The Hindu Business Line : Does your brand have the right DNA?

WE see how brands turn a neat 180 degrees, and disappear. How about 360 degrees? That's Ogilvy's success story in The 360 Degree Brand in Asia, a book by Mark Blair, Richard Armstrong and Mike Murphy, to help in "creating more effective marketing communications". The old concept of `integration' needs resurrection, argue the authors. Also, `loyalty' and `influence' have a role in Asia. Plus, the focus on `brand challenge', `interplay' and `contextual creativity'. Not a book for the faint-hearted, warns the blurb. A few degrees to read:

Just doing things better than the competition is no longer a guarantee of success. The cutting edge in markets often lies at the intersection between markets. Retailers are banks. Airlines are holiday companies. Car manufacturers are financiers. Sports-goods makers run theme parks. Hardware manufacturers are software consultants. This means brands have more and different competitors.

What is a 360 Degree brand communication? It is an approach to marketing that sees no limits on the number of contact points possible with a target consumer — media will be found, and activities created, to maximise involvement with the brand, whenever and wherever they are needed most.

It is critical to establish and identify some expression of brand DNA (what, within a brand, is immutable, cannot be transgressed, and which signals this brand) — and this brand only — within its competitive set). Without an expression of such core identification factors, ideas cannot be rooted in brand values. Brand consistency would be impossible.

An idea could be defined as an unexpected combination of different thoughts, which puts `something' in a new and involving context. The process of idea-generation and selection is one of combining conscious reasoning ("What shall I do?"), emotional evaluation ("What will this do for me?"), and instinctive decision-making ("What is the ideal stimulus for me right now?").

Great brands (which means profitable brands, with high numbers of emotionally loyal consumers) are almost always 360 Degree brands. That is because makers of great brands know they don't own the brand; the consumer does. But they also know that they, as the manufacturer, are responsible for how that brand lives and breathes in the consumer's life.

Discovery has an end-point and that destination is `insight' — the most overused and least understood word in marketing. Many companies have their own `processes' to unearth `insights'. The problem is that, most of the time, insights are things we stumble across, rather than carefully excavate.

Check if your brand touches the consumer; that means touché for the bottomline.

Books courtesy: www.wiley.com

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