shobha ponnappa brand strategy breakthroughs and case studies

REPERTOIRE IN DIGITAL MARKETING: PART

1

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SHOBHA PONNAPPA CONSULTING IN DIGITAL MARKETING BREAKTHROUGHS

BRAND STRATEGYBREAKTHROUGHSAND CASE STUDIES



My suite of services in BRAND STRATEGY



A brand audit is a detailed analysis of your brand in its current state. By identifying which qualities of your brand are currently effective and which ones are not, you can restructure your identity and your messaging goals to produce better results.

Any brand sooner or later begins to deviate from the original factors that supported it, and your strategies start to suffer as a result. Allowing your brand to deteriorate, or failing to update your brand in response to new environmental factors like changing demographics or new products, is a major mistake that can cost you your loyal customers and prevent you from finding new ones.

I. BRAND AUDIT




A brand audit can prevent this from happening by analyzing your current position and providing new insights into your brand.

Once you have a good understanding of what’s currently right or wrong with your brand, you can create an action plan to readjust your standards and get a marketing strategy to support it.

Check out this BRAND AUDIT breakthrough case study!

I. BRAND AUDIT




I. BRAND AUDIT Car Brand Case Study




A leading car manufacturer came to me when they were going through a rough patch on a brand with less-than-acceptable levels of engine performance. The brand was rapidly dropping off the consumer shortlist. Worse still, it was creating huge post purchase anger that was being aired freely by buyers on the webisphere.

Expectation management being one of the most important social media imperatives today, I was tasked with changing perceptions and getting irate consumers to understand the company’s concrete measures to set right the flaw.

I. BRAND AUDITCar Brand Case Study




I was also to shape the mind-set of those who were in the market for a car in that segment but who were now confused and wary of the brand.

I started with a Brand Audit of the entire consumer experience before, during and after the problem. The breakthrough came with the finding that the anger came more from the past love of the brand than the current hate of it. By reshaping the content from this insight, and with stories rooted in a big idea, brand enmity was turned once more in the direction of brand advocacy.





Key take-out:

Brand Audits play a key role in situations like this. But they are also invaluable when a brand starts out in the marketplace or when a brand stagnates for no apparent reason.





Put simply, competitive brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. The idea is to identify and attempt to “own” a marketing niche for a brand, product, or service using various strategies including pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging, and competition.

The end-goal of positioning is to create a unique and consistent impression in the customer’s mind so that the customer associates something specific and desirable with your brand that is distinct from rest of the marketplace.

II. BRAND POSITIONING




It is critical to positioning that a brand is able to make all the various factors of its total marketing align. The positioning has to “make sense” and be predictable when subconsciously associated and brought together to form the big picture of the brand.

Your customers are counting on your brand to be predictable. Otherwise, what does the brand stand for except for its inconsistency?

Check out this BRAND POSITIONING breakthrough case study!


II. BRAND POSITIONING



II. BRAND POSITIONING Skincare Brand Case Study




A skincare brand with mildness as its core value was struggling to gain launch traction for its range of products in the online world. I was asked to look into what could be going wrong.

A deeper analysis of the differing offline and online personas of the brand showed me how schizophrenic the brand really seemed.

While it carried all the gentle values in the real world, the brand was aggressively chasing eyeballs on the social web.





So much so that it was going against the softer attributes and the key positioning of the brand and leaving consumers more uncomfortable than engaged.

It took a careful recalibration of content ideas and messaging to bring back the familiarity levels and restart meaningful conversations.

Incidentally, this mismatch of brand attributes with brand positioning happens more often than it should.





Key take-out:

Brand Positioning and its alignment with brand attributes is as hugely important during the pre-launch phase as it is during subsequent launch, social CRM and social commerce campaigns.





Every brand promises something to consumers. The best brands deliver on that brand promise in every customer interaction. The importance of a brand promise is so solid that consumers develop expectations for the brand. They trust that the brand will deliver on those expectations and its promise in every interaction.

Brands that consistently keep their promise in every aspect of their business — from their advertising to their employee relations and everything in between — can be very powerful.

III. BRAND PROMISE




Too much rigidity, however, can be counterproductive. Brand promise breakdown happens very often, for example, when the promise has outlived its original relevance.

Brands often make the mistake of thinking their promise today will be the right for the brand and its consumers forever. Instead, brands need to listen to consumers, research the marketplace, pay attention to trends, and “relevance” the promise to ensure it is always on target.

Check out this BRAND PROMISE breakthrough case study!


III. BRAND PROMISE



III. BRAND PROMISE Coffee Brand Case Study




Brand promises are often laddered up so far from a core value that in the process they could end up cutting the umbilical cord that links them back to the product. This is often seen in beverage brands because the experience makes for a better story than the taste.

A brand of coffee that promised to start up conversations was exciting in a cafe scenario, but in social media, already rife with buzzy chatter, coffee wasn’t even needed to stimulate banter.





I was called in to see how to “relevance” the promise in a way that made social-web-sense.

A tricky exercise as the promise had affixed itself to the brand as a tagline and could not be separated from it.

Rather than start conversations, we created content guaranteed to get the target set curious, kicked, chuckling, even livid about it. The content became the coffee.





Key take-out:

A brand promise is a great differentiator and must at all costs resonate with its consumers. Whether a new or established brand, the thumb rule is that on the web it’s better to even be hated than to be ignored.





Brand personality, a subset of total brand identity, is nothing but personification of brand. Brand personality is the way a brand speaks and behaves. It means assigning human personality traits and characteristics to a brand so as to achieve differentiation. Brand personality includes both demographic features like age, gender or class, and psychographic features.

Brands having a favorable brand personality are known to enhance brand attitudes and purchase intentions and engender higher levels of consumer trust and loyalty.

IV. BRAND PERSONALITY




Brand personality, like human personality, has emotional appeal that must resonate with its target audiences. The relationship between the brand-as-person and the customer is analogous to the relationship between two people.

Brands and consumers speaking the same language vibe with each other. The brand is perceived by the consumer as “one of us”. Problems arise however when “brandspeak” and “consumerspeak” start drifting apart.

Check out this BRAND PERSONALITY breakthrough case study!


IV. BRAND PERSONALITY




IV. BRAND PERSONALITYBeer Brand Case Study



A brand behemoth in the offline world with a huge fan base – that was cool. A hesitant and late entrant in the online world – now that was so uncool.

When consumers evolve faster than the brands they are loyal to, there is not just disappointment but an active disassociation. After all it’s not just who you are seen with, it is where you are seen with them.





Brands that have been slow to embrace the social web are in danger of coming too late to the party. I was called in to make sure the night was still young for a beer brand that was the coolest to hang out with in a football stadium not so long ago.

The content we generated made no apologies – it merely skipped a version and went on to talk the language of 2.0. But with a breakthrough idea and an edgy tone of voice. Now many steps ahead of its consumers, it became the back-slapping buddy all over again.





Key take-out:

Brands like people are in a process of evolution and defying age is equally important for brands too. The social web doesn’t have time to stop and listen to excuses. It’s a place where even an armchair veteran needs to start sprinting like a nifty start up.





SHOBHA PONNAPPAhttp: shobhaponnappa.com

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shobha ponnappa brand strategy breakthroughs and case studies

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