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CLIENT SERVICES > BRANDING > BRAND MODELING
Branding stands for all coordinated activities to build a lasting, favorable public image — the brand. The most important cornerstones to building a brand are Product Attributes: outstanding products and customer care and the right pricing strategy; Corporate Attributes: employee motivation, corporate ethics, and corporate philosophy; and Verbal and Visual Identity: integrated marketing communications, corporate brand identity, and creative tone. This allows for a Brand Platform to exist that supports the true brand — the sum of all the expectations, engagements, and experiences its customers have with a company or product. The three E’s of a brand must be designed and managed in order for a brand to reach its full potential.
BDR has developed a proprietary process that allows for brand managers to truly understand their brand in the form of a brand model. BDR has developed the measurement tools necessary to determine if a company is as true to their brand as they think they are. By utilizing the and its measurement tools, brand managers are able to make marketing and operation decisions to improve weaknesses within the brand, communicate the true brand to all audiences, and provide strategic leadership for the brand.
Old Brands and New Brands
BDR has applied our Brand ing techniques to 100-year-old brands as well as newly developed brands. For older brands, our Brand ing process allows for brand managers who may not have been there for the creation of the brand to regain a deeper understanding of their brand and its current condition in living up to the brand promise. For new brands, our process allows for a road map to be created that defines what the brand stands for and how it will get there.
Developing the Brand Model
At the core of the is the Brand Platform. The three key supports of the Brand Platform enable the core of the brand to exist.
The first support, Product Attributes, is the brand reputation. This involves tangible and intangible perceptions of what it’s “good at.” The second, Verbal and Visual Identity, evaluates the values and personality of the brand and its users, providing insight into the brand’s “character.” This includes the multidimensional value propositions delivered by the brand — functional, emotional, and intellectual. The third support, Corporate Attributes, involves analyzing the brand’s leadership, assessing perceptions of the quality and value it delivers, and the future direction it might take. Also analyzed are perceptions of its momentum in the market and its ability to persuade stakeholders as to its relevance.
This approach provides the basis for in-depth research designed to enrich the organization’s understanding of how the brand is perceived. A variety of qualitative techniques ranging from focus groups to in-depth, one-on-one interviews and ethnographic surveys are utilized to achieve this. Customers are asked about the category under discussion, how and when they use these products/brands, and what specific needs they meet.
The qualitative phase provides the team an opportunity to deepen its understanding of the higher order benefits delivered by the brand through the use of “laddering” techniques. Such an exploration of the brand can uncover many paths, beginning with product attributes, which link to logical functional benefits, and from there, extend to more emotional and self-expressive benefits.
Gaining such a qualitative understanding of the key associations tied to the brand leads to a more refined portrait of the brand's strengths and weaknesses, what associations the brand might “own” in the future, and which associations believed to be owned by the brand either are or are not, or are not meaningful or motivating in terms of being a strategic driver.
Once a deeper qualitative understanding of the brand has been ed, it’s time to take significant analytic rigor to the findings. Here, quantitative research determines the extent to which an association is owned by a brand in terms of being highly descriptive of it and being unique within the category. This is also where it’s determined how relevant that association is to the respondent and the role it plays in the purchase decision — ultimately being correlated to actual purchase and usage behavior. Brand Modeling analysis ensures that brand stewards are equipped with data that will foster better-informed business decisions.
Brand Modeling Process
Developing a brand model averages between 6-8 weeks. Our process is:
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Brand Discovery
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Brand Investigation/Interviews
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Customer Surveys/Focus Groups
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Brand Prototyping Retreat
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Creative Application of Brand
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Presentation of Brand
Brand Modeling Deliverable
BDR may communicate the Brand Model to the client in a variety of forms (print, multimedia, three-dimensional, etc.). Each project includes a graphical representation of the brand Model, measurement analysis, and a Brand Report, which defines the and the brand's strengths and weakness. The Brand Report is a management tool that allows your brand management team to make business and marketing decisions based on the brand’s value. |
