In this Expert Insight Interview, Ulli Appelbaum discusses the art and craft of brand positioning. Ulli Appelbaum is a well-known, award-winning marketing and brand strategist and the author of The Brand Positioning Workbook: A Simple How-To Guide to More Compelling Brand Positionings, Faster.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Ulli Appelbaum’s definition of branding
- Why a brand is a lot more than your logo, brand colors, and tagline
- How marketers create brands through cooperation with their customers
Definition of Brand
Ask ten people what a brand is, and you will get twelve responses. Ulli Appelbaum defines it as everything your desired audience or most essential customers associate with your offering. This can be independent of anything you do, but your job as a marketer is to determine the core association you want your consumers to connect with you.
Once you have determined this, you will be able to stand out from your competition and remain relevant. So, the sum of the associations about your specific offering is your brand. Even though this definition sounds simplistic, it is very actionable.
Brand vs. Brand Assets
This approach to branding allows you to understand why people choose to do business with you and what they associate with your brand that might explain that behavior. Then, you can think about the desired brand associations that you want to create with your offering.
Once you have defined those, which is a difficult task in itself, you can determine whether you’re supporting your desired brand association with everything you do regarding product development, advertising, web design, etc. Although many people think their brand is their logo, brand colors, tagline, and so on, these are just brand assets. These allow you to create brand recognition.
Collaboration with Customers
We often see marketers start their branding process by thinking about what they want to communicate about the brand without really thinking about what the customers associate with it. It is important to remember that the brand you will end up with is the result of a sort of partnership between you and your customers.
Large companies spend millions of dollars on innovation and research. They live and breathe their product and brand 24/7 and are excited about that, so they want to talk about it with their customers. On the other hand, consumers don’t care that much about the behind-the-scenes aspect. All they want is a quality product for a reasonable price.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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