your Big Idea to get attention.
Every marketing and advertising program needs a Big Idea.  Your customer’s Unique Buying Advantages will guide you in crafting the message that will stop your audience in their tracks.  This message speaks to the Buying Advantages, not the Selling Advantages.  Discipline yourself to ignore the clutter and avoid meaningless messaging.

Cornerstone 4:  Holding everyone accountable through Intra-gration.
Involve all touch points of your business with understanding, espousing and living your brand.  It’s a good idea to survey your internal customers to get a sense of their interpretation of the brand.  Have each employee establish their goals that will assist the organization in achieving their broader goals.  Each employee is responsible for carrying out the message and protecting the brand every day.  There is no bigger task than servicing customers.

Cornerstone 5:  Marketing Integration is essential in 2006.
This is where you will want to pull the brightest and most unusual thinkers together in a strategy session that will propel the Big Idea and the organization to another level.  The key to getting your message out there at the lowest cost per impression is directly tied to integrating your marketing.  Choosing the right communications methods, timing and venues to deploy precision, evocative marketing will get you there.

Why are some brands more successful than others?

A brand is not a product or service specifically, but the attitude and perception that back the brand up.  Attitude and perception is something that you can impact.  Many organizations fall short however.  They spend a great deal of money on advertising, and they have beautiful graphics that look compelling.  If you go back in history to the 60’s through the 80’s, you’ll find some of the most significant brands were made out of advertising and great creative.  Over the duration of time, they fell short and eventually paid the price for this shallow thinking.  Those that executed every detail, exercised meticulous planning and insisted their employees execute at a higher level have become great brands.  Brands that certainly have value on the balance sheet.

Many an organization believed that the key essential ingredients in building a brand were advertising and creative.  They are just not here to tell their story.

Why then doesn’t every organization have the right ingredients to create a brand that ends up on the balance sheet?  

They do!  They just don’t use them!  Protect the brand at all cost.  Sometimes it hurts to do the right thing; often it will cost you in your back pocket.  Many executives have troubled vision.  They only see what is in front of them at the moment and they get lured into the trap of thinking exclusively short-term profits possibly hoping to save face with investor relations.  Unfortunately for the fitness and longevity of the Brand, their decisions are tainted from the beginning.  At any cost, reach out to your customers and do the right thing.  Apply a dash of humility, a sprinkle of passion and a dose of integrity to every decision you make as an executive.  The long-term benefits will greatly outweigh the short-gain profits.

To create a truly successful brand, everyone in the company, from the CEO to the receptionist, should understand and live the core values and mission statement of the company, understand that the business and its products/services are there to serve the consumer, understand that the brand is alive in the sense that it augments the loyal consumer's life, hopefully for a very long time.

More than anything else, these five cornerstones will get you there.  Once these five cornerstones create the foundation for your marketing execution, a lasting, effective and truly valuable brand of stature will emerge.