With 35 years total of branding experience, Stimulus Advertising is prepared to start, enhance, or reform your brand. Several elements are necessary to make your brand top-of-mind.We take a mixture of tried and true practices and the knowledge and formulas we have put together over the years and customize the activity of "branding" for each individual organization. Below is some of these corridors of thinking...
1. Thought Leadership
There are two brand leaders in every category. The Market Leader who holds the biggest share and distribution, and the Thought Leader who has the most sensed potential in the consumers mind. If a brand is not on top, first the brand developers must think as if the brand is a leader.
2. Re-Evaluation
Successful brands desire to puncture the consumer’s autopilot and make consumer’s rethink the place of the brand in their lives. This re-evaluation is to be done swiftly and powerfully, positioning their brand in the consumer’s mind and life.
3. Gaining Clarity
Once a business has explored the potential opportunities available to their competing brand, it is time to be clear about what the challenge to the market or another brand is going to be. Now is the time to sit down and determine a focus.
4. Sacrifice
What a company chooses not to do is as important to their success as what they choose to do. Concentrating focus, voice, and actions more narrowly is an advantage to building brand identity. When concentrating so closely on certain aspects of a brand’s message, it is sometimes important to let other aspects go.
5. Over-commit
A selected path of action must be successful. When a business chooses to drive success through one or two key activities, they cannot just commit to these activities, they must over-commit.
6. Build Identity
Success as a competing brand comes through developing a very clear sense of whom or what the brand/business is and why it exists. Once defined, these concepts should be projected as an identity with intensity, consistency, and salience. This way, consumers notice the brand even if they are not looking for it.
7. Enter Social Culture
The use of communications to create genuine salience in the world around us remains one of the very few remaining sources of competitive advantage—but only if systematically embraced within the company.
8. Intelligent Naivety
Often times, marketers need to break free from the clutter of little pieces of knowledge that are the basis of their strategic thinking. In turn, they can see the real opportunities for radical growth.
9. Idea-Centered, not Consumer-Centered
Success is a very dangerous thing- it causes brands and people to stop behaving in the way that made them initially successful. This principle encompasses how a brand maintains its momentum once it has become successful. Here we move the organization from being consumer-dependent to focusing on the generation and implementation of ideas. These ideas constantly refresh and renew the relationship with the consumer.
Challenger branding seeks to place smaller brands into the competition with larger brands. Professional NBA basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain was quoted saying, “Everybody pulls for David, nobody roots for Goliath.” It remains a goal for Stimulus Advertising to continually support challenger brands and encourage their action in the marketplace. For more information on leadership and challenger branding, see “Eating The Big Fish” by Adam Morgan.
