Globally, the mobile broadband market is already well advanced. Japan has about 89 million telephone subscribers, 77 million of which have data service accounts, and Europe is only slightly behind. North America, however, lags way behind, with only 12 percent of subscribers downloading content. And most of that is ring tones and simple graphics.

A Dark Horse

Who will leap to the forefront in the mobile broadband space?

At the moment, I don’t see any clear front runners. Most industry analysts expect Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft or media giants like Disney, Fox and the other major TV outlets and movie studios to figure it out. However, I’m betting on a little known company called InfoSpace. Why? Because the big content providers are going in the wrong direction. They’re treating the mobile platform as a smaller version of the desktop platform, when that’s not what the market wants.

Mobile users don’t want a bunch of links, they want answers, and InfoSpace has just released a spate of products that provide them. These products instantly identify where the user is located (the real missing link in most competitive offerings) and give immediate access to extensive online directories. On another competitive front, InfoSpace’s acquisition of three mobile games companies -- Atlas Mobile, IOMO Limited and Elkware GmbH -- positions it a leader in the rapidly growing mobile games market.

While InfoSpace is relatively unknown to most consumers, it has a solid reputation in the search engine and mobile categories. It already provides services and content to every major carrier in the United States including T-Mobile, Cingular, Verizon, Alltell, Vodaphone, Orange, Telefonica and O2. If you have a cell phone, you probably already have access to InfoSpace’s content because it reaches 90 percent of U.S. mobile customers and provides over half of the content sold today in North America.

Local Searches Lead the Way

InfoSpace recently demonstrated its abilities in the mobile Web. Its mobile services platform is driving Cingular’s new and improved Media Net, which allows users to create a home page on their screen that offers up to 16 categories including weather, sports, financial information, entertainment news, world news and more. It’s intuitive and easy to use, and puts you just of a couple of clicks away from the information you need.

The mobile Internet is much more about local searches and local needs, regardless of whether you’re hanging out in your local neighborhood or find yourself in some other part of the country in unfamiliar turf. The big question is, “Who’s going to pay for the local information?” Nobody believes it can work like pay-per-click on the Internet. Instead, it’s much more likely that local search activities will be paid for by local companies who advertise their products, services or locations.

Enter InfoSpace’s “pay per call” model, which they will have up and running by the end of the year. While other companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo are still experimenting with this model, InfoSpace will eclipse all of them and offer an outstanding service.

InfoSpace is definitely a company worth watching. I believe it will eventually win the race and dominate the mobile content market, much like Yahoo, Google and MSN have come to dominate the desktop Internet market.

When asked to identify a company’s brand touch points, most people point to the obvious, such as logos and advertisements. In fact, people often think of the logo as the brand and advertising as the primary way to build the brand. In reality, the concept of brand touch points encompasses far more than these basic visual cues. Every point of contact your prospects and customers have with your company and its products and services provides an opportunity to build your brand – or weaken it. How you manage those points of contact determines the relative strength or weakness of your brand.

Every company has an internal and external brand experience, and each plays an important role in developing your overall brand. Picture a massive iceberg floating in the Northern Atlantic. The visible portion poking its head above the ocean’s surface represents a small fraction of the iceberg’s full mass. Similarly, only a small portion of your company’s brand experience – the external part - is highly visible. Much more of your brand lies below the surface and is not as easily recognizable.

To illustrate our point, let’s look at an extreme example – IBM. For much of its history, IBM had one of the strongest brands in corporate America, arguably in the entire world. By the early 1990s, however, the company’s branding and advertising systems had fallen into a state of chaos. When Lou Gerstener took over as CEO in 1993, he quickly realized that reviving and clarifying the IBM brand was one of his highest priorities.

At the time of Gerstener’s arrival, IBM had more than 70 different ad agencies representing the firm. Each worked with a different product manager, with no central coordination or oversight. A single issue of an industry trade magazine could have up to 18 different IBM ads with 18 different designs, messages, and even logos. The company had hundreds of product brochures, each different enough that it was virtually impossible to tell that they came from the same company. Gerstener likened the situation to “70 little trumpets all tooting simultaneously for attention.”

To wrest control of IBM’s messaging from his country managers, Gerstener brought 35 of them to a conference center in Palisades, New York. He plastered the walls with IBM’s widely disparate advertising, packaging and marketing collateral, creating a veritable train wreck of brand and product positioning. At the end of his presentation, Gerstener posed one question: “Does anyone doubt we can do this better?” Unanimously, the team decided to consolidate IBM’s 70+ advertising relationships into a single global agency. From that point forward, all of IBM’s marketing reinforced one basic positioning message: IBM as global, world-class integrator. The rest is history.

A Question to Ponder and an Exercise

What if you conducted an exercise at your company similar to Gerstener’s branding exercise at IBM? What if you took every one of your company’s brand touch points and spread them across your conference room? Use the following list of touch points to start the process:

Internal Branding (Employees):

• Recruitment Advertising
• Website
• Employee Handbook
• Screening Process
• Goals and Objectives
• Review Process
• Compensation Structure
• Internal Communications
• Recognition Programs
• Training and Development
• Promotion Criteria

Retention Branding (Customers):

• Policies and Procedures
• Logo
• Identity
• Website
• Email Marketing
• On Hold
• Receptionist
• Brochures
• Datasheets
• Press Releases
• Advertisements
• Direct Mail
• Catalogs
• Packaging
• Pricing
• Strategic Alliances
• Correspondence
• Announcements

Acquisition Branding (Prospects):

• Customer Service
• Technical Support
• Logistics / Delivery
• Corporate
• Headquarters
• Branch Offices
• Tradeshow Booth
• Business Processes

Financial Branding (Financial Community):

• Press Releases
• Annual Report
• Quarterly Reports
• Analyst Briefings
• Investor Presentation

Every business is different, but chances are good that most, if not all, of these will apply to your business. As you review your various touch points, keep in mind that one of the simplest ways to build a strong brand is to make sure that every point of contact that prospects and customers have with your company reinforces your brand promise. Then ask the following questions:

• Is a singular message reinforced or are there a cacophony of messages?
• Is there a similar look and feel to the messages or do they look like they are from different companies?
• Is the visual imagery the same or is the graphic look (including the pictures) different?

