Building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to build your brand.
It's a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter.
The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.
The fundamental problem is that you can't possibly anticipate every possible touchpoint that could influence the perception of your company's brand.
For example, if you happen to meet an employee of Company X at a bar, even if the employee isn't working, how you perceive your interaction with that employee will affect how you perceive Company X, and therefore Company X's brand. It can be a positive influence, or a negative influence. Every employee can affect your company's brand, not just the front line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.
At Zappos.com, we decided a long time ago that we didn't want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience. We believe that customer service shouldn't be just a department, it should be the entire company.
Advertising can only get your brand so far. If you ask most people what the "brand" of the airline industry as a whole is (not any specific airline, but the entire industry), they will usually say something about bad customer service or bad customer experience. If you ask people what their perception of the US auto industry is today, chances are the responses you get won't be in line with what the automakers project in their advertising.
So what's a company to do if you can't just buy your way into building the brand you want? What's the best way to build a brand for the long term?
In a word: culture.
At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff -- like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers -- will happen naturally on its own.
We believe that your company's culture and your company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag the culture at first, but eventually it will catch up.
Your culture is your brand.
So how do you build and maintain the culture that you want?
It starts with the hiring process. At Zappos, we actually do two different sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his/her team will do the standard set of interviews looking for relevant experience, technical ability, fit within the team, etc. But then our HR department does a separate set of interviews, looking purely for culture fit. Candidates have to pass both sets of interviews in order to be hired.
We've actually said no to a lot of very talented people that we know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But because we felt they weren't culture fits, we were willing to sacrifice the short term benefits in order to protect our culture (and therefore our brand) for the long term.
After hiring, the next step to building the culture is training. Everyone that is hired into our headquarters goes through the same training that our Customer Loyalty Team (call center) reps go through, regardless of department or title. You might be an accountant, or a lawyer, or a software developer -- you go through the exact same training program.
It's a 4-week training program, in which we go over company history, the importance of customer service, the long term vision of the company, our philosophy about company culture -- and then you're actually on the phone for 2 weeks, taking calls from customers. Again, this goes back to our belief that customer service shouldn't just be a department, it should be the entire company.
At the end of the first week of training, we make an offer to the entire class. We offer everyone $2000 to quit (in addition to paying them for the time they've already worked), and it's a standing offer until the end of the fourth week of training. We want to make sure that employees are here for more than just a paycheck. We want employees that believe in our long term vision and want to be a part of our culture. As it turns out, on average, less than 1% of people end up taking the offer.
One of the great advantages of focusing on culture is when reporters come and visit our offices. Unlike most companies, we don't give reporters a small list of people they're allowed to talk to. Instead, we encourage them to wander around and talk to whoever they want. It's our way of being as transparent as possible, which is part of our culture.
We've formally defined our the Zappos culture in terms of 10 core values:
1) Deliver WOW Through Service
2) Embrace and Drive Change
3) Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4) Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5) Pursue Growth and Learning
6) Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8) Do More With Less
9) Be Passionate and Determined
10) Be Humble
Many companies have core values, but they don't really commit to them. They usually sound more like something you'd read in a press release. Maybe you learn about them on day 1 of orientation, but after that it's just a meaningless plaque on the wall of the lobby.
We believe that it's really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you're willing to hire and fire based on them. If you're willing to do that, then you're well on your way to building a company culture that is in line with the brand you want to build. You can let all of your employees be your brand ambassadors, not just the marketing or PR department. And they can be brand ambassadors both inside and outside the office.
At the end of the day, just remember that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff -- including building a great brand -- will fall into place on its own.
Via: zappos blog
Showing posts with label brand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brand. Show all posts
Monday, 10 August 2009
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
5 Simple Ways to Protect Your Brand
1 Choose Wisely
The more creative your brand name is, the greater the odds that it is unique. A more distinctive and create name or slogan is generally more capable of standing out among the competition and becoming a brand with real value. Which sounds like a more exciting brand, a more valuable brand: “Jim’s Gym” or “Vantage Fitness“? “Cincinnati Frozen Yogurt” or “fraîche”? “Joe’s Pizza” or “Pie-tanza”? “Search.com” or “Google”?
2 Use it
The more you use your trademarks – brand names, logos and slogans – the stronger and more distinctive they become and the more your likely customers are to remember your brand and to use it to tell others about it.
