Brand Strategy Essentials: From Identity to Growth

1. Class preview: Welcome. I'm excited to have you here as we explore branding together. Whether you're a marketer, a freelancer or somebody just curious about how brands work, this course is designed to help you think more clearly about brand and branding and ask better questions. Hi, I'm VancavHikov. My day job is head of strategy at BBDO, a global famous creative agency. I come from a practitioner background. But let's start with the reality check. Branding is often misunderstood. Many people think it's having the perfect logo or having a great slogan, or it's your product or having a viral art campaign. But that is just the surface. Your logo is like salt. It's essential, but it's just one part of the flavor. The full brand experience is the core recipe. It's how you remember. Branding is about perception. I lives in the minds of your customers, not in your design files or PowerPoint deck. It is not what you say about yourself. It's what people say when you're not in the room. As the great Sir John Haggerty puts it, a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world, a very tiny corner in someone's mind. So here is the most important thing to understand upright. Branding is not about you. It's about them, your customers. It's what they think you are. Great brands are not talking about themselves. They're tapping into something bigger. Nike doesn't just sell shoes, they inspire athletes and everyday people to push their limits. These great brands have built an emotional connection with their audience by focusing on what matters to them. Now this course won't give you a one size fits all formula for branding success because that doesn't exist, but it will give you a structured way to think about branding using the frameworks of some of the best minds in our industry. We should cover brand identity or vision or the David Tucker model helping you to define your brand essence, positioning and differentiation using April Dunford's framework, how to make your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace, brand growth and consumer behavior based on Cantars blueprint. What makes your brand grow and why some brands fail. Balancing brand and performance marketing, based on the famous work of Peter Field and Les Binet, how to think long term while still making short term sales. As you go through this course, I want you to keep this in mind. Brand Strategy begins with two very simple questions. Who exactly am I here for, and what change do I seek to make? Are you ready to start thinking about branding differently? Let's dive in. 2. What is a Brand?: If Apple opened a hotel tomorrow, most of us would probably guess what exactly it would be like, minimalist design, seamless tech premium feel. Now imagine Hayat made a computer. Could you picture it? Probably not. That is the difference between having a brand and having just a good product. When you have a brand, you made a promise to people so they know what to expect. It's a shortcut and when the expectation is consistent and distinctive, you have armed something powerful, trust, recognition, and loyalty. Branding expert Martin Nomier puts it best. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a company product or service. Let's break that down. It's not what you say about the brand, it's what they perceive it to be. It's more emotional than logical and it's unique for each person. No two people see one brand exactly the same. For example, think about Tessa. To some people, Tessa represents cutting edge technology. To other people, it's simply an overpriced status symbol. To others, it's the future of sustainability to most people recently, it's a big brand failure. Same brand, different gut feelings. These very perceptions collectively shape the Tessa brand. It is essential to differentiate between brand and brand in as these serve distinct throws. A brand is the collective perception and emotional response associated with a company or a product. Branding relates to how you manage your brand to essentially do two important things. First, come easily and fast to mind in buying situations. And second, when it comes to mind, it should be associated with a couple of things that are relevant to consumers and you do relatively better than your competitors. What is the simple takeaway from this lesson? Bunt is a perception that lives in people's minds, it's shaped by emotions, experiences, and expectations. Here is the important part. You don't own your brand, your audience does. 3. The Role of Brands in Decision-Making: Think about the last time you bought a pair of sneakers, smartphone, or a cup of coffee. Did you analyze all possible options logically or did you just go with the brand that you trusted? We choose them based on how they make us feel. Brands are shortcuts for decision making. They reduce uncertainty, create trust, and save us from the exhaustion of endless choices. Strong brands make decision making easy by creating strong emotional connection with the audience. Research shows that emotion drives up to 95% of our purchase decisions. Even when we think we're making rational choice, emotion plays much bigger role in our decision making than we realize. Trust is the foundation of every strong brand. I'm a forensic artist, work for the San Jose Police Department 1995-2011. I showed up to a place I had never been, and there was a guy with a drafting board. We couldn't see them. They couldn't see us. Tell me about your hair. I didn't know what he was doing, but then I could tell after several questions that he was drawing me. Tell me about your chin. It kind of protrudes a little bit. Hm. Especially when I smile. Your jaw? My mom told me I had a big jaw. What would be your most prominent feature? I kind of have a fat rounder face. The older I've gotten, the more freckles I've gotten. I would say I have a pretty big forehead. Once I get a sketch, I say, thank you very much, and then they leave. I don't see them. All I had been told before the sketch was to get friendly with this other woman, Chloe. Today, I'm gonna ask you some questions about a person you met earlier, and I'm going to ask you some general questions about their face. She was thin, so you could see her cheekbones. And her chin, it was a nice, thin chin. She had nice eyes. They lid up when she spoke. Cute nose. She had blue eyes, very nice blue eyes. So here we are. Oh, this is the sketch that you helped me create. And that's a sketch that somebody described of you. Yeah, that's She looks closed off and fatter sadder, too. The second one looks more open, friendly and happy. Mm. I should be more grateful of my natural beauty. It impacts the choices and the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children. It impacts everything. I couldn't be more critical to your happiness. Do you think you're more beautiful than you say? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We spend a lot of time as women analyzing and trying to fix the things that aren't court, right? And we should spend more time appreciating the things that we do like. If people trust a brand, they will choose it even if they're newer or cheaper options and trust is connected to familiarity, we're drawn to what we recognize and that is why it's really important for brands to consistently use colors, logos, headlines or the so called distinctive brand assets. We people tend to trust what is familiar and recognizable to us. Take McDonald's, for example, no matter where you are in the world, the McDonald's meal tastes the same. The golden arches, the red and yellow colors all signal comfort and familiarity. Even if a better burger is available, millions still choose McDonald's because it's a safe choice. When a brand is trusted and familiar, it becomes the default choice. People don't think twice before choosing it. We buy brands based on emotions and functions, but emotions dominate. Trust and familiarity make brands the default choice. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 4. The 95:5 Rule: Let me start with the hears trof on marketing. Most of the people you're targeting are simply not buying, not today, not this week, and maybe even not this year. This is not a hunch. This is the 955 row. The 955 Rule was introduced by Ehrenberg Bass and it's based on numerous data points. The rule says at at any given time, only 5% of the category bars are actively seeking to buy. That is there in market. The, the other 95% are simply not interested in the category at that point. They are out market, which means if your entire strategy is targeted at converting people now, you are missing on a much bigger opportunity. Instead of chasing the tiny portion of buyers who are in market now, the 5%, your job as a marketer is to build memories to be salient with the 95% that are out market. When they enter the market, your brand is the one that pops up in their head. Take GEICO, for example, their ads aren't trying to get you buy insurance tomorrow. They're just making sure that whenever you think about car insurance, their 15 minutes can save you 15% pops into your head. That's the game. And the same goes for B to B. If you're selling software, chances are your client isn't changing platforms within the next quarter, maybe not even in the next year, probably in three years. That's the normal cycle there. But if they're already familiar with your brand, if your brand is salient, they're more likely to shortlist you when it counts. Once you get the 95 fiber everything shifts, everything falls into place. Your creative is no longer about features, benefits, call to actions or offers. It's about making memories. Your media strategy is no longer about frequency or retargting, it's about broad reach to future buyers and your measurement becomes mental availability, not just CTRs. Here is why that matters so much. There is an excellent research done by Bain and Google showing that about 80% of the time people will choose the brand that popped in their head on day one of the purchase cycle. They're choosing whichever brand came first to mind when they enter the market. Not the one that chased them with retargeting, not even the one that offered the biggest discount, simply the one that was there, the one that was already in their head. This means that if your brand is not in their consideration set before they enter the market, then it's often too late. You can't win the race if you're not at the starting line, right? This isn't fluffy brand stuff. It's deeply commercial. To your finance team, your pitch should be something like this. Brand building is about influencing future cash flow and that matters a lot because company valuations are based on future cash flow and to your sales team, you could say the following. If you want more pipeline, the best way to get buyers tomorrow is to be remembered today. Here is the kicker. You simply count time when somebody will enter the market. Your job is to make sure that when they do, you are already in their minds. Like Warren Buffett said about investing, it's not about timing the market, it's about time in market. The same goes for brands. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 5. Strategic Branding Frameworks Overview: If a brand is gut filling, why then we need a structured framework? The answer is simple. Good brands are not based on guesswork. Good brands have a strong identity, clear positioning, and they attain a balance between short term activation and long term brand building. That is where the next frameworks come into play. David Tucker's model or the so called brand vision model helps you define who you are. That is your identity as a brand. Then we have the positioning framework of April Danford, which help you position your brand against competitors. That is how you stand out in the crowded marketplace. Lastly, the work of Lesbian and Peter Field helps us define the balance between short term brand activation and long term brand building to attain sustainable growth. Together, those frameworks help you define clear brand positioning, clear brand identity, and drive sustainable growth. This model helps brands define who they are, that is their identity. It breaks down brand into core identity. These are the things that never change and extended identity. These are a couple of attributes that evolve over time. To arrive at your identity, you need to look at it from four different perspectives. First one is brand as a product. That is what you offer, your features, your benefits. The second perspective is brand as an organization. Company values, your culture, your mission. Then we have the brand as a person, that is the personality, tone and style. Lastly, we have the brand as a symbol that is the colors, logo, imagery, or the so called brand distinctive assets. Let's take Nike brand identity as an example. The core identity is about performance, empowerment, inspiration. Then we have the extended identity that is partnerships with athletes, new sustainability initiatives. These are things that evolve over time and help keep the brand fresh and relevant. Then we have Nike as a person that is bold, confident, motivational. Y. This model helps brands differentiate themselves in the market. That is to stand out from the competition. It provides a structured way to find your brand distinctive space. Let's look at the five components of this framework. Number one is competitive alternatives. That is, what would customers use if your brand didn't exist? Remember, you are not the customer. Customers don't think in terms of competitors. They think in terms of alternatives or options and very often the way they structure the alternatives is very different from the way you as a company and your competitors structure the category. Often consumers will think of alternatives that are not your direct or even indirect competitors. Then we have the unique attributes that is what makes your product or service different. Then we look at the value and the proof, why should customers care? What value do you provide and how do you prove it? Then we have the target market characteristics. Who is the ideal customer? Who are they? Finally, we have the market category. Where does your brand fit in the industry? Let's look at Tesla positioning strategy as an example. The competitive alternatives are gas powered cars, other EV brands. Then we have the unique attributes which are cutting edge technology, autopilot, software updates. The value and proof are environmental benefits, high performance design, strong brand equity, and the market category is premium electric vehicles. Let's look at the famous 60 to 40 Ru Lesbnt and Peter Field. Their work helps brands balance long term brand equity building with short term activations. There are many implications from their work, but the major one is that there is a sweet spot for each brand in terms of balance between long term brand building and short term sales activations and this sweet spot helps them attain long term brand growth. It is different for each brand depending on the brand size, the category, and so on. But generally, it starts at 60% brand building and 40% brand activation. Something very important to remember, you don't do it with a single campaign or single act. You need to allocate 60% of your budget for brand building and this implies quite different medium mix messaging, KPIs, and then you have 40% for sales activation. This implies different targeting, different mix, different messages. The formula for defining and growing strong brand is the following. Start with David Tucker's model and define who you are, that is your identity. Then use April Dunford's positioning framework to define your distinctive space in the marketplace, and then applying Lesbian nights and Peter field rule of 60 to 40, make sure your brand grows sustainably over time by balancing long term brand building with short term activation. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 6. Brand Diagnosis – Start With Clarity: Hi, before you start doing any work on positioning identity, brand essence, you need to ask yourself, where are we now? What is our starting point? A great brand strategy starts with diagnosis or the market orientation. We've seen the truth of the brand as it is today. Strategy is a response to a situation. And if you don't understand the situation, you're just guessing. Remember, it's always a three step process, diagnosis, strategy, and then tactics or implementation. Many companies keep the first step that is diagnosis or market orientation, and that is a big mistake. A lot of brands jump straight to execution, and that is how we waste money. Let's walk through the five areas you need to explore to truly understand your brand starting point. What do currently customers think about the brand? If they have to describe the brand in free words, what those would be. Ask yourself, are we top of mind in the category? Do we exist? Do we have some mental availability when the category is mentioned? What emotions or associations are triggered by your logo? Try the one word test. Ask ten people, what is the first word that comes to mind when you hear our brand? Sometimes you learn more from this than from a verte slide to research being good isn't enough if people don't think of you when it counts or that is in the buying situations. Are people considering us when a buying situation occurs? Are we easy to come to mind? Do we show up in the right moment during the buying decision? Salience is not just familiarity or awareness. It's about coming to mind at the moment of choice. Your brand heritage is a strategic asset. Can't manage properly a brand if you don't know where it came from. Your brand history is a very important strategic asset. Origin stories, founding values, early success, or even missteps, those could be the raw materials for your future strategy. Ask yourself, why did this brand exist in the first place? What has it stood for over time, and what regional values still matter to customers today? Brands like Cadbury or Levis have successfully gone back to their roots when reinventing themselves if you're struggling to differentiate today, look back before leaping forward. Many brands unintentionally abandon their valuable heritage because they're chasing trends. Don't lose what made you strong in the first place. Your brand lives inside your company. Ask yourself, do employees and leadership agree on what the brand stands for? Does your internal culture supports your external messaging? Is your customer service, product quality and team behavior aligned with your brand promise? Internal misalignment is one of the biggest causes of brand confusion. A great campaign can fix a broken culture. Brands don't exist in a vacuum. You're always competing with other options for attention, for trust, for loyalty. Try to figure out what space do we occupy currently? Who is winning and why? Are we being out positioned or misunderstood? Think of your category as a mental map. Each brand owns a specific territory. Where are you exactly on that map or are you missing entirely? Here are some red flags to look for. Your messaging changes every few months. You rarely listen to customers. Customers know your category, but not your brand. You have sales, but no loyalty or preference. Internally, people describe the brand in ten different ways. If any of this sounds familiar to you, it's time to slow down and rediagnose here are some tools that you can use to diagnose brand perception survey or usage and attitude, the quick and dirty one word exercise, what is the one word that comes to mind when your brand is mentioned? You can run some internal alignment polls. You should develop a brand pded checklist with KPIs such as awareness, preference, consideration, NPS, and competitor or category map, visualize who owns what in the category. So remember, diagnosis or market orientation always comes before developing strategy or any tactical execution. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 7. Creating a Strong Brand Identity : In this session, we're introducing one of the most popular models in brand theory. That is the David Tucker model. We'll break it down so that you can use it straightaway and we should look at some examples of how this model applies to brands like Patagonia, for example. The Acer brand model was initially known as the identity model and then it was renamed to brand Vision model. To keep things clear and avoid confusion, we shall name it the Acer brand model. This model helps us define key ideas, associations, and attributes that make up a brand identity. Brand identity is the foundation of any brand work. You need a well articulated description of the aspirational image of the brand and what you want the brand to stand for in the eyes of the consumers and the employees, that description of the identity drives any brand building program and greatly influences the rest of your brand activities. The brand identity elements are structured in three layers. First is the brand essence, that is the emotional core of the brand then we have the core identity elements that are central to your relevance and differentiation. These are things that never change. Then we have the extended identity elements, additional traits that add texture and depth, but these are more flexible and they evolve over time. The important clarification, it's not ticking the boxes exercise, so you need to include what is relevant for your brand and you're not chasing a specific number of items to be there. A strong identity helps you stay consistent in all channels and touch points. Your core identity keeps your brand grounded while the extended identity gives you the flexibility to adapt and evolve. So let's take Patagonia as an example. Their brand essence might be protecting the planet. Their core identity includes environmental activism, durable, outdoor gear, and transparency, and their extended identity is about things like adventure, storytelling, and ethical sourcing. This structure gives Patagonia the space to evolve over time and yet stay true to what they are. Once again, the Acer brand model isn't about filling boxes. It's about including what is really relevant for your brand. You will start by identifying the most important ideas, then sort them into core and extended identity elements and finally define your brand essence. In the next video, we should dive deeper into core and extended identity elements and see how to identify those for your brand. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 8. Core Identity vs. Extended Identity: Again, in the Aker brand model, your brand is made up of several identity elements. These fall into two groups, two categories, the core identity elements, your most essential non negotiable traits, and extended identity elements, supporting associations that add personality and flexibility. Your core elements define who you are. Those are things that should never change. They drive relevance and differentiation. Your extended elements are the ones that at depth richness. They help you stay current, but they can evolve over time. It's really difficult to choose things that you stand for because you give up the other options. If you don't make a choice and you are not consistent with it, you try to be everything to everyone. Trying to please everyone ends up pleasing nobody. This is where the idea of the smallest viable audience of set Godin is really irrelevant. Don't try to reach everyone, find the smallest group of people or consumers for whom your brand will truly matter and build from there. This idea is useful because your core identity is designed to help specific group of people. Your goal here is find relevance for the right people. Remember, strategy is about two important and simple questions. Who are we here for and what change can we make? Let's look at some examples. A brand like Apple may have a core identity built around a couple of things humanity, simplicity, and creativity. Those are things that never change. The core stays strong and doesn't change. The extent it evolves. Here's the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs and the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things, they push the human race. Forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So here is a basic process to define those adapted from the acer model. Step one, start with deep strategic analysis. Look at your customers, competitors and internal brand story. Step two, identify recurring themes in your communication and operations. What are the values and ideas that we never as a brand compromise? Step three, ask yourself, what does our audience consistently recognize us for? From here, group those elements into two buckets. What must remain consistent to preserve your brand and what can evolve to keep your brand fresh and relevant. As you do this, picture your smallest viable audience. What do they love you for? What would break their trust if it is removed. Thank you for watching and see in the next video where we should focus on the brand essence. The one thing that people remember about the brand. 9. Brand Essence: The One Thing People Remember: In this video, we should explore one of the most important tools in David Acker's brand model, the brand essence. This is the single idea that captures the soul of your brand. It lives in the center of your brand identity and helps unify everything else that you say or do. Brand essence is the internal emotional core of your brand. It is usually one sentence or even a phrase that captures how your brand tries to make people feel and think. It is what everybody working on the brand uses as a guiding light. Authentic athletic performance, Nike comes to mind instantly feminine magic. Each of those examples expresses the promise behind the brand and often it's emotional. David Tucker describes the brand essence as the unifying idea of all your identity elements. It's what people feel about your brand at the gut level. It is especially useful when the brands needs to refocus or to enter new markets because it reminds you of what should stay the same regardless of the context. So to create your brand essence, start by asking, what feelings do we want people to associate with the brand? What promise do we consistently deliver? What do we represent even when the product is out of the equation. From there, distill your answers into one simple phrase. Keep it simple, keep it down to earth, keep it even prosaic. Next, we should take a look at the four lenses, the four perspectives that help you define your brand identity elements. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 10. The Four Brand Perspectives: Hi, now that we have explored Brandsen's current extended elements of your identity, let's see how we can use those for perspectives to arrive easier at those important elements. The Acker brand model identifies four different lenses to make it easier for you to arrive at your brand identity elements. These are Brand as a product, Brand as an organization, Brand as a person, and Brands a symbol. Let's look at each of them. Brandt as a product is what you do. Brands organization is basically your values, your company values and mission. Brand as a person is about your vibe or personality and Brand as a symbol is how you come across your distinctive brand assets. If those don't match, then your brand is seriously misaligned. This perspective is the most tangible. It includes product attributes, benefits, use cases. For example, Apple is known for design, seamless experience, and innovation. Those are key product related brand benefits. Here we focus on the internal values and culture. What is the company's mission and reputation as a business entity? What does the brand stand for? For example, Patagonia is recognized for environmental protection, activism, and transparency. Patagonia is one of the rare examples where purpose is front and center of the brand core and brand essence. So now we are getting into the emotional territory. If your brand were a person, what would it be like, confident, friendly, quirky? This influences your tone of voice, the customer service style, and your storytelling. For example, Harley Davidson comes across as rugged and rebellious and that is part of the brand. And finally, we have the visual and metaphorical site like logos, colors, brand codes that trigger recognition. Really important stuff in terms of distinctiveness and salience. For example, nike swoosh symbolizes motion and aspiration. It says so much without a single word. These four perspectives help you build deeper, more rounded brand personality. They ensure your brand is not just one dimensional. When you look at four perspectives together, you get a rich and layered identity. This helps internal teams align, customers relate and ensure consistency across everything we do. You might identify some identity elements in the product category. Others in how your organization behaves and some in the visual expression or brand as a symbol. Some of these perspectives are more relevant for your brand, while others may not. Remember, it's not ticking the boxes circle exercises. Keep what is relevant and don't overcomplicate it. Here is a simple exercise that you can do. Pick a brand and use those four perspectives to describe it. What does it offer as a product? What does it stand for as an organization? What the brand is like as a person, and what are its distinctive brand assets or the visual part. Then ask yourself, are all those elements pointing in the same direction? If not, that might be a clue that this identity needs tightening. Now we have explored all the key parts of the Acker brand model, brand essence, corre and extended telements the four perspectives. Taken together, they give you flexible but focused way to build a brand that is authentic, memorable, and built to last. Next, we should look at how to take that identity and turn it into a clear competitive positioning in the marketplace. