I’ve had many clients struggle trying [...]]]> Your brand name is a good start in creating the verbal expression of your brand. To convey a richer story, you need more than that. Call it a tagline, strapline, or slogan, a short, catchy phrase may help take many brands to the next level.

I’ve had many clients struggle trying to create the ideal tagline. Some struggle to define products that are hard to describe. Others struggle with an extremely diverse array of products. Still others are saddled with boring and hard to remember slogans.

Here are several approaches that can help you break through the frustration to create a tagline that truly works. Taglines can take a number of forms, depending on your communication goals:

Descriptive: If you have an uncommon or confusing product or if you have chosen an unusual brand name, your tagline can add clarity. A downside of descriptive taglines is that they tend to be boring. Yet a number of companies have managed to avoid that pitfall. BMW wins with “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”  Rice Krispies goes a step further to describe the experience of the product with “Snap, Krackle, Pop.”

Benefit Based: You can help customers visualize the value of your brand by focusing attention on its key benefit. Disney promised to be “The Happiest Place on Earth,” and FedEx delivers “The World On Time.”

Point of Difference: In a highly competitive market place, moving beyond the benefit to what makes your brand better can help you stand out. John Deere claims “Nothing Runs Like a Deere,” 7Up is famously “The Uncola.” Pork is positioned as “The Other White Meat.” Bounty paper towels are “The Quicker Picker Upper.”

Witty Catchphrase: Some brands have achieved places in pop culture with catchphrases that have caught fire. Budweiser had “Wassup.” The California Milk Processor Board created “Got Milk?” Verizon eternally asks “Can you hear me now?”

Personality: Your tagline can establish the personality of your brand. “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?” contrasts with Hooter’s “Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.”

Visionary: Companies with lots of products sold in many countries often struggle with a tagline that embraces their far flung businesses. In these cases, a tagline that evokes the mission or vision of the company can be very effective. GE is “Imagination at work,” whether talking about train locomotives or microwave ovens. Dupont is about “The Miracles of Science.”

Provocative or Motivating: Telling your customers what to do or why your brand is important is another way to approach finding an effective tagline. AFLAC tells people to “Ask about it at work.” Michelin reminds us “Because so much is riding on your tires.”

When you are developing tagline options, we recommend creating several ideas that fall in each of the above categories. Thinking in new ways can help you get past creative roadblocks. You just might find that one winning phrase!

Old Logo

New Logo

Originally marketed for electronic signs, the company has enjoyed better success as a maker of mobile electronics displays.  Paper thin and lightweight, the technology [...]]]> Congratulations to E Ink on their new logo. The company was a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab back in 1997 and pioneered the concept of electronic paper.

Old Logo

New Logo

Originally marketed for electronic signs, the company has enjoyed better success as a maker of mobile electronics displays.  Paper thin and lightweight, the technology offers high contrast and low power consumption. Best known as the technology behind the Amazon Kindle,  other users include Barnes & Noble, Casio, Citizen, Hanvon, Hitachi, Lexar, Motorola, Plastic Logic, Samsung, Skiff and Sony.

With a clear future as an ingredient brand, E Ink was more than ready for an updated logo. While the new logo is an improvement, I am not sure it does what the E Ink press release claims. The new logo is a safe corporate expression, but the company claims “new E Ink logo design emphasizes the cultural legacy passed on by technology. E Ink embraces technological advances while respecting human life, human culture and human nature.” Huh? Can’t say I’m seeing that.

(Full disclosure–I was E Ink’s director of marketing from 1998 to 2000, but the original logo had been chosen before I joined the company.)

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet [...]]]> “Don’t use the F-Bomb” is a seemingly common sense rule when using social media for corporate purposes.

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive.”

If a pro can make such a big mistake, how can you protect your brand when your employees tweet and post on your brand’s behalf?

While you can’t create common sense through policy, it does make sense to provide guidelines.  A social media policy does more than make clear what mistakes to avoid. It helps you use the social media more effectively.

Here are some basic points to cover:

• Make sure people know they are personally responsible for what they write. Once something has been said, it can’t be unsaid, and there is no telling who will see what is written. Everyone should think twice before hitting the “share” button.
• Be real. Don’t create a fake persona or a faceless corporate presence. Use your real name and identify your relationship with the brand. Compare how Toyota uses real people vs. Chevy’s faceless corporation approach.
• Think about your audience. You will be talking to clients, future clients, employees, bosses, suppliers, competitors—everybody. Be careful not to alienate them. Ray Catena Lexus, a New York area car dealer “likes” The Mets on their Facebook page—how do Yankee fans feel?
• Stay away from religion, politics and sex. Good advice for polite company at a dinner party is also good advice for using social media. Be especially careful when thinking of voicing a negative opinion about anything—and never badmouth the competition.
• Don’t get defensive. Your company may come under criticism. Resist the urge to fight back. Be polite to detractors and use the opportunity to present additional information and resources. Don’t call people names or denigrate their thinking.
• Don’t misuse copyrighted material. Be sure to provide attribution for any material you share. Never post confidential material.
• Be helpful, bring value, be amusing. Don’t just blare out commercial messages and public relations fluff. If you get a reputation for being a walking, talking commercial, you’ll be considered a spammer and will be tuned out—often rudely.

