(Here’s my latest “brand experience brief” — insights and analysis of new and interesting restaurant and retail concepts.)

Steak ‘n Shake Signature in New York City’s Times Square is not your father’s Steak ‘n Shake.  With a retro-contemporary feel and upgraded menu, the classic diner change is trying to win over burger aficionados.  Check out my take on whether or not they’ve succeeded.

related brand experience briefs:

• Patagonia’s Tin Shed
• ihop express
• Subway Cafe

brand as business bit:  I just taught “Why Small Businesses Need Brands and How to Build Them,” a session in Marketing Profs University course on Marketing Your Small Business.

I talked about how brands don’t only create value for large companies — they’re also important to small businesses.  A couple of reasons:

Small businesses need to build relationships with suppliers and distributors, the media , investors, local government, banks, etc.  You need to stand out among the sea of proposals or plans they are inundated with and you need to be crystal clear about what your value is so they will want to business with you.  A brand can help you do just that — a thoughtfully-designed brand identity and substantive brand story communicate what the company stands for and express it in a memorable, compelling way.  If your company doesn’t have the salience and clarity that a strong brand provides, your business is likely to be passed over by these people without a second thought.

Also small businesspeople have so many decisions to make and a brand serves as a compass for making them.  For example, the pressure to grow and produce immediate results can lure entrepreneurs into pursuing areas outside the company’s initial charter.  While branching out into a new technology or adding to your service offering may make sense when viewed through the lens of short-term growth, these distractions divert precious dollars and manpower away from your top priority – that is, developing a strong and sustainable core offering.  Because a brand embodies the values of the company, it can serve as a decision-making filter when you and others are evaluating growth opportunities.

Heather Rast, the course curator, tweeted some of the other points I made — here’s a screen grab of her Twitter feed during the session:

P.S. If you’re interested in the course, it’s recorded for use on demand.  Use my code “BRANDASBIZ” when you register to save $200!

brand as business bit:  Next week I’m teaching a webinar, Why Small Business Needs Brands and How to Build Them, as part of a Marketing Profs University course on Marketing Your Small Business.  Here’s a sneak preview:

One of the topics I will cover is how to differentiate — and among the approaches I will discuss is specialization.  By designing your business to appeal specifically to a certain type of customer, you become known as an expert for that market and stand out from the crowd.

An example:  When I did a Google search for website agencies in my city, I got over 8000 results.  Now that’s probably not an accurate number of actual agencies in town — but I can imagine there are at least 100 and they all seem exactly the same. They all seem to be saying and offering the same things – effective, innovative, well-designed websites.

But then there’s City Gates, an agency that specializes in making websites for churches.  They’ve developed a real expertise in knowing the kinds of features, content, and designs that churches want and need – and this expertise separates them from the crowd.

If you were a church, which agency would you pick – one who specializes in serving organizations like yours or a generic one?  That’s the power of differentiation through specialization.

(P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketing Your Small Business, register for the course and use my code BRANDASBIZ to get $200 off!)

In the spirit of New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas, I’ve compiled an alphabetical digest of ideas, from A to Z, that I wrote, spoke, and passed along over the past 12 months.  The following are excerpts — the original pieces linked. 

By assembling this collection of preoccupations, provocations, and predilections, I realize how random my ramblings may seem at times – but I hope they’ve been helpful to you in some way.  So here we go:

All You Need Is Love – Love is a driver of business — when businesses are grounded in love and when leaders love the people around them, the result is growth and goodness and success and strength. (my op-ed published by the Greenville News)

Belief Repositories – “Belief repositories are fueled by hard evidence but can lead marketing teams to make investments where no experiment or marketing mix model has yet been run.” (Joel Rubinson in a guest post on my blog)

Culture Isn’t Enough — A vital, vibrant culture unifies, aligns, focuses, motivates, and propels.  But it is not enough to produce a profitable business.  Culture must be linked to, and pursued with the same rigor and vigor as, the customer experience. (blogpost)

Decrease Your Deal-Dependence with Differentiation — Differentiation is really the best way for all businesses to address consumers’ new value mindset. (my bylined article published by Franchise Update Media)

