Strategic branding and marketing

FLAME DATING utilizes a practical, action-driven process that focuses on helping our clients improve the success rate of dating.

Like any other consulting practice today, our counsel begins at the intelligence gathering phase and unlike all others, concludes after implementation of the recommendation(s) provided.

FLAME DATING has extensive in-house expertise in marketing and strategic consultancy. This expertise ranges from developing overall brand vision, positioning and promotional platform.

Brand Equity from FLAME DATING

  • Building the equity of your brand
    • means ensuring that people will choose your brand before anyone else
  • Benefits of building brand equity
    • profit and ROI (cf Fortune 500 and Business Week report)
    • better prices
    • increased loyalty
    • lasting longer (long term asset)
    • innovation springboard
    • competitive protection
    • equity means "customer retention"
    • a strong brand
  • Changing "brand" or packing needs to be done very carefully taking each market characteristics into consideration
  • Branding implementation needs to be based on local market situation (are we known there or not ? Is change perceived as positive or negative?)
  • Branding implies a step change
    • focus on perception
    • understanding (emotion, experience, ..)
    • investing (money, time, ...)
    • new horizons
    • adding value
  • Companies believing in the value of a brand, train new sales managers in selling the company/brand before a particular product
  • How to measure brand equity ? (AIPL)
    • Awareness (outcome)
    • Identity (driver)
    • Product perception (driver)
    • Loyalty (outcome)

Our tasks today

  • Create brand identity = positioning
  • Create brand proposition
  • Assess your business plan, brand positioning and proposition interact
  • Determine how we can measure and monitor success
  • Action plan

The most important assets of any business are intangible: its company name, brands, symbols, and slogans, and their underlying associations, perceived quality, name awareness, customer base, and proprietary resources such as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships. These assets, which comprise brand equity, are a primary source of competitive advantage and future earnings. Yet, research shows that managers cannot identify with confidence their brand associations, levels of consumer awareness, or degree of customer loyalty. Moreover in the last decade, managers desperate for short-term financial results have often unwittingly damaged their brands through price promotions and unwise brand extensions, causing irreversible deterioration of the value of the brand name. Although several companies, such as Canada Dry and Colgate-Palmolive, have recently created an equity management position to be guardian of the value of brand names, far too few managers, really understand the concept of brand equity and how it must be implemented.

In a fascinating and insightful examination of the phenomenon of brand equity FLAME DATING provides a clear and well-defined structure of the relationship between a brand and its symbol and slogan, as well as each of the five underlying assets, which will clarify for managers exactly how brand equity does contribute value. How to building brand equity: the fascinating Ivory soap story; the transformation of Datsun to Nissan; the decline of Schlitz beer; the making of the Ford Taurus; and others. How to avoid the temptation to place short-term performance before the health of the brand and, instead, to manage brands strategically by creating, developing, and exploiting each of the five assets in turn.

A Brand New You

Mark Walker is only 3, but he already knows what he wants from life. And thanks to streaming video on his Reebok-sponsored website, the Missouri toddler, who now nails 18 baskets in a row, can finally tell the world. In the video, wide-eyed Mark doesn't commit to a favorite food or a favorite basketball player, but he does commit to a brand. "I am the future of basketball," declares Mark. "I am Reebok."

In San Diego, the newborn son of Sean and Deanna Chesleigh will soon answer to the name of Horton. This summer, the couple named their child after a Ruffles potato chips cartoon spokesbaby in exchange for $50,000 in college scholarship funds.

Whether reminding us to "Be Like Mike" or inviting us to join the Pepsi Generation, companies have long encouraged consumers to identify with products and brands. We're Mac or PC, Xbox or GameCube, Starbucks or anyplace-other-than-Starbucks.

Previously our social positions were determined by blood, family name, accent, place of birth and religious association. "These were all aspects of social place that were loaded at birth," says James Twitchell, author of Adcult USA and Twenty Ads That Shook the World . These once-permanent associations have lost much of their grounding. We can't tell a Methodist from a Presbyterian or automatically deduce a person's heritage from family name or accent. But we still yearn for community and connection, so we look for cues from those elements of identity that we can relate to.

We not only identify with brands but also, in the case of Horton or Mark (or, more specifically, their parents), appropriate them for our own use. The family crests borne by the knights and noblemen of old have been replaced by Nike swooshes and Tommy Hilfiger's red, white and blue. The fact is, we genuinely care about the stories brands tell and the emotions they evoke, according to Susan Fournier, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "People look at brands as carriers of symbolic language and forget that a brand's first purpose is to close the sale."

Brands evolved after the Civil War as a pledge of quality for newly mobile individuals who no longer had personal connections with the cobbler who made their boots or the farmer who milled their grain. Brands served little other purpose for decades, but in the twentieth century, brands--the stand-ins for a personal relationship with a manufacturer--began to form increasingly intimate relationships with consumers.

"Brands can be endowed with characteristics all their own," says Timothy Brock, professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "The personality of the brand becomes extremely attractive to consumers, and so brands become new friends, who over time become old friends."