The Social Media Governance Web site has an impressive library of real social media policies from many different types of companies. These can provide a template for your company’s social media policy as well as give you an idea of what issues other companies have faced and how they dealt with them.

1. Orascom Holdings  (including Orascom Construction and Orascom Development)

Egypt isn’t known for creating global brands. The country wins “Best Country Brand for History” almost every year, but their commercial brands are not winning awards or dominating global markets. Here are the top 12 home-grown corporate brands from that country:

1. Orascom Holdings  (including Orascom Construction and Orascom Development)

2. El Ezz Steel

3. Middle East Oil Refineries

3. The Arab Contractors

5. Egypt Air Holdings

6. El Sewedy

7. Telecom Egypt

8. Mobinil

9. Alexandria Minerals & Oils

10. Talaat Moustafa Real Estate

11. Suez Cement

12. Ghabbour Auto

Any one know the biggest Egyptian consumer brands–not brand made by multinationals and marketed in Egypt, but actual Egyptian brands?

]]> http://merriamassociates.com/2011/02/egypts-top-brands-12-top-corporate-brands/feed/ 0 http://merriamassociates.com/2011/01/marathon-oil-spin-off-runs-into-brand-confusion/ http://merriamassociates.com/2011/01/marathon-oil-spin-off-runs-into-brand-confusion/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:40:37 +0000 LDMerriam http://merriamassociates.com/?p=1973 Corporate restructuring can make perfect financial sense, yet create a perfect mess out of the brand.

Take Marathon Oil, which just announced it is spinning off its “downstream” refining and retail operations. Those low margin businesses drag down the finances of the whole company, so a spin off is a shrewd move. Still, calling one company [...]]]> Corporate restructuring can make perfect financial sense, yet create a perfect mess out of the brand.

Take Marathon Oil, which just announced it is spinning off its “downstream” refining and retail operations. Those low margin businesses drag down the finances of the whole company, so a spin off is a shrewd move. Still, calling one company Marathon Petroleum Corp. and the other one Marathon Oil Corp. creates endless confusion and genuine brand risk—people will always wonder which Marathon is which. (Motorola has done something similar).

From Brand Confusion to Brand Risk

Should Marathon decide to eventually sell the retail operation, brand confusion becomes a risk. What an acquiring company does under the Marathon retail brand will  impact the parent company brand. The risk also runs the other way. If Marathon has an oil well disaster like BP did in 2010, it impacts the retail brand. Consumers aren’t going to differentiate Marathon Oil and Marathon Petroleum when they boycott. Marathon is one brand, no matter that it is now two companies.

Retail Rebranding is Expensive

Should Marathon eventually sell its spun-off retail operations, the buyer may not want to change the brand name on each of the 6500 individual gas stations. Joe Bona, retail brand expert and president of the retail practice at design and strategic branding company CBX, notes: “The cost of rebranding sites, terminals, transportation vehicles etc. would be quite substantial and the risk of alienating core constituents would also be a concern. Of course then there would be the marketing cost and time to build any new brand. Without having access to research, I would have to believe Marathon has positive equity in the markets they operate, so anyone planning a new brand would have to weigh the risks of any such move.”

A number of years ago, I worked on the rebranding of a major oil company merger involving some eight different retail brands. When deciding which brands to keep and which brands to discontinue, we discovered that distributors liked having a portfolio of brands so that they could own all four corners of an intersection, each with a different brand name. This may be another reason why keeping the Marathon brand could make sense to a future buyer.

Rebrand the Parent Company

A cheaper solution would be for the parent company to rebrand its exploration and production business. While they loses some legacy, they can make up for it with a clear, differentiated brand—and a future with less risk or confusion.

Some companies use stratagems to [...]]]> A good brand reputation is not a service you can buy and can’t be gained by a clever stratagem. Still, reputation managers at companies trying to do damage control or damage prevention always seem to be on the look-out for shortcuts to a strong positive brand reputation.

Preventing Negative Conversation Is Impossible

Some companies use stratagems to try and prevent negative conversation. In advance of an expected Wikileaks attack, Bank of America registered hundreds of negative domains in mid-December. Erik Sherman writes on bnet “BofA executives have limited imaginations when it comes to the many ways people could put down the company and its managers.” And he points out they are years too late, with sites such as www.BankofAmericaSucks.com having carried on a brisk trade in negative consumer opinion for years. Despite Bank of America’s big URL buy, hundreds of negative URLs remain. In fact, another blogger Cory Doctorow calculates that the number of potential URLs limited to just five negative variations (blows, sucks, crook, thief, and fraudster) at a cost of just $5 each would exceed the capital reserves of the bank.

