RICHARD BRANSON – A STUDY IN “TOTAL N CENTRAL” BRANDING!

Richard Branson is the public face of the Virgin brand ecosystem and has made his ageless, daredevil personality synonymous with the Virgin brand, even though he doesn’t personally lead many of Virgin’s businesses.
He has created a lifestyle around the brand that closely mirrors his own. It makes sense then, that Virgin Airlines launched as a “high quality, value for money” airline was the first to offer a customer experience that echoed Branson’s own “high life”—offering passengers chauffeur-driven airport transfers and in-flight entertainment before its contemporaries.
With his foray into space travel, Branson has only become more the flamboyant, risk-taking entrepreneur. While recording artists, commercial air travel, and space travel are unrelated on the surface, it is Branson’s—and, by default, the Virgin brand’s—personality that keeps things centralized.
The only risk: the sustainability of having a brand revolve around its leader’s lifestyle. Branson has centralized a disparate product portfolio within a single brand identity, but it’s critical that his system stay relevant outside of his personality and lifestyle.
While Branson is more of an external brand champion, his commitment to keeping his own lifestyle on-brand is admirable. He has succeeded in uniting products ranging from technology to transport under his system of brand centrality—what remains to be seen is how sustainable this will be over time.

ELON MUSK – A STUDY IN ASPIRATIONAL BRANDING

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made Tesla resemble a technology brand rather than an automobile brand, and he regularly tweets company updates from his personal Twitter handle. In the spirit of aspirational leadership, Musk announced the Hyperloop, a pneumatically powered tube that can theoretically shuttle passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes compared to five hours today. The catch: it’s a futuristic product without a delivery date, but for Musk and his cult following, that’s okay.
Musk has crafted for himself a persona that is both highly aspirational and personally accountable. He personally authored a blog post in the aftermath of Tesla cars catching fire, making a staunch defense of Tesla’s product and consequently of his own brand identity—an identity that is always-on, prepared to deal with blows to the brand.
Musk is  a rare entrepreneur who is both internally and externally a champion of the brand. His social media reputation management for Tesla keeps the brand accessible, and he is hands-on on the business side (he is known to work 100 hours a week). His system of aspirational branding has positioned Tesla at the forefront of emerging technology, giving it the legitimacy to continue pushing the envelope. In short, Musk has ensured that his internal and external brand management reinforce and strengthen one another.

Are you correctly branded for the local culture?

While companies insist that branded content is a hot new thing, it’s actually a relic of the mass media age that has been repackaged as a digital concept. In the early days of that era, companies borrowed approaches from popular entertainment to make their brands famous, using short-form storytelling, cinematic tricks, songs, and empathetic characters to win over audiences. 

This early form of branded content worked well because the entertainment media were oligopolies, so cultural competition was limited. Films were distributed only through local movie theatres; similarly, magazine competition was restricted to what fit on the shelves at drugstores. Consumer marketing companies could buy their way to fame by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favorite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. 

The rise of new technologies that allowed audiences to opt out of ads—from cable networks to DVRs and then the internet—made it much harder for brands to buy fame. Now they had to compete directly with real entertainment. So companies upped the ante. BMW pioneered the practice of creating short films for the internet. Soon corporations were hiring top film directors and pushing for ever-more-spectacular special effects and production values.

These early digital efforts led companies to believe that if they delivered movie-style creative at internet speed, they could gather huge engaged audiences around their brands. Thus was born the great push toward branded content. But its champions weren’t counting on new competition. And this time it came not from big media companies but from the crowd.

The problem that companies face is structural, not creative. Big companies organize their marketing efforts as the antithesis of art worlds, in what I have termed brand bureaucracies. They excel at coordinating and executing complex marketing programs across multiple markets around the world. But this organizational model leads to mediocrity when it comes to cultural innovation. At Eyecatchers, we follow a disruptive approach that we like to call ‘Cultural Branding’ – taking advantage of the enormous opportunities that social media has created by way of spawning sub-cultures of the crowd-culture. To know more, or to get your brand a Cultural Branding Strategy, speak to us on +91 9967450735 or drop a mail at info@eyecatchers.co

The Brand Building Challenge

In today’s era of social media, brand building has become a perplexing challenge. This is not how things were expected to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden digital age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form-factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hype, such efforts have had very less returns.

As the crux of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to overfly traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. To a great extent, most brands seem to continue thinking along these erroneous lines! Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To understand this conundrum, we need to recall that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon now called crowd-culture. Crowd-culture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowd-culture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media.

We at Eyecatchers partner you in creating a brand identity for your business: from Brand-name Research to Trademarking, from effective and elegant Brand Design Solutions to creating a Brand Personality, for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to start-overs.