Rebranding Branding - The Distility Blog

Yesterday, Apple's market capitalization eclipsed that of Microsoft. Their rivalry has fascinated me since I was old enough to geek. Apple has always been about control of the experience. Microsoft in its hey-day about control of the industry. Things they are a changing. So what about their brand brand strategies?

Brand Positioning: Microsoft
The Microsoft brand position has always been that of Number One - The market leader. This is a brand position that works for pathetic reasons. People want buy safe so buying from #1 seems like the safe choice. But Microsoft never channeled this dominance into a concrete brand position. They drank too much of their own cool aid and believed their solutions were more competitive than they really were. Being big has led them to being a big mush of meaning, being so many types of software, hardware, services, and systems they have no brand focus. What we here at Distility refer to as "over-branding". As their dominance has waned, their brand position has deflated to the pathetic "I'm a PC" campaign.

Yes, their are some exceptions like the X-Box, but I'd argue that they essentially created a Masterbrand with X-Box, with "Microsoft" being treated as a lesser endorser brand. There's a future in that.

What lies ahead for Microsoft as they succumb to second place? I see the Microsoft brand moving to the background so more focused brands like Zune, X-Box, and Windows can be accurately positioned vis-a-vis the competition.

Brand Positioning: Apple
My first Apple was the Mac 512/800. It was the easiest computer I'd ever used. That's what made it different back then. Every Apple product I've used since then has maintained that dramatic difference. Steve Jobs knows the integral role that design can lead in brand differentiation. While they couldn't be market leaders like Microsoft, Apple became the thought leaders with ease of use their weapon of choice. The "I'm a PC/Mac" campaign was the ultimate expression of that brand position.

Positioning is all about being positioned relative to a competitor, so what happens as the competition gets easy to use? Can Apple  sustain this position indefinitely?

Brand Promise: Microsoft
There's no doubt that in the early days DOS enabled Microsoft to make good on the promise of personal computing. But that isn't the same as a brand promise - the combination of company passion with customer need.

With DOS, Microsoft had the business savvy to be in the right place at the right time and to strike the best deal. The success that poured out of that allowed them to try and be everything to everyone. But I never sensed that they had a promise to me the consumer.

As mentioned above, by retreating the Microsoft brand, the firm can put better brands, and brand promises forward. That's what they have done by replacing MSN Search with Bing. Notice that Bing is not branded Microsoft and that seems to be working.

Brand Promise: Apple
When I started-up my first Apple program - MacPaint - the Apple promise was clear - creativity. They delivered on this promise by making a graphical user interface (in case any of you forgot) and enabling desktop, multimedia, and video production in the 80s, 90s, and 2Ks respectively. Their Think Different campaign expressed that promise perfectly.

As they branch into more and more lines of business, as they become the mainstream, how can they keep focused around a single meaningful promise? Is it being "magical" as they describe the iPad? Is it being "sensuous", as I find using my new MacBook Pro's smooth glass track-pad right this minute.

What is your Position?
What do you think is Apple's unfolding promise and position? What about Microsoft? Let everyone know, there are no right or wrong answers.

In the world of brand marketing, experts are everywhere. Branding agencies build their businesses on their expertise, and create proprietary jargon and brand models to bolster their credibility. But experts are often the exact opposite of what you need when you want to find your authentic brand.

Experts come in all shapes and sizes. They might be individual consultants or partners in a big name agency. They might do branding as a core competency, or they might be marketing gurus, design experts, or market researchers. Many experts have the ability to focus your vision, identify change, and shift perspective in a way that can make a dramatic impact.

But here's the problem. You wouldn't hire an expert to interview you, go away, come back and tell you who you should be. That would be crazy! Yet that's exactly what many companies buy from experts. How can this reflect an authentic brand? Why would any member of your team buy into this? It's exactly this kind of approach that results in so many phony brands that never stick with the team and the audience.

What we at Distility bring to the table is a fresh take on branding strategy. We don't believe we can ever be as expert as you are on your brand promise, position and personality. We know branding best practices, we know how tapping into a team's passion can transform a brand, we know how to invent useful branding technologies, but we don't know everything - THAT we know.

This post is one in a series on our biggest brand strategy secret here at Distility: That most bad brands can be traced back to a failure of exploration, a failure of commitment, or both.