Brock labels such relationships "parasocial" because they take place between constructed personalities and humans--similar to those between soap opera characters and their fans. Fournier has identified a total of 15 types of consumer/brand relationships, from marriages of convenience and casual friends to courtships, flings and secret affairs. "For most people, JELL-O shows up as a childhood friendship," says Fournier. "Johnson & Johnson is more a mother and child relationship. Microsoft, for a larger than average number of people, forms a master-slave relationship."

Michael Solomon, professor of consumer behavior at Alabama's Auburn University and author of Conquering Consumerspace, says companies that have caught on to these relationships now play matchmaker. Saturn, for example, hosts owner reunions and barbecues, as if the purchasers of Saturn cars--along with the vehicles themselves--belong to the same high school or extended family. Harley-Davidson does the same with its Harley Owners Groups (HOGs), semiautonomous organizations that arrange charity rides and weekend gatherings in more than 100 countries so that you can bond with "the thousands of brothers and sisters you've always wanted."

Apple Computer doesn't create new family members so much as brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Presenting itself as the anti-IBM, Apple is the computer for those who shun the domineering image of "Big Blue." This approach can be traced from the historic "1984" television ad that depicted Macintosh computers as a tool to fight Orwellian oppression caused by widespread PC use (aired just once, during the 1984 Superbowl, but still considered one of the most successful ads ever) to its recent showcasing of computer owners who have made the switch from PCs and the Windows operating system. Apple presents itself as unique. It invites users to think of themselves as revolutionary--even though, by buying and supporting Apple, they're really just responding to another marketer's push.

Apple has also pushed its brand personality through product design: Other computers are gray, so theirs are colorful; others are square, theirs are round. Apple thus created a "meme"--a term the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins coined to describe self-replicating cultural elements. The meme lives outside of Apple advertisements, effectively turning its customers into a quasi-sales force. While most computers can be mistaken for one another, Apple computers stand out.

Apple's presentation of its brand as an attitude rather than a product advantage is merely an extension of the concept that advertising superstar David Ogilvy developed in the 1950s. Ogilvy created densely written ads that told stories about the finer points of a Hathaway shirt or a Rolls-Royce. Ogilvy is perhaps best known for a 1958 print ad that carried the headline "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock" and included trivia that buyers could use to impress their friends: "The famous Rolls-Royce radiator has never been changed, except that when Sir Henry Royce died in 1933, the monogram RR was changed from red to black."

Brand Awareness Defined

Brand Awareness:

The act of creating public awareness of a specific brand in order to maximize its recognition, successful brand awareness strategies should define a company's uniqueness and set it apart from competitors. Quite simply, if potential customers do not know about a company, they will not purchase from it. Therefore, one of the preeminent goals of any business should be to build brand awareness, albeit in as cost-effective manner as possible.

Consumers tend to make purchasing decisions based on peer recommendations and direct experience, as well as traditional advertising methods. This is why it is necessary to build brand awareness strategies out by instilling trust among consumers. This trust must be achieved through credibility, rather than just a catchy advertising campaign. Promotional marketing involving a one-to-one component is proving increasingly effective at building trust and acquiring new customers. Online brand awareness strategies are used frequently, albeit with differing levels of success. These online brand awareness strategies can include the use of advertising including banners, sponsorships, and email/newsletter advertising, online PR, affiliate marketing, etc.

Intro

Average age? education, or only primary school or 1st grade secondary school, virtually nobody university degree? Average income On average 50 % of dating people have university degree Average number of dates per year = 27

Brand awareness

25% spontaneous brand awareness FLAME DATING On average 4.3 brands mentioned spontaneously Strongest response North and East of Belgium Strongest response from 19 years age group

Total brand awareness

TBD

Brand usership structure

FLAME DATING: 65% awareness and 13% preferred brand SSS: 98% awareness and 52% preferred brand (better than FLAME DATING) PPP datin: 34% awareness and 10% preferred brand HHH dating: 36% awareness and 10% preferred brand HHJH Dating: 16% awareness and 12% preferred brand

Brand satisfaction:

  • FLAME DATING: 37% very satisfied (main reasons are faster relationships, less going out, quality, , long lasting - 0% not at all satisfied
  • HJHJ dating: 41% very satisfied (id above + good formula) and 0% not at all satisfied

(with other brands 1 - 7% not at all satisfied)

Advertising awareness

FLAME DATING mainly known from d posters (also important are television and radio FLAME DATING – also knowns from www.hollywood.org website were we have banners

BRAND ATTRIBUTE RESULTS

Importance of targets: Brand performance on targets (difference versus mean)

Targets for boys and girls are the same

  1. Increase dating
  2. Assures proper quality of people
  3. Allows shorter dating period
  4. Gives strong healthy relationship
  5. Allows to meet people with high quality standard

FLAME DATING on all 5 targets better than mean

Brand performance on attributes (difference versus mean)

Important attributes for FLAME DATING

  1. High quality products and people
  2. Lowest price
  3. Consistent people quality
  4. Available at local places

Brand performance of FLAME DATING better than mean on all important attributes, lowest price not important for people who date as long as the outcome is good

Brand performance of FLAME DATING better than the others

Together with DDDD dating the best brand performance.