Defining a Brand through Thought Leadership

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Do you know what your company’s brand is?

More importantly, do you know how to map out a strategic game plan for identifying your company’s brand, and how to communicate it effectively to your audiences?

The “Just Do It” tagline and the distinctive “swoosh” logo are instantly recognizable to millions as representative of Nike, yet are they the Nike brand? The Nike brand goes beyond a sign or symbol; it’s really a collection of perceptions held by the consumer.

This is a truer definition, and helps clarify that brand is not the product or service itself, but an intangible that exists in the minds of buyers. Understanding brand in this approach weighs the importance of brand more accurately.

It also shows that a brand, and brand loyalty, is built not only through effective communications or appealing logos but through the total experience that it offers. As branding strategist Harry Beckwith notes, “It is not slickness, polish, uniqueness, or cleverness that makes a brand a brand. It is truth.”

Challenge: Good Company, Invisible Brand


When I joined K/P Corporation (www.kpcorp.com) as its marketing director, brand was one of my foremost concerns: Although our company serves some of the world’s leading brands, and had grown to become a successful marketing and business process solution provider over the course of its 75 years of business history (starting from

humble origins as a family-owned print shop in 1929) the ‘truth’ of K/P’s brand was this: it was virtually unknown outside of the company and our cherished list of industry-leading customers; it did little to convey the benefits that differentiate K/P from its competitors in the minds of potential buyers.

Your Company’s Brand: an Agreement with your Customer


It is important to note that the perceptions in the minds of buyers that create brand can just a likely be bad as good. Thus, when building, maintaining, or repositioning a brand, you repeatedly make a unilateral agreement with your customers as to their satisfaction with what you will deliver to them—whether it is to be the

least expensive, the fastest, the safest, the highest quality, the most functional, the most stylish or what have you. As Howard Schultz, the genius behind Starbucks said, “Customers must recognize that you stand for something.”

Today, you can communicate with your buyers across multiple channels—email, blogs, print and web advertising, direct mail, and measured media to name a few—with increasingly individualized and relevant messaging. However, new channels and new communication methods don’t signal the death of brand; quite the opposite, it is only through a strong brand can you create the core tenet of any brand: credibility in the mind of buyers.

Credibility: the Brand Foundation


Credibility comes in everything the company does: it is not just “marketing speak,” but the veracity of the representations that sales makes, in the performance of the product or service and in the value that it brings, operational excellence, execution, and so forth.

Marketing’s role then is to create positive associations—credibility—to bring potential buyers into the sales funnel. While this is important to all brands, brands in the service industries, in highly-commoditized industries, and in highly competitive industries need to pay close attention to

not only capturing, but maintaining the buyer’s mindshare, and therefore his or her emotional and psychological connection with the brand. If marketing—and the company as a whole—doesn’t bother to do this, then that cranial real estate is going to the competition.

First Step: Customer Focus


As I had mentioned, K/P has lengthy experience with a large number of clients across many industries, including Fortune 500 clients such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Chevron, Boeing, Washington Mutual, Kaiser Permanente, Starbucks, and Nordstrom.

Our first step in re-branding K/P through thought leadership was to closely examine the best practices we had employed for some of these clients and what made them successful from their perspective. Everything became customer-focused and customer-relevant:

we wanted to stand in the customer’s shoes and to understand, “what do they want?”, “what is their reality?” and “how does the real value we provide as strategic partners extend the duration and breadth of our relationship with them?”

Once the brand was repositioned to be customer-focused, the path for every other marketing activity became clear: to support the brand by increasing credibility and increasing credibility through thought leadership.

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Summary



Using a thought leadership strategy to define and communicate your company’s brand is not the quick fix or the easy solution. However, it is a strategic and meaningful way to understand your customer’s needs, be responsive to those needs, and create powerful market presence through communicating the value you deliver to your customer – and their brand in the marketplace.

Article Tip
Whitepaper Example [Sidebar]

An old cliché runs that nobody who bought a drill ever really wanted a drill—they bought a drill because they wanted a hole. In his book White Paper Marketing Handbook, Robert Bly states that in the B2C market, “…the proliferation of information

on the Internet has trained consumers to demand and respond to informational, content-rich marketing materials rather than traditional 'hard-sell' advertising.” In the B2B space this proves to be true as well, with solutions-oriented white papers creating differentiation from competitors.

It is about providing solid information rather than relying solely on clever marketing-speak. Sharp slogans and beautiful brochures don’t persuade prospects that K/P can be a valued business partner; but displaying thorough understanding of their business problems will convince a prospective

client that K/P has the ability to solve those problems. K/P has successfully created well-received white papers for both the high-tech computer and specialty retail industries with additional papers in the works. These can be found at kpcorp.com.