Get To Know Your Company The Way Customers Do

Don't Leave Technology Branding To The Bloggers

By Jim Griffeth

How often do your salespeople ask for better branding of your products? Lead generation programs, it would seem, are all the rage.

And yet, IT marketers spend 31% of their budgets on branding according to a recent study by Marketing Sherpa. Most people accept that branding, when successful, boosts revenues, market share and profitability. But how?

The underlying mechanisms that determine the success of high-tech branding are not well understood. Unraveling this complex world can help smart companies optimize their sales productivity with well-conceived branding initiatives that amplify lead generation efforts. The most effective branding strategies balance factors of control and impact, are pervasive throughout a company and are sustained over time.

Seek First to Understand Branding

Each prospect and customer collects experiences from every interaction that involves a company and its products - not just those orchestrated by the marketing team. Importantly, they decide what weighting to give the branding information gleaned from each different type of interaction. Over time, customers synthesize their own notion of a brand from the weighted average of these experiences.

Following this logic, we can rank order customer experiences (or touch points) by their impact on the brand. For example, the experience of using the product itself is the number one determinant of brand attributes for most technology brands, whereas a slick brochure, advertisement or trade show booth plays a supporting role at best. It is not surprising then that prospective customers turn to the experienced users for reliable insights into product capabilities, performance, ease of use, quality, support, and even pricing and discounting practices.

This "referential branding" mechanism has become central to the technology branding process thanks to the efficiency of search engines and the emergence more recently of blogging. These sources are so effective at providing the prospective buyer with the impartial information needed at each stage of the buying process, that they are steadily displacing more traditional and controllable sources of information. The growing importance of referential branding and the associated decrease in control that companies have over sources of branding information, is undermining the efficacy of traditional branding methods.

Five Steps to Successful Technology Branding

Step 1: Know Your Brand As Your Customers Do. Start by researching your customers' current perceptions about your brand and the relative importance of key touch points. These may include your product, salespeople and customer support people, your search ranking and web site content, and your partners, editors and industry analysts. Include in your research plan a carefully designed survey instrument and a statistically significant and representative sample of customers, employees and third parties. The goals of this brand research are to: · build a list of touch points rank-ordered by weight, and · establish a baseline of perceptions in each touch point area.

Step 2: Choose Your Branding Investments Based on Weight and Control. Using the rank-ordered list of touch points, and the desirability of their branding information (or lack thereof), build your list of likely branding initiatives. In addition to the usual array of marketing programs, these initiatives should include non-marketing programs too (e.g. providing users with blogging access to software developers). For important touch points where you have little or no control over the branding information, consider building relationships with third party "heavies", like user group leaders, consultants, editors and analysts. Prioritize your list of branding investments based on expected ROI, factoring in both the weighting of the target touch point and your degree of control over the outcome. Give the most attention to the high weight/low control group, the most resources to the high weight/high control group, and don't invest in low-weight touch points.

Step 3: Make Branding the Heart of Your Sustaining Strategy. Successful branding provides an on-going competitive advantage to selling efforts. To build that advantage, corporate leaders must define explicit long-term branding objectives as a vital component of corporate strategy, and then task managers and individuals from every group in the company with the step-by-step acheivement of these objectives.

Step 4: Leverage Branding Successes to Build Sales Productivity. Positive customer experiences are branding successes you can use to create more positive customer experiences. Actively seek them out, document them and incorporate them into selling and marketing activities. Use the branding initiatives themselves to reinforce your company's ongoing commitment to creating the most positive customer experience possible. The resulting brand "buzz" will translate directly into sales momentum.

Step 5: Stay Connected With the Evolving Experiences of Your Customers. To turn your technology branding efforts into market leadership, you have to stay the course over many years. This includes continuous measuring, learning and tuning of your initiatives. This diligence is the true test of a company's commitment to improving the experience of its most precious resource - its customers.

Jim Griffeth is President and Managing Partner of StratiMind, an online marketing consulting firm that helps high-tech companies develop powerful strategies and crisp execution. Jim can be reached at jim.griffeth@StratiMind.com .

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