Thursday, January 20, 2011

8 more exercise templates -- to put branding in action

I want to share with you 8 additional worksheets from my first book, ForwardFast.  You can apply these “workshop-in-print" templates for your own team meetings.  Click here to download these templates.
  1. Mode of Action Descriptions - Many pharma brands have successfully created new positions by coining unique actions. Some terms have become so metonymic that you forget they were ever branded claims.
  2. Customer Experience Branding - Focusing on the customer experience turned out to be a great method for branding blood-donation technologies. One product we branded was a blood-collection system created by the client, and we branded it through partnerships with Disney, The Ritz Carlton, and Starbucks. The campaign was presented as a different donation experience – and we targeted high school blood drives by creating a special MySpace page for the product.
  3. Global Branding - It is beyond cliché to say the world is getting smaller. The world is flat. Your brand should work across borders, cultures, and languages. Many marketers get hung up focusing on the relatively few differences among markets rather than the overwhelming similarities.
  4. Retail and Environmental Branding - The point of environmental branding is to create a branded space. This has major implications for retail spaces and convention booths. In selling health, science, and technology brands, the environment might be a drug store kiosk or a specialty store display. Or it might be a presentation space that not only makes a potential customer comfortable, but also presents information about your brand in a compact and concise way.
  5. Brand and Product Innovation - Often with pharmaceuticals, the ingredient or product doesn’t change, but the delivery system does. By branding this delivery system, you can capitalize on the inherent innovation of the product. Target changed the packaging for its prescription medications, for example. Not a major change, and the products did not change, but they successfully leveraged this enhancement. 
  6. Consumer Research and Insights Analysis - This is about branding the communication cycle. Customer feedback can have a profound impact on branding strategies, so you should move this beyond a simple “how are we doing?” concept. For example, imagine the brand value of a pharmacy that calls the customer a day later to check up on the patient and then sends out a mailer a week after that to see how the patient is complying.
  7. Package and Structural Design - Like the delivery system, packaging design can make or break your brand effort. This goes back to first impressions. Your packaging is just one part of your brand identity, and since it is a quite visual part, you ought to make sure it looks good.
  8. Brand Evangelism - Never underestimate the value of a spokesperson. Often it is enough for a product to be evangelized – if someone we know and respect likes the product, we assume we will like it. Consider the power of endorsements on political campaigns or Oprah’s Book Club on book sales.

No comments: