Brand hibernation.

Why your brand shouldn’t act like an Arctic ground squirrel.

Spare a thought for the ground squirrel. Every autumn, they gorge themselves at the Arctic all-you-can-eat buffet. Then bloated and exhausted from that hyper-activity, they collapse into a season-long sleep. When the first rays of spring rise over the glacial landscape, and the squirrel wipes the sleep from its eyes, it will have lost 25% of its body weight. That’s right. A full quarter.

Skin and bones, it leaves its slumber to start again: the annual pattern of feast and famine.

It’s not too dissimilar a pattern to many brands and their marketing plans. But while a squirrel has to do this to survive, smart brands can use smart solutions to keep awake (and eating) all winter long.

A brand may experience marketing troughs for several reasons. It could be that sales follow a seasonal sales pattern, for instance toys over Christmas or swimming pools before summer. It could also happen that economic uncertainty prompts marketers to scale down on communication.
Whatever the reason, if you leave the marketplace, the principle of ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ applies, and your brand, like the squirrel, will lose the punching weight that you worked so hard creating. You may even find, emerging after a long slumber that the world around you has changed. For Arctic squirrels, it might be global warming. For brands, it may be the emergence of new competitors, the constant rise of social media and new technologies or even its main competitors staying vocal in the downturn.

All of these scenarios are anathema to the slumbering brand. So how do you maintain a presence? How does a brand stay awake and active all year round? The first and foremost rule is to plan for your peaks and troughs. If you are a seasonal business, you’ll know when these occur. Obviously, the lion’s share of your budget will go into before and during your busy periods. But instead of going into deep sleep straight after, run smaller follow-up campaigns. They don’t have to include block-buster TV commercials. They can make use of cost-effective social media. Or direct marketing campaigns. Or innovative guerrilla marketing. That’s why you employ a marketing agency. Tell them to get creative.

 

Whatever your solution is, keep reminding your market that you’re out there. Lying dormant and doing nothing is the worse thing you can do. You’ll lose impetus and market share. And come spring, like the squirrel, you’ll have to work yourself to a standstill just to get back to where you already were!

Hilton Rose | Your Brand Agency

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Email     :  hilton@urbrand.co.za

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Goodwill hunting. Building the value of your brand.

Goodwill hunting. Building the value of your brand.

A company is more than just the sum of its physical assets. For instance, if you’re thinking of selling your business, you’d add up your properties, vehicles, computers, furniture and, yes, even that collector’s artwork in reception. That would give you a fair idea of physical value but wouldn’t you expect more from a prospective buyer?

What about your customer list? Supplier relationships? Intellectual capital? And, the subject of my blog, the value of your brand?

Measuring the worth of a brand is more difficult than, let’s say, the worth of your intellectual capital (which is no Grade 1 math either). So how do you do it? How much is your brand worth?

Over the years, research houses have carried out studies trying to answer just that. How much would people pay for your brand over the physical base line? This is tricky because it is not what we do in the real world. Most people, when asked to place a monetary value on brands, are in denial about paying a premium just for the name.

Me pay more just for a label? Not a chance! That is patent nonsense though. Everyone pays more (and expects to pay more) for the D&G handbag, not just because it may be made of superior material but because it’s labelled D&G.  And, thus, so are you labelled – a discerning person at that.

In one study, focus groups were asked to place a price tag on a car. The researchers used pictures of an identical car but super-imposed different badges on its grille. Not surprisingly, Volkswagen was valued higher than Ford and Mercedes trumped both. They extrapolated that brand was worth 10% of the retail value of the car.

In the real world, this is to a large extent why, in the latest Forbes Survey, Apple’s brand value is double its closest competitor, Microsoft. Interestingly, Apple’s advertising spend in 2013 was half that of Microsoft. That doesn’t mean advertising less raises the value of your brand. It means paying attention to end-to-end branding, from internal factors like R&D and pricing to external factors like customer service and marketing, all play a huge role in the value of a brand. The key to raising the value of your brand, and ultimately its market value, is just that: holistic branding.

If customers like every part of your brand, potential business purchases will pay more for it. If not, you may have to rely on the value of that painting in reception.

Let’s hope it’s a Van Gogh!

Hilton Alexander Rose

Your Brand Agency | Director 

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