Embrace (and Enforce) an Inspiration Policy –  Clarify why inspiration is important to the company, and how people will be supported and encouraged to develop it.  (one of the top10 things i’m going to use from Andy Stefanovich’s book, “Look at More Stuff”)

Failure Is a Gift – “I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, you won’t get better.” (from my three-part recap of Harvard Business Review’s Failure Issue which quoted former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley)

Grow As Slowly As You Can — Growing slowly allows you to make sure you have the right people and allows you to personally foster your culture. (learned from talk by Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals)

Health Is In the Eye of the Beholder –  Health means different things to different people — and that variation is actually good news for restaurateurs. (my bylined article published by SmartBrief for Restaurants)

Innovate Around the Person, Not the Technology — The temptation with any development in technology is to use the new capability as the starting point for innovation.  But this often leads to developments which fall short of or are off base from what end users want and need. (my guest post on CEA’s Digital Dialogue)

Just Because… “Food is served fast, doesn’t mean it has to be the typical fast food experience” – (from my recap of the reality TV show, America’s Next Great Restaurant, quoting Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle)

Kodak Tries to Bring Its Digital Revival into Focus — Kodak is not giving the consumer a reason to purchase. I don’t know that a good brand halo helps if you don’t have the ability to convert it into sales. (my POV quoted in Bloomberg Business Week)

Less Is More — “Trader Joe’s may offer customers less choice. However, in terms of ease of choosing and relevance of choice, it is definitely where less choice is more.” (C.B. Whittemore in guest post on my blog)

Modern Brand Names — Brand names reflect the business climates they’re developed in — modern brand names need to tap into the differentiating power of values and personality. (blogpost)

Not 360 Degree Marketing – “The goal shouldn’t be 360 degree marketing.  Find 10-20 degrees that give the most leverage.” (advice from Tim Maleeny, Ogilvy’s Director of Planning)

On-Stage Leadership – “Leaders are always on stage… it’s a metaphor [to explain] role modeling is the key element. They’re always in the spotlight.” (the philosophy behind Sharp Healthcare’s leadership training, as explained by Director Mark Tomaszewicz)

Progressive Brands Should Turn Their Backs on Sustainability – “Brands have a far more important – a far more exciting – role to play in helping us all move towards becoming more sustainable in our lifestyles.” (POV of Guy Champniss, Managing Director of Meltwater Consulting, as relayed in my blogpost)

Quality… of engagement is a better measure of brand strength than quantity of followers (from my piece “Leveraging ‘Like” Into Loyalty” published by Franchise Media Update)

Remarkable Retail — What makes a retail store an experience so compelling that customers will tell others about it?  Interactivity, a personal and local feel, and an editorial voice. (my e-newsletter recapping a series of Brand Experience Briefs)

Storytelling – “If you’re curating really excellent thought-provoking content, and then sparking conversations around that content, you can build that kind of equity…so that people naturally develop a relationship with you.”(recommendation from Sam Rosen, Creative Director and Co-founder of ThoughtLead)

Take a Crap – I told a CEO to “take a crap” – that is, go sit on the toilet in her restaurants — so she could see how much the details of the customer experience get overlooked.  (blogpost)

Use Your Fear – Survivors aren’t fearless.  They use fear:  they turn it into anger and focus. (one of many business leadership lessons from the book, “Deep Survival” as relayed in my presentation)

Visibility – A logo must achieve impact and contact. The former is about visibility, stating what the brand is and stands for; the latter connects the brand to the customer, making a personal, emotional connection. (my Brand New Perspectives column in QSR Magazine.)

Wallets…are becoming as unnecessary as watches.  Smart phones are easier to use, provide more functionality, and offer greater security.  (blogpost)

X…as in TEDx San Diego – spoken word artist Sekou Andrews opened this year’s event with an inspiring declaration:  ”When our ‘ready’ is ‘able,’ our will be done.” (from my slideshow recap)

You Need More Competition — More competition is a good thing because it generates increased demand, gives customers confidence, builds up infrastructure, and helps you get better. (my bylined article published by SmartBrief on Leadership)

Zappos — CEO Tony Hsieh says, “Every employee can affect your company’s brand.  Not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.” (quoted in my speaker video)

Thank you for following, reading, re-tweeting, liking, commenting, and sharing me and my work this year!  See you in 2012 for another year of ideas!

