Larry Light, chairman-CEO of Arcature, has written an excellent piece in AdAge about brand revitalization using McDonald’s as his prime example. His six rules for brand revitalization are imbued by eight principles: purpose, promise, people, product, place, price, promotion and performance.
If you’d like to review his six rules, check out his article referenced above. In this post, I’ll focus on a few of his principles in a marketing program for a product or a service.
The purpose has to be inspirational as well as aspirational (Light highlights the latter). In other words, its the company’s mission statement or the mission statement concerning the particular product or service marketed. In order to inspirational, employees must be able to unite behind it and view it as something valuable, something worthy of their best efforts. The aspirational aspect concerns attainability. Is the purpose within the realm of possibility for the company and its employees? If the answer is yes to BOTH, the purpose is good.
The promise principle relates to integrity. If you promise “x”, can you deliver “x”? If not, what steps have to be taken to bring the company and the product/service to that point of deliverability?
Finally (at least for this blog post), it’s all about people. I’m not talking about your target market here. I’m speaking of buy-in. Do the employees and your key managers sufficiently committed to this effort? If not, buy-in has to be attained before you ever launch the product/service. Without the necessary commitment from inside, no success can be attained in the marketplace. The employees, who are your company’s ambassadors and sales staff have to be certain this is something that’s needed by the target market.
Notice, we haven’t even begun to deal the product/service as such. The internal marketing apparatus must come first and must be built from the foundation. If not, you’re building on quicksand.
No Comments on “Marketing Your Brand: First Things First”