10 Commandments of Branding by Donald Trump

8/14/2019 10 Commandments of Branding by Donald Trump

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Real Estate Investing for Real Estate Professionals:

How to Increase

Your EarningsandBuild WealthBy Gary Eldred, Ph.D.

Trump University Faculty


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T r u m p U n i v e r s i t y . c o m

2006 Trump University

I. Introduction

Heres a fact: Your brand is your organizations single most valuable asset. If you doubt this,

consider how easily you can identify Coke and Pepsi by their logos alone. Or think about

choosing an airline for your next tripwhether youre booking first-class or coach, youre

unlikely to choose any airline, regardless of how good a deal it offers, if it hasntestablished

a consistent and proven reputation for safety. Your brand is what your company stands for

and how it is perceived by the rest of the world. Well-known examples include Volvo, which

is synonymous with safety, or FedEx, which is known for on time delivery.

At an intuitive level, we all have some understanding of branding. When we maintain

interpersonal relationships, for example, were essentially managing our own brands. When

we do the same for our businesses, we need to take a more systematic approach, onethat coordinates all of that businesss different components. Nevertheless, whether were

coordinating personal or professional interactions, the essence of what needs to be done

remains the same: managing how other people perceive us. As an entrepreneur or small

business owner, if you are a savvy brand manager, this can translate into more than a

household name; it can translate into dollars. A lot of dollars.

How much are we talking? Billions. In fact , for consumer products companies, brands can

represent 50 to 70 percent of the companys total value; for industrial products companies,

it is about 10 to 20 percent. Brands are worth a lot of money.

So how can we define and manage this valuable asset? First , lets look at the three major

components of a brand, all of which need to be managed:

IdentifiersName, logo, color; any cues that brings the brand to mind.

AttributesBrand attributes include the economic, functional, and emotional benefits

which are assigned to a brand by customers. They can be either positive or negative

and are the basic elements of a brand identity. In the Volvo and FedEx examples,safety and on time delivery are attributes.

AssociationsConnections that customers make between a brand's identifiers and

its attributes.


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While we may manage our own brand, ultimately brands are owned by customers. From

this perspective, your brand is defined by what your customers will let you doits that

simple. More importantly, its true. Customers wont tolerate gourmet prices at McDonalds.

They wouldnt allow it. And remember, customers will develop an idea about your company

whether you manage your brand or not. You need to manage your brand or someone else(maybe your competitor) will do it for you.

So, how do you develop, manage, and profit from your brand? With the right levels of

discipline, persistence, and monitoring, anyone should be able to effectively brand their own

business. This can take time. Some of the worlds most valuable brands, such as Coca-Cola

and Marlboro, werent overnight success stories. Their achievements took a lot of time,

effort, consistency, and strategy. This report offers you a Top 10 list of strategic best

practices that will help you maximize your brands value and, in turn, your profits. We call

them: The 10 Commandments of Branding.


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II. The Ten Commandments of Branding

Commandment 1: Establish a ClearBrand Position

A brand position is a clear, unambiguous statement that communicates what your companystands for and what it offers. For example, we all know that FedEx is an overnight delivery

company that promises, above all, to get your package to its destination on time. Most of us

make a nearly instantaneous connection between FedEx and overnight reliabledelivery.

This is what a good brand shouldaccomplish: an instant connection between the company

and its key offering. If youre FedEx, you want your brand to become synonymous with

overnight reliabledelivery.

Consistency also extends to your brand position. The benefits you communicate should be

the same over time and across various media. But consistency without clarity wont take you

very far. In order to build a successful brand, your brand position must be clear.

Heres how you achieve this: You should choose one or two benefits that make up your

brand position. These are the key benefits that your target market cares about and that

you have the capabilities to produce. Why one or two? Because people generally cant

remember more than that.

Focus on one or two benefits only. One of the most common mistakes companies

make is choosing too many benefits to represent their product. Their message becomes

muddled, and customers get lost in information overload. Before they know it, the window

of opportunity to occupy a place in the minds of their customers has closed.

Avoid ambiguity. Make sure that the one or two benefits that you decide to focus on

are very specific. For example, it is too vague to say that you offer quality. You can be

fast, however. You can be fast and friendly. But you cant be fast , friendly, safe,

convenient and stylish. If you try to be all these things, few will believe you and no one

will remember you.


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Commandment 3: Build Your Brand as Early as Possible

If you dont build your brand as quickly as possible, someone else may take the position

that you want. Thats just a hard fact. There are two issues at stake here. First, your customers

will create an image of your company in their minds eye nearly immediately, so you need

to be ready from the get-go. Second, theres a lot of competition in the world of branding;

your direct competitors may be the fast followers who have entered the market soon after

your launch. The earlier you establish your brand, the more customer loyalty youll gain.