(Here’s another installment of “brand experience briefs” — insights from my audits of new and interesting retail and restaurant concepts.)

What:  Subway Café

• a test concept featuring (as stated in the company’s press release) “an upscale coffeehouse ambience, an expanded menu, and Seattle’s Best coffee offerings including espresso drinks, lattes and frozen blended beverages, along with amenities such as Wi-Fi, and DIRECTV”
• “There are coffee people out there who like to have their Starbucks but want to have something to eat too,” one of the store managers explained the concept to the local newspaper.

Where:  Twenty locations including two stores in the San Diego market – one downtown, the other on the edge of Mission Hills, an upscale neighborhood.

What worked:

• Décor and fixtures – The only thing that seemed even somewhat appropriate were the décor and fixtures.  Instead of the standard Formica countertops and generic fixtures that adorn a regular Subway, the Subway Café featured nicer items.  A stone wall made the store seem higher quality than your typical Subway, bar stools and tables gave the place a hipper feel, and the wall hangings were eye-catching.

What didn’t work:

• Product – The coffee is advertised as Seattle’s Best brand, which is a positive association for me, but the coffee drink I ordered (a Caramel Latte) was made in one of those one-cup dispensers and that detracted from the perception — and reality — of quality coffee.  That Subway Café uses a machine to make their coffee drinks means they miss all the compelling cues of a standard coffeehouse and the benefits those cues suggest and deliver — no fresh ground coffee, no hand-made product, no sense of real ingredients.  Plus the drink tasted awful – and trust me, I am not a coffee snob.

The food selection was equally off-the-mark.  The pastry selection, standard and stale-looking, didn’t tempt even my overactive sweet tooth.  Plus the assortment skewed toward breakfast items despite my visit taking place in the late afternoon – why not offer more daypart-appropriate items like cookies, brownies, etc.?  Or better yet, use those ovens the store already has to make fresh-baked items?

• Training – The employee who served me was not trained.  She didn’t know the menu, she had to study the instructions for operating the one-cup machine (really?!), and she couldn’t answer a standard coffeehouse question (“We have half-and-half” is not an acceptable answer to the question “Do you have soy milk?”)
• Brand visuals and messaging – The store was filled with signage for Subway, Seattle’s Best (old and new visual identities), and Tazo Teas, but none of the designs or messages were integrated.   Further, the Subway Café logo has no cohesiveness – it looks like someone simply slapped on the word “Café” to the end of the Subway logo. This visual disjointedness detracts from any sense of a concept.

• Overall concept – If Subway Cafe intends to create a “third place” a la Starbucks, it’s got a long way to go.  Delivering a coffeehouse experience requires more than putting up some coffee signs and installing a coffee machine.   A different level and type of product quality and selection, service, and ambiance is called for.  Subway doesn’t have the credibility, nor the executional chops, to go there.  Plus, Subway’s primary brand equities are fresh, healthy, and made-to-order-right-in-front-of-you – Subway Café leverages none of these.

What I’d change:

• Shift gears — Focus on building Subway’s breakfast daypart.  Subway shouldn’t try to be something they’re not — especially since they’ve got a great concept as is.  This new concept is probably intended to offset the sluggish growth Subway will eventually experience, as the chain reaches a point of saturation in most markets.

So instead of creating a new concept, they should introduce a “Breakfast at Subway” program.  Offer fresh brewed Seattle’s Best drip (skip the coffee drinks), more breakfast sandwiches and sides (including fresh and perceived healthy items), and breakfast combos.  Keep executing the heck out of the grab-and-go experience that Subway does so well – and leave the coffeehouse aspirations to others.

Bottom line:  Starbucks and McDonald’s have nothing to worry about.

