Three steps to make a brand successful

To persuade me, you must use my words, think my thoughts and feel my feelings. This famous quotation of Cicero summarises perfectly how a brand can be consistent in different cultures. This persuasion has three important elements: the central positioning and personality, the core proposition and the adaption to cultural differences.

The first one is central positioning and personality: where will the brand stand for? A decisive factor in understanding the brand is his name. An example of the 80’s: General Motors  brought his new car on the market and called in ‘Nova’, which had to represent everything that was new. They asked themselves why the sales in many southern European countries did not go well and discovered that ‘Nova’ means ‘does not go’ in Spanish. After changing it into ‘Corsa’ things got better.

Secondly, the core proposition has to summarise everything. What do we want the customers to think by hearing our brand name? They should be able to distinct our brand from others and to know why they have to buy our product.

The third, often forgotten but very important element is the adaption to cultural differences. When we have developed the core proposition, we have to adapt it to the local market. Here are several components to take in mind, like different languages, customer needs and values. The United States often make a mistake here. They think of Europe as one region, one big place where a one-size-fits-all approach is very affective. But we can already deduce from the previous two blogs that European marketing is a difficult assignment with a lot of different cultures. Communication is very important. Talk to the people instead of organize everything from a distance.

To conclude, it is important to first of all know where your brands stands for and after that you can execute is to different cultures.

Lara Moons

Ensuring brand cosistency in different cultures