3B-3E (notes.1)

Brand Management: Aligning Business, Brand and Behaviour

BUSINESS / BRAND / BEHAVIOUR
Sales Funnel: Aware / Consider / Try / Adopt

Not customer, but consumer! Dynamic sequence of experiences...
Journey across a variety of experiences for the consumer.
Business to design & deliver a differentiated experience. Brand - engage people. Align the 3Bs accross channels & markets.

The brand image lives on customers mind.
Visual identity + Image. Competitive environment.
Safe = Volvo / Magical = Disney (experience)
A brand is a living entity, the product of a thousand small gestures.
Perfect competition: players in industry don't make profit, all value goes to the consumers.
- Large number of sellers with low barriers to enter.
- Perfect information for customers.
- Homogeneous (commodity-like) products. Low cost competitors copy the leaders.

Role of environment?

Brand promise + Delivery of that promise. Engage with different business functions, more than marketing (ex. HR). Care about!
Responsibility in business practice. Test - Get it out - Feedback - Improve. Give magic. Experience / Learning by doing / Purpose of business.

Brand purpose:
- Differentiation, difference that matters to consumers. Brand differentiation: A relevant (valued) point-of-difference in relation to competitors. What the brand stands for? Use Slogan!
From product / service - to consumers' wellness (ex. Pampers). Build the brand from inside out! Consumer purpose - product / service. Understand the core value of customers behaviour. BB - customers buy solutions!
In 3B model: Business, organization's fundamental reason for being and core purpose is to guide and inspire. Brand, exists as the purpose to drive the entire organization. Behaviour, the goal worth the strive and the struggle.

M&C Saatchi :
The way that brand communicate to consumers. Influence!
Brand life cycle is vey quick. Speed! As brands get out of fashion.
Principles of 'brutal simplicity':
This is the idea that whatever you're selling should be broken down to its core value or essence for it to be understood.
SURT ('Simple universally recognisable truth') + Brand Truth = IDEA
3 box thinking works because it mirrors an old sales technique of getting someone to say 'yes' 3 times which then results in them saying 'yes' to the final question of 'would you like to buy this product'. (If you tell people that the sky is blue or the grass is green - they have no option but to agree. If you then tell them something they can't dispute about your brand then they have to agree with that too. Once you finally hit them with your simple new idea, they have not option to but agree once again, even if it challenges their existing beliefs.)
3 box thinking: Consumer/Target truth / Brand truth / Idea!
Simplicity!
Traditional / Digital / Social media (brand glue to hold different formats together) = Coherent view. Ask people to behave in a certain way. Affect peoples behaviour.

3E
Value creation: Efficiency / Effectiveness / Experience
The experience part differentiates you. Think about a music performance! Create an advantage.
The Quality of the product vs. The experience of the product
Business -Efficiency (past: reduce waste and keep the output) Strong focus on cost reduction. (TQM Total Quality Management)
Does cost cutting actually work? Cut the bad cost, be careful about the good cost!
Effectiveness, race in terms of performance.
Customers pay money for the value created. Consumers use, value is in the use of a product / service. This is the consumer experience. Make everything easy. Allow consumer to be creative. Value created within the consumer and not within the product. Consumer's journey. The product allows you to release the value. (ex. Apple)

3B/3E (3+3 drivers of value creation)
Business + Efficiency: Assemble commodities sod to markets.
Brand + Effectiveness: Design products/services for customers/clients.
Behaviour + Experience: Stage experiences for consumers.
Are you pretty much the same with competitors? Differentiation?

Brand image is what people think about the brand. The potential benefits of having a strong brand purpose: Provide customer relevance, attracts and motivates talent. The customer journey cuts across business processes and all people (across the organisation) need to deliver on the brand promise.
Brand differentiation = Competitive advantage.

“Let’s seize this opportunity to create more and better jobs, cultivate valuable skills, and not simply repair but prepare our economy for the 21st century.” IBM for the 2008 economic crisis.

B2B
New research shows there’s a surprising gap between the brand messages that suppliers offer to customers and what their customers really want to know.

The themes that many B2B companies consider important for brand imaging appear to have minimal influence on buyers’ perceptions of brand strength.


-Are you telling the same story as your competitors?
Given the prevalence of similar messages, this is an important checkpoint for many companies. If both you and your rivals claim that your (and their) products derive from renewable sources, this probably won’t move the needle when customers consider your brand. Contrast that with IBM’s Smarter Planet branding effort, which tells a story emphasizing the company’s special capabilities in the digital economy and guides not just external communications but also product development and other forms of employee engagement.

-Does your sales force say it is facing headwinds?
Even in the digital era, personal interactions with sales reps remain the most influential factor—across touch points—for B2B customers. That makes salespeople a great source of information about the degree to which customers see your products as differentiated or worth a premium.

-Do you deliver your brand in a consistent way?
Especially at a time when opportunities to deliver brand messages are proliferating as never before, consistency is crucial. If anything, today’s increasingly fragmented environment calls for a more disciplined communication of values and messages across a wider range of channels, including some quite traditional ones, for a longer period of time.
though: changes in the market environment should influence brand-messaging. Consistently gathering information and evolving in response are valuable ways of closing any gaps that may be opening up between your brand messaging and your customers’ needs.

brand bar stool test:
(measure advertising effectiveness because: advertising is most effective when it is easy to understand.

The Barstool Test is a technique used by many copywriters:
Once you finished writing your copy, imagine you are in a bar having a drink with your prospect. Then read each sentence you written, out loud. As you do so, ask yourself, “Would I really say that, in that way, if I were sitting on a barstool having a beer with this person?” If the answer is no, decide what it is you wouldn’t say, re-write it, and repeat the process. Do this with every sentence and every paragraph of your promotion until you are satisfied it all sounds like a barstool conversation.
And that’s it. That’s the Barstool Test.

Take-Away Points
1. Research has shown that advertising is most effective when it’s easily understood.
2. The best way to make an advertisement or any other marketing content easy to understand is to write like you speak – as though you’re having a conversation with your reader.
3. To make sure your writing sounds conversational, use the Barstool Test.