It’s easy to conclude that a logo is a brand or that advertising is the primary strategy to build brand (even though it is extremely expensive, even for the largest companies). However, the reality is that a brand consists of a lot more than a logo, and there are many ways to build a brand. The key is to identify the touch points of your brand and make sure they are aligned with your brand promise. The more consistency you have across your various touch points, the stronger your brand will be.

1. The Brand Promise is a commitment you make to prospects and customers. It answers the question on every customer’s mind: “If I engage in a relationship with you, your product or your company, what can I expect?” The answer to this question must address the big problem solved or the compelling need fulfilled -- in other words, the primary benefit of your product or service. Companies with the clearest brand promises have the strongest brands. And the simplest idea is often the most powerful.

2. The Brand Attributes include all the unique ways you deliver your brand promise. These comprise the feature set that describes the customer’s experience with your company. Common attributes might include your unique versions of quality, customer service, innovation and flexibility.

3. The Brand Personality describes the human characteristics people experience when they encounter your brand. It has by far the strongest influence on the emotional connection people feel toward your brand. Often a company’s brand personality matches the customer’s self-perception of their own personality or a personality they aspire to. Common brand personalities include ruggedness, sophistication, excitement, competence or sincerity.

1. The safest cars in the world
2. Frequent, low cost flights
3. Everyday low prices
4. Fun entertainment for the whole family
5. Advanced processors with continually improving cost and speed performance
6. A unique coffee experience
7. Low cost computers with minimal hassle
8. Time-certain delivery
9. Refreshment

These companies (how many did you get right?) are market leaders because they have relentlessly focused their entire organization on their brand promise. When you do business with any of them, you know what to expect and what you will receive.

The Essence of the Brand

Brand personality has to do with the emotional connection people have to your brand. It manifests itself in many different ways. It can be portrayed in the pictures and visual imagery of your brand or it can be communicated in the “tone” or “voice” of your communications.

Southwest Airlines, for example, knows that their employees directly reinforce their brand personality. Consequently, they hire only those people whose personalities exactly matches a carefully defined profile:

• A commitment to customer service
• Self-motivated and energetic personality
• Team-oriented
• Ability to work equally well alone or with others
• Sense of humor
• Positive attitude
• Flexibility to work in a dynamic, fast-paced environment

Statistically, it is easier to get into Harvard University than it is to get a job at Southwest Airlines. If you don’t match this profile, you don’t work for Southwest -- period. Of course, this isn’t the only reason for Southwest’s phenomenal track record of success. But their fanatical devotion to their brand personality and the people who deliver it has played a major role in their ability to maintain a consistently strong brand image.

These three concepts -- brand promise, brand attributes and brand personality -- represent the essence of your brand, so it is critical to understand the power that comes from the interplay among and between them. By pursuing these concepts with passion and commitment, you can develop a clear, consistent and compelling brand that attracts customers to your value proposition and puts your company in a position of market leadership.

Answers to which companies own the brand promises listed above:

1. Volvo
2. Southwest Airlines
3. Wal-Mart
4. Disney
5. Intel
6. Starbucks
7. Dell
8. Federal Express
9. Coke

Of late, Intel has garnered a lot of press regarding the sweeping changes management intends to make in the company’s brand and product line. In many ways, these changes will send the world’s largest chipmaker into uncharted territory. Some analysts are saying that Intel’s new direction will necessitate creating a new brand. However, at its core, I believe Intel will very much remain the same company, mainly because the deeply established core values that drive the Intel brand are alive and well and working exactly as designed.

A New Direction

New CEO Paul Otellini appears to be steering Intel in a very different direction. Instead of remaining focused on PCs, he's pushing the company to play a key technological role in a half-dozen fields, including consumer electronics, wireless communications and health care. And rather than continuing to focus solely on microprocessors, he wants Intel to create a variety of chips and software and then meld them together into what he calls "platforms."

With Grove and Barrett at the helm, Intel first provided customers with full sets of technology ingredients, such as microprocessors, chipsets, communications chips and base software capabilities. Under Otellini, Intel will develop complete technology platforms based on Intel ingredients, an evolution best evidenced with the introduction of IntelÒ Centrino™ mobile technology. Even the “Intel Inside” logo will disappear, to be replaced by an updated Intel logo with a swirl around it to signify movement. And for the first time since the early 1990s, the company will add a tagline: "Leap ahead."

At first glance, all of this looks like a sharp departure from the company Grove and Barrett built. However, upon closer examination, these moves turn out to be very “Grovesk” at their core.

In December 2005, Grove’s photo appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine, accompanying an article entitled “How to Become a Great Leader.” Fortune stated that Grove, 69, has never lost track of the truth -- that Intel has always been one wrong move away from disaster and that a closed mind is the trap door to the abyss. During his tenure as CEO, Grove made numerous “bet-the-farm moves” could have killed the company but ended up propelling it forward. For example, his decision to get out of the now commodity memory chip business and focus solely on microprocessors. Or the decision to stick with Intel’s mainstay chip technology, CISC, rather than pursue the new, more glamorous, RISC technology. Or the decision to focus on microprocessors for PCs and invest billions of dollars in plants to manufacture them.

While it appeared that Intel was doing most of the adapting, it was really Grove himself who underwent the most radical change. Forcing himself to constantly adapt to a succession of new realities, he left a trail of discarded assumptions in his wake. Grove attacked every problem the same way, by setting aside everything he knew. Fast-forward to the present, and it looks to me like Otellini and team are doing the exact same thing in the exact same way that Grove taught them.