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 11. Why Positioning is Crucial: Remember, most customers have at least 1,000 brands in their lives and each brand should be happy if people give it three or 4 seconds per month. Positioning should be really simple based on a couple of concepts, free for simple things. Positioning, as April Dunford puts it, is the act of deliberately defining how you're best at something that a defined market cares a lot about. It's not branding fluff, it's a strategic choice. No amount of media spent, clever tactics or creative magic can save a brand that doesn't know what it stands for. Short, realistic or even prosaic positioning statements are a sign of a true brand mastery. Probably the best example is the positioning of KITCAp. Five simple words, that's brilliant. KITCAP believes brakes are good for you. That's it. True genius of kit Cat lies in the fact that for almost 40 years now, they managed to keep that positioning that simple and did their best to prevent anyone from adding a simple word to it. Neither did I that. Come he, C he break, Lu Kit cat cow. Na jani AglpaGalii Git cat break Banta. Just gave for a break. I want to break me. Oh, hey, just a minute. I'm just for break. I GdnGdn But life still goes on. Have a break. Have a kit. T's didn't start by competing with Ford or Toyota. They entered the market as premium performance, electric car brand, something totally different. Their initial product, the Roadster was positioned more like a luxury sports car than a EV vehicle. This gave them clarity and credibility. As they scaled, they maintain this premium perception while increasing accessibility. Their positioning shaped how people thought about electric vehicles, not just green but fast, sli and aspirational. Positioning is not about being different to everyone. It's about being the best choice for a specific group of people and helps everyone else self select out. Positioning clarifies who your branch is for. And remember, complexity very often kills clarity. Sometimes it's best if you position into a niche and scale from there like Tesla. In the next video, we should explore the components of effective positioning and how we can use them. Thank you for watching and see you in a while. 12. The Five (+1) Components of Effective Positioning: Most positioning statements are overcomplicated or buried in marketing German. Consumers don't have time for 15 slides, they need a simple idea. Why should I choose you? No matter how many frameworks you're using, please bear in mind that the end result should be simple. Your brand model should fit into one page. If it doesn't you have to go back and redo it. Let's break down the six components of effective positioning. What would customers do if you didn't exist? This frames how currently they solve the problem that you're addressing. It shows who or what you're truly competing with. For example, if your product is in project management tool, the alternatives might be email chains or spreadsheets. Without identifying their current go to solution, you can't position yourself as the better choice. What do you offer that the alternatives don't do that well? These are your true differentiators, just features, but attributes that only you provided in the way you do without some relative difference or just a commodity. What meaningful outcome do your distinctive features provide? And how do you prove it? This is the so what test. Features are nothing without the result they enable. Think about consumer value, things like time saved, results achieved, pain avoided or goals reached, then what evidence supports that value? Who loves your product the most? Who gets it right away? What are the shared traits of your best todians? Is it about behavior, mindset, role, or lifestyle? This isn't about broadridge, it's about the right resonance. Here is where Set gooden thinking is really useful. Great positioning doesn't just describe your customer, taps into how they see themselves, and what type or culture they feel they belong to. Example, you're not just saying, we make protein bars for active women age 30 to 45. You're saying we are the brand for women who climb mountains before breakfast. This mindset shift helps you to move from demographics to psychographics, from what people look like to what they believe, value and aspire to. What mental box do you want your customers to put you in? Your category is like the A in a grocery store where people look for your product. If you're a protein bar and you're shelved with candy instead of healthy products, you're in trouble. When you define your category properly, customers know what problem you're solving. Choose one that highlight your strengths and align with what your audience is looking for. If you don't claim a clear category, people will assign one and it might not work in your favor. What external forces make your positioning even more relevant? Trends act as social proof a momentum to your message. These could be shifts in culture, technology, regulations, values, or behavior. Use them wisely. Not every trend is relevant, but when they are, they can essentially elevate your positioning. Let's look at the positioning framework in the case of Slack, competitive alternatives, email, Skype previously, internal messaging tools, distinct capabilities, channels integration, real time collaboration, value, team alignment, reduced email caes, best fit Audience, fast moving teams, remote first companies, and the market category, workplace communication platform. Let's see a commercial that brings that to life. All kinds of people on all kinds of teams, use Slack to do amazing things. So remember, positioning is not just a message, it's not something that you communicate. It's a strategic lens for everything you do. And you have to keep it simple. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 13. Positioning Strategies & Differentiation: Let's start with a common misconception. Positioning is not about claiming a single attribute like fastest, cheapest or most innovative. No brand truly owns a single attribute in the mind of the consumers. At best, you hold a relative edge, a slightly better or more relevant perception in one or more areas that truly matter to the consumer. Our job as marketers and strategies is not to control perception that is impossible, but to guide it to influence it through consistent signals, brand codes and meaningful difference. So here is a critical distinction, one that many marketers tend to overlook. Differentiation is about offering to your customers something that they truly care about and that gives them a reason to choose you. But it's relative, not absolute. You just need to be perceived as slightly better in a way that counts. Distinctiveness is about being easy to recognize and recall through visuals, colors, sounds, and other distinctive brand assets. As proven in the last ten years by the work of Arenberg Bus Institute, salience and distinction often beat the abstract and really impossible claims of uniqueness. I truly believe that the USP or the unique selling proposition should remain in the previous century where it belongs. But still relative differentiation is something that is possible and we should strive for. The brands that win in the long term are distinctive, they're easy to remember and to recognize and relatively differentiated, perceived to offer more of what is important. Db is a perfect example of smart positioning. They didn't try to beat Cocoa at their own game. Instead, they created a new category, energy drinks and they won it. What did they do? They launched the category with no direct competitor. They use the smoke end to emphasize uniqueness and strength. They charge a premium price, positioning it as performance enhancer. They aligned with sports and extreme experiences, and they promised a clear functional benefit, energy and performance. Aprio Danford outlines three classic positioning approaches or strategies. First, head to head, compete directly with market leaders. Big fish, small pond. This implies dominating a niche or sub segment. And create a new game. Invent a new category or mental space. Let's map some brands to those approaches. We have Pepsi as an example of head to head strategy. Boulder, you've driven alternative to coke. Then in Big fish small pond, we have Tesla as an example. They entered a niche and then scaled and we have Fred Bo create a new game. They invented a new category. Remember, as Seb goodin puts it, positioning is a gift, make it easy for people to choose you and make it easy for people to remember you. Keep positioning clear, not clever. Positioning is not about being unique. It's about being better enough in areas that matter and being remembered when it counts. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 14. The Three Growth Accelerators: According to Canars research, after studying more than 6.5 billion impressions, free things stand out. Strong brands do free things really well. One, predispose more people to choose them. Two, they're mentally and physically present. And free, they find or create new space in the market. That is the growth formula in a nutshell. This is about building brand equity, long term emotional connection with your audience. Kantar defines it as building strong, meaningful difference. You stand for something that people care about that is meaningful and you are seen as unique or better than alternatives that is different. Here are some brands that do this well. Nike inspiring performance, emotion and identity. Of promoting crew beauty and self esteem, Apple which stands for innovation with simplicity and style. The stronger the brand type, the more people are predisposed to choose you even before the buying decision. This is about mental availability, being easy to remember, and physical availability, being easy to buy. In short, if you're not top of mind, you don't come fast to mind in buying situations or easy to get, you are not often chosen. Presence comes from salient advertising, consistent branding, distribution of shelf space, and search visibility. Think about Cocoa, it's everywhere on every shelf in every fridge on every billboard. There is no accident. Strong brands are visible, consistent and accessible. You cannot inspire someone if he doesn't consider you in the first place. Even in categories where people do a lot of research online, like financial services or emotionally strong brands, still perform better during comparison. You need to be instantly recognizable. That is where brand distinctiveness or salience comes in. Ask yourself, do we have recognizable brand assets and do we use them consistently and often enough? These are your distinctive brand codes and they're critical for coming to mind easy and fast in buying situations. Brands like McDonald's with the golden arches, Mike with the sush and Mastercard with the overlapping circles, use their codes consistently to stay visible on top of mind. A noisy market, distinctiveness creates shortcuts in the brain and makes choosing you easy. Sometimes growth means going where your competitors aren't is about innovation, category creation and relevance to emerging needs. It is where you stretch into a new category, new format or new occasion. Here are some examples. Outley didn't fight me. They redefined it. Redboo created a new category of energy drinks and Tesla repositioned the electric vehicles category from Echo hoice to a status symbol. This is the boldest growth flavor, but the one with the most upside if it's done right. These are either strategies. They work together. Predisposing people means long term equity and trust. Be present means getting picked in the right moment and finding new spaces, means staying ahead of the curve and driving relevance. Brand growth isn't about choosing one single path. It's about creating a system where you're meaningful, visible, and forward moving. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 15. The Role of Meaningful Difference: L, if there is one phrase to take away from this model, this is the one brands that grow both meaningful and different. Here is what counters data shows us. Meaningful brands connect emotionally and deliver value that people care about. Different brands are distinctive they stand out in a crowded marketplace, and when you are both, you're more likely to earn preference, loyalty, and pricing power. One of the best ways to be both meaningful and different is to tap into culture of shifts. That is where growth opportunity lives. Let's look at the brand that nailed it. Airbnb didn't invent vacation rentals. They existed long before. But they saw something bigger happening. People were tagged of sterile hotels and they crave authentic experiences local living and belonging. The message Airbnb used was belong anywhere. This is not just a product message. It's a cultural invitation. They position themselves not just as a place to stay, but as a movement as well, an alternative to the impersonal travel industry. So they made meaning for the brand and build difference for product and cultural shifts. Dear stranger, when I booked this trip, my friend said I was crazy. Why would I stay in someone else's house? But this morning, a city I've never been to felt like one I already knew. I just wanted to thank you for sharing your world with me. It felt like home. Airbnb belong anywhere. Before you chase growth with tactics, as innovation, ask yourself, who is this for? Remember, targeting is the starting point of any good strategy. Strategic targeting defines who you serve and whom you don't. It ensures that your meaningful difference actually matters to somebody. Without a target, your positioning floats. It sounds good, but it lands nowhere. Proper marketers start with a target consumer. We do that because we have to build a product and experience around them, not just at this connects directly to Airbnb. Their early audience wasn't anyone who travels, they targeted young urban explorers looking for authentic stays. Their message of belonging wouldn't have worked with traditional hotel loyalists. You don't need the biggest audience, you need the right one, people who will care, adopt, and spread your message. So how do you know if your brand is delivering on meaningful difference? Here is a quick self assessment based on Catars framework. Ask yourself, is your brand meaningful? Do we solve a real emotional or practical need? Do we stand for something bigger than the product? Does our heritage or legacy at emotional depth or trust? Is your brand different? Can people recognize us at a glance? Do we offer something that others don't or don't do that well? Is our tone, look or approach different? Do we use our distinctive brand assets consistently enough to help people remember us? Does your brand have the right difference for your category? High involvement categories like financial services, cars, or tech may require deeper storytelling and trust. Low involvement categories like FMCG might win with freshness, consistency, and salience. Brands grow when people care and notice. Meaningful difference is how you earn both. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 16. Differentiate – Why Standing Out Is Essential: Hi, this model is about Marti Neumeyer, famous framework for brand building. In his book, the Band Gap, Marty outlines five disciplines of brand building that bridge the gap between brand strategy and execution. These are differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, and cultivate. In this module, we shall explore each of those disciplines in a practical way with a lot of examples and a case study of Netflix, where we shall see how each of those five disciplines is applied in real life. By the end of this module, you will see how you can apply those five disciplines to your own branding efforts so that you make your brand more distinctive and effective. Let's get started. When it comes to branding, the first discipline in this framework is differentiate. In plain terms, this means making your brand standing out from the crowd. This is really important because we, our human brains are hardware to notice only what is different. If your brand looks fuse and acts the same way as the others do, people's mind will filter it out. Your brand needs that difference. Marty suggests that we ask free simple questions to test the brand focus. Who are you what do you do and why does it matter? If you can answer those three questions with clear, compelling, simple answers, then you're on the right track. If not, it's time to sharpen your focus. Who are you? What is your brand identity? What is your core purpose? Why does your brand exist in the first place? What do you do? What business are you really in? What do you offer FIM in terms of value and experience you're providing to consumers. Why does it matter why anyone should care? What makes your offering valuable? Meaningful to customers. Toughest one is usually why does it matter? The answer must be rooted in differentiation. The value that you're providing better than your competitors. Marty calls it onliness. His brand commitment matrix uses the concept of onliness to define what your brand does better than its competitors. Ideally, the concept of onliness speaks directly to what your customers truly want or need. For example, if you can say, our brand is the only X that does Y better than competitors, you have a powerful differentiator. Customers will gravitate towards you if they feel that you are the only one who can deliver a certain benefit or experience in the way that you do. As Marty puts it, if you are the only one who does what you do, consumers have no choice but to come to you. To bring this to life, let's consider Netflix early days. We should use the Netflix case as a running example in this module. In the late 90s, Netflix differentiated itself from video rental giants like Blockbuster by mailing DVDs in their iconic red envelopes with subscription base and no late fees. That was a radical departure from the practice of driving to the store and paying late fees for overdue DVDs. Netflix answered the question, who are we as an online DVD rental service? What do we do as convenient home rental deliveries? Why does it matter with a differentiated promise? No late fees. This clear differentiator laid the ground for Netflix brand. There's a better way to rent movies as many as you want for just 20 bucks a month and no late fees. Go to netflix.com. Make a list of the movies you want to see, and in about one business day, you'll get three DVDs. Keep them as long as you want, without late fees. Then when you're done, look, prepaid envelopes. Return one, and they'll send you another movie from your list. It's easy. Netflix. All the movies you want, 20 bucks a month and no late fees. They stood out as the easy customer friendly alternative. In your branding efforts, differentiate by finding your open niche or your unique angle at it. Remember, in a world of too many choices and too little time, being different isn't just good. It's necessary. It is the first step in creating a brand that people will notice and remember. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 17. Collaborate – Aligning Teams and Partners Around the Brand: Great brands are not built in isolation. The second discipline collaborate is all about teamwork inside and outside the company. Marty famously said building a brand is a collaborative project. It takes a village to build a brand. In other words, every department, every employee, every customer plays a role in delivering the brand promise. Brand building is like making a great movie or building a cathedral. You need diverse experts working in harmony towards a shared vision. What does it mean in practice? First, it means aligning your internal team. Your marketing folks, your product developers, salespeople, the HR. Everyone should understand what your brand stands for and how they can contribute to it. For example, if your ads promise premium service, but your support team is uninformed or unhelpful, the brand loses credibility. Strong brands break down the silos. They make sure that every employee is on the same page about the brand and its meaning. One useful tool is the brand commitment matrix introduced by Marty in the brand flip. It is essentially a framework that aligns brand strategy with its execution. On one side, you outline what your company stands for, your purpose or why you exist, onliness or what makes your offer different and values that is how you behave. You map the target customers. The identity, who they are, aims, what they want, and more what they believe in. The magic happens when you ensure that both rows match your purpose connects to the customer identity. Your onliness fulfills their aims or what they want and your values resonate with their beliefs. By making this contract between you and your customers, you give your team a clear clue. It's much easier for everyone to collaborate when they have a common understanding, this is who we serve. This is what we promise, and this is how we deliver it. Collaboration extends beyond your company to your partners and even customers. Many brands work with outside agencies, distributors, consultants. The key is to treat them as part of your team and part of the brand. Share your brand guidelines, communicate your goals, and foster real collaboration. Collaboration means that each person focuses on what he does best and communicates openly so that all pieces fit together. In the case of Netflix, collaboration was crucial when they decided to shift to streaming. Internally, teams from engineering, content licenses, marketing, had to unite around a new strategy of streaming video. Externally, Netflix had to collaborate with content providers such as TV Networks or movie studios to license shows for streaming and with device manufacturers like Smart TV and game console Makers to ensure Netflix app was available everywhere. Aligning all these players around the goal of convenient on demand entertainment, Netflix made its brand bigger and stronger. They essentially said we are all working together to give our customers the ultimate convenience and choice in watching content. Strong brands are built on teamwork and alignment. Make sure that everyone who touches your brand understands their role in building it. Create frameworks to keep your strategy and execution aligned and remember your brand success is a team sport. When your whole village collaborates, your brand experience becomes much more powerful and consistent. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 18. Innovate – Creativity as a Brand Value Driver: The first discipline Innovate is about keeping your brand fresh, creative, and often disruptive. You have differentiated your brand, you have aligned, your team, and that is great. But to truly build brand value, you have to deliver something special to the market. This means constant creativity in your products, services, and how you express your brand. As Marty says, it's execution, not strategy, where the rubber needs the road. Innovation is what gives brands traction in the marketplace. Innovate means finding new and better ways to delight your customers. It's rooted in a simple idea. Do what your competitors aren't doing. It often requires stepping out of the comfort zone. It is human nature to imitate what has worked up to now, what your competitors are doing. But in branding, when you copy others, you become invisible, Marty reminds us that to succeed, you have to do something that has never been done before. This doesn't mean change for its own sake, but rather a continuous push for improvement and originality. Surprise is half the battle in branding. When customers encounter something delightfully unexpected, it creates value in their minds. If there is nothing new or exciting, it doesn't pay to notice. The offering becomes a commodity and you're forced to compete on price alone, which is not where you want your brand to be Marty atone uses the phrase when others zig Zach. In fact, his book, Zach is all about radical differentiation through innovation. The idea is that if the whole category or the whole industry is going in one direction or zigging, an innovative brand finds a way to go in the opposite direction or aging, leapfrogging the competition. Consider how Netflix innovated in its journey, first by mailing DVDs, then asking people to come to take them, and then by deliberately disrupting its own DVD business, to pioneer streaming the Netflix co founder famously said, If Netflix wasn't ready to cannibalize its own business, somebody else would this bolt willingness to change is at the heart of innovation. By the mid of 2000 Netflix saw the writing on the wall. The future of streaming was over the Internet. They invested in video streaming technology early around 2005, although that technology was far from perfect and the speed of Internet was a limiting factor. It was a big creative leap and a risky one. They had a very successful DVD service business, which could have made them complacent. But innovation often means disrupting yourself before someone else does it. So Netflix move was textbook zag while Blockbuster and all other competitors were still focusing on physical rental, Netflix zached into streaming. Internally, this required massive and creative problem solving, new algorithms, new interface designs, and a new brand experience of instant play. It was scary. But remember, truly innovative ideas tend to scare the hell out of everybody at first, but it paid off enormously. Redefining the entire category of home entertainment. For your brand, innovate means fostering a culture of creativity. Listen to your customers for pain points or desires that nobody is addressing. Those are golden opportunities to zag. But importantly, innovation should be aligned to your onliness or your differentiator. Focus on innovations that reinforce why you're different. The brands that succeed long term are the ones that keep experimenting. They prototype new concepts, they test them and they keep the ones that resonate. Differentiate, made your customers notice you, innovate, gives them fresh and evolving reasons to love you. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 19. Validate – Testing and Learning Before You Scale: The front building discipline is called validate. As you can guess from the name, it's about testing and refining your ideas. Validate reminds us that even the best ideas should be tested and refined in the real world. In the old days, communication used to be a one way street. Today, effective branding is like a dialog. This means getting feedback, collaborating with consumers, and using data to make informed decisions. Why validate the first and foremost reason is because our assumptions are often wrong. Actually, we are quite poorly qualified to look and see your brand from the consumer perspective. By testing your branding elements, you can catch issues early and learn what truly resonates. Validation can save you from costly mistakes like the new coke, for example, and can also uncover tweaks that can turn a good idea into a great one. How do we validate? Actually, Marty champions quick, dirty and cheap tests, fast and informal ways to get feedback from your consumers. His mantra is better a rough answer to the right question. Than a detailed answer to the wrong one. In practice, this means prototyping some of your ideas and putting them in front of few actual consumers in realistic context, the observing and asking the right questions. Here are a few clever validation tools. Take two competing brand designs and swap their logos and names. If the competitors branding works just as well with your name on it, then your design is not distinctive enough. Look at the communication piece from your own brand and cover up the logo or the name. Can people still tell that your brand is speaking? If not, then your brand voice may be too generic. Share a draft concept or a prototype of a product with somebody from your audience, then ask them to describe it back to you. If they can't clearly articulate what it is, then you have a clarity problem. These kinds of tests are inexpensive and fast, but they're incredibly illuminating. They embrace the idea of failing fast to learn fast. By validating early and often, you turn wild guesses into educated guesses and then into knowledge. Netflix, true to form, heavily uses data NAB testing to validate decisions from the recommendations algorithm to where the play button goes on the screen. In the early 2000, Netflix investment in data and analytics for personalized recommendations was a form of validation that proved critical when transitioning to streaming, they learned what viewers actually liked, which guided both their interface design and eventually even content decisions. One more aspect of validation is measuring your brand performance over time. Decide on a few key metrics that matter for your brand like salience, repeat purchase rate, NPS scores, and keep an eye on those while you implement some changes. If something you tried isn't moving the needle or is moving it in the wrong direction, then you should course correct. Test your branding ideas in the real world with real people as early as you can. Embrace feedback, even if it's not what you were hoping to hear because feedback is the w that will make your brand better. Trim what doesn't work, polish what works. By the time you fully launch your brand idea, you will have the confidence that it really clicks with your audience because they were part of shaping it. