Let’s face it, branding is in crisis.

Brands need to be trusted

The basic idea of a brand is that it is trusted and so provides strong, ongoing revenue streams from its loyal customers. Hence having rigorously managed brands which internal and external stakeholders respond to consistently is vital. So if we look at the top 20 grocery brands documented in 1955, 17 are the same today.

Yet brand trust is in decline

However, these 17 brands are in the minority. “The Brand Bubble” by John Gerzema and Ed LeBar clearly shows all is not well for brands and notes that on all indicators, consumer trust in brands is declining while financial values of brands on organisations’ balance sheets continue to rise. This inverse correlation is named the ‘brand bubble’ and is a forerunner to challenging times for both brand managers and shareholders if brands are re-valued to reflect their weakening market position.

At a practical level we are living in a time when brands are at their least trusted in history (Source, Yankovich 2006) with brand loyalty plummeting to an all time low. In 2000, 4/10 people were brand loyal in any given category and today it is less than 1/10 consumers who are loyal to brands. (Source: Carlson Marketing.)

How do manage brand strategy to deal with declining trust

Yet brand strategy underpins maintaining and growing income streams – so how do we re-think what a brand is about to help deal with ‘trust’ challenges?

We believe a major contributor to turning this around is to take brand templating from a 2D exercise and make it 3D.

Forget the brand onions, brand wheels and brand triangles and template your brand to bring alive the inter-relationship between the following areas:

• Emotional benefits
• Practical benefits
• Societal benefits
• Spiritual benefits

Hence for corporate branding we use the Dekoda™ system

And for personal branding we use the Mibrand™ system

If you would like to discuss any aspect of brand templating email us now.