Welcome to our Beloved Brands blog. I started to write various brand management stories in the fall of 2011, just as social media started to take off. I had no idea anyone would read our blog. Within a few months, things took off. Millions have read our blog. We share everything we know to help you learn about marketing. I believe that knowledge is power and we want you to use that knowledge to empower yourself to achieve the extraordinary. Over 50,000 marketers visit Beloved Brands every month.
Brand positioning
Learn how to figure out brand positioning
To find your ideal brand positioning statement, you want to find the space that is most motivating to consumers. And, find the space that is most ownable for your brand. Our brand positioning statement process starts with a defined consumer target your brand will serve. Then, we focus on the emotional and functional benefits that differentiate your brand. Further, we use support points to help differentiate your brand from competitors.
Marketing Plans
Learn how to write marketing plans
A strategic marketing plan gets everyone on the same page, including senior management, sales, product development, customer service and your agency partners. So, we have a one-page brand plan to help. That way, everyone drives against the same vision, key issues, strategies, and tactics. Throughout this article, I will show how to write a marketing plan, with a few marketing plan examples. And, we have a marketing plan template you can purchase.
Brand strategy
Learn how to write a brand strategy roadmap
Every brand should have a brand strategy roadmap that includes the vision, purpose, values, key issues, strategies, and tactics. As well, our roadmap layers in the brand idea to deliver a consistent brand across the five consumer touchpoints.
Brand concepts
Learn how to figure out brand concepts
Only a fool would start writing a brand concept without doing the necessary homework. I will show you how to write a brand concept that uses the brand idea, consumer insights, functional and emotional consumer benefits, and support points. Our brand concept process can also work for product concepts. Furthermore, I will provide a few different brand concept examples. Think of your brand concept as you would a 30 second TV ad or a digital billboard. Most importantly, stay focused on your most essential messages. If you start with a blank piece of paper, you will end up with a random chance at success.
Creative Briefs
Learn how to write creative briefs
I wish everyone would stop writing ugly creative briefs. Most importantly, the creative brief is a crucial way for brand leaders to control the strategy. On the other hand, make sure you give freedom on execution to the experts who execute. Too many marketers have this backward, preferring to give freedom on strategy with various possible strategic options layered within the creative brief. Then, they attempt to try to control the creative outcome by writing a long list of tangled mandatories. We will use our creative brief template to show you how to write every line of the creative brief.
Marketing Funnels
Learn how to work with marketing funnels
A classic marketing funnel would measure awareness, familiarity, consider, purchase, repeat, and loyal. They tell you where your brand is now, and when analyzed with intelligence, brand funnels can provide hints as to where you can go next. The brand funnel analysis can help you determine where your brand sits on the brand love curve, as it moves through five stages: unknown, indifferent, like it, love it, and onto the beloved brand status.
Brand profit
Learn how to figure out brand profit
While good marketers can run brands and marketing programs, great marketers can drive their brand’s P&L and deliver growth and profit for their brands. Here are eight ways the Brand Leader can drive profits: 1) premium pricing 2) trading the consumer up or down 3) lower product cost 4) efficient marketing costs 5) stealing other users 6) getting current users to use more 7) enter new categories 8) create new Uses for your brand.
Marketing Career
Learn how to manage your marketing career
In a classic marketing team, the four key roles are Assistant Brand Manager up to Brand Manager then up to Marketing Director, and on to the VP/CMO role. For each role, our game plan has five factors of success, which your boss will need to see in the you before they are willing to promote you to the next level. The list is cumulative, in that once you can demonstrate one of the success factors, you will need to keep improving on that skill at every level. Early on, it is all about trying and repeating every new task. As you move up in your marketing career, you need to keep working on tweaking, improving, and perfecting.
Beloved Brands is the playbook to keep at your fingertips
Our readers tell us they reach for Beloved Brands a few times each week as a reference toolkit to help them with the day-to-day management of their brand.
To start, we will challenge you with questions that get you to think differently about your brand strategy. Then, we take you through our process for defining your brand positioning. We will open your mind to new possibilities for how you see you can differentiate your brand. And, we use examples of brand positioning statements to bring the learning to life.
Next, we will show you how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow. Make sure all stakeholders know precisely how they can contribute to your brand’s success.
Moreover, we will show you how to run the creative execution process, show you how to write an inspiring brief, and make decisions to find both smart and breakthrough work.
Finally, you will learn new methods to analyze the performance of your brand with a deep-dive business review.
Above all, over 90% of our Amazon reviews receive five-star ratings. As a result, Beloved Brands has spent numerous weeks as a #1 bestseller in brand management.
