Springwise:

Lucky Seven makes custom caps that bear the logos of fictional companies featured in cult films and television shows. Founder Jay Jay Burridge is a self-proclaimed seventies kid, who spent much of his childhood wearing a Star Wars cap. Burridge, who is an artist by trade, founded the London-based company as a hobby, and turned it into a successful online business.

Lucky Seven’s caps are all made to order. On the company’s website, customers are invited to design their own caps by choosing either a mesh or army style cap, a colour combination from an extensive palate, style of captain’s laurels, and the preferred fictional company’s crest. Want to declare your loyalty to the promise and opportunity of Blade Runner’s Off World Colonies? Done. Prefer people to think you shot J.R. because of your Ewing Oil cap? No problem. Every order is shipped in a Lucky Seven hat box, and caps are priced at GBP 30.

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Branding Strategy Insider:

A strong brand is defined and characterized by the following 9 dimensions:

1. A brand drives shareholder value

2. The brand is led by the boardroom and managed by brand marketers with an active buy-in from all stakeholders

3. The brand is a fully integrated part of the entire organisation aligned around multiple touch points

4. The brand can be valued in financial terms and must reside on the asset side of the balance sheet

5. The brand can used as collateral for financial loans and can be bought and sold as an asset

6. Customers are willing to pay a substantial and consistent price premium for the brand versus a competing product and service

7. Customers associate themselves strongly with the brand, its attributes, values and personality, and they fully buy into the concept which is often characterized by a very emotional and intangible relationship (higher customer loyalty)

8. Customers are loyal to the brand and would actively seek it and buy it despite several other reasonable and often cheaper options available (higher customer retention rate)

9. A brand is a trademark and marquee (logo, shape, colour etc) which is fiercely and pro-actively protected by the company and its legal advisors

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Entrepreneur.com:

Every brand platform needs an adjective. By this I mean every brand needs to own a word in the minds of consumers. Jif peanut butter, for example for decades had TV ads that ended with the tagline, “Choosy Mothers Choose Jif.” Obviously, the branding strategists behind Jif hoped to associate the word “choosy” with their peanut butter. (Notice how superior product quality is implied, not stated, through use of the folksy term, “choosy.”) Today, Jif’s tagline remains virtually unchanged. Talk about a successful branding strategy: Jif has been the leading peanut butter brand in the United States for more than 27 years.

This leads to the third installment of my four-part series on A.S.A.P. Branding. Both an acronym and an adjective, each letter in A.S.A.P. stands for a key component to your branding platform. For example. A = “Advantage; but as a whole, A.S.A.P. refers to the speed and efficiency with which you can successfully gain brand traction using the following simple guideline:

A = Advantage. Content of your message.
S = Style. Style of your message.
A = Adjective. Verbal cue to your message.
P = PMS Color. Visual cue to your message.

See my previous A.S.A.P. columns for discussions on Advantage and Style. Read on for more information on Adjective.

What’s Your Adjective?

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Branding Strategy Insider:

Imagine your company brochure was so popular that people could sell it online for $38.95. Or your carry bags went for $9.90, and stickers featuring your company logo fetched $15.50 each. Impossible, right?

Maybe. But think again. Consider Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria’s Secret and Playboy. A never-ending range of merchandise attached to these brands gets sold on eBay all the time, demonstrating the true value of those brands. And, perhaps, the value of their prime driver: sex.

But, is it really that simple. Does sex sell? Provocative behavior, seasoned with sex, seems to be an ever-effective formula.

Seventy years after the first lightly clad woman was featured in advertising, for an automobile, sexual suggestiveness still seems to do the trick. As trivial and superficial as it sounds, the magic still seems to work in the old formula.

If you passed by an Abercrombie and Fitch store during the summer months you might have noticed something unusual about the U.S. clothing retailer. The staff who greet you at the entrance are wearing an unusually small amount of clothing. A pair of undies for the boys and, for the girls, a micro-sized bra which you can hardly see. Then there’s the store itself. It exudes a distinctive exotic aroma that you can detect from the other side of the street. Meanwhile, high-decibel chart-topping music maintains momentum. The windows are covered with posters of lightly dressed teens, preventing people on the outside from seeing in, and people on the inside from seeing out. All this, combined with the fact that the staff act more like models than sales staff, seduces you into feeling you’ve entered a nightclub rather than a fashion store.

Of course, this is all quite on purpose. And, it’s all about sex…

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The Wall Street Journal:

For entrepreneurs, the importance of picking the right name for a company may rank second only to naming a child. (And it’s lot more expensive to change.)

Name consultants are paid millions each year to help decide what to call a company.

San Francisco naming boutique Eat My Words has come up with a test called the Smile & Scratch Test.