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 20. Cultivate – Long-Term Brand Growth and Loyalty: Brands are not static, they're living evolving entities. The fifth discipline cultivate is about nurturing your brand in the long term, growing it, adapting it, and building a low community around it. Think of your brand as a garden, differentiate, collaborate, innovate, and validate. Those got the garden planted and starting to bloom. Cultivate is what you do day after day, watering, weeding, and sometimes replanting the garden to keep it healthy and thriving. Cultivation involves several things. You should want your brand to be consistent so people can recognize it, but you wouldn't want it to be static or rigid so that it can change. Marty asks, if people can change their clothes without changing their character, why can't brands do the same? This means it's okay and even necessary for brands to refresh their visual language or adopt their messaging over time as long as the core remains intact, a brand that never evolves can be outdated, but a brand that changes its core identity is unrecognizable and not trusted. Cultivation is about striking a balance, preserve the essence, change the way it comes across. Cultivation starts at home. Long term brand growth requires nurturing brand centric culture within your organization. Everyone from new hires to top management should know what the brand stands for and how to embody it. Some companies do that by holding regular brand orientation sessions, webinars, and trainings, essentially ongoing education. Even when the stuff changes, the brand meaning and spirit stay alive. Today's strongest brands are the ones that drive fame, act more like communities or tribes. Cultivation involves engaging your customers and turning them into active participants in the brand. In the book, the Band flip, Marty talks about how branding efforts have flipped customers own more of the brand perceptions than the body does. Remember, it's not what you say it is, it's what they the customers say your brand is. Cultivation also means that you regularly review and refine your brand strategy as the world around changes, markets evolve, new competitors come up, consumer preferences shift and your brand should be proactively adjusting. This doesn't mean changing your identity or core, but it does mean keeping an eye on the horizon. Netflix, after mastering streaming, cultivated further growth by moving into content production. They saw that long term growth requires owning the content like movies or TV shows, and later they adapted to international markets by adding more local language content. When Wednesday dances, You experience her emotionalism. Just like that Korean show on Netflix, where people play kids games for money, and if they use, they actually die. And the great when Math's eyes roll back, and she starts rising up into the Snaa we have to talk about the show. Like, Yo, you have a stalker? Why haven't you gone to the cops? Instead, he kept egging Martha on, like, Donny. Bro, what are you doing? Are we going to bring a CpxTmin strive to survive. And I felt like racing could be my next thing. My favorite part was No, no, no. Honestly, can't believe I haven't seen it. It's so good. So good. So good. So good. So good. You better watch. So good. To effectively cultivate, many companies establish brand guardians or chief brand officer role, someone whose role is to watch over brand consistency and evolution. In summary, cultivate means to continuously nurture your brand ecosystem, your team, your customers, and the brand itself. Never assume the job of branding is done. Instead, keep the dialog open, keep learning and adjusting and keep reinforcing the community and culture around your brand. Each of those five disciplines adds a piece to the puzzle of brand success. Together, they form a holistic approach that can turn the good brand into a great one. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 21. Navigating the Long and the Short – How Brands Grow in the Real World: Hi, let's start this module with the reality check. In branding and marketing, we simply love the opposites. Emotion versus logic, brand versus performance, long versus shot. But what if those aren't opposites at all? If those are just different sites of the same strategy. We have been told that we have to choose. Are we a brand builder or a performance marketer? Are we focusing on the long term loyalty or the short term ROI? But the truth is this thinking is outdated. Smart brands know how to play a long term game while still driving results today. Short and long termism are both just wrong termisms. In other words, picking one at the expense of the other is simply wrong. Some marketers obsess over short term metrics, clicks, conversions, growth in the quarter, others invest heavily in long term brand building storytelling, but might forget to close the cell today. Neither approach is effective alone. What we need is a balance of long and short term let's break it down visually. Sales activation campaigns create an immediate spike in results, but that spike fades or decays quickly. Brand building works differently. It accumulates over time and creates lasting momentum. Over time, the brand curve keeps rising and when done right, it continues paying dividends years later. When done right, long term brand equity doesn't just reinforce the brand, but drive sales immediately. What is the key takeaway? Don't choose one, balance both. Growth doesn't come from extreme focus on brand building or short term activation. It comes from aligning both strategies so that they work in sync. New data provided by Les Binet and Peter Field shows that the best balance depends on your category, size of brand and many other factors. The data suggests that in categories like finance, more brand investment is needed. The right split of the budget there is 80% to brand building and 20% to activation. Wow, B to B, probably 50 50 would be the best balance between short term and long term brand building. That is what this module is about. It's not brand versus performance, but brand and performance. Let's dig into how to make that work in practice. See you in the next video. 22. Why Short-Term Tactics Kill Long-Term Growth: Let's be honest, short term tactics are seductive. They give you numbers to show to your boss. They create sales spikes, and when a campaign delivers a CTR or conversion boost, it feels like a win. But here is the catch. Those effects fade really fast, very fast. The spike disappears and next month for next period, you're under the same pressure to do it again. This is a critical distinction. Sales activation works only on the people that are shopping in the category. Normally, that is 5% of the total market at any given time, 5%. It doesn't create preference, it doesn't build long lasting brand associations. It doesn't make you more famous or trusted. That's not its job. Its job is to harvest demand, not to grow it. So let's break down what can go wrong when we over relied on short term tactics. There is an over reliance on promotion, so you basically train your customers to buy only when it's discounted. There is a sense of fatigue and diminishing returns. Each campaign gets less effective, so you need to put more money in to shout louder next time. There is a lack of emotional connection, no story, no brand, just pricing features, and there is this difficulty to sustain pricing power. If people see you just as a discounted commodity, you actually can't charge a premium. Imagine you're fashion retailer running 40% of promotions every month. Your revenue looks good, but the margins are shrinking and the demand for the brand is zero when the promotion ends. This brand is essentially renting customers. The moment the discount stops, traffic drops. Contrast that with the brand like Patagonia, they almost never discount, but people are loyal. They know what the brand stands for and they're ready to pay a premium. That is the power of brand equity. Of course, short term can be and should be part of the mix. But if that is the hop plan, you're setting up yourself for failure. Brand building is what makes your marketing more effective over the long term. It builds preference, pricing power, and long term demand like this Nike commercial here. We're never alone. And that is our strength. Because when we're doubted, we'll play as one. When we're held back, we'll go farther and harder. And if we don't fit the sport, we'll change the sport. We know things won't always go our way. But whatever it is, we'll find a way. And when things aren't fair, we'll come together for change. We have a responsibility to make this world a better place. And no matter how bad it gets, we will always come back strong. Because nothing can stop what we can do together. So sell for today, but built for tomorrow, thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 23. The 60:40 Rule for Budgeting: H. So what is the 60 40 rule? By analysis of thousands of campaigns across different categories, Lesbian and Peter Field found that the best performing brands allocate their budget overall budget, roughly 60% long term brand building and 40% to short term marketing performance or activations. Remember, this is just the principle and this is just the starting point. 