Ideals That Advance the Top Brands

The reading today covered the ideals that characterize and advance the best brand identities. These ideals include: vision, meaning, authenticity, differentiation, sustainability, coherence, flexibility, commitment and value.

Without going into too much detail on each of these ideals, I would like to look at a couple topics of interest.

Steve Jobs and Apple were cited as examples of visionary leadership. I don’t know how much Jobs has to do with Apple’s current marketing initiatives; however, in my book the whole crew involved with Apple’s marketing has done a phenomenal job. To me Apple is the very definition of effective marketing. Just take a look at this image:

What does this image say? iPod. The digital media player field is so saturated; however, Apple created a must have iPod brand and differentiated itself through one of the most effective marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. At some point in the future, I’m sure I’ll elaborate on my opinions of the iPod campaign.

The next thing that I wanted to talk about was the concept that the meaning of a brandmark often evolves over time. While I absolutely hate BP because of their unabashed pursuit to environmentally destroy the Four Corners, I can’t think of a better example than BP when it comes to the evolution of a brand. BP is British Petroleum. However, if you’ve tuned into their current marketing initiatives, you’d know that BP is now Beyond Petroleum. Just take a look at how they explain their brand:

'Beyond petroleum' is a summation of our brand promise and values. It's our way of expressing our brand to the world in the most succinct and focused way possible. It is both our philosophical ideal and a practical description of our work. - BP Website

While BP certainly deserves credit for evolving their brand, unfortunately Beyond Petroleum is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. BP is still the same dirty, ruthless oil company they have always been.

Lastly, I wanted to take a look at differentiation in the field of online search. I’ve been in the search engine marketing industry since 1998. Back then there were so many search options and a great deal of differentiation. Over the course of the last nine years, we’ve seen the monetization of search, consolidation beyond the wildest imagination and the emergence of the 10,000 lb gorilla, Google. As I recall, in about 2000, there were approximately 20 search engines that we really targeted. Nowadays, we target three main databases – Google, Yahoo and MSN. For fun, I thought I’d post an image of all the old school brandmarks to illustrate industry differentiation.


BTW - for those of you that notice.... Yes, this isn't all that old school. Overture's logo is there instead of GoTo. Northern Light's logo is missing. Etc.