A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

On Friday, June 29^th the iPhone will be on-sale through AT&T Wireless. AT&T is expecting a huge amount of traffic to their stores due to their new product. Industry analysts and executives are unsure how much AT&T will benefit from the iPhone and the affects it will have on their competition with Verizon, Sprint Nextel and other wireless carriers. The new iPhone will change consumers' expectations of what type of mobile phones should be offered through wireless companies.

Chetan Sharma, a wireless industry consultant, stated the shift will be like the one caused by the Razr from Motorola, the once wildly popular phone that became the first phone that people regularly asked for by name. The iPhone's popularity is a testimony to the power of Apple's brand name and reputation. Due to the fact that Apple is a powerful brand customers are willing to give the new phone a chance as they did when the iPod first became popular. According to Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, Apple expects to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. A market research firm, M:Metrics, found that 64% of American mobile phone users had heard of the iPhone and 14% will be interested in purchasing the new product. These statistics are testimony to how powerful AT&T and Apple's iPhone marketing campaign has been.

The iPhone has the potential to shift AT&T's whole brand and its launch is bigger than any of AT&T's other products. AT&T has been greatly focused on their marketing techniques for the new phone because it has the potential to bring in more subscribers. AT&T is excited about the potential to increase their customers because their share of new monthly wireless subscribers has fallen steadily over the last year. AT&T is currently losing 1.7% of their subscribers each month compared to Verizon who is losing 1.1%.

To accommodate the expected demand for the iPhone AT&T has hired about 1,900 workers for their stores across the country. Glenn Lurie, president for national distribution of AT&T's wireless group stated, "This is going to drive a tremendous amount of traffic and energy to our stores. It'll help our growth not just in iPhones but in our overall business."

It should be interesting to hear if AT&T's launch on Friday is successful and if it will increase their customers. This is an excellent opportunity for AT&T to improve their brand and have a new position in the wireless carrier network.

While flipping through a Target Marketing magazine I came across an interesting article discussing how great brands remain great. The article "Great Brands Never Rest" contains six not-so-secret steps to a strong brand. The six steps the article highlights that will guarantee your brand never rests are:

Step #1: Know Your Position: First determine who your top three competitors are and then try to understand their brand strategies (strengths and weaknesses). Evaluate your brand by comparing the competitors' strategies. Do you have a clear position? Are you making it easy for your customers to "get" you? Then ask yourself the following questions about your brand and leading competitors' brands: What would make a customer, with several other choices, pick one over the others to do business with? Where are each brand's channel strengths? How clear is this to the customer? To complete this step successfully, spend time as a team looking at your brand through both a competitive and customer lens.

Step #2: Know Your Customers' Positions: In order to continually maintain the growth of your brand you need to thoroughly understand who your customers are. Ask yourself the following questions to determine your customers' positions: What is it you know for sure about your customers' lives? What would you like to know? How are you going to find out? Who will keep track and synthesize this information so that it is at the core of every brand decision?

Step #3: Share Your Position: Remember it is important that your employees know your organization's and customers' position. If employees know about your brand and your customers they will be able to relay this information to anyone they meet. Employees are the face, the voice and the "experience" of your brand to your customers. An example of organizations putting Step #3 into action are Cabela's employees wearing and using their outdoor gear in order for them to understand the customer side of their business.

Step #4: Stay Focused on Your Position : Don't take your brand strengths for granted or your competitors' weaknesses for granted! Remember to always stay alert, curious and know what your brand's growing edge is. Big and small companies often lose their way and struggle to make a comeback. Big companies that are currently trying to refocus their brand and establish a new reputation are Blockbuster, who lost a significant part of its audience to the convenience of Netflix. Blockbuster might not have lost their way if they would have remained focused on their brand position.

Step #5: Leverage Your Position : When leveraging your position look at your brand heritage. Are you using your company's story to the fullest potential? Many companies underutilize their heritage. L.L Bean is an excellent example of an organization using their heritage to leverage their brand position by incorporating one detail at a time since 1912. L.L Bean has been an outdoor specialist for years that matches its brand promises to its actions. Every connection, every detail, is a chance for them to connect people outdoors. Their leverage position is that they have guaranteed outstanding products and customer service since 1912 and are not about to change any of their promises.

Step #6: Delight and Reward Those Customers Who Support Your Position: Communicate a sincere appreciation to your customers that have chosen to do business with you by saying a heartfelt "thank you." Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart with the belief that "There is only one boss. The customer. And she can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending her money somewhere else."

Great Brands Never Rest! Don't forget that brands are disciplined, focused and action-oriented.

A healthy brand innovates and reinvents itself constantly to remain relevant to shifting consumer desires. This is a key component of brand building, but how do you know when it's time to change and what to change?

A recent marketing-accountability study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers identified some very concrete indicators:

• When customer conversion or repeat rate vs. competition slips
• When the percent of consumers rating the brand as "excellent" slips
• When factors rated highly by customers differ from the company's goal
• When the company sells more on promotion or price reduction than it does at premium
• When a brand's net promoter score slips (net promoter score is a widely used marketing metric that's derived by subtracting the number of brand detractor from the number of consumers who say they would recommend the brand to another)

Brand reinvention in these cases should include

• Product innovation
• Refocusing marketing efforts on growth
• Exploring new targets
• Analyzing the root cause of the deterioration
• Completing a deep qualitative study on brand issues

Notice that hiring a new ad agency is not the solution. As Don Sexton, professor of business at Columbia University states, "Sizzle alone won't do it. You have to have the steak as well. Great advertising makes a lousy product fail faster."

Strong brands start out with a point of differentiation and an understanding of why that difference is relevant to their customers. When a brand begins to slip, it's crucial to go back to the beginning and be sure all efforts are grounded in the core values that made that brand strong.