Posts Tagged ‘brand-book’

12.24.10

Merry Christmas and The Santa Brand

Wishing you and yours a truly, deeply festive season from all of us.
It is that time of the year when the age old question is asked by children all over the world, do you believe in Santa?

Santa is an amazing brand in many ways. It heavily relies on a vast number of brand ambassadors from parents to department store Father Christmases to deliver the brand, whilst at the same time lacking authenticity as most of the world doesn’t actually believe in it.

Despite all this the Santa brand has brilliant storytelling, an instantly recognizable brand visual language, creates a powerful sense of brandticipation and consistency of brand experience – I don’t know about you but my December 25ths have a definite groundhog day feel to them.

The Santa brand continues to capture the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people – perhaps making it the most powerful brand in the world. And with a share of the wallet estimated $450 billion plus of Christmas spending in the US alone each year, I’d love to see Interbrand calculate a value for Santa’s brand equity.

For those interested in the exercise of brand thinking with a touch of Ho Ho Ho, take a look at the Santa Brand Book from Quietroom we came across this week:

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01.29.10

Regional Branding – You have to own something

Branding a place or a region is no different to product or service branding – you have to own something that is distinctive and compelling to your target market. However, when it comes to regional branding there is an added complication. You have to balance the competing needs of a diverse set of stakeholders because the people and businesses that make up the region simply do not always see the world through the same lens. Different mental models, different types and sizes of businesses, different levels of self interest and all that before one even layers in the different egos at play.  A lot of stakeholders and lot of emotion makes for interesting branding.

With such a diverse range of stakeholders, the developers of regional brands need to adopt a strategic and pragmatic approach. For a start there needs to be recognition that not all stakeholders will be of equal value in building a world famous regional brand, that the 80:20 rule is well and truly alive. Certainly the team we worked with on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia understood this point. Led by the regional Development Board, the regional branding process started with identifying those businesses that were considered mission critical to being on-board. Clearly your preference is to have everyone on board, but it can also be a very liberating feeling if instead you identify the 20% of stakeholders who will give you 80% of the bang, you can then immediately narrow your focus. And of course the law of attraction always works, enlist the shakers and movers and others will want to jump on board anyway. Once you have the right people involved there is a need to explore what makes up the region, what makes it a special place. Is it nature’s gifts, is it food producers, is it the unique experiences on offer, is it wine, is it a combination.

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