This is the first of a series of posts we will be doing that tackle real world brands – asking you the question: what would you do differently if you managed this brand?

Let’s take Tully’s: a Washington brand which has gone head to head with Starbucks and has acknowledged and even accepted its second place status. Its strengths: hand-crafted coffee – from the small-batch roasted beans to the barista-pulled shots (read not automated and something Starbucks doesn’t do anymore), its size (remains small and local), and its summer menu of ice cream specialties. Its weaknesses: not differentiated in a Starbucks-led market, lacks internal culture, and doesn’t know what it wants to be.

If you were Tully’s brand manager, what would you do to take it from brand zero to brand hero? Lay it out for us and next week, we’ll throw our ideas into the mix and see if we can’t build a better brand for the local coffee chain.

In a paper recently presented at the United Jewish Communities Summit conference in Miami, the authors discussed the shift their organization made through branding–from a “money asking organization” to an organization that helped “people find their connection to the Jewish community.” This shift has resulted in many practices, including a change who they nominate for the board, the creation of a Jewish Community Forum, a brand-filter-based budgeting process and changes in major campaign events to eliminate minimum donation amounts. The total amount donated in 2007 far outstripped 2006.

How did they get there? By analyzing their brand assets; building on strengths and reducing the impact of liabilities.

-Lynn Parker

Branding Strategy Insider had a post about extending your brand to employees and how different organizations engage their employees to embrace and deliver their brands’ promises. This is definitely important and something we as brand managers strive to do everyday. But, how do we engage our employees to do this? How do you instill ownership of your brand in your employees, so that delivering that experience is second nature or implicit in everything they do? Is it a systematic process of training and rewards or is it more organic? Is it a set of guidelines or is it rules? Is it all of the above and then some?

Let us know how you do this or just your ideas on how you would do it and then we’ll share some of ours.

-Jen Travis

In the 2007 Brand Marketers Report just issued by Interbrand, we found it interesting that less than 20% of companies surveyed use living the brand metrics. Does this perhaps reflect the percentage of companies living an integrated brand?

-Lynn Parker

1. Whether your brother-in-law likes it is irrelevant
When it comes to names, opinions are like cell phones: everybody has one. Don’t let people out of the process sway your opinion. Especially anyone’s brother-in-law.

2. Whether you like it is irrelevant
Like, schmike—what counts with a name is if it meets your criteria. Most names people instinctively dislike upon first impression: do you think Amazon wowed the VCs when first presented? Did Starbucks show up as a brilliant nom-de-guerre upon first sighting? I don’t think so. The inventor of the Frisbee hated the name, preferring the “Pluto Platter.” Read more about the Frisbee name here.

3. Spelling counts
Your third-grade teacher was right—spelling matters. Get too cute with it and no one will be able to remember how to search for your company.

4. Descriptive is overrated
“But people won’t know what we do unless it’s in the name.” Well, they won’t remember you if you sound like all the possible competitors. Strong brands have strong names; weak brands have descriptive names. What’s stronger: Integrated Healthcare Systems or Talyst? Exquisite Events or Whistling Rabbits? You be the judge.

5. Odd is good…up to a point
The key thing you want a name to be is memorable. That being said, too weird is off-putting. Who your audience is will define how far you can go. Home Street Bank, yes. Purple Bank, not so good. Virgin Airlines, good. Upsy-daisy Airlines, not so good.

6. Acronyms are expensive
“It worked for IBM and AT&T.” Yes, and they had decades and millions of dollars to put towards building meaning into their acronyms. For smaller companies, acronyms require too much marketing muscle to make meaningful. They evoke nothing, and they don’t even play the role of a descriptive name. Avoid them.

7. Pronunciation counts
If your friends and family can’t pronounce it, your customers sure won’t be able to. Don’t pick a name that people stumble on saying—because they may just stop saying it.

8. The trademark lawyer is your friend
Your cursory search on the web is no way to avoid trademark lawsuits. Clear your choice with a trained professional—it will save money and heartbreak in the long run.

9. Gotta have the dot-com URL? Let it go.
What with people squatting on URLs, search engines getting big bucks from misspellings, and the high price of buying a URL, sometimes your best choice is to add a word to your name for the dot-com or use the dot-net or dot-biz version. Know when to cut your name search losses.

