Branding for the service sector

Replacing 'try before you buy' within the service sector.

Before we purchase something we seek an example of what we can expect. Sometimes this is very tangible. For example, when we purchase a car, we can test drive it, take it home, show our friends and family and attain a real insight into what a purchase would deliver to us. Within the services sector, this insight is often impossible. It is understandable that the consumers desire to try before you buy would transcend across to the services industry, however it is impossible to truly experience what would be delivered upon proper engagement of a service business. Within my industry, some advertising agencies and graphic design studios try to trick prospective clients by offering a solution up front and for free as proof of their capabilitythis is referred to as free pitching. In fact thisIll call it diseasebecame so virulent, that our clients came to expect our service for free and it is taking considerable effort to eradicate. Thanks to the hard work of the likes of AGDA and Blair Enns, free pitching will soon become an unfortunate part of our history. Similar challenges are faced by lawyers, financial advisors, accountants and many other service businesses. So how can branding solutions assist the service sector and their customers? A) Convey a promise that is trustworthy and possible for your business to deliver. If your positioning seems too good to be true, most likely people will perceive it that way and not take the risk. Similarly if you can not produce examples of delivering on your promise in the past, this will also discourage prospects to engage you. B) Inspire trust in your expertise, process and experience. It is important your business communicates what it does, why it does that and how you achieve it. Once your prospects start to see the methods behind what you do, they will trust the process and take the next step with you. C) Find what is at the heart of why people engage businesses like yours. Your language should be geared around resolving that deep need of your prospects. This should be what guides your communication strategy and it will determine what sales tools you require and how to structure them often all of these will be available on your website, so that is a good place to start. D) Reputation is everything. It is highly important once you are engaged by a client that you deliver. Once youve delivered to a satisfied client, you can use this case study as an example of your capabilities to other prospective clients. Case studies are the key to business development within the service sector. E) Lastly and perhaps most importantly, be inspiring. The best service businesses create a position that is both realistic but exciting for the prospect. If you can get your prospect in a position where they are starting to think big and get them truly excited about the idea of working with you, then youve got it right. What youre aiming for, is for your prospect to be thinking that might just be possible, do you think we can do that! To achieve this requires exquisite execution of all elements of your brand. So if prospects are tentative to engage your service business, then refocus the positioning of your business to address what is their core need.

Steps for building a service brand With appropriate senior management commitment, building a relevant and powerful brand for any consumer-focused company, including a bank, is a reasonable goal. There are six components that go into successfully branding a service sector firm. These steps blueprint the process of developing a concise message or promise that an institution wants to communicate to its customers, and for executing a strategy that delivers on that promise. The above figure illustrates the process of building brands. 1) The first step in building a branded business is to understand the role of the brand in that particular business, including the leverage it can provide across markets and product categories. A brand can provide information and communicate efficiently, qualify a product or service, or establish differentiation. A truly powerful brand can do all three if necessary. To decide what role brands should play, it is important to take a dispassionate look at the current status of the organisation and product/service offering-how they are perceived by customers, competitors and employees. In addition, the institution has to understand what these distinct constituencies need to know and believe about the brand. For instance, in General Electrics (GE) appliance business, the retail trade is most interested in product quality, marketing support and access to credit. Consumers are interested in product quality, but in addition seek a set of design attributes. GEs brands thus play two roles. 2) Secondly, brand builders must choose a brand architecture consistent with the chosen role and the institutions products, services and market landscape. There are three types of brand architectures: the first is a single brandone brand that covers the entire product range, for example, Sony, Home Depot and Visa. Then come tiered brandswith a parent brand supported by sub-brands for each product line. Companies such as Sears and Nabisco use a tiered brand architecture, where individual brands benefit from the corporate brand umbrella. The third architecture is multiple brandswith each product carrying its own brand distinct from the parent. Procter & Gamble is a company that uses multiple brand architecture, with each of its productsTide, Pampers, Ivory Soapbuilding and supporting its own brand identity. Which brand architecture you choose depends on business objectives and market conditions. The single brand architecture best applies when customers seek the same attributes across market segments and product lines. The tiered brand architecture allows the institution to build on critical foundation attributes while still tailoring the marketing message to specific segments. Multiple brands are needed when each market segment has distinct needs. 3) The third step in branding a business and developing a brand strategy is to position the brand to effectively communicate the value proposition. Critical here are clarity, consistency and relevance. Volvo (safety), Nike (limitless performance) and Wal-Mart (good deals) are examples of companies that have clear brand positions. The clarity is achieved through the consistent use of all marketing levers (price, product design, image and channel selection) to drive home a single message. 4) In the fourth step, a company must develop the programmes needed to deliver the brand and the brand promise. This happens through programmes or services that convey the brand message to the target audience. Nikes support of grassroots athletic events and Visas Olympic sponsorship illustrate the type of programmes needed to creatively deploy brands. Nike helps amateur athletes perform, while Visa demonstrates its global reach.

