Arts and culture leaders have a tough but rewarding task: creating and leading sustainable organizations that deliver real social value. There is a lot of competition out there. Being an effective leader means constantly adapting, cleverly using the best tools to reach as many people as possible. This course is designed to help leaders at any level do just that.
4.5 | Brands & Beyond
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Arts and Culture Strategy
ratings
From the lesson
Where Do We Stand? Making Choices
A tension exists between artistic/mission and economics. As much as we’d like to try, we can’t be everything to everyone. We must find alignment and balance. How do you recognize and systematically respond to changes in your community? In this unit we’ll explore advancing your mission through a sharp focus on customers and markets; how best to understand the needs and interests of stakeholders; how to identify the best target-customer segments for your organization/project; and how to attract and retain those customers.
Meet the Instructors
Peter FrumkinProfessor
Nonprofit Leadership Program, School of Social Policy & Practice
Mrs. Russell Willis TaylorLecturer, School of Social Policy & Practice; Past President & CEO, National Arts Strategies
[MUSIC]
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
brand that is all about style, and youth, and power.
Different brands convey different things, but a strong brand has an immediate
visceral connection that you know when you see it what it actually stands for.
Think also about, in the athletic domain, Adidas and Nike.
Those are strong brands because people associate Adidas with a whole range
of professional athletes and Nike, of course,
has incredible recognition around its kind of ethos of doing things,
getting things done, taking chances, and being on the edge.
But in the non-profit segment, there are strong brands there too.
Think about the Susan G Komen Foundation.
It is almost synonymous with the issue of breast cancer.
And when we think more broadly about the cancer field, the first
organization that comes to many people's minds is the American Cancer Society.
It's been around forever, has a stellar reputation, it has a strong brand too.
So brands exist in the corporate sector and we know what they are.
But there are also strong brands in the non-profit sector and they
have been constructed very carefully over time and they are now extremely valuable.
Think about one of the oldest and biggest brands of all, the Red Cross.
It's not just an American brand, it's a global brand.
And they constructed this brand over years and
years of work in crisis situations, in natural disasters.
Where it's come in and help the most desperate people meet their needs.
It's a global movement now, it has a lot of warm glow associated with it,
and it allows them to do a lot of other things.
All the powerful brand that's associated with the Red Cross
allows it to collect blood donations and
then to use those blood donations in all sorts of biotech and
other high-tech bioservices that they now offer.
A lot of that is driven by the goodwill
that's created by the brand of the Red Cross.
You wouldn't have those blood donations without the incredible goodwill that
the organization has built through its brand.
So, brands are very powerful and once you have them they can last for a long time.
But brands have to be managed.
If something goes wrong, they can be lost.
Think about the Lance Armstrong foundation.
There, an organization started by selling little yellow bracelets made out of rubber
with the word Livestrong on it.
No one thought it would be very successful, but before you know it,
they sold tens of millions, I think upwards of 60 million or more of
these bands at a dollar apiece, generating a large windfall for the charity.
The organization was on an enormous roll.
It had all this powerful connection to Lance Armstrong's personal
experience with cancer and his overcoming of its incredible
challenge to win the Tour de France, time and time again.
But the whole brand collapsed when Lance Armstrong's problems began and
when his Tour titles were taken away in a doping scandal.
So brands can be very strong but they can not be assumed to last forever,
they have to be managed, protected and built.
And once they're lost, they're very hard to regain.
So a brand is something you want to develop.
It's something you're gonna take time to think about.
How you'd start to build it, how you'd start to draw people in.
I think when we think about marketing more generally, goods ideas,
artistic visions, are terrific things, but they're not enough.
I talked about the need to marry both artistic value and
community value together.
And I think marketing is about that.
And building the brand is that moment where you can try to connect the two.
You need to know your audience, across all the things we've talked about.
You need to know your audience.
A huge part of marketing is understanding those segments, knowing what they want,
knowing how they respond differentially to different options and
products and services.
You have to have a good strategy for
reaching the audiences that you've picked out.
You have to have an approach that says, not every product, not every offering
that we're going to put forward is going to be right for every target segment.
We're gonna get better and
more sophisticated at matching those customers and services.
Finally, what you really want to do over time is to build a strong relationship.
I started off by saying marketing is all about an exchange relationship,
it really is.
And when you build a strong exchange relationship
where you're giving people what they want and
you're producing something that has strong artistic value, that's when you're
creating a real community of value that's lasting and enduring.
And that's also the moment when you can construct a brand.
And if you have a strong brand you'll develop a tribe and
a following that will go anywhere for you.
[MUSIC]
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