Ideally, before a competitor tries to knock you out of the market, you have established your

company as the leaderin a certain area.

In the late 1960s, a company today known as Kraft researched the United States coffee

market and found that there were two choices: brewed coffees, which were rich-tasting but

messy to prepare, and instant coffees, which were perceived to be watery-tasting but easyto prepare. What people really wanted was a rich-tasting, easy-to-prepare coffee.

Kraft used processes from the US space program and introduced a freeze-dried coffee,

Maxim, that was richer tasting than the current instant coffees and was also easy to

prepare. Maxim quickly achieved a 10 percent share of the instant coffee market.

Meanwhile, Nestle was developing its own freeze-dried coffee. They introduced it with the

tagline: You know what freeze-dried coffee is, now taste the best, Tasters Choice. Within

two years, Tasters Choice overtook Maxim and Maxim never regained their lead. In those

two years, Tasters Choice charged the same price and spent less money on advertising.

What happened? Kraft educated customers about freeze-dried coffee, and that was

necessary to build the market. But Nestle seized the education that Kraft initiated and was

able to focus entirely on taste. In effect, Krafts efforts ended up helping Nestle. Again, build

your brand as early as possible with one or two key benefitsor someone else will.


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Commandment 4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets

Marketing strategies need to focus on the attributes of the product or service so that they

are effectively positioned in the marketplace. Brand strategies must do that too, but a

branding strategy must also focus on the associations and identif iers.

Developing brand associations requires consistency over time and across markets. This

simply means that everything your company does and everything it saysin short, all of its

communications, packaging, and management practicesshould be going in the same

direction as its brand. For example, if the key benefit of your product is safety, then

everything you communicate across all your markets should be about safety. This kind of

consistency and repetition will stay in the minds of customers; they will have the same

experience every time they see your product, and they will remember it. That has been the

strength of the worlds most valuable brands, such as Disney, IBM, GE, and Nescafe.

Sounds easy, right? Its actually easier said than done. It can be a real challenge to stay on

course when faced with daily obstacles and fierce competition. This is not to imply that

brands should remain staticthey have to change with the marketbut at any given

time, your company should consistentlyreflect its brand. This includes all of your

companys products, services, advertisements, communications, customer service, even

the look of the building and vehicles. As you can imagine, this kind of consistency is

particularly difficult to achieve and maintain when dealing with a global market that

includes different countries and cultures.


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Commandment 5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position

You want all the touch-points in your company to reflect your brand. For example, if your

brand is built on friendliness, everything in your company must embody that, from the

employees to the logo to the company lobby.

Southwest Airlines is a fine example of superb branding. It builds its brand on friendliness.

When people think Southwest, they immediately think friendly. Southwest employees are

trained to be cordial and courteous at all times. If a f light attendant at Southwest is rude to

a customer, the brand suffers, and ultimately business suffers.

Branding is making sure you have the right content, and then communicating that content

over and over again until it creates a remembrance factor. If people already know what you

do well, you have to keep hitting them with the same message. And that message starts

first and foremost with your employees, who deal with the actual customers. They are the

people who will carry your message further, so you want them to know your branding

position inside and out.

Branding should extend across all aspects of your internal communications. These include:

Business cards

Business environment

Employee appearance

Employee interaction with customers

Ambiance

Signage

Stationary

Bulletin boards

Brochures


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Even small details like pizza boxes should reflect the company brand.

Communications with employees should always be motivational, not in the sense of

motivational posters but in terms of something more factual, i.e. highlighting a successful

week of sales, and explaining why consistency of your brand is important to your

company's success.

Can you ever go too far with communicating your brand internally? The answer is no.

Internal communication is synonymous with effective employee training. The more your

employees understand your brand position, the better they can sell it to the rest of the world.


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Commandment 7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position

If your product or service embodies your brand and your customers dont know it, its

useless. You must always remind customers of what you do well, and then remind them

again. Sounds extreme, right? It isnt. Dont count on your customers to tally up what you do

for them. This is not their job; its yours.

If your current customers dont believe that youre the fastest drycleaner, this may be due to

the fact that you havent been telling them that you are. Lets say you own a one-hour photo

and consistently get photos done on timeyou should subtly remind customers that you

are reliable where most other one-hour photos are not. A sign in the window, a flyer, a

coupon, testimonials from satisfied customers, or a brochure can be effective reminders

that keep sending the right message home. You can never have too many visual cues that

might reinforce your brand attributes with your audience.

Just as with your internal communications, branding should extend across all aspects of

your external communications. All of your advertising, promotions, and public relations

should serve as a reminder of your brand position. In addition, your salespeople must

deliver a consistent message.

