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What’s the difference between a great brand and a silly slogan?
A powerful brand is incredibly valuable. Interbrand estimates that a successful brand can be worth tens of billions of dollars. That’s far too much money to be attributed to nice words or cool colors. What makes a brand valuable is the promises it makes and keeps.
Here are some examples of great brands that win through making and keeping their promises.
In response to my article about the Apple iPad on Sunday, a reader posted this fantastic list of predictions on LinkedIn. Although, he prefers to remain anonymous, he agreed to let me post it here.
Here’s the list. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Everybody wants value for money. Accountability is a crucial element of any business relationship. Shouldn’t there be a simple formula to evaluate return on marketing investment?
Unfortunately, there isn’t one and there never will be. Running a business requires judgment, skill and experience. Any simple rule of thumb is bound to be either so narrow that it misses the big picture or so general that it’s meaningless.
That doesn’t stop people from trying though, which is why we’re inundated with ROI myths. Here are four of the most damaging:
Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice… I won’t get fooled again!
How about a third time?
Almost as soon as Apple came out with the iPad, it became fashionable for the technorati to point out its flaws. However, Apple will surely prove the naysayers wrong, just as they did with the iPod and the iPhone.
Here are 5 reasons why Apple will win again:
For many, Social Networks begin and end with Social Media, but network analysis is about much more than tweeting. As the tools improve, Social Network Analysis will become as important to marketing as target group analysis was a generation ago.
Understanding networks will help us bring order to the complexity and chaos in the world around us. From how information spreads to managing sales and finding the information we need, networks can help us run our businesses better.
We like to have rules.
Rules make it easy for us, they absolve us of responsibility. With a little bit of work, we can learn the rules and apply them. If we can show that we’re following them, we can prove that we’re doing our jobs. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing them very well.
For a system of rules to be effective, it would have to be verifiable, internally consistent and complete. Unfortunately, that is a logical impossibility. Effective management isn’t about following rules, it’s about showing good judgment in the face of uncertainty.
Many people who like to think they take a pragmatic view miss out on the reality of the way things actually work. Many of the most useful ideas are also the most bizarre.
It is through the improbable that we achieve the practical.
The New York Times announced that they will indeed switch to a metered model in 2011. This is an incredibly bad idea.
Let’s call this move what it really is: the subsidize paper – charge online model. Most newspapers lose money on print and distribution, why do they expect to charge on the web where marginal costs are zero and low barriers to entry make competition incredibly voracious?
Most of all going to a metered model will distract them from the real task at hand: learning how to run an online business.
I’m a big fan of the New York Times web site, and the company in general. So when, the chairman, Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., announced that they are seriously considering a paid model online again, I took it personally. It will surely end just as badly as last time they tried it.
Taking a page from Rupert Murdoch’s playbook will do more harm than good. What they need to do is fix their business in three areas: web product development, online ad revenues and print ad revenues.
And I’m going to tell them how…
Why do ideas spread?
By all rights, they shouldn’t. Ideas are valuable things. They can launch multi-billion dollar businesses, win wars and bring fame to those who possess them. Moreover, an elaborate legal infrastructure has evolved to protect them. Yet they not only spread, they often get better as they do.
Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to make the point that cultural evolution is very similar to biological evolution. If we want to know more about how ideas are created, disseminated, that’s as good a place as any to start.
