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The Future of Pharma Profitability Lies in Building Corporate Brands

It’s no secret that brands are constantly in search of ways to build connections and loyalty with their customers. However many brands are tackling this challenge by blasting meaningless messages into the ether, hoping to gain a committed following. It's a sure-fire way to turn people off and eventually leave your messages falling on deaf ears. Strong brands engage consumers with authentic and consistent material that reflects an understanding of their interests and gets the dialogue going.These days, great content makes for great brands.

Loyalty programs have become all about earn and burn: customers spend money, earn points and then redeem them. It's time to rethink this concept.

When thousands of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression, many of them started riding the rails across the country in search of work and food. Hobos, as they were called, had been hopping trains since the 1870s, working as migrant laborers wherever they could find a job. They often traveled by themselves, leading to the inevitable problem of knowing what to expect when arriving in an unfamiliar place. Some cities might be welcoming while others might be less hospitable. A farmer might feed those who worked his fields while others might turn you into the police. A secret language of signs was developed that informed hobos about what awaited them. To the casual observer, the signs were gibberish or graffiti; but to the hobo, they could mean the difference between a hot meal and a night in jail. And therein lies a key question for today’s companies to ask themselves:

When marketers map customer experience, we start by defining a beginning and an end. To improve the experience for a particular brand, we typically look at the customer’s touchpoints with the brand on that continuum, not acknowledging that our customers live in an ecosystem, transcending any single brand.

Nestlé's Nespresso brand dominates the fiercely competitive Swiss market for coffee capsules. But Migros is successfully challenging its powerful competitor with its own brand, Delizio –thanks to a new brand identity and a strong positioning. Success spawns imitators, and Nespresso’s success quickly led to the appearance of numerous competitors: Today nearly a dozen players compete in the portioned coffee market – a market that has seen double-digit growth for the past several years.

For a few years now, the shiniest new toy in the digital marketplace has been the mobile app.

The proliferation has been amazing: The 1-millionth app went live as 2011 came to a close, and the pace has continued through 2012. The trend, Mobilewalla told theNew York Times, has been 15,000 mobile app releases per week.

Everyone wants to get a piece of this pie. And why not? The thing is that for all the really cool, highly successful apps there are hundreds, (thousands?) of others that are dumb, useless, or a joke.

Marianne Caponnetto is a case in point: Change agents can come from anywhere in the organization. At Scholastic, the leading children’s book publisher and education technology company, she’s enabling change from the boardroom after having earned her stripes driving the change imperative in sales and marketing leadership positions at DoubleClick, IBM, and Dow Jones &Co. 

Good business ideas occasionally die an unnatural and premature death. While benchmarks, stage gates, and filters can help prevent bad -- and costly -- decisions, sometimes ideas are just ahead of their time. Revisited periodically, a company’s inventory of dead and discarded ideas may become the source of new opportunities.

The point of sale is the key consumer touchpoint for many brands (especially in consumer goods) that reflects the moment of truth in a consumer’s purchasing process. A large part of marketing investment focuses on converting consumers at this critical point.

We hear it all the time among clients, within companies and at meetings. Everyone understands that if you stand still in today’s rapidly changing environment, then you’ll be choking on the other guy’s dust as you fade into irrelevance. The ability to get ahead, much less to transform, is today’s business imperative. But it takes change agents to lead the charge.

All too often, though, stuff gets in the way. The barriers of silos. Resistance to change. A shortage of the right skills for the challenges. The fact is that transforming a business is really hard work.

In this article, David Aaker shows how to identify the “must haves” and discusses barriers to competitors such as going beyond functional benefits, finding shared interests with customers, ongoing innovation, superior execution, scaling the concept, becoming an exemplar, and branding the innovation.
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Short CMO tenure has become a widely accepted fact of life. The arguments for this state are quite familiar: poor cultural fit, overly ambitious agenda, lack of productivity, change in business strategy, and no budget, to name just a few.

More often than not, there’s a more fundamental issue at play, and it’s one that is systemic across organizations. There’s a missing piece of what we call marketing middleware — the “Intel Inside” of marketing.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Especially in a social world.

It’s one of the stark realities that hit home last week with the uproar sparked when the Susan G. Komen Foundation yanked, then reinstated, its funding to Planned Parenthood.

At best, you can hope to influence perceptions. That takes a deep understanding of today’s milieu and how your brand holds up against the increasingly critical guideposts of openness, transparency, authenticity.

Komen failed on all three fronts.

Winning the brand relevance competition requires finding the right “must have,” bringing it successfully to market and then growing the resulting business. The problem is that success breeds competitors and the benefits of pioneering a new category or subcategory can be short-lived. A key step is to create barriers such as ongoing innovation, a large group of satisfied or even passionate customers, proprietary technology and preempted distribution.

It is Econ 101: Create an environment with weak competition. The alternative, fi ghting the “my brand is better than your brand” preference war, is rarely successful at changing market positions because of the resulting customer momentum.

Aaker details one of the growth paths described in his book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant: Removing negatives, and reasons that people use when deciding to exclude your brand from consideration.

Consumer brands have invested billions to create experiences built upon distinctive combinations of products, services and people. Companies on the business-to-business (B2B) side, however, are typically less focused on creating customer experiences as a way to achieve competitive advantage. And that might seem to make sense. Yet a closer look shows that the attributes describing B2B winners – reliability, accuracy, quality, ease – are often the hallmarks of a great customer experience. 

It has become obvious that neither consumers nor businesses can evade the new digital world. As digitalization accelerates, its impact shows up not only through big players like Facebook, eBay, and Google, but also through digital media’s effect on the relationship between companies and customers.

Marketing is increasingly under pressure to make the most of its brands, its investments, and its organization. Although this pressure is particularly intense in tough economic times, the topic is increasingly relevant even in good times.