The Old Values Remain

In its January 9, 2005 edition, BusinessWeek ran a cover story entitled, “Intel Inside Out: How It’s Shaking Off the Andy Grove Era.” I don’t think so.

From my perspective, the legacy of Grove is very much alive and well at Intel. If fact, the article states that when asked about the sweeping changes at Intel, Grove replied in the following manner: “I want to say,” he boomed, “that this program strikes me as one of the best manifestations incorporating Intel values of risk-taking, discipline and results orientation I have ever seen here. I, for one, fully support it.”

What a leader! Grove understood that the sweeping changes at Intel were not an indictment of his and Barrett’s leadership. Rather, he recognized that times had changed and that Intel needs to -- again -- change with them.

Perhaps Grove’s greatest legacy is the strength with which he built in the values that drive Intel’s brand. If the new management team remains true to those values, and I believe they will, Intel will continue to make the right moves in a market where change is not only constant but is accelerating all the time.

Published in the January 2002 Harvard Business Review, the article briefly outlined a methodology and set of tools for gathering customer input in a way that actually drives product innovation. In addition, the article illustrated how Cordis -- a medical device manufacturer specializing in products for interventional vascular medicine -- used Ulwick’s approach to innovate the heart stent and gain market leadership in the angioplasty balloon market. As a result, Cordis’ stock went from $20 to $109 per share when it was acquired by Johnson and Johnson.

Now, Ulwick has updated his tools and provided a more comprehensive look at his methodology in his recently released book, What Customers Want (McGraw Hill). This book should be required readying for anyone involved in product development and marketing. Partly because it offers a comprehensive, step-by-step approach for converting innovation from a random hit-or-miss process into a more methodical approach, but also because it greatly reduces the risk of new product failure and substantially increases the odds of success.

In a world where some 80 to 90 percent of new products fail, the ROI for using Ulwick’s methods is substantial.

According to Ulwick, most customer research provides little real value to the companies conducting it. Worse, it often misinforms their decisions and steers them in the wrong direction.

Why? Because the methods most companies use to gather customer input are inherently flawed. In fact, Ulwick argues that faulty research methods represent both the source and the cause of most new product failures. Based on my own experience, I tend to agree.

Traditional qualitative research methods ask customers to define their needs, benefits, specifications and solutions. However, the most frequent responses to questions about product improvements focus mainly on “better quality” and “lower price.” Besides indicating that the product category under question might be perceived as a commodity, these generic answers leave little room for new product developers to devise truly innovative new products.

The reality is that customers have a hard time articulating why they do what they do and what will motivate them to buy a new product. Therefore, traditional research methods -- such as talking to customers about the solutions they want or can envision -- essentially ask them to act as product developers and marketers, and that’s a job most customers are ill equipped to do.

How do you gather customer input in a way that supports innovation?

Start by silencing the literal voice of your customers. In other words, suggests Ulwick, stop asking customers to tell you how and what to innovate. Instead:

· Focus on the jobs your customers need to get done
· Work to uncover measurable outcomes your customers hope to achieve
· Isolate important customer constraints

By directing your research towards these key areas, you will make more appropriate and better-informed decisions about what represents meaningful innovation for your customers.

A Good Investment

For me, the best and most practical part of the book lies in Ulwick’s eight-step approach, which dramatically improves every aspect of the innovation process from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating and marketing breakthrough product ideas.

Drawing on more than 200 complete studies, Ulwick loads his book with real life examples that bring meaning and insight to the process and make it easy to translate his principles to companies of all shapes and sizes.

For less than $20 and a few hours of reading time, What Customers Want delivers a remarkable return on investment. A can’t-miss formula that delivers real innovation that your customers will value, it just might ensure that your next new product introduction hits the target in regards to the jobs your customers need help with and delivers measurable improvements to their most important outcomes.

I’m not suggesting you actually walk down the aisle with your customers. But maybe the time has come to look at brand relationships in a different way?

We all know that the best brands make strong emotional connections with their customers. Recent research suggests, however, that the best brands don’t stop there. Instead, they leverage those emotional connections to such an extent that their customers feel “married” to the brand.

In general, customers come to strong emotional connections with a brand in two ways. First, they personify the product (or the company) so that they have a relationship with it just like they would with a real person. They sometimes experience a full range of emotions when they interact with the brand, and occasionally even talk about the brand like they would a good friend. Apple Mac users fall into this group.

Second, customers can become part of a group that shares a common bond around the brand. Harley Davidson and BMW motorcycle customers fall into this group, as do the user groups of many software companies.

For most technologists and scientists, however, this emotional model of branding is just too warm and fuzzy, especially with products that mostly satisfy functional needs. Most technology companies find it very difficult to methodically and systematically build emotional engagements. They also find it challenging, if not impossible, to measure and monitor these emotional connections when they do occur.

As a result, when trying to build a strong brand marriage, many technology companies are left standing at the altar.

Thanks to some groundbreaking work conducted by the Gallup Organization around the topic of brand engagement, brand bachelorhood may soon become a thing of the past.

In their insightful book, Married to the Brand, Gallup draws on worldwide research and development efforts completed between 2000 and 2004 to define the emotional attachment necessary to bond a customer to a brand. More important, they illustrate the basic principles involved in creating the ultimate brand relationship -- passion for the brand -- and moving customers to the point where they feel that no other brand will do.

Fortunately for technology companies, the research doesn’t stop with luxury retail brands like BMW cars, Armani suits, or Louis Vitton handbags. It also includes those difficult to brand relationships between IT managers and their software providers or between physicians and pharmaceutical firms.

Highlights from the research include:

·There are crucial differences between a customer and an engaged customer. Don’t settle for merely gaining a customer. Instead, strive for customer engagement.

·What it takes to initially attract a first-time buyer is quite different from what it takes to convert that buyer into a fully engaged customer.

