Have you ever defined your favorite brands and questioned why they are favorites? It is a key exercise we often use with our clients. This exercise helps to evaluate what should be the heart of your company’s strong brand identity by examining the best of the best.
Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.
- David Freemantle
We like to quote from the book Funky Business Forever when we discuss brands or branding with our clients:
The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.
It is not easy being different, is it? But all the more important.
The key to a good brand is being different. There are 4 critical things to remember about brands and branding:
Every business has a brand, whether explicitly defined or not. The important question to be answered is how good is the brand?
Brands deliver an emotional connection to a business’ products and services. Most purchase decisions have critical emotional components.
Your brand represents a collection of your customers’ perceptions of how they see you, how they feel about you, and what they say about you.
Your brand communicates every time it touches a customer. This makes you, as a marketer, responsible for this communication ‘moment of truth’.
Most brands sell products or services. GM sells cars. Borders sell books. Real estate brokerages sell homes. The best brands, however, satisfy a desire to get at the emotional heart of the matter.
Let’s review my favorite 6 brands and why they stand out as the best for me. This is a great way to appreciate the importance of branding and emotion.
KLM Airline
I prefer brands that are most innovative and very eager to try lots of new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines certainly deserves to be in this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.
They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over 4 years, and their strategies have played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.
If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, it is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).
Their brand identity is built around a culture of innovativeness. Over the past four years, KLM has launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes but they keep exploring and testing what consumers like the best.
LEGO
The Lego brand is another brand I like best for its ability to adapt and innovate by trying lots of things. They teach us many things through their stories, storytelling, and messages. The words and images they use, then, reflect who they are, what makes them distinctive, and the brand values they want to represent to all their stakeholder communities. The brand represents their ability to influence how people see them, feel about them, and talk to others about the brand.
It is human and emotional, and at that critical time when a customer engages with one of their employees or someone in their channel or even one of their products, their brand comes alive with engagement.
We are big fans of the Lego Company and its products. The LEGO brand is more than simply a familiar logo. It is the expectations that people have of the company towards its products and services, and the accountability that the LEGO Group feels towards the world around it.
When Lego tells its creative branding story, the Lego Brand experience teaches us to create a distinctive voice with unique words, feelings, emotions, and images … dare to create differences with our communities.
JetBlue
I like this brand for creating unique selling propositions that have real value for me. They are my favorite airline, no question. JetBlue’s brand success centers on the achievable – the simple things – they knew would make a difference for their passengers.
This set the stage for direct TV and XM radio, the provision of first-class seats to everyone, more legroom, great snacks, and high-end service at lower end pricing. No other airline offers this unique set of value propositions. They are different and their brand stands out because of those differences.
Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.
Zappos
Zappos brand is the top of my list for their awesome culture from the top to bottom of their company. They don’t sell shoes. They deliver that extra dose of love we all need from time to time. There is no secret here. Zappos became Zappos because of the fanatical customer support it offered. That is the company’s brand.
As Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO, puts it,
Back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered great service. Today, we really think of the Zappos brand is about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.
Starbucks
A favorite of mine for their aggressive innovation style and the way they engage customers. Starbucks brings us a space to enjoy the products they sell, rather than just a product.
Some would say that it fills a psychological need that other companies have not had to do in quite the same way. The emotion is all about uplifting moments and daily rituals. Stimulating all our senses.
Disney
The Disney brand is a huge favorite because I love their products so much. Magical, fantasy entertainment. Being bringers of joy, affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers.
