But does being perceived as an innovator truly drive brand preference and ultimately purchase decisions? In this article, we focus on what we’ve discovered about the meaning and relevance of innovation to B2B buyers and how marketers can infuse these learnings into their brand-building efforts.

Does innovation drive purchase decisions?

Is innovation a necessary and sufficient platform for brand positioning? “If customers believe we have a leading-edge offering,” the dialogue goes, “they’ll be predisposed to choose us over the competition.”

As we look across a wide spectrum of B2B results from our client work, we’ve found that a claim around “being innovative” is rarely, if ever, the most important purchase driver in B2B situations.

Generally speaking, claims around innovation are often met with skepticism. While it is true customers want to buy products with the newest, latest and greatest technology built in, they worry that new innovations are risky, overly complex and can produce negative unintended consequences. Promoting Innovation as the sole differentiator is a flimsy premise on which to choose one brand over another.

Innovation archetypes

How should marketers interpret these general findings?

We’re convinced that innovation, properly qualified and positioned, can be a powerful platform on which to build a B2B brand. Looking behind the data, we’ve identified three archetypical ways to cast innovation in a way that helps drive customer choice and avoid the “better mousetrap” trap.

The bleeding-edge innovator: This type of innovation message appeals to buyers (like the CIA or a quantitatively oriented hedge fund, for example) who have virtually unlimited budgets and a mandate to stay at the leading edge at all costs. Being not only the first to market, but also staying at the edge, can be a powerful differentiator in selected market segments.

Incremental innovation: In long-cycle industrial businesses, where product innovation may happen only once a decade, one strategy is to create a unique service proposition. GE Aviation took this approach with the creation of OnPoint Solutions, introduced in 2005. This innovative approach to service successfully countered GE’s rival Rolls Royce and their one-size-fits-all service approach (known as TotalCare).

Customer-centric innovation: Tactics such as simplifying the customer experience, creating Web-enabled self-service platforms or introducing new product features that are in direct response to customer feedback are three flavors of this type of innovation.

According to Riney, Toyota’s “brand is damaged. It’s in crisis. At least for a year, you’ll see some negative rub-off on other properties and people that associate with it.”

The article discusses the phenomenon of product integration in TV programs, and the new dynamic created when crises arise involving a specific marketer or brand. The particular example cited in the article is Toyota’s product-placement deal with ABC’s “Modern Family” for the entire 2009-2010 season, coinciding with the automaker’s massive recall of several car models.

BrandLogic has helped several brands recover from crises, including Texaco, Merck and Move.com.

Click to read the Advertising Age article.

Please post your questions, comments or ideas for future shows here or via e-mail at bamcast@brandlogic.com. You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes or via RSS.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve gone on the road to find out. In addition to learning from our clients, we’ve been spending time with visionary marketers at leadership forums in places like London, Las Vegas, Moscow, Mumbai, Miami and even midtown Manhattan.

From our wide-ranging travels, we’ve been able to discern several key trends that matter to marketers in every industry and every corner of the world.

Each installment of this ongoing series will highlight one trend and its implications for you. We look forward to your commentary.

Employees say: involve me more, train me less

What we’re hearing: Involving employees, through online communities, in the process of creating, managing and building brands is becoming standard practice among leading-edge marketers (and their compatriots in the human resources function).

Involving employees at Kraft Foods

Kraft Foods, owner of America’s best-known cheese brand, began a corporate rebranding initiative to reposition the firm as a global provider of snacks, quick meals and other convenience-oriented foods. From the outset, CMO Mary Beth West and her colleagues in human resources set out to “co-create” the solution with employees at every stage of the development process. As part of this initiative, Kraft invited over 7,000 employees from across the firm to contribute their ideas via an online community. This community, hosted on an internal server for several months, gave the Kraft team the ability to run “what-if” scenarios and other participatory exercises. The firm’s brand promise, captured in the tagline “Make today delicious,” as well as the firm’s seven core values, were a direct output of this co-creation process.

Building global brand communities at John Deere

In highly decentralized, global organizations, the corporate brand management group is often challenged with the amount of time it takes to distribute brand assets around the world in a consistent manner. John Deere, the leading agricultural and construction equipment manufacturer operating in 31 countries, decided to take on this issue by creating an online brand community. The installation of this platform has helped Deere streamline the approval process for developing on-brand communications, while at the same time helping brand professionals share materials and success stories with each other.

Implications for you

1. In the past, brand management was all about making verbal and visual communications consistent. Brand managers now have to monitor how the brand lives virtually – social media, blogs, embedded messaging, etc.
2. Invest more in brand participation, less in brand training. Let employees have a say in what the brand stands for, and let them make it better over time.
3. Find common ground with human resources. Rather than creating an “internal brand” from HR and an “external brand” from marketing, why not co-create the brand all at once?

