[MUSIC] Think for a second about how you will go about actually building a brand or strengthening a brand. I hope that by going through the following process, you will have a better understanding as to what are the four steps that you should follow. First of all, define the product identity. What does this mean? What you really need to try to understand is, what is your history? Who are your people? Who were your first customers? Who were your first employees? What kind of company we are? Who works for us? Who were our first customers? What kind of products are we in? What kind of services? What was our strategy? And, what kind of partners can collaborated to define our own history? How would you go about doing this? Well, you need to do a little bit of Marketing Research. Focus groups, in-depth interviews with previous customers, with lead customers, with some of the original customers of the company, looking through the company records, into some of the history archives of their own company will help to try to understand. Where are we coming? What is our identity? What's our history? And, what are we all about? What should be the end product of this first step? The end product of the first step should be a map of attributes. What are some of the specific attributes that characterize the history of our company? As a way of an example, let's look at the Nike Attribute Map. Nielsen has yearly identified from social media comments. What are some of the competitors, products, related concepts, and brand attributes that Nike has demands it's customers and the customers of the competitors. So now that you have defined the identity and built the map of attributes for the company, what's the next stage? The next stage is all about positioning. Positioning is something that we have already covered before, but positioning is about selecting a package of benefits. Which is, normally a subset of all the attributes and benefits that we have identified in the first step. So, how should those benefits be? Ideally, benefits that are meaningful to whom? Not meaningful to us, not the ones that we would prefer, but meaningful to our customers. Second, they ideally should try to set us apart from competitors so they should be differentiable benefits. In addition, hopefully, those benefits are sustainable over time so it's worth investing effort and money to build around those ideas and concepts that would give us a competitive advantage over time. And finally and most important, those benefits need to be coherent with our identity. So let's look at an example. As an example, let's looks at Starbucks. The Starbucks name, as they found out, is associated with many positive attributes. Good coffee, good urban locations, very acceptable service, innovation in products. It's also an accessible luxury and usually is associated to a premium experience, pricing and products. Okay? However, Starbucks has chosen to build it's brand around two critical attributes. That of being the third place, from it's origins in North America as most North American's did not have in the late 70s and early 80s at third place and mainly commuted from office to work. And around the concept of community. Starbucks, it's CEO, and every single corporate communication, stresses over and over and over this concept of community and how it's embedded in all of it's operation, it's organization, and what they're ultimately trying the customer experience to be all about. Okay, so now that we have defined our identity and establish our positioning. The next step will be to communicate those attributes to the general public, and particularly to our consumers. So what is important here? It's important what I say and who says it. And also, what other people are saying including consumers, competitors, and other stakeholders. But the chief stakeholders that need to be saying what we really want to communicate or convey about demand are our own employees. They are the main ambassadors. Any service or experience is represented by an interaction with one of our employees, right? So, necessarily, they are the main ambassadors of the company. And because employees are so critical in the libering branded experiences. Let's see what the Starbucks CEO had to tell us about why was it so important to invest heavily on their own employee's at the most critical moment of the company in 2007. >> In the height of the cataclysmic problems, when we were really in trouble and looking to save money on many levels, I was under severe pressure from an institutional shareholder who owned a large block of stock at Starbucks, to cut the health care benefit of our employees. And he said to me, you have the license to do this. You will not be criticized because everyone is cutting benefits. And of course, perhaps I would have had the license to do it. But the very essence and fabric of the culture of the company is linked to providing unique benefits for our people. Of course, we would have gained a lot by cutting that benefit, but we would have lost the trust of our people. And so, we actually reinvested more money during the crisis in our people that we did in years past. To ensure the fact that they understood, we would not forsake them during the financial crisis. [MUSIC]
