How does a brand become trusted?
Many advertising agencies and the old media sales representatives will talk about the importance of brand advertising. They will produce a spiel that goes along that ‘it is necessary for a business to establish it’s brand in the market place. They will state that brand advertising is more important than direct response marketing.
Recently there has been a survey in Australia of the most trusted brands. The top brand was Australia Post. The second was Toyota with third going to Cadbury.
To my knowledge Australia Post and Toyota do not undertake brand advertising. They are always advertising and marketing a product or service. Toyota are always marketing a car; Australia Post are always advertising and marketing one of their services.
This seems to highlight the ploy that brand advertising is actually a waste of money and small business in particular need to be careful not to get caught in the trap of doing any marketing that would just purely be focussed on brand only.
The next important aspect of this is that these brands deliver on their promise.They inform their customers what they will be getting and then deliver it, consistently. It is this delivering on what they promise is the reason why these brands are the most trusted in Australia.
Obviously the big 4 banks do a lot of TV marketing, but because the belief is because they are not delivering on their promise, they do not make it into the top 10 most trusted brands in Australia.
This survey highlights the fact that a business must be focussed :-
- on delivering on its promise, delivering on its service and product in an exceptional consistent way
- if it does any marketing and advertising at all it must always be promoting a product or service, the brand development will follow from that.
Your brand will be trust not because of advertising but because you deliver on your promise.
A Real Brand – Real Customer Loyalty
I love to hear of stories of great companies who have built a real brand. This is a brand that has a loyal customer base and when the brand is mentioned people can tell you stories (great stories) of this brand. Recently Peter Day of the BBC interviewed the CEO of WD-40. Yes those distinctive blue and yellow cans with that spray we use to solve all sorts of problems.
As Peter stated in his notes – ” it starts off as a lubricant and then generates all kinds of other uses, most of which give the users the wonderful feeling that it’s their cleverness to spray on the WD–40, rather than the product’s versatility.”
Originally WD-40 was designed to stop space rockets corroding. This formula was the 40th attempt to come up with a water dispersant. However as some of the people who worked for the company started taking the product home it started to gain other markets.
There are a number of lessons that can be learnt from the business.
It has been a business significantly built on sampling. They give a sample to someone to try which has led people to purchase. From this word of mouth has done a lot of the business building.
But this word of mouth has been helped by the company. It you visit their website you will fine a fanclub and a page devoted to 2000 plus uses of the product. The 2000 plus uses are full of stories that people can tell each other, try out and otherwise create word of mouth marketing.WD40 ask people to continue to send in examples of how they use the product.They are fostering the word of mouth.They are creating a tribe around a spray can.
The brand has a promise of being able to solve all those little lubricant issues around the house or business. But more than that even keep squirrels from climbing a pole. Read some of the 2000 uses for some crazy examples.
Also it is interesting how little detail is important. The smell that comes with the spray is added. It is not necessary to make the product work. But the smell is important for us to remember the product.
WD40 really take the time to understand the customers need and how their products can help.
So the lessons in summary -
- how are you fostering word of mouth
- how can you allow your customers to sample your product or service
- what little details can you do to your product or service that will leave a memory eg smell, touch etc
- how can you really understand the customers needs better.
How brand savvy are our children?
This was an interesting video on how brand savvy our children are. The children in this video on NBC were 8 to 12 years of age. They were able to identify the brands by smell, sound etc. They also had very definite opinions on what the brands stood for. Advertising and marketing are having very significant impacts.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Think about what this means to your business? Even if your product is not aimed at that age bracket children and people are foring opinions about the brand well before they are necessarily looking for that product.
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