Over the last 12 months, we’ve gone on the road to find out. In addition to learning from our clients, we’ve been spending time with visionary marketers at leadership forums in places like London, Las Vegas, Moscow, Mumbai, Miami and even midtown Manhattan.

From our wide-ranging travels, we’ve been able to discern several key trends that matter to marketers in every industry and every corner of the world.

Each installment of this ongoing series will highlight one trend and its implications for you. We look forward to your commentary.

Marketing ROI: many definitions, little consensus

What we’re hearing: There are no silver bullets when it comes to measuring marketing ROI. Leading-edge marketers are still seeking new (and not so new) techniques for justifying their brand-building investments.

Brand valuation: is it still relevant?

Brand valuation – the process of ascribing a dollar value to a brand – seems to be losing its luster as a technique for measuring performance. Marilyn Mersereau, SVP Marketing at Cisco, asked a group of about 100 brand marketers whether they were aware of the Interbrand/Business Week brand valuation study. Not surprisingly, nearly every hand in the room went up. When she asked whether anyone was actually using brand valuation in their organizations, the audience collectively shrugged. She went on to express her befuddlement with the methodology behind brand valuation, and no one in the audience was able to explain it either.

Going back to basics

Anne Greer from 3M offered the key criteria her organization uses to measure brand performance: the brand’s influence on driving selection, satisfaction and loyalty. These tried and true metrics can be measured with a high degree of accuracy and are easily understood by non-marketing executives.

Measuring the ROI of brand experience

Jon Picoult at Watermark Consulting believes that companies who deliver a positive customer experience actually have a higher stock market valuation than their less-consumer friendly peers. See his statistics here.

ROI isn’t always just a number

Jeffrey Hazlett, CMO at Eastman Kodak, cautioned against an overreliance on subjecting every brand-building activity to an ROI test. When his CFO asked about the ROI on his attendance at the People’s Choice Awards, he countered with another definition of ROI: “What’s our Risk Of being Ignored?” Because Hollywood is a major revenue source for Kodak, he argued, having a presence at this industry event might not be measurable today, but will help build Kodak’s reputation with this important customer segment longer term.

Implications for you

Rather than suggest a new process or methodology, we think marketers could improve their ability to measure brand performance with a few simple steps:

1. Reorient all brand research towards two goals: measuring how well the brand is doing against an agreed-to strategy (brand health) and how well the brand performs against external factors (brand performance).
2. Build bridges between marketing and finance: Each function has a language all its own, and finding a common way to communicate is critical. So why not make the first move and ask your CFO to explain free cash flow to you over lunch?
3. Reserve a budget for experimentation: It’ll never be more than 5-10% of the total, but every marketing budget needs to include a little mad money. Don’t apologize if some of your experiments go wrong, but make sure to capture the learnings and make adjustments.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve gone on the road to find out. In addition to learning from our clients, we’ve been spending time with visionary marketers at leadership forums in places like London, Las Vegas, Moscow, Mumbai, Miami and even midtown Manhattan.

From our wide-ranging travels, we’ve been able to discern several key trends that matter to marketers in every industry and every corner of the world.

Each installment of this ongoing series will highlight one trend and its implications for you. We look forward to your commentary.

Social media: going mainstream in a hurry

What we’re hearing: Experimentation with social media is so 2009. Visionary marketers are investing heavily in social media and are realizing short- and long-term benefits, both in terms of reputation building and revenue generation.

Making beautiful music at the Mayo Clinic

At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, perhaps the world’s most renowned medical center, Amy Davis and her team have embraced social media in a big way. Since its founding in 1889, the Mayo Clinic brand has been built on positive word of mouth referrals generated by thousands and thousands of conversations among patients, families, physicians and others across the world. Amy’s team sees social media as a natural way to accelerate this phenomenon, and has embraced the use of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to help humanize the experience that people can expect at the Mayo Clinic. They captured a touching moment on video (which was posted on YouTube) of two senior citizens, both being treated at the clinic, playing one of the many pianos sprinkled around the Rochester campus. This video gained national attention, and the couple was invited to repeat their performance on major media outlets like ABC’s Good Morning America, giving Mayo Clinic massive media exposure.

Southwest Airlines: making money with Twitter

When was the last time you wanted to talk to an airline? With a generally positive reputation in an industry where its peers are often reviled, Southwest Airlines has opened up new revenue sources by leveraging social media. With a small staff, Linda Rutherford and her team have turned Twitter into a revenue-generating opportunity.

Last July, Southwest decided to forgo using paid advertising to announce a two-day fare sale, and instead spread the word via Twitter and Facebook. This fare sale resulted in the two highest revenue days in the airline’s history – a record that was broken that October when a subsequent social media fare sale was held.