3 Distinguish It
Use ALL CAPS, bold or italics to emphasize your brand as often as you can. Then the customer knows exactly what your brand is.
4 Apply to register it
Registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a federal agency and part of the Department of Commerce, enhances the protection and the value of your trademark assets. Registration allows use of the ® symbol, provides substantial benefits and savings if you ever have to go to court to stop an infringement, and may help stop cybersquatters from registering new domain names. See http://www.uspto.gov/teas/index.html for more information.
5 Create Google Alerts
An easy and free way to monitor for others copying your brand or commenting on it. If you find a possible infringement, contact the offender and if unresolved, contact an attorney. www.google.com/alerts.
The more creative your brand name is, the greater the odds that it is unique. A more distinctive and create name or slogan is generally more capable of standing out among the competition and becoming a brand with real value. Which sounds like a more exciting brand, a more valuable brand: “Jim’s Gym” or “Vantage Fitness“? “Cincinnati Frozen Yogurt” or “fraîche”? “Joe’s Pizza” or “Pie-tanza”? “Search.com” or “Google”?
2 Use it
The more you use your trademarks – brand names, logos and slogans – the stronger and more distinctive they become and the more your likely customers are to remember your brand and to use it to tell others about it.
3 Distinguish It
Use ALL CAPS, bold or italics to emphasize your brand as often as you can. Then the customer knows exactly what your brand is.
4 Apply to register it
Registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a federal agency and part of the Department of Commerce, enhances the protection and the value of your trademark assets. Registration allows use of the ® symbol, provides substantial benefits and savings if you ever have to go to court to stop an infringement, and may help stop cybersquatters from registering new domain names. See http://www.uspto.gov/teas/index.html for more information.
5 Create Google Alerts
An easy and free way to monitor for others copying your brand or commenting on it. If you find a possible infringement, contact the offender and if unresolved, contact an attorney. www.google.com/alerts.
Via: dumblittleman.com
Sunday, 10 May 2009
10 Rules for Today's Consumers In the New World of Real-Time
1. We Want Access to Your Product As Quickly As Possible
2. We Expect the Product to Work On Any Platform In Any Location
3. We Want to See That You Allow for Feedback, Positive and Negative
4. We Expect That You Respond to Your Customers, Quickly
5. We Expect That You Join and Lead the Conversation
6. We Want to See That You Continually Improve Your Product
7. We Expect You to Use Your Product and Be Visible
8. We Expect That You Will Embrace or Lead Standards
9. We Expect You Are Driven By More than Money Alone
10. We Want You To Treat Us As Informed Consumers and Partners
Via: louisgray.com
2. We Expect the Product to Work On Any Platform In Any Location
3. We Want to See That You Allow for Feedback, Positive and Negative
4. We Expect That You Respond to Your Customers, Quickly
5. We Expect That You Join and Lead the Conversation
6. We Want to See That You Continually Improve Your Product
7. We Expect You to Use Your Product and Be Visible
8. We Expect That You Will Embrace or Lead Standards
9. We Expect You Are Driven By More than Money Alone
10. We Want You To Treat Us As Informed Consumers and Partners
Via: louisgray.com
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Protect Your Product’s Look and Feel from Imitators
Too many U.S. companies believe that being first to market with a design feature, whether it’s registered as a trademark or not, is the best way to ensure that your brand is associated with it. That’s a false assumption—and a dangerous one. Instead companies must ensure that consumers connect a product’s look and feel with the brand. That means conducting targeted research on design features and, in many cases, spending more money to hammer home the brand association in consumers’ minds.
A design feature is what’s known legally as trade dress—any nonfunctional characteristic of a product’s or package’s appearance and feel, ranging from the pink color of Corning’s insulation to the cowhide pattern on Gateway’s computer boxes. Many companies don’t know how much trade dress is worth and therefore can’t make informed decisions about how much to spend to protect it from being copied. And firms, especially small and midsize ones, often don’t register design features as trademarks because meeting official requirements can be costly and difficult. Often they believe that the chances of being copied are slim or that they can successfully sue an imitator because they originated a feature.