This diagram sums up the way most brands go wrong, and what it takes to get to the holy grail of the authentic brand.

This post is one in a series on our biggest brand strategy secret here at Distility: That most bad brands can be traced back to a failure of exploration, a failure of commitment, or both.

This diagram sums up the way most brands go wrong, and what it takes to get to the holy grail of the authentic brand.

This post is one in a series on our biggest brand strategy secret here at Distility: That most bad brands can be traced back to a failure of exploration, a failure of commitment or both.

• A creative culture that doesn't know how to promote, manage, or - when required - kill ideas
• A rush culture that can't create the time for brand marketing collaboration and consensus
• Team members who re-invent the brand when it isn't asked or required
• Leadership that encourages the brand being everything to everyone, and neglect the potential of a focused brand strategy.
• A lack of an overall business strategy that precisely defines the target customer, what they are being sold, and what competitors the team must differentiate against. How can you commit to a brand without clarity around these fundamentals?

In our last post, we introduced Distility's big brand strategy secret: At the heart of our approach lies a deep cultivation of the way a team explores and commits to their brand.

A successful brand strategy tells your team how you want your brand to be known. It identifies a desired brand reputation - one that, by being achieved, will accelerate your overall business success. So why do so many Brand Strategies, and the Brand Marketing that follows, experience an inglorious lack of effectiveness?

We're going to let you in on a very big secret -- the secret that lies at the heart of our approach with Distility 1day1brand. The reason most brands underwhelm usually boils down to a failure of exploration, or commitment or both.

To achieve a successful brand strategy requires a high level of exploration -- that is, productive dialogue around the brand's promise, position and personality. But that is not enough. There must also be a high level of team commitment to the most relevant, compelling, and competitive brand ideas. For Distility 1day1brand we consider the key ideas your brand promise, brand position, and brand personality but we're not ideological. Whatever your brand model, without quality exploration and commitment, your brand strategy will be compromised.

If your brand strategy has been fully explored and your team has full commitment to the best brand idea(s), then you have conviction and strength driving you forward as you do the hard work of earning the desired reputation.

"Exploration" and "commitment" are at the heart of a successful brand strategy. They are also the most neglected ideas in the world of corporate branding. That is to say, very few brands, from micro-brands to mega-brands, are fully explored and then committed to by their teams.

Subscribe to this blog or stay tuned for our next post in which we go to town on this diagram...

It is time once again explore the absolutely fascinating subjects of brand and brand strategy. We'll pick up our conversation again with some useful definitions.

Brand. Your company's brand can be thought of as its image in the collective mind of the marketplace - its personality, promise, and position as perceived by your customers and potential customers. Even if you haven't done anything about your brand, you have one. It might be minimal, but it is there. Just as the productivity gurus tell us that not making a decision is a decision in itself, not purposely developing a brand still leaves you with a brand. Your existing brand is influenced by the sum of your public communications - sales calls, web content, emails - plus whatever other material is out there, including press coverage, customer reviews, and competitor propaganda. Obviously your customers won't have read every scrap of information available to them about your company and your product, but what is out there is all they have to go on. They aren't swayed by your good intentions or the content still sitting on your editorial calendar, waiting to be created and released.

Another way of looking at this is to say that your brand is rooted in the past. It is the sum total of all the impressions the public has formed of you up until this moment.

Brand Strategy. Your brand strategy, on the other hand, is all about the future. A brand strategy encompasses aspirational notions of what you would like the marketplace to think of your company. So brand strategy leads, and if it's effective, brand follows. Brand strategy is difficult to do because it must accomplish the trick of being authentic and enduring while at the same time serving your business strategy, which is likely way out in front of the market and will certainly change over time. As brand technologists, we love these sorts of problems, because they cut straight to the core of what a business is all about and solving them tends to require a lot of exciting new thinking. Also, solving these problems keeps us very busy, professionally speaking, which we like a lot.

This is why it's important to know that the Distility 1day1brand workflow won't instantly change your public brand. What it will do is create an internal brand for your employees, and it will also create a brand strategy: a vision that is authentic and compelling and supports your business goals, something that can guide your communications going forward, including design, message, and customer interactions.

For our next post, we'll bring SEO back into the picture and fit it all together.