Implications for you

Rather than recite a litany of statistics about the growth of social media (which you can find in this short video), we suggest the following steps:

1. Turn the corporate communications department into the corporate conversations team. It’s all about two-way dialogues from now on, not about issuing press releases.
2. Bring in social media-savvy talent: Communicating in the 140-character format of Twitter, for example, requires a knack for brevity.
3. Keep on experimenting. Like in the dot-com era, new models are being invented every day and new platforms will replace today’s standards before you know it (remember MySpace?).

What can you, as a brand manager, learn from Apple’s gaffe? The real lesson is deeper than “don’t come up with names that can be made the butt of jokes.” Rather, you need to think about your target audience and what they’ll respond positively to.

It’s human nature to gravitate to ideas that we personally find appealing, but we should never forget that when we come up with a name, we’re not creating it for ourselves. As a writer, I love wordplay and double entendre, but often that approach can produce a name that is too clever and likely to go right over the heads of the audience. It won’t “play in Peoria,” to borrow the old phrase… which itself may not mean anything to younger readers.

The point is that you should do whatever you can to imagine yourself as an actual member of your target audience. Endeavor to shed your preconceived notions, your background and the pop culture references that you respond to. Enlist as diverse a group of people as you can to comment on your work. Try to cover the entire spectrum of race, gender, politics, education, background, age and occupation… even those who lie outside the target group, because they may give you a point of view that you never would have considered.

Recently we went through a naming exercise here at BrandLogic for a new client, and once our creative team came up with a strong list of candidates we took one additional step: We called in one of our employees who happens to be in the target audience to comment. She gave us an invaluable perspective that helped to ground us in reality, resulting in the elimination of what many of us thought were good names and the addition of whole new ideas.

What’s your strategy for vetting your brand work? Do you actively seek other points of view? When someone comments, do you capture that feedback and use it to guide future work? Let us know!

The innovative report, titled Act! Our Commitment to Making a Difference, covers a variety of sustainability issues for PBG’s various audiences, including customers, investors, employees and potential employees. Along with designing the print version of the report, BrandLogic also created the Web version, available at www.pbgact.com.

Sustainability is a front-and-center issue that companies increasingly need to address in their brand communications. For this reason, we take great pride in helping organizations share with key stakeholders their commitments to the environment, their employees and their communities.

Click here to read the press release.

Company CEO Sterling Ball (son of Ernie Ball, who invented electric guitar strings) has managed to build a vibrant, distinctly American brand, selling both premium and mass-market products manufactured in the United States while remaining profitable – and while maintaining industry-leading brand equity. No small feat in today’s economic environment.

How? Sterling has demonstrated unusually deep insight into his industry, his customer base and his brand identity. He is not at all afraid to question conventional wisdom. He even stays in direct contact with his end users – ordinary amateur musicians – on a near-daily basis via the company’s Web forum. How many CEOs do you know who choose to have unfiltered conversations with their customers?

In a recent blog post, Sterling talks about marketing and advertising in his industry and the value of going against conventional wisdom. He cites, among other things, a great example of how he took what most of his peers considered to be a threat and turned it into a competitive advantage. Namely, the introduction of the hit video game Guitar Hero.

Most of those in the music industry thought the game would hurt sales, because kids who might want to get a guitar for the holidays would ask for the easier, glitzier video game instead. The industry feared a substitution of form over substance; Guitar Hero lets kids pretend to be musicians without any skills whatsoever.

They were right. Guitar Hero became a huge hit. But Ball immediately understood that this would happen and turned it into a brand-building opportunity while the rest of the industry resisted. Ernie Ball brand messaging is found within the game itself, so a whole new generation of potential customers who would never have been exposed to the brand now know exactly what it’s about. By the time they’re ready to buy their very first pack of guitar strings, Ernie Ball will be foremost in their minds.

The brilliance of Sterling’s insight is that he stepped outside the corporate world and got into the minds of his future customers. He understood that kids are in fact much more interested in form than they are in substance – it’s just part of learning and growing up.

I clearly remember being six or seven years old, listening to The Beatles on the radio and pretending to play guitar using my mom’s yardstick. At the time I didn’t have a clue what an electric bass actually was. If my parents had bought me a real instrument, I probably would have abandoned it — too difficult for a little kid. Who wants to learn music? I wanted to rock! But here I am today, doing the real thing and having the time of my life.

That’s what Sterling understood: Some of those kids who play Guitar Hero want to go beyond the game and experience the real thing – and when they get to that point, they’ve already got a clear impression of Ernie Ball Music Man.

The result has been an increase in sales, plus an incredibly valuable increase in brand equity. All because the CEO went against conventional wisdom, got close to his customers and understood what really makes them tick.