If Levis means casual to people, then an experience in a Levis store must exemplify

casual. The salesperson should not be wearing a suit and tie because that might

contradict the brands position. He or she should be in a pair of Levis jeans and a casualtop or T-shirt, a reminder to customers that Levis does casual better than anyone.


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Commandment 8: Dont Dilute Your Brand

Once you have established a clear brand position, dont dilute it. What this means is that

you shouldnt keep extending your brand or adding to it indef initely. If you extend it, you

might actually hurt it. In particular, you should never extend your brand to products and

services where customers wont let it go. Remember, branding is about what customers

will let you do.

The goal of your brand is to make an immediate and clearly identifiable impression on

people, one that links your company to a clear benefit . To that end, you not only need to

stay on message, but you need to keep your product offerings consistent with your

brand. What does this mean?

Lets look at Levis again to see how overextension of brand can be a problem. In the early

1980s, Levis tried introducing a line of business-casual attirea departure from its brand of

casual. It initially failed. People were unwilling to allow Levis to extend its brand to business

attire. Levis, however, was smart enough to quickly identify the problem, at which point it

introduced a new brand, Dockers, which is solely dedicated to business-casual attire.

To see another example of a very consistent brand, take a look at Red Bull energy drinks. Red

Bull has clearly established itself as the best (or at least the most popular) energy drink. It

does nothing else but produce energy drinks. If Red Bull decided to produce a calming

chamomile tea or scented candles, you might find it a stretch. Furthermore, if you visit RedBulls website http://www.redbullusa.com, youll notice that the look and feel is completely

consistent with its brand: high-energy. Everything on the screen is consistently moving,

sliding, fading, etc. The colors change continually, and most importantly, no other product

competes with or weakens Red Bulls high-energy image.


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Commandment 10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organizations Most

Valuable Asset

We began this report by stating that for well-managed brands, the value of the brand is a

companys most valuable asset. However, the challenge comes when you have to maintain

your brand as your most valuable asset. There lies the key to long-term success. Maintaining

your brand involves everything we have talked about in this report. It means maintaining

consistency, communicating and monitoring. It means putting Commandments 1-9 into

practice every single day. The companies with the worlds most valuable brands have

mastered this process. If you maintain your brand, your chances of success are far greater.

And remember, branding is essential for all businesses, not just large companies. Its equally

relevant for small companies. Trump requires superior branding, and so does the mom-and-

pop store around the corner.


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III. Conclusion

Any entrepreneur or small business owner can ensure effective branding for their business

with the right amount of patience, effort, persistence and strategy. Utilizing this list of best

practices can serve as an aid in maximizing your brand value and, in turn, your profits. Its

important to put all of these commandments into practice, not just some of them. It is also

important to revisit your brand strategy as customers become more knowledgeable,

competitors become more aggressive, and new technologies emerge over time.

These and other factors may require you to change your brand strategy in order to maintain

an edge over your competition, and secure your spot as the leader in an ever-evolving

marketplace.

Next time you go out, notice how you perceive different brands, from major chains to the

pretzel vendor on the corner. Youll be surprised at just how entrenched many of your

perceptions are.

For comments or questions, please contact: [email protected] or log on to

www.thearrowgroup.com.

For more information about Trump Universitys marketing and branding programs, visit:

www.trumpuniversity.com .


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About the Author

Don Sexton, M.B.A. and Ph.D., is a member of the Trump University faculty in the areas of

marketing and sales. He is a teacher, researcher, consultant, and founder and president of

The Arrow Group, Ltd., a firm that provides consulting and training services. He has taught a

wide variety of courses in marketing, international business, and quantitative methods. His

research concerns successful global marketing and branding strategies and is based on his

empirical studies as well as his considerable experience consulting with major companies

throughout the world. He has written numerous articles for publications such as the Journa

of Marketing and Management Science and is frequently quoted in media such as The

New York Times and Business Week. Dr. Sexton has been a full-time faculty member at

Columbia Universitys Business School for almost four decades, and is a recipient of the

schools Distinguished Teaching Award.


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About Trump University

Trump University is a business education company that blends the knowledge and

experience of Donald Trump with world-class curriculum. Trump Universitys offerings are

based on the principle oflearning by doing,and include online courses, audio courses,multimedia home study programs, publications, and live events.

Trump University is at the forefront of education for entrepreneurs and small business

owners. It offers programs that can help you understand and reach your target market

better and build a world-class brand. Trump University online courses such as Build a

Powerful Marketing Strategy,Accelerate your Business Growth, and Keep them

Coming Backgive you hands-on experience using the same marketing tools and

techniques used by some of the largest and most successful companies in the world.

For more information about Trump University marketing and entrepreneurship programs,

visit www.trumpuniversity.com.

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10 Commandments of Branding by Donald Trump