How digitally competent are prestige brands in China?

This is a pretty cool report issued by L2, in partnership with Labbrand (where I work), looking at the “Digital IQ” of prestige brands operating in China and ranking 100 of them. This version of the report identifies some strong positive correlations between Digital IQ measurements and the brand valuations published by BusinessWeek and Interbrand every year. Of course, correlations don’t imply causation, so the relationship between the numbers may bring more questions than answers.

Thanks to everyone at Labbrand and L2 that did the research and put this all together. Stay tuned for an article-form version of this report, which I’m currently helping to write. Should be available in a few weeks.

Over-complicating the simple and oversimplifying the complex

I’ve been doing some competitive research lately, and for once it’s not for a client. It’s for my own company (the one that now employs me), which means I’m examining brand consulting firms and other shops that do basically what we do but maybe call it something different. (Which, by the way, is a plague in this industry—an industry that demands its clients communicate clearly, and yet insists on using nebulous terms interchangeably and coming up with proprietary “processes” that are little more than trademarked names for the same thing all their competitors do. But we can talk about that some other time.)

I looked at fourteen companies in total, including Landor, Interbrand, Futurebrand, The Brand Union, Lippincott, Wolff Olins, Prophet, Siegel+Gale, Added Value, BrandLogic, and four smaller, Asia-based agencies. I chose these firms based on

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Businesspeople are people too: the case for emotion in B2B branding

[Originally published on B2B Brand Debate]

The goal of branding is sometimes explained as an attempt to create an emotional connection between brand and customer. It’s easy to demonstrate the effectiveness of this emotional side of branding with examples like Disney, Starbucks, and Harley-Davidson (brands that you may associate with happiness, indulgence, and rebellion, respectively). Brand managers working with business-to-business (B2B) brands, however, often chafe at the idea that their company or product—maybe an accounting firm or an esoteric scientific research tool—should be connecting with its customers at an emotional level.

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Has brand positioning been repositioned?

[Originally published this on B2B Brand Debate, where it got some comments including one comment from Al Ries himself.]

Before Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote their seminal book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” David Ogilvy—one of the true Mad Men—set the stage for their thesis, stating “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product.” Ogilvy’s “big idea”—one that reflects the qualities of the brand and differentiates it from competitors—is Ries and Trout’s “position.” A quick glance at the websites and whitepapers of today’s leading branding firms suggests that elements of this definition remain intact. They speak of “relevant differentiation in the marketplace” (Landor) and ensuring that customers “can tell the brand apart from others” (Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com). Some experience in the world of branding firms and a look at the work posted on their sites, however, reveal that definitions and deliverables don’t always align.

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