HOW TO LEVERAGE A BUSINESS IDEA: BRANDING
Many people love brands while other hate them, thinking it’s about overselling. Our fascination with the words ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ is amazing, though.
Both professionals and people on the street talk about ‘brands’ in all kinds of contexts. Almost everything you choose is now branded, from products to services, cities to countries, sports figures to politicians. And this is even truer in the age of connectivity, when social networks give not only companies but also the individual a low-cost and highly efficient opportunity to showcase strength, skills and experience, to map out and build up our private and professional human relations.
One thing is sure: love or hate branding, it is definitely one of the most efficient strategies ever to leverage a business idea in highly competitive markets.
It is no secret that branding has long been the most efficient method to find new professional opportunities in an unstable work environment, with all-out competition pressurising the individual. That has only increased with branding’s new online dimension. Witness first of all these long established brand ideas:
- Swatch (swatch.com) … Swiss watches. A disposable fashion item of which you can buy more than one.
- Victoria’s Secret (victoriassecret.com) … and its angels. Seductive underwear.
- Paul Smith (paulsmith.co.uk) … colourful and sophisticated. British Fashion Design.
- Smart (smart.com) … for sophisticated urban needs. A micromobility car solution.
- Zaha Hadid (zaha-hadid.com) … futuristic and questioning. Bespoke architecture.
- Brompton (brompton.co.uk) … personal transport. Folding bike.
- Kingdom of Bhutan (grossnationalhappiness.com) … a Tibetan country. Rethinking political values with GNH (Gross National Happiness) instead of GNP (Gross National Product).
There’s also co-branding, a version of branding which is being used more and more. Brand collaborates with brand. Here are some successful examples:
- Architect Rem Koolhaas’s OMA (oma.eu) works with … Prada (prada.com)
- Stella McCartney (stellamccartney.com), Karl Lagerfeld (karllagerfeld. com), Roberto Cavalli (robertocavalli.com) or Jimmy Choo (jimmychoo.com) work with … H&M (hm.com)
- Lego (lego.com) collaborates with … Muji (muji.com)
- Giorgio Armani (armanicollezioni.com) works with … Nobu (noburestaurants.com). Actually this collaboration brings together Giorgio Armani and Nobuyuki Matsuhisa with Robert De Niro at Milan’s Armani/Nobu Restaurant (armaninobu.com).
Many of you will have known these brands for years. I call them off-line brands, or b.c. brands — before connectivity — as their origin lies in traditional means of communication such as display advertisements, TV commercials and so on. But now think of what I call a.c. brands — the so called ‘online brands’ — established after connectivity entered our everyday lives.
In 1994 the mother of all Internet sales business models, Amazon.com, was founded, followed in 1998 by Google.com, in 1999 by Blogger.com, in 2001 by Wikipedia.com, in 2002 by Friendster.com, MySpace.com, LinkedIn.com and OpenBC/Xing.com, in 2003 by Flickr.com, in 2004 by Facebook.com, in 2006 by Twitter.com, Behance.com, Spotify.com, in 2009 by Foursquare.com, in 2010 by Pinterest and, in 2011, Google Plus. And so on. As you can see, a lot has happened in a short time — you could say we are watching online branding in its infancy. Awareness of these brands is built up through online communication and referrals — most have not even spent one cent in classical communication — but that doesn't mean their communication strategy is less efficient. Google, within its few years of its existence, has actually made it to the top ten of the most valuable global brands.
To understand this change in media and communication I strongly recommend you to watch EPIC 2015 (epic.makingithappen.co.uk), a short video about the change in media and communication.
