Amaze and Respect: Essential Verbs to Enhance Your Brand Strategy in 2015, Part 1

Harvard Business Review recently featured a cover story that promoted three key verbs as critical to marketing success: THINK, FEEL, DO. Does your 2015 brand plan include those verbs? No doubt your strategic plan has powerful verbs in it already: verbs like activate (previous customers), entice (new customers), cross-promote (merchandise across channels), engage (customers with content) and increase (profitability). I expect those verbs are baked into most plans. But brands that make a difference in the lives of their customers often add a few unexpected verbs into their strategic planning and their actions. As the new year quickly approaches, I invite you and your team to consider a few of these: Amaze The brand builders at Quicken Loans, the nation's largest online retail mortgage lender and the second largest retail home lender in the United States, have mindfully incorporated a powerful verb in its tagline: Engineered to Amaze. The verb amaze is a driver in all of the company's brand touchpoints—from the short video clip of Quicken Loans' amazingly simple mortgage process on the home page to the text query ("AMAZE" to 26293) to the Zing! Blog where "Amazing Insights on Home, Money and Life" are offered to customers. Breaking out of the maze of bureaucracy and painstaking processes that the mortgage industry is known for is what drives the leaders of Quicken Loans to create products and services that are amazingly useful to customers. Delighting its customers with a fast, efficient, friendly loan process distinguishes this brand and is part of the reason J.D. Power ranks Quicken Loans the "highest satisfaction in primary mortgage origination" for the last four years. What do your customers find amazing about your brand? What new strategies might you adopt in the upcoming year to be even more amazingly useful to your customers? Respect Where does the verb respect fit in your brand's DNA? For Jeffrey Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield, the two co-founders of Harry's, an online men's shaving boutique, this verb dominates their strategy. Here's how the two describe their service: Like most of you, we've long had to choose between over-priced, over-marketed razors that disrespect your intelligence, and low quality, cheap razors that disrespect your face. We knew there had to be a better way, so we created Harry's as a return to the essential: a great shave at a fair price. Respecting customer intelligence, respecting the customer's face, lathering in an edited and simplified shopping experience (like one of these men did in his first business—Warby Parker) and creating a meaningful charitable connection all adds up to a new venture that elevates a daily chore. Harry's believes "a great shave is powerful, preparing you to conquer the world in your own way, every day." It's apparent that this respect for their customer's time, attention and wallet coupled with respect for the activity of shaving informed all Raider's and Katz-Mayfield's brand launch decisions. The co-founders conducted their own shave tests and found all existing products on the market lacking. In addition to finding a European manufacturer to make a different type of blade, it led them to reconfigure the razor handles and craft two unique and exclusive Harry offerings: The Winston and The Truman, inspired by old pens and knives. "With Harry's," Raider says in a Fast Company interview, "I think we care about customers a lot, but it's more about respecting them and giving them a product they really like, but not overwhelming them with choice-just sort of giving them a shaving tool we think will work really well." Plain and simple, how well does your brand respect your customers' attention, time and wallet? In 2015, how can you be ever more respectful? Tune in in early December for the final three verbs you should use to enhance your brand strategy in 2015!

Branding

Amaze and Respect: Essential Verbs to Enhance Your Brand Strategy in 2015, Part 1

Andrea Syverson

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Andrea Syverson