The Courage to Narrow Things Down
2006-06-29
Kazuya Kusumoto
Project Manager, Hakuhodo Brand Consulting
It’s already been some ○X years since I entered this business and, as a Brand Consultant, I have worked with a great many client companies. My impression is that at the dawn of brand consulting, when the term “brand management” had just come into use, we were mainly receiving requests for our services from major business-to-consumer companies. However, recently there has been an increase in the number of offers related to building brands from business-to-business companies and from the venture companies that have shown such remarkable growth. Nonetheless, while times and the types of businesses or industries may change, the underlying need of our client companies remains the same: developing the brand concept. I would like to talk here about what I have felt regarding the various brand concepts I have seen over the years.
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Finding “the Guiding Line” for Company Transformation
2006-06-11
Masamitsu Nishi
Project Manager, Hakuhodo Brand Consulting
I believe the real role of the consultant is to give behind-the-scenes support to the client company, enabling it to achieve continuous growth by implementing transformation. In order to bring about this transformation, it is necessary to address the fundamental problems within the company. These may be in areas such as the organization and human resources; products and the business process; finances and investment distribution; information systems; or the brand—which area they are in and how severe they are will depend on both the external environment and the situation within the company. There are a great many cases in which the problems are so deeply rooted or so diverse that establishing the problem can be extremely difficult.
Think back to when you had to solve geometry problems. You must have found that by drawing out the lines of a geometry problem you were working on, the way to the solution became clear. These were the guiding lines that make you think, yes of course! That’s it! I think finding these guiding lines in geometry is analogous to finding the fundamental problems as a step toward implementing transformation of a company.
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Defeating the past
2006-01-27
Noritaka Morikado
Consultant, Hakuhodo Brand Consulting
It feels like I have been trying to find the meaning of “change” for several years now.
Defining the values of a brand is in a sense the work of tracing the whole process through which the company has passed, from everything it built up in the past right through to the present day. It also means giving concrete form to the experiences of success or failure produced by the business and to the pleasures and the pains that the business has felt. With these revealed emotions as a base, the business then directs its energy toward building a dream or vision for its future direction. This vision becomes a shared concept for the brand to bring about reform.
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Who is going to like a brand that the staff doesn’t believe in?
2005-11-30
Shoji Makiguchi
Senior Project Manager, Hakuhodo Brand Consulting
For a long time people have argued that a brand is similar to a religion. In many respects they are the same—both are made up of essentially the same elements, such as icons, a founder, traditions, a mission, a bible, preachers, and believers, and they fulfill the same role as well. This relationship between people and brands is often explained in terms of emotive feelings that go beyond the question of profit or loss for companies. Marc Gobé, President and CEO of d/g* worldwide, states that the brands of companies like Apple, Target, or Patagonia, where the special thinking and behavior of the workforce are largely homogenized, sometimes have all the strength of religions. (It is paradoxical that there was such an outpouring of anger among Nike’s customers when they discovered that the company’s products were made in sweatshops.)
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The Frontier of Branding Technology
2005-10-20
Hideki Takayama
Project Manager, Hakuhodo Brand Consulting
Over the last few years, I have been pursuing the idea of branding for B2B companies (B2B branding). Brands were always thought of as the marketing tool applied only to B2C businesses. This has changed for various reasons, and in recent years the number of B2B companies working on branding issues has increased. Thanks to this, HBC has received many inquiries from B2B companies and the majority is interested in branding at the company or business level. In this column, however, I would like to turn my attention to the topic of developing a brand for technology or for parts and materials as a new possibility for B2B branding.
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