(Interested in learning how to improve your in-store experience?  Sign up for a Brand Experience Day.  We’ll head out into the field to experience retail concepts — good and bad — and then regroup to identify and apply the insights to your business.  Learn more.)

other brand experience briefs:

• Walmart.com store
• 77kids
• Central Market

My curiosity was piqued by the headline of a recent article comparing Siri, the personal assistant application on new iPhones, to Speaktoit, currently available on Android phones – but not because I wanted to understand the differences between the apps.  I was struck by how different the two names are – Siri:  short, cute, a person’s name, vs. Speaktoit:  longer, cumbersome, a function.

I got to thinking about what makes a brand name effective and how that’s changed over time.  As I’ve dug into the trends, I’ve discovered how brand names reflect the business climates they’re developed in – and how understanding the relationship between the two can help people develop effective brand names in these modern times.

In the past, brand names have served as labels for companies, products, or services.  The role of name-as-label is description and the purpose is primarily to instill confidence.  That’s why founders’ names (e.g., Disney, McDonald’s, Hewlett-Packard) and functional names (e.g., Burger King, IBM, Weight Watchers) have been popular.  The names tell people either what the company/product/service is, or what it does, or who’s behind it.  Names as labels are about consumer risk-reduction.

But in today’s marketplace, it seems brand names need to do more than that.  Modern names need to stand out, draw people in, and inspire their imaginations.  These days the most effective brand names don’t serve as labels – they’re more like identities.  They declare instead of describe, convey personality instead of confidence.  That’s why we see names like Jack for radio stations, Freebirds for restaurants, and Zappos for e-tailers.  These names as identities are about consumer attraction.

Which brings me back to Siri vs. Speaktoit.  The name Siri is derived from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center which developed the technology that powers the application.  Fortunately the founders were prescient enough to understand the technology’s potential and adapted the center’s name into woman’s name instead of forming it as an acronym.  An actual person’s name makes the application seem personal and approachable — the precise attributes the technology needs to attract people and generate trial.

The name Speaktoit Assistant, however, seems pedantic.  While the name clearly describes the technology, its descriptive nature genericizes the product.  It emphasizes what the user can do vs. suggests how the user will feel.  The potential of the technology seems more limited with a functional name and the name almost begs for copycats (I’m sure plans for Talktome, SayIt, and JustSpeak are already in the works.)

And that’s really the point.  An effective brand name conveys – or at least evokes – differentiation.  And while differentiation has long been an important part of brand-building, in most categories today, differentiation is achieved less with features and functions and more through values and personality.  The former are easily and quickly copied and commoditized; the latter, less so.  Modern brand names need to tap into the differentiating power of values and personality.

An effective brand name also supports the primary marketing task, so modern brand names should facilitate the marketing task of today’s market.  Companies have and always will need to assure customers of the brand quality in order to reduce the perceived risks of purchase – but now that is achieved less by promotion and more by identification.  Modern consumers trust brands that demonstrate interest in them and the things they care about – they’re attracted by the sense of affinity.  So marketers should select names that facilitate this connection through identity.

There are two other factors to consider. First, salience. With the growing number of competitors and the shrinking size of screens – not to mention attention spans – the need for salient brand names is greater now than ever before.  Short, pithy names stand out quickly.

Second, if ICANN’s push to add as many as 1,000 new top-level domains is accepted (and it’s looking increasingly like it will), descriptive names will become even less important.  No longer will a company need to spell out that it’s an eating establishment if it can use the “.restaurant”  or “.eat” domain.  So marketers will enjoy more freedom when selecting modern brand names.

Brand names are an interesting sign of the times.  And it’s clear, it’s a brand new world out there (pun intended.)

related posts:

• a tale of two re-brands: syfy and starbucks
• losing more than a brand name
• fundamentals of brand naming

Renown brand author, speaker, and advisor Martin Lindstrom joins me today to talk about the ways marketers manipulate customers and what we should do about it.

The topic is the subject of Martin’s latest book, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.  From the reports on secret data-mining to chemically addictive make-up to fetus-targeted advertising, the book reads like a tell-all on the secret marketing lives of today’s companies.  It raised so many questions for me, so I’m pleased to share this interview.

