The good folks from Informa Middle East kindly invited Wavelength’s Darren Coleman to deliver this webinar so you can get brand-driven growth right.
Informed executives – who understand marketing effectiveness – leverage their brands to drive growth. But knowing how to start then structure brand-driven growth initiatives is a challenge many marketers face. In this webinar, Wavelength’s Darren Coleman shares practical tools and best practice examples that will help you get started with brand-driven growth.
Here are some of the key points we covered:
The business case for brands
“Brand building dominates long-term growth and involves the creation of memory structures that prime consumers to want to choose the brand. This priming effect also improves pricing power and so, over time, has a strong impact on profitability.
There is no context in which short-term sales activation is the primary driver of growth – short-termism in marketing is unwise. Always.”
Les Binet & Peter Field, Effectiveness in Context (2018)
Brands drive sales
Brands drive share
Brand growth is nuanced
Brands defend in a downturn and propel bounce back
Kraft Heinz illustrate the peril’s of being ROI driven and not investing in brands
Brand-driven growth examples
- Nike’s brand essence of authentic athletic performance has helped it move into football, tennis, golf and a host of other markets. However, its move into snowboarding was less successful. Why? This lifestyle sport doesn’t tend to major on authentic athletic performance.
- Caterpillar’s brand is associated with rugged, bold, tough and reliable personality traits. Initially embodied in heavy earth moving equipment, its brand personality has served as a platform for profitable growth in footwear, clothes and even specialist mobile devices aimed squarely at the construction industry.
- Babyshop’s brand positioning focuses on giving its customers the best choice at the right moment. Their instore and online “Baby Expert” service supports this positioning with aplomb. Babyshop used RFID technology to address stock availability issues and the brand has a carefully planned promotional calendar for cultural events e.g. Ramadan, Eid, Christmas and key times of the year e.g. salary weekends. Such initiatives ensure Babyshop customers have the best choice at the right moment.
How to deliver brand-driven growth
To deliver scalable brand-driven growth you need to embrace a structured approach. Using The Brand-Driven Growth Blueprint (BDGB) will help you do this. My agency, Wavelength Marketing, has used this blueprint to help clients around the globe, across B2B and B2C markets, drive growth through brands. As with all blueprints, the BDGB is not a silver bullet. It’s a system of thinking designed to focus and guide your efforts and actions.
To get the most from the BDGB you need to follow a sequential yet iterative process that is underpinned by five questions.
Five questions that structure brand-driven growth
- What corporate objectives does my brand need to support?
- Who is our target customer?
- What is our brand?
- What is the product/experience we want to launch?
- How will we measure success?
Brand-Driven Growth Blueprint – Worked Example for Nike
- Objective: Increase revenue from non-product activities from $100m to $900m by 2025
- Target customer: Keen to up their game. Want to stay ahead of the pack. Winner. Competitive.
- Brand (a facet of): “authentic athletic performance”
- Experience: Tennis, football, rugby or golfing academies with inspiring feature walls, motivational quotes, nutritional food that convey authentic athletic performance.
- Measurement: Employee (knowledge of employees, relative work satisfaction etc), brand (salience, relevance, price premiums etc) & financial metrics (sales, profit margins etc)
A big think you to Lynn Hunter from Informa for inviting me to deliver this webinar and Louise Anninger for talking me through the technicalities. It’s much appreciated.
To watch this and other videos please head over to our YouTube channel.
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