But the legal climate for brands changed in 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled that because Samara Brothers, a New Jersey–based wholesaler, could provide no evidence that consumers associated its children’s-clothing designs with only one brand source, Wal-Mart could sell items that looked a lot like Samara’s. A product’s design feature can now be protected from imitation only if it has “secondary meaning”—if buyers see it as a marker of the brand. That meaning must be acquired through marketing.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult for a company to get the data it needs to help build a bulwark against imitation. It can conduct a simple experiment to determine what percentage of consumers associate a feature with the brand and whether the feature is valuable enough to be worth the effort of spreading that association to more consumers.
Say, for example, a maker of western boots with decorative stitching hires a research firm to conduct an experiment with current or potential buyers in five widely distributed malls, out of sight of the company’s outlets. The researchers show half the shoppers the (unlabeled) decorated boots and the other half the same boots without the design feature. Then they ask the participants in both groups what they’d be willing to pay for a pair. The difference in the average price quoted by the two groups becomes the per-unit value of the stitching. Finally, they ask the participants to name the brand. Typically, few participants can do that—which may surprise the company.
Suppose the stitching added $40 to the perceived value of the boots, but the fraction of people who could identify the brand was only five to 10 percentage points higher in the with-stitching group than in the without-stitching group. The company would need to create a campaign to strengthen the association between the feature and the brand. That might mean increasing the marketing budget as much as threefold, at least for a while, but it might also discourage imitators and improve the likelihood of success in a legal contest. A difference of at least 20 percentage points that can be attributed solely to the design feature is usually considered a solid defense against imitation if the company sues a competitor.
Research data of this type are becoming common in infringement lawsuits. But companies should be collecting data even if no imitators are on the horizon, because trade dress is an increasingly important asset. The rising value of brands is illustrated by the $305 million in damages awarded to Adidas in May 2008 for imitation of its athletic shoes—believed to be the largest amount ever awarded for trademark infringement. Valuable assets like trade dress can be managed rationally only if their value is fully understood. In effect, what you don’t know will hurt you.
Via: Harvard Business
A design feature is what’s known legally as trade dress—any nonfunctional characteristic of a product’s or package’s appearance and feel, ranging from the pink color of Corning’s insulation to the cowhide pattern on Gateway’s computer boxes. Many companies don’t know how much trade dress is worth and therefore can’t make informed decisions about how much to spend to protect it from being copied. And firms, especially small and midsize ones, often don’t register design features as trademarks because meeting official requirements can be costly and difficult. Often they believe that the chances of being copied are slim or that they can successfully sue an imitator because they originated a feature.
But the legal climate for brands changed in 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled that because Samara Brothers, a New Jersey–based wholesaler, could provide no evidence that consumers associated its children’s-clothing designs with only one brand source, Wal-Mart could sell items that looked a lot like Samara’s. A product’s design feature can now be protected from imitation only if it has “secondary meaning”—if buyers see it as a marker of the brand. That meaning must be acquired through marketing.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult for a company to get the data it needs to help build a bulwark against imitation. It can conduct a simple experiment to determine what percentage of consumers associate a feature with the brand and whether the feature is valuable enough to be worth the effort of spreading that association to more consumers.
Say, for example, a maker of western boots with decorative stitching hires a research firm to conduct an experiment with current or potential buyers in five widely distributed malls, out of sight of the company’s outlets. The researchers show half the shoppers the (unlabeled) decorated boots and the other half the same boots without the design feature. Then they ask the participants in both groups what they’d be willing to pay for a pair. The difference in the average price quoted by the two groups becomes the per-unit value of the stitching. Finally, they ask the participants to name the brand. Typically, few participants can do that—which may surprise the company.
Suppose the stitching added $40 to the perceived value of the boots, but the fraction of people who could identify the brand was only five to 10 percentage points higher in the with-stitching group than in the without-stitching group. The company would need to create a campaign to strengthen the association between the feature and the brand. That might mean increasing the marketing budget as much as threefold, at least for a while, but it might also discourage imitators and improve the likelihood of success in a legal contest. A difference of at least 20 percentage points that can be attributed solely to the design feature is usually considered a solid defense against imitation if the company sues a competitor.
Research data of this type are becoming common in infringement lawsuits. But companies should be collecting data even if no imitators are on the horizon, because trade dress is an increasingly important asset. The rising value of brands is illustrated by the $305 million in damages awarded to Adidas in May 2008 for imitation of its athletic shoes—believed to be the largest amount ever awarded for trademark infringement. Valuable assets like trade dress can be managed rationally only if their value is fully understood. In effect, what you don’t know will hurt you.
Via: Harvard Business
