At the heart of all killer brands is the promise they commit to delivering to their clients. No matter how clever or memorable their brand marketing is if they fail to deliver on that promise, they fail. And those promises represent what the brand stands for. Feelings and emotions, as Freemantle states, are critical in the way customers are influenced.
Failure to deliver on your promise or to be what you stand for is like a politician promising no new taxes. Mark my words. Those kinds of promises are a prescription for a marketing disaster.
Importance of branding
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, and 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’s 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. Killer brands, however, satisfy the desire to get at the emotional heart of the matter. Let’s review 10 killer brands and what they stand for. This is the best way to appreciate the importance of branding and emotion.
JetBlue
JetBlue’s brand success centers on the achievable – the simple things – they knew would make a difference for their guests. 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 others these value propositions. They are different and their brand stands out because of those differences.
Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.
Nike
Ask anyone who works in marketing what Nike stands for and you’re likely to hear the same three words: “authentic athletic performance.” Their goal is to be associated with customers that desire to be high-performance, high-notch athletes, achievers, and winners. Nike is the name of the winged Greek goddess of victory and the logo represents the spirit of this goddess. Wrapped in emotional appeal.
Ragu
Super convenience in an inconvenient world. Simple as that. But it must achieve a taste appeal, so Ragu has increased its product offering to give customers more sauce taste options. Super convenience with grandmother’s good taste.
W Hotels
People don’t go there to sleep. They go there to feel glamorous. Style and sizzle remain at the forefront of what this brand stands for. A hotel brand leader in contemporary lifestyle personality.
Zappos
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 as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.
Intel
Look inside to find the best processor technology. The trust mark symbolizes customer trust and faith they are receiving the best in technology. Technology that is life-changing.
Ritz Carlton
Ritz Carlton’s desire is to create guests for life. Stories of extraordinary service. Acts of kindness. Ritz Carlton focuses their attention on impeccable service standards to separate itself from other Hotels. What Ritz Carlton has done so well is operationalize it so that culture and brand are one.
FedEx
Simply put, the FedEx brand is synonymous with “reliability.” Define your benefit to customers in the most straightforward terms possible. If your promise is reliability, then you need to offer reliability in everything you do — from your products and services to your website and communications. Peace of mind. FedEx famously built its brand around a singular idea: by coming through when something “absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”
Starbucks
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
Magical, fantasy entertainment. Be bringers of joy, be affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers. To speak, as Walt once put it:
not to children but to the child in each of us.