·It’s the total brand experience, and not just a few isolated elements, that determines the health of a brand marriage.

·It takes more than trust to build a long-term brand relationship. You must also have brand passion.

·Emotions are powerful, profitable and measurable.

·Every time a customer touches a company, the brand relationship can be enhanced. Or it can be diminished.

·Successful brand marriages can be achieved only by company-wide commitment and aligned, integrated efforts.

Why Customers Say “I Do”

The best of the Gallup research involves a series of questions that measure and monitor the strength of relationship that exists between a company or a brand and its customers. As part of its findings, Gallup discovered that strong responses to these questions are directly linked to increased market share, revenues, profits and customer retention -- just the kind of research and validation that emotionless CFOs can sink their teeth into.

The questions fall into two basic categories. The first three questions measure customer satisfaction; the last eight measure the strength of the customer’s engagement with the brand.

On a 5-point scale from “extremely” (5) to “not at all” (1):

·Overall, how satisfied are you with [Brand]?
·How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase/repeat (if needed) [Brand]?
·How likely are you to recommend [Brand] to a friend/associate?

On a 5-point scale from “Strongly Agree” (5) to “Strongly Disagree” (1):

·[Brand] is a name I can always trust.
·[Brand] always delivers on what they promise.
·[Brand] always treats me fairly.
·If a problem arises, I can always count on [Brand] to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
·I feel proud to be a [Brand] [customer/shopper/user/owner].
·[Brand] always treats me with respect.
·[Brand] is the perfect [company/product/brand/store] for people like me.
·I can’t imagine a world without [Brand].

According to the Gallup research, the answers to these questions indicate with remarkable accuracy whether your customers consider you a life-long partner or a one-night stand. More important, they point out areas where companies can take focused action to build the relationship and strengthen the brand.

The reality is that your customers are eager to tell you the state of your brand relationships. Moreover, they would love to help you make those relationships even better. Wedding bells can chime for your brand, but only if you ask the right questions, listen closely to what your customers are saying, and take appropriate action based on what you hear.

That which we call a rose, by any other word, would smell as sweet.

In his famous line from “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare seems to be saying that a name is nothing more than an artificial and meaningless construct.

Granted, the old Bard could turn a phrase better than anyone. But he obviously never ran a business. For when it comes to positioning products, services and companies in the marketplace, a Lexus or a Starbucks by any other name would not smell as sweet.

Imagine if Intel were called “Microchip Systems Technologies.” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Plus those little “Intel Inside” stickers you see on the outside of almost every PCs would have to get a lot bigger in order to fit the entire name.

The point I’m trying to make here is not so much that corporate names need to be short and to the point, although that certainly helps. The overriding principle is that when it comes to building a strong brand, the right name will give you a lot more leverage in the marketplace, whereas a poorly-chosen name will make it almost impossible to gain any traction.

The “Elite Eight”

Many factors go into the selection of the right corporate name. Here are eight that I’ve found to be of great value when determining and/or assessing a name:

1. Distinctiveness. Does the name stand out from the crowd, especially from other names in the category? Does is separate well from ordinary text and speech? The best names have the presence and impact of a proper noun (i.e., Intel or Lexus). They make you sit up and take notice. Nebulous, generic names like “Systems Integration Technologies” or “Medical Device Group” do not provide clarity or distinctiveness.

2. Brevity. Is the name short enough to be easily recalled and used? If not, how will people truncate the name? For example, a two-word name like “Evergreen Associates” is likely to become “Evergreen.” In the same manner, a combined-word name like “SystemPoint Corporation” is likely to become “Systempoint” or even “Syspoint.” Before settling on a name, think about the various ways customers (and your own staff) might cut it down to size.

3. Integrity. By integrity, I mean the name’s ability to resist reduction to a nickname or acronym. In almost every case, long multi-word names will quickly get reduced to non-communicative initials, such as IBM or GE. If you have a few decades and billions of dollars with which to build your brand, you can survive getting “acronymized.” Otherwise, be very careful of what others might do to your name.

4. Appropriateness. Is there a reasonable fit with the business purpose of the entity? Does the name align with the rest of the brand? Does it reinforce a brand promise or brand attribute? For example, “Acura” evokes a sense of precision and accuracy. “Accelrys” (a supplier of bioinformatics software for gene and protein sequence analysis) suggests acceleration of a process. Also, could the name work equally well (or even better) for another organization or entity? If so, keep looking. Nothing confuses the marketplace like a name that stands for two different products or brands.

5. Easy spelling and pronunciation. Will most people be able to spell the name after hearing it spoken? For example, it’s hard to miss the spelling of Lexus once you hear it. In addition, can people pronounce the name without difficulty after seeing it written? This may sound trivial, but you don’t want people to have to work at verbalizing your name. A name -- especially a synthetic one -- should never turn into a spelling test or make people feel ignorant.

6. Likeability. Will people enjoy using it? Names that are intellectually stimulating have a head start over those that don’t. People like repeating names that provide a good “mouth feel,” have a nice cadence, or sound good to the ear.

7. Extendibility. Does the name have legs? Will it support other brands, sub-brands and endorsed brands? Does it suggest a visual interpretation or lend itself to a number of creative executions? Great names provide endless opportunities for creative twists and turns over time.

8. Protectability. Can the name be trademarked? Is it available for web use? While many names can be trademarked, some are more defensible than others, making them safer and more valuable over the long run. Before settling on a name, it makes sense to consult with an experienced trademark attorney. Since you will be investing far more dollars in building the brand value of the name over the years, consider it money well spent.

In the long run, choosing a corporate name involves as much art as it does science. But the more you stick to these criteria, the better your chances of selecting a name that supports your company and helps to build your brand over time.