60 to 40 is where you should start from. Brand building is your investment in the future. It's future proving your sales in years to come. It might be slow, but it's cumulative and it's sustainable. It works by creating memory structures, meaning an emotional connection, and this takes time. You need to invest consistently and patiently. Think of this like planting seeds. You don't see the results immediately, but when they grow, they create even stronger roots. Performance marketing is the tool that helps you harvest the demand that is already there. You capture people that are in the market. But if you're doing only that, here is the problem. If you only harvest and never plant, you run out of crops. No future demand means no future growth. Now here is the really interesting part. When you do both well, they don't just add up, they multiply. Brand building boosts performance by increasing conversion rates and pricing power. A strong brand actually makes each performance more effective because people know you and they trust you already. In 2021, Airbnb shifted a bigger part of its overall budget to emotional storytelling and long term brand building. When they did that, they saw not only shifts in brand co, but also lifting direct bookings, reducing the dependency on paid search. That is how Brant and performance work together. So how should you approach your budget allocation? Start with 60 40 as a base and then adjust based on life cycle, the category dynamics, and your brand strength. But remember, never bet on one tactic. Growth comes from balance. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 24. The Role of Emotion & Creativity in Branding: Based on numerous data points, Les Binet and Peter field prove that emotional campaigns are twice as effective as the rational ones when it comes to driving long term brand growth. Why? Because emotion creates memory. It cuts through the clutter, makes people feel something, and stays with them longer in branding, what sticks is what matters. The goal of brand building is mental availability. Being easy to come to mind when somebody is in a buying situation and the thing that creates that mental availability is emotion. Emotional campaigns form strong memory structures that help your brand show up in future buying situations. People remember how you made them feel and that's often what drives purchase. In a crowded marketplace, creativity is not a nice to have, it's a necessity. The data shows that highly creative campaigns deliver significantly better business results. The reason why is because creative work tends to be remembered better, share and sometimes talked about. It gives your brand more impact per dollar. Creativity is not just design or cleverness, it's about emotion or resonance. The British retailer John Lewis doesn't run Hartsw ads during the holidays. Instead, they tell simple emotional stories about love, giving, and connection. Come in. All my little plans and schemes Lost like some foca and dreams Seems like all I really was doing was waiting for you. Just like little girls boys playing with the little toy. Seems like all we really would do was wailing for Tonita be Donita be three Street Stream S S real. The result, Bruntove goes up, sales go up, and their campaigns tend to be talked about in years to come. When you combine emotion with creativity, you move to connection and meaning. Emotion and creativity are the drivers of marketing effectiveness. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. Uh huh. 25. Key Metrics for Brand Success: Let's start here. Everything that is easy to measure is worth measuring. Clicks, likes, impressions, those are easy to measure, but they often don't reflect real brand impact, so they are vanity matrix. Vanity matrix are easy to obtain and they make you feel good. Brand matrix make you feel smart. Let's dive into four metrics that matter the most. Number one, brand equity. This is the total value, the cumulative sum of your brand in the eyes and the consumers. It's not one number. It's the sum of what people thin, feel, and do in relation to your brand. Strong equity, strong brand equity means higher preference, stronger loyalty, and greater pricing power. Think of brand equity this way. It is what remains if you take out the product. Number two, salience. That is the ability of your brand to come to mind in buying situations. Number three, differentiation. As we talked, this is about relative difference. It's not uniqueness. Can customers tear you apart from other options in a meaningful way? This links directly to future growth potential. If you're not differentiated, you will turn into commodity. Number four, demand power. Our customers choosing you without being pushed. The indicators of demand power are premium pricing, strong organic traffic, and inbound interest. Let's look at some tools and ways to do that. Brand tracking surveys, typically run quarterly, measuring awareness and salience, associations, preference and brand health scores, net promoter score, basically measures customer advocacy. Would they recommend you search volume and share a voice. How often are people looking for your brand and how much attention are you getting in media, both pay and organic? Sales lit in pre and post campaign sales trends, especially when performance media is being held at a constant level, and finally, brand equity indices, tools like antars BrandZ IPSs brand value index. Let's highlight some common traps. Mistake number one, chasing short term KPIs. It's tempting to double down on cliques and conversions, but these don't tell you about long term brand health. Mistake number two, confusing awareness with preference. People might know your brand name, but that doesn't mean that they want you mistake number three, failing to triangulate. Quantitative data, such as survey scores, need to be correlated with qualitative insights. You should be looking for why behind the numbers. The reality is that we live in a measurement rich but insights poor world. Don't just collect data. You need to use it to steer. What gets measured gets managed, but only if you're measuring the right things. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 26. The Power of Consistency and Wear-In (Not Wear-Out): Here is a paradox. Marketers love novelty, but consumers fancy familiarity. One of the most common mistakes in brand execution is this line of thinking. Our audience is getting bored of this, but data tells us different story. While marketers are tiring of a campaign, it's often just started to land with the audience. We tire of our ads long before the market has even started to notice them. Consistency builds recognition, and most importantly, builds trust and familiarity. So let's define two key ideas. Where that is when we marketers think that the campaign is stale or outdated and wherein when consumers are starting to recognize and associate the work with the brand. The truth is most iconic brand campaigns don't just go viral. They wear in over time, like Cadbury's Gorilla, Nike is just do it or Cokes holidays are coming. These brands understood something crucial. Repetition creates visibility and resonance. Cam nine Oh, no. Oh, no. No. This is about mental availability, the likelihood of your brand coming to mind in buying situations. But in order to do that, your brand should be distinctive. That is your brand should look like itself, and mental availability is built for brand assets and brand codes. Repeated consistent use of logos, colors, distinctive brand assets. Every time you swap these out, you're starting over. We are so close to the work, we get tired of it really fast, but consumers are not exposed to our content at that frequency. They are not obsessed with our brand. What feels to us is just becoming recognizable to them. It's not wear out, it's wearing. If you have a brand building campaign that proves to be effective, keep running it, keep running it for years. Audi's Christmas campaign in the UK has been featuring Kevin the carrot since 2016. They resisted the urge to make changes every season. Kevin became a beloved brand code, a distinctive brand asset. The result is consistently rising brand preference and emotional connection. Brands grow for memory structures and memory is built for consistency. Don't queue your campaigns too early. Great work needs time to wear in. Stick with your distinctive brand assets and use them consistently year after year. That is how you build distinctiveness. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video. 27. Thank you video: So here we are at the end of our journey together. If you have made it this far, I want to say a big heartfelt thank you. You have invested your time, your attention, and hopefully your curiosity, and that matters. This course wasn't designed to make branding expert overnight. Because the truth is no course can do that. Branding is a long game. It's a strategic craft, and it's something you build through questions, not just answers. If this course helped you think more clearly and ask better questions and see branding not just as a buzzword but as a strategic tool, then the course has done its job. One of the most important things I can leave you with is this branding isn't something you finish. It's something that you keep doing. It's not a slide deck, it's not a logo. It's not a mission statement. It's about being present, nurturing it, adapting to challenges, and growing alongside it. It's a daily practice of showing up and being clear, making it, and keeping it simple. Thanks again for spending this time with me. If you found value in this course, I would love to hear what's stuck with you. Please feel free to leave a review or comment. And most importantly, keep going, keep learning, keep building a brand that is clear, human, and built to last. I wish you clarity, courage, and creative success. See you out there.