5) Essential for generating brand performance is the fifth step in effective branding: creating or designing an organisation to lead and manage a branded business, one that includes the right skills and structure to execute the brand strategy. Citibank, for example, has recently recruited a number of people with brand-building skills, including William Campbell, formerly the marketer behind many of Philip Morris successes. 6) Finally, for a brand to be effective in the marketplace, the business system must be aligned with the brand promise. It must start at the very top with a vision and strategy that is embraced and articulated by senior management. Imagine Virgin Air without Richard Branson or Nike without Phil Knight and the importance of leadership in establishing and driving a brand becomes obvious.

Industrial Branding
B2B branding has its specific features. First of all, these features are related to the fact that the commercial brand is working with the professional audience. Requirements for the professional audience are tougher, so the emphasis in creating brand shifts from the emotional angle to rational one. Requirements for the B2B brand are the same as the requirements for professionals - being reliable, predictable and guaranteeing quality. If the emotions are decisive in the brand's future on consumer market, industrial brand is a brand that solves the problem. It is the brand that is trusted in business as a serious partner. Another important detail that should be taken into account in the industrial branding is the factor of marketing communications. Marketing communications which help to develop a B2B brand work in more sophisticated way. The brand has to build relationships at different levels of decision-making, each time from scratch. We recommend distinguishing 3 main phases in industrial branding: Naming Corporate identity Developing the concept of brand

Naming
Naming is the choice of brand name. Choosing a name in the industrial branding is the choice of the brand's future. The name in the B2B sector is clear associations with a specific area of activity. There's nothing more dangerous in the industrial branding than an abstract and empty name. Of course, there are some cases when a fundamentally new product, a unique product, is created in the B2B sector and the task of the name is to inform the market: "Please do not compare me with anything! I am really like a unique product! That's just what my name tells about! ". However, to be frank, there are not so much cases today. As a rule, the new product can be classified and put into a number of similar goods. The task of the name is to win the competition. The task is to draw attention, make the first impression, say about the brand as much as possible and do it very quickly. How to create the name which can do it? We believe that creating something new it's always good to consider the existing experience. Well, you can always look at the experience of others and learn useful lessons. Who of the predecessors was successful and why? B2B should not have unnecessary words because the task of business is to earn more money! It means that the most successful brand names are "speaking" names. About what should they speak? They should speak about what is important. The brand name which says nothing about the product and the company's business will not help to find new contacts and proper positioning and even affect it. It's not just that the brand can not be correctly

perceived by the market and rejected only on this ground, but that the abstract name of the brand will make the owner to invest more money in brand building. The brand name is like its testimonial letter. The brand will be perceived by its name immediately making the first conclusions. Actually, one of the features of industrial branding is that it has very strong stereotypes. To some extent, this is the very feature which is associated with the fact that industrial brands are harder to diversify or reposition. However, the explanation is simple - more sophisticated marketing communications are to blame. Their complexity is explained by the fact that industrial brand has to build contacts at various levels of decision-making because the decision making process in business, as a rule, includes several stages. Industrial brands are the big fish of modern industry. They are trusted, they are matched and they are the marks of economic prosperity as a whole. The appearance of a new name is the event and the disappearance of the old one is the tragedy. The decisions on the B2B brands are sometimes taken by the governments as so great is their role in the modern society.

Creating the Corporate Identity

Corporate identity in industrial branding should reflect several qualities of the brand: Industry specialization Geography of business

The potential customer will have only several seconds for the corporate identity contact to make a decision whether to continue the dialogue. If a business card will go in the trash it will be difficult to return to constructive dialogue. That is why the corporate identity should be not only recognizable, unique and attractive, but also substantive. Corporate identity should represent the business telling the maximum useful information about it in a short period of time provided. Creating a corporate identity of a company operating in the B2B sector includes several stages: 1. Creating a design solution 2. Creating a slogan 3. Description of design solutions and a slogan, description or creation of business legend from scratch 4. Creating a brand-book or guidelines for corporate identity use None of these items can not be missed because the corporate identity will be the image of your brand for many years. You should understand it, you should be comfortable with it, but, and which is more important your customers should feel comfortable with your corporate identity. You create a corporate identity not for yourself, but for the business, and, strangely enough, your business has different needs. Corporate identity must be recognizable and understandable. This is of crucial importance when we talk about B2B business which is the professional sector.

The Concept of b2b Brand

The B2B is going through the same stages as the brand of the consumer market. However, there are certain features. First of all they are associated with the target groups the brand is oriented to, as well as with marketing communications in the b2b sector.