The article, entitled “Six Types of Marketing Organizations: Where Do You Fit In”, is based on a study by Booz Allen Hamilton and the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) that identified six basic types of “marketing organizations” within companies. I found it to be a fascinating and insightful look at the importance of making sure the marketing function aligns with what the business really needs.

According to the article, the six types of marketing “organizations” (i.e. the marketing people, systems and processes inside a business and the activities they perform) are as follows:

2. Senior Counselor. Although still functioning at the strategic level, marketing serves as more of an advisor to the CEO than a formulator of company-wide strategy.

3. Brand Foreman. Functioning in a more of tactical role, marketing focuses on providing various services to support the company’s brands. This can include developing communications strategies and creative initiatives, as well as campaign execution.

4. Growth Facilitator. Similar to the growth champion, except here marketing mainly supports other major functions rather than initiating and leading strategy on its own.

5. Best Practices Advisor. Marketing serves as more of a tactical weapon whose primary purpose is to help each business unit achieve maximum effectiveness in their marketing efforts.

6. Service Provider. Marketing acts much like an outside vendor, providing advertising, promotions, public relations and other marketing services to the company’s business units and product teams as needed.

The danger, warns the article, is that most marketing organizations believe they cover all these functions, when in fact they actually perform only one. As a result, there is often a major disconnect between what the business needs from the marketing function and what it actually gets.

The key to resolving this dilemma lies in answering three critical questions:

1. What type of marketing organization currently exists in your company?
2. What type of marketing organization needs to exist in your company (based on your strategic goals, value proposition and the future direction of your business)?
3. How do you properly align the marketing team so that #1 and #2 are the same?

A Simple Test

What I really liked about the article was that it included a link to the Booz Allen/ANA Marketing Profiler, a short questionnaire that identifies your marketing organization’s current profile and offers recommendations for your moving your marketing organization closer to where it needs to be. In addition, the profiler offers resources and readings (based upon your profile) to help formulate the proper strategy for this “migration path.”

I took the profiler for Townsend, Inc., and found it to be quite accurate (we came out as "Growth Champions”) in its assessment of our current marketing function. More important, the recommendations offered to improve our marketing organization were dead on. They helped focus my thinking in several important areas and reinforced a couple of initiatives we have recently begun. For example:

• Recommendation: Develop metrics and decision tools (such as marketing ROI) to measure the performance of individual products, channels and segments.

• Lesson learned: At Townsend, we need to do a better job of measuring our marketing ROI. We have already started down that road by shifting primarily to direct marketing and Internet marketing, which should make it easier for us to track and measure results.

• Recommendation: Don’t keep all decision-making authority at the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) level. Instead, allocate these “decision rights” to appropriate levels of the organization to ensure accurate, rapid and continuous responses to service requests

• Lesson learned: This was a good reminder that we need to get our internal teams more involved in the marketing process so they can help select where we prospect and ensure that we generate the right kinds of clients for Townsend.

• Recommendation: Make sure your capabilities are properly aligned with both the marketing agenda and the CEO’s priorities. Understand exactly what skills are required in individual areas.

• Lesson learned: If we’re going to market through the Internet, we need to build internal Web-based marketing skills as quickly as possible.

• Recommendation: Involve other organizational areas (operations, product development, finance, sales) early in the process of making marketing investments

• Lesson learned: Again, a good reminder to get our internal teams more involved in how we market as an organization.

The Rise of Samsung

It might be easy to dismiss this kind of assessment as an interesting but not especially valuable exercise. Before doing so, however, consider what assessing their marketing organization did for Samsung.

According to the “strategy+business” article, Eric Kim took over as vice president of global marketing for Samsung in 1999, just as the company embarked on a new strategy to go from “a low-cost producer of electronics, sold primarily under the brand names of its OEM customers, to a manufacturer of high-end digital products.” This represented a huge and very difficult shift for the company, one that could lead to failure on a massive scale if all the proper elements were not in place.

Upon analyzing the skills, structure and core competencies of his marketing organization, Kim quickly realized they did not align with the new direction. He then spent five years reworking Samsung’s entire marketing organization so that it more closely matched the firm’s newly identified needs.

The result?

Last year, Samsung became the world’s 21st most valuable brand (according to the Business Week/Interbrand 2004 rankings), only one spot behind the vaunted Japanese electronics giant, Sony. While many factors contributed to this meteoric rise, developing the right kind of marketing organization clearly played a major role in elevating Samsung to its current position as one of the world’s elite brands.

So -- what kind of marketing organization do you have? And more important, does it deliver what your organization needs?

To find out, take the Booz Allen/ANA Marketing Profiler. I also recommend reading the article to get a full understanding of the concepts involved. You may discover that you’re marketing organization is right on track with where it needs to be. Or you may find out that you’re trying to pound a round peg into a square hole.

Either way, my guess is you’ll find it time well spent.

I recently had the great fortune of working with Global Shop in Houston. Their business works well on a lot of levels, but the most remarkable thing about the company is the tremendous value it creates for its customers.

Global Shop provides comprehensive EPR systems to small- and medium-sized manufacturers. It helps those manufacturers automate their entire business from the initial quoting of a project to cash collections and everything in between. The primary benefits to customers are increased productivity and profitability, along with improved customer deliveries. But most customers would say that Global Shop has taken their business from chaos to order and given them tight controls.

Global Shop has emerged as the market leader in its category by focusing with laser-like precision on delivering the basic value proposition of “best total solution.” In fact, it is executing the business strategy of customer intimacy as well as any company I have worked with. As a result, Global Shop now has more than 1,000 installed customers and has grown at a sustained annual rate in excess of 25% for the past several years.

When prospective customers build a short list of possible vendors in the ERP software space, they quickly see that Global Shop offers the best total solution. This makes a huge difference because the ERP space is littered with failed attempts and implementation failures. Automating every aspect of a manufacturing business is a daunting task, yet Global Shop enables companies to achieve success where most have failed in the past.

How does Global Shop offer a better solution?

