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Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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An organisation's values reflect its beliefs and standards, while the brand values translate these into benefits for the outside world. They may differ but must be closely aligned.

Most electronic forms of interactions do not delight customers, but they have a great potential to destroy brand equity if they fail. For example, after 20 years automated teller machines (ATMs) do not please us very much, but they irritate us when they are down for service. While Web sites may provide some delight today, they will probably be the same as ATMs in the future. The interactions with the greatest potential for delight are those that involve people, who can resolve customer problems, empathize, smile, and provide unexpected levels of service. Companies that entirely replace people with machines may run a great risk with their brands. For most companies, the answer is to manage the mix of people and automation: Machine interaction is fine for many transactions (cash withdrawal, airline check-in) as long as customers have other opportunities to meet the brand's people.

We are aware of many brands in our over-advertised existence, but they only become relevant when our current focus matches their offerings. Like how we notice other vehicles of the same make right after we buy a new car, brand relevance is often about our focus relative to time and place.

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In their simplest form, brands are the manifestationÂ…of some type of relationship between the buyer and the seller...A "brand relationship" is some type of bond - financial, physical, or emotional -that brings the brand seller and buyer together. Thus, the relationship can be either deep or shallow. Rational or irrational. Long term or short term. Or any combination in between.

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Effective brand building requires making relevant and compelling connections to deeply rooted human emotions or profound cultural forces. Brands that establish themselves within the larger incredibly complex fabric that we call life will set themselves apart in a more meaningful way. Great brands understand the need to respect both the physical and emotional needs of consumersÂ…Great brands transcend great products. They respect the timeless human search for people, places, products, and services that are relevant and compelling. Consciously or not, we seek experiences that make us think, that make us feel, that help us grow, and that enrich our lives in some way. Wherever possible, make your brand a part of that process.

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The primary function of brands is to reduce our anxiety in making choices. The very fact we are anxious indicates that we have freedom to choose. The more we sense we know about a product, the less anxiety we feel. When we know less about a product, then our uncertainty rises. The axiom is demonstrated by the correlation that exists between familiarity and favourability.

Bill Schley, author of Why Johnny Can't Brand (Portfolio, November 2005), says branding "is not what you say but what you do." But what a company does is already, well, what it does! To brand, in a corporate sense, is no more a verb than "to gorgeous." A brand is a result, not a tactic. One cannot go about branding an organization or a product or a service; the organization, product, or service is what creates the brand. In a brilliant twist, the experts have bottled an end and sold it as a means...Remove the hype, and branding is just commonsense strategy, rebranded.

brand relationships are useful because they help reduce the risk associated with purchasing decisions and help us create and communicate our identities to others.

Branding is a very complicated concept. There's brand recognition, and then there's brand experience. And the real key is brand experience. When we're talking about whether we're cross-selling or outsourcing, the important element is that brand experience, and that brand experience has to be consistent.

The brand's strategy should be the translation of your competitive-marketing strategy into terms of a promise to your existing and prospective customers.

A brand is a storehouse of trust. That matters more and more as choices multiply. People want to simplify their lives.

As they move from merely validating products to encapsulating whole lifestyles, brands are evolving a growing social dimension. In the developed world, they are seen by some to have expanded into the vacuum left by the decline of organized religion. But this has made brands—and the multinationals that are increasingly identified with them—not more powerful, but more vulnerable. Consumers will tolerate a lousy product for far longer than they will tolerate a lousy lifestyle.

Purpose brands create enormous opportunities for differentiation, premium pricing and growth. But reckless management can erode the equity of these brands. There are only two ways to extend brands without destroying them: Marketers can apply the brand to different products that address the same job. Or they can apply the brand to endorse the quality of products that do other jobs and create new purpose brands that benefit from the endorser quality of the original brand.

The concept behind any dialogue has to be focused on increasing the consumer’s sense of comfort or value. If you offer incentives on brands people don’t accept or know, you aren’t offering anything. But if your offer underscores a key value of your proposed relationship, an incentive can work wonders.

In practice, competitive brands are mostly very similar. Michael Porter’s “sustainable competitive advantage” suffers from two disadvantages: Competitive advantages seldom exist; and if they do, they are rarely sustainable.

Almost any difference between brands that makes a difference in sales gets copied very quickly. “The trends in our technology lead to competing products being more and more the same,” the famed advertising guru James Webb Young said 80 years ago. But Young had the wrong causal explanation — the mimicking was due to competition, as it is now, and not to the latest technology of the early 1920s. Competition consists of not letting your competitors be effectively different or better, thus preventing them from getting or staying ahead.

It’s not that serious product differentiation is at all difficult to achieve. There is in fact much of it around. Most competitive brands, however, do not sport any uniquely effective product attribute — if they did, it would be copied.