If you plan to develop the brand in the b2b sector it will be interesting for you to learn about some aspects of the development of the b2b brand. The concept of the brand in the b2b sector or industrial branding helps to see the future of the brand, its prospects and its regional growth potential. The concept of the brand development will allow you to avoid mistakes at the stage of brand creation and putting it on the market. The most common mistakes are those associated with naming, when the brand name has to be quickly changed in one of the strategic markets, because it can not be used the way it is for lexical or psychological reasons; corporate identity, when the corporate identity is associated with quite contrary to what the brand owners expected to get when developing it. Brand is an asset of business, since its inception and through its whole life in the market you should work to increase its price and value. It is these challenges, the challenges of long-term strategic planning the brand concept handles for the brand. The concept of industrial brand development should handle the following tasks: defining the goals and tasks of the brand shaping the corporate mission of the brand. It is important to remember that the b2b market is real people who make decisions on the ground of business feasibility never forgetting about the moral aspects. If there are two competing brands on the market one of which has a more human-friendly image it is the image the customers will prefer. Ultimately, people like to make decisions that from their point of view make the world a little better. The corporate identity mission of the brand solves this particular problem explaining what exactly this brand is different from its competitors and why it is so important for the brand to be successful. specifying the target group as industrial brand usually works in one or more clearly defined sectors. It is important to know these sectors very well, to investigate the decision-making process in the companies represented in the sector in order to make sure that marketing communications really contribute to the dialogue with all the links of the decision-making chain. specifying a plan of geographic priorities of the brand. At the stage of brand development is necessary to anticipate that the brand can go beyond the certain geographical scope and become successful in various countries. The brand should be technically ready for the eventual success. developing the concept of brand extension, its development in the market, entering adjacent markets. specifying the communication brand concept. Fist of all, you should specify the communication tools which will help to bring the brand on the market. This is very important to make the brand technically ready to work with certain media. All technical questions concerning the use of the brand should be reflected in the brandbook, but we must be realistic. Today's world is so diversified offering such a large number of communications solutions that it is almost impossible to predict everything. If you need a quality brand-book you should focus on the decisions that you plan to use without spending time and effort on something that won't be popular in the foreseeable future.

Creating the concept of industrial brand development is the creation of a better future because every successful brand it is the way to make the world better and solve one more problem.

Retailer as Advertiser Building a Retail Brand Successfully

June 22, 2011

Retailers can successfully shape perceptions about their brand by creating and executing marketing programs with the same creativity and discipline as manufacturers. In its journey to rebuild its brand in a differentiated and relevant manner, Walgreens has achieved milestones that offer other retailers important lessons in brand building. Kim Feil, CMO, Walgreens describes the practices that helped rebuild the brand. Retailers can build a more distinctive proposition for shoppers through creative and disciplined marketing, noted Kim Feil, CMO, Walgreens during her presentation at the Nielsen Consumer 360 event in Florida. Feil noted that while the Sunday circular has been the vehicle of choice for most retailers, it is limited in its ability to shape brand perceptions effectively in a differentiated manner. When Walgreens began its journey to reshape its brand perception and resonate with consumers despite a difficult economic scenario, it crafted a comprehensive marketing program with all the elements of a contemporary marketing mix. Feil described the process at Walgreens when she took charge of the marketing function and worked towards a more broad-based approach for communicating the Walgreens brand as well as its offerings. It began by understanding the brands lineage and long history of innovation, which shaped a well recognized brand. However, consumers saw the brand as old, convenient, cluttered and a standard, undifferentiated store. Consumers did not recognize Walgreens as a comprehensive health services provider, despite the fact that they employ the second largest healthcare team after the government. Walgreens embarked on a journey to rebuild the brand. By segmenting consumers carefully, they realized that while shoppers wanted to be helped, they also needed to make their own informed choices. This realization reconfigured Walgreens positioning to become the first choice for health and daily living that helped consumers live well, stay well, and get well. To execute on this positioning, Walgreens broadened the set of touch points to reach out to consumers using a variety of media that included television, mobile and online amongst others. For instance, the Walgreens online team converted shoppers online experience to echo the brands proposition by offering information and advice as well as integrating more social media. This

created the real-time ability to conduct a dialogue that helped the retailer offer promotions that resonated with consumers. The strategy yielded positive, tangible business results in 2009 and 2010 when Walgreens applied its new marketing mix during the flu season. By taking the same core principles and what Feil described as connection points with consumers to other areas such as consultations, health services, outdoor, mobile and online Walgreens was able to increase awareness, consideration for their offerings and reinforce the brands new positioning. Similarly, in the mobile arena, the Walgreens mobile application became one of the top 10 downloaded apps during the weeks that it was advertised. As a result of these actions and their positive outcomes for both sales and profitability, Walgreens has demonstrated that by applying the right marketing mix models and metrics to brand building, retailers too can be successful advertisers.