Drowning Out Negative Conversation Also Doesn’t Work

Some companies try to flood the conversation with false positives. Techniques can be as ham-handed as reviewing your own company (five stars!) on Yelp! to systematic attempts to manipulate search engine results. Companies like ReputationDefender.com floods the Web with positive content optimized to make the pages of search engine results pages. Covering this company years ago, Forbes.com recounted a story of one executive who used the service to drown out sites calling her a “fraud” and “con artist” with stories of her business, her upcoming book, even her recipes, though she is quoted in the article as saying, “the truth is, if it doesn’t go in the microwave, I don’t make it.” Google “Reputation Defender Scam” and you’ll find dozens of reasons to stay away from this company and any service like it. It should come as no surprise that cheaters cheat. If your company is already battling negatives, don’t pile on with dishonesty. A good brand will behave as honorably online as in real life.

Integrity Works

Honesty is its own reward, but in business, it is also profitable. I have talked about transparency of today’s world and the absolute need for brands to be genuine in a half dozen articles. In a world of Wikileaks and Gawker, nothing is secret for long. Whatever might be gained by shading the truth will cost plenty when your brand gets lambasted in public. A good reputation is not gained by a strategem and can’t be bought as a service. It takes genuine effort over a long, long time. Build your brand on solid rock and it will weather many a storm. (see here and here)

Gone are the days when a brand was a simple guarantee of product quality. Brands [...]]]> It was just a matter of time before the kinds of people who vandalized brand symbols at world economic summits resorted to brand cyber-vandalism. The Wikileaks hacktivists have targeted and threatened global brands like Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Amazon, Twitter and Shell.

Gone are the days when a brand was a simple guarantee of product quality. Brands today play a greater political, social, and economic role. Brand power extends far beyond products and companies to symbolize more powerful companies and larger issues.

The Role of Brand Has Expanding Beyond a Simple Functional Promise

Because of their symbolic power, brands are regularly co-opted to attract attention and dramatize political issues. That is how The Gap has become a symbol for sweatshops, McDonalds for the obesity epidemic, Walmart for labor violations, Disney for cultural imperialism, Barbie for sexism and on and on. Many brands are more powerful than sovereign nations. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, not nations. This is exactly what has gotten Shell into trouble with the Wikileak revelations that the company is more powerful than the Nigerian government.

Brands make abstract concepts simple and personal. Brands are in our homes, on our backs, and in our bodies. They are an accessible and satisfying target. Taking on armies and governments is daunting. Torching a Citibank or breaking the windows at a KFC is easy.

Ready or not, leaders of powerful brands must recognize that their roles and responsibilities have expanded. Symbolic use of brands in political, social, and economic debates is part of the new reality.

1) Providing [...]]]> A shocking number of companies miss a critical opportunity to communicate in search engine results. What you say in Google, Bing and Yahoo! impacts traffic to your site and your brand image.  Yet, too many companies let programmers write this marketing copy. Here are the five most common search engine results copy writing mistakes:

1) Providing no information at all. No title. No description. No reason to visit. No idea of what the company does.

2) Leaving the placeholder text from the software used to build the Web site in place. Surely the government of Massachusetts has more to say than promote Joomla! Web content management software.

3) Allowing random content to populate search engine results. Here is one “huh?” example from Elan Corporation, a pharmaceutical company:

Here is another example of random content from Healthnet:

Instead of offering directions for finding a subscriber number, Healthnet could have used the search results to talk about the “Healthnet: A better decision” brand positioning or they could have offered their company description: “Health Net, Inc. is among the nation’s largest publicly traded managed health care companies. Its mission is to help people be healthy, secure and comfortable.”

4) Just listing what you sell, packing in as many search terms as possible, but offering no real compelling reason to visit the site.

5) Allowing your description to exceed the allotted space or simply not using the space you have efficiently. In general, you have 60 characters to use for your title and 160 for your page description. Take this example from Corning:

The title is short and generic. Instead of being just “Corning Incorporated | Home”, the title could have included branding: “Corning: The world leader in specialty glass and ceramics”. That would have left plenty of room for a succinct and compelling description: “Corning has 150 years of materials science expertise and process engineering knowledge. We turn possibilities into breakthrough realities.”

Getting traffic to your site requires that you effectively communicate who you are and why someone should visit. Brand communicators need to get actively involved in how their company appears in search engine results pages. This copy needs to be “on brand”, rich in keywords, and should encourage people to click and visit. This communication is too important to be left by default to Web page programmers.