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Brand building matters

The Brand Book by Thomas Oosthuizen

TO SAY as the author does, “much of brand management is a hit-and-miss affair” is understandable to many in business.

The reason they would give is that there are business factors one cannot manage in the way one can manage production, and marketing and brands are among those unmanageable factors.

If you are in any doubt as to whether brands genuinely matter, there is overwhelming proof that it does. A strong brand commands higher margins, sells more of its product or services, attracts new customers and clients, and retains them more effectively.

Building a brand does matter, and maintaining a brand matters no less.

What is clear from Oosthuizen’s book is that a brand is not the preserve of mature and large companies; it is no less and perhaps even more crucial for small and medium-sized firms that do not wish to stay that way.

I say this upfront because managers of smaller size businesses often think that it is just sales that matters right now. Staff  have to be paid and the doors kept open. Brand, the heart of marketing, is what ensures that the sales come and keep coming.

Oosthuizen defines a brand as “a basket of benefits associated with a given name”. A suitable starting point before digging into this book is to ponder the implications of that statement. Then provide the compelling answer to the nature of those benefits in your business.

A brand is powerful when the basket of benefits could not be used without serious modification by others in your industry. If this is true of your company, well done and read no further. You probably manage Virgin, Apple, Southwest Airlines or Nike.

If you are looking for a simple way to develop your brand, the first thing you will learn from The Brand Book is that this process is anything but simple.

It has beaten some very smart, trained marketers, and that is why there are so few famous brands. Branding is hard work because there is no “right answer”. Business is far too complex to have a recipe that will fit all.

The best that can be done is to use a reliable guide who has a method that has yielded results for disparate businesses.

The Brand Book was written by a reliable guide with these credentials, and provides a method that has yielded results.

The basket of benefits that your brand should convey must cover both the functional and the emotional. Apple is the most valuable consumer goods brand on earth not because it makes better products, but rather because it creates unique products with a unique emotional appeal.

If the company was a person the attraction would lie, to a large degree, in their personality, and a brand is no different.

A brand can be aggressive, docile, friendly, challenging, even passionate. Like a person, real personality is what they manifest most of the time, not occasionally.

Choosing to be a “fun and friendly” brand must translate into a multitude of “fun and friendly” experiences and messages. It must inform the way your telephone is answered, all correspondence phrased and your product or service delivered.

The brand must be deeply embedded in the business strategy and operations of the enterprise or this basket of benefits will be confusing. Clearly, some brands are suitable to their industry, and some would be bizarre. A “fun and friendly” restaurant could work, but a “fun and friendly” undertaker could not.

The suitability of a brand to your business is far deeper and more complex than this. If there are many restaurants that could be described as “fun and friendly,” it would be extremely difficult to stand out in that market place.

Additionally, do the patrons of an upper middle class restaurant want “fun and friendly"? If so, are there enough to make your restaurant wealthy?

This is where the errors in branding come in – branding has to be grounded on research, not banter about the boardroom table. Without deep, fact-based knowledge, the branding process cannot even begin.

What has distinguished Oosthuizen in his field and earned him the respect and trust of serious companies is the rigour of his work. What jumps out at the reader in the first chapters of the book is that marketing is not a light and creative activity; rather it is fact-based, critical, analytical, and only then highly creative.

Far too many popular books on marketing gloss over this difficulty work. The Brand Book does not. It guides the reader through the stages that are required to achieve an uncommon result - a famous brand that attracts customers at a price with healthy margins and then keep them.

Oosthuizen presents a method that he uses and explains each step. There are lists of questions that need answering and research that needs to be done. I am quite sure that making the effort to work through this book will yield a significant return on the effort expended. (It did for me.)

Even if you are not able or about to prepare your own brand strategy,  reading this book will give you deep insight into what is quality and what is superficial. This will be useful when the agency does their presentation. 

This book will ensure that your brand management is not a hit-and-miss affair.  

Readability:   Light ---+- Serious
Insights:       High -+--- Low
Practical:       High +---- Low

 - Fin24
 
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy. 
 
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