Category: marketing

Apple’s branding breakthrough and what it means for #highered

Earlier this week, Interbrand unveiled its ranking of best global brands for 2013. And for the first time since Interbrand began keeping score (way back in 2000), Coca-Cola has been dethroned. The new king of the global brands is Apple. Google takes the No. 2 spot, and Coke tumbles to third place.

A BloombergBusinessweek timeline of Interbrand's top 10 global brands since 2000. (Click image for larger view.)
A BloombergBusinessweek timeline of Interbrand’s top 10 global brands since 2000. (Click image for larger view.)

Interbrand’s methodology for determining brand value is about as arcane as U.S. News & World Report‘s approach to the annual college rankings. (For example, Interbrand relies on something it calls the “Brand Strength framework,” which is some sort of “diagnostic tool that delivers actionable insights.” Um, okay. That certainly clarifies things.)

But people in the branding world pay attention to Interbrand’s scorecard, just as higher education administrators do the U.S. News rankings. And both sectors love to brag about their organization’s rating when the scores look good and to loathe the rankings when the scores look bad, it gets people talking.

So let’s talk about brand rankings.

How did Apple dethrone Coca-Cola? And what could higher ed brand managers learn from it?

Getting emotional. Apple’s stock price has tumbled from $700 a share in September 2012 to the neighborhood of $478 per share recently, according to this analysis of the Interbrand rankings. So, considering stock value alone, one might conclude that Apple has even less value today than a year ago. But that would leave out one important component of the brand’s value. “Less tangible strengths like emotional intelligence and psychological insight are proving to be just as vital to leading a brand today as the ability to generate high ROIs and increased shareholder value,” says Interbrand CEO Jez Frampton in a statement. It is “a sign of the times,” Frampton says, that Apple, “a company that has changed our lives, not just with its products but also with its ethos,” has risen to the top of the brand hierarchy. For higher education, the takeaway is about the emotional value our institutions provide students, alumni and others.

Global and the new normal. Frampton also points out that “in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected, ‘developing’ countries like China are now poised to become bigger players, and collaboration — across borders, across silos, or co-creating with consumers — is more crucial than ever.” How will colleges and universities in the U.S. — or anywhere else, for that matter — position themselves to compete in this global environment?

Can you be both cheap and good? Apple becomes No. 1 on the heels of its recent announcement of a new, less expensive line of iPhones, a move that some see as risky. It actually bends one of the so-called “immutable” laws of branding (see this post), which says, in essence, that your brand should stand for something simple and narrow (more about this here). Apple has been known for high-end, well designed products. Are they now lessening their worth by offering a $99 iPhone? It’s a risk that may pay off. Consider what Stanford and others are doing with MOOCs, or Georgia Tech’s gambit of offering the $7,000 computer science degree. Will expanding access and dropping prices help build these brands or will it ultimately hurt? Time will tell. But time is not on the side of being both cheap and good.

Then again, Apple is known to “think different.” I wouldn’t bet against them, and look for them to stay on top of the charts for a while.

Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fanboy. 

Boring old brand-building

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

The Rieses are right. Building a brand can be tedious work.

And who likes tedious? Certainly not creative people like us, right? We want variety. We want new.

And certainly not academic schools, departments, research centers or programs that want to do their own thing  — “make a big splash!” — rather than stick with the university brand.

Tim Nekritz wrote about this issue recently. He describes it as a personal branding issue. Which it certainly is. Personal branding applied to academic programs is a new twist, and one I hadn’t thought about before Tim wrote about it.

But this issue of everyone wanting his or her own brand — of every department, every program, every student group, every sports program — is even more deeply entrenched in our culture. Because it’s embedded in our human nature.

We humans are easily bored.

We get tired of the same old thing. We crave something new.

Think about it. What graphic designer would be content to merely enforce an institution’s graphic identity standards, day in and day out, without desiring a more creative outlet of some sort? That’s why they’re doing freelance work at 1 in the morning. (More about that in this infographic. But I digress.)

The most successful brands are those that find a distinctive niche in the marketplace and stick with it. Which means they must be consistent — in their messaging and identity. Even established brands, when they make changes, are most successful when those changes are not jarring to the customers. (Contrast Starbucks’ successful minor tweaking of its graphic identity in 2011 with the great Gap logo debacle of 2010.)

One of the key takeaways from the recent CASE Summit, which I wrote about in my previous post, was “routine matters.” People notice the regular, not the irregular. This applies to the world of branding as much as it applies to our behavior.

Safe sports cars?

Or consider an example from Al and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

“Volvo has been selling safety for thirty-five years,” write Al and Laura Ries. (My edition of this book was published in 2002, so tack on another 11 years to that figure.) And selling safety has worked for Volvo. Even when Consumer Reports ranks some other make and model as the safest brand, Volvo is usually perceived as the standard for safety.

But “every once in a while,” the Rieses write, “someone at a company like Volvo gets a bright idea. ‘Why should we limit ourselves to dull, boring, safe sedans? Why don’t we branch out into exciting sports cars?'”

A Volvo sports car? (Yes, there is such a thing. To Volvo’s credit, they stick with their brand messaging, pointing out that the C30 Sports Coupe provides “large car safety in a smaller package.” Still, I’m not sure the two ideas — safety and sports cars — go together so well. I agree with the Rieses here. Volvo has diluted its brand by expanding into the sports car line.)

The higher ed example

Let’s apply this principle to higher education. The president of a liberal arts college decides it should add engineering programs, because STEM is all the rage. I think we see some schools jumping on the MOOCs bandwagon because they’re either 1.) afraid they’ll miss out on a hot trend or 2.) wanting to be perceived as a leader in the brave new world of higher education. But does the question ever occur to them: Will this dilute our brand?

“You should limit your brand,” advise the Rieses. “Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind. This limitation is the essential part of the branding process.”

Maybe that’s why colleges and universities have such a tough time with branding. They don’t like the idea of limiting themselves. That’s just human nature.

But “Limitation combined with consistency (over decades, not years) is what builds a brand,” say the Rieses.

Decades, you say? That’s a long time to be doing boring brand work.

But if we stick with it, it will pay off.