“The best way to kill a so-so product is with a great marketing
campaign.”
“Branding” is perhaps the most misunderstood term in
marketing, and perhaps in all of corporate America. There are a handful of
companies worldwide–including Coke, AT&T, Nike, McDonald’s,
Geico, Budweiser–that actually run true branding campaigns, defined as a
broad-based marketing effort designed to change or influence the market’s
perception of a product or service. The reason only a handful? Prohibitive cost.
Only a tiny fraction of companies have the multi-hundred million dollar annual
marketing budget needed to move the perceptual needle.
So what does branding mean for the rest of us? Inside-Out
Branding© is a philosophy that represents the opposite of how many companies
and marketing service providers view branding. The basis of the Inside-Out
Branding concept is that your company’s brand doesn’t equate to or derive
from your logo, tagline or your marketing budget. Nor is your brand comprised of
the words in your company brochure, Web site or television commercials.
Rather, Inside-Out Branding states that your brand equity comes
from inside the company, starting with the product or service and your
customers’ experience with it. Think of your brand as the sum total of the
hundreds or thousands of touch points you have with your customers (see image at
right),
from the timeliness and accuracy of the invoice, to the way the
receptionist answers the phone or attitude customer service associates convey to
the clarity of your product’s assembly instructions to, most importantly of
course, the way your product enhances the day to day life of your customers, be
they consumers or businesses.
So Inside-Out Branding is much more than simply promoting your
company with memorable and creative messages. With Inside-Out Branding, every
customer touch point and every aspect of the customer experience add up to
create a company’s brand identity.
Too often companies use investments in advertising or other
promotion to fix what is in actuality a product or sales problem. The Inside-Out
Branding approach recommends that your marketing budget should only be used once
your product or service has achieved a very positive customer experience and
your company has “cracked the code” on the optimal sales process.
Generally speaking, before dollars are spent on awareness and
lead generation, your product or service should be achieving these key
operational metrics:
- Your customer satisfaction rating of at least 95% (why would you promote a
product that customers wouldn’t recommend to others?)
- Your customer renewal rate of at least 90%.
- Your sales process results in a close ratio of at least 25% (i.e. you
convert at least one out of every four visitors to your online store or close
one of every four deals you’re in.)
Bob London is president of London, Ink, a Maryland-based marketing and
communications consulting firm, and serves as a Virtual VP of Marketing for
growth stage companies that need an injection of marketing experience and
leadership to drive key initiatives and results.
the company’s market legitimacy. Together with great leaders like Seth
Finkel, who I worked with at PSINet, and John Curran, who had been CTO XO
Communications and BBN/GTE Networking, we retrenched not only operationally but
strategically.”