At the end of my class on brand management each term my MBA students rate the subject on various attributes. Among them is the degree to which the class had a “strong theoretical basis”. It is always my weakest score because I do not rely on very much published academic research to build the course content. Some decent case studies and a few readings from Harvard Business Review more than suffice.
So, what makes a story a myth? Of course, ultimately it’s your audience – or all of us.
Every brand must change, but the extent of the change, and the size of the calls that accompany those shifts, are very different. So when should you refresh what you have to bring it up to date, and when should you “kill” the brand and start again? Refresh a brand that is fundamentally robust and that has strong engagement and loyalty with customers. A refresh is about more than just the tweaks required to keep a brand current. (Those are brand updates and are now business-as-usual.) A brand refresh can in fact be a ceiling-to-floor rethink of how the brand not only looks but also how it delivers, speaks and operates. In essence though, the brand’s DNA remains intact. The brand retains its core market position and values, but opens the door to change other aspects of the business as required.
Accessibility is one of the five drivers of customer brand insistence in our proprietary BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system. How does accessibility contribute to customer brand insistence?
Twitter was built on 140 characters. Even though the limitation was serendipitous, it remains a defining characteristic of the brand in the minds of many. Concise thinking, hash-tagged to provide simple, global connection – there’s the Twitter value equation in a little under half the consigned quota. But the question Carl Miller asks is a good one. What happens when the idea that defined you starts to work to inhibit you?
