What a shocker of a time Toyota has been having! Over 8 million vehicle recalls world wide, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it gets a lot lot worse. Toyota has now moved from an acceleration problem to a braking problem. The number of new recalls may be a lot less, but we are now dealing with the model that they have been backing their future on, the hybrid Prius. Add the Lexus HS 250h to the recall list and we are also playing at the prestigious end of their brand portfolio. The big question is will it put the brakes on the brand?

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All Brands Have Meaning
Whether carefully and strategically considered or by default, all brands hold associated meanings in the market place. Well considered brands establish a competitive brand proposition (their brand strategy) with layers of meaning to both differentiate themselves from their competitors and to connect with their audience. These brand reinforce their meaning through all of their actions or brand touch points. As a brand agency we help brands to define their meaning and create the brand design for all their communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers.

A Snapshot of Brand Association
The clever people at Brand Tags have been busy collecting the associations that people have with brands. The result is a unique opportunity for those brands to compare the meaning and messages of their brand communication strategy with the brand associations of a cross section of the market.

Today’s snapshot is of fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch
As we might expect, the greatest level of association is with their brand-mark – the A&F Moose – but from there it gets pretty interesting.

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The Difference Between Message and Value
In the past week I’ve had several conversations with clients, colleagues and our creative staff about the difference between brand messages and brand value. Brand is still a relatively young business concept and continues to evolve, mature and become more valuable to companies with each passing year. When I think back even just five years ago to the types of brand briefs we were working with, they were mostly Brand Message Centric – ‘what can we tell the market about our products or services that will compel them to choose us over our competitors?’ Typically these days our brand projects have a very different philosophy, our clients are rightly more focused on “What must we be delivering through our products and services so that our market can’t wait to include us in their lives?”. This is the compelling and critical difference between brand Value and brand message.

Apple, a brand obsessed with building customer value from the inside-out. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney once said
“A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” Few truer words have ever been spoken about brand. What I would add though, is that not all brand gestures are born equal. Some gestures have the potential to cause far more damage to your brand than others – and these are the ones you should spend your time-on getting right.

Brand strategy kamikaze
Australian retailer; Cotton On has worked hard to build a good business with a growing community of loyal customers who believe in it’s brand. Over the past years Cotton On has made many brand decisions, big and small, and made them well… until now. Cotton On recently launched a new range of babies clothes with contentious prints on them with messages like ‘I’m living proof my mum is easy’, ‘I’m a tits man’ and worst of all ‘they shake me’. I’ll leave the debate on the inappropriateness of these messages to others more eloquent than I, however, I’m drawn to shake my head is disbelief at the apparent absolute disregard for the impact of this gesture on the Cotton On brand.

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