10. Great names are made, not born
Remember, you build meaning into a name over time: great names do not spring fully formed as from the head of Zeus. Pick a name that meets your criteria, evokes your brand, and is memorable. Then build meaning into it like crazy.

-Lynn Parker

In a word: everything. Branding Strategy Insider posted a blog about the importance of continual improvement on everything an organization does, both internally and externally.

What was conspicuously missing, from my point of view, was the “how”. What informs your company’s ability to exploit successes and continual innovation? Because it can’t just be innovation and change for innovation and change sake. It has to be grounded in what you stand for as a company and the resulting business goals, right?

Your brand IS that change leadership tool. It is the backbone of change and innovation – letting us know what areas to change, how we change them and where we need to innovate to fill the gaps. Much more than a logo or a simple marketing message, it is a compass for who you are, where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Do you have an example of how your brand has led your company through change?

-Jen Travis

If there’s no connection between a company’s highest level business strategies and internal planning—what exactly are you planning for? I love this cartoon because it points out the futility of having a strategy if it isn’t understood and put into action.

Brand integration—meaning that all employees are aware of and living their company’s fundamental business strategy (the company’s role in customers’ lives)—addresses this scenario head-on. When every employee has a few simple tools to guide everyday actions so actions are always strategy-based (see “Information about brand tools” in our Resources section), you eliminate the need to make it up as you go along.

Is your company following strategy? Or just pretending to? Any lessons to be had from corporations recently in the news?

-Beth Woolley

In my last entry I talked about how important it is to get leadership not just on board, but intimately involved in your integrated brand process. This makes sense because brand is your uber strategy and senior leadership sets strategy. One successful way to make leaders successful is through what I call “step-ahead sessions.” These sessions keep the CEO ahead of the rest of the leadership team on branding issues, so they can lead. I typically meet with a CEO two-to-three times before the brand is defined (something we do in the form of large group meetings involving people from various levels of the organization), and then again before each strategy-setting session with senior leadership, providing counsel, practicing answering questions, and drafting memos to the senior leadership team.

Regardless of the content of these sessions, I have two objectives: one logical and one emotional. First, the CEO needs to understand the process and what she can expect to see happen as a result. Private sessions give her an opportunity to explore the process at a level of detail suitable to her style. Second, and perhaps more important, is the building of confidence. An integrated brand process is part change management, part self-exploration. And these can be difficult for any executive because staying the same is always easier and more comfortable. By building confidence in her leadership ability around this process, she’ll be more likely to keep everyone, including herself, on track.

-Briana Marrah

I recently told a group who worked at a health care organization about my mother’s experience—how she had dental insurance for the first time in her life; how she had made friends through the cancer support group they sponsored; how her days now start with aerobics made possible by the inclusion of a YMCA membership in her health plan. This made a much bigger impact than if I said: my mother had a great experience with your organization. Why? We are made of stories. We speak them, understand them, remember them, live them and we respond to them. When trying to get your entire company headed in the same direction, storytelling can be a powerful tool in building support and clearly communicating that direction.

For instance, a presentation that includes stories full of characters and details resonates. Afterwards, what they walk away with is the stories that were told.

When listening to a good storyteller, you hear the story with your head, your heart and your soul. No other form of communication can communicate large amounts of information so quickly and persuasively.

Use your company’s stories to communicate who you are, what you do well, why you do it and what kind of results have been produced from your business process. As a company leader and business strategist, if you want your points to adhere to your audience, then stories are your cement.

-Lynn Parker

Have you ever run into a brand that talked a good game, but when it came to delivering, just couldn’t cut the mustard? Think most cellular service companies (they all say they have the best network, but we all seem to experience dropped calls and bad customer service). What are their strengths? How can we really tell them apart?

Strong brands, such as Nordstrom for instance, successfully identify their core strengths through the eyes of their BEST customers, and continuously strive to deliver more of it. Business books, like Strengths Finder 2.0, advise individuals on how to do this. It’s about “maximizing one’s strengths and not trying to make one’s weaknesses less weak.” The core belief in this book and in branding is, “you cannot be anything you want to be — but you can be a lot more of who you already are.” We can all aspire to be more, but if we don’t utilize the best of who we currently are, we won’t get there.

What are your strengths?

-Jen Travis