Tag: branding

Do you have an irrational brand attachment?

July 22, 2010

Everybody has one. There is one brand that you will buy no matter what. Perhaps they dazzled you with great service, or their reliability is out of this world. Maybe their stuff is just plain cool.

I have a couple of irrational brand attachments for very different reasons. The first one is Dell. I have been a fanatical Dell customer for 10 years, and it was early in my customer life that I became one. My hard drive suddenly stopped. Dead. My attempts to revive it were futile. When I called Dell, I was floored to hear that a local agent would be calling me to arrange to have the new hard drive installed. The story gets better – the agent informed me that my hard drive was obsolete and their smallest one now had twice the storage space. When I inquired about the cost, the agent answered “nothing, it is under warranty.” Within 24 hours (on a sub-zero night in February), I had a gigantic hard drive installed and ready to go. That is dazzling service!

My other irrational brand attachment is to Fender. They’ve been in the electric guitar business for 60+ years and didn’t get to be the leader (sorry, Gibson) by accident. Fender guitars sound great at first grab – you don’t have to do anything to them to get an amazing sound and feel. Every Fender I’ve owned has been an incredible out of the box experience.

There you go. Two ways to build an irrational brand attachment. You can make your customer service an unexpected delight. You can provide an expectation that the product will be wonderful. There are many other ways. Pick yours.

Only 57 channels? Is anything on?

June 16, 2010

Think back to the good old days. Remember when you used Twitter as the bastion of refuge from the clutter of other channels? Time to think about that channel plan again. Twitter has more than 120 million users and adds at least 6 million new ones per month. Even with only one tenth of its users actively tweeting, Twitter has not only become the clutter, it has basically become full to capacity. Marketers who choose to use Twitter are faced with a double whammy of a high noise level and (so it seems to this user) a high instance of site unavailability. So what is a marketer to do? Do you find another channel that is less crowded, or soldier on with increasingly crowded and unusable channels, or what?

Twitter is just a channel rather than a means to an end. Marketers cannot live by Twitter alone. The same can be said for Foursquare and even Facebook. Just because one of your TV networks (take GSN, one of my guilty pleasures, for example) may experience some overloading, that does not mean that your TV set is broken or your satellite/cable service is down. Switch to another channel and see what you get.

Think long-term about changes in your market and how your customer behavior will evolve, and try to forecast where they are going next. See if the channel still fits.

Call it what you like, but I call it…

June 11, 2010

This must truly be the end of an era. Or is it? General Motors recently distributed an internal memo, instructing employees to “communicate our brand as Chevrolet,” effectively stopping the use of the name Chevy when referring to their long established Chevrolet brand. Then, they backtracked. Claiming that their original memo was “poorly worded,” General Motors clarified by saying they wanted to use the name Chevrolet as they expanded into global markets.

This brings up a host of questions:

  • What is going on here? The names Chevrolet and Chevy have been pretty much synonymous for 100 years. This is one of the world’s oldest brands.
  • Is dropping the shorter name going to hurt the brand? Only a scandal of Toyota-like proportions could hurt such an established name.
  • What is General Motors afraid of? Is it is doubtful that anyone would mistake a similarly named company (OK, there is a Mexican restaurant chain with a similar name, but their food tastes better than the car) if they only used two of the three syllables.
  • Has General Motors done anything wrong? They did what nearly every major corporation has done at least once – issued a statement and then clarified. Clarity is good. The original memo was described by a General Motors executive as a “rough draft” that got out, so now they are stating what they really mean.
  • Isn’t it still an honor to have customers name your product? Many brand and company names (think IBM, KFC, and FedEx) evolved into their current forms because customers knew them by a less formal name. Shortening the name doesn’t cheapen the brand at all, rather it increases the customer’s affinity for and identity with the brand. Keep the brand top of mind, regardless of the syllables used.