01 Nov 9 Strategies To Evolve Your Brand
Evolving and redefining your brand can be done in a number of ways and at Amplify, we can work with you and your teams to help you define what is most important to your brand and your customers. Through redesign of the core brand assets to the marketing and digital items in support, there are number of different ways you can breathe new new life into an old brand, product or service – or simply breathe life into an entirely new concept.
Here are 9 ways we think offer a great starting point.
1. Think of the product in new ways – when you redefine what something is or could be, you reframe its context and it’s much easier to redefine what it can be used for. When you stop thinking of milk as a drink, for example, and start thinking of it as a food, you change the scope of the product you’re working with in so many ways.
2. Redefine who you want to be a brand to – if the current audience places a declining level of value on it, think about who might be able to use it in ways that enable you to regain value. Starbucks redefined the value of coffee globally by making coffee hip, urbane and tailored to individual taste. Now they’re looking to do the same thing with tea. In a world that really does believe it’s seen or searched it all, discovery is a powerful consumer motive.
3. Change what it looks like – sometimes changing the value of a commodity can be as simple as changing how it appears to others. Think about the difference in pricing and perception between bottled beer and beer on tap. However, new packaging alone won’t make up for a product that doesn’t add value. What it can do is signal the unrealised value that you want consumers to take up on.
4. Formulate your offer in different ways – the water industry changed how we think of water by adding vitamins and/or carbon dioxide and then segmenting those offers to specific audiences. Today, the world spends more than $100 billion a year on bottled water. What could you do to what you have to make it more than it is right now?
5. Name it in different ways – the deer industry in New Zealand renamed its venison offering “cervena” to differentiate it from deer meat sourced from elsewhere and to make a strong country-of-origin play. If you’re selling copper and everyone else is selling copper, what can you call your copper to distinguish it from what people can source anywhere? Again – renaming alone won’t be enough. In the case of cervena, the change in name spoke to an idea that consumers were interested in, and eliminated the concern that they were eating Bambi.
6. Package it in different ways – the red meat industry is now starting to segment its offer and to assign different perceptions of value to cuts and breeds that not too long ago would all have just been beef. Angus is a classic example. Others are packaging along ethical lines to put daylight between themselves and others and to appeal to consumers who are prepared to pay more for feel good foods. Cage-free and free-range eggs are part of this trend.
7. Distribute it in different ways – changing the distribution channel can be a highly effective way to transform your white label product into something valued by a more specific audience. iTunes rebuilt the value of music by reinventing the concept of ‘the single’ into a single digital track and allowing people to buy the music they wanted in a new way, at a new price. Tablets are having the same effect on books and magazines – redefining how consumers access content and buy it.
8. Price point it in different ways – This is a particularly effective approach when combined with segmentation. Go after various parts of the market with products that demonstrate various levels of value add and are price pointed accordingly – e.g. a bulk product at a bulk price, a high end or specialised product priced at a top-end price, and a consumer focused product that may even operate at flexible price points. Forced into what was close to a death-spiral for many, the airline industry repriced to find new ways of achieving yield. First, they cemented the front-end profit by giving business and first class passengers more space and more comfort to protect margins. Then they debundled their economy offering, adding new categories like Premium Economy, cramming in more seats in cattle class and instigating fees for service that have kept the asking price low whilst charging at every point for things that were once considered included.
9. Wrap a different story around it – New storylines can change how people perceive a product. Water, beer and wine have all used stories to engage consumers and to deliver a new sense of worth. Increasingly, there are opportunities to link undifferentiated products to differentiating stories around environment, supply chain, conduct, purpose and cause. Psychologist Dr. Norman Holland, in an interview with Stephen Denny, explains why: “When we adopt a brand for our own use, we integrate it into the stories of our daily lives.” Once integrated of course, that storied brand has new value for buyers because now it’s personal.
Excerpted from The Blake Project.com