Apple and Google. They are respectively the number-one and number-two brands in the world, according to BrandZ’s ranking of the Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands of 2011. Compared to other brands in the top-10 — such as IBM (1911), McDonald’s (1940), Coca-Cola (1886), and Marlboro (1924) — Apple (1976) and Google (1998) are relatively new brands. So, how did they come to dominate the world?
At the center of brand building is creating an idea in the mind of a consumer that his life will be improved should they buy your brand. This is what industry jargon terms as the “value proposition.” However, Apple and Google have gone beyond simple value proposition and have built products that consumers feel they can’t live without. They reinforce this “life-altering” benefit through simple, yet powerful, advertising.
See for yourself with one of Apple’s advertisements for the iPhone 4S and Google’s “Dear Sophie” campaign. Both commercials are simple in their execution, which allows them to masterfully drive home the value proposition built into their brands. The truly genius aspect of the brand advertising is that it injects their products into the consumer's life through the timeless technique of “demonstrations.”
As I wrote in “Why Apple Can Get Away With Murder,” Apple and Google didn’t build their brands through things like product quality or the exclusion-factor inherent in luxury goods. Google offers many of their products for free, and there isn’t an Apple product launch that isn’t followed by days of consumer gripes about build quality or battery life. Apple and Google built their brands on the idea that their products were not like anything else, and that your life is made significantly better by their use.
Small-business owners with struggling brands may look to Apple and Google and say, “Well I could never do that. They have the most brilliant minds in marketing, and a massive advertising budget, to help them stay at the top.” While this may be true now, it wasn’t always like that. Apple began in the family garage of Steve Jobs, and Google started out as a PhD research project.
Brands with larger advertising budgets than most companies gross in an entire year, who hire the best and brightest from Madison Avenue, have failed miserably in launching new products or even keeping their current brand alive.
The key to Apple and Google’s success was building products that set themselves apart from all other competitors and provided benefits to consumers that they cannot now ever live without. Does your brand do that? If not, focus on how you can get it there, then align your entire organization behind that idea.
Showing posts with label differentiation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label differentiation. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2011
a conversation about branding with stanley hainsworth
Advertising is very much a learning experience. Even the advertising greats received valuable knowledge from their predecessors. Before today’s advertising legends, there was David Ogilvy. And, before Ogilvy, there was Claude Hopkins. Each generation gives the next lessons from which they can draw upon in creating better advertisements, and stronger brands.
Over at Fast Company, Debbie Millman, president of Sterling Brands, sits down with a man who helped build Starbucks into one of the world’s most powerful brands. Stanley Hainsworth, who has served as the creative director at Nike, Lego, and Starbucks before leaving to start his own agency, knows something about branding, and making brands superpowers in the marketplace.
The whole interview (available here) is full of expert wisdom worth an entire read, the following excerpt is the most valuable for those seeking to build a brand with staying power. Hainsworth describes how Howard Schultz took a coffee shop in a crowded marketplace, and turned it into a global icon [parts bolded for emphasis]:
Differentiation. That’s the key.
Starbucks didn’t just make coffee. Starbucks made an “environment” for coffee. It was this differentiating factor — a conscious decision, executed to perfection down to the very art that was hung on the walls — that moved Starbucks beyond its competitors and into branding glory.
What differentiates your brand from your competitors? How are you creating an emotional connection with your consumers? Read the interview, and take a lesson from one of the masters of branding.
Over at Fast Company, Debbie Millman, president of Sterling Brands, sits down with a man who helped build Starbucks into one of the world’s most powerful brands. Stanley Hainsworth, who has served as the creative director at Nike, Lego, and Starbucks before leaving to start his own agency, knows something about branding, and making brands superpowers in the marketplace.
The whole interview (available here) is full of expert wisdom worth an entire read, the following excerpt is the most valuable for those seeking to build a brand with staying power. Hainsworth describes how Howard Schultz took a coffee shop in a crowded marketplace, and turned it into a global icon [parts bolded for emphasis]:
When Howard Schultz first came to Starbucks, he wasn't the owner of the company. He joined a couple guys that had started the company. He went over to Milan and saw the coffee culture and espresso bars where people met in the morning. He saw how people caught up on the news while they sat or stood and drank their little cups of espresso. That inspired the vision he crafted from the beginning--to design a social environment where people not only came for great coffee, but also to connect to a certain culture.
Howard was very wise in knowing that Starbucks was not the only company in the world to make great coffee. On the contrary, there are hundreds of other companies that can make great coffee. So what's the great differentiator? The answer is the distinction that most great brands create.There are other companies that make great running shoes or great toys or great detergent or soap, but what is the real differentiator that people keep coming back for? For Starbucks, it was creating a community, a "third place." It was a very conscious attribute of the brand all along and impacted every decision about the experience: who the furniture was chosen for, what artwork would be on the walls, what music was going to be played, and how it would be played.
Howard was very wise in knowing that Starbucks was not the only company in the world to make great coffee. On the contrary, there are hundreds of other companies that can make great coffee. So what's the great differentiator? The answer is the distinction that most great brands create.There are other companies that make great running shoes or great toys or great detergent or soap, but what is the real differentiator that people keep coming back for? For Starbucks, it was creating a community, a "third place." It was a very conscious attribute of the brand all along and impacted every decision about the experience: who the furniture was chosen for, what artwork would be on the walls, what music was going to be played, and how it would be played.
Differentiation. That’s the key.
Starbucks didn’t just make coffee. Starbucks made an “environment” for coffee. It was this differentiating factor — a conscious decision, executed to perfection down to the very art that was hung on the walls — that moved Starbucks beyond its competitors and into branding glory.
What differentiates your brand from your competitors? How are you creating an emotional connection with your consumers? Read the interview, and take a lesson from one of the masters of branding.
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