Marketing Excellence
We empower the ambitious to achieve the extraordinary
Without a doubt, I see our role is to help the ambitious marketers who are trying to improve their skills. In most cases, we hope to challenge your thinking so you become a smarter marketer. Most importantly, our purpose is to find ways to help you reach your full potential. We provide the tools, templates, processes, and provocative thoughts.
Undoubtably, everyone learns their own way. With this in mind, we provide numerous brand stories to engage on our Beloved Brands site.
Moreover, we provide brand templates that help you run your brand. For instance, you can find templates for marketing plans, brand positioning, creative briefs, and business reviews. Altogether, we offer brand toolkits with all the presentation slides you need.
Our marketing training programs cover different streams to suit the type of marketer you are. For instance, our marketing training covers consumer marketing, B2B marketing, and Healthcare marketing.
Finally, I wrote our brand playbooks to help you build a brand that your consumers will love.
The fundamentals of marketing matter
The marketing fundamentals that we show in this article are part of what we use in our marketing training programs. Ambitious marketers will learn about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, writing creative briefs, advertising decision-making, marketing analytics, and marketing finance.
Importantly, when you invest in our marketing training program, you will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. Without a doubt, you will see your people make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
Search for any topic on our Beloved Brands website
Marketing Careers
On a classic marketing team, there are four key levels:
- Assistant Brand Manager.
- Brand Manager.
- Marketing Director or Group Marketing Director.
- VP Marketing or CMO.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on the brand management career pathway.
At the Brand Manager level, it becomes about ownership and strategic thinking within your brand plan. Most Brand Managers are honestly a disaster with their first direct report, and get better around the fifth report.
When you get to the Marketing Director role, it becomes more about managing and leading than it does about thinking and doing. To be great, you need to motivate the greatness from your team and let your best players to do their absolute best.
And finally, at the CMO level, you must create your own vision, focus on your people to make them better and shine, drive the business results, and run the processes.
Our Beloved Brands Marketing Training program will make your team smarter.
If you are running a marketing team, you will always benefit from having a smarter team. When you invest in our marketing training program, you will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. As a result, you will see them make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
We’ll work with your team to help them learn more about the five core marketing skills: Strategic Thinking, Brand Positioning, Marketing Planning, Marketing Execution, and Brand Analytics. Most importantly, your marketers will learn new tools, concepts, and ideas to trigger new thinking. To help their skills, we get participants to take each tool on a test run. Then, we give feedback for them to keep improving.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on the brand management career pathway.
Strategic Thinking:
Our marketing training teaches brand leaders how to ask tough strategic questions to slow everyone down and engage in debate of options to move forward. To start, you will be given various tools to approach strategy in a thoughtful, analytical way. Importantly, marketers need learn how to change brain speeds to move from a strategic thinker style to uncover what is holding back a brand, and onto an instinctual thinker style on marketing execution.
We introduce our Strategic ThinkBox that allows marketers to interrogate their brand. Importantly, our ThinkBox pushes you to take a holistic look at the brand’s core strength, competitive landscape, tightness of the consumer bond, and business situation.
Brand Positioning:
Our brand positioning process teaches how to decide on the target market, consumer benefits, and reasons to believe. To start, you will learn to define the ideal consumer and frame the definition with their biggest needs, consumer insights and their enemy. Then, we provide our benefit cheatsheets to help learn how to discover the functional benefits and emotional benefits that a brand can deliver. Importantly, marketers need to make a decision on trying to stake out a unique space that is motivating to consumers, and ownable for the brand.
Learn to use our brand idea tool and see how it helps to communicate the brand idea to everyone across the organization. Finally, marketers will learn how to take the brand positioning work and translate it into a brand concept, brand story, and a brand credo.
Marketing Plans:
We see the marketing plan is a decision-making tool on how a brand will spend their limited resources. Moreover, the marketing plan communicates the expectations to everyone who works on the brand. Importantly, we teach marketers how to put together the vision, purpose, goals, key issues, strategies and marketing execution plans.
Learn how to write key issue questions and strategic statements that forms the foundation of the marketing plan. In addition, our marketing training provides various marketing planning templates including our one-page brand plan and ideal Marketing Plan presentation deck.
Marketing Execution:
Our marketing execution training starts with the concept of our Marketing PlayBox that matches up to the Strategic ThinkBox. To keep marketers on strategy throughout the execution stages, our Marketing PlayBox helps find in-the-box ideas that meet four dimensions: they are focused on our target, fit with the brand, deliver the message, and execute the strategy.
