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ERROR MSGThe Center for Strategic Services

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Joel Goren

Senior Vice President and Strategic Brand Consultant

Joel Goren leverages his 25 years of branding experience by providing services designed to help companies build stronger brands. Prior to TNS, Joel served as managing director at Interbrand. He also has held a range of positions that give him a 360 degree view of branding, including chief marketing officer, brand and marketing consultant, corporate vice president of strategy, brand manager and advertising agency executive.

A simple way to think about your brand is to consider it a relationship platform. In other words, your brand is how you define and build relationships with the key audiences that are important to you – specifically, the audiences that make your business goals and strategies become a reality.

Carefully crafting and reinforcing the desired brand relationship with your key audiences is critical to attaining your goals. When we speak about "crafting and reinforcing," we are speaking about two related, but somewhat different issues. Both issues need to be considered across all points of interaction (i.e., "touchpoints") between your key audiences and your brand.

Crafting the relationship

You should seek to create a brand relationship that is influential, relevant and credible. Your relationship promise or benefit should be so influential that it forces your competitors to react to your initiatives – keeping them from setting the category standard or leading the "category debate." For example, MCI redefined long distance telecommunications with its "Friends and Family" offering, evolving the category from a price-driven commodity to a value added service. Starbucks redefined how coffee should be considered and marketed, evolving coffee from a simple beverage into something that can represent both a taste sensation as well as a positive out-of-the-home experience.

The relationship promise or benefit should be important and relevant to the lifestyle needs of your key audiences. While most light beer drinkers want to balance perceived caloric intake with beer taste and enjoyment, only Miller understood how to leverage the more relevant carbohydrate issue (instead of the caloric issue) in positioning its light beer offering. Sara Lee, among others, has come to understand that weekday breakfast is a meal most family members eat as their schedules allow. So breakfast is often an "on-the-go" meal option and new products must address this lifestyle need to be successful across most audience segments.

Not only should the relationship promise or benefit be credible on its face, but more importantly, it should be credible as an offering from your company/brand. For example, IBM realized it needed to expand its offering into a portfolio of consulting services if it wanted to actively collaborate with customers in a strategic dialogue around how technology could impact business performance. Not only did it invest in its IT consulting and outsourcing capabilities, it also acquired PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting to gain credibility as a strong strategic/business consulting resource.

Schweiz HotelsReinforcing the relationship

You need to be able to deliver a customer experience that reinforces and is consistent with the expectation your positioning has created across a full range of interactions. Some important touchpoints include personal interactions (sales and customer service), indirect interactions (PR and "buzz" creation), digital interactions (Website and Internet messaging) as well as traditional communications (advertising and direct marketing). The goal is for audiences that have a relationship with your brand, and therefore experience your brand, to be at a minimum satisfied, and ideally delighted, with their experience.

This aligning of brand expectations with brand experiences is how you offer a consistent and reinforcing brand to the marketplace. It is how you build stronger levels of affinity between your audiences and your brand. This works to both improve commitment and loyalty behavior among your customers and also sets the stage for a more satisfactory trial experience – and repurchase – among prospects.

five star hotel in ThessalonikiThis is a challenging goal for most organizations. Yet, for those companies that have committed themselves to aligning brand experiences, the economic ROI to the business has usually been rewarding.

ERROR MSGCrafting and reinforcing brand relationships – i.e., building and effectively managing both brand expectations and brand experiences across key touchpoints – will not only build the value and power of your brand, it will build your business.

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