To test out a company’s name, first ask if it possesses these qualities:

Simple – one easy-to-understand concept
Meaningful – customer instantly “get it”
Imagery – visually evocative, creates a mental picture
Legs – carries the brand, lends itself to wordplay
Emotional – empowers, entertains, engages, enlightens

Then scratch the name if it’s got these deal-breakers:

Spelling-challenged – you have to tell people how to spell it
Copycat – similar to competitor’s names
Random – disconnected from the brand
Annoying – hidden meaning, forced
Tame – flat, uninspired, boring, nonemotional
Curse of knowledge – only insiders get it
Hard-to-pronounce – not obvious, relies on punctuation

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BusinessWeek:

Talk to entrepreneurs about their marketing and communications efforts, and they’ll often use the words “branding,” “marketing,” and “advertising” interchangeably. That reflects the pervasive confusion about the terms, says Gail Guge, managing partner of Wilkin Guge Marketing in Ontario, Calif.. “About 15 years ago, ‘branding’ became a buzzword in the business vernacular, and people still get the words mixed up all the time,” she says.

That confusion is unfortunate, because understanding the concepts and how they mesh is vital to every company’s bottom line. Studies show companies that market their products or services without first establishing their brand identities are not likely to achieve return on investment. “If you’re spending money to advertise and market without being connected to a brand position, you might as well pile the money up and burn it,” Guge says.

Rob Frankel, a branding expert and author in Los Angeles, calls branding the most misunderstood concept in all of marketing, even among professionals. Branding, he says, “is not advertising and it’s not marketing or PR. Branding happens before all of those: First you create the brand, then you raise awareness of it.”

Your Brand is Your Personality… read on.

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1. What is your brand’s vision?

2. What are the good attributes of your brand (or company, or product, or service)?

3. What are the practical benefits associated with your brand?

4. What are the bad aspects of your brand, and how can you fix them?

5. What emotions are behind customer purchases of your products/services?

6. How is your brand positioned against the competition?

More questions at Evan Carmichael.

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Entrepreneur.com:

In today’s highly competitive markets, smart companies are focusing more and more on emotional branding to differentiate their product in the minds–and hearts–of consumers.

No wonder. Today’s consumers face more choices than ever, yet they devote less time to product comparisons. To compound the matter, brands in many industries have become increasingly similar in quality, price and delivery. This typically culminates in a price war. One of the best ways to avoid this is to develop a lasting connection with your consumers on an emotional level. When customers feel an emotional pull toward your brand, they spend less time reasoning through differences in pricing. You’ve gained their trust and are rewarded with their loyalty. Once a consumer’s emotions are involved, you’ve injected real power into your brand.

The Link Between Emotions and Brand Loyalty
Research shows that reason and emotions differ in that reason generates conclusions but not necessarily actions, while emotions more frequently lead to actions. You can educate consumers on your product’s features, but without an emotional involvement of some kind, consumers may not attach values to those facts–at least not the values you may want them to attach.

For example, a salad may be a healthier choice than a hamburger and fries, but many people grab the burger anyway. After all, on an emotional level, a salad equals “doing the right thing” (ho-hum) but a hamburger equals “pleasure and gratification” (mmm). When it comes to brand loyalty, nothing is stronger than securing an emotional bond to your brand.

Functional vs. Emotional Benefits… check it out!

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SBInformer:

Personal branding is all about you. It is something that any of us can relate to because it is what other people see as a reflection of our identity and values.

Hence, each and every one of us has a personal brand whether we like it or not. The issue now is whether you can sustain your own personal brand to create a clear and memorable impact of who you are, what you do and what you stand for.

Whether you are a sole proprietor, a conglomerate and Fortune 500 Company, or even a company executive, it is essential that you have your personal branding that would make you recognizable to your target audience. It helps you to build that powerful personality that has a positive impact to your audience whenever they think of your brand.

Your personal branding is a combination of different factors. This includes your values, traditions, capabilities and actions that you believe in. It is what makes you different and unique from the rest of your competition. The important thing with personal branding is you. It may be in your color printing ads or even in your business cards – the bottom line is to make your personal brand ubiquitous in everything that you do. Continue reading.

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WSJ:

Here’s a new twist on startups: Buy a brand first – then start your company.

At Circlerbrands.com, there are several for sale, like “We Do the Math” for aspiring accountants or “BloomService” for someone looking to get a foothold in the floral industry. Each brand already has a registered trademark, logo, registered domain names and a vanity toll-free number.

That’s a lot of hassle out of the way. All that’s left is to well, build the business.

This “plug-and-play” strategy is the brainchild of Susan Murphy and her husband William Pilipchuk, whose interior design and branding company iContact Designs Inc. is based in Pleasant Ridge, Mich. After helping clients come up with brand names and slogans for two decades, the pair decided to see what the market would bear for their inspirations.

“We’ve always had these ideas,” Ms. Murphy told me today. “We’d be in the shower and screaming for the other person to ‘get a piece of paper.’ We’re looking for a forward-looking company that wants to hit the ground running.”

Though they haven’t sold any packages yet, Ms. Murphy thinks their upfront legwork will run in the “six to seven-figure range.” But, she notes she’s open to negotiation and other payment possibilities, like an equity stake.

Other brands for sale: LaBeatOh! (Ms. Murphy is thinking a Latin food chain: “I could help design the interior”), Dr. ChewLittle’s (organic baby food?) and Pizzapotamus (pizza delivery with a hungry hippo logo).

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