To start, we show how the creative brief sets up the PlayBox, serving as the bridge between the plan and execution. We go through the creative brief line-by line and give you examples of the best and worst. Importantly, you will learn to use our Creative Checklist to help make smarter decisions on creative communications. We workshop how to give feedback to your agency based on gaps you see with the checklist.
Learn to make media decisions that match up to your consumer’s purchase journey. In addition, we provide a similar Innovation Checklist to compare innovation ideas.
Brand Analytics:
Our comprehensive brand analytics training teach brand leaders how to lead a deep-dive business review. We outline the best analytical thinking so you can become a well-rounded marketer.
Learn to look at the marketplace, consumer analytics, channels of distribution, competitors or other brands in their industry. And, learn assess the brand itself. Importantly, you will learn how marketing funnels can help assess the brand’s performance. We provide 64 analytical questions that marketers can ask of their brand. Finally, we show how to understand the financial performance indicators of the brand.
Our training looks at three specific streams; Consumer Marketing Training, B2B Marketing Training, and Healthcare Marketing Training. With each program, all the of the examples are tailored to the type of marketer. Undoubtedly, we believe marketers will be at their best when the can see the concepts or tools working on their type of brand.
Take a look at our Marketing Skills assessment tool to see how you or your marketing team measure up.
For more information on our Beloved Brands Marketing Training programs, click below or email Graham Robertson at Graham@beloved-brands.com
Marketing Stories
Take a look through our other marketing stories
All the best John Lewis Christmas ads plus a look at this year’s new spot
The new John Lewis Christmas ad for 2022 is out! While it feels like a lovely story, I’ve seen this ad before. For this year’s
Innovation Process – How to plan, decide, and launch the best new products
𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗺. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻. It is crucial to make innovation planning a core practice within your organization and embed an
Use a Brand Key Model to display your brand’s USP
A Brand Key model is a tool from consumer marketing that allows marketers to lay out the unique selling proposition (USP) elements of their brand
The most beautiful Apple store locations in the world
The most beautiful Apple Store locations have become tourist attractions around the world. The cube on 5th avenue in New York City is one of
The best way to write goals for your business
Writing goals are an essential part of running your business. We usually achieve what we think we can achieve. Your goals should have a balance
Using in-the-box creativity keeps the marketing execution on strategy
The best creative marketing ideas come through in-the-box creativity using problem solving where the box is your brand strategy. Alternatively, save your blue sky out-of-the-box
Ferrari sells nearly as much merchandise as cars
Ferrari is one of the most desired luxury car brands in the world. To Italians around the world, the Ferrari brand screams the passion they
Go beyond Porter’s Model to understand the 8 sources of power
When I was in business school, I learned about Michael Porter’s model as a way to understand the five forces that outline an industry attractiveness
The best brands are able to answer these 5 questions
The best brands have a well-defined brand positioning statement that helps build the brand’s reputation over time. They know their best customers better than their
Engage the stages of learning to take on new marketing skills
As you go through your Marketing career, there is a repetitive nature, as we tend to work on the same essential types of work streams
Marketing budget cuts are coming. Time to make smart decisions.
When your finance manager comes over and tells you to freeze your marketing budget for the rest of the year, don’t be that marketer who
Understand your business situation before making your next move
A smart brand strategy is a smart business strategy. Before moving towards a plan, you must understand the business situation you face. In this article, I
Netflix is launching ads. Did they wait too long?
Netflix advertising will launch in Q4 of 2022, with annual revenues estimated at $150 million in 2023 and will increase to $1.8 billion by 2025.
Five free online tools to use for Market Research
Marketing research is an important part of any marketing plan. It helps you understand how people think and behave so that you can create products
Social Media: How to make the most of your online presence
Social media has become an integral part of our lives. It’s where we connect with friends, share photos, watch videos, and learn new things. In
5 steps to building an effective brand strategy
A brand strategy is a plan for building your reputation and image. It helps understand your customers better and create a unique identity. Dig in
How McDonald’s transforms their restaurant six times per day
Before we dive into our McDonald’s case study, let’s get one thing out of the way–the McDonald’s brand is not on its last legs. For
How to align your marketing to manage the customer journey
Think of marketing execution as a business investment that showcases your brand story through creative execution to help connect your brand with customers and manage
Our Innovation Checklist helps make the best innovation decisions
Our Innovation Checklist is designed to help brand leaders compare innovation ideas. It is a decision-making tool to help sort through various factors to compare
Marketing Careers: The experiences you need to reach your potential
To be successful in your marketing career, there are many on-the-job marketing experiences you need to find your success. You will need to collect the