For starters, the company’s training resources go far beyond the industry standard, and their customers know it. Not only does Global Shop excel at every point of touch, they also offer a variety of training options that allow customers to quickly build and maintain their software skills in a manner that fits each company’s unique needs.

Each week, the company holds training classes in Houston, where implementation teams immerse themselves in the requirements for successful implementation. Customers can send as many people as they want, as many times as they want -- for free. Everything is included in the upfront cost of the software and the minimal annual licensing fee. The company also offers the best Web-based training in its category.

But what really differentiates Global Shop’s training is that many of their onsite training consultants are former customers who not only have a deep understanding of the software, they also intimately understand the inner workings of small manufacturers. They know the best practices of Global Shop’s diverse customer base, and can often make dozens of high impact, high leverage recommendations that lead to immediate improvements in the customer’s business.

Global Shop also has a unique way of keeping its software up-to-date. Every time the firm does a customization for a customer, that same customization is available to the entire customer base at the next upgrade -- again at no extra cost. As a result, Global Shop customers know that every upgrade will contain the improvements they need to keep their ERP system at the cutting edge for the next 10 to 15 years.

Compelling Brand Personality

From a branding perspective, what impresses me most about Global Shop is its execution and presentation of its brand personality. A brand personality is the human characteristics we associate with a brand. It’s where we make the all-important emotional connection. It’s often the personality we identify with or the personality we aspire to. Global Shop’s execution of its brand personality would make most consumer brands envious, and it is proves critical in closing the sale.

Most of Global Shop’s customers think and act like small, owner-operated businesses, even those that have several hundred employees and an international customer base. Many are family owned businesses. These businesses typically operate under intense competition, with most feeling the pressure from offshore competitors. And despite their small size, these companies are complex operations that require heavy capital investment and expensive engineering talent and skilled labor on the shop floor.

I would characterize Global Shop’s brand personality as “sincere” because it presents itself as a financially strong, family owned business. Global Shop emphasizes the fact that it has been in business for three decades, and makes it very clear that it has no interest in selling out to a larger software company, as so many of its competitors have. Global Shop also makes customers aware that second-generation family members are being groomed to take over the company, and that all of the software code is developed inside the U.S. rather than offshore.

Global Shop has created a compelling brand personality that exerts a magnetic pull on potential and existing customers. Prospects and customers immediately conclude that Global Shop is “like me,” which leads to instant chemistry and a feeling of trust. One definition of trust is “the feeling of you being on my side.” Global Shop conveys this feeling from the moment you first meet them.

All of which adds up to a powerful software company with a powerful brand. I think their customers would certainly agree -- Global Shop is the best small software company in the U.S.

Dell executives say they're monitoring online complaints and taking steps to correct those issues. In particular, they've added more customer service centers and employees in an effort to better resolve customer complaints. These measures seem to paying off. In a recent article, Investor’s Business Daily cited internal Dell numbers that show a 35% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction and a 30% improvement in its ability to resolve problems the first time out.

Considering the fact that Dell surveys about 24,000 consumer customers a month, these numbers are worth noting. But I wonder if some of the steps Dell is currently taking might come back to bite their brand in the long run.

I recently purchased a Dell computer online, and I have to say the experience was outstanding. In fact, Dell executed flawlessly.

I happened to be in the market for a new PC and saw a great price in one of Dell’s advertising circulars. I went to their web site and easily found the advertised box. I added a few extras (nothing like a little extra horsepower to jazz up a new PC!), placed my order and sat back to await delivery. Afterwards, Dell sent me several tracking e-mails to keep me apprised of my order’s status.

The computer arrived a couple days before promised -- a nice surprise. I whipped it out of the box and set it up in a matter of minutes. Everything worked fine and I began to install my own software. During the installation process, however, I hit a snag and my computer locked up. I called Dell, and in a matter of minutes they helped me resolve the problem.

I’m sure my experience is repeated thousands of times a day around the globe. After all, this is where Dell really shines. They do the acquisition and setup experience in less time, at a lower cost and with less hassle than any other personal computer company. That’s what Dell’s value proposition and brand promise are all about -- delivering a low-cost, customized PC to your door with minimal time and effort on your part.

Not So Great Down the Stretch

Although Dell has mastered the PC acquisition and setup experience, they have struggled to provide service well after the sale. And that’s where the Dell brand is taking a hit.

Dell built its reputation by providing quality PCs at a very low price -- a classic application of the lowest total cost value proposition. What Dell doesn’t provide is a true customer intimate solution or the best total solution. If a complicated problem arises several months after buying the computer, your problem-solving experience with Dell is likely to be very different (and far less satisfying) than the initial acquisition experience.

Until now, Dell has gotten by with this approach because their traditional customers, who tend to be experienced consumers of technology, don’t expect much service after the sale. However, Dell’s customer base is expanding, and that seems to be where many of the problems are coming from.

As Dell has achieved dominant market share and picked up more new customers, a growing number of them are first-time buyers or PC novices who require a great deal of hand-holding after the sale. If you read the posts on the customer affairs sites and blogs, you quickly get the idea that the majority of complaints are coming from technology newbies. Plus, as the absolute number of customers continues to increase, the number of mistakes on Dell’s part is bound to increase with them.

A Shift in Strategy

As a low-cost provider, Dell does not have the profit margins to provide comprehensive customer service. But that’s about to change.

Dell recently announced a spate of paid customer support options ranging from consumer services that mirror the comprehensive in-home services offered from Best Buy’s Geek Squad to comprehensive business services. The business services run the gamut from simple system set-ups to complex deployments that coordinate rollouts at multiple sites and meet tight customer deadlines. Looking ahead, it’s just a matter of time until Dell offers comprehensive IT outsourcing that mirrors similar service offerings from HP and IBM.

