Partner Plus Brand Basics Session 2 Slides

Brand Basics Part 2:
Defining Your Brand
John Bowen, Alex Millet and Mohammad Saigol
Brand Consultants
11 April 2013

Presented by

© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1

• Brand consultancy
• B2B and corporate focus
• Strategy and design


• Part 1: Understanding Brand (4/4/13)
What we mean by brand, what value it can offer to a business, and how you
might begin to think about creating or improving your own brand.

• Part 2: Defining Your Brand (4/11/13)
Guidelines for helping you define what your brand stands for in the context of
your competitors, your customers, and your own company and culture.

• Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life (4/18/13)
Information and advice about translating your company’s brand strategy into
customer brand experiences through messaging and design.


• How to define your brandscape

• How to chart the future path of your brand

• How to create and use some simple brand positioning tools

• Some tips for making your brand strategy tangible


“Patents expire. Copyrights
expire. Only brands can be
owned forever.”
Larry Light, from “Disruption: Overturning Conventions and
Shaking Up the Marketplace”

© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
2011 Cisco Confidential 6

Understanding your customer

Understanding your competition

Understanding your company


The people who exchange money for your products and services
are a critical component of your brandscape.

• Talk to three of your best customers

• Talk to three customers who are dissatisfied

• Conduct desk research on your category and target


In order to understand how to stand out in your customer’s mind,
you need to know who they are comparing you to.

• Look at three direct competitors

• Look at one or two aspirational competitors

• Look at one or two out-of-category brands you admire


Lasting brands are authentic, meaning that what they promise is
directly linked to why they were created and how they operate.

• Look to your company’s history and achievements

• Look to your company’s leaders and cheerleaders

• Look to your company’s business model


insight | [in-sīt] | noun
(1) The capacity to gain an
accurate and deep intuitive
understanding of a person or
thing, or (2) an understanding
of this kind.
Oxford Dictionary


Stay on top of industry trends
and competitor moves.

Identify unmet customer needs
that can improve your product or
sales / service model

Keep your company focused on
your most important goals


Your company’s goals for the
future

What tomorrow looks like, in a
best case but credible scenario

How you and your stakeholders
measure long term success


The most trusted
technology
company in the
world, Cisco is a
leader in delivering
personal and
business video that
transforms life’s
experiences.


At the highest level, what you
offer to all your audiences

A summation of your
differentiated benefits

The organizing principle for all
communications and actions


Bringing people together.

Cisco Brand Promise


Your brand promise is internal language that inspires external
language and action – to develop it, look to your insights.

• What higher order value do you provide to customers?

• What do you do different and better?

• What attributes and equities does your company own?


“Branding is about taking
something common and
improving upon it in ways
that make it more valuable
and meaningful.”
Scott Bedbury, “A New Brand World”


Avoid confusing tactics with
strategy and strategy with goals

Attract customers and
employees that are right for
your business

Align promise with delivery to
increase customer satisfaction
and drive repeat business


A focusing of your brand promise
to increase relevance to a target

Answers the question: “Why
should I exchange money for
what you have to offer?”

A core component of internal
and agency briefs


For [target customer] who [customer
need], [your brand] is the [offering
description] that [differentiating
benefit].


Value Proposition
For independent,
proactive women 25-
39 who, in seeking
balance, put so much
into their day they
need to replenish
what’s been taken out,
DASANI is the new
bottled water that
provides total body
hydration and a feeling
of pure satisfaction.

Is it relevant?

Is it differentiating?

Is it compelling?


Reasons to believe, sometimes called RTBs or proof points, are the
tangible facts that back up your promises

• They are not aspirational – they are unassailable

• The good news – you’ve probably already gathered most of them

• Grouping specific RTBs into buckets can lead to useful themes


Reasons to Believe
Purity
Reverse osmosis filtering
Added minerals

Availability
Distribution
Portable

Sustainability
Plant based bottle
Recycling initiatives


• Internally – deploy RTBs to prove to your people that your brand
is authentic and actionable

• Externally – use them to support the higher order benefits and
promises you lead with in headlines and sales presentations

• Some companies prefer to include RTBs in their value proposition
by adding a clause beginning with “because” at the end


Ensure that your offering is right
for your target and adjust either
to optimize your business

Have an industry standard tool
to brief your marketing agencies

Prepare a convincing story for
sales presentations


Focus

Relevance

Differentiation


What can you do right
away to start making a
difference?


• Designate brand guardians

• Conduct brand workshops

• Learn from the front line


• Conduct a web survey

• Share knowledge and best practices

• Ask the opinion of outsiders


• Introduce distinctive language

• Simplify, simplify, simplify

• Own a distinctive color


A promise to the outside
world is meaningless if
your people aren’t
internally prepared to
deliver on it.


In this section you learned how to assess your brandscape by
looking at your customers, your competition, and your own
company.
You were also given tools to develop key components of your brand
like the Brand Promise, Value Proposition, and Reasons to Believe.
In Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life, you will take all of these and
begin to translate them into tangible brand assets like identity and
messaging strategy.
See you next week!


Thank you.

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Partner Plus Brand Basics Session 2 Slides

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