Listen in to hear about his findings and how he thinks consumers and marketers should react.

I’d really like to know what you think of Brandwashed and I have an extra copy of the book that I’d like to share.  So I will send it to whoever is the first person to post a comment on my blog or send me an email about this interview.

other interviews:

• sam rosen on the future of media
• david aaker on brand relevance
• john gerzema on connecting with today’s consumer

I’m guessing most of you don’t frequently have the opportunity to tell your CEO to go take a crap, but that’s essentially what I did last year – and ever since, we’ve had a fruitful and rewarding relationship.

This, of course, requires some explanation.  The background is that my partner (Shawn Parr of Bulldog Drummond) and I had been engaged to kick off a brand revitalization effort for a restaurant chain.  As is the case with many of my clients, the challenge was less about setting the right brand strategy and more about engaging all stakeholders to execute it with excellence in the customer experience.  We decided to start with a worksession for the executive leadership team – our goal was to help them take an honest assessment of their brand execution in the customer experience.

For most of the worksessions I lead, I assign pre-work for the participants.  Sometimes it’s reading briefing materials, other times it’s doing research on competitive brands or consumer trends.  The value is the participants come to the session more focused and primed for discussion.

For this worksession, the pre-work assignment was to do some restaurant visits. But there was a catch: we gave them specific instructions to follow — including visiting the same location at various times of the day/night (to help them assess the consistency of the customer experience), to taking a friend along and asking him/her to complete an assessment (to help them see things they might miss), and to going to the bathroom and sitting on the toilet (to get the full experience of using the facilities, not just looking at them).  We believed this last step – essentially telling the CEO (and the rest of the executive team) to take a crap — would be a real eye opener — and indeed it was!

The participants came to the worksession armed with stories and pictures (part of the assignment) revealing how poor the customer experience was.  The CEO reported learning so much from the exercise because her m.o. was usually to go through the drive-thru, rarely going inside the dining room and never going to the restroom, much less sitting on the toilet.

It was uncomfortable for the executive team to give their sobering reports from the restaurant visits, but their collective frustration served as the foundation for the rest of the worksession.  The exercise aligned them with a common understanding of the customer experience problems and united them with a commitment to develop solutions.

Since then, we’ve been on a journey of developing a brand strategy that’s more focused and executable, and engaging the rest of the organization with the vision and their roles in delivering the brand throughout the entire customer experience.  The company is well on its way to regaining brand equity and its key business indicators have been improving.

It’s been a terrific engagement — and it all started with a simple exercise:  go sit on the toilet.  It’s amazing how much the details of the customer experience get overlooked.  Other eye-opening assignments I’ve given include:

• For an e-retailer, order a product online and get it delivered to your home.  Most executives buy – or are given — their company’s products in the office and then take them home with them to try out. Many are surprised to see what their product and packaging looks like after getting shipped from the warehouse, taking a cross-country ride through the USPS, and getting dumped on a doorstep.
• For a restaurant brand, order the items with the lowest sales mix.  Most executives try the newest products on the menu and have their favorites they always order.  But sampling some of the least popular menu items gives a sense of what a product is like when the ingredients have been sitting around for awhile and the chef or crew don’t have the proficiency that comes from making and serving the product frequently.
• For a services company, make a complaint.  Corporate executives set and review service procedures and some might occasionally listen in on service calls, but there’s nothing like dialing up that 800 number themselves.  A CEO learns a lot from enduring the hold time (a 60-second wait time doesn’t sound that bad until you have to sit there listening to bad hold music), to trying to converse with a live representative (who may or may not have the skills, tools, authority, or inclination to fix the problem), to seeing how the complaint is (or isn’t) resolved.

There are plenty of other ways to illuminate a company’s opportunities to improve the customer experience – and some CEOs might not respond as graciously to explicit instructions on bathroom usage.  But I always try to work in a way to personally and deliberately engage in the customer experience the people responsible for making changes to it.