Why this shift in strategy? One, Dell is trying to protect its brand by offsetting a growing number of customer complaints. Two, and more important, they’re hoping to boost revenues by turning customer service from a cost into a profit center. To me, the most interesting aspect of all this is what it might do to the Dell brand.

Currently, Dell dominates the best total cost value proposition in the personal computer market. But some day their top line revenue growth will stall unless they do more -- hence their ventures into providing value-added services after the sale. My bet is that Dell will successfully navigate this shift and that customers will want the added services will pay for them. However, adding these services and becoming a services company may prove confusing to customers. Ultimately, it could confuse their brand.

Is Dell a best total cost or a best total solution company? Can they implement both value propositions without confusing customers and/or diluting the brand? For now, they remain firmly entrenched in the best total cost camp. But if their intentions are to migrate -- however slowly and tentatively -- toward a best total solution strategy, it should make for a very interesting journey. More important, it should teach us all some valuable lessons about the challenges involved in maintaining a #1 brand in a rapidly changing environment.

As professional communicators, we are taught to control the message, limit the spokespeople to those trained and credible enough to deliver our carefully crafted corporate message.

But blogs have changed this.

While not for every company, blogs are an incredibly powerful communication tool when put in the hands of the rank and file. The leveraging of blogs for the PR department and executive suite should be reconsidered and instead, the value of empowering your hundreds or thousands of brand ambassadors to speak their minds and hearts about their lives and your work should be evaluated.

But what if they share all your secrets? Tell your customers how they really aren’t respected? What about controlling the message?

Your company culture will be a big determinant here: if your culture is closed and secretive, this will never work. But if you can stand to hear the good and the bad, within reason (more on this in a moment), the blogosphere and your customers, partners, investors, will be better for it. Because blogs are all about being real, transparent, accessible. Who has more of these qualities than your front line brand ambassadors? Especially when your company or value proposition is complex, these daily touchpoints for your brand can be the clarifying experience your potential or current customers need.

One thing you need to do before you send your employees on their way with links to www.blogger.com, is a little document that spells out what your company’s policy is about blogging, just to be clear, so that new product prototype doesn’t find its way onto the web before it should. Some good ones to review and possibly repurpose for your situation are Yahoo’s or Sun’s.

Some Microsoft blogs of interest:
Marketing and Recruting Blog
Robert Scoble’s blog
Mini-Microsoft

Jen Crossen is a Senior Account Executive at Townsend Inc. in San Diego. She is a seasoned PR professional who helps clients build their brands by using innovative brand-building ideas.

The answer is, it depends.

The latest thinking in the field of branding (which first began to emerge as a true field of study back in the early ‘50s) identifies five branding strategies that reign supreme in today’s corporate world. Although each strategy can be successfully employed by companies offering very different products and services, they all seem to work best within fairly narrow parameters that pertain to the industry, product or service and market being served.

Choosing the best strategy for your company, then, depends on matching the parameters of your product/service and market to the appropriate model.

1. Mind-Share Branding. Success in this category requires owning and consistently expressing a set of abstract associations that customers relate to the product or service. However, the perceived benefits of buying and using the products (i.e., consistently low price, great selection) are very real to the customers. As the company consistently expresses the “brand DNA” through each and every transaction, it becomes firmly entrenched in the customer’s mind as the only choice in this product category.

Interestingly, mind-share branding works equally well at opposite ends of the product spectrum. Functional and low-involvement product categories (such as Tide, Southwest Airlines and Wal*Mart) and complicated, high-involvement product categories (such as Dell computers) can both prosper under a mind-share brand strategy. At each end, however, the goal -- and primary benefit -- is to simplify the buying decision for the customer.

Good reads: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Differentiate or Die and The Disciple of Market Leaders

2. Cultural Branding. Cultural branding is probably the most American of all branding strategies in that it uses cultural icons and “brand religion” to establish and sustain a brand myth with which individual consumers can passionately identify. The focus is not so much on the product or service as it is on the relationship between the cultural icon and the product and the brand myth that the consumer buys into. The most successful brand myths address acute contradictions in society that touch people at a very deep level.

Culturally branded companies run the gamut from home décor, fashion and automobiles to food/beverages, entertainment/leisure and social movements. What kind of person responds to cultural branding? It’s the meek, mild-mannered accountant who buys the Harley Davidson hog in order to unleash his “inner self” on weekends. It’s the budding playground hoopster who just knows that he will never reach the NBA unless he wears Nike Air Jordans. It’s the thirsty consumer reaching for an ice-cold Coca Cola because “it’s the real thing.”

Good reads: How Brands Become Icons and The Culting of Brands

3. Emotional Branding. Want your customers to consider you a friend rather than just some faceless entity they buy from? Then aim for the emotional branding strategy. Here, the goal is to build deep interpersonal connections with each individual who interacts with the brand, so that you end up with a relationship partner rather than a customer.

Emotional brands have real personality. They are often expressed through a character or persona (Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald) that appeals to people of all ages. Emotional brands work best with services, retailers and specialty goods -- such as Disney and Starbucks -- where the company can tap into powerful emotions and create compelling experiences that evoke strong loyalty to the brand.

Good reads: Emotional Branding and The Experience Economy

4. Viral Branding. Thanks to plenty of media buzz, viral branding has rocketed to the top of the charts as the latest brand strategy of choice. However, the fact that the media has embraced it does not mean that all companies should. As the name implies, viral branding works by spreading the word through “brand viruses” such as influential spokespeople, early adopter customers and other forms of grass-roots marketing. Accordingly, it achieves the best results with new fashions, new technologies and premium and super-premium brands that eschew mainstream markets.

Viral branding appeals to people who see themselves as cool, hip and fashionable. It attracts those who get a charge from “discovering” a new brand and leading the vanguard of early brand advocates. Who stands out in the viral branding category? Google, Hotmail, Absolut Vodka and Vonage are names that immediately come to mind.

