Tag Archives: branding

Visualizing Innovation, Value and Brand

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When innovating a market, there are three specific intersections that define your products, your value propositions and your brand. Visualizing these intersections leads to a very clear understanding where to focus your outbound marketing. Our new Silicon Strategies Marketing white paper – – creates the visualization framework you need to communicate within your organization so everyone is clear on how to communicate to the market. Download now and see how intersections between the possible, desirable, needs, differentiations, thoughts and feelings define your brand.

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Branded Lies

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If you want to destroy a brand, just lie a little. Some recent political news (on which I won’t elaborate to avoid ruffling friendly feathers) is a case study in bad marketing by incorrectly setting the market’s expectations and misleading buyers. This is a cardinal sin in the Marketing religion, and those guilty of the sin will burn in the pits of unemployment lines. All relationships are built on trust, and all transactions are relationships. Even small one. When you buy a candy bar at the corner store, you trust that the reported weight is close to accurate, the contents are faithfully reported, that the snack isn’t poisonous and that the store has not substituted inferior goods. That’s a lot of trust behind a 50¢ transaction and fleeting relationship. Had any of those trust points been violated, you would never again buy that candy bar or shop at that store. … Continue reading →

Apple Brand Polishing

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Apple is now the most valuable brand on the planet, with Google growing faster and likely to overtake them. Poor old Coca Cola has dropped to third while these upstarts reign. Interbrand recurrently measures the strength of various global brands. They recently released their latest report that knocked Coke off its thirteen year perch at number one. As the chart shows, Google began their assent in 2009 and Apple followed in 2011, all riding the wave of a highly wired and wireless global society. You may drink Coke, Pepsi or bottled water, but everybody sips while searching Google on their iPhones. Interbrand’s analysis is not the old school, completely financial estimate of customer good will that expresses a brand’s cumulative equity. If we used that measure, Coke would still command the lead with Coke $12B in customer good will, Google would have $10B worth, and Apple would trail with a … Continue reading →

Brand Bonuses

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“You can get better quality than we offer, but you can’t find a higher price than ours.” Oddly, that pitch works when not stated so bluntly. Known in marketing circles as the Mercedes Effect, it shows that people are willing to pay money for no added value aside from perception. Mercedes, Coach handbags, Apple computers and many other products have remarkably higher prices and margins than competing products of equal functional value. The difference is almost entirely because people want to own the brand and enhance their sense of self-worth by proxy. There are other reasons for cultivating cult brands aside from getting obscenely rich. Great brands, well-crafted and relentlessly enforced can: Create buyer/market/investor faith in the product/company/cause. Bias purchase decisions, thereby increasing the number of conversions per promotional dollar. Create a sense of mystic relevance (or as the authority on propaganda calls it, perceived hidden underground knowledge). Allow you … Continue reading →