We talked about the essentials of marketing, those five Ps.
Well I want to go a little bit further today, talking about brands and how you
kind of create a sense of following and a tribe for your organization.
It's a complex issue but if you have a strong brand, it can be very,
very valuable.
But let's think about the big question of brand.
Brand is that amorphous,
powerful thing in the ether that connects customers to products.
It's the thing that draws them forward, that makes them think about the product,
that makes them loyal and makes them come back time and time again.
And to be able to construct a brand, you need to know your customer.
You need to know your product.
And you need to know how the brand is going to connect the two things together.
That's the essential challenge of brand building,
is how do I understand my customer's needs and who they are and what they want?
How do I craft programs that are gonna meet those needs?
And then how do I make that connection through a strong brand that's gonna be
recognizable over time, again and again?
That's gonna draw the customer and the program together.
When it comes to knowing your customer,
I think you really have to spend time digging deep.
We talked earlier about segmenting the public.
That's an essential first step, but you need to have also,
priorities in terms of who you're gonna target within each of these segments and
why and the expense you're willing to put out for it.
You need to think about the execution question,
which is how can you get to each of these segments?
How can you understand them and access them?
And be ready to make changes if you make your initial calculation incorrectly.
How can you recalibrate and hit the target population effectively?
So knowing your customer's a starting part, involves that segmentation.
But it also involves setting targets and strong execution.
Once you know your customer, then the question is, on the other end,
how do I differentiate and distinguish my product or service so that it stands out?
You need to start to outline the key audience and donor needs and
compare your offering to competitors.
And then say, what can I do on the product side to really stand out and
be better and different?
You need to identify opportunities based on both the audience and
donor interests to find an optimal brand that you can construct and draw people to.
And I think a powerful tool that you can use in this process
is the construction of a statement of positioning.
And that involves saying, here's our core artistic or cultural product.
It's for this particular intended audience, and
it meets this particular need of theirs.
If you do, that you're starting to construct that chain that links customers,
users, donors, whatever you want to call them on one side, and the programs and
services on the other through this concept of a brand.
Something that makes them connect the two together.
Now, there are a lot of brands out there,
you probably recognize a lot of companies based simply on reputation.
They're strong, big, powerful brands that are out in the corporate sector.
You know what they are, but the question is how did they emerge as brands?
How do you construct a brand?
Where does it come from?
And how do you maintain it once you have it?
That gets to be higher in a different calling.
So let's think about strong brands.
I think a strong brand connects people at a very high emotional level,
a different level than strictly a question of what product or service I should buy or
what art should I consume?
Something that much more visceral that makes them feel
that there's something there that drives them into the organization.
A strong brand inspires loyalty, passion, trust, and pride.
It gives them a sense that they wanna be a member.
They wanna be a subscriber.
They wanna be a patron, that being around this organization is a good thing and
that it's actually worth something, that this connection is valuable.
And ultimately a strong brand is what's gonna differentiate you.
It's gonna give you that advantage,
if you can construct one that'll make you stand out in a crowd.
Now there are some big brands out there.
Think, in the motorcycle domain, about Harley Davidson.
It conjures up all types of images of people in black leather,
riding large, loud motorcycles off on the freeway on the weekends.
But then think also about, a very different brand, Ducati,
which is this exotic, Italian, urban