(This post is part of the Bathroom  Blogfest, a fun series of posts from a community of bloggers organized Christine B. Whittemore, chief simplifier of Simple Marketing Now. This is my first year participating in the series and I’m so excited to hear the different perspectives on this important aspect of customer experience.  Below is the list of all the other posts – happy reading!)

Yogi Berra once lamented that, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”   Today companies have a related complaint:  “Brand loyalty ain’t what it used to be.”

No longer can brands expect long-term loyalty, even from its most faithful customers.  As economic pressures mount, competitive landscapes shift, and life simply happens, it may seem pointless for companies to try to lock-in customer loyalty.

Nonetheless, last month the folks at SymphonyIRI Group released a study entitled, “Brand Loyalty:   How Understanding Brand Equity Impacts Brand Loyalty and Delivers to the Top and Bottom Line,” [free registration required] which attempts to deconstruct the drivers of brand loyalty.

The scope of the report is limited to consumer packaged goods, so the findings may not apply to all categories.  Also the analysis defines loyalty as, “Greater than 50% of buyer’s total purchasing is of a single brand, not including ‘private label.’” While you can argue whether or not this is an accurate definition of loyalty, the report points to a few truths about brand loyalty which stand on their own and which stand the test of time.

1. Price does not equal value.

Perceived value drives loyal purchase behavior.  The report explains, “…even when times are tight, brands are important. However, in the context of the new, more conservative world of CPG, brands that provide value are critical.”  But value isn’t about price alone.

The researchers found that when it comes to brand decisions, 79% of consumers consider price and 76% consider past usage and trust of the brand.  Shoppers also factor in requests of household members, product labels, in-store displays, and much more into their buying decisions.

Further twice as many people agree with the statement, “I tend to buy the items that give me the best value for the money” as those agreeing, “I tend to buy the lowest price item.”

So, bottom line, brands can’t bribe customers into loyalty with price.

2.  As brand loyalty increases, consumers are less sensitive to price changes.

While marketers may know this intuitively, SymphonyIRI reports category data to prove the point: “In sugar and butter, where loyalty is pretty low, substantial price hikes have led to sharp drops in loyalty during the past three years. In blades and dish detergent, on the other hand, relatively high brand loyalty has continued to grow despite rather sharp price increases.”

This should be good news to the many companies whose categories have been hit with rising raw material and manufacturing costs.  It suggests that consumers accept some price increases – loyalty is leverage.

And just because a category may not inspire high loyalty in general, it’s not stuck.  The research shows that brands can still build loyalty during inflationary times.  Chocolate candy is an example of a category with relatively low average loyalty (16%) that has seen an increase in loyalty between 2008 and 2011.

3. Private label enjoys loyalty too.

“Private label products have captured the attention, the respect, and the wallets of American consumers,” the report declares. The researchers found nearly all consumers purchase private brand products these days and more than one in three actually seek out private label products.

Although 47% of consumers are buying more private label today versus before the economic downturn began, the strength of private label isn’t simply a result of belt-tightening.  Consumer perceptions of the quality of private label products have become quite favorable in some categories. Across retail channels, store brands are viewed as offering the same or better quality as national brands by more than 50% of the population.

Private label loyalty is strong and growing across many of the top 100 CPG categories, the report shows.

Concluding recommendations come straight from the report:

• Invest heavily in establishing and strengthening brand loyalty, focusing in on and delivering against the most meaningful needs of key and target shoppers.
• Leverage frequent and granular assessments of core and target shoppers to ensure a comprehensive and always-current understanding of value drivers for key categories and brands.

In a recent post, I described a meeting I led for one of my clients that needed to engage its senior leadership with its brand. And I mentioned that I had started the meeting with a cheeky “What Can Brands Learn from Lady Gaga?” video.