Good reads: Tipping Point, Spreading the Idea Virus, The Anatomy of Buzz and The Influentials

5. Sensory Branding. Singapore Airlines and Kellogg’s Cornflakes in the same branding category? Hard to believe, but true. Sensory branding takes the focus off the product or service itself and puts it squarely on the sensory experience it creates for the consumer. Hence, this category includes a broad and a diverse range of products and services, from fashion, cosmetics and high-end retail to automotive and travel/hospitality.

Sensory branding goes beyond the ordinary to create a full connection with one’s environment through the senses. We’re talking full-on sensory engagement here! Not just with the over-stimulated senses of sight and sound, but also connecting with touch, taste and smell. In some categories, the buying experience (how, when and where the product is purchased) helps to create the brand. Here the brand doesn’t really begin until customers actually use the product or service. The end result is an experience so full, rich and satisfying that customers refuse to consider any other brand.

Good read: Brand Sense

Choosing Your Branding Strategy

As an avid student and practitioner of branding, my experience is that all strong brands can usually be linked to a clear focus on one of these models. However, while it’s usually best to focus your branding efforts on one model, aspects of the other models can be used to strengthen a brand.

For example, the mind-share model of branding tends to rely on the sight and sound senses. But it’s fairly easy to add a distinctive touch or smell from the sensory model to strengthen the brand.

Regardless of which strategy you choose, building a strong brand depends upon applying the appropriate model to your product category, the unique circumstances of your customers and your market. I hope I’ve given you at least a good start in identifying which model is right for you.

On the surface, the Intel Inside campaign looks like a simple stroke of genius. Shell out a few million bucks for some well-placed television commercials, and in no time consumers will be insisting that your customers put your name on the outside of their product, right? If only it were that easy. What most people fail to realize is that the remarkable success of the Intel Inside campaign -- or any campaign that seeks to turn a commodity into a recognizable consumer brand -- rests on two very important principles.

Let’s address the money issue first. At last count, Intel spends about a $1 billion a year in cooperative advertising with their major customers, such as Dell and HP. Add to that the $1 billion Intel’s customers spend and the total financial outlay to support the Intel Inside brand comes close to $2 billion a year. Or, as we say in the business, serious money.

In general, Intel matches every dollar its customers spend on advertising that mentions the Intel Inside brand. For example, those hundreds of millions of advertising circulars that Dell sends out each year? Intel absorbs about half their cost. In fact, every time you see the Intel Inside logo or hear the Intel Inside sonic brand, you know that Intel paid for about half of the marketing costs. This enormous financial commitment is one reason why the Intel brand stands out from the crowd and why technologists easily point to it as one of their favorite brands.

On the end-user benefit side, the key word here is “perception.” In this case, Intel has successfully convinced enough consumers that a computer with the Intel chip inside is the fastest available and therefore can handle any application they can throw at it. As a result, consumers perceive real value in the Intel brand, which is why the vast majority of PCs rolling of the assembly lines carry that well-known sticker on the outside: Intel Inside.

Likewise, any commodity product or ingredient technology that hopes to develop a powerful consumer brand must similarly convince the buying public that their product is so superior that consumers won’t accept anything less. And that’s exactly what a little-known company called SanDisk is trying to accomplish.

Will SanDisk Be the Next Intel?

A leading provider of flash memory -- the tiny wafers that store digital music, photos and videos -- SanDisk is one of the primary beneficiaries of the soaring demand for cell phones, digital music players, digital cameras and game consoles. Over the past three years, revenues for the Sunnyvale (CA)-based firm have surged an average of 70 percent a year. This year, they’re tracking an increase of 19 percent, for a total of $2.1 billion in sales. Not surprisingly, SanDisk’s stock has shot up 40 percent over the past 12 months.

Despite these glowing numbers, SanDisk faces a huge challenge. For the most part, memory is a commodity business, and prices can be harshly cyclical. Pricing wars frequently erupt overnight, and prices can take a nosedive almost as fast. During the summer of 2004, for example, flash memory prices plunged precipitously, causing SanDisk’s stock to drop 40 percent in four days.

To avoid ongoing pricing hiccups, SanDisk is striving to develop a strong brand that consumers will recognize and value. At the most basic level, this means convincing consumers to ask for a “SanDisk one-gigabyte card” for their digital camera rather than just any one-gigabyte card. Just as Intel has convinced personal computer buyers to insist on Intel as the “chip of choice.”

From where I sit, it seems like SanDisk has the first part of the consumer technology branding formula right. They’re spending millions on a worldwide advertising campaign that targets retail stores, magazines and even prime-time TV shows like The Simpsons and Survivor. In terms of sheer dollars, SanDisk isn’t shelling out as much hard cash as Intel, but it probably doesn’t have to. If fact, most companies don’t need to spend nearly that much. They just have to commit enough financial resources to garner the attention of consumers.

SanDisk also seems to have the second part of the formula well underway by working hard to distinguish itself through technology that delivers real consumer benefits. Last year alone, SanDisk increased R&D spending by a hefty 48 percent to $125 million. The result has been a string of innovations -- waterproof memory cards, titanium cards, and secure memory cards with embedded fingerprint readers -- that have captured the attention of consumers because they offer compelling value.

SanDisk is also working with wireless carriers to help protect consumers from fraud and identity theft. When faced with a lost or stolen cell phone, consumers can contact the carrier to remotely disable the card and keep sensitive personal data safe. SanDisk has even successfully offered new products in the gadget business. Last August, for example, the company introduced an MP3 player that quickly raced to first place in the category, only to be knocked off by Apple when it introduced the iPod Shuffle.

Does SanDisk have what it takes to make the leap from anonymous commodity provider to a recognized consumer brand like Intel? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I plan to follow them closely to see how their branding campaign continues to unfold and, more important, how the market responds. As someone who lives and breathes technology branding, I believe we can all learn a great deal from SanDisk’s ongoing branding efforts.