ANA Marketing Maestros

Brand Equity Competitive Advantage

The most important assets of any business are intangible: its company name, brand, 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, contends David Aaker.

And so do I. 75% of a corporation's value today is brand equity, that intangible asset to which drives shareholder value “ and with that much at stake, I would be worried if brand managers in my organization were not primarily focused on building this most important asset.

Companies today can no longer lean on cost cutting or mergers to drive growth – they must grow organically. That means building their brands.

Now if you mean that brand managers have to look at product, pricing, distribution, and customer service innovations as a way of generating growth “then we are in complete agreement. Because these are the just a few of the avenues a great brand manager will look to to build brand equity. Marketing needs to strengthen the relationship between the brand and its customer. Whatever way you accomplish this task is considered building brand equity.

GE's objective is 8% annual growth “ nearly twice the average corporate growth. And their primary weapon “the GE brand. They are focused on doing what's right for their customer so that they will drive up their net promoter score “the metric that measures how many of their customers will recommend them to others. This too is all about building their brand equity. In fact Jeff Immelt said “Sophisticated marketing is now one of the company's three imperatives, along with risk-taking and innovation. The new marketing team itself will embody all three of these qualities.

And Jeff's concept of sophisticated marketing? Build brands.

Viral Video A Boone for Advertisers

J.D. at New Media Musings has an interesting recap in Flavors of Grassroots Video. Online video has been an increasing area of interest for  marketers -- recently we have heard American Express talk about their creative as rolling video stock.

A week or so back, Unilever (they call their creative "filmed assets") kicked off an  Enhanced TV Task Force with a case study where they used a viral online video they had developed for the Axe brand in the UK. The beauty is that they repackaged their "filmed assets" as a short clip on the Adult Swim Video on Demand channel. The story of a small town in Alaska with no women that turned to Axe body spray was a huge success for Unilever. They were hoping for a million viewers to download this low-cost endeavor. They got 2 million.