A Buddy System for Brands

tcbmag.com - March 3, 2009

Download a PDF of the full article as seen in Twin Cities Business.

As 3M's director of corporate brand management, Dean Adams probably oversaw more brands for one company than he'll help manage now for all of the companies that are clients of Level. Adams joined the Minneapolis brand and reputation management firm as principal brand strategist in early February, retiring from 3M after 34 years.

The Maplewood-based manufacturing giant had 1,500 trademarks when he took the top brand post in 1993, Adams says, enough to stretch the marketing budget to nano-thinness if it had to work equally hard for all of 3M's brands and products. But then some key lessons came out of the company's efforts to improve its brand management, and that made allocating resources easier.

One was realizing that half of the branding and marketing job was already done, in a sense. What customers want with any product is "specialness and authority," Adams says–"specialness" meaning the product is relevant and different than its competitors, and "authority" meaning consumers trust it and it's a leader in its industry based on high quality.

"We realized that the 3M [corporate] brand, because we put it on so many things and it's so well known around the world, has extremely high scores on trust, leadership, and quality. It is one of the ultimate authority brands," Adams says. In other words, the "authority" half of the brand message was already being delivered with the 3M logo, thanks to the product quality and service the company has delivered for decades, he explains.

3M could rely heavily on its corporate brand for the launch of Filtrete in 1991, a line of premium furnace filters that were priced at 20 to 30 times the cost of a standard fiberglass filter. "The 3M brand on the package was huge, absolutely huge—as big as we could practically make it without having it look silly—because it was giving all sorts of credibility and authority to those first filters," Adams explains.

The company leaned more on specific product brands, or "strategic" brands, in other cases. Adams cites 3M's Littman brand as an example, a line of stethoscopes that can be custom ordered with engraving and color preferences. The job of strategic brands is to "focus on being special, being relevant and different," he says. "If you put the two of those together—if you put Littman with 3M—we're bringing specialness and authority."

Adams will emphasize to Level's clients the importance of a whole company's performance to its brand. The recession makes it more important for companies to wring value from their corporate brands, he says, but technology is also bringing corporate brands to the fore as a support for strategic brands. Unhappy customers have a megaphone for talking about brands now in social networking technologies. Meanwhile, businesses have data-mining capabilities that show with increasing clarity which parts of their interactions with customers add value to the business.

The state of the art in marketing and branding is in superior execution throughout the business, Adams says—"how you answer the phone in call centers; how the sales rep positions the product with the customer; or when you get the invoice, if it's easy to read." —D. L.

Download a PDF of the full article as seen in Twin Cities Business