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Branding And Strategic Investment: Why Firms Don’t Invest

Branding is a business strategy. It can justify higher margin because customers trust the brand based on their prior experience or because the brand is the best match for their preferences with respect to one or more product characteristics. The value of the brand to the firm is the price premium it commands. Successful branding can increase loyalty among customers, making them less likely to switch from purchase occasion to purchase occasion, even when competitors...
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How Eveready Paid The Price For Underinvesting In Marketing

How Eveready Paid The Price For Underinvesting In Marketing

Seminal research demonstrates that companies who underinvest in branding potentially face an extinction event as diminishing share of market and declining price support make profitability elusive. Even in the best market conditions, brand investments play a key role in deciding outcomes among competitors. This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox. A classic case study is that of Duracell...
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The Perils Of Losing A Brand’s Relevant Differentiation

The news from YUM! is that Pizza Hut may be sliced. The other two big brands in the YUM! portfolio – KFC and Taco Bell – are managing. Sadly, Pizza Hut is not hot. There are several reasons why Pizza Hut is experiencing difficulties operating in today’s restaurant environment. Late last year, QSR magazine wrote an in-depth story about Pizza Hut and its tribulations. The article cited the various Pizza Hut evolutions: from a dine-in...
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Brand Strategy Work Is No Job For Ad Agencies

The world of marketing has evolved, and today the companies that supply marketing communications and brand strategy are very different. There was a time when ad agencies were also the chief brand builders for their clients. It was called the 20th century. But that era is over and even big and brilliant agencies are no longer qualified to work on brand strategy. Ad agencies should do what it says on their tin – be agents...
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Values Are The Spine Of Strategy

In those times when maximum effort is not enough, and this happens to everyone and every enterprise, what heartens first is observing others — partners and competitors — who have endured the same condition and prevailed. In the cases where redemption eludes, the second point of heartening is the comfort found in venerating the one element that adheres to every vestige of an endeavor: values. Enterprise values typically express the core beliefs, principles, and ethical...
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How Brands Can Be Old And New Simultaneously

Not to beat this Cracker Barrel fiasco into the ground anymore, but there is a problem when brand marketers use age as a definer of relevant values. When Cracker Barrel and its crack consultants decided that modernizing the Cracker Barrel brand meant jettisoning the totems of Cracker Barrel’s provenance, those involved made a mistake. It is possible to be old and new at the same time. This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter....
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The Art Of The Successful Brand Pivot

In the early 2010s, entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield and his team of developers were building an online game called Glitch. Butterfield’s team eventually decided to shut Glitch down after it struggled to gain traction with users over years of effort. But amid that failure, the team noticed something interesting: the internal messaging system they had built to collaborate on Glitch was really effective. In fact, it solved many of the communication problems they had experienced in...
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How Process Workflows Strengthen Brands

The most effective enterprise strategic plan flows from purpose, vision, and values. These guideposts provide context for long-term priorities; objectives and key results to be achieved through well-defined projects; and key performance indicators to measure how it is all going. And as the circulatory system for projects and teams, processes — their efficacy and unexploited potential — are critical to the success of the plan. Effective workflows within each process are the secret of performance. The...
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