Although I can’t show the video here, I did want to share with you the points from it, since I really do believe the Lady has a lot to teach us about brand-building. And the success she’s achieved in such a short time is admirable for anybody – and any organization – that’s looking for tangible results:

• won five Grammy awards
• 1st album “Fame” hit #1 on record charts in 6 countries
• named Billboard Artist of the Year in 2010
• on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People
• is #7 on Forbes’ list of Most Powerful Women
• sold over 22 million albums and 69 million singles worldwide
• grossed $170 million on 137 songs in 22 countries in 1 year

Those are impressive numbers on the key metrics that matter for someone like Lady Gaga. How did she build such a powerful brand? Here are the top 5 lessons we can learn from the Queen of the Little Monsters:

#1. define a clear identity

“Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta” just wasn’t who Lady Gaga aspired to be, so she changed her name and assumed a new identity:
• a change agent
• a diva
• pop culture
• creative
• outré (definition: unusual and startling)

Companies need to clearly define their brand identity. While visual image is certainly an important piece of this (Lady Gaga wouldn’t be Lady Gaga without her unique looks), identity is much more than just a logo or look and feel. Brands must be clear about what they stand for – the values and attributes they want to be known for.

Companies need to ensure the brand identity is understood, embraced, and interpreted and reinforced properly by all internal stakeholders so that it is clear to the outside world. This is particularly important in today’s social media-dominant world where if you don’t define your identity, someone else will.

#2. be different

If there’s one thing Lady Gaga is, it’s different. She stands out from the sea of female pop artist sameness by looking, acting, performing, writing, and being different. “You have to be unique, and different, and shine in your own way,” she explains.

Differentiation is critical to brand-building as well. It’s important because our brains are hard-wired to notice differences. So differentiation enables you to stand out and get noticed – not a small feat in the today’s over-crowded marketplace.

More than that, though, differentiation also helps create brand preference by helping customers understand their options and giving them reasons to choose one over the other. And it helps companies charge higher prices. If people perceive an offering as special, they are willing to pay more to get it. Think of how at auctions it’s the one-of-a-kind items that people drive up the price for. Plus, if you offer something completely different from everyone else, customers can’t easily compare it to others and so you can set your own price expectations.

#3. tell your story by creating an experience

Lady Gaga is an entertainer, so she knows how to create a breakthrough experience that really brings to life who she is and what she wants to say.

Think about the 2011 Grammys. She was paraded through the streets and down the red carpet in an egg carried by staffers in revealing eggshell-like costumes. On stage, the egg hatched and Lady Gaga emerged, launching into a spectacular version of Born This Way. At one point, she played on a dramatic organ with disembodied heads balanced on top and, at the end her dancers stripped off their latex outfits. Talk about an experience!

Most companies, of course, wouldn’t want – or need – to create such a spectacle, but they do need to create customer experiences that stand out and send a message. Brand experiences should tell a story, appeal to the senses, and inspire — from start to finish. And, details matter (you can bet every moment of Lady Gaga’s time at the Grammy’s was choreographed.)

#4. stand for something bigger than yourself

The gospel according to Lady Gaga goes something like this, “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

Or in other words, “To everyone who says this is wrong to feel like this say, ‘I was born this way baby.’”

To her fans, Lady Gaga is more than a singer or performer. She is hope, love, inspiration, and empowerment. That’s why she’s able to create such a powerful connection with them.

Companies can develop powerful connections with their customers as well. For some, this is done by connecting the core values of the brand with customers’ core values. For others, it’s about calling people to a higher purpose to which the company and its customers aspire. The point is to recognize that, as humans, we all seek meaning in our lives.

#5. foster a community

Community is what creates impact for brands and for Lady Gaga.

Lady Gaga calls her community her “Little Monsters.” They love it; they love her. She’s written a manifesto and created an app for them.

She also uses different tools to engage, listen to, share with, and relate to them: Twitter (12.2 million followers), Facebook (42 million likes), YouTube (150 million views), etc. Her website features a wiki-style blog, Gagapedia, which features nearly 2,000 pages of content she and her Little Monsters have created.

These tools and tactics are powerful brand-builders. They help develop relationships that seem exclusive and personal, while fueling buzz and broad awareness. What company wouldn’t want to have a passionate community of supporters and evangelizers?!

To riff on her song title, Lady Gaga teaches us about